never claimed to own this, so I don't know why you need the disclaimer. It's not like you're doing anything with these eps right now anyway, so please can't you share?
The next day, Luther Boggs gets a stay of execution because there is no justice in the universe and I spend an entire night in the office, which even I admit is a new low for me, but it has nothing to do with Boggs and I almost convince myself of that while I'm finishing up that article on the Gulf Breeze photos (Ed Walters was a big faker and the townspeople all jumped on the bandwagon). It comes out really well – so well I submit it to Omni under a psuedonym and hope for the best.
I am vaguely aware of a story of a teenager kidnapped in Iowa, but teenagers disappear all the time and I don't pay it much attention. Still, something about it pulls at me during the crash of the Mars Observer, and as I scan newspaper headlines in the convenience store where I buy my sunflower seeds the next morning I notice the headline on a newspaper - "Teen Taken from Tent by Aliens".
To be fair, 'newspaper' might be overstating the reputation of this particular publication. Still, something about it begs a closer look.
It's the girl in Iowa, and it's not much of an article.
"Sixteen-year-old Ruby Morris vanished
August 7 while camping with her mother
and younger brother by the shores of
Lake Okoboji in rural Iowa.
"Her mother, Darlene Morris, is
convinced that Ruby was abducted by
aliens. 'Ruby wouldn't just run off,' she
told a reporter. 'She loves me and her
brother very much.'
"A thorough police search has revealed
no clues. 'Ruby seems to have vanished,'
says a souce close to the police
department.
"Several 'bright lights' were seen in the
vicinity of Lake Okoboji the night
Ruby vanished from the campsite.
Not exactly Pulitzer material but I think I can do something with this. At the very least, the lake is a hotbed of UFO activity, and the least I should do is haul the paper down to work and see if there's anything I can work with here.
Scully doesn't care what I'm reading or if I even do anything at all, so I dig out my files and clip out the article on Ruby. At first it doesn't look like anything at all, but then I notice the mother. Darlene Morris.
The name is familiar. The girls in 1967 – what were their names? I pull out their file and sure enough, Darlene Morris.
Ruby's mother.
Now it holds water. Not a great amount and not without a precarious sense of balance, but it holds water.
Scully's at lunch when I fill out the 302 and submit it – better that way. She'll just want me to tell her what's up and where I got the article and somehow I don't think that will go over well. Instead I send it through channels and then I start going through the Bigfoot sightings and wait for my travel approval.
Scully is summoned to Blevins' office around two, which I didn't count on. Now I'm really in for it. She returns fifteen minutes later with my 302, wearing a scowl. "Mulder."
Dead meat.
"You just requested permission for us to go investigate a tabloid headline?"
"Scully," I ask her, "did you read the article?"
"Yes."
Too bad. She starts pacing, which is not a good sign.
"It just doesn't seem... substantial enough to warrant an investigation."
"Okay Scully, so we disagree, it's not the first time and it won't be the last."
"Well, at least if we had a legitimate source, we could..."
I'll legitimate her source! "This is the essence of science, you ask an impertinent question and you're on your way to a pertinent answer."
"But what makes this case anymore credible, than..." she pulls the paper off my desk – dammit, she must have known it was there all day, I knew I should have recycled it – and reads from the front page. "...the hundred year old mother with the lizard baby?"
A fascinating piece of journalistic... something. "Because the lizard baby wasn't born anywhere near Lake Okoboji."
"Oko-what?"
Now I have her attention. "Boji." I get right in her face. "Okoboji."
Attention firmly grabbed. "Is that supposed to mean something to me?" This "man of mystery" thing is fun and I see why the men in black enjoy their jobs.
"If you know anything about trout fishing." I tell her as I turn off the lights. "Or UFO hotspots."
Which she doesn't. "Define hotspot."
I turn on my trusty slide projector and pop up the picture Darlene took as a little girl. "Four sightings in 1967, August, including one by a national weather service plane." Click, new picture. "This is a light blasted, digitally enhanced enlargement."
"The pilot took that photograph?"
Showtime. I try not to smirk. "Try a girl scout with an instamatic. Four of the nine girls in the troop claim to have seen something, five if you include the den mother." Or whatever you call the leader of a girl scout troop. Don't ask me, I was an Indian Guide. "The Air Force said it was a weather balloon caught in a wind sheer. But there wasn't a weather balloon launched that day within seven hundred miles." So obviously not a weather balloon. Plus, there weren't any air force installations nearby, so we're not talking another version of Ellens. "Now read me the names of those girl scouts from 1967." Now I turn on my overhead projector and get out the transparency I made of the article.
She sighs. "Lisa Tyrell, Bonnie Winston, Dorreen McAllister, Darlene Mor..."
And I'm over by the screen, pointing to Darlene's name in the article.
I win.
She opens her mouth to say something but I beat her to it. While she was upstairs I put in a call to the cops, pretending to be a reporter. The last piece is in place. "It's the same Darlene Morris."
Scully's voice is resigned. "I guess we'd better get some seats on the next plane to Iowa."
"It leaves at 7:30 tomorrow morning," I tell her. "Our seats are reserved, just not paid."
She scowls. "I have to go figure out how to break this to Blevins. I'll meet you at the airport." She gathers her stuff and walks out the door.
She comes back just when I'm about to phone Ruby's mother. I put it on speaker and whisper, "Darlene Morris," as the phone rings. On the second ring, she picks up.
"Hello?"
"Mrs. Morris?" I ask, "This is Agent Fox Mulder from the FBI. I was hoping to talk to you about your daughter's disappearance."
"Do you know where she is?" she sounds desperate.
Scully winces. "No," I tell her, "but I'd like to come out and interview you in person, see if I can help. We haven't been asked in by law enforcement and there's no evidence Ruby's left the state, but the case falls in my division's jurisdiction."
"Yes," she says, "of course. Did you want to interview Kevin as well?"
Kevin? "Ruby's brother?"
"Yes, he's eight. He's been having nightmares, I don't know if it would be good for him to talk to you or not. He hasn't really told the police anything but I think he's holding back. He and Ruby were both outside when she vanished."
Huh. "I suppose I'd better try talking to him if he's up for it," I tell her, even though he'll probably just see me as another cop. My partner and I will be in Sioux City tomorrow afternoon. Will you be available?"
"Yes," she says, "of course. Thank you." The line goes dead.
"That was interesting," says Scully.
"How so?" I ask.
"I would have thought she would want her son to talk to us no matter what."
She doesn't get it and I don't know if I can explain it. "She doesn't want to have both her children in pain," I tell Scully. "She wants him to be as normal as he can."
She frowns. "Nothing will be normal after this."
Don't I know it. "Well, Kevin wasn't going to have a normal life as it is, Scully. His mother's name is on file with the Center for UFO Research because of all the fuss she's tried to stir up about the UFO she saw as a girl. I'm sure both Kevin and Ruby have felt the effects of that."
We have to rent a car and drive to Darlene Morris's home outside Sioux City. I drive, Scully bats around all the reasons teenage girls might legitimately run away from home without alien involvement, including but not limited to drugs, boyfriends (and pregnancy), trouble with siblings (especially with the age difference between Ruby and her little brother, Kevin), her father kidnapping her (parents are divorced, dad is AWOL), and my personal favorite (although I don't tell Scully this), having a mother who is obsessed with UFOs making it impossible for a teenage girl to integrate into teenage girl society. Although Scully doesn't put it quite like that.
"Mulder, have you considered that the reason Ruby might have run away might be that she's having trouble with her peers due to her mother's belief in UFOs?"
Ouch.
"There's no evidence she ran away," I point out lamely.
"Occam's Razor, Mulder."
The simplest explanation is most likely to be true.
"Explain where she went. They were in the woods, where could she have gone?"
"Someone picked her up."
"Who? You just said she didn't have any friends."
Scully sighs and mutters under her breath.
I check the address and pull in in front of a mildly dilapidated house in the middle of a fairly nice block. We walk up to the door and knock. A woman answers, and Scully steps up to her. "Miss Darlene Morris?" The woman nods and Scully flashes her ID. "I'm Agent Scully and this is Agent Fox Mulder, we talked with you on the phone last night."
"Please come in." She stands aside to let us enter. It smells strongly of cigarettes, coffee, and desperation. I remember the smell from when I was a child, just after Sam vanished. Sadness, that's what I smell. Terrible sadness. "Well I, knew that if I screamed, loud and long enough that, someone would listen. But I never expected the FBI." We had the Treasury Department, the State Department, the FBI, the CIA (I think), the police, the state troopers, and I think for a time a couple of Texas Rangers just for kicks. Never helped. "Er, this is Kevin. Kevin, say "hi"." I can hear my father's voice. "Tell them what happened, Fox." Like it did me any good.
"Would you like some coffee?" I remember waking in the night to the sound of voices in the living room, coffee percolating in the background. Really, I should have remembered. I hate dealing with the kidnappings of young girls.
"Mmm-hmm," Scully answers Darlene, who walks away toward the kitchen and Scully follows, then looks back at me, but my attention is drawn to the mantel, where there is a picture of a young Ruby on display. I can see so clearly my mother's mantel the last time I saw her. Samantha's last school picture is still displayed, neatly seated next to my high school graduation picture, which may be the most recent picture my mother has of me. It's like she pretends that I just graduated and Samantha – Samantha will be back any day.
What will happen to Darlene? Will she be in denial like my mom? Or will she accept that her baby may not come home? Or will Ruby just walk in the door one day? Why should Ruby get to come home and not Sam? She was just getting to be fun – just starting to get out of her 'annoying baby sister' phase. I miss Samantha.
One of Ruby's pictures is her in a swimsuit, so similar to the one Dad took of Samantha two days before she vanished, down at the pier. I remember she lost a tooth in those two days. What else changed? What has changed since? A person could go crazy thinking about this – but I can't help myself.
I join Scully and Darlene in the kitchen, where Scully is interviewing Darlene with her professional detachment fully in place. "Some days I can't even get myself up out of bed. And Kevin has been acting so strange, I don't know what to do anymore. I-I just, want her back again."
"Miss Morris, during the divorce, was there a custody battle?"
"Charles had nothing to do with this."
Well, denial is not just a river in Egypt, but she seems pretty sure. "How can you be so sure?" asks Scully.
"Because I know what happened. It's just like it was before."
Here we go. "Summer of 1967, the girl scout troop?" I ask her.
"How did you know about that?"
"Your name's on record at the center for UFO studies in Evanston, Illinois."
She perks up a bit. "Really?"
"Yea, pilot for the national weather service made a similar sighting over the same area on the same day," I tell her.
"They took her didn't they Mr. Mulder?"
How the hell should I know? Maybe. I should talk to Kevin. "You, you said that Kevin was there, the night it happened."
"He didn't see anything, he was asleep."
How am I supposed to look at him without seeing myself? "Do you think I might talk to him anyway?" She nods. "Thanks," I tell her, and head into the living room. I can hear Darlene continue to talk to Scully.
Kevin is watching static on the TV. I remember staring into space, and I remember, more than anything, eyes. People watching me, watching each other. Family members and friends. They would smoke and stare, or just sit and stare, or cook a meal but they would still be staring, shocked, unable to do anything but stare at the impossibility of it all – wondering how to live in a world so changed, if they had any right to live in a world so changed that a little girl could just vanish into thin air... oh, yes, I remember the staring.
"Hey buddy! Mind if I sit down?" Kevin just shrugs. "Thanks." He looks down at his coloring. "Your mom tells me you've been having nightmares."
"I guess so."
I remember the nightmares, when I was finally able to sleep at all from pure exhaustion at first – but mostly I remember when the nightmares stopped.
"Wanna tell me about em?"
"No."
I remember people asking me questions I did not want to answer. Questions about my dreams – about what I thought happened that night. Questions I couldn't answer.
"All right." I look down at Kevin's coloring – or writing. Definitely writing. "What're you doing?" He turns to look at me, then back to his writing he goes. "Are you making something?" I ask him, and he nods. "Can I take a look at it?" He passes me the pad of paper. "Thanks," I mutter, but I'm distracted by what's on the page – ones and zeros. Binary code.
Kevin points to the TV. "It's coming from there."
I don't believe it. "The TV?"
But he nods again.
"Can I keep this?" I ask him. He nods and starts another page.
I walk back into the kitchen and show the page to Darlene. "How long has Kevin been doing this?"
She blinks at the paper. "A week or so," she says, "but I figured as long as it kept him occupied during all this -
No need to explain. "I'd like to run the code, see if anything turns up. It's a long shot but from what I understand the police have looked at everything else."
She nods. "Sure."
Scully stands up. "Thanks for the coffee," she tells Darlene. "We'll be in touch if anything turns up."
We book it over to the police station, show our I.Ds and are given access to a fax machine. I write out a quick cover letter while I'm phoning Danny. "Danny speaking," he answers.
"Hey, it's me. I need a rush job on something."
"What is it?"
"I don't know what it is," I am forced to tell Danny, "maybe a binary sequence of some kind. Could be anything, could be nothing."
"Mulder," he whines, "I'm busy."
"I know you're busy, look erm, I know a friend who knows a friend who knows a friend who can get you tickets to a Redskins game." And it's a good thing the NFL finally uses computers to reserve things, because two of those "friends" are computers – the one at Langly's desk and the one in the Redskins' ticket office.
"They better be good tickets," he mutters.
"You got it."
"Okay, Mulder, I'll have a look at your code. You owe me."
"Alright, you know where to find me. Thanks Danny."
"Later," he replies, and I can hear the fax machine on his end whirring before he hangs up.
I duck back into the Sherrif's office and he glares at me. "You done chasing figments?"
It could be nothing. "Yeah."
He sits down heavily. "So, as I was telling your partner, we found no evidence of kidnap, no phone call, no ransom note, and since we didn't turn up a body..."
I know, I know. "You assume she ran away."
"Well, it wouldn't be the first time Ruby Morris ran away from home." I saw that in her file. She ran away once before for two weeks when she was twelve.
"Well, how do you explain what her mother saw?"
"Well I think that Darlene has a very active imagination. I've been listening to those stories since the first grade."
Now I'm pissed. I remember this too – the police wouldn't talk to me after the first day, because anything I remembered – disjointed as it was then – was fairly paranormal in nature. "So basically you ignored her statement."
"I included it in my report."
"But you didn't bother to check it out." I don't know how he would have checked anything out, but that's not the issue here.
"We went out to the campsite, we didn't find anything. Let me tell you something, Darlene's little girl was no prom queen. I can't count the number of times I pulled her out of parked cars, or found her puking her guts out by the side of the road, it was just a matter of time before-"
"Not my baby! Not Samantha!" My mother's voice fills my head for a minute, and I find myself asking, "Before what?"
"Before something bad happened to her and if Darlene needs to make up crazy stories to get past that, fine. But don't tell me to treat it as the truth, I not gonna waste my time."
"A lead," I reply, "no matter how small, is never a waste of time." And then I walk out the door.
On the way out, Scully is in full lecture mode. "I just think it's a good idea not to antagonize local law enforcement."
Probably. "Who me? I'm Mr. Congeniality."
"You never know, we might need his help one of these days."
He'd probably just say it was just a matter of time. "I'll send him a bunt cake."
I'm headed to the car, but there's a note in the windshield wiper. At first I think we've got a ticket, but it's definitely a note, reading, "I'm across the street. Follow me." I hand it to Scully, who glances at it and then across the street. I follow her gaze to a young girl standing in the grass in front of a small squarish building. She walks away, into the building – the city library.
We follow her to a particular aisle and walk down it. She moves around the corner before we can get a clear look and talks to us from behind the boos. "You're looking for Ruby, right?"
"That's right," Scully says. "Who are you?"
"Doesn't matter."
"Are you a friend of Ruby's?"
"Ruby didn't have friends, she just had people she liked to hang with." Scully doesn't bother gloating.
"And she liked to hang out with you?"
"Guess we had some times."
Why be so secretive? "Like the night she disappeared?" I ask.
"It was Greg, she was supposed to see him that night."
"Who's Greg?" Greg – first I've heard of a Greg.
"Her boyfriend, Greg Randall. Supposed to meet up at the lake. Had stuff to talk about."
"What kind of stuff?" No friends, but a boyfriend? This doesn't add up.
"Greg got Ruby pregnant. I don't know, whatever, she got herself pregnant."
She was pregnant. Huh. "Do you know what they were planning to do about it?" Scully asks her.
"Gonna leave town, least that's what Ruby told me."
No friends, but she confided in this girl?
Scully continues her questioning. "You know Greg from school?"
"Greg, school, I don't think so. All he ever did since we met him was pour beer. The Pennyslvania Pub."
There's a clatter of falling books behind me, and we both turn away for a second. When we turn back, she's gone and we can hear running footsteps. We dash around the shelves, but there's no one there and no obvious exit.
She's gone.
Scully frowns. "Mulder, if Ruby didn't have any friends, why would she confide in this girl? It doesn't make any sense."
I know. "Yeah, but we should go check out the bar anyway.
We find the bar okay, and when we walk in we stand out – actually, FBI agents usually stand out in some bars. Bureau dress code does not include biker jackets. I try to pretend I'm not annoyed when someone mutters about Scully being a "real" girl. Like I even know what they mean by that.
I manage to get the bartender's attention. "scuse me. Do you know where we could find Greg Randall?"
"Who's asking?" he replies, so I show my ID. "What kind of trouble's he got himself into now?" Nice.
"Actually, we were hoping you could tell us."
"Greg called in sick about three weeks ago man, I haven't seen or heard from him since."
Three weeks. "Any ideas where he might have gone?"
"No, but if you find him, you tell him he's fired." Nice.
Scully pulls out a card where she's written the location of our motel. She wrote up about five of them in the car, to give out to people we talk to. I think it's crazy, but it kept her occupied. "This is the motel we'll be staying at if you hear of anything." He puts it in his pocket. Yeah, like that'll ever see the light of day.
But when he moves his arm, it catches my eye – specifically, the bicep. "Hey, that's a nice tattoo, what is that?"
It's a flying saucer, and I know that. "What's it look like?" he asks.
"Flying saucer. You don't really believe in that stuff do ya?" Be cool, Mulder.
"I take it you don't," he says, but he's interested. He's making a convert.
What would Scully say? "No, I think it's all just a bunch of crazy people howling at the moon."
"So er, you haven't been out to Lake Okoboji, have ya?" Not a question.
"No I haven't, why?"
"You should ride with us sometime, you might see somethings that'll change your mind." He pulls back his hair – his ear and the side of his head show horrible burn scars. "Get a killer sunburn in the middle of the night."
We go back to the motel so we can get some rest and regroup, because we have nothing except leads on a guy who's been missing for three weeks and could be anywhere using any name – or dead in a ditch on a deserted road where no one lives. Either way, it's looking sketchy.
I remember the day the police weren't in our home for the first time in six months. Not one cop. Samantha had had a birthday in January, four months after she vanished. She was nine, and we didn't even know where she was and the cops didn't show up all day. They didn't have a single thing to tell us.
We can't even get the cops into Darlene's house, and it bites.
I'm woken up somewhat earlier than I might like by someone pounding on the door. I get out of bed, throw on some clothes, and open it to find a man standing there. He pulls out his NSA ID – Michael Holtzman, field agent.
NSA. Wonderful. Without saying a single word, he pushes his way into my room followed by another guy in a bad suit.
"Come on in," I mutter, and neither of them even glances at me. I sink down onto my bed and wait for it. Sure enough -
"Where did you get the document?" People are still filing into my room, digging through my drawers.
Hello to you too.
"Well, if you explain to me what you're talking about, maybe I can help you out." He hands me a sheet of paper covered in ones and zeroes. Ah, the document. Kevin. "This is a document? Just looks like a bunch of ones and zeroes to me."
"Tell me where you got it."
God only knows what they'll do to the kid. "Tell me what it is."
"Keep playing games Mulder, I'll haul your ass up in front of the D6. You can explain to them, what you're doing obstructing justice."
Lovely. I hand the paper back to Holtzman. "It's your call Holtzman. So unless they tell me otherwise, I'm not accountable to anybody outside my sub-committee. I don't care if it's the NSA or the Vatican Police." Isn't it funny how dawn makes things colder? I throw on my shirt. I've never had trouble with the Vatican Police. Could be fun – more fun than this. I throw on a shirt over my undershirt.
"It's a defense satellite transmission."
Whoa. "You're kidding." What the hell is Kevin picking up? And how?
"Just a fragment but highly classified, we need to know where it came from."
Not only am I not turning in an innocent kid, but how the hell is he supposed to pick anything up sitting in front of the TV? "Well sure, I'll let you know as soon as I find out."
Someone's phone rings in the background, but Holtzman and I are both seriously pissed now. "That's it Mulder, you just bought yourself a one way back to Washington."
Does that come out of my budget?
"We got it," says the man who just hung up his phone.
It takes me ten seconds to figure out what they are talking about. They got what they need, and there's only one person who could have given them that. The NSA walks out of my room, and Scully walks in. "Great," I mutter. Here we go.
"What?" She asks. Here we go.
"You shouldn't have told them. They have no jurisdiction." I'm mad and I'm not hiding it. I thought we were past this.
"Mulder, they're NSA." Who cares? I throw on my jacket. Tie. I need a tie. "They think the boy may be a threat to national security."
"C'mon, how could an eight year old boy, who can barely multiply, be a threat to national security? People call me paranoid." He's eight! And he should be studied, not interrogated.
"Well how did Kevin obtain top secret information? And, where do you think he got it from?"
I walk past her onto the balcony, throwing on my tie while I run down the stairs.
"Mulder?"
I'm gonna kill Scully. "I think he saw it on TV."
She sighs. Mulder, let me get dressed and I'll meet you downstairs in three minutes.
She gets in the car with me and digs her case notes out of her briefcase. I think I'm still glaring, because... "Mulder, it was the NSA."
"Scully, he's eight! You shouldn't have told them." I think we've been down this road before.
"It's illegal not to tell them. We work for the law."
"Scully, if you don't know and I don't know, they'll never know and they'll never be able to charge us with anything. Victimless crime."
"Mulder, that's the same argument corrupt cops use when they're lying to Internal Affairs!"
I pull down the street where the Morris family lives. "We're not corrupt, they're unbending."
"It's their job to be unbending."
It's their job to be unbending? Please. "It's their job to protect national security. Kevin saw this on the static on the TV, Scully! He's no danger."
"Then they'll figure that out."
The NSA beat us there of course and is already hauling out boxes of stuff. At one point the FBI decided I may have killed Sam. I think it was three weeks or so after, and they started getting desperate. Two agents dragged me into the police station and told me they knew what I'd done. It went on for two hours, with my dad sitting in the corner, until I told them it was my fault because I should have let her watch her stupid movie anyway. I guess after that I wasn't a suspect anymore.
Holtzman has the Morrises dragged down to the local FBI headquarters. I have to watch Darlene trying to reassure Kevin as they're dragged away in separate cars to the same destination.
Kevin is not reassured. "MOOOMMMM!"
They shush him and put them in their respective cars and drive off. The whole thing is hard to watch and yet I have to and it sucks and it's all Scully's fault, but women go insane because of these things so I'm pretty sure it's harder for her to watch than it is for me.
Especially since it's all her fault.
In Kevin's room, Holtzman boxes a bunch of sheets of 1's and 0's. I pick up Kevin's busted piggy bank off the floor and send Holtzman what my mom used to call my Patented Mulder Glare. He ignores me. "You guys do really delicate work," I tell him, deadpan.
"Let's get this to cryptography," he tells his little buddy, ignoring me. "I think we got what we needed, thank you," he adds pointedly to Scully as he walks out.
I go to the window and watch him drive away. And then I see that the trailer parked in the side yard. The top is all burned. Or looks burned.
So how would just the top of a trailer get burned?
Scully moves in next to me. "What is it?"
"I'm not sure," I tell her. Probably nothing.
I walk down the stairs, trying to think of what, other than maybe lightning, and even that I doubt, could possibly do that. Or maybe a flying saucer hovering above with the brights on. I get outside and climb the ladder onto the top of the camper. The top isn't just burned, it's ash. I drag my fingers through it and take a whiff. It smells... burned. And it's clinging to my hand.
We get back in the car and head for the local FBI headquarters. Scully is in a furious silence, but my mind is churning. "Scully," I finally ask when I can't take it anymore, "let's say for a moment that Kevin can pick up satellite transmissions from a TV. How would that happen?"
"Well, he would have to be able to receive radio waves."
The human brain picks up all kinds of stuff. And plenty of information heads our way if we knew how to access it. Plus, there are reliable scientific instances where people have been able to pick up things that most people cannot pick up. Like radio waves, or ULF waves, or other things of that nature. Our eyes pick up all kinds of things our brains don't know how to process. "And how would he get that?"
"I have no idea."
"It could be done to him."
She is silent for a moment, probably trying to figure out where I'm going with this, how much to admit to. "Well... I guess. I mean, we don't know how, but if someone did know how to make that kind of neurological modification, then, yes, I suppose it's plausible."
Plausible. "The top of the trailer is burned."
"What?"
"Whatever was done to Kevin would take a lot of energy. The top of the trailer isn't just charred, it's ash. Something out there was expending a lot of energy – and way more than a lightning storm."
"Mulder-"
"From above," I add before she can say it wasn't aliens.
When we get to the FBI, Darlene and Kevin are still being interrogated, so we manage to get a few words with the agent who is decoding Kevin's work over in cryptography. She's a short hispanic woman who, when Scully figures out what she's doing, tells us, "Oh, you're the ones who found it. Well, you really should send this over to those guys who investigate the weird ones, because this...is weird. They'll be letting the boy go soon."
"How so?" Scully asks, probably about the weird, not about letting Kevin go.
"We scanned all seventy-seven pages through the mainframe in Washington," she tells us.
"And none of the information is actionable?" Scully presses her.
"Other than the satellite transmission, nothing can be construed, in anyway, as a national security risk. As far as I know, the boy's being released this afternoon."
"So it's just a random set of ones and zeros?" Scully concludes.
"On the contrary, there was nothing random about it."
Suddenly, Scully is very confused. "I don't understand," she replies.
"All information can be rendered digitally-" She takes us to her workstation and sits down - "in a series of ones and zeros. When we downloaded the data, we found an amazing range of – well, see for yourself." Part of a picture I have on my mousepad comes up. "Da Vinci's universal man." It changes again to something I've seen in magazines. "A DNA double helix. Oh, there's lots more. It changes again, and the computer plays music.
"That's from the Brandenburg concertos," Scully realizes.
"But they're just fragments, a few notes here, a few not there. Some lines from the Karanish Experience Sonnet."
It was just a fragment of a DOD transmission. Changing channels on the TV. "Almost like someone's switching channels, huh."
We all stare at each other and I know what Scully's thinking. Or, well, I don't, but I'm thinking the whole "saw it on TV" thing is starting to make a lot more sense. Well, a lot less sense, but more sense if you accept that nothing makes sense anyway. Darlene and Kevin are brought out then, and they walk right by us. I try to stop her, to apologize, but she just says "I have nothing to say to you," and keeps walking. I should let it go there, really, but have you met me? I don't do that.
So instead I reach for her, try to grab her arm and stop her. "Mrs. Morris, please give me a minute to explain."
She stops and turns to her son, and says "Would you please just wait right over there for Momma, I'll be right there." Kevin walks over to the stairs, but he glances up at me before he does it. "I thought you were both supposed to be here to help us."
Scully jumps in. "This has been a terrible mistake. And I assure you that the government will pay for all repairs and damages."
"I don't want your money, I want my daughter back. And I want you to leave us alone."
"But your son has seen something," I point out, because that's obvious to anyone with a brain.
Full Mother Protective Mode kicks in. "You stay away from me, and you stay away from my child." She walks away to collect Kevin from the spot where he's staring at the TV monitors in the security area. "Come on, honey, it's okay, let's go now."
We have no choice but to check out the scene of the crime.
Scully notices this.
"I thought we were headed back into town," she says as I pull onto Route 68, which takes us to the lake. Maybe to Ruby, maybe to evidence that Greg took her away on his motorcycle, maybe to her decomposing body in the woods. "Where are we going?"
Maybe to whatever changed Kevin into whatever he is now. "The boy's the key Scully, I know it." It's not an answer to the question she asked. It's the answer to the question I want her to ask.
"The key to what?
Better. "Finding Ruby. Just think about it for a minute, this is a boy who is receiving all kinds of digitized data from a television screen." Or so I think. If I'm wrong I'm wrong.
"Agent Atsumi said it was a statistical aberration."
Agent Atsumi was grasping at straws. "No."
"Okay, I admit it, it's not much of an explanation but it..."
Yeah, I don't care. "I think that Kevin is a conduit, of some kind." Conduit: a line of transmission from a source (aliens) to a recevier (at the moment, me).
"A conduit."
"A link, or a connection, to whoever, or whatever, took Ruby that night." To whatever took Samantha? Maybe. How many alien forces go around abducting girls? I'm guessing not many.
"But how?"
"If there was an abduction, it's likely that Kevin was touched in some way." I am an abnormality – as far as I know I was untouched by the abduction. I have no implants, no new abilities.
No proof.
"Mulder I know what you're thinking. I know why this is so important to you." I have to look at her then, and see the sympathy, the pity in her eyes. I don't want her sympathy. I want to find Ruby. And I want her to bring Samantha home with her, but of course that won't happen. It never happens. "I know," she continues, and I know she's right. "But there is no evidence indicating an abduction."
"That's why we're going to Lake Okoboji," I reply, and I know that she understands.
It's a nice place to go camping. Before, when Samantha was still around to be jealous that she didn't get to go too, Dad and I were Indian Guides. I liked the outdoors. I still do, in an abstract sort of way. There are seagulls, woods, and a nice spot for a campfire. I can figure out pretty easily where they all were that night. "According to the police photos, Ruby and Kevin were sleeping right here," I point to the spot next to the campfire.
Scully says what I'm not saying. "Just a stones throw from the forest wall."
But it came from above. "Meaning what?" The trailer was burned above. I look up. The trees are burned too.
"Meaning anybody could've come out of the forest to grab her."
"Have you noticed the tree line?" She looks up and scowls. "Evidence of extreme heat." With no time context.
"Or an electrical storm." Samantha and I used to go to the beach and collect shells. There's some good ones here. I wonder if Ruby feels about Kevin the way I felt about Sam. God she was annoying. "Besides which, there's nothing to connect it to the night of Ruby's disappearance."
One of the shells isn't a shell. It's a piece of glass.
Glass forms when sand melts. Scully's the one with the physics degree – how's she gonna explain this? "That's true." I rub the sand off the front of the glass and hold it up to show her. "Do you think a lightning strike could've caused this?" I walk it over to her frowning self. "Do you have any idea at what temperature sand solidifies into glass?" I hand it over and watch her rub at the sand embedded into what was the bottom side. "Twenty-five hundred degrees fahrenheit. Something was out here Scully, something hot enough to turn sand into glass, that, singed those trees and to blister the roof of that camper." Really must tell the aliens to stop careening through the atmosphere when we finally meet. I walk back to the waterfront to look for more glass, but Scully calls to me. "Mulder, look."
It is a wolf, a white one. Weird. It turns and runs into the forest and I follow.
Wolves don't hang around people like that, as a rule. Especially not in daytime. Unless they smell something really good. I stop when I see a pack of them, huddled around a bunch of stones on the forest floor. A person-sized bunch of stones. I pull out my gun and fire a shot into the air and they scatter. By the time I reach the stones, Scully is there. "What is it?"
When I take a breath to answer, I smell the decomposing body inside. Nothing quite like it. "It's a grave. Shallow, by the smell of it."
I pick up the stone on top. "Mulder what are you doing?" I know what I'm doing. What I would want someone to do for my sister, if her body is under a pile of rocks somewhere. I am bringing someone's child, someone's sibling, home to them. "Mulder, you are disturbing a crime scene." It's not just that it could be Ruby – I feel, have always felt, that what I do will find it's way to Samantha. An act of kindness, or of anger, will ricochet through the world until it finds her. Like the act of digging up a grave – like the one that for all I know she's in now. If I find Ruby – even her body – maybe then someone will find Samantha. Maybe then Mom would forgive me. Maybe then I would forgive myself. Or maybe I can bring Darlene that kind of peace. Maybe then I could forgive myself too. Scully grabs my arm. "Stop."
I turn to her, very slowly, and look right into her eyes. "What if it's her? I need to know."
She lets go of my arm. "I'll call the police. Just enough that we can tell if it's Ruby or not, okay?" That's all I need to know, so I nod. I move one more stone from the grave, set it aside, and look in. And then I have my answer.
When the police arrive, they bring a ton of pretty yellow tape to preserve what's left of the crime scene, but it's not gonna be any help. The man in the grave has been in there for three weeks. There's been rain, and wolves, and all the evidence is long gone. The coroner, the crime scene people, cops in uniforms, photographers, and more all descend on the scene to do their thing, and Scully and I are left a the side, which is fine. "You okay Mulder?"
"Fine," I tell her without malice.
The man in the grave is Greg. It has to be. "Looks like a male caucasian," the coroner says, and I have a sudden impulse to tell Greg he's fired.
"Victim's name was Greg Randall," the sheriff calls out, which is a conclusion I arrived at ten minutes ago.
Scully, however, did not. "Ruby's boyfriend."
"Ruby had a lot of boyfriends," the sheriff responds. He goes to bag Greg's wallet, but I reach out.
"Before you put that away, can I take a look at it?" I ask him.
"Go right ahead."
I grab some gloves out of the nearest case and open the wallet. Money, ID, slip of paper with the name, "Dr. Jack Fowler" and a date – August 7 – and a time – 2:30. Scully reads over my shoulder, and then we look at each other.
Maybe we can at least figure out if Ruby was pregnant or not.
When we get back to town, I take the note and blow it up on the copier. Scully gets out the note that girl left on the windshield without being asked, and when we compare the two, there it is. We'll need a handwriting expert to make it legit, but when we line up the FO for Follow and the FO for Fowler, only an idiot would miss the similarity.
"Look at that," Scully says, "it's her, the girl from the library."
"Who?" asks the sheriff.
"We didn't get her name but she claimed Greg and Ruby had run off together."
He sighs. "Well, Doc Fowler's a buddy of mine, delivered both my kids. I could find out who had that appointment."
I know what this could mean. If this girl was at the doctor, she was probably pregnant too. If Greg was going to run off with Ruby – well, men fear pregnant women for a reason.
The Sheriff picks up his phone and dials. "Jack? Hi, it's Marty. Listen, I need to know who had an appointment with you on August 7 at 2:30." He pauses. "No, it's a case. Homicide." Another pause. "Really. Thanks Jack. I owe you a beer."
He hangs up the phone, and turns to look at us. "There's this girl, Tessa Sears, who used to hang with Ruby. The appointment was a prenatal checkup – and it was for Tessa."
This could complicate matters.
When they bring her into the interrogation room, she isn't scared, or angry, or anything at all. She's been brought in for questioning, she's waived the right to an attorney, but she's not under arrest. She's eighteen years old and I think she just killed a man. "Have a seat Tessa," says Scully when they get her to interrogation. I watch from a spot by the wall and the sheriff leans against the wall, because this is Girl Talk. With a tape recorder and handcuffs. "We know that you lied to us the other day. We know that you had the appointment with Doctor Fowler on August 7th. We know that you're the one that's pregnant, not Ruby."
"Don't know nothing, do ya?"
"We can prove it Tessa, and we can prove that Greg was the father."
"So what if he was the father."
"This is very serious. Do you understand how serious this is?"
Samantha could have been returned without her memory. It happens. If she was returned in Texas or something, no memory, no family, what would happen to her? Who would she become? What if she's in prison? Tessa is proof that it doesn't take much desperation at all for a woman to go homicidal.
"Now you've waived the right to an attorney, so if you lie to us here today, you could be charged with perjury."
"Promised me we'd be in L.A. by Christmas," she says. "He had a friend there, I'd never seen the ocean."
Or if someone tried to stop her from finding us? What if she doesn't even know we exist?
"You said that he and Ruby were seeing each other. You said that they were planning to meet at the lake, is that true?"
What if she's decided she doesn't want to look?
"Lookit, I was nowhere near the lake that night, okay."
Yes she was. I stand up. "Sure you were Tessa." I walk toward her. "You knew they were meeting, so you sat there and you waited for them. You were angry and you were jealous." She knows where Ruby is buried. She has to.
"I wasn't."
"You sat there and you waited and when they showed, you killed him first, isn't that how it went?"
"No."
They just handed me the crime scene report and preliminary autopsy findings. "You snuck up from behind him and you shot him in the back-" I smack the desk - "BAAMMM." I walk around the desk and stand beside her. She doesn't even twitch. "And then you killed Ruby-" I hit the desk again - "BAAMMM." I walk over to the other side of the desk - "What was she doing right before she died Tessa? Was she pleading for her life? Was she running away?" Being Bad Cop is fun.
"I didn't kill her."
Her, not them. We're getting somewhere.
I walk back over to her side of the desk. "Where's she buried Tessa?"
"I don't know."
"You don't know where you buried her, Tessa?" I walk back to her other side.
"I didn't kill her."
Still? "You didn't?"
"SHE WASN'T EVEN THERE THAT NIGHT!"
This could cause problems. I crouch down beside her. "Well how would you know that Tessa, if you weren't there yourself." But I already know. Tessa killed Greg Randall, but she didn't touch a hair on Ruby's head. The Sheriff can take over from here.
Ten minutes later we're on our way out of the police station, and I think Scully wants to kill me, because I just said, "Scully, this puts us back at square one. Ruby could still be alive."
I have to believe that, because if there's no hope for Ruby then there's really no hope for Samantha.
"Mulder you're not seeing the whole picture here."
I have to believe. Scully doesn't. I fight to remember that as I reply, "Which is?"
"Which is that all likelihood, Ruby is dead."
Likelihood. Plausibility. Odds. Logic. But those aren't the hard-and-fast rules of life. "Is that your conclusion or the conclusion of the Sioux City Sheriff's Department?"
"They're searching the national park and a rescue dive team is coming in from Des Moines to drag the lake."
I know what she means, but our whole murder case just got blown away. Tessa Sears killed a man – but she didn't kill Ruby. There would be no reason for her to say she was innocent of killing Ruby when she's sitting there admitting she killed Greg unless she didn't kill Ruby – which means Ruby, as far as I'm concerned, is alive. She's alive until I find her body. I look Scully straight in the eyes. "They're wasting their time."
"Do you really think Tessa Sears is telling the truth?"
About what? Probably. "Why not, what if Ruby never did show up that night?" It doesn't matter who was pregnant. Ruby's still gone, and Tessa didn't throw her in the lake.
"She lied to us in the library, she lied to us about her pregnancy, what makes you think she wouldn't lie to us about killing Ruby?"
Explain the burned trees. Explain Kevin. "Because something was out there in those woods."
"We have a suspect in custody, we have a confession to one murder, and we have a statement which speaks to the intent to commit another. It's over, Mulder. It's time to go home and turn this over to local law enforcement."
She only says that because she knows that this is really about Samantha to me. She's trying to protect me – or herself. Someone's getting protected here and I don't appreciate it.
"I can't do that," I reply, and I just walk away and leave her there, and head into the sunlight because we still have one chance. Just one.
"Mulder where are you going?"
Like she can't figure that out. "To talk to the boy."
"Darlene won't even let you in the door."
Yeah. "Well, I've gotta see him."
"They don't wanna have anything to do with you...us." The footsteps behind me stop. "Mulder stop. Stop running after your sister."
The elephant in the room.
That's one thing that most people know without even asking – you don't bring up the elephant in the room. Because that takes me to places I can't afford to go on a case. It takes me to the damaged parts of myself – things I just barely keep under wraps. Maybe I should be better at it, but I'm not.
I'm just not.
"This won't bring her back." Scully sounds like she's going to cry. For me? Why would she want to cry for me? I've done all the crying I'm going to do, which is actually very little.
No. It won't. But it might bring someone's sister back. It might keep Kevin from spending his vacations tiptoeing around his mother when he's in his thirties. It might mean his father – if Charles Morris ever comes back at all – will someday be willing to be in the same room with him. It might mean all the things for the Morrises that I and my family will never have. In a way, I think, it will bring her back.
Just not to me.
I don't expect Scully to understand this.
"Come with me or don't come with me but until they find a body, I'm not giving up on that girl."
And then I walk to the car and get in, and pretend not to be surprised that Scully climbs in the passenger side without another word.
The ride is silent, but not uncomfortably so. It's like we've gotten all the things we are thinking out in the air. We haven't even agreed to disagree, we're just – cool with it. Relaxed, even. Scully's got whatever's going on in her head, and I have mine, and we've just arrived at a spot where that's okay. I know she won't let me cross any lines – but I won't let her back up so far we can't see them, either.
It works, I think, as we turn down Darlene's street, because we are so different. No matter how much we disagree, at the end of the day we're in the same car.
When I knock on the Morris's door, there's no answer.
A chill starts in my stomach.
"Hello?" I jiggle the knob and to my surprise it moves, so I walk right in. Scully is right behind me. "Mrs. Morris?"
The chill begins spreading up my spine.
"Kevin?" calls Scully, but she's met with silence.
The chill finds itself in the tips of my fingers and toes. I look down at the floor, and absentmindedly turn off the TV as I see that there is a neat square of 1s and 0s written in eight-year-old writing. And when I say square, I mean SQUARE. Thirty sheets or so of printer paper.
The kettle starts boiling in the kitchen, and the chill crawls into the inside of my skull.
I sit on the couch and stare at the papers. Why? And how? What is it? "Mulder," says Scully, "What does it mean?"
I don't know. "I don't know."
"I'm gonna check upstairs," she says, and her footsteps echo up the stairs for a moment, then - "Oh my god."
Huh? She's leaning over the rail, staring down. "What is it?"
"Just come up here." I climb up and she points down. "Look," she says, pointing at the face made by the 30 sheets of printer paper neatly arranged in a square to show a girl's face. "It's her, it's Ruby."
Which doesn't tell us where to go.
"Mulder, if you were Darlene, and you saw this, what would you do?"
Do not be afraid. She will not be harmed. One day, she will return.
"I'd go back to where it all began," I tell her. And then I know. "We need to go back to the lake."
It is dark by the time we get there.
Not good for searching.
"This is a long shot Mulder, they could be anywhere."
I know. And for once, I speak the thoughts that run through my head when I'm working a case like this. Thoughts of Samantha, the ones I always keep to myself. Only this time, I don't. Maybe because I need to trust her, or maybe because I need to let go, just a little. Or maybe because I just want to see what will happen if I tell... someone. "You know when I was a kid, I had this ritual. I closed my eyes before I walked into my room, cause I thought that one day when I opened them my sister would be there. Just lying in bed, like nothing ever happened." She doesn't answer, so I keep talking. "You know I'm still walking into that room, every day of my life."
That's how I know where Darlene will be. She's been given a piece of hope, and she's walking into her own room. Also, I know because I can see her camper now. "Scully," I say, very clearly, and she looks and sees and all I can think is – if she gets her wish, why can't I have mine?
Sometimes I am not very nice.
I pull in behind the camper and we both get out of the car. "DARLENE!" I cry, but there's no answer. When I open it, they're not inside.
Which means they're in the woods.
The dark, scary woods where wolves live and someone was recently murdered. Brilliant parenting, Darlene.
"Look, there's a trail ahead," says Scully, gesturing with her flashlight.
We run into the woods, and I can hear someone crying – a woman. Darlene. She's on the ground, crawling down the path. We both kneel down next to her. "Are you okay?" I ask.
"It's here, I saw it."
Saw what? "Where's Kevin?"
"I couldn't keep up with him."
Scully and I look at each other and I know what she's thinking. Darlene needs a doctor. And I need to see – whatever there is to be seen. I need to do what I can to save Ruby. No more, no less. Scully nods, just once. "Go ahead."
And so I run down the path, and there, suddenly is Kevin. I can see him perfectly, outlined in the light from the other side of the hill he's standing on. It's very Close Encounters and extremely unnerving. "KEVIN!"
Kevin walks away from me, toward the light. And I chase him into it, stupidly. Just for a second I think it's the light that took my sister – but it isn't. I know it. It's different somehow, but I want so much to believe that it's really here, and I've finally found something...
But I haven't. It's motorcycles. The biker in the bar, the one who got the killer sunburn in the middle of the night, I think, as I grab Kevin and pull him to the ground so we don't both get run over. Poor kid. When the bikers are gone, I stand Kevin up and ask, "You okay?"
"She's back."
Just for a second – half a second, even, I'm dumb enough to think he means Sam. But Samantha's not back, and I know it. Samantha's never back. And Ruby's not either. "Kevin I'm sorry but, I don't..."
"She's here. I know it."
Oh, kid. It's too late for me. It's not too late for you. Best to head off the obsession. "Kevin I don't think she is. I know how much you want it to be her, I did too."
"MULDER!"
It's Scully, screaming from down the path. Bikers? Or something else? "SCULLY!" I reply and I pick Kevin up and run back to where I left her. She and Darlene are still there – and so is someone... else. A girl. "RUBY!"
She's lying flat on her back and she doesn't move. "She's unconcious but she's still alive," says Scully.
"I'll get help," the Trained Emergency Management Person inside me says, and then I run back to the car for my phone.
I make the calls I need – 911, the sheriff, the FBI. And then I take a minute to sit in the car and wait and deal with the fact that my sister may not be back but someone's sister sure is. And while it gives me hope that someday it will be our turn, I'm jealous. That's it. I'm jealous of an eight-year-old boy who just got back the sister he had no right to ever expect to see again.
I want Samantha back so bad I can taste it, and that's with me all the time. What scares me most is that someday, it might not be. I will have given up on her – she'll be gone. I don't want that. But I do want my freedom from this burden – and it is a burden. It's not just that I think aliens are cool, but that I have no choice but to believe in them, and believe they visit Earth and return the people they've taken. People like Samantha.
Or maybe I just want to know she forgives me for whatever it is I could have done to stop her abduction – which, for those of you keeping track, was nothing. I couldn't prevent it and I couldn't save her.
I miss her. That's the thing. I miss my sister, and I wish she was here so I could tell her that. I wish she was lying in the woods with Ruby clinging to life, so I could tell her that now, but no, not for Fox Mulder. I realized long ago, I don't get to have that.
There is a flash of red behind me as the ambulance pulls up, and I drag myself out of the car and escort the paramedics down the path to save Ruby.
Ruby is fine, they tell us at the hospital, and we can see her tomorrow.
So we go back to the motel and change and all those things a person should do after they've been running around the woods and nearly rolled over by a biker gang – shower, change clothes, sleep. Scully knocks on my door the next morning and when I open it just says, "Ruby's allowed visitors," and walks away so I can get changed and ready to go.
When we get to the hospital, Scully goes to chat with a nurse for a few minutes and comes back with, somehow, Ruby's chart (I don't know how she does that. And I don't want to.) "Nurse says she been awake for almost an hour," she says, as we walk down the hallway.
"Any ideas what caused the coma?" I ask, even though the coma bit didn't last.
"Er.., there's no sign of head trauma, no narcotic traces or electrolyte abnormalities, but her white blood cell count was sky high."
That reminds me of something – experiments, people who were also abducted, and astronauts. "By any chance was there attendant reduction in the lymphocyte population or a release of gluco-cordacoids?"
We stop outside Ruby's room. "Actually both, how did you know that?"
And I don't really know what either of those mean. "They're symptoms of prolonged weightlessness. Shuttle astronauts have reported similar imbalances."
There's a window in the door, and I can see someone moving around. I knock, and then Kevin opens the door. Ruby is in the bed, awake.
"Hi," says Scully. We walk in, and she looks at Ruby. "Hi Ruby."
"Who are you?
"We're with the FBI, I'm Special Agent Dana Scully and this is Fox Mulder."
"My mom said you might be coming by."
There is a little twinge of something in the back of my brain, but I ignore it.
"How are you feeling?" asks Scully.
"Fine I guess."
The Question. "Where were you Ruby? Can you tell us?"
She and Kevin look at each other. "It's okay Ruby," he says. "He knows."
"Ah, I'm not supposed to tell. They told me not to say."
Stupid aliens, covering their tracks. "Who told you?" She just looks at me. "Ruby, who told you?"
"Sweetheart, you don't have to say anything."
Darlene is there.
Scully tries to salvage the situation, but we both know it's lost. "You're right, we should wait until Ruby gets a little stronger."
"Can we speak outside for a moment?" We all duck out into the hallway. "I think that it's best that we put all of this, behind us. I mean, hasn't Ruby been through enough already?"
Oh no, no no no no... I try to fight what I see coming, because we're so close, just Ruby's testimony could give me something to look at, someplace to try to find – whatever. Where they leave their bodies or where they keep people in suspended animation. I won't lie, I want to know where they have the little girl in the time-impervious bubble. "I know how dis-oriented she must seem right now, but in a couple of weeks, maybe even a few days, we could..."
"I don't want her talking to you, or anyone."
No. Please no. Ruby could tell us so much, and from a psychological standpoint it's not good to keep traumatic experiences buried. "She should be encouraged to tell her story, not to keep it inside, it's important that you let her."
"Important to who? I have my daughter back, I don't want anymore trouble. Besides she can hardly remember anything."
What about next month? Next year? Ten years? Twenty? "But she will remember one day, one way or another, even if it's only in dreams. And when she does, she's gonna wanna talk about it, she's gonna need to talk about it."
But she shakes her head. "Like I did? Listen to me, all of my life I have been ridiculed, for speaking my mind."
As have I. Doesn't she see how precious that is? "But it was the truth Darlene."
"The truth has caused me nothing but heartache, I don't want the same thing for her."
She's her own person! "It doesn't have to be that way for Ruby."
"As far as I'm concerned, she spent the last month on the back of a Harley Davidson."
Never mind that that's actually possible. "Is that what you're gonna tell Kevin?"
"I'm sorry."
And I believe she is sorry, too. That's the worst bit. She goes back into the room and I try to follow her, although God only knows what I'd say, when there is a hand on my shoulder.
Scully.
That's her function, after all, to keep me from opening doors where I should not. I should remember that.
Darlene pulls Kevin into the room and closes the door, and that's it. It's over.
After a routine flight home, and routine drive from the airport, I am restless and unnerved. That weekend, I don't have anyplace else to be, so I decide to go for a little drive. Seven hours later I'm in the church down the street from our house in Chilmark. I don't know why I'm here exactly. I hardly ever come here anymore. I just know it's time, now, to admit to myself certain truths, things my mother will never admit to and my father will never speak to me long enough to believe. Samantha might as well be dead – she is not coming home.
When she vanished, at first, there were cops and public notice and all the things you'd want to see. And then, gradually, it all went away as the months went by with no word. There was simply nothing else to be done – no other leads to follow. It has remained that way for more than twenty years. If Samantha ever comes home, she will not be the Samantha I knew. It is quite probable that no trace of my sister remains – even if she is alive, she is dead.
I walk in the door of the church and look around. We had the volunteers here, despite the fact that I was raised somewhat (in the secular sense) Jewish. They had coffee going all hours, and posters, and fliers, for five weeks, and then they closed up shop.
A year after Samantha was gone, there was a notice that there was to be a candlelight vigil for Samantha. And then the year after that and the year after that. Even when Samantha's search was pretty much called off, even when my parents divorced, even when none of us has been here for years and years and years, the vigil still happens, every year, on November 27.
I didn't know this until just now, when I walk in the door. It's not very obtrusive, but on a small table is a picture, one that was at one point used on the fliers they distributed and is now immortalized in this church – me and Samantha at the pool, grinning at the camera. She is twenty years older now, but I can still remember her that day, just an ordinary day for ordinary children, the last weekend before school started that year.
Shaking, I reach out and pick up the photo, then slowly take it out of the frame, which is placed under a small sign giving the date of November 27 and the note, "Annual Candlelight Vigil for the Safe Return of Samantha Mulder." I take the photo from it's frame, surprised to find that my mother's writing is on the back, giving the date and the legend, "Sammie and Fox," and I'm startled when someone behind me clears their throat.
"Can I help you?"
I don't even know how to begin to respond to that.
The woman is short, with curly gray hair and blue eyes. She looks like someone's grandmother. When she sees the picture in my hand, her eyes narrow. "I would appreciate if you put that back," she says, "That's the only copy we have."
I should give a speech of gratitude to her, but instead I say, "How long has she been missing?"
"Nearly twenty years," the woman replies. "I volunteered to distribute fliers for the first five weeks, but nothing ever came of it. She was just gone."
I think I remember her. Anna – something. "I know you."
She frowns at me. And then her eyes dart to the picture. "Fox?"
I nod.
"Oh, Fox, I had no idea you'd moved back here! After the divorce we never heard from you again. I had hoped you might come home someday, but you'll have to tell me where you're living so I can visit. I heard a rumor you moved to England!"
"I did," I tell her. "I went to Oxford, and then I came back and started working for the FBI. I'm just visiting – I live in Washington." Or close enough.
"Well, it's wonderful to see you anyway. How've you been? FBI?"
"Yeah, I'm an FBI agent now. I really love it," I lie or possibly tell the truth because I don't really know the difference anymore.
"You know," she says, "every few years someone will bring up the idea that maybe we should just stop having the vigil. That it's been so long and no one even remembers Samantha's disappearance. But I always tell them that someday she'll either have been gone so long that she must be dead or she'll come back and then we'll know she's alive. But either way, she deserves to know that someone remembers after all this time."
I don't have any clue what to say to that.
"Your father comes every year," she says.
What? "I didn't know."
"Well, he doesn't let anyone see him, really. We hold the vigil outdoors, just after sunset. There's a tree in the yard, see?" She points out the window to a huge old oak. "And every year there's a man standing there, in the shadows. He doesn't carry a candle, but one year I caught a glimpse – it was Bill."
Why wouldn't he show himself at something like this? Why wouldn't he tell me they still held the vigil? Usually it seems like he wants me to know stuff like this – like he blames me for Samantha. Like he thinks it's all my fault, which it is. It must be. I was responsible for her that night.
"If you'd like to go in," says Anna, gesturing to the sanctuary doors, "go right ahead. I'll be in the office all day."
I step into the sanctuary, not because it's ever been something I felt I needed, but because it's what she expects. I take a seat in a pew and stare at the stained glass and decide that I've gone nuts and I should really just leave but I don't. Instead I sit there and wait for some kind of inspiration.
My dad told me once, when I graduated from college, that it was my responsibility to be everything Samantha couldn't be, since I was the last person to be responsible for her. It makes sense to me, in a weird way, that that would be how it should be, because it was my fault. I'd spent a long time blaming myself by then. I'd gotten good at it. And I'd gotten used to it – it was mine, my own self-blame, my own security blanket of self-hatred.
But what does my father carry? He just stepped next door, and when he came back his baby was gone? What pain is it that he holds within him? Does he blame himself? I didn't get that psychology degree for nothing, you know. Maybe, after all this time, I finally understand something about my dad. Maybe blaming me is the only way he can keep from blaming himself.
I pull out the photo and look, really look at it. It may have been the last day we were on good terms – I was twelve, she was eight and annoying, and she always wanted me to play barbies with her. Barbies! I had more important things to do. I had baseball cards.
A tear runs down my face and onto the photo as I remember the way she screamed my name. So trusting – that I would save her. And I couldn't.
I know I should have been afraid that night. But I wasn't. Because of the voice in my head, the one that told me, Do not be afraid. She will not be harmed. One day, she will return.
Maybe that's God and maybe aliens and maybe it's not anything at all, but the impulsive man in me that wants to believe thinks that here, in this place where every year they pray for her safe return, one more voice shouting to the empty sky couldn't hurt.
And maybe it could even help.