REVAMPED AS OF APRIL 2014

Perhaps it was because she had never been a deep sleeper, but Carmen was not used to having dreams at night. Her body had simply grown accustomed to spending long periods in light sleep, and though it seemed a curse at times when she woke in the morning feeling like a zombie, it was something that would simply take too much time and conscious effort to change.

And that was why the fact that she was laying down on the sofa bed now, writhing and whimpering in her sleep as though she was being attacked, was particularly unusual. She had not had a dream she could remember in years, but this one - painfully detailed and terrifyingly real - would remain etched in her mind.

Carmen was standing in front of Mort's house, but it seemed that no one was there except for a man in the doorway. He was old, with obviously graying hair hidden under a wide-brimmed black hat. He was dressed in very plain, worn work clothes with threadbare patches at the knees and elbows - a farmer. The man seemed nothing to be intimidated by physically, but he exuded an odd, frightening aura. At first, he seemed to be surveying the area, squinting against the setting sun, until his gaze met Carmen's. He stared silently for a short instant, then began sauntering over. It didn't seem threatening or menacing, per se, but the fact that his gaze remained firmly locked on Carmen was deeply unsettling.

"John Shooter," he said, gesturing carelessly towards himself. She nodded mutely, barely able to breathe in realization - this was the same man that had ruined Mort's life. He was real.

Shooter was real.

"Who are you?" he asked in a Southern drawl. Carmen opened her mouth to answer but couldn't manage to force anything out except for a few unintelligible garbles. Suddenly, Shooter broke into much faster steps - he grabbed her by the throat and pinned her against a tree. She sputtered for breath, struggling in a futile attempt to push him away.

"What the hell do you think you're doing?" she coughed, clawing at his hands with her own nails, trying to make him let go. "Get off- -"

"I asked you a question, girl, now you'd better answer me if you come near my house, else I'll take good care o' you." he growled, "Who are you?"

"My name is Carmen."

"Carmen what?"

"And- Allen." she replied, inexplicably swapping in the surname she had just discovered belonged to her mother. Perhaps it was out of fear, or hope that if she gave a different name, he wouldn't be able to find her. Somehow satisfied with the answer he received, Shooter stepped back and raised his eyebrows. A crooked grin crossed his face as he dusted his hands in satisfaction as though he hadn't done anything. "Where's Mort?" she asked shakily, rubbing her throat with a wince.

"You mean Mr. Rainey," he droned knowingly. "He don't live here no more. I suppose you got some questions 'bout him? That ain't surprisin',"

"No," she snapped defensively, trying to sidestep away from the man in front of her. "I ain't got - I mean... I don't have any questions. Nobody else believes that he's innocent, but I do." Carmen's face contorted into a from. Ain't? She never said 'ain't'.

"You're awful defensive for summat who thinks he's innocent," Shooter said, taking a short step closer to her. She narrowed her eyes in suspicion. "Can't say I blame you. You ain't got no reason to trust the man. "

"Where is he?" she asked again, ducking under his arm and running past him. He whirled around and stared at her skeptically.

"He don't live here no more, like I told you." he shrugged simply. "But I know that don't answer none of your questions. It'd be summat more helpful if you took a look around here for yourself." He gestured around the edge of the house, towards the back. "You're welcome to - it's my home, Miss Allen. See for yourself -"

"I don't need to look for anything," she growled back ferociously.

"The man was shittin' you, Miss Allen," he said, advancing on her again. "Been shittin' you all along, and gonna keep shittin' you until the end. He ain't what he tells you, just like you ain't what you tell him. You ain't what you tell yourself."

"You don't know anything about me," she said, clenching her fists at her sides.

"Does anyone?" Shooter snapped back. Carmen's eyes widened, like a doe facing down an 18-wheeler. "You ain't never been nobody. You been hidin' behind a made-up name and your pretty face, long as you can remember. You ain't nobody. I know that. Mr. Rainey knew that. You ain't nobody, miss."

"Did he tell you that?" Carmen hissed angrily. "How did you know about my name? Where's Mort?!"

"Don't matter," Shooter said, making a gesture like he was dusting off his hands. " I told you, he don't live here no more."

"Shut up!" she yelled, clenching her eyes shut. "If you think I'm gonna be rattled on account'a you, Shooter -" she snapped back, but before she could finish her eyes went wide and she jumped back slightly, clapping her hand over her mouth. That hadn't sounded like her...

Carmen sat straight up in bed, her arms flailing out as though aiming to strike something, but when she opened her eyes, she was back on her sofa, alone in the dark. Her face and her hands were cold, but the skin on her throat still felt warm and tender, as though she had really been choked. It had just seemed so real. She looked down and realized that her hands were shaking.

"This is ridiculous," she muttered breathlessly to herself, clenching her hands into fists in attempts to stabilize them. "I... I am losing my mind."

It was just the jitters, she thought to herself, clenching her eyes shut. She was spooked by the idea of having serious feelings for Mort, and it was making her imagine things. But none of it had felt imaginary - she could have sworn she still felt where Shooter had grabbed her by the throat. Surely, she couldn't have imagined that.

Carmen didn't want to doubt Mort. She wanted to be the person who believed him, because he had shown her nothing but goodness so far - but this dream, the sheriff... all of it seemed dead set on backing her into a corner. If she could just get to the bottom of everything and know the answers definitively, once and for all, maybe then everything would be fine. Maybe Shooter had been calling her bluff, planting ideas in her head - he had invited her to snoop around the property because, she decided, he knew that she wouldn't. He assumed that she would just let the suspicions stew in her head until they came to a boiling point. Shooter thought Carmen was afraid to know the real answers...

But Carmen Anderson lived to find answers. She lived to solve problems and riddles. If anyone could get to the bottom of this, it was going to be her.

In a rush of adrenaline, Carmen grabbed her keys off of the kitchen table and started her car. Shaking the entire way, she drove up to Mort's cabin. But, instead of knocking on the door as she usually would, she stopped the car and stood in the spot where she had stood in her dream - she made sure to tread quietly so not to wake Mort up. She knew she had to do this alone.

"Take a real look," Shooter had said. Carmen nodded surely and tiptoed towards the edge of the house. She had never looked around what was outside the back door before. In the dark, she tripped once or twice around the unfamiliar surroundings. Still, there was enough light bleeding through the foliage to see what was quite obviously there.

On one side was dissolute greenhouse of gardening supplies that obviously hadn't been used for quite a while judging by the layers of cobwebs and rust visible even in the dark from a distance. Across the way, closer to the house, was a patch of plants - corn stalks. They were wild and overgrown - it appeared that at least for a time, they had been well-watered and tended to. Now, however, they were overgrown, untouched.

"This can't be right" Carmen muttered skeptically. The soil in these hills was enough to grow small shrubs and berries, and trees that were able to dig deep roots - but corn seemed like a stretch. There was no way the soil up here could sustain it, or developers would have been falling all over themselves for the properties up her. She'd never have been able to get her home for such a bargain if it was on good, fertile land.

Carmen stopped just feet from the corn patch, pushing a bit of windswept hair behind her ear. She stared a bit more. That patch in particular was the only part that had been dug up and cultivated - nothing else had been planted, no other part had been landscaped or aerated at all. If Mort had gone to the trouble of fixing one section, why waste his time on such a small patch that he wasn't going to use.?

A rising, anxious feeling in Carmen's gut said to leave it be and go home - it couldn't possibly be worth it to sneak around behind Mort's back this way. This was ridiculous - who was to even say that Mort had planted those corn stalks, anyway? They could have had a renter. He could have tried hiring a gardener. There had to be some kind of an explanation for all of this that made sense.

But, she reminded herself, if she chickened out of looking - if she didn't know for certain and let her imagination run wild - Shooter would have won. It was a test of whether or not she trusted Mort - it was sick and twisted, perhaps, that the only way to prove her trust was to dig up his entire property, but if she didn't trust him, she would have been too afraid to do it. Shooter had somehow known her bluff. Carmen looked around the dark yard and noticed an old, rusted shovel was resting against the door. She scooted toward it and grabbed it.

Maybe she'd lose him for this - maybe he would be too betrayed by her snooping to listen to her explanation why she had done this, but she honestly didn't care. She started digging, trying hard not to make a whole lot of noise, keeping her ears alert for any noise that would indicate that Mort was awake. Even in the cold night air, she was sweating. It took about half an hour to get down a foot, another twenty minutes to get past the more tightly packed soil - and after that, she had to swallow painfully to hold down a shriek, and a bout of nausea.

It was still covered in a layer of earth, but Carmen recognized what it was. A decapitated body of a person lay in the ground. It had rotted away so badly that the identity couldn't be determined right away, but somewhere close to her angrily churning stomach, Carmen knew.

"Amy," she muttered, stepping back. Amy Rainey was buried in the ground behind Mort's house - did he know? She couldn't breathe. She dropped down on her knees, right in the dirt and ran her dirty hands through her hair. What does this mean? she asked herself.

Whether it was to cover up the scene, or to just get that horrid spectacle out of her sight, she threw the soil back over the hole. Her hands once again shaking terribly and the memory of John Shooter's sadistic laugh ringing in her ears, she furiously shoveled the dirt back over the hole she had made. She laid the wilted cornstalks she had uprooted over where the gaping cavity had been, and then ran back to her car.

Carmen didn't realize that she was crying the whole way back home. She ran back inside her own house and stared at herself in the full-length mirror. She was filthy, covered in dirt.

What have I done? She thought to herself, shaking so badly at this point that it was difficult to breathe. She believed that Mort didn't know what had happened to Amy - but the belief seemed to be harder and harder to maintain with every passing moment of knowing that Amy was in fact buried right behind the house.

When Mort Rainey awoke, there was already the strange sense of something being amiss. He had slept on the couch again - he had still yet to ever sleep in the bedroom, and instead used it as a storage room. A clutter room. As such, it was nothing new that there was an abundance of strange noises at night. If it was silent at night in the middle of the woods, there was a reason to be worried. Last night, however, in his half-asleep stupor, he could have sworn he heard the scrape of a shovel. He thought he heard it throughout the night, but he had assumed it had been another bad dream - a haunting, almost. For a while, that had been nothing unusual. He brushed it off and pulled the pillow over his head, going back to sleep.

He woke with the same feeling of worry and dread, however, and he decided that maybe a morning walk would serve to calm his nerves. When he stepped out onto his property, however, he noticed that his thoughts of something being amiss were terrifyingly valid. The small corn patch - the one he had stopped tending to months ago once the voices in his head had all calmed down the first time around - had been partially uprooted. A part of it was loose and hand obviously been dug up.

Someone had been there. He racked his brain to try and remember if he had been... sleepwalking. But he hadn't. His clothes were clean, his slippers had been right where he left them. He couldn't have touched the corn patch. Impossible. Impossible.

Completely panicked, he ran inside and slammed the door behind him, his mind reeling with the possibilities of who could have done it or who could help him until he finally reached the conclusion that there was only one person he could call. He couldn't call the Sheriff or anyone in town. He couldn't call anyone else than the person whose number he was dialing.

"Pickuppickuppickup-"

"Hello?"

"Carmen!" he said, not even caring that his voice came out in a tight, embarrassing near-squeak. "Carmen, someone's been here, they dug up my yard - I don't know what they were looking for, or hiding, or..."

There was silence - Carmen felt a pang of guilt that she couldn't bring herself to express some kind of sympathy for his panic. She was too panicked herself at what she'd found. She certainly couldn't tell the truth either.

"The Sheriff came by to see us both, I think he might have sent someone," Mort said, running a hand through his hair. "I know he couldn't have done it himself because of his arthritis. Terrible arthritis. Reason he does needlepoint. Unless he only said that as a way of throwing me off -"

"Mort, stop it," Carmen said, attempting to keep her voice steady. "What if it was - a dog? Or some kind of an animal?"

"What kind of animal digs a hole, fills it, and puts the dead plants back where they came from?"

"I don't know!" she retorted shrilly. "You know more about animals than I do."

"And I know that no animal could have done that, are you listening?" he said frantically. "There was someone here, and someone is after me. I knew it would happen. I knew it," he said, his voice growing increasingly fearful. "I had this dream, Carmen - no, give me a minute. Shooter. John Shooter, you remember?"

"I remember."

"John Shooter came back - it's the first time he's shown himself in any way to me in a very, very long time," Mort explained, attempting to sound calm. "And I don't believe in this - this dreams telling the future mumbo jumbo, but he said he was coming back for something that was his. I don't know what he means. I don't know what he's after."

Carmen fell silent - a part of her wanted to reassure Mort that, no, it was not John Shooter who had dug up his yard. However, a small voice in the back of her mind reminded her why she had gone to dig up the corn patch in the first place. Carmen had dreamt about Shooter last night. She had seen him, she had spoken with him. She couldn't in good conscience say that Shooter was a figment of his imagination, because Shooter had brought her there. So instead, she had to distract him. She had to get him talking about anything else.

"Why is this freaking you out so much? Nothing was stolen or anything," Carmen said carefully, gauging his reaction. She had to be sure he didn't know what was down there.

"It's the principle of it," Mort said desperately, though by the sound of his voice, venting his anxiety to someone seemed to have calmed him considerably. "This is my home. It's the only home I have left. And that garden..."

His voice trailed off, and Carmen gulped slightly at his hesitation.

"That patch was Amy's garden. The garden from the story."

The story, Carmen realized. Sowing Season, the one that had started everything. Carmen had dug up the secret garden, and now it was her secret too. Her hands shook, and she drew a quivering breath. "Mort," she said shakily. "I - I really need to go."

Pause.

"Carmen, I'm sorry if I freaked you out with this," he said desperately. "It's just - I don't need anymore weird things happening. I don't need this anymore."

"I know," Carmen said quietly. "Mort, don't worry. Everything will be fine. I just - I have work stuff."

Mort gave a grudging chuckle. "I'm sorry. I'll talk to you later, alright?" he said, giving it the old college try to sound fine. "I know you're busy."

"I'll call you," Carmen promised. "Everything is going to be fine, Mort."

After hanging up, however, Carmen felt far from fine. She picked up the phone again and dialed one of the only others she had memorized. "Rob?" she said once he had answered the phone. "Rob - hi. I need your help. No, it's not about the magazine. I just need you to help me get my hands on some information."

"Of course. Yeah, I'll be right over..."

Mort had lasted a couple hours at best with his attempts to play like everything was fine, but eventually, the pressure got to him. He had started trying to write something - anything - only to find himself wondering if right now when Carmen was out of his sight, if Shooter had already gotten his hands on her. Eventually, it was more than he could take, and he got into his car - maybe she was too busy to come over, but surely it wouldn't do any harm if he were just to swing by and check on her. She would understand.

When he arrived, however, he was admittedly surprised to see a second car driving up Lake Drive ahead of him. They both pulled up in front of Carmen's house at the same time, and almost simultaneously stepped out of their cars.

"Afternoon," the man in the other car nodded. "I'm Rob. You must be Mort,"

Robert Wallace. Mort's eyebrows leapt upward, and he cleared his throat, looking down at Rob's outstretched hand. Mort hesitated, but shook it out of courtesy despite the fact that he wanted nothing more than to punch this man in the face. He was good-looking, and he drove a BMW. Very city mouse. "Nice to meet you," Mort said stiffly, eyeing him with extreme suspicion.

It was now that Carmen happened to walk out of her front door, an expression of surprise crossing her face at the sight of Mort. Rob cleared his throat uncomfortable and held up his laptop bag.

"I'm just gonna head inside and hook this up so we can get to work," he said. Carmen nodded for him to head in, while she walked down the porch steps to meet Mort in front of his car.

"I showed up because I was worried - because someone trespassed on my property and dug up my yard, and I was worried about you being up here alone," Mort said quickly with a forced smile. "But it looks like your best friend has it covered."

"You're upset because Rob is here?" Carmen asked, her brow furrowing deeply. "Rob is my best friend, and we still work together, I had no idea I needed your permission before seeing him."

Carmen yelped, however, when Mort gave a growl and slapped his hand loudly onto the hood of his car.

"Do you have any idea what is running through my mind right now, showing up here and seeing him hanging around?"

"Yeah, I'm pretty sure I have an idea," Carmen defended, crossing her arms over herself. "I'm pretty sure I have a very good idea what you were thinking."

"And?"

"And I think you're completely out of line."

"What?!"

"I'm not Amy, Mort."

And just like that, Mort felt like he he had been plunged into a pool of ice water, because she was right - he wasn't acting this way because she had ever given him a reason not to trust her. He was acting like this because of Amy. He looked down at his feet, leaning back wearily against his SUV and crossing his arms as well. He felt like shit.

Carmen, however, felt like shit too. She knew that this was all because of her - it was because she had to go snooping in his yard, and wasn't willing to say that it had been her. She wanted to get to the bottom of it herself. At first, she had thought it was because she didn't trust Mort, but she realized that in all honesty, she wanted to protect him. He couldn't handle knowing what was down there.

She flinched slightly in surprise when Mort was the first to reach forward for her hands, pulling her towards him and hugging her tightly. After realizing that this was as close as he could come to an apology, she exhaled, relaxing and returning the embrace. Mort shifted and placed a kiss in her hair.

"Look, I'm gonna go home," he said with a weak smile. "Maybe try to get some work done. I'll - I'll call, okay?

"Okay," Carmen said with a weak smile. "I'll talk to you soon."

Mort couldn't help but beat himself up over the scene he'd caused as he got into his car and drove back home. He knew Carmen hadn't signed up to pick things up where Amy left off. She hadn't signed up to fix all of Mort's problems. Mort gritted his teeth in frustration at the fact that he was starting to be intolerable. Once he pulled up in his own driveway, he groaned and leaned his head against his steering wheel, clenching his eyes shut.

"You thought I was going to come after her at her own house?"

Mort jumped, and he felt a swelling of nausea at the sight of John Shooter, smiling coldly and chuckling condescendingly. "I told you before Mister Rainey, I ain't that stupid."

"You stay away from her -"

"You gonna stop me?" Shooter asked, tilting his head to one side. "You gonna stop me like you stopped me from getting to your wife, Amy?"

Mort's hands grasped his steering wheel so tightly that his knuckles went white, as though if he didn't acknowledge Shooter, he would just disappear. But he stood there, smiling and tapping his fingers on the car window.

"You should know better by now, Mister Rainey," Shooter chuckled. "Why ain't you with her right now -"

"That's none of your business."

Shooter raised his eyebrows and let out a hoot of laughter that made Mort's blood boil. "History sure do have a funny way of repeating itself, don't it, Mister Rainey?"

Mort clenched his eyes shut. This was not real. It couldn't be real.

"I'll be seeing you real soon, Mister Rainey," Shooter said, still chuckling darkly. "You and your lady friend. Good day."

And when Mort finally opened his eyes, Shooter had disappeared.

Uh oh, Mort sees Shooter again. That can't be very good. And Carmen saw something she really wasn't supposed to see. Tsk tsk. She's getting a little bit nosy. Maybe she needs to be taught a lesson...?

Thanks to my reviewers from last chappie:

lordoftheringsfanficreader: your name is long...hee. Just kidding! thanks for reviewing! Keep reading, mmmkay?

Dawnie-7: Yeah, you've got a right to start getting a wee bit scared right now. Looks like Shooter's gone Freddy Krueger on us...

over-dramatic-05: Harhar, the sheriff does seem to be getting in the way, doesn't he? He's not done raising hell for everyone yet...He'll be the cause of some major problems. (Yes, that's sort of a hint)

Kurama13: Your reviews always tell me to "update soon" makes me rush, haha. My beta can't seem to keep up with how fast I want to update, so she misses a lot of typos. Hee.

PS: I just wanna know...What's your honest opinion of Carmen? Like, what impression do you get from her? Bitchy? Maybe a little bit conniving? Or kinda just sweet but street smart? A lot of people who read this story (apart from people on the site) have lots of different opinions of her.