The Lady, or the Tiger?

Chapter 19: The Tiger Rose

He showed up unexpectedly at her University class with a single rose in his hand and a wrinkled-corner-of-the-mouth, 'I'm sorry' expression on his face. The class was finished for the day, but it seemed all of the young students, each of them quite noticeably female, had remained afterwards – eight or so of them in total. Julia was up in the front of the small lecture hall, at the podium, her besotted students all gathered around wanting more. Every single one of the young ladies' eyes followed their professor's glance across the room to see what had caught her attention…

The answer stood there, displaying an uneasy twitch upon suddenly becoming the center of attention. Detective William Murdoch, the male half of the storybook couple, 'Toronto's Favorite Couple' – as they had been coined by the press – that is at least back before the adopting-a-baby-so-the-selfish-wife-can-keep-working mess, and then the dreaded Body-Dumper case, had sullied their good name.

Hope shown on his face from where he gazed in from the doorway, looking handsome as ever.

Julia had managed to forget, for a little while anyway. But the sight of William standing there brought it all back. They had had a fight… in the center of it their little toddler son, and swirling all around him, a parental disagreement about how to best toilet train the child. The little one had wanted his mother to see his success before it was flushed away. William had told him that that was not necessary. William Jr. had begun to fuss and whine about it, and then William had decided to solve the problem by flushing it away, spewing the two-year-old into a tantrum…

One of Julia's students gushed something about how sweet it was, "him showing up here, with a flower and everything."

And then Julia mumbled it out, followed by a sickly, zing of a feeling gurgling up inside of her upon realizing she had probably said it too loudly, regretting instantly that it had been overheard, "Probably just doesn't want to spend another night on the couch."

Two of her students, Miss Cranston and Miss Roy, both near enough to her to distinctly make out what it was that their professor had said under her breath, jolted upright with surprise and shot their eyes to each other, intrigued, and with a guilty glee in their titillated smiles.

"Excuse me, ladies," Julia said.

As she walked away, she heard Annie Cranston say, the larger group huddling around her, "If he were my husband, he'd never spend a night on the couch…" and Julia rolled her eyes and grumbled to herself about how unrealistic such naïve young women could be.

William pinched his lips together, giving her his admitting-it face.

And in response to it, there was a track inside of her head that wondered why… why William would be the one to apologize, for their fight had been as much, if not even more, her fault as it had been his. Unsettled in her own mind about it, she dropped her eyes down to his offering. NOT a dozen roses… she noticed. "Why just the one?" she asked him.

He leaned, tilted to her, confiding, "I've known since I first met you, Julia, that you were the one for me…"

"Oh, he could be delightfully winsome," she reminded herself, half-thrilled and half-annoyed.

This particular rose was like none other she had ever seen, and she was certain it had cost him a pretty penny, probably as much as the more traditional dozen that he usually donned when keeping his promise to never stop courting her.

"Why the stripes?" she wondered.

His pause, too long, along with his troubled expression, and she knew that, whatever was happening inside that magnificent brain of his, it was something that he had suddenly felt uncomfortable about – probably something that William himself had not even been quite conscious of up until she had asked him about it, and then her own bright brain rushed to think what it could possibly be, and then she believed she had grasped it, the joy of discovery quickly doused with the hurt of its content. The tiger-striped flower signified her moodiness as of late, like two distinct and opposing colors within one person, and she sighed.

William swallowed, working to find words to explain… "Stripes... Stripes…?" Fortunately, some bubbled up, and, with them, confidence filled him. Thinking she would like his answer, he said, "Rare, and wonderful, and remarkable…" he bowed inward to her and whispered, "Like you."

His gesture, his words, the feel of it, reminded of the night at the Ball when he had told her he had seen his future – and that it was her. It had a similar effect on her now.

From the cluster of female students on the other side of the lecture hall, undoubtedly sharing in their mutual admiring of the doctor's husband, Miss Danroy's query called out, "Dr. Ogden, do you think we could have Detective Murdoch teach us a class…"

Annie Cranston, in her role as an early member of the Murdoch Appreciation Society, notably the young woman having had been encouraged, upon meeting Dr. Ogden, into becoming a pathologist herself, reminded them all, "Oh yes! Detective Murdoch has such famous and ingenious techniques!"

"I'd sure like to learn his techniques," more than one of the lovestruck young women lustfully thought to themselves inside their pretty heads.

"It would be wonderful!" another gushed.

Julia rolled her eyes, and somehow William just knew that this, too, would be a bone of contention between them. He hurried to wiggle out of it.

Unfortunately, he was so deliciously gorgeous while doing it…

"Ladies," he gave a charming bow to them, "I am sure Dr. Ogden is much more qualified than I at…"

A surge of worry, for he heard her huff next to him…

But then, Julia Ogden's mind played for her a mirage of cascading memories of William Murdoch's brilliant moments – the rotting liver stench in his office walls, the result of an experiment in hatching Junebug pupae found on the body, and his figuring out that their 'wrong' timing for hatching meant that they had been, and thus the body had been, kept on ice, and leading him to find the killer… And his showing up in the morgue with a way to test blood to see if it was from an animal – a dog in this case – or from a human, ultimately proving that his father was not the murderer and freeing him to go out west to reunite with William's half-brother Jasper… And William taking her to his back room of his office and dropping a blob of heavy modelling clay and a big book into her hands, suggesting that she use the 'Hess method' of 'seeing' a face, so smart, thinking of a way to make a replica of a face from a skull…

"We shall see," she gave. "Perhaps…"

Her unexpected utterance seemed to suddenly suck all of the air out of the room, the silence, for no one, least of all Julia herself, had expected her to agree to having her good-looking, overly-ogled husband stand in front of a bunch of easily-smitten young ladies and… impress them for three hours.

Julia turned back to her husband and accepted his nervous nod. Her eyes dropped down onto his unique flower, still waiting in his hand.

He cleared his throat and said, "The flower shop called it a 'Tiger Rose."

"Of course," she said, feeling herself softening to him, "because of the stripes."

William nodded and lifted it to offer it to her once more.

Julia took it and brought it up to that tender space between her lips and her nose, felt the lushness of its petals and breathed in the sweet scent of it. "Lovely," she thought, "I guess the rose breeders didn't give up fragrance for beauty," her more scientific mind figured.

"It's delightful William," she tried to whisper her message to him.

As she passed the stem from her one hand into the other, a thorn pricked into her flesh. "Ouch," she said maintaining their intimate whisper in response to the sting. "It has claws, and it scratches like a tiger too, I see," she joked.

William wrinkled a corner of his mouth, for that point, too, alluded to some similarities between the flower and his wife, and she felt her giggle bubbling up inside. It took effort, but she kept it at bay.

With the playfulness blooming between them, a part of William's awareness was tugged to the physical, in more ways than one. In the small, scratched places on his back, he sensed keenly, in the flesh under his shirt, hidden away from view by his suit vest, and his suit jacket, and his winter coat, the tingly sting of the spots where Julia's fingernails had dug into him… And his brain hollered out NOT TO… but it was too late, and his mind replayed it, the knee-buckling memory from two nights ago, making love to her in the shower, and WHAM, it was powerful, the flood of it.

The students approached. And the heat of their invading presence spurred Julia into wanting to get away before they started pressing… pressing for her attention, or worse, for HIS, probing her for hints as to what topics would be on the upcoming exam, pressing her for letters of reference for lab positions over the summer…

She glanced into William's eyes. "I just have a few things to do in my office…"

He nodded, switched his hat over to his other hand.

She expected him to follow her, but she heard the young ladies start to hover as she turned…

Miss Delroy asked him, "What types of things would you expect to cover… um, detective…"

Julia… William… and each of the other ladies as well, caught the movement, Miss Delroy's eyes dropping down and widening as they took in the look of the detective's… lower parts.

Julia rolled her eyes…

"…when you give us our lecture," Miss Delroy finished her question, her eyes still down on him.

Julia couldn't help herself, she huffed, and immediately started to storm out, chin up, arms pumping at her sides. Only two steps into it, though, she reminded herself to be the grown-up and slowed down, lowered the tempo, tried to simply nonchalantly walk away… every cell in her body focused behind her, wondering, hoping, praying, that he would follow.

"I…uh," William generally unable to be impolite, responded, "Well… uh, I'll have to think about it." He clamped his lips together, an attempt to apologize for his being brusque, before he said, popping his homburg onto his head, "Ladies," and nodded, tipping his hat to them…

And then the detective took his leave, his fast pace exhibiting his desire to catch up with his wife.

There was a comment, not meant for him to hear…

All he could make out was the few words, "rear-end of him…" followed by a flutter of embarrassed giggles.

The detective now out of earshot, Annie Cranston said, "Believe me girls, you don't know the half of it – you should see him with his shirt OFF…"

A myriad of gasps filled the air.

"As if you…" one of the bunch called her on it.

Oh, so smug, her reply, "The Murdoch's Halloween Party, his costume… But, I must say, Dr. Ogden looked mighty… let's just say, she looked quite GOOD herself."

Florence Delroy, as she often did, found Annie to be irritating, and so she minimized the thrill her rival was offering the group, saying, "We all saw the photo in the newspaper, Annie…"

"Yes. Yes, that's true," one of the group added, "Dr. Ogden, and the detective, and their adorable little son – Oh, and that invention of his, that moving Halloween monster-thingy really looked like…"

Another woman interrupted, "They were some sort of sea creatures, weren't they?"

Miss Cranston won the race to name the characters of their Halloween costumes, "King Neptune and his wife Salacia…" she piped up, then devilishly adding, "How salacious!"

)

Once they got up into her office, Julia closed the door behind them, using the previously set precedent to signify that she was meant to be left alone.

William said something about science, sensing the topic was safer common ground for them, suggesting aloud that he could use his UV photography technique, and its ability to reveal hidden bruises on a corpse – or anyone for that matter – as something to lecture to her students about. Julia agreed that it was good idea, albeit the technique was connected to the only case he did NOT solve last year – the Body Dumper Case.

With his Tiger Rose as a way for her not to look at him, to give herself some time to think, she busied herself finding a flask for the extraordinary flower, and then happily parked it on her desk, sans water for now. For his part, she noticed, William unbuttoned and removed his coat and his maroon winter scarf. She knew they would need to talk about the fight, and Julia Ogden had never been one to avoid challenges. "No time like the present," she thought to herself.

Sitting at her desk, she turned to watch him. He had been distracting himself by reading her diplomas on her wall. He turned to face her as well, sensing she was ready. A part of her inside smiled, for it was William who said, "I suppose we should talk about last night."

"Yes," she answered him, "I think that would be a good idea."

He would never know it, but Julia, too, felt a flip of fear inside her gut. There was a bookcase against the wall opposite her desk, and William leaned against it, settling in for their talk.

Julia cut right to the crux of the matter, to what had happened to their son as a result of their actions… William's, at first, on his own, and then theirs, combined. She had an advantage here, being a trained psychotherapist – trained by Freud himself in Vienna.

"As a toddler, William," she started, "William Jr. is at the anal stage of his development. He needs to feel mastery… to gain a sense of self-confidence in his ability to accomplish things. Did your father see you as accomplished, William – Was he proud of the things you did, did he celebrate them?"

Suddenly Julia realized she was in danger of going way too fast. William had improved vastly over the years at analyzing his own and the psychological states of others, but this… your own child… and relationships with your parents when you were a child, were most assuredly sticky territory, in any situation. And the situation was loaded right now, being on the heels of a fight.

The unexpected question had come at him so quickly that he frowned before he could take control of his face. And then, once he'd gotten it, his face going blank, he had to fight with all his might not to follow his instincts and close up completely. Already feeling it had taken him too long to respond (a lesson he learned incredibly poignantly back when he took too long, when he could not respond to her question about her sterility before she went to away, left him to go to Buffalo) he hurried to reply, muttering, "Some. Some he thought were … strange, I guess," followed by his signature wrinkling at the corner of his mouth.

My, oh my, did he worry that she would ask him about his own toilet training as a child. He would have to have said that he did not remember – because he didn't. And sitting there at this moment with her, a part of him worried that she would not believe him. He prepared in case she asked, searched backwards in his mind. He did know one thing… it was unlikely that his father was not even around. If memory served (and in William Murdoch's case it probably did), his father was out sailing around the world.

Julia furiously wanted to get the pressure off of him, feeling bad for having put him in such an uncomfortable spot. "I'm sorry, William," she gave. "Freud's theories are difficult to talk about on a personal level. I understand that," she offered.

He asked, relieved, "What's the next stage… after this one?"

Inside, she giggled, and her eyes resisted bulging. "Oedipal," she answered him.

William pursed his lips and blew out the pressure. His eyebrows rose up high and he said, "That's the one with incest and scratching your eyes out…?"

Unable to hold back, Julia giggled, a part of her thoroughly delighted. Truth be told, she felt such a pang of love for him that it made her happy through and through. She knew in that moment that they would be alright, that they would work this out. And as was often the case with these two, the connection would be some learning or another, for both she and William fascinated with the science and the workings and the phenomena of the world.

She smiled and told him, "The oedipal stage has some issues with fathers and sons, and jealousy over the mother, yes. But we don't have to worry about that right now, hmm?" she asked him.

Adorable, he wrinkled a corner of his mouth at her.

Getting them back on track, Julia said, "William, I would like you to read… um, to learn more about Freud's theories on development. I think it's important. And, let's agree…" her beautiful eyes held firmly to hers, "that if I'm home when William Jr. masters something – particularly if he does so with what we're working on with him at this stage, with his toilet training, I DO want you to call me to see and to celebrate his success with the two of you. And I'll call you."

William nodded, lips clamped tight.

Julia went on, adding, "Rewards for doing this well are what are needed, in order for William Jr. to become capable and competent and productive as an individual."

William nodded again, and inside her head Julia warned herself not to fall into a lecture.

"This… Well, it may not be easy. And we'll have to be careful not to make too much of it… to put even more stress on him. But we can do it," she encouraged herself as much as William. She pushed her chair away from her desk and stood.

His eyes darkened, and his breathing changed. He had become a bit captured by her, by how beautiful he found her to be, noticing her complexion, creamy and pink, so smooth, so perfect, and those eyes of hers, blue… mesmerizing… magnetic, and so amazingly big, and off at the edges, those fiery wisps of her hair, and it all made William's heart skip a beat.

She stepped closer to him, "And, I have to say William, I should not have taken my concerns to the level that I did, either, last night. I was wrong, to get so upset. I should have remembered that you did not know the significance of what was happening on the psychological level, that you would not expect William Jr.'s reaction to YOUR taking control, and flushing away his… his proof that he had done it… his success in a sense. And certainly, I should not have let it affect OUR relationship. I am sorry…" She was very close now, the quietness of her voice attesting to her nearness, "And… I really regret that I made you sleep on the couch. And the flower is truly beautiful. Thank you for…" Her eyes dropped away, unsure what to say. "Thank you for putting up with me, pulling me back to my senses, loving me…"

William stepped the final inch, intimately closer, and began his mating ritual in his most usual way, taking one of her curls in his fingers. "I did miss you…" He wrinkled a corner of his mouth at her.

Julia's internal flame erupted. She would never know why, why in this moment she had blurted this out, for she had never told him this particular truth before. The words flew out of her mouth before being caught by her brain, examined, analyzed. "William Murdoch, have I ever told you that you are the most gorgeous man I have ever laid eyes on?" she flirted, herself stepping deeper into his arms, the smell of him, Chinese spice and Williamy, insensing her deepest core.

His insightful brain flickered it in front of his mind's eye, an image of the striking, opposing-colored stripes of the Tiger Rose, and he knew it was her sudden switch to lust that had brought the image to him, his mind adding superimposed images to the flower, one on each stripe of color, her face, so angry at him last night, right next to it, her wanting him so right now…

Cocky sometimes, he would tease her. "I seem to remember…" he said, as she felt him slip his hand, so large, into the arch of her back behind her, sliding upward, so firmly locking her in, "…you being quite taken with another…, as I remember it was the dashing Neil Catfrey who not so long ago caught your fancy…"

Those magnificent clear blue eyes of hers darted here and there across his face. But then, they settled on his remarkable big brown eyes and then they deepened. She took a deep breath, and she waited for him to do the same, the whole time their eyes stuck, melded, and the love flowed between them and it reminded of the sincerity between them, and when she felt it solid and strong, she replied, "Neil Catfrey reminded me that there were other attractive men in the world besides you, it's true William, but there are none, NONE, that I love so that it makes my heart ache, no one but for you William, for me too, you're the one."

There was a twitch of a smile on his face, feeling the truth of what she said.

"William, no fight over how to parent our child… our children…" she paused, both of them remembering, with their eyes dropping down, to consider the baby growing inside of her, "Nothing will ever change that."

"Good," he said simply. Then he added, "Besides, a modern marriage is impossible without disagreements, no?

His efforts were rewarded with a smile. "I over-reacted… It seems I do that a lot…" she sighed, a bit embarrassed, her eyes dashed off to the side. A tiny wrinkle at the corner of her mouth told that she had admitted something to herself, and when she looked back into his eyes, the look melted him even more. A breath first, she continued her thought, "Yes, I do that a lot these days. And I'm getting a little tired of blaming it on being pregnant." She frowned. "But, despite that, there's a possibility that I am being overprotective, that I am coddling him too much…"

William knew he was meant to object, but he did not. His wrinkle told that he would be honest rather than placate. He saw, now, that this time she had had reason to cater to William Jr.'s outburst, to push to give in to the tantruming, it was true, but there had been other times, other times when he believed that her pampering of their son spoiled him, and he feared it would make him weak, lacking in grit and the ability to control himself.

She cupped his cheek. She loved him, even more for that part of him that loved the truth.

"Parenting has its challenges," she said, bringing him to smile.

"That it does," he answered plainly.

"And William, I may know more about psychology, but I'm still learning, too," she gave, gesturing to him with another wrinkle at the edge of her lips. "I am sorry, truly."

His hands slipped into her hair, up deep into the tresses, his manly thumb glancing over her tender ear. He was going to kiss her, and her insides burned with wishing. She felt his breath on her as he said, "Rare and remarkable and beautiful like the Tiger Rose," and he tilted his head and he moved so close and she saw his eyes close away and she closed hers too, lured by the tingling of the aura of him hovering… before their lips touched. Perfectly, he paused, melting her into softness before he filled the space with his warm, amazingly-soft lips. The kiss, long enough for the heat of their breaths to pour out around them, steam sizzling it upwards between them.

Oh, there would be no couch-sleeping tonight.

)

William had talked Julia into letting him take her out to her favorite French restaurant for dinner after her class, even though it meant that they would get home too late to tuck William Jr. into bed. They were both happy to have made-up, even more so than usual, because he was leaving for Ottawa in the morning, to advocate for getting his truthilzer admitted as reliable evidence in the courts. They had agreed it was a good time for him to go away – there had not been any murders for weeks, and the monotony was driving William mad.

At the French restaurant, the young woman who served them oohed-and-ahhed over Julia's unique, striped flower, offering to bring a glass of water for it. The Tiger Rose sat in the center of their small table while they dined. The meal had been lovely. They even decided to indulge in dessert. Julia gave him her request for him to order for her when the waitress came back and then excused herself to use the bathroom, pregnancy already affecting her ability to outlast a whole meal, despite the fact that she was not even showing yet. She reminded herself how much harder it would get as the pregnancy progressed, and still, her inner joy trumpeted that it was beyond worth it, it was still phenomenally wonderful, the feeling she had when she remembered that William's child was growing inside of her.

Upon Julia's return, she could just tell, her instincts prickling with suspicion, her astute observations pushing it towards certainty, that the waitress had made a pass at William. She knew her husband, and he was blatantly uncomfortable. She noticed that those big chocolaty eyes of his darted anywhere but at the young woman, and he avoided looking directly at her as well. It was particularly obvious though when the waitress brought them their desserts – William's eyes nearly glued to the table cloth, him not adding a word to the conversation. Although she felt the fury brewing inside of her, she decided to spare him. She would not bring it up, instead she effused about the delicious chocolate mousse, and spoke of his ideas of what subject matter to choose for the lecture that he would give to her students at some, as of yet unspecified, date. Unfortunately, that topic of conversation brought her little relief from her jealousies and insecurities, for it was pitted with her imagining in her head having all those infatuated young female students of hers gushing all over how wonderful, and smart, and handsome he was. Try as she might to push the nagging thoughts away, she felt herself becoming obsessed, and then she thought to herself that it was probably an overreaction again, because she was pregnant, and she stopped herself from letting herself remember the disaster of the OTHER waitress, when she was pregnant with William Jr.

Moving on, she heard herself say to him, grateful that she was pulling off not appearing to be troubled, as she said, as a conclusion, "Well then, we are in agreement. The most innovative technique is using the ultra-violet light for photographing the body, so it should definitely be one of the things you share with them."

"Julia," William's face lit up with an idea, setting up the spark of intrigue, "I think we should write a paper together on it…"

"Or perhaps even a book together someday, William," she delighted with the idea…

The waitress interrupted them, William having already laid out the money atop of the bill. They stopped their conversation and he handed her the money.

And then, then, the brash waitress said to William seductively in French, "Si tu changes d'avis, je suis ici du mardi au vendredi," and William's uneasy reaction reddened his face, and Julia grit her teeth and stuck her jaw up in the air fighting against her inundation of feelings – angry, hurt, so vilely, vilely jealous, her knowing enough French to know that the woman had suggested he meet her here at the restaurant.

William barely managed to get out the words, "Keep the change," his eyes anywhere but on the waitress.

Hiding her disappointment, the woman smiled, glanced at Julia, then left.

"Jesus Christ, William!" Julia protested in a hushed whisper-of-a-yell as the waitress walked away.

"Julia, please," he complained, "The Lord's name..." he reminded her.

"Honestly!" she threatened to steam. "Unbelievable – a WAITRESS… again," she remarked, shaking her head vehemently. But instantly she saw the discomfort on his face.

She gave out a big sigh. "Don't worry, William. I know you did nothing to invite it…"

His relief filled the space between them, each of them better able to breathe.

He stretched towards her from his side of the table, hoping not to be overheard, "She knew who we are, Julia. Said she had read in the papers that you were pregnant, and… um, she wanted me to know…" he blew out some pressure, "She said she would be…" William needed to clear his throat. He tried again. "She said she wanted me to know she could help… um, if my… if… my needs" he wrinkled his face apologizing, then swallowed nervously, "weren't being met."

"I see," Julia said, becoming furious inside. "How dare she!?" her brain bellowed, "Is there no honor among women?"

Calm, Julia called for calm. Fortunately, with that tiny bit of settling down, a natural curiosity arose in her. She ducked her chin down and looked up at him from her side of the table.

And William prepared for the incoming…

"And what did you say, William… to her proposition?" she nudged at him.

Another pursed-lips exhale, he was surely feeling it. He leaned over the table closer to her. "I said that my needs were being met," he told her.

Lovely, that he could not say it without blushing.

And she pictured it… William's pause, the woman's question too direct for even HIM to miss her intentions, then he would have clamped his lips together, fighting the urge to say too much. She heard his voice in her head, "My needs are being met just fine," she heard him say to the pretty young woman, followed by a "Thank you," because William Murdoch defaulted to being good-mannered. Really, how brazen… her inner fury flared again.

William caught Julia begin to search the room and worked to deflect from a confrontation, "Shall we go?" he asked her.

Her eyes back to his, she nodded. "Of course," she said placing her napkin on the tabletop, starting to push her chair back, but then remembering to wait for him to come around and gentlemanly pull it back for her.

Heading out, William realized that Julia had left the Tiger Rose in the water glass on the table. "Uh… Julia, wait," he stopped her and then rushed back to get it, feeling the weight of nearly all the eyes of restaurant patrons following him as he hurried across the restaurant floor. Droplets of water sprinkled about as he pulled the Tiger Rose free from the water glass. He took out his handkerchief and began to wrap the thorny stem in it so that Julia could better hold it. Looking up to where he had left her waiting, the empty space there hit him hard. "She left! Darn. She's angry…" he felt his heart sink.

But then, out of the corner of his eye… "That was most definitely Julia""Bloody h…" he stopped his brain from finishing the unacceptable thought, and then he was already dashing in her direction before it completely registered. This was dangerous, to say the least – Julia was confronting the waitress, right there in front of a table full of guests!

"You owe us both an apology," he heard her saying sternly as he got closer…

"Him, for tempting him to betray me. And me for… for trying to lure my husband into an illicit affair… and for using my being pregnant – with HIS child mind you, as the way to do it! It's despicable…"

"Julia," William exclaimed as he arrived, then anxiously nodded to the large table of diners, "Uh…" all eyes on him, he suddenly had no idea what to say.

"She knew exactly what she was doing, and she wronged us… both of us," Julia caught his eye, saw him take comfort in their bond. "She should apologize, William," she insisted again.

"Yes," William agreed immediately. Truly, his wife was brilliant. The waitress apologizing to them, for she had most assuredly trespassed against them, that would help. "Yes, that seems the right thing to do," he reiterated, turning to request it more directly from the waitress herself.

The young woman turned bright red, felt such a dizziness of shame she could hardly stand. She managed to blurt out that she was sorry before she ran away into the kitchen, out of sight. It would take all the courage she could muster to later return to that same table of patrons to deliver their meals.

As for William and Julia, William rose to the occasion beautifully. He stepped Julia aside, looked into her eyes, took a chest-lifting deep breath and smiled, and then he wrinkled a corner of his mouth, and she just toppled completely for him. He offered her the Tiger Rose once more, winsomely tilting near to her, whispering in her ear, "Rare and remarkable, remember," and then he touched his fingers under her chin, rough and gritty meeting softness…

And her heart flipped over in her chest, and the floor floated up, and the world swept into a swirl… HE WAS GOING TO KISS HER…

"Here, William?" her voice blended squeaking with a gasp.

His perfect voice, home, told her, "Everywhere, Julia. I love you to your soul, everywhere," and then he did, he kissed her right there in the French restaurant with everybody watching them. The only thing missing were the colorful bursts of fireworks all around them, and the whole world knew, once again, that they WERE Toronto's storybook couple.

On the way out, the cold of late February biting on the skin and freezing in the lungs, he asked her if she thought their picture might be in the newspaper, the two of them kissing in public – again.

"Perhaps," she replied happily, tucking her arm into his elbow and squeezing him close, "Perhaps."

)

As William and Julia arrived at home, Claire-Marie heard them and came to meet them at the door. Immediately the young nanny spotted the Tiger Rose in the doctor's hand. "They made up!" her heart delighted, and she gushed about the beauty of the strange flower. While the couple took off their winter coats, she offered to put the flower in a vase, Julia requesting it be placed on the kitchen table so they could enjoy it over breakfast.

Julia asked Claire-Marie about William Jr.'s using the toilet before he had gone to bed.

The nanny frowned, "I'm sorry to say, he wouldn't even try on the potty," she reported, herself unaware of what exactly had happened the night before. "As a matter of fact, not all day. He insisted on nappies," she added.

William Jr.'s parents shared a meaningful look.

Claire-Marie grasped the significance of the look, understood that there had been a problem with this last night, and then her heart jumped up, suddenly for she remembered that the detective had also spent the night on the couch, and she knew that whatever had happened with their son's potty-training, it had likely been at the center of the argument they had had last night.

"Two steps forward, one step back with these things," Julia said, trying to dispense calm.

Once they were alone, they agreed that they would have to more directly address the problem, planning to talk with William Jr. about it, making sure the little one understood how they are both so proud of what a big boy he has been trying to be, and that they expected that his getting out of his nappies would take some time, but also that they each were certain that he would be able to do it.

William felt a knot in his stomach over the whole thing.

He told her he had remembered more, more about his own father's support when he had been a boy, but he was unable to remember anything from so young as William Jr. was now. He remembered that his father was proud of anything he accomplished that was athletic…

And in Julia's head there was a flash of the memory of when she was still married to Darcy, and she was helping William play out his trick on the man from the Blackhand in order to save Anna Fulford's life, and he looked so incredibly good in his tighter baseball suit, and he had hit a home run and been the star of the day.

"Oh," he had suddenly added with the memories solidifying in his brain, "and my maths… My father was always impressed at my ability to do math. But…" he wrinkled a corner of his mouth questioning that memory in more detail, "Well, I remember one time I was doing a… well, a chemistry experiment, I guess, with my mother's cooking sundries… I'd discovered the reaction between vinegar and baking soda. And my father came by mumbling about how there was something wrong with a boy who would do such an outlandish thing. It wasn't manly… he had said…"

"Oh, I beg to differ, William. Chemistry is most definitely manly…" she stepped into his arms, and the mood flared into romantic, "and womanly. And when the right two, when the right man, with the right woman, come close enough together to excite… Mmm," she admired his body through his clothes. Her lips dangled over his as she said, "The attraction can be quite strong, electromagnetic, gravitational, hmm…? Downright covalent and ionic, somehow all at once."

And then, she kissed him, William standing stiff, resisting the fall.

And then breaking off the kiss, she asked of him, "Shall we shower together – conduct a little chemistry experiment of our own?"

And then her giggle peppered the air, for all he could manage to give was a stunned nod in response. And with that, she took her man by the hand and brought him up the stairs, for a hot shower, very hot. His wife would send him off to Ottawa happy.

) (

It was on a dark country road in the blackest hours of night. As the wagon pulled over to the side of the road along the deserted property line, the hardened older snow crackled under the wagon wheels as they left their long, thin tracks. The horse stomped his foot, impatient. A single figure, dressed for the frigid late February weather in a hooded coat and bulky boots, face covered with a woolen mask, giving both cover from the cold and safeguarding against being identified, began the dirty deed. The first thing out, a stepladder, one of two, wedged by half a dozen wooden boxes against the wall of the wagon, held there tight and requiring a strong tug to free it.

The snow was deep, nearly over the tops of the boots as the dark figure drudged the ladder through the snow to the fence line, the first of many sets of footprints in the snow - unavoidable. The stepladder placed within an inch of the fence posts, dug deep into the snow to secure it, the Body Dumper made sure to note the precise location of Murdoch's tripwire, finding it running all along the top rail of the fence, but sneakily hidden on the inner side. A second stepladder was tossed over the fence. After climbing over to the fresh side, that second ladder was setup on other side of fence mirroring the first – the whole time the killer being extremely careful NOT to touch the wire, not to get caught in the trap.

Then up the ladder and back over again… boxes, boxes, boxes…

Deep into the woods and over to the shore of the Don River, as expected it was partially frozen over. The search for an indent in the ground successful, the shoveling began. Under the snow there was a layer of dark leaf litter that scattered when tossed aside, stark against the white snow, but under that, the ground was frozen solid. The dump would not be deep, but there was hope, hope that with the body, chopped up as it was, would be largely carried away by animals before it was discovered. Maybe, maybe, it would never be found at all.

With the dumping of the chunks of the contents of the first box into the 'grave,' the sight of the body parts toppling out, some of the parts so blatantly identifiable, a foot…, and the retching disgust curled the Body Dumper into a moment of weakness. The vomit swallowed back, bile and acid, for it was essential to minimize the evidence, the Body Dumper ran for the icy running water of the river to hurl into it, the potential evidence lost in the undertow.

The last box was the hardest, the most gruesome. It was not to be buried under the snow with the others. This box held the parts that could identify the victim, the head and the fingertips. Already sickened by the whole ordeal, the Body Dumper was careful not to look, head turned away as the wooden box suddenly felt lighter, bobbing up into the air, right before the splash – a big one, and following it, distinctly imprinted on the memory, a spattering of tinkling smaller ones, "the fingers," the mind disturbingly explained the sounds, taking some solace in the fact that their audible passing meant that the evidence had made its way into the flowing water to be washed away.

Almost done… the empty boxes were tossed back over the fence. And once the Body Dumper had climbed over the roadside of the fence, the farther stepladder was lifted out of the snow… avoiding contact with the wire. Made it!

Moments later the tapering off of the crisp echoes of the crunching of the wagon wheels in the snow was the very last chance to catch the Body Dumper in the act.

Undetected, the deed was done.

) (

It was fortunate that William had planned to meet George early at the Stationhouse for the constable to help him pack up and transport the various pieces of equipment he needed to take with him to Ottawa. He was bringing the truthilzer, but William had also figured he may as well include the ultra-violet photography, and so the camera, and the associated special lenses, along with the photographs of the oddly shaped bruise the innovative technique had uncovered on a victim's thigh, also needed to be readied. Thus, William was in his office when Jake Castern, the caretaker out at their Body Farm, phoned with the news of his discovery – another body had been dumped on their property, most likely last night.

The drought of murders was over, and unfortunately, with the sudden influx of something important for William to do also came the end of the pleasant lull in the press' attacks on them as a couple. The calm had been lovely, a result of the news being spread exponentially by the women at their Church that Dr. Ogden was pregnant, the celebration subsequently ending up being loudly broadcast in all the headlines, and with it, endless comments about how the Murdoch's had always been innocent of the charges railed against them by the press of their illegally using contraception. It was 'obvious they were NOT' now, for how else would Dr. Ogden have gotten pregnant? This very morning, there had been a photograph of Julia walking on the street with him, and a big to-do about how "the little Murdoch bump" was visible already. Even all those rejections the they had received from all those orphanages when they were trying to adopt a child were seemingly rendered mute, representing merely mistakes in judgement on the parts of the snobby committee members. But now, now that yet another body had been dumped on their property, the newspaper assaults would surely begin all over again.

William unknowingly rubbed roughly at his brow as he called Julia over at the morgue to let her know. His fingers massaged red marks into his forehead. The news wasn't good.

) (

(This was a particularly grisly body dump).

Back in the morgue, William came in for an initial report. Despite the skin-crawling feelings brought on by this latest murder, he still found his step lively, his heart light. Upon opening the large morgue door, her music instantly showered him, and always, always, when he discovered her playing her phonograph in the morgue like this, he remembered the first time he had encountered the lovely sight, the juxtaposition of its uplifting sound with the gloom and gore of where it was located, and he had felt it happen then, one of many, many times to come, his heart had opened up, with a warm aching, it had opened, expanded, stretched and enlarged. He had felt the undeniable sensation of love.

The bam of the door closing behind him drew her eyes up to meet his. She approached, wiping her hands clean on her morgue apron.

Funny, he felt those butterflies, nervously slid his fingers along the brim of his hat in his hands. He could feel the smile, out of control, on his face.

William," she called out to him.

Her face was bright, happy to see him… She was so beautiful, the thought hit him again for the umpteenth time.

"Doctor," he gave her his charming bow. The game was more fun if they held to that exciting tension between professionals and lovers.

"What have you?" he asked her.

Julia held her eyes to his for a brief moment too long as she made the shift inside. She gestured for William to approach the body – well, body PARTS really, laid out on the morgue slab like the pieces of a jigsaw-puzzle of a man, creating the illusion of what used to be. It was an incomplete jigsaw puzzle at that, for this particular puzzle was blatantly missing a head.

"Our victim… And I do believe that this time it is just the one…" she paused waiting for William to make the connection she had intended – to remember the last time he had had a case with merely a few parts of a body to work with, back when he had mailed her the three pieces, a forearm, a foot, and part of a torso, to analyze in Buffalo, and she had discovered that they were from three different victims rather than just, as had been expected, the one.

William pinched his lips together tightly and nodded. Bad memories were associated with that time in his life, painful memories. They showed on his face, in just that little twitch of a second. It was not just the gruesomeness of remembering the chopped-up pieces of the victim at the time, but also of her having had left him to go to Buffalo, and his constant fights with her replacement – that strict and slothly Dr. Francis…

Julia looked back down to the evidence positioned out in front of them, getting back to her report. She inhaled and began, "The victim was male, about 40 years old. He was in good shape, but…" there was a pause, trying to find how to say it, "Well, what evidence we do have from what little there is of his fingers, and from the palms of his hands, suggests that he was not a laborer – he lacks the callouses that would be expected." She took a breath, changing the subject. "He was a big man, tall and brawny…"

William stepped closer, listening. He leaned down to the arm closest to him.

She wondered if he was remembering all those years ago when she had admired the dead boxer's big, muscly arms. This victim was not as well-endowed as that one had been. Oh, but William had been so deliciously jealous, she remembered. It had been absolutely lovely…

"Any identifying features, doctor?" he asked.

So slightly, there was a sigh from her, impatient with his doggedness, and in response, so subtly, a devilish smile from him, a part of him enjoying her disappointment.

"There are no notable scars or tattoos or birthmarks. And obviously," her tone was back to official, "the victim was naked, so there will be no evidence from his clothing. There weren't any fibers that I could find, indicating that he was likely naked when…"

William's eyes jumped up to hers, such anticipation, worry, dread in his eyes…

"Oh," she rushed to say, "He was already dead when he was chopped-up, William," she reassured. Julia saw the gratitude in his eyes before he hardened and went on with their business at hand.

"So, decapitation wasn't cause of death then?" he asked pointedly.

"No. No, um the wound at the neck was post-mortem, as were all the others…" her tone twinged with a bit of teasing as she slyly added, "detective," and then went on, "An axe, I'd think.". She moved on to consider cause of death and the weapon. "There are no bullet wounds – no bullet, obviously," she chuckled at her own silliness.

Julia cleared her throat, laughing inside at her husband's strained facial expression. Back to sounding as official as she could muster, she continued, adding, "There are no significant cuts or stab wounds, so not a knife… I suppose he could have been poisoned… or even hit, or shot, in the head, as no head was recovered…"

William interrupted, sharing his suspicions about the head and the tips of the fingers, "There were footprints out onto the ice. The head was probably dumped along with the fingers into the flowing river." Then William considered aloud, "The victim could have been shot with a rifle… like the first victim you and your students found... dumped, back on the Fall Equinox?" He wrinkled his face, questioning himself.

"That was nearly half a year ago, William," she said, a hint of worry in her voice. "Do you think it's the same killer?! The Body Dumper?!" she asked.

Their eyes met.

The Body Dumper was the only case he had not solved last year.

And the press had been rabid about the whole thing.

It would start all over again!

She could tell that he suspected so by the 'admitting-it' wrinkle at the corner of his mouth. But he had no proof, no direct evidence. And they both knew their focus needed to be on the clues.

"The killer knew about my boobytrap. Whoever it was used two stepladders to avoid contacting the wire on the fence," William's mind began delving, "Only one set of footprints left in the snow – only one person…" His mind down another track, asked, "Who would know about the trap?"

Julia watched William's face change, take on that focused and yet relaxed, honed look.

"I'll have to question that older reporter, the one who set off the trap, got caught in the net but cut himself free, when he planted a fake body to get a headline…"

"Charlie Masters," Julia provided the name.

"Yes," William nodded.

Julia reminded him, "But William, anyone reading Madge Merton's story about the spots and stripes on the leopards and the tigers would have known that you had set a trap. They'd be on the lookout for whatever tricks and devices you had set-up to catch them."

William considered it. "Still…" he argued, "He seemed to know details… things that only someone who had gotten captured in it before would likely know."

Julia almost laughed out loud at the expression of surprise on William's face. He had thought of something!

"That is if it is a "HE" at all?" he wondered aloud…

And for a moment, he tilted his head, and he chased down the clues.

Julia knew this look. She would wait.

Multiple pathways fired, like fireworks in his brain, electric and fast, apart, separate gleaming streamers… lightning speed, coming together…

"It was the footprints, bootprints actually," William corrected his own thoughts, "Big. But, there was something not right. The weight was distributed strangely – too much weight to the back of the boot…"

And inside William's head, on another offshoot, he was remembering a case from back when the toff-philanthropist, Howard Rockwood, had been murdered. Rockwood was the founder of Baker House. (The same Baker House was a home for children that had recently been among the many orphanages to reject the Murdoch's application to adopt a child, the place still leaving a bad taste in William's mouth). Supposedly Rockwood had been trampled by horses, but William had figured it out. The horses, being meant for the glue factory, should not have had shoes on their hooves… But the boots, the bootprints in the dirt mixed in with the shod hoofprints of the horses… "Street children," he had figured back then, "wearing boots that were too big for them and stuffing socks in the toes… The front of the bootprints had been too light, not deep enough compared to the depth in the dirt made by the heel."

His mind tossed up one final thought – the killer had turned out to be a woman, the only one leaving footprints in the horse pen without the odd weight-distribution pattern. Rockwood's wife in the end, wearing her own, child-sized boots that night. She had whacked her wealthy husband on the back of the head with a shovel, a crime of passion to protect their adopted daughter from Rockwood's abusive sexual advances.

"At the scene," William's attention was back with a jolt, "The Bootprints left in the snow… They were large, I'd say size 11 or so…"

"Odd," Julia interrupted him before he could get to the point. But then unexpectedly she broke into giggles, her own logic catching up to her thoughts. "I was going to say the killer's shoe size would have been about the same size as our victim here, but clearly, the man didn't chop himself up into pieces now, did he?" She wrinkled a corner of her mouth at him, her apology, his style of expressing it.

"Coincidence, I guess," William concluded.

"I'm sorry, Wil… detective," she corrected, "What were you saying?"

"The heels were too deep compared to the front part of the bootprints. It could have been a woman wearing a man's boots, to throw us off the scent," he suggested.

Truly, the man is ingenious, she thought to herself. "Yes. Yes, I see what you mean. We should be careful not to make assumptions. Perhaps the killer is a woman," she agreed.

"Or a smaller man," William added the possibility, with a corner-of-the-mouth wrinkle.

William's eyes dropping back down to the body assembled on the morgue slab indicated he was anxious to get back to the postmortem report.

Julia took a deep breath following his glance. The display was quite something. "Chopping-up the body like this, but then leaving all the parts… well, these parts, leaving the pieces together in the same shallow grave of snow – it doesn't make any sense?" she posed the question. "Perhaps, I guess, the smaller pieces would decompose faster than if the body were left intact, with the larger surface area exposed I mean. But that would be irrelevant in this freezing weather… Oh!" she had an idea, "Maybe the killer wanted to make the body easy to find! Maybe he wanted to attract animals to the body parts so that they could dispose of it by carrying it off in pieces. The killer figured there wouldn't be much to be found by anyone, come spring…"

While Julia talked on, William stared down at the deeply creviced chop marks near the edges of the different parts of the body. He remembered Dr. Francis telling him about marks like those, back when Julia was in Buffalo. He re-heard Dr. Francis' voice explaining, "Incidentally, these clean cuts here indicate an axe was used for the dismemberment…" And then flashes from that case began to cascade in his mind, of finding the one cement block on the shore of the Don River, being able to see the ankle of the foot distinctly at the edge of the flat, gray, rock-hard cement. He had fought with Dr. Francis – again, about his inappropriateness in requesting that the doctor come out to the crime scene.

And then he remembered their unfriendly exchange in the morgue later. Dr. Francis seemed to have absolutely no sense of urgency in doing the postmortem. Sarcastically, the man had snapped at him about people having the "unfortunate habit of dying, sometimes in bunches – like this week." William sighed, remembering how much the roadblock to working his case had been frustrating him beyond his ability to hold his patience. But then, then he had looked for something, anything that he could use to move forward on the case – and fortunately he had spied a large chunk of the cement block that was off to the side on a cabinet in the morgue, still intact, and William had noticed that the pattern of the wood that had lined the cement block while it had hardened was visibly etched into the cement. He heard himself, inside his head, start to ask Dr. Francis, "May I take…?" and then being rudely and snidely dismissed with, "Yes! So long as you leave me in peace." The sour taste in his mouth curled his upper lip.

Ironically, it was that very piece of evidence, the imprint he had made by tracing the wood's knot pattern from the cement block onto a piece of paper, that had ended up being the key in proving his case. His predecessor at stationhouse #4, Detective Lamb, had turned out to be the killer. A dull ache flamed in William's chest as he realized, as he thought, that Lamb's case had been so much like his own with Constance Gardner, from back when he was a constable and he had convinced her, then as Ava Moon, to testify against that lecherous Cudmore in court, only to have the villain rape and viciously slash her with a knife after he was found NOT guilty, destroying her face and her ability to ever have children. She had paid so much for HIS mistake, HIS insistence on holding to the truth, telling on the stand that his Inspector at the time had beaten Cudmore when the man had confessed, leading to Cudmore's being set free. Clearly now, William recognized, that this case with Detective Lamb had been the driving force behind his decision to free Constance Gardner – at the cost of stopping Julia from marrying Darcy. So similar, this crime to that one – Lamb's with a murdered Harriet King, and her three killers Lamb's victims, Lamb chopping them up and dividing their body parts into cement blocks, and then his own with Constance Gardner, a confessed murderer, and him breaking the law to set her free…

"What is it, William?" he heard compassion in Julia's voice as she called him back.

The two lovers stared into each other's eyes for a breath.

His exhale warmed his heart before he told, "I… I was remembering a case. The one with the three body parts, um…" he cleared his throat…

There was stress there.

William went on, "I sent them to you in Buffalo…"

"Yes," Julia leaned closer, "I remember the case. There are certainly similarities."

William reminded himself that Detective Lamb had been found guilty of the three murders – that he was in jail. Thus, Lamb could not be responsible for this crime. His alibi was rock-solid. But then William's mind went off on a tangent, remembering that it was only recently, during the Pink Panther Diamond case, that he had been reminded of Malcolm Lamb's current status as a prisoner in the Don Jail, by the previous Stationhouse #4 detective's father, Alderman Lamb. Standing there now in the morgue next to Julia, he still poignantly remembered the sting of his being dressed-down in the Inspector's office by the alderman and Thurston Howell the 1st. Mr. Howell was the pompous toff who was hosting the showing of the Pink Panther Diamond as part of his Halloween gala. William had had evidence that the priceless diamond had already been stolen by Neil Catfrey and Sally Pendrick, but, since it turned out that Alderman Lamb was the owner of the Riverdale Zoo, the place where the Pink Panther Diamond was being held and would be displayed, Howell was able to shut down William's investigation. The two men had argued that the current Stationhouse #4 detective, William, could not be trusted because he was such a stickler for the law. The proof they had for this complaint against him was specifically that he had had a GOOD man like Alderman Lamb's son, Detective Malcolm Lamb, sent up for killing despicable men who clearly deserved it, and worse, for what they had done to that poor King woman…

"Do you think the two cases are linked William?" she asked him.

William looked puzzled, unsure if she was asking, again, if he thought the Body Dumper was the killer in both cases where the victims were dumped at their Body Farm.

His pause prompted her to clarify, "I mean the one when I was in Buffalo, and this one?"

Julia managed not to chuckle when he wrinkled the corner of his mouth and then frowned.

"Perhaps," he replied, "But unlikely. The man who killed and chopped-up those victims while you were in Buffalo is in the Don Jail, I'm certain of it."

"Oh?" she asked for more.

Another frown.

"The detective before me at Stationhouse Four," he answered, "Detective Malcolm Lamb."

Julia burst into giggles…

Her unexpected reaction knocked William back on his heels a step with his surprise.

She asked him, "Really?!"

Not having time to nod, William stiffly stood just watching her.

"That's his name – 'Lamb?" she checked.

His stance remained cautious, for William was preparing himself.

She covered her mouth with her hand, declaring, "Oh William," she pushed her explanation through her giggles, "You'll hate it!" and then she bent over and laughed harder…

Then even harder when he frowned.

She decided to say it, despite the fact that her joke was certain to be met with his scorn, "It's just that both cases involve a…" her face was already deliciously pink with preparing to deliver her punchline. Finally, she blurted it out, "They both have a LAMB-CHOP!"

William managed to remain stiff, to extend the joy of the game, him playing his role perfectly. William Murdoch tended to make quite a good straight man given the opportunity, and he saw her absolute playful, lovely, wonderful pleasure dancing in her eyes. Right then and there, William Murdoch's heart opened even that tiniest bit more with love for this magnificent woman. The only detectable movement from him, a delayed lift of one eyebrow, collapsing her completely.

He waited for Julia to finish reveling in the pain she had caused him with her, even worse than usual, bad pun. Once he thought she was ready, despite the fact that the sides of her mouth seemed to be wholly stuck in that wide smile on her face, he planned to move on with his investigation.

Yes, Julia was right about him, William was undeniably tenacious when there was a case on the table – so to speak. ( ;

"What have you on time of death, doctor?" William asked her, using a simple gesture towards the body pieces arranged on the morgue slab to pull her back in, sensing she was ready to get back to the case.

Julia ducked her chin down and looked up at him through her eyelashes. There was a hint of scolding, but with it an effort at holding back the urge to do so, resulting in a hesitation, as she coached herself behind her blue eyes that she knew who it was she had married, and she loved this man, exactly as he was, with all her heart. Something settled, and then she took a big, deep breath and stepped forward, focusing her attention on the body once more.

"Well, detective, there's something odd about that too," she answered him, wiping her hands at her morgue apron again.

"Oh?" he inhaled with bated breath, his own anticipation rising.

"Well, as you know, all these body parts were frozen. That makes determining time of death complicated. But this is curious…"

It tickled her insides the way he perked up, intrigued by a strange clue.

Julia used a surgical probe to pull back some flesh at one of the chop marks and exposed the deeper flesh. Little white specks could be seen in the wound. "These maggots. See…?"

He nodded. His brain was fast, and it rushed to consider the evidence. There was something different about them, and NOT just because Julia had alerted him that they would be odd. "Ahhh," he got it! He had seen such maggots thousands of times before, but they were usually wiggling. These were completely still!

"You wouldn't expect flies… in the dead of winter…" she stated the problem to be solved.

She elaborated, "Remember that dead body that Inspector McWorthy insisted I autopsy a little while back, the one found frozen amongst a bunch of pigs in a pigpen…?"

William smiled. "I remember the stench of it when he defrosted," he said.

"Yes, it was quite awful," she agreed, her own mind reminding her of a long time ago when she had pestered William about the stench in his office, falling for his story about something dying in his walls, until he showed her his rotting liver in the backroom – brilliant, hatching Junebug larvae…

Her face lit up as she added, "Well, McWorthy's body didn't have any maggots at all… But remember the Junebugs William!?" she rushed to ask him and then paused, knowing he would catch up.

"Of course, Julia!" William exclaimed. "Our victim was someplace warm before he was frozen, just like that victim years ago, who was killed by Dr. Birkins, and the Junebugs laid their eggs, and then after they had laid their eggs, the body was put on ice in the icehouse, and that delayed their hatching by five days! Yes! Yes, of course. This victim had to be similar."

He looked at his wife, saw that she was still waiting, his face already wrinkling with the conundrum. "But that victim… the one with the Junebugs, he was killed in the summer. This victim was killed… well…"

"I'd say at most a week to ten days ago," Julia answered him, "Though, that's what I've been trying to tell you, it could have been longer. It depends on how long the body had been frozen."

"Of course," William gave.

"You may have noticed that this body… well, at least all these parts of a body…" she began to explain with a nod to the puzzle pieces on the slab, "They don't reek as badly as did the body McWorthy sent me. That's because the one McWorthy sent me had been frozen in the pigpen almost immediately after death. That body hadn't gone through putrefaction before it was frozen, so it went through it when it defrosted here in my morgue. This victim here was kept warm past the really stinky stage, about three days or so. And these maggots would have taken more like six or seven days to get to this size. So, we know the body was kept somewhere warm, and somewhere where there are flies, for at least six days after he was killed!"

She had hoped for more excitement.

"Well, it's a good clue, isn't it?" she pressed at him.

Realizing he was disappointing her, William cheered up. "Yes. Yes Julia, it's… well, I'm sure it will be important…" He just needed a minute… to make some connections.

The truth be told however, and even William, himself, did not know this yet, he had already made the connections, and he really, really did not like where the conclusions were leading him.

He frowned and then decided to think out loud, feeling her waiting for him. "The body must have been kept someplace where it is warm in winter, but it cannot be someplace like inside a house or a flat because there also must be flies there…" he said, thinking, "So, probably with animals…"

"A Stable?!" Julia suggested.

Such a vile and sickening feeling trickled into William's gut with the next thought, triggering bad, bad memories…

"Or a slaughterhouse," he added. His gut telling him that that would be the place in the end.

She had seen the disgusted look on his face, and now she knew why it was there. William had nearly died at a slaughterhouse, at Davies Slaughterhouse to be exact, here in Toronto, and not that long ago either – right before William Jr. was born, while he was working on the meatpacking case. That same case that took him and George out onto the trains to pose as hobos.

She remembered, somewhere inside her head, that William and George had met Upton Sinclair, the author of the hugely popular American book, "The Jungle," while riding the train to Chicago. Sinclair had been researching his book by posing as a hobo too.

"But," her brain screamed at her, "William will have to go BACK to Davies Slaughterhouse now, to investigate this case!"

Julia's eyes followed William's hand as it rose to cover his trapezius muscle at the top of his shoulder. And she knew he was subconsciously feeling the pain all over again, remembering being hung from the meathook that awful night. The whole story was horrid, William and Constable Jackson getting chloroformed while searching the offices at the slaughterhouse, and then later regaining consciousness to find themselves naked and wrapped head to toe in burlap and rope, and then hung from a meathook up on the ceiling in the darkest hours of night, in among a line of pig carcasses waiting to be sliced in half by a huge rotary saw in the morning. Her heart melted for him.

"William," her voice so soothing, warm with empathy and care, "Going there…" she pushed herself to say the name, "…to Davies Slaugh…" and then her voice caught because the word 'Slaughterhouse' has the word 'slaughter' in it – and that was exactly what had almost happened to him! And tears filled her eyes.

She dropped her eyes away from his, too revealed for a second.

After a deep breath, she looked back up. "Of course you will," she said pinching her lips together, stronger, knowing William Murdoch well enough to know that he would face his demons, that he would go wherever the clues led him. "You're like a dog with a bone when you've got a case," she said.

William breathed out some of the bottled-up pressure. He wrinkled a corner of his mouth at her admitting it and added, "Not just any case, Julia. This one… well, this is the second time a body has been dumped at our Body Farm. The press is not going to let this go. It's going to get bad again," he warned.

He moved his hand from his shoulder to rub at his brow.

"You'll solve it William. I know you will," she tried to encourage him.

Sensing he would prefer changing the subject, Julia said, "So husband, now that this case has got its teeth into you, I don't suppose you'll be taking me to lunch. We've worked straight through it, and I'm famished."

He smiled and gave her a handsome bow, "Well, you are eating for two," he said.

She smiled and placed her hand over her slightly bulging womb. "Yes, the 'Murdoch Bump," she said, using the morning's headline. Her expression threatened to tease. "Well, as it is YOU who gave me this 'Murdoch Bump,' Mr. Murdoch, perhaps YOU should also be taking me out for lunch," she reasoned.

William raised a mischievous eyebrow at her, posing, "So, it's 'I' who gave you that bump?"

Amazing, how quickly disaster struck after that.

Instantly Julia's face scrunched into squeaking sobs, "You think someone else… William! You think I…!?" her tears flooding and glistening her cheeks…

"Oh, this was a runaway train!" William's brain bellowed at him with PANIC!

"No!" William gasped, "Julia NO! Look at me. Look at me," he reached out and grabbed her by her upper arms, pulled her closer. Rushed breaths, he pleaded, "I was just teasing – that WE made the bump, that You had something to do with it too, that it wasn't me alone. I never meant… I've never thought, not ever one little iota, that you ever…" William found he couldn't even say it.

Relieved, he saw she believed him. The runaway train had been stopped.

She sniffled.

He was already pulling out his handkerchief from his inside pocket. As he handed it to her, softly rubbing away a stream of tears from her cheeks himself first, William was thinking back to the myriad of times that Julia had charmed him with her provocative change from his seeing himself as being all alone, and her showing him, reminding him, that they were a team, a VERY GOOD team, that they were together.

He swallowed and said, with his customarily winsome wrinkle, "Somehow it works so much better when you do it…"

Making her laugh.

And she stepped into his arms, and he took one of her wild curls in his fingers, let his fingers brush against her neck, her ear, tucked his fingers deeper into her hair.

They could… They might…

William stopped the fall into romantic bliss. "I uh… I should investigate the stables, and the other… the slaughterhouses."

"So, no lunch for your devoted, loving, loyal and brilliantly wonderful wife then?" she teased him, just a little, still hoping to tempt the dog away from his bone.

His exhale, through pursed lips, assured that she had failed to sway him. He would take the heat. Accepting the fact that she was right, a wrinkle of admission followed, for he was wholly tied-up, as usual, with the case.

Julia sighed and asked, giving in, riding along with him where he was if she could not get him to be where she wanted him to be, "Do you think the papers will assume it's the Body Dumper again?"

He frowned and said, sweeping his hand through space to make it appear as if she could read what he was saying, "Murdoch's Body Dumper Strikes Again."

Julia had one better, making him suffer through yet another bad pun. She lifted up one of the victim's lower legs and improved, "Murdoch Stumped by Body Dumper Again," waiting for his moan.

He obliged, groaning with having to endure the misery. "I hope not," he said shaking his head at her and joining her in laughing, "I sincerely hope not."

And then, after thinking twice about it, William decided to take his wife out to lunch after all. The whirlwind was most certainly about to begin, and he wanted her to feel loved and cared for before he completely yielded to it. "The Windsor House?" he proposed, extending his elbow to her.

"Why William," she smiled and tucked her arm into his, "That would be lovely."

) (

Arriving at the front gate of Davies Slaughterhouse with the Sun gone, and the day shift of filthy, reeking, exhausted workers filing out, William looked at his pocket watch in the dull glow of the street lamps. "Missed supper…" he thought to himself, in his head imagining the warm coziness of their delicious-smelling kitchen, with his beautiful wife, and his bright-eyed little baby, and the efficient-minded Eloise fluttering about. A frown showed on his face as he recognized now that it might have been a mistake to put Davies off until the last on the list to investigate. He sighed. He had hoped that one of the other stables or abattoirs or even Burns' cattle-slaughtering plant would have held the evidence he needed. They had not, and down in his bones, he was not surprised, for it felt like fate that he would end up here. "Might as well follow this through," he heard his own voice inside his head say.

Back in the recesses of his mind, he was already imagining ways to sneak in later, when he would have a better chance of going undetected, the night shift much smaller, and the management closed up for the night.

Deciding it was best to get out of sight before the manager, or even worse Davies himself, came out and recognized him, William joined in with the flow of the exiting workers. He knew that right now his greatest advantage was that they did not know he suspected them, and he wanted to keep it that way. He asked a man where most of the workers go after a hard day's work. With that, William was invited to join a bunch of the men on their way to the local bar, the Blind Tiger Pub.

)

A few hours later William was back at the ill-omened entrance to Davies Slaughterhouse. Through his detective work, all the while nursing a single glass of whiskey that he had managed to avoid actually drinking, he had learned of a missing line worker, and it was confirmed by the bartender that the man had been missing for about a week. Thus, his investigation required a closer look. His mind had jumped ahead, picturing gaining clandestine access to the upstairs offices and stealing a glimpse at their records for the missing worker's information, dates of work, most recent address, and such.

It was largely dark in there. A deep breath for courage, and an effort at calming his nerves, and he advanced inward, hugging to the inside of the fence-line where the slaughterhouse lights were most dim. William pictured finding incriminating evidence, "Maybe clothing," he thought, remembering that Julia had said the victim had been naked when his body had been cutup, thus his clothes may have been removed and left where he had been…

Intrusive, the memories came, paralyzing him in his tracks…

He was dangling on the meathook in the stench and the blackness, nauseous with the screaming pain in his shoulder. Earlier that same day he and Jackson had seen a pig carcass hanging from a similar hook on this same ceiling he was hanging from now, and they had watched as it had been sliced in half, severed apart by the whirling, huge, silvery spinning saw, the same fate he knew was now waiting for him at the end of his own path. He did not fear dying, for he had had a wonderful divine vision back when he had died in that bathtub all those years ago. But his heart broke for Julia. The regret he felt debilitated him, collapsed him, stealing away with it all the air and the stench, and piercing him with a ceaseless whining in his ears. And now he knew it too as he stood there at Davies stuck in this memory, more clearly than he did back then – he had felt profound guilt. He had chosen to risk his life despite his knowing it would hurt Julia unbearably, it would destroy her. Guilt, because his unborn baby would never know him… So deeply, he regretted that choice.

Regaining control, William thought to himself, "You should look in the garbage bins…"

He moved forward, seeking the cover of the back of the main building where the garbage bins used to be. A part of his brain remembered George telling him that they had found his and Jackson's clothes in those same garbage bins that night. So odd, right then and there, William felt the scratchiness of the burlap against his bare skin.

He had made it to a small structure located close to the main building. His eyes scanned the area. His heart jolted when his eyes caught it, at first merely peripheral, it had stunned him. His scientific brain ran the thought in the background, "Peripheral vision is more sensitive to dim light than looking directly at it…" He had become entranced by seeing the building where IT had happened. And he was just back there again, and he knew, hanging there, one among the carcasses, that in the morning the whole process would begin again, and he would die…

And now, unlike then, he remembered with a horrific surge of guilt, so that it floored him all over again, EXACTLY what that process was like. William knew the intricate details of the pig's process through the line because he had worked undercover, at the beginning of the pig-slaughtering line, at Jonathon Ogden's Meatpacking plant in Chicago.

Flashes, so real, filled the cold, dank night with skin-crawling, blood-curdling squeals in his head, instant bile in his mouth with the revulsion, the disgust of the memory – HIM the one doing it, HIM the one responsible, placing the chain around the innocent pig's back foot, jumping back into the clear, the machine hoisting the animal up into the air, then bone-cracking thrashing and terrified screaming, the metal of the chain, of the whole apparatus up on the ceiling, howling and fighting to hold, to withstand each slam and twist and jerk the pain-soaked and panicked pig belted out. The first time he had done it, there was an innocence to the act, but the second, the second time was unforgiveable, for he had chosen to do it knowing full well the cost, he had chosen to solve the case, NOT to give away his cover, NOT to be found out as a detective spying on Jonathon Ogden's Chicago meatpacking plant, but with that choice each and every one of those tortured, agonizing pigs had been a weight on his soul. William fought against the gravity, with all his might he resisted the buckling of his knees, the falling drop to the ground and the dire urge to beg for forgiveness from God for his sins. And William understood then, that it was not fear of Hell eternal that most frightened him, but instead the unbearable agony of the guilt and the shame. Hell was what he deserved, for each of those pigs, and for pulling the trigger and being willing to take James Gilles' life, and for being willing to kill his own child, twice.

Tears in his eyes, hiding there ducked down against a wall in Davies Slaughterhouse, William had a profound awareness, an essential truth revealed to him – it was not he himself who decided if he would be going to Hell… No, it was not him – it was God who would decide his fate, and the lingering worry that added on at the end of the thought, it was true for Julia's fate as well. And he knew in his heart that God could be merciful. There was still hope, even though he would have condemned himself… and he considered, he would have condemned her too.

Out corner of his eye, he saw movement, electrifying his heart with a hushed gasp. Instincts took over, and he was up, up so quickly, so cleanly, because in one of his lives he had been a lumberjack. Unknowingly, he had climbed up a wooden column of the main building onto the outstretched roof of the second floor, the task completed before he had even thought to himself that it was probably the night watchman making his rounds. He remembered, as he laid out flat, plastered to the floor of the roof, and he held his breath and listened with all his might, that he had already imagined climbing up one of those same columns earlier, when he had noticed a second-floor window that had been left opened a tiny crack, and he had pictured sneaking into the offices through it. He could still do that – get into the offices through that cracked window, once he was certain the coast was clear.

Only a few moments later, William found himself with his fingers squeezed under that window. Now he had to decide, in or out. Risk or leave. A distasteful sensation stole his face, and despite himself, he paled. The memory was there, Jackson's big shadow behind him in the hallway as he fiddled with the lock to Mulligan's manager's office door… the tiny, humungous 'creak' behind them, then the smell and collapsing dizziness of chloroform, then the whole ordeal on the meathook…

Somehow, he fought back to the here and now, felt the freezing cold on his face, felt his feet on the floor of the outstretched roof, felt his fingers tucked under the wood of the bottom of the window. The only remnant of his fall back into the horrors of being caught breaking in back then was the swirling, sickening guilt of having had taken the chance of getting caught in the first place, risking getting killed, even after he had promised Julia that he would not. William tried to comfort himself, thinking that he had kept his promise, the specific one he had made to her at the time… He had NOT gone alone. But with that thought he was hit with a wham of even heavier guilt – for Jackson, too, had almost died that night as well.

More thoughts fired in that split second while his fingers prepared to lift the window. He had been spared the guilt back then, too,by fate, neither himself abandoning Julia by chancing being killed with his stubbornness and his tenacity for working a case despite the costs, nor being burdened by the responsibility of Jackson's death, because they both had survived in the end.

His own thought – "TOO" – dragged through his brain. Inquisitive, he had no choice but to chase after it. TOO, because it was fated that there had NOT been a bullet in the chamber when he pulled the trigger to shoot Gillies… TOO, because they had decided in the end NOT to abort William Jr. and Julia had survived giving birth to him… TOO, because, once again, his decision that she abort this second child had been changed, largely by circumstance and her wishing, changed to accept the risk of losing her in trying to have the child…

Another place in his brain warned, the importance of the message heightened by its arriving from off to the side and in a whisper, "You're NOT with someone else now. This time, you ARE alone."

William chickened out in that very second. He would NOT go in. He turned back. He snuck back down the wooden column to the ground. He would go home. He would come back tomorrow.

Almost to the gate – safe. His brain shot up a last temptation, "You should at least check the garbage bins…" There was a soft thud, William's puffy winter coat absorbing the sound as he planted himself against the fence line, so close to the gate. The thought came as a picture in his mind, seeing himself discovering the victim's clothes crumpled up and waiting to be discovered in the bins, "…they could be gone tomorrow…" The thought had halted his retreat, demanding to be addressed.

Two tracks at once…

Julia in his arms tucked under him after making love, tender and vulnerable, and the salty taste of kissing her, and shushing her sobbing, the woman he loved so much that it ached overcome with her dread of losing him…

And the other, an excruciating pain in his shoulder, so much so that his hand rushed to the wound to cover it, to protect it. Breathless, he identified it as George, George's voice in his head – "We were certain you were there, sir. We found your clothes in the bins behind the building…"

The terror struck with grave force…

"Oh God," William wobbled with his desperation finally folding him, HE had been naked that night, up on that meathook, about to be sliced in half by the huge whirling saw blade. It was all too close to this victim, his trauma of being naked and cut-up. He couldn't breathe, any choice was gone. He turned and ran, ran like a little baby. Only one thing in all the world – "get out."

) (

Their house was quiet. Julia had gone to bed. William sighed, trying to cope with his regret of that. He locked up the house, quietly. Tiptoed past their opened bedroom door, his lamp left on, Julia curled up on her side of the bed under the covers. He checked on the baby, his Little Man. He had always imagined the feeling s of having a child, but never, never, had he imagined how profoundly strong those feelings would be. His mind drifted to the 'Murdoch Bump.' Underneath the happiness, the secret feeling was still there, he noticed, the guilt about his being willing to end the child's chances at life, and pushed down out of sight underneath it was his heart-stopping fear that Julia would die, so dreaded that he would not allow himself to see it.

In the bedroom, he undressed. He would shower, for desperately he needed to get the distinct and aversive smell of dead meat off of him. He was suspicious that Julia was feigning sleep, but he decided it best not to address it.

Finally, clean, feeling so much better, safe and home in his pajamas, he clicked off his lamp and carefully slipped under the covers to lie next to her.

She gave in to the need to have him in her arms.

Julia rolled over and covered him, tucking him under a leg and an arm as she rested her head down on his chest. His muscles felt strong under her, and the cottony softness of his pajamas against her skin comforted her down to her soul. He felt warm and safe and she loved him so. She took a breath and reminded herself to notice, to be grateful for his heart beating underneath her, reminding, "He's here. He's fine." The tides of his breaths lifted and dropped her, rocking, soothing. Silently, she began to cry.

She felt his chin tuck down close to her head as his fingers swept at the hair dangling down over her face.

"You were worried…?" he said it as a statement as much as a question.

And he felt her tiny nod in response rip open his heart, the burn of it wet and warm. It was love, that pain.

The admission to him had lifted the secret of her suffering, and she inhaled despite knowing that he would hear that it was shaky and strained.

"I'm sorry, Julia. I should have called… I, uh…" he halted his words. It was hopeless. He was wrong, and he knew it. She worried terribly about him, always had. "And it was only worse when she was pregnant," he reminded himself, for her instincts would tell her that it would be an utter disaster to lose him now, now that she needed him even more…

Her voice squeaked, for she still held her breath against the pain, "It's me who should be sorry, William…" She squeezed him tighter for a moment. "I know it's unreasonable… I mean, I knew who I was marrying. And I know you are more cautious than you used to be… And besides, one of the things I love about you is your courage… such a hero really, William…" she nuzzled closer to him, wiggled softly against him to dig in deeper. "But… honestly," she took a breath before it poured out of her in a rush of squeaky tears, "I get so scared…"

William pulled her closer, his lips down to her forehead, "Shhh…" he wished he could take away her pain.

In little blurts and spurts she wrenched up her deepest fears, telling him, "I think to myself that… maybe I will be alright… without you. And then I know I won't be. And, even if you don't get…" she felt herself gagging on the words, "even if you don't get killed… there are so many… other ways…" Julia took a breath, shallow and weak. Shame crept in, causing hesitation. She went on, "There are so many other ways I could lose you… All those gorgeous young women throwing themselves at you all the time…"

And then William remembered her University students just recently, giggling and flirting with him about his upcoming 'lecture…'

"Julia…" he hugged her tighter…

She stiffened in his arms and sobbed out, "And I'm so old… and fat! And it's only going to get worse now that I'm pregnant – I'll get huge!"

Spontaneously, William giggled, for his quick mind had thrown up a memory, and he found it funny… at least he found it funny now, years later.

The unexpected chuckle caught Julia's attention, stopping the tearful fall, and she lifted her head to find his face in the darkness.

William rolled her to place the two of them lying facing each other propped up on their pillows in the dark, eye to eye, heart to heart. His fingers found her face, noticed its softness under the damp heat. He leaned in and kissed her cheek. "Julia," he said, "Do you remember Monsieur Bernier, the man who wanted to fund his expedition to the North Pole?"

She nodded. "Where could this possibly be going?" her curiosity was piqued.

William lifted an eyebrow, the familiar action unseen, but nonetheless sensed, in the shadowiness of the room as he told her the story, "He did not know you were my wife, and he… well…"

She could feel William shaking his head with his disbelief, the gesture tickling her inside.

"He considered your… your attributes aloud to me, um… well, man to man, I guess. He said you were too skinny," he finally spit it out, pressing closer to her so she could feel his forehead touch against hers, intimate and sweet.

"Oh… I see," she responded, suddenly wondering if William thought so too.

"I, of course, think you are the most irresistible, beautiful, gorgeous woman in all the land. And this bump here," William's hand, warm and tender, slipped down to cover the baby inside of her, between them, as he told her softly in her ear, "This bump is MY baby growing inside of you, growing inside the woman I love more than any other. And I promise you Julia, to me it is truly the most beautiful thing I have ever seen."

William wriggled to pull her closer and plant his firmer body into hers, and then basked with the reassurance of feeling Julia lifting her long, supple thigh up over him to embrace him with it, and then he added, "And as for your being 'old…'

And he felt her smile tighten against his cheek, anticipating that he would find a way to say something charming…

William said, "It has always been my biggest wish, my fondest dream, since the moment I met you, to grow old WITH you, Julia Ogden, and therefore it is impossible that you will ever be too old for me to be head over heels in love with you, it is simply not possible."

As the glow flooded her heart, warmed her with its outward-rippling waves, her jaw hung opened, stunned, with the unexpected overflow of emotions. Her eyes reached desperately for his in the dark… He was such an astounding man. But, before she would tell him this, she took a breath, soaking in the pleasure for a just a moment longer. "I love you, William. And, I feel better," she told him, and then she leaned and tilted her head and kissed him in the dark.

"Good," he replied, softly, and then with a hint of a promise of more, he kissed a trail along her jawline to her ear, and then downward, growing more rough and demanding, he took the flesh of her neck along with her breath.

Julia being Julia, she would handle the surge of lust that was wholly seizing her womb by teasing him, taunting him, breaking off his hungry kisses, denying him more, making him wait, the push and pull always intensifying the attraction between them.

"And so, William…"

Just the tone of her voice caused William to wriggle inside, reminding a little bit of a worm about to be dinner…

Her devious smile shaped her words, "What did you say to him… to Monsieur Bernier when he said your wife was too skinny?"

"Whew," his brain exhaled with relief, He could handle this one… and in that very same moment another part of his brain sent him a captivating image, a memory… from their honeymoon, Julia's breathtaking reflection in the suite window, in the room with a view, the solid tedium of the brick wall from the building next door blocking their view of the sparkling bright lights of the nighttime in New York City, its darkness creating a mirror from behind the glass, and HER before it, bare flesh under her robe, him behind her removing it seductively, slowly, admiring every creamy pink, curvy inch of her….

William too, felt his body responding to the more wild call. He cleared his throat, yet still his voice scratched. "I… um, I… I can't remember," he flailed.

Julia crawled upward, pushing him onto his back and mounting up on him in the dark, the sliding of their bodies against each other through their nightclothes erupting them both down low, deep inside their most primal parts. "You expect me to believe, William," her voice teased, her lips, her nipping teeth, at his ear, "…that the GREAT Detective Murdoch, with the most…" her mouth kissed down to the spot above the top button of his pajama top, and her fingers pinched it opened, "…detailed and precise and perfect memory I've ever known…" next button in the line gone, "cannot remember defending his wife's beauty to another?" her hand slipped in and poured all over his hunky bumps and bulges.

The pressure on him, William tried. He started by going back in his mind, extending the bated pause between them, adding intrigue… Fortunately, William was quite a master at controlling his lustful urges, for his wife's hand had slid down even lower… Inside his head, he focused. The three of them, him, Bernier, and Julia, had walked together outside of the museum where Bernier's presentation had been interrupted – as usual, whenever the two of them tried to go anywhere or do anything together, by a body showing up on the scene. Monsieur Bernier had said, on the side, after Julia had departed and was out of earshot, that 'their coroner' was too skinny, "those words, definitely those exact words," William remembered, thinking on, "Then… Oh yes," the outspoken, overly chummy man had rambled on – suddenly becoming aware that something was wrong by the reaction on William's face. Then the exact memory landed, Monsieur Bernier had said that Mrs. Bernier had 'some meat on her bones…' And then he had joked that he liked to know she would survive an angry, cold winter while he was away on his expeditions.' And then, thank goodness, William remembered his response, he remembered what it was that he had said to Bernier!

He cleared his throat, it would be a challenge to speak rather than to moan. "I remember feeling so terribly awkward…" William started to explain.

Julia laughed, "I wouldn't doubt it, William," she said, rising up off of his chest, increasing the distance between them once more.

But William felt their connection down lower, quite keenly, and he was certain Julia could feel underneath her that he had become eager, and at the same time he also felt the coldness of the room sweep in to replace the lush warmth of her on his now bare, and lonely, and quite damp, chest.

Needing to clear his throat again, he continued to try to answer her earlier question, "Bernier had commented about how 'our coroner' was pretty enough, but too skinny…"

Julia took his hands and brought them up to cup her breasts.

"Cotton, the fabric," William noticed, trying NOT to notice the other things he could feel within his fingers, like how round and heavy and utterly delectable… and then his thumbs brushed over the firm, poked-up swellings of her nipples through the cloth, and a wave of lust began to drop him, and with all his might he stopped the inevitable fall. He froze his movements, swallowed – hard, and returned to his telling her about Monsieur Bernier, and his answer to the man's claim that she was too skinny. "Bernier told me that his own wife was meatier…" William's hands pressed in, mushing her delicious breasts to bulge and fill in the gaps between his fingers, and Julia's breath caught, and a bolt shot straight to his groin. William chuckled inside at his trouble resisting and then went on, his breathing a bit more labored as he said, "And Bernier said that he liked his women that way. And then I told him that 'our coroner' happened to also be MY wife, and it was understood between us, Julia, between myself and Monsieur Bernier, I promise you that, that I like MY women to be just like you…" William took a breath and added, "And then Bernier just dismissed the whole exchange, shrugging it off with a simple, "To each his own." William wrinkled a corner of his mouth, regretting there wasn't more to it when all was said and done.

Julia teased him, "And so, you defended my honor then?"

She sensed his frown, expecting she wanted more. "Julia, I knew that Monsieur Bernier had never seen you naked…that the man had no idea… He couldn't possibly… Sometimes, Julia, I find myself so struck, so taken, by how beautiful you are that I lose my ability to speak, to think, even to brea…"

William's ability to make words halted right there, for his wife had begun to unbutton HER own nightgown now, and he wanted more than anything in the world, to touch, to feel her silky skin as he squeezed and squished her body with his, to get his mouth on her, to taste her flesh deep back on his tongue, to mold, and to push into, this scrumptious, scrumptious woman, so that the whole of the world spun out of control… the last words disappearing in his mind, "Too skinny, my a**…"

Sweltry, their lovemaking had been that night, the second night he had gotten home too late from Davies Slaughterhouse.

)

Lying in bed next to her, William huffed quietly, frustrated that he was unable to fall asleep. Julia was long gone, sleeping sound and content, as he would normally be after such a powerful bout of lovemaking. His lips pinched together in the darkness, admitting it to himself, he was feeling guilty, guilty for not phoning her like he should have tonight, for taking the risks he had taken, and strangely at the same time he felt ashamed of not taking more, and in the dark and the late, sleep and awake mingled.

He recognized it as it was unfolding…

It was the remembering of the time he had died in the bathtub. He was delightfully weightless, floaty. He'd seen all the cards laid out in front of him – him both the dealer sitting at the table laying out each card, and the player standing on the other side of the table, but floating almost up to the ceiling, awaiting his fate, seeing his life story in the cards. All of the cards that were dealt were exactly the same one, laid out in a row – all the same queen. At first, he had thought they were all the ONE card he had expected – the Queen of Hearts… and he knew, with a breathtaking thump in his chest, that it was HER… that, of all of the cards, in his whole life, Julia had always been the ONE. But then he noticed, like a hint breathing the sad truth into his ear, that the hearts on all the cards next to the queens' faces were black-colored, and so quickly his focus adjusted to be able to see what it was that he had missed. "They were not red hearts at all," his observations demanded he see the truth, but instead they were upside-down hearts, in reality – spades, spades, the suit that always landed with such power and coldness in the soul. And he thought to himself that they were the cards he HAD actually chosen, representing the path that he had taken as opposed to the path he COULD HAVE taken. He had been given the opportunity to choose the Queen of Hearts, he had chosen otherwise, and he had done so more than once. The ache of regret threatened to burn a hole right through his chest.

Those early choices had left him a life that was black and lifeless. His queen, the one he had ended up with in the end, because of his choice, his terrible, life-altering choice back when SHE had written him that heartwrenching note, and yet he still chose to let her marry Darcy, was the Old Maid, the one that was destined to be alone, the one with no match… And William knew that that card was he himself, NOT Julia, that he was his only queen. He was intelligent, respected, even admired, competent and accomplished, careful, but completely alone.

A wish to turn away from it, William rolled in the bed, floating just under the blurry film of consciousness, and he thought on…

His most life-changing regret had been revealed to him in those cards, all those years ago, that he saw laid out by himself on that table while he hovered above his dead body down in the basement in the bathtub, and that regret was that he had lost her.

And then a thought hit him, "if the Queen of hearts would have been Julia, then the Queen of Spades was Julia…" And then he thought it – it nearly killed him, but he thought it – HIS decision had hurt HER too, "it had cost HER the ONE match that was a perfect fit for her, he had left Julia to live a life as the Old Maid too, because of his choice!"

Closer to awake now,the theft of his breath, the movement of absorbing the shock of the disastrous discovery stirring him, William realized that he had NOT yet grasped this consequence, this truth, back when he had had his divine vision, floating up on that ceiling, Julia somewhere else in the world, someone else's wife, living in her loveless marriage. He had discovered it now, now, while he lay in bed with her - the impossibility of that contradiction seeming so strange it wrinkled his brow… he drifted back down deeper as his thoughts moved on.

"She could not be the Queen of Spades," he argued with himself, seemingly now back completely in the time when he was floating on the ceiling, "because it is the Old Maid Card, and she IS married, married to a toff, a doctor like herself, who can give her the life she is more accustomed to than I ever could have." But, "Oh God, it hurt…" for in the same second he knew that she was unhappy in that marriage, destined to remain that way, stuck because of HIS decision. He thought back to the two choices – the one letting her go to Buffalo, the other choosing to free Constance Gardiner rather than stop her wedding. His face twitched, pulling him back up closer to consciousness, as he wrinkled it doubting himself. Then he thought that he would make the same choice again – freeing Constance Gardiner essential in order to be a man good enough for her, for himself, for God, despite the fact that it could still cost him imprisonment some day for breaking the law. "Besides," reasoning piped in, "the decision you would change – the letting her go to Buffalo without trying to stop her, proposing marriage, telling her how you feel about her – that decision would have meant she never would have married Darcy in the first place."

Again a wrinkle twitched – he had imagined being more forceful with her that terrible day when she told him she was sterile in the morgue and plummeted his world into mayhem and fear, and he felt an ounce of shame, thinking she would see him as an arrogant, entitled MAN who thinks he can make a woman do whatever he wants… but then he thought, and it was so beautiful and it was so true and it meant he HAD hurt her in not fighting for her back then, because he knew now, that he would not have been insisting that she hear him, that she stay with him, because he was A man, but rather he would have been insisting she stay with him because he was THE man, and that, he knew, would have made the difference. He had chosen wrongly, fearing being too aggressive, overpowering, forceful, demanding… his choice instead to be GOOD in his own eyes, in God's eyes, in Julia's eyes. William's soul filled with tears and his throat swelled shut. He had lived his life as a GOOD man, he did not murder (and yet his finger twitched remembering squeezing the trigger on the gun as he fired it, and hearing the tiny, silent 'click,' and Gillies remaining unharmed), even deeper inside of him, his soul twitched, (thinking of Julia's womb, growing 'the Murdoch Bump,' twice, two times he had begged her to end the life growing inside of her.) Being good was complicated, he had come to see…

Suddenly he remembered freeing Constance Gardiner.

And then suddenly, it was Chief Inspector Giles wearing his striped prison uniform, who was dealing the cards to him from the other side of the table – and now, that little table had switched too, the table in the room atop the bathtub where he floated on the ceiling above his lifeless body, it had changed into the big one in the Interrogation Room in the stationhouse…

Immediately, there was another switch, quiet and smooth, nothing strange about it, and William was hanging up on the meathook again, like before, reflecting of his decisions before he died… his choices that had gotten him into this hopeless predicament – about to be sliced in half in the cold dark inside the bowels of Davies Slaughterhouse, and rendering Julia to be abandoned, alone and grieving, and William Jr., his beautiful unborn child, to never know his father…

Oddly, he was awake enough to think to himself, reflecting on his almost dying on that meathook that day, that the previous comfort, the one he had felt of knowing the beauty and wonder of dying from his divine vision while dying in the bathtub, it had been meaningless in the face of such regrets, such guilt.

So close to being awake now, William reminded himself that this time when he had taken the risk of sneaking into Davies Slaughterhouse he had chosen better, he had chosen to be true to the Lady he loved when he chose tonight to leave Davies Slaughterhouse, NOT to risk his life for the case. He had done it for her. He was so glad he had done it.

Sleep descended, bringing to life the stench of dead pig carcasses so nauseating it curled his nostrils, and reminded of the excruciating pain in his shoulder from hanging on the hook. His thoughts invaded back to demand his attention, wakeful twitches of thoughts mixed in. So much had changed since that first time, since he had gone out into Sinclair's "Jungle." He wondered if it wasn't because of William Jr. being born, being a part of their life now. And now, now there was a second child on the way… And intrusively in the background of his mind, fear crept up, rose up to squeeze his heart. "JULIA COULD DIE," it whispered.

It must be that he was back asleepThe William that sat at the table – the dealer, turned the card, turned the card over again, and he watched, like last time when he floated up on the ceiling facing death, "or was it on the ceiling hanging from the meathook facing death?" the question suggested from somewhere. The Queen of Hearts, "this time it really was the Queen of Hearts, not spades," and he knew it was Julia again, that he had gotten her back! And then the sinking feeling that followed as he also knew that she would die from trying to have this baby, and once again, he would have missed the opportunity to save her, for he could have insisted she abort it.

Wham, he was suddenly freezing cold, barefoot in only his pajamas outside standing at the foot of their front porch steps. He looked up to see his younger self floating on the ceiling again and he thought, first losing her to Buffalo, and then to Darcy, now losing her and this child to his indecisiveness, AGAIN, his lack of forcefulness, leaving William Jr. motherless, all because he had made a bad choice, to let things be, to trust. My God, it cost so much, could cost him everything, everything that he took each and every breath for.

"Not everything," he heard that knowing voice inside his head remind him, for now there was William Jr. in the world too.

He heard a sound, distinct, in the distance – chickens clucking.

Instantly he thought, feeling the change, knowing he was somewhere else, no longer floating on the ceiling above the bathtub, or standing outside in the freezing cold barefoot, or hanging from the meathook… So odd, his brow wrinkled. He was still in the stink of the pig carcasses in the slaughterhouse as the thought came, "I didn't know they slaughtered chickens here too?"

Suddenly, William had BECOME a big chicken – he WAS a huge, oversized, chicken, riding along with pig after pig after pig on a conveyor belt, the belt moving incredibly fast.

"Can't get off…" the breathless thought disappeared into the haze of the room with the speed. He spotted Julia out in the room. "She's distracted by something, she doesn't know I'm in danger, doesn't see me at all, so distracted. He looked where she was trying to reach. "An egg! It's an oversized, giant, Egg. "Why is Julia trying to get an egg…?"

So strange, he thought to himself that HE had laid it…

Julia turned to look at him, their eyes met.

With a jolt, the conveyor belt suddenly stopped. He could get off now! Without thinking anything peculiar about it, he was simply himself again, not a chicken.

"I want this baby, William," Julia cried to him across the room, pleading for his help.

The tininess and incongruence of the sound amplified it – a little, tiny, bell tinkling its warning in the distance – somewhere up near the ceiling.

William knew this bell, knew what would happen next, for it had been the recurring nightmare that had haunted him during his childhood – "AND NOW IT HAD COME TRUE!"

His heart raced and his mind flurried. "Three seconds – we only have three seconds until IT appears…" ("It" being the dark, shadowy, skeletony, hooded monster of his childhood dreams). The 'soul-thief,' was on the prowl. "We have to hide – NOW!" his brain screamed in terror.

"Julia," he screamed out, flying off of the conveyor belt to grab her, to pull her to him, with him, to hide before it appeared.

She resisted him, crying, "No! No, William. The Egg!"

"There's not time!" he insisted. Only one second left, and a part of him considered overpowering her, forcing her. "Julia PLEASE! I can't bear it," William whispered and screamed and wailed his pain at her, and she yielded to it, her heart breaking, for she left the Egg, she let it go FOR HIM.

He rushed her over to the conveyor belt, ducked down and tucked her in with him underneath it, its stillness reminding that time only stood still for the littlest tick of a second, even if it felt like eons.

Poof! The soul-thief materialized, sucking all the air out of the room. He had the eternity of three seconds, three seconds, to find a victim.

William worried that he would see a foot, or hear them breathing. With a panicked lightning bolting through him, he realized Julia was crying.

"Shh," he tried to shush her. Even closer to her ear, tears in his eyes, so quiet his whisper, "Shh, Julia. Please. Shh. Shh."

"I wanted that baby, William," she squeaked and gasped out her regrets.

Impossible, his heart jumped even faster, sparked by a horrendous terror the likes of which he had never known – IT HAD HEARD HER!

The soul-thief turned, oriented, aimed their way.

"It was coming! Too much time left. Homed in, it would take Julia!"

Another silent sound cracked the ringing in his ears.

Every attention darted to the Egg – trying only to be born.

"The baby!" Julia screamed, the soul-thief already approaching it.

It was doomed – their baby was doomed if he tried to save it, doomed if he did not…

Poof! The soul-thief was gone…

That odd, terrifying halted time had run out. The monster's three seconds had passed.

William had not needed to decide… had not truly confronted the dilemma of facing his fears or fighting the tigerous soul-thief.

Gratefully, he and Julia were moving again – being taken, carried forward, both of them together again on the conveyor belt. Julia was rubbing her belly. He looked down. She was pregnant! Not concerned with how he knew, he was certain that the baby that had been inside the Egg was now safe inside Julia, growing. She was so happy it brought tears to his eyes. He loved her so. He wanted nothing more than for her to be happy. Yet still, he felt the fear. Lord, he prayed it would be alright."No choice now but to ride out the path…"

Suddenly, Chief Inspector Giles, still in his boldly striped prison uniform, was on the conveyor belt in front of them dealing the cards. "Actually," William noticed, "all the people on the conveyor belt were in striped prison uniforms…" Absolute horror when he saw it – "Julia was in stripes too…! Her abortion!" his head screamed the explanation to him.

"Giles is dealing the cards now, instead of me…"

"The game Giles is playing is Bridge," William noticed, trying to calm down by focusing on the facts.

Prisoner Giles spoke as he dealt, telling the rules, "Loyalty is the only moral instinct that can exist on the same plane as truth itself. They may clash, but one can never TRUMP the other without cost…"

And William heard himself reply in the dream, "Yes, but LOVE can trump them both, can it not? Love can trump loyalty to God and Faith, loyalty to others, and love can trump truth as well. My love for Julia wins, it always wins, in the face of…" and suddenly William was thinking in his head, no longer speaking out loud, "…her breaking the law and choosing to have an abortion, and still my love for her trumped my loyalty to justice, and even more, my love for her wins when I ACCEPT her sin, the taking of the life of an innocent, budding, child. Julia broke the law, and in doing so she sinned, and still, my love pushed me past those things…"

But then William noticed that the stripes on prisoner's uniforms were changing colors, changing from dull grays to stark orange and black, "and the texture… the stripes were getting fuzzier, furrier…?"

On the conveyor belt, all the prisoners were becoming tigers – caged tigers, a threat, but contained. And, although he and Julia and Chief Inspector Giles seemed to be staying human as all the other prisoners on the conveyor belt continued morphing into real-life, man-eating tigers – he worried that he and Julia might change too, if God had decided that they were both to be damned for their sins…

But they did not change, and now all those tigers, they were in the same cage as William and Julia, and he was suddenly thronged with the urge to protect her with all his force, to his last breath, for Julia was in grave danger.

It was Giles who saw his panic. He offered William a lambchop, suggesting he use it to save his wife from the nearest, most ravenous and carnivorous, tiger… The one right behind Julia on the conveyor belt. "Throw it out there…" Giles gestured wildly out into the vastness of the world, "to get him off the scent," he yelled over the wind, the bars of the cages that had been keeping them trapped with the prisoners on the conveyor belt now all simply gone.

William tossed the lambchop out, threw it away with all the power he could muster, and the closest tiger flew off the conveyor belt after it. It had worked, they were safe.

But then he noticed that there was a place of the floor that was buckling upward, rising, splintering apart.

Suddenly, the wood cracked opened, and up from the ground, a wild, man-eating, terrifying tiger rose, bellowing out a harrowing roar.

Its growls rose the hair on the back of the neck as that tiger rose up through the floor, and turned and took aim at them, and a part of William thought about how odd it was for a tiger to have been buried in the ground in the first place, and then he suddenly knew that the beast was the result of HIS buried guilt, his buried regrets, his buried fears, things that HE had tried to bury away rather than address. And William found himself struggling, so very, very hard, to decide if that rising tiger, if the things HE had done and not fully dealt with in the past, were a danger to them… more importantly, a danger TO HER!

The tiger rose all the way up and leaned back on its haunches, readying to pounce…

William felt a rush jolt his heart filling him with a sense of astounding strength, for he knew down to his deepest core, he had proven it at another time – back when he had almost died in James Gillies' cage, a subject in the disturbed nemesis' experiment, William knew he would die for her, he most surely would.He would fight that tiger to the death if need be for her. And that's when he turned to look, to see if Julia was frightened…

and Julia was gone – vanished.

William stood staring, paralyzed with pain and disbelief, staring at the place where she had been standing, where, now, there was nothing left but thin air.

He looked up to the ceiling, to himself floating up there when he was younger, so sad from his regretting not telling her that he loved her, not asking her to marry him, NOT telling her that she was the ONE for him. There was accusation in his voice as his younger self said to him, tearfully yelled it to him, "You did NOTHING again!" and the hurt of it, of knowing he was right, brought searing tears to his eyes, and the torrents overflowed and trickled down his cheeks, for William knew he had lost her, forever this time. Julia had died… SHE WAS GONE, lost while he was distracted by the tiger, and he knew that he had lost his chance to save her, to choose, his Lady.

"Daddy?" William Jr.'s sweet little voice summoned…

"I must've slept through his knocking…" William's own startled voice in his head rationalized the unexpected presence of their toddler son. With a jerk, William was abruptly awake.

But there was no William Jr. in the room… Julia was next to him… in their bed… still sleeping. "It's still dark – still early…" It rolled and rumbled, his grounding. Memories from what had been just prior poured through his head. He had been having such a strange dream… and he remembered he had gotten home late last night… "Davies Slaughterhouse," the memory landed, "The case – the case with the victim at our body farm, chopped up…!"

Pools of tears filled his eyes as a humungous wave of emotion overtook him, overwhelming him with a tremendous impulse to tell her he was so, very, very sorry, that he loved her so astoundingly, breathstaggeringly much that sometimes he thought he might die from it… And he laid there, fighting that urge, and he noticed that he was holding his breath, and he knew it was for two reasons – first, for fear that it would wake her to make the sound of taking that breath, and second, because he sensed that upon letting go, that once he released the exhale, the intensity of the ache in his heart would flare the embers smoldering in his chest into the agonizing blaze that he knew was waiting there.

He fell back into what, for him, was most reliable – logic, details, clues, and the emotions responded, eventually, to gravity, sinking downward, becoming tolerable once again. William asked himself about his crazy dream, his exacting mind intrigued, and meanwhile over in another part of him, as all those tumultuous emotions settled, a deeper feeling became conscious for a brief second, drawing his attention – he felt ashamed, and the two pathways emerged together into the one question, "Why would I dream that I was a big chicken?" and then the second meaning of the words, the less literal meaning, hit him, and he understood that the shame was because he had been frightened, and he had given into that fear tonight, tonight after sneaking into Davies Slaughterhouse. That was it! – He was ashamed of being 'a big chicken.' William settled back down deeper into his pillow, figuring – for now – that he had found the core of this shame that was sickening his insides, seeing it as a reaction to his decision NOT to crawl through that window from the roof into the Davies Slaughterhouse manager's office, or even to check the garbage bins for the naked victim's clothes. It made perfect sense. And with that, it felt acceptable, bearable.

He sighed to himself in the dark, his thoughts moving on. It was because of this shame that he remained stiff and rigid next to Julia in their bed. He had chosen NOT to wake her, had decided that he did Not want her to join him downstairs for hot chocolate and to talk it through. It was Not worth the risk to his pride.

Stuck there, not taking a chance of getting up out of the bed, thinking it would probably wake Julia if he did so, his mind ran amuck with the hunt, for on a deeper level William knew that the 'big chicken' inside of him was not simply afraid of being caught at Davies. There was something more to it, rising up in him.

It was just under the surface of his awareness, like looking down into a frozen lake and seeing it under the top layer of ice. Such focus, he dove for grasping it. And then he just knew, he had held his tongue, too afraid to risk speaking up, being forceful, demanding she abort this second child. He had been silenced by her enthusiasm and wishing, and Dr. Tash's insistence the risks were tolerable, and the belief in the science he was being cited by both his own wife and her longtime friend and colleague, accepting that they knew better that he did in such medical matters. But, he was afraid – very, Very, VERY afraid, that his choice to give up his power, to let her try to have this baby, had been wrong. He should have done what she had offered that freezing cold night, the two of them barefoot out on the front porch steps – he should have insisted she keep her word to him and have an abortion, for no other reason than because he decided so.

And, even deeper underneath that fear there was another more eternal one, for William realized, becoming wholly terrified lying there silently, stiff and locked into stillness, that he was afraid that even his own being willing to do such a sinful thing would mean he would be damned to eternal Hell, and the sickening feeling erupted with the thought that followed, for he realized now, he was also so terribly afraid that he would NOT be damned, because he believed that Julia most surely would be, and he felt it in the depths of his soul, as a throbbing glowing ache, he would rather be damned and be with her than be in Heaven without her.

He swallowed down the vile taste… lost now, was the sugariness of ignorance.

It was undeniable, a heart-seizing panic, lying there next to her in the shallow-breaths of silence, to feel that fear. "Yes," he answered himself, trying to find that internal logical voice he trusted, "that was what the 'big chicken' was about…"

The 'three seconds' tingled in his memory – the dreaded childhood monster that came to rob your soul. William sighed, thinking to himself that his dream told that he may have been spared facing Hell, for he had not had a chance to decide to push Julia to have an abortion, and that was really just dumb luck in the end, time running out… like in the dream, with the women at the Church figuring out Julia was pregnant, and news of their 'Murdoch Bump' completely titillating the papers. Lying there, grown-up now, William knew that the seed of that frenzied childhood dream was his terror of his father losing control, hurting them in a drunken rampage, and his own childhood tuned-in reading of the signs, like hearing at the door, the sound of the inebriated over-jingling of the keys in the lock, so much like hearing that tiny little tinkling of the bell in the dream. And, once the danger had been detected, then you were instantly shot into survival mode. A part of you knew that it wouldn't be forever, probably not even long, until the scary monster was gone with as little warning as when he came. You just needed to hide till then. That's how his luck had been, a decision made or not made in that little tiny window of time where the consequences outweighed life itself, and so often, William had defaulted to not deciding.

But then, the memory arriving with the scent of freshly chopped wood deep in the back of his throat, and the sounds of an armful of small wooden logs cascading downward, clunking and knocking together, as they all fell to the floor – "The firewood…!" the words landed in his brain with the heavy childhood memory…

And then there was a sound, oddly inside but seemingly outside as well, both screaming and barely audible, so that your body had to have been in the space between things in order to hear it – between two breaths, between two heartbeats. It was a simple 'click,' much like the sound a key makes when turning the mechanism deep inside of a rusty old lock, and William got it… He knew! And he would never be able to UN-know it again. There was a connection between his fear that Julia would die as a consequence of his timidity and clumsy inaction and his terrifying childhood dream, between his father's drunken raging and Julia's and his mother's deaths... the firewood, and it hurt so badly, for even though William knew in his heart that it had not been intentional on his part, and that he had been just an eight-year-old little boy who was scared out of his wits, startled by his father's predatory mood, he understood now that it was one of those pieces of firewood, that HE had dropped on that floor beside the hearth, that had killed his mother in the end. It was HIS fault that it was left there when he went to hide from the monster, and SHE boldly confronted that monster – a force to be reckoned with – "so much like Julia," he thought, somewhere else in his brain – and his mother had slipped on a piece of wood that he had dropped. And William knew now with a thud of certainty down into the marrow of his bones, that it wasn't his father hitting his mother and knocking her down to hit her head on the hearth that had led to her death – that instead she had hit her head after slipping on HIS dropped firewood, and she had drowned in the lake later from the concussion of that, and so it was HIM who was responsible, because he had been 'chicken,' and now he sensed Julia would die in a similar manner, HIM too afraid of his own manly aggression to have insisted that she abort the child he believed would kill her in childbirth – his seed growing inside of her, HIS seed, His inaction, killing her in the end.

William sighed, then allowed himself to shift his position slightly, feeling that odd contradiction of the profound discovery stretching him upward, lightened him with the relief of grasping the cause, but also sinking him downward, substantially burdening him with fully understanding the effect.

Another dream, remembered, softening the blow of this one. An older dream – that one, too, with Chief Inspector Giles, that time the game was Chess instead of Bridge, Julia his Queen, and on the chessboard, gigantic, over-sized chess-pieces, all trying to kill her from every which direction…

And then he remembered the body, moaning, alive but wrapped in burlap, in the corner of their bedroom…

"Had that been the same dream…?" the question disappeared.

"It was Julia…!" he remembered, of the bound-up and damned body in the corner. In that dream, too, she had been destined for Hell. And William felt it distinctly, feeling so ashamed that SHE would be condemned for doing THE SAME THING that he was willing to do, but in his case it had never actually happened merely because he had been too weak, too cowardly, and because time had run out. And what made his shame, his disgrace, even worse was that Julia had been the ONE who stopped HIS own sin, stopped HIM from insisting on the abortion, with her wanting their baby so much! Oh, that hurt down to the bone.

He hadn't noticed, Julia's breathing had changed.

Julia found herself suddenly awake, alerted to William being home, in the bed next to her. Somehow, she knew he was awake. She rolled into her position, her arm and leg over him, her head on his shoulder. "He's stiff as a board," she noticed, and her heart felt the tug of worry for him, love for him.

"William…" her voice loud, compared to the long, dark silence, "Are you alright?" she asked.

She knew him so well, she was completely aware of his 'admitting-it' wrinkle at the corner of his mouth.

"Bad dream?" she asked, her fingers beginning a soothing tour of his pectoral muscles through the comfy fabric of his pajamas.

William laughed, embarrassed, and then he told her, "Yes. I was a big chicken, you were trying to save a giant egg, and then there was a huge tiger that rose up through the floor to get us…"

"Well," she said, propping her head up to look into his face in the shadows of the room, "That IS quite a dream."

It was the sound of his breath that changed the mood. William's tone was solemn as he said, "I lost you, in the end."

"I see," she responded. She remembered him out on the front porch bench in the freezing cold – drinking whiskey because of that same fear. And she remembered all the times she had sobbed to him, so totally crushed by how much she loves him and her own fear of losing him, always after they had made love together and they were so close that they were one rather than two, and she knew she would never survive the loss of him. Somehow, all of that was conveyed in those simple words she had just said to him… "I see."

William cleared his throat to speak, and he pressed her gently back down to his chest, wanting a little distance, the truth he would tell her now taking some courage. "I have been very troubled, I guess…" his face wrinkled again, "And I, I… well, I didn't want to worry you, to burden you, with the baby and all…"

Julia lifted up again, tipped her head close to his. "William…"

There was such strength and warmth in her presence…

"I'd rather worry WITH you than worry ABOUT you," she said, cupping his cheek in the dimness. Gently, she gave him a kiss.

And although he would never have thought it possible, William felt a deepening of his trust settle into his heart, trust in this amazing woman at his side. First, a little twitch of a smile, then his mouth wrinkled again. And then he told her, told her that he was terribly worried, still, that she would have… "problems, with the birth…" and then he paused calling on himself to hold his nerve, and he said, "Sometimes I wish… I regret, not holding you to your promise… to have the abortion if I pushed you to…"

Oh, with a wallop, he instantly regretted telling her.

He rushed to ease, "But only sometimes," he said, pulling her closer. "And there's nothing to be done now, anyway. We'll have to just hope."

Julia remained lying over him and she heard his heart beating against her ear, and she became keenly aware of his holding of his breath, William's suffering aching her heart. She took a deep breath herself hoping he would follow her lead, and then she rubbed at his heart inside his big, strong chest, and she tenderly kissed at his heart through his cottony-soft pajamas, willing with all her might to heal it.

"Oh, thank God," she thought, hearing him respond – hearing him take a breath.

And now it was her turn to ease. "William," she started, "I promise you, as soon as I reach the halfway point, four-and-a-half months, and from that point on, because once I'm there we all know I would have to have a Cesarean section even if the baby was lost and I was miscarrying, we'll have Isaac close at hand. He's already agreed. And I'll always stay with someone – not let myself be alone, so we can be certain that I could get to the hospital right away. I promise, from that day until the baby comes," her voice pleaded and reassured all in one, "Alright?" she asked.

She loved him so that tears stung her eyes, for he gave her his 'sorry' face, his 'admitting-it' face, that same face he gave her when she first saw him safely back from Bristol England, that face that melted her down to her soul. And he then kept it short and simple with his words, as could be his way. "Good," all he said, locking them tight together, together, where they both knew that they would always be alright, come what may.

)) ((