REVAMPED AS OF APRIL 2014

"It could be nothing..."

Carmen had reveled in the fact that the weeks that immediately followed Daniel Bartlett's murder were, oddly enough, some of the happiest weeks of her life. there was a sense of things being stable with her and Mort, and it almost felt everything was behind them. There had been no more incidents, no more disappearances, no more unnerving dreams. For a few weeks, they had been able to simply be a couple. Mort had even learned to be okay with Rob dropping by for work-purposes - they'd all even eaten dinner together once in those weeks.

But even as the calm became restful and refreshing, it also gave Carmen more time to wonder - and she wondered incessantly if there wasn't anything out there that would make it so all of those old worries about Shooter and murders and mysteries would be gone for good.

If it was out there, she decided, she had to find it.

Tonight in particular, Mort had deigned not to stay over - he had lately been hit more often with surges of inspiration and was actually able to write again, which worked well enough for Carmen, who finally committed to the idea of combing the numerous databases she and Rob had access to.

"I can't possibly be scared to do this," she scoffed, laughing at herself a little bit as her laptop booted up. "That's ridiculous."

Carmen honestly couldn't even have told you what scared her so much about learning about Shooter - but part of it was the unsettling gut feeling that anything she could find might possibly do more harm than good. But that was ridiculous, she reminded herself. There was know way that not knowing about Shooter could be more dangerous than knowing.

It was a tedious, drawn-out process. At first, the only results that came up were for adult film stars, for whom the term "shooter" had an entirely different meaning. She scrolled through the listings with a disgusted expression before finally giving in and filtering the results by location. One of the few things Mort knew about Shooter was that he was a farmer - a dairy farmer from Mississippi.

"Bingo."

Carmen's eyes finally rested on a shorter list of results on "Shooter, John: Dellacourt, Mississippi".

This had to be it, Carmen said, holding her breath without even knowing she was doing it. This had to be him. Her palms were already starting to feel damp with sweat when she opened up the first result and was presented with a photograph. Suddenly, it was there - she was looking into the face of the man she had seen in her dream, the face that Mort had described to her many times over. Shooter was a real human being.

Carmen's heart raced with exhilaration at the idea that she was so close to solving the mystery - she was about to bring all of these doubts to an end, to clear Mort's name with everyone in town. It had been so easy.

Until, after only a brief scroll down the page, a single line caused Carmen to stop cold.

Died June 3, 1985.

"No. This has to be some kind of a mistake," Carmen said, rubbing her hand irately over her heavily creased forehead. But Dellacourt was a small town - finding one John Shooter there was one thing. Expecting there to be multiples was another. Carmen covered her eyes, gently pressing with the heels of her hands as though it would change what she was seeing on the screen in front of her. It could have been a set up, she decided. He could have faked his death - but why would he come after Mort with a claim that could be so easily debunked?

She opened her eyes and exhaled heavily, leaning her elbows on her knees. There was something here to be found, she just knew it. She didn't know if she would like it, but it had to be here somewhere.

With a lot of time and even more effort, she managed to dig up more about the town of Dellacourt, Mississippi. In 1985, when John Shooter had supposedly died there, Dellacourt had a population of just over six hundred and was the most successful agricultural town within a twenty-mile radius. The town's only newspaper, the Dellacourt Daily Gazette, had scans of its old articles loaded into a database, which Carmen began to scour thoroughly. She was going to figure out what secrets were still left in Dellacourt, even if it meant skimming through years worth of newspapers filled with obituaries, and stories about blue-ribbons winning pigs, squash, and dairy cows.

Records showed that Shooter's farm had been a major provider of dairy products and corn in the late seventies, but was repossessed when he had failed to pay off a longstanding debt to one of the richer townsmen, a businessman by the name of Timothy Haley. In settlement of the debt, the town court decided to forgive the dollar amount in exchange for the title to Shooter's farm, which the man had no choice but to surrender. However, unable to find another way to make a living - he had indeed tried his hand at several trades including carpentry and writing - Shooter continued to work on that farm as an employee of its new owner until the day he died.

And John Shooter's death, it would appear, was no accident. One article noted that he had been run over by a tractor, but gave no details of the murder. It instead skipped to the fact that his wife, Arby, went missing with a suicide note, and within a week was found in the barn in which her husband had worked, hanging dead from the rafters.

Sad, Carmen mused, but not what she was interested in knowing. She wanted to know the circumstances of John Shooter's death. A cross-search of local papers in the neighboring areas served slightly more helpful - the surrounding towns, it turned out were equally as quiet, equally as boring, so that the single exciting, gruesome event to occur in Dellacourt was the only thing for miles worth reporting. Bits and pieces of a story came together from several obituaries from different papers, culminating back in the Dellacourt Daily, the only obituary with the most important element: a small photograph of John Shooter which confirmed what she had so sincerely dreaded. That was the man she'd seen the picture of minutes ago, the man who had died, the man who had been tailing Mort, and entering her dreams.

A story in the Gazette the following month detailed the death of John Shooter more explicitly - the man in custody for the crime was none other than Timothy Haley, the man who had taken up ownership of Shooter's farm. However, he was not in custody for the murder of John Shooter. He was being held in a psychiatric facility for his own safety after having committed four murders - his entire family. First found had been his wife, Amelia, a tall, svelte woman who he had first met in Connecticut on a long trip to buy his first plot of land. Found two days later were his three children: Kenneth, Thomas, and Theodore. He was held in a psychiatric facility because he seemed to have no recollection of having committed the murders - they had only been found after local authorities dug up his property and found them. And the hallucinations - horrible hallucinations of John Shooter standing in his home, following him, threatening to kill him.

It was so familiar - but that was the most unsettling part. Carmen went to print all of the stories she found to try and see if viewing differently, sprawled out on her living room floor, would let her come to a different conclusion. Any conclusion. Within half an hour, her entire living room was a mess of papers defaced with yellow highlighting and pen scribbles.

"It can't be that simple," she muttered, tucking her pen behind her ear and staring down at the papers in front of her, shuffling them around and reordering them. However, even going through each of them one by one, over and over, the conclusions remained the same. Shooter hadn't been a figure that Mort created. Shooter had been real. But the coincidences were too great - if Mort hadn't heard the story of Shooter and Tim Haley before, then how was everything the same?

It meant that Mort had killed those people. It also meant that he hadn't. It meant that whatever had moved Tim Haley to kill had found a new victim in Mort Rainey - but for the exact same stroke of madness to occur in two completely unrelated people was ludicrous. It was unheard of. Carmen dug the heels of her hands in over her eye socket again and gave an agonized groan. She was creative, she was intelligent, she was resourceful - she had prided herself on this, always. But she was no match for something this much bigger than she was.

One thing for certain was that John Shooter had died in 1985. There was no falsifying it - that part of the story had been straightforward enough. The government had given Timothy Haley the deed to Shooter's farm, and he didn't appreciate it. Haley was a sport and let Shooter stay and tend to his precious cows and corn, but it wasn't good enough. One night, while Haley was out on his tractor, Shooter came out with a cocked gun pointed at him, screaming about how he'd lost everything that he'd been planning to leave for his family, and that he wanted it back. Tim Haley assumed that Shooter was bluffing and would jump out of the way. Haley didn't stop the tractor, hoping that Shooter would get scared off, but realized too late that the man with the gun wasn't about to move. This wasn't about to end until one or the other was dead.

Shooter was pinned underneath the tractor until he die, which, in all likelihood, couldn't have taken too long. When someone came for the body, it was barely recognizable, but Haley said there was no way that the corpse wasn't that of John Shooter. A bullethole in the bottom of the tractor proved him true, since it also proved that Shooter was holding a cocked revolver.

John Shooter had been killed, mauled underneath the old John Deere that tilled the farm that used to belong to him. Shooter couldn't have written Sowing Season in 1997 the way he had told Mort, because he had already been dead for twelve years. So, why? If he was some kind of ghost, if he had somehow been reincarnated, why Mort Rainey? What did Mort do to warrant the ire of a man who had never met him?

There were patterns. The patterns were too much to ignore, and yet, they had no explanation. Timothy Haley killed his wife, Amelia...

"Amy," Carmen said under her breath, covering her mouth with her hand.

His three sons, Kenneth...

"Ken Karsch."

Thomas...

"Tom Greenleaf."

and Theodore...

"Ted Milner."

Four deaths in 1985 were indirectly caused by John Shooter, true enough, but it was a far stretch of the imagination to say that this fated Amy Rainey, Ken Karsch, Tom Greenleaf, and Ted Milner to death in 2004. The fact that they possibly shared names didn't automatically sentence them to death.

And corn. Why corn? John Shooter had died over it. Amy Rainey was buried under it. If anything, it was just a strange twist of fate, a tedious and irrelevant factor, but it was still worth noticing. The connections buzzed in Carmen's head until they were so overwhelming in volume that she couldn't stand it anymore. It was too unbearable - and too much to keep to herself. She began gathering up the papers on the floor, stacking them together and shoving them into a manila envelope. She struggled to get the stack of papers to fit, but she couldn't leave anything at home. She needed to show this to Mort - it wasn't the closure she had been hoping to find, but it was something. It was proof that it wasn't all in his head, that something was happening beyond their control. It was going to be a start, at least, and it was more than they'd ever had before.

Finally able to shove everything into the only envelope she had to spare - the one Rob had used to drop off the information about her mother - Carmen tucked it under her arm and decided to go. Her adrenaline was rushing too severely for her to consider calling ahead. She didn't bother to put on a jacket. She merely walked out of the house in her pajama pants and tanktop, into the cold night, and got into her car.

She backed her car up down Lake Drive and bolted off into the night with such conviction that anyone who saw her would have thought she was going off to commit a murder herself. Her headlights were the only light around for miles, and she threw on her high beams. In the sudden first moment of illumination, she suddenly saw what looked like a figure in the middle of the road - a man in a hat, though his face was obstructed from view. John Shooter. Carmen yelped and swerved the steering wheel, but not quick enough to avoid a tree limb which severed suddenly from above her with a loud crack, falling onto the hood of her old Honda.

She cried out in pain as her legs were pinned down momentarily by the impact, though somehow not broken. Her legs gave way to the jagged pain of broken metal cutting into her and she let the brake pedal loose, sending the car hurtling backwards down the incline into a tree.

The force sent her head flying forward, but she covered herself with her hands to keep her head from hitting hard against the steering wheel. She couldn't move her legs now unless she wanted to risk them being torn to shreds by the broken glass and metal. She sat hopelessly, crying silently to herself. She was stuck, and only just realizing how cold it was...

"Shooter!" she screamed into the darkness, but she should not have been surprised to know that there was no response. There was no one here, and it would be dark for hours. She was trapped, she was freezing. In ten or twenty minutes, she couldn't quite tell, she couldn't even feel the goosebumps in her arms or legs. She was numb all over, and shivering. She licked her lips, which felt like ice, and knew she was starting to get desperate. She reached over to the glove compartment, stretching as well as she could. Her arm tingled with the sudden motion of the cold muscles, and the ripping sensation in her trapped legs caused her to cry out again in agony.

Carmen often locked her cellphone in her car to better ignore it when Rob was bothering her too often. Pained tears streaked over her cheeks as she hoped against all hope that she'd forgotten it here this time too. "Please," she muttered weakly, feeling her strength waning from a mixture of cold, pain, and blood loss.

She managed to get the tiny latched door open and gave a weak smile when her fingers closed around her phone - it was here, and it was working. She swiped for it, and clumsily dialed 911...

"I'm stuck..."she whimpered... "In the woods... Lake Drive..." her breath hitched, and she couldn't speak anymore.

Hello? Hello? We're on our way...

Original A/N's

I seemed to get a lot of feedback about adult monopoly. I had no idea that you all liked board games that much! Haha

over-dramatic-05: tisk tisk, we wouldn't want to hurt teh sheriff's feelings! haha. You have such hostile feelings towards the old fart! hee. Almost makes me feel bad for him. Maybe I should just give the guy a break and have Carmen quite picking on him...nah. And...Barbie: Queen of the Prom. Interesting...

lordoftheringsfanficreader: Yeah, Carmen's pretty good at getting her way. She has a thing for getting out of trouble, right? Hopefully it holds up for her,

Dawnie-7: Haha, Mort and Carmen should collaborate and write a book together, haha. What a story that would be...

Kurama13: Harhar. I don't think the sheriff finds Carmen very sweet.

blackcharityflint: I've never seen Lost in La Mancha. I want to. sigh

Well, until next chappie, my friends! Write long reviews, because i'm b0o0o0o0ored. Haha