I own no part of the Doctor Whoniverse. I'm only a lonely tourist who can't be held accountable for any damage I plan to do.


The Doctor sat stiffly on the straight-backed, narrow chair beside the greasy kitchen table. In the yellow light of the electric bulb, he had a better look at the tiny kitchen, the splintered wood countertop, moldy around the corners of the massive sink. The woman bustled about near the wood stove, heating a kettle and laying out two cups and two saucers and a pale blue sugar bowl. She cracked open a canister of tea and the Doctor felt his sinuses pinch at the bitter smell of the leaves and the sharp tank of damp mold.

"And you are the, ah... housekeeper here?" the Doctor asked, wincing as he watched the woman pour two heaping spoonfuls of leaves into the chipped teapot.

"I keep the house," she said, "whatever that makes me." She kept her back to him. He was surprised by that, after she had been so suspicious with the gun, but once she'd seen his face, she'd willingly put the weapon away and now she seemed to be trying to hide her own face from him. He wondered why.

The Doctor poked the toe of his shoe into the splintered hole in the floorboards where the bullet had struck before ricocheting deep into the plaster wall. She'd been as surprised as him when the gun went off. "We've met before," he said casually, as if the question hadn't been burning a hole on his tongue for the past five minutes now.

"Have we?" she said. The kettle sang. She took it off the stove and poured the tea, setting one steaming cup down in front of him with a clatter. She looked him in the eye, staring at him with a familiarity that was unsettling, but he would have sworn he'd never seen her face before.

"You've met me," he said. "You saw my face and said, 'you again'. You recognized me."

She continued to stare at him. She was forty-years-old if she was a day, but her eyes were clear and cold. He cleared his throat and looked down at his teacup.

The woman sat down across from him. "You look very much like the school friend of my youngest brother," she said, easily sipping the foul-smelling tea that he had yet to find the courage to drink. "That man came by once, drunk as a skunk. His wife had refused to let him into the house, so I unlocked the garden for him and let him sleep there for the night. I thought you were him again."

The Doctor frowned. It was a good story, and she told it like a story, too, her face impassive as she stirred a pinch of sugar into her tea. There was something familiar about her, he realized, the angle of the cheekbones perhaps, or the color of her eyes. He had never been to 1930s Spain before. He would swear to that, and he didn't know any middle-aged housekeepers either.

"How long have you lived in Zaragoza, Mrs.…?"

"Miss." The woman corrected him. "Miss Karena Andalucía. And you are...?"

"The Doctor," he said, watching her face, but there was no change in her expression.

She took another sip of her tea. "You have a strange way of meeting people, Doctor...?"

"Just the Doctor," he said, more than a little disappointed. "I was investigating... something."

"Ah, you're a doctor of medicine, then?"

"I'm a doctor of quite a lot of things actually, but what I was investigating was not medical. It was... well, what do you know about this? I found it just outside your door." He set the soggy newspaper and the child's cap on the table between them. Miss Karena's eyes widened, and he smiled, smugly satisfied to have caught her this time.

She took up the beret. "This is Antonio's cap," she said, looking at him accusingly.

"You're certain?"

She turned it over and showed him a torn seam that had been mended with the wrong colored thread. "I know my own work," she said. "Where did you find this?"

"I told you, it was outside your door. Or at least, down your alleyway. You knew this child, Antonio?"

She was looking down at the cap, turning it over in her hands sadly. "I am not the police, Miss Karena," the Doctor said. "I promise. I'm just trying to understand what's happening here. This column," he tapped the scrap of newspaper, "it's quite a coincidence that I found this bit of paper with his cap."

"I gave him the paper," she said. "I wrapped his dinner in it."

The Doctor reached out to touch her hand, but she pulled away from him. "What are you doing here? What do you want? What do you care about a few runaway children?" She threw the cap down on the table.

"What I want, is to help," the Doctor said, and he did. Whoever Karena was, she clearly cared about this missing child. "When did you last see Antonio?" he asked. "When you gave him this paper?"

She scowled at him, but then she sighed and nodded. "Three nights ago he knocked on my door. His mother had gone off without leaving him dinner, so I made him a packet."

"You haven't seen him since?"

She shook her head.

"It may be nothing," he said, not very reassuringly.

"You have today's paper in your pocket," she said, nodding to the corner that stuck out of his pocket. "Have you looked into it yet?"

He took out the paper. "I'd only read the headlines..."

She took it from his hand and stood up, unfolding it. She pushed the teacups and sugar bowl aside and spread the paper out across the table. The Doctor stood up next to her, surprised, and watched as she turned the pages until she found the column that she was looking for.

"There," she said, pointing. "Read that."

With a glance at her, the Doctor took out his glasses and bent down to read the fine print. He'd need stronger lenses if he was going to spend much time reading in this faded light.

MISSING CHILD (6): Manuel Alvarado Sánchez was last seen at play near the north docks of Río Huerva, Saturday last. A red-haired woman, aged approximately 27 years, in servants' dress was seen by several workmen nearby and is wanted for questioning by the Guardia Civil...

"How many others have there been?" the Doctor asked, glancing over the rest of the page. The other columns were devoted to petty crime: purse snatchers, a peeping tom and a man seeking his run-away wife.

"Six that I know of," Karena said. She tapped her finger on the table and seemed to be considering how much to tell him. "It started three months ago, but there were rumors before that..."

"You've been investigating!" the Doctor said, eagerly. "You're a detective!"

"I'm interested," she said. "I read the gossip columns. After the family finishes the newspaper, I read the news. There was a boy I knew. He was... he went missing, and so I started reading. That was when I found... Ángel was a good boy, like Antonio. I gave him food and looked after him." She shook her head. "They were both good boys."

"Children run away."

"Ángel wouldn't do that," Karena said angrily. "His parents took him out of school when he was four years old. I leant him books and taught him to read. I helped him to keep up his studies. He wanted to be a doctor..." She swallowed the lump in her throat. "When he disappeared, he still had one of the books I'd given him. He would not run away without returning it to me."

"You sound very sure of that." Her hand was on the table, and The Doctor covered it gently with his own. She didn't seem to notice. "It's not unusual, when a boy makes up his mind to leave home… Well, I doubt he'd stop to return a book."

"The book was not mine. I took it out of the professor's library upstairs," Karena said, taking her hand from his.

"And who is the 'professor'?"

"My employer," she said. "I do not give food or books to just any child. They were good boys. They deserved better than this life." She sat down again and bowed her head over her hands in her lap. "They deserved better than whatever monster took them away."

The Doctor looked around at the dingy kitchen. The house was big enough, but the part of it that he had seen was very poor. He could think of more than a few earth-people who deserved better than what life gave them.

He crouched down beside Karena and put his hand on her knee. "You've been looking into these disappearances," he said. "Tell me what you know. Show me what you've found. It was an accident that brought me here, but I'm here now, and I'm going to help you."

She raised her head to look at him. "I don't need your help," she snapped. "No one cares. No one helps. Their own parents barely notice they're gone. The newspapers only print the stories to sell more copy, along with the other gossip. Revolts among the working class, the streets are not safe. They say that even the Church cannot be trusted to keep the peace, that it stokes violence against the people instead. So much violence here. Soon the world will be at war again."

The Doctor looked at her in surprise. How could she know? But she waved her hand aside. "There is always more war," she said. "So who cares about one missing child?"

"Or six?" he asked.

"Or six," she agreed. "I don't need your help, but you'll help them." She looked hard at him, and he saw the way the soft skin crinkled around her eyes and the creases in her skin that told him she frowned more often than she smiled. He could even see the hint of soot caught in the wrinkles of her hands from the pollution of progress in industrialized Spain. She was not yet forty, but she had lived a longer life than that, and he thought... for a moment he thought that he saw...

"Wait here," she said, standing up and pulling away from him. She hurried out of the kitchen, leaving the Doctor alone, crouched beside the table.

He sighed and stood up. While she was gone, he took the opportunity to look around, checking a few drawers and standing up on the chair to look out the high windows at the narrow yard outside: a ragged kitchen garden full of weeds and broken paving stones. Across from his window, long row of beanpoles still carried the corpses of last season's crop and a tiny shed leaned against one corner, barely wide enough for a rake and a spade. The Doctor heard Karena's footsteps returning. He sat back down in his chair and picked up his cup of tea, taking a sip before he remembered what was in the cup.

Karena stepped into the kitchen before he could spit out the tea, and he choked down the sour liquid. She ignored his pained grimace and laid a faded blue journal on the table in front of him. "There, if you want to help."

The Doctor turned the pages. The book was filled with newspaper clippings and scraps of note paper. Karena had clipped more than a dozen articles regarding the missing children (five children all together), and each was pasted onto its own page with the date neatly penciled in along the side. There were other loose articles tucked between the pages that spoke of other things, strange occurrences, missing pets and suspicious neighbors' gossip. It was all very... convenient.

"Three months ago, two days before Ángel disappeared, this was written in the daily gossip column." Karena turned to the earlier pages and pointed to the article in question. "Marisol Garcia, six years old, says that she heard a voice calling out to her from inside the family's cook stove. Her mother found her trying to climb inside."

"The paper doesn't seem to think much of it."

"No, but here, again, another girl who heard a voice, this time from the chimney grate of her grandmother's kitchen." She held up a square of note paper. "Two days after Ángel was taken."

Taken? The Doctor made note of that. He took the note paper from her and sorted it among the other clippings. "The girls hear voices in chimneys and stoves. The boys go missing from streets and alleyways," he mused out loud.

"It may mean nothing," she said. "It is easier for a boy to wander alone on the streets than for a girl."

The Doctor nodded, but he was busy reading. Karena's information was very complete. Many of the notes that she had taken were dictated interviews, rumors and gossip. If it weren't for the readings that he had taken on the sonic, and the fact that the readings had been found on a missing boy's cap, he might have dismissed her suspicion as superstition, or the paranoia of a grieving mother, but as he turned page after page of newspaper clippings – each one dated with painstaking care – he felt sure that it was all connected, and that Karena knew more than she was telling.

"Have you checked the area where the first child went missing?" he asked, closing the book and tucking it into his pocket.

"How am I meant to do that?" she demanded. "Ángel's sister saw him last walking down the Calle Pascual, but it would take twenty minutes to walk that street top to bottom, and more than a dozen paths lead off of it."

"Yes. Alright. That would make the search more difficult," the Doctor agreed, reminding himself that she didn't have a sonic screwdriver that would follow the alien energy readings that he felt sure he would find. But still, it seemed that she was too eager, now that she had given him the book, to put him off again.

"Well, there are a lot of streets to cover," he said, standing up and taking his glasses off. He folded them up and put them away in his pocket. "We'd better get started."

"We?" Karena said, shaking her head. "I've sat too long with you as it is. I haven't time to wander the streets all day."

"I don't know the city, and you've done all this work. You don't want to see it through?"

"I can't help you," she said. "It's nearly noon, and the professor'll be wanting his tea." She began gathering up the cups and saucers from the table, making a lot of impatient noise to encourage him to go.

The Doctor didn't understand. He could see it in her eyes that she wanted to go with him. She wanted an investigation and to find out the truth, not to be stuck washing dishes and serving tea to some dusty academic. The Doctor wasn't sad to see his nearly full cup of tea dumped down the sink, but he was, surprisingly, disappointed that he couldn't convince her to join him in the search.

"I suppose I'll be off then," he said, "if you're sure you won't…?"

"I can't. I'm sorry." And she genuinely looked it. He didn't press her. She'd given him plenty of clues to go on, and he knew that he'd be seeing her again.

"If you remember anything else, you can contact me at this address." He took a pen from his pocket and scribbled down the street name and number of the empty lot where he'd parked the Tardis.

"You have everything you need," she said, ushering him out the door. "Good bye. Good luck, Doctor." She saw him out of the house and shut the door behind him, turning the latch with a snap.

The Doctor frowned at the door, more curious about her than anything else he'd learned since landing in Zaragoza. And where had he heard that name before? Where had he met Karena before?

He walked back down the alleyway, wishing that he'd been able to convince her to come along with him. Adventures were so much more fun with someone else along for the ride. Someone to listen while he talked, and to remind him to act human when he wasn't. And there was something else that was nagging at him about Miss Karena. Not just that her face was oddly familiar to her, and that her manners were not at all what he would have expected from a middle-aged, nineteenth century housekeeper being confronted by a strange Englishman in her kitchen.

First things first, he told himself, as he stepped out of the alley and made his way around to the front of the row of houses. The gang of boys and the policemen must have gone about other business by now. The rush of morning traffic was over as the Doctor walked down the block and across the street. He found a convenient corner and a warm, brick wall against which to lean. From this vantage point, he could see both the east end of Karena's alley and the front door of her house. Donna thought his days were all spent adventuring, running and escaping and saving the world. What would she think if she saw him now? Standing idle against the wall. But he could be patient when he wanted to be.

He opened the clippings book and paged through the articles again, looking more carefully at the penciled in dates. The woman had clearly done a lot of work collecting columns from two city papers and three of the small, gossip rags. The Doctor turned the book on its side and looked lengthwise across the page. He smiled and shook his head. She'd been careful, but not careful enough. The earliest disappearance was indeed Ángel Perez, and the latest - besides Antonio who had not had time to have articles written about him - was Pedro, eight years old. There were many more notes on the most recent two boys. The Doctor was about to shut the book again when a small scrap of white paper fell out. It had no date and only one word written on it: Red.

That puzzled him more than anything else. "What have you discovered, Miss Karena?" the Doctor murmured, frowning up at her house. "And who are you?"

.

His suspicions were confirmed, less than ten minutes after the Doctor took up his surveillance, the front door of Miss Karena's house opened and the woman herself stepped out. She wasn't dressed like a housekeeper now, oh no. Her clothes were fine and clean, and her hair was swept up under a neat cap. She locked the door and hurried down the steps to the street. She looked around quickly, but the Doctor had already slipped around the corner and a cluster of old ladies stood between him and Karena. She didn't see him.

He watched her straighten her skirts and start down the street, walking away from him. Half a minute later, the Doctor followed.

.

Karena walked down to the market street that the Doctor had passed before. He turned up his collar and hoped that no one would recognize him, but Karena walked openly, ignoring the crowd. She stopped once to speak to a basket weaver, and again two shops later at a milliners. She stepped inside a dressmaker's shop, and the Doctor took up wall-leaning again as a hobby until she came out again carrying a long, thin, paper-wrapped package.

Karena walked on, but with a new purpose, and the Doctor had to hurry to keep up with her. If she'd thought she was being tailed before, she must have decided that she'd shaken him. She made no more stops over the next half mile until she arrived at an empty, boarded up building and stopped to fish a key from her purse. The marquee over the door had been painted over and the upper windows were broken and blocked with plywood. The street itself was like any other, a few open shops, a few rented flats above the shops, and a cluster of children rolling hoops along the sidewalk. Housewives sat at the upper windows, watching the children, but otherwise the street was empty.

The Doctor watched as Karena let herself into the shop, and then waited for the children to clear off down the street before he approached. He hurried up the front steps tried the door, but it was locked. He was about to take out the sonic again and let himself in after her, when a movement caught his eye and he turned.

Halfway down the block stood a woman in a gray dress, wearing a broad-brimmed black hat. She held a piece of paper in her hand and was looking up at the numbers on the houses on the other side of the street. She looked down at the paper again, turned and looked across the street. She saw him watching her.

The Doctor was too far away to get a good look at the woman's face, but he guessed that she must have been surprised to see him. She turned on her heels and hurried away, and as she turned, the Doctor caught sight of flame-red hair braided and tucked up under her hat.

He hesitated. He had come here following Karena, but he knew where that woman lived and could always find her again; one of the clipped articles in Karena's book had mentioned a red-haired young woman wanted in connection with Manuel Sánchez's disappearance. This woman in grey certainly had red hair, and she was about the right age. Her clothes matched the newspaper description as well. It could be a coincidence...

The woman had reached the end of the block and dashed around the corner. The Doctor, before he could second-guess himself again, he leaped the stair railing and took off after her. He could only hope that he'd made the right decision and was following the right woman this time.


To Guest Reviewer, Dove: Thank you so much for your kind review. This story is designed to be a collection of episodes that can be inserted into the regular timeline of the TV series, hence the skipping around. Carmen is like a cameo character who shows up occasionally and doesn't always explain her absence but, for the record, the Doctor hasn't "done" anything with her yet. He put her in the Zero Room and, as far as he is concerned, she's till in there.

To Everyone Else: Please review! Your comments and questions can only make this story better!

-Paint