Open Hearts(1/3)

Wed Jan 29 1997

Disclaimer: characters, concepts and situations in this
story are property of Chris Carter, 1013 Productions, Vince Gilligan,
and other people who aren't us. No infringement on existing copyrights
is intended.

This is a journal story in our (still looking for a good
name for it) "Book" series. It takes place during the FOURTH SEASON
episode "Paper Hearts", written by Vince Gilligan. We present this
as a tribute and homage to a wonderful episode of our favorite show.

There is some "adult" language in this story. PG-13 and
4th season spoilers.

If you have comments, please write to us:
Vickie Moseley is vmoseley@fgi.net
Summer is summer@camelot.bradley.edu

...we adore and answer all mail.

Open Hearts
An X-Files Thing
by Summer (summer@camelot.bradley.edu)
In Tandem with Vickie Moseley

Part One

The Journal of Fox Mulder

Thursday, 11 November 1996

Hadn't realized how long it's been since I made a journal
entry. Not regularly for quite some little time now... getting lax
again. Bad habit. God I'm tired. Gotta get this dream down.

A red dot of light appeared on the wall of my living room.
It turned into red letters: FOLLOW. So... I did. Wandered through
backyards filled with swingsets and gardens. Past a sign, but I
wasn't paying attention, didn't see the sign. The red dot led me
through the woods and I saw a little blond girl on the forest
floor.

She sank into the ground before I could reach her.

...Well, this is a new kind of nightmare, isn't it, Dr.
Mulder. And dammit, my leg's asleep from sitting on it when I fell
into the chair to write this. Okay. Okay. The little girl wasn't
Sam. Wasn't any child I've ever seen anywhere, even in case files
or the newspaper or on TV. She's a stranger to me.

That's odd. I always dream of people I've seen before: I
never forget anything I see, so my brain always has plenty of
visual resources to call upon. If it wants to show me a person, it
just flips through the mental photo album, grabs an appropriate
face and voila, instant dream.

But I don't know this little girl. I've never seen her
before. Who is she?

And why did this dream feel so different? Urgent. Foreign.
Like I was tuned into a new frequency tonight. Even when I dream
I'm someone else, instead of Fox Mulder, there's a sense of "me"
being in control. I didn't have that sense tonight.

Probably I'll psychoanalyze a perfectly obvious, ordinary
reason tomorrow, once I've actually managed to get some rest.

As if.

Friday 12 November

Well, now that I've dusted off the old journal, so to
speak... it's not that it's been a while since I wrote, it's just
that my "entries" lately have been fast notes on scraps of paper.
We've been out in the field nonstop for weeks. Time to catch our
breath and catch up on paperwork.

Times like these are slow torture to me, but Scully seems to
relish having a breather now and then. She's having lunch with her
mother today, apparently. I almost invited myself along. It's been
a while since I saw Mrs. Scully, and I'm still on edge... I never
could come up with the "perfectly obvious" reason for that fucking
bizarre dream last night, and it's been on my mind all day. I keep
jumping at shadows here in the office, of all places-- imagining I
see that red dot of light in the corner of my eye. It's not fear,
not even apprehension... it's even stranger. It's desperation. I'm
frantic to find out what that light is, what it means.

One thing my psychology studies ingrained in me was the
constant self-monitoring, self-analysis that led me to start this
journal in the first damn place. If I can keep track of my
problems, I've got a much better chance of understanding them.

Usually I'd just analyze the dream, try to understand the
subconcious motivators it portends, the whole tedious exercise. As
much distance as I've put between me and that Ph.D., I've got to
admit, it usually works. But I can't figure this one out. A red
light leads me to the woods, where a little blond girl lies dead
on the ground. The earth swallows her up before I can get to her.
If we were on a case, it would make sense-- the need to reach a
victim before it's too late--

"...dead on the ground". I didn't realize until just now.
The little girl was dead.

--shit, I thought I saw that red light again. No. It's just
the fluorescent tube by the door, flickering again.

Red lights, dead children. I think this should wait 'til I
have more time than my lunch hour to work through it.

Okayokay, same dream again but I managed to get some more
details this time... I'm here in the apartment, the red light
appears on the wall, spells "FOLLOW", so I do, go through yards,
swingsets, gardens, I pass a white car-- the red light lingers on
the car-- then it's into the woods, through trees and bushes to
the place where the little blond girl lies, and the red dot
appears on her for a second, it spells something or it makes some
kind of shape on her chest. She sinks into the ground before I can
reach her.

I know the way through those woods, and I'm sure they're
close by... they seem familiar, and the trees, the air, the
atmosphere-- it's East Coast woods. Walking distance from here, in
the dream, but anything can be that close when you're asleep.
Where is it really?

Where am I?

--God, for a second I really didn't know if I was in
Arlington or Chilmark. Been a while since I had a lapse like that.
Could those woods be on the Vineyard? Could the girl be Samantha?

No. Why would I dream of stranger in my sister's place? It's
always been Sam in my dreams about her, even when other things
have changed. Sometimes it's just lights and I'm paralyzed,
sometimes I see the grey figures as they take her, sometimes it's
men dressed in black and someone holds me down, sometimes it's
dark and I can only hear her voice. But those dreams always start
with Samantha. And end without her.

Sam. It's not about you this time, is it? Why would I hide
fears about my sister behind another little girl's face? I've
lived with this all my life... there's nothing more to run from.
I've faced the awful truth.

Haven't I?

Saturday 13 November

Oy, expense reports, and on a Saturday, no less.

Scully's noticing the lack of sleep. How can she tell? Sure,
I'm irritable and jumping at every movement in the room, but I
always do that. I must really be bad, I guess, because she offered
to work at her desk upstairs, if I want the basement to myself.

I told her I'm just afflicted with cabin fever and the
deleterious effects of making out expense reports for our last
four cases, all in one huge doomed undertaking. There's no way I'm
going to get the Bureau to spring for TWO cellphones lost in the
line of duty... in fact, since I'm filing the reports en masse,
they probably won't approve EITHER remuneration. Thank god for
business deductions.

...Damn. Still can't get that dream off my mind. With Scully
gone to lunch, the office seems to fill up with it. Those woods,
right on the edge of familiar. The journey through backyards--
every yard filled with toys or swings or a flowering garden-- the
white car. Trees and dead leaves and earth. The red will-o-the-
wisp bobbing and shining in the darkness, leading the way.

That little blonde girl.

I can't see how the symbolism fits with anything that's been
weighing on my mind, of late. The last time I dreamed of Sam
was... four, five, six days ago... Right, the day we got back from
Montana. Six days ago. That was Old Faithful, complete with the
Stratego game and the Spielbergian light show out the windows and
the outline of the skinny grey alien at the door. I don't think
I'm due for any new gut-chewing over that one. The X-Files are
open, we are doing good work, and we will find out what happened
to Samantha-- we'll find her.

So if these images don't come from my present or my past,
then that leaves my future. Precognitive dreams.

Scully always insists on seeing my dated journal entries
whenever I claim precognition, and three times I've managed to
record a dream image that I later saw in reality and confront her
with it. Every little bit helps. Of course, she managed to explain
them all away, but I've come to expect that. And it's fun to make
her go dig through the science journals to come up with a
perfectly rational explanation. That is the foundation of our
relationship, after all-- ideological tug-of-war.

Cryptonesia is her favorite line, currently. Subconciously
stored information. This, though she usually doesn't go for the
Freudian idea that the subconcious mind keeps a record of
everything, only a small portion of which is accessible to the
conciousness. Hell, I never liked that psychological model myself
until it was convenient... no, it makes sense for me. My mind
really DOES work like a camera. I know the controversies about
hypnoregression, but I have every reason to believe that my
recovered memories are accurate.

Except that they keep changing every time I turn around.

Okay, maybe I am overdue for a gut-chewing session. Fuck.
Sure, this is a great respite from expense reports. If Scully
comes in here and finds me depressed, she'll either take off for
the second floor or try to make me talk about it, and I'd like to
avoid either option.

If it's a precognitive dream, it would probably have
something to do with a case we'll be going out on, eventually. I
should go through my prospective files, check my email, read the
latest issue of The Lone Gunman. Try to anticipate it. All right.
Good. That's a plan.

FOLLOW...

Home sweet apartment. I didn't find anything at work that
looked like a match, so I went through all my red-ringed articles
and highlit news stories here... there've been some disappearances
in North Dakota, children, that I think look like a pattern-- all
three kids went missing at school bus stops-- but those were boys,
five to seven.

This was a little girl, older than that, and I could swear
it's close by-- definitely on the East Coast, probably in
Virginia, dammit, I even think it's in Fairfax County. Why doesn't
that red fucking Tinkerbell light show up NOW and lead me to her?
I can't shake these images. It's that light. It's like somebody
trying to tell me something. But at least I know why I'm fixated
on this dream. If it's precognitive, and I'm more and more certain
that it is, then I may be able to prevent whatever's going to
happen to that child. Maybe if I recognize it, find it in time...
maybe when it really happens, I won't be too late.

Two nights in a row. I'm gambling for a third, leaving this
notebook comfortably in reach to write down whatever I see. This
time I'll get the details. The only dilemma: sleeping pills. This
dream woke me up two nights running, I was thrown out before I
could understand what was happening. If I took a pill, I might
stay in the dream long enough to find out more... or I might sleep
so long that I'd forget the dream entirely before I wake up. No.
No drugs.

I had it! Damn, damn, I had it, I saw it, WHAT WAS IT--

Red light appeared on the wall. FOLLOW. I followed through
yards, past the rope swing, through the garden. A parking lot;
asphalt under my running shoes; white car. The red light lingers
on it, spells MAD HAT. --Mad hat? Was that it? No, I had more...
mad hat. Mad hatter? Dam tah? An anagram? A rhyme? HAD THAT, mat
had, no, it must be mad hatter. The little girl, Alice, through
the looking glass-- through the ground-- through the land.
Wonderland. Oh god.

Oh god, the little girl. It's Roche. It's John Lee fucking
Roche, the light made a heart on her chest, it's his cloth hearts,
it's paper hearts. I saw the sign--

Sunday 14 November

She's dead. There was never anything I could do to change
it. Dead, long dead, twenty years dead. So many different ways to
say it's over.

For her. For us it means the start of a new investigation.
Skinner agreed to delay our current paperwork for this, though he
glowered at me when he signed off on it. Pursuing a case because
of a dream hasn't made me his candidate for agent of the year.

Scully wasn't thrilled either. She showed up at Manassus
Park when I called for the forensics team this morning. Shook her
head at me when I explained about the dream. But then we found
her. And while the evidence was dug up and recovered and brought
back for analysis, Scully thought it over and, of course, came up
with a sensible explanation. Apparently I'm so damn good that I
solved this one in my sleep.

I worked on Paper Hearts... was it '90? I was looking at X-
File cases at the time. God, that was a tough one. All the
victims, all those little girls. And at first I thought maybe it
was a series of abductions... it was too hard, then, to separate
the mishmash of my own recovered memories from the X-Files cases I
was going over and the literature I was reading about UFOs and the
cases I studied for the Investigative Support Unit. Fortunately I
never told anyone about the original ET theory, and eventually I
put enough distance between me and the case to be more objective
and see it truly.

I did a short assessment-- it was okay. Detached. He's a
travelling salesman, I theorized. Gains people's trust, comes into
their homes, tags their kids. Patterson wasn't satisfied with
that. "You're not letting yourself see this one's motives," he
said.

"He's a child molester. That's the motive."

"You can't shy away just because he preys on little girls.
It's that much more important for you to climb inside his head and
tell us what it's like in there."

I told him I could do the profile without getting that deep
into it.

"Not in my unit, you can't."

So yeah, I did it his way. And profiled the unsub and it
broke the case and VICAP caught Roche and he confessed to the
murders of thirteen little girls. Got a written commendation after
I testified at his trial and made sure he couldn't plead insanity.
Took a vacation after that one.

But we never found his souvenirs, the cloth hearts he cut
out of their clothes. Never got to count them to make sure the
numbers lined up. The case was closed, but it wasn't really over.

Scully says I've kept it with me, that I've been
subconciously putting together the pieces since 1990. Damn, I'm
slow. And now the case is open again. Roche started killing in
1979. It's still not over for us. Even if it comes so far too late
for this lost little girl.

But it will finally be over for her family. They'll have her
picture on the mantle, still. Her things packed away in a back
room. A favorite doll left out, maybe. Her coloring books still
stacked by the sofa. Now it can all be put to rest... that's how
Scully says it. Laid to rest. It sounds so proper and peaceful.

But it's not. It's never peaceful to put a child in the
ground. And never, never a murdered child. There's no rest in
that, no peace...

I can do this. Handle this. We've done it before. It's never
easy for anyone to deliver this kind of news, and at least I can
offer some empathy. I know what it's like... to always wonder. And
now they'll know. I know how they think they've accepted this
possibility. And I know they're wrong. She's still there, and nine
years old, until we find her, and suddenly after all these
years... she's dead..

Already I'm anticipating delivering the news, and we haven't
even found out who she was. But Scully's so fast at making
matches. It's the thorough examinations she does, all the
infinitesimal details she manages to discern. Most pathologists
would stop at clothes and teeth.

Scully will want us to tell the family ourselves. I'll have
to be ready for that. I need to see the body again, the cut-out
heart in the pajama top, the clothes she was wearing, and make
that twenty-year-old skeleton become a real person again for me.
Someone's little girl wore those clothes before Roche cut the
heart out of them. Easier to see "the body" while we're exhuming,
but I have to remember her as a living child, now.

And find a way not to see Samantha in her place.

end part one

From summer@interlabs.bradley.edu Wed Jan 29 11:56:35 1997
Disclaimer in part one.

Open Hearts
An X-Files Thing
By Vickie Moseley (vmoseley@fgi.net)
In Tandem with Summer

Part Two

Dana Scully's Personal Log

Thursday, November 11, 1996

My angel wing begonia died. What was I to expect? We've been
on the road almost five solid weeks. Nothing can go five weeks
without water, and since it hadn't been that well cared for to begin
with, it succumbed this time. Just as well. I think Mom's right--I
need to start collecting cacti. Or air ferns. Or get a fish tank and
just keep water and plastic plants in it like Mulder does. At least it
would add a little humidity to the apartment.

Aside from the demise of my houseplant, it was so nice to be home.
I had a closet full of dirty suits that I had to drop off this morning.
If Mulder comes up with another road trip in the next three days,
before they're out of the cleaners, I just might have to shoot him
again to avoid going naked while we investigate the case.

I can never let him read this log.

I was glad to get Mulder back in DC in one piece, actually. These
cases were grueling and more taxing than any we've had in the last
several months. I didn't think I would make it through the last one.
I was positive that even if I did, I would be flying home with
Mulder on a stretcher again. Someday the man will learn to duck.
This time he was lucky and the bad guys were just bad aims. But
one of these days, the old Mulder luck is gonna run out.

Mulder luck. An oxymoron.

I have to fold the load that just quit in the dryer and then I'm off to
bed. Tom Clancy's latest (still waiting on my bedside dresser) and
my own bed with my own pillow awaits.

I feel like I've died and gone to heaven.

Friday, November 12

Today was a great day! I got most of the reports finished up, at
least as far as I can go before handing them off to Mulder. I had
lunch with Mom and she forgot to nag me about not calling her
while we were out of town. She didn't even remind me to ask
Mulder to Thanksgiving (although I suspect that's because she's
going to call him herself this year). And, if wonders will never
cease, I got home early enough to get caught up on my bills and
watch some television.

There are times that I almost wish this was the norm of my life,
rather than the exception. It's nice to have a nine to five, not too
much to worry about job. It's nice to come home during rush hour,
rather than in the middle of the night. It's nice to get to the video
store and actually find titles that I want to watch.

Oh, god, I'm making myself sick here.

Seriously, I'm happy to have the time to relax. I wish the same
were true for my partner. I would have expected Mulder to be well
into his normal at-home routine by now. It's like he flips a switch.
He comes home from cases like these, sleeps for 18 hours straight,
eats like a horse for two days and then he's chomping at the bit,
complaining about the paperwork at the office, the traffic at rush
hour commute, his cable company's latest offerings--anything to let
me know that he's ready to go out and play again.

Not that way this time. I should have noticed yesterday, but I was
so glad to be home that I didn't let it sink in. He was in the office
before me. I got in at 8:30. If he was on his normal schedule,
Mulder would have dragged his sorry ass in around eleven and begged
to go to lunch immediately.

Both yesterday and today he's been jumpy as hell. Come to think
of it, I don't know if he even went to lunch today. I almost asked
him to come with Mom and me, she always asks about him, but he
was so deep in thought (or half asleep) at his desk that I decided
not to disturb him.

I hate this. Now I don't know if Mulder is really having problems
or if it's just my 'mother hen gene' kicking in. Mom is always
warning me that I make too much of some of Mulder's little
'quirks'. She tells me that dark circles under the eyes of a bachelor
do not necessarily mean that he isn't sleeping. It _could_ mean that
he has better things to do with his time than sleep.

I wanted to squelch that one real fast, but what could I have said
that wouldn't have gotten me in instant hot water? I mean, if I
were to tell her that Mulder doesn't have anyone to cause him to
lose sleep, she would immediately want to know how I know. And
then, the next part of the conversation would be why _I_ don't
have anyone in _my_ life to cause me to lose sleep. And from
there, the whole discussion is right down the crapper. No way.
I wasn't about to fall into that trap this time.

But I'm getting that sickening feeling in the pit of my stomach.
Time to go on 'Mulder watch' again. The analogy of a suicide
watch isn't lost on this one, either. When he gets like this, I just
know it's only a matter of time before he runs off and does
something stupid. At least lately he's calling me before he runs off.
Even a minor improvement is appreciated. It means I spend the
time worried sick that he's getting himself killed and not wondering
where the hell he is. Oh, yeah, a real improvement there.

Mulder watch. I wonder if it's possible to get that item put on my
list of job responsibilities. It's apparent that I am the only member
of the Bureau who has that duty. It puts me in my own
classification, job-wise. I should be getting merit increases based
on my performance in that area. If I keep Mulder productive and
away from the hospital for an entire fiscal quarter, I should get a big
bump in pay.

As if.

Saturday, November 13, 1996

It was gorgeous outside. This was a perfect Indian Summer day. I
really wanted to go over to Mom's and help her put the garden to
bed for the winter. Last year we found a bunch of cherry tomatoes
that must have escaped the frost before Halloween and ripened in
the warm weather just like we've been having. We had chef salad
with fresh from the garden cherry tomatoes. But instead, I gave up
that wonderful possibility to stay in the basement and help Mulder
do the expense reports.

Ah yes, the joys of writing fiction.

He KNOWS he's going to get his ass chewed for those cell phones.
I know that he couldn't help losing the one, it was slippery as all
get out with that goopy substance on it. Thank God he got the
call through for backup before he dropped it in the storage tank.
Otherwise, I'd be writing a eulogy instead of an expense report.

But the other one was just plain Mulder clumsiness. No if, ands, or
buts. The same man who can make writing on a whiteboard look
like a chorographed ballet cannot keep hold of ANYTHING in his
hand for more than ten minutes.

I once threatened to velcro the damned phone to his wrist. That
idea is looking better all the time.

But this time, it's coming out of HIS pocket. I have MY cell
phone, thank you very much. And I had the foresight not to
_hand_ it to him to call the Sheriff. I called myself. Pissed
Mulder off, but at that moment, I couldn't have cared less.

He looked like death warmed over today. At one point, I was sure
that he was about to fall asleep right there at his desk. I even
offered to go up to my 'other' desk and give him some privacy. I
mean, if he can't sleep on his couch, maybe he can sleep at his desk.
My god, how long before he starts only sleeping when we're in
planes? I can see my life two years from now, going on airplane
trips every single night so the Mulder can get some sleep.

Well, it will take some time to get that image out of my head.

After we played 'phone, phone, who lost the phone' for the
majority of a beautiful day, I came home and felt guilty as hell.
I had wanted to call Mulder and see what he was up to, but I figured
he wanted to be alone for a while.

...Not true. *I* wanted to be alone for a while. After being joined
at the hip for five solid weeks, I wanted some downtime from Fox
Mulder and his amazing technicolor phobias. I just wanted to go
home and hide in my own little world for a while. So, I ignored
that gnawing feeling that I have to keep tabs on him every minute.
That awful feeling that if I don't keep him under strict surveillance,
he'll fall apart faster than one of those jigsaw puzzles that Grandma
Scully used to love to put together. I just decided that this
weekend, I am NOT my partner's keeper. Fox Mulder managed to
muddle through 31 years of his life on his own; I'm sure he can
make it through one weekend without me.

Not that I want to think that he's that capable. It's funny. I see
him working and all I can think about is 'God, will I ever get to be
_that_ good--that sure, that confident, that relentless, that steady in
my pursuits.' And then I watch him struggle to deal with all the
mundane stuff, like sleeping and eating and the most elemental of
living skills, and I can't help but want to cut up his steak and fork
it into his mouth. It's annoying. It's confusing. I makes me want
to scream at him to GROW UP AND ACT HIS AGE.

I know better. I know that sometimes, it's me that acts like I'm in
need of a keeper and he's the Rock of Gibraltar. But it's so easy to
forget those times when he acts like he's been acting lately.

If I thought it would do any good, I'd try to get him to talk about
it. But that's about as effective as nailing jam to a wall. Mulder
is at his slipperiest when he is avoiding an emotional meltdown. I
know; I've become expert at the signs.

I just have to be on hand with the broom and dustpan to pick up the
shards.

Sunday, November 14, 1996

Well, that didn't take long. Emotional meltdown. Established time
of arrival, approximately 5:05 am Eastern Standard Time. At least,
that's when he put in the call to the Bureau's forensics team to
come out to the middle of a park in Fairfax Co. and start looking
for a body that was buried almost 20 years ago.

When he called, I could _hear_ the manic sound that his voice gets
when he's tettering on the edge. Balancing that high wire of sanity
again. This time, it was just to get me out of bed and down to the
park to stay with him. I don't know if he expected me to be there
to comfort him if he was wrong or to stand witness for him if he
was right. Or vice versa. The really scary part was--he WAS
right.

They found a body, all right. A little girl. Oh, god. Not another
little girl. A little younger than 8. On some level, I think that fact
alone gave me some relief. But then I realized that Mulder hadn't
expected to find what I assumed he was looking for. He knew that
wasn't Samantha in that grave long before the forensics team
uncovered their first spoonful of dirt.

How did he know?

He told me about his dream. Mental note--since Russia, he has
been a lot more forthcoming about his dreams and his mental state.
I still get the requisite share of 'I'm fine, Scully', but interspersed
with them is quite a few 'I'm tired', 'My head hurts', and the more
revealing 'I had a bad dream'. Revelations like that make the Ten
Commandments on the Stone Tablets seem like the jokes on Laffy Taffy
wrappers.

So he told me his dream. Red lights. Little red lights. At first,
all I could think about was the little red dot of a laser sight.
The kind that you look down and see on your chest about 3 seconds
before some asshole shatters your sternum and blows your heart to
kingdom come. That sent some good shivers down my spine, let
me tell you.

But the red dots weren't on Mulder. They were on the wall of his
apartment. And they 'told' him to follow them. OK. As far as
dreams go, we are still working in the realms of sanity.

The little red dots lead him through some backyards, past an old
truck of some kind, up to Bosher's Run Park. Here's where I started
getting worried. Mulder told me that he 'didn't see the name on
the sign to the park the first two nights of the dream.' _First TWO
nights_? He's had this dream three nights in a row. But it gets
better.

He follows the red light and it lands on a tree. Then it slides down
the tree and rests on a little girl, lying on the ground. Even before
he could get to her, Mulder knew she was dead. He described her in
perfect detail. Small for her age, slight of build, blond hair, pug
nose.

By this time, the forensics team has uncovered the skull. I could
tell just by looking that it was a child. The body had been there a
long time, and I would have run the required tests to determine
exactly how long, but Mulder supplied me with the information.

Suddenly, everything on earth demanded that he see the chest area.
The team was doing the SOP: they had cordoned off the area and
run string markers. They usually work from one direction, north to
south, and were doing so this time. Unfortunately, that wasn't the
way Mulder wanted them to go. What he wanted was in the south
end of the area. Ignoring me and everyone else, he stooped down
and started digging in the dirt at the south end, just below the head.
The chest area, he kept wanting to see the chest area.

I couldn't help but wonder if the dream had triggered something a
lot more serious. Mulder, even though he thumbs his nose at the
'corporate ladder' and loves to circumvent procedure whenever it
suits him, doesn't mess with evidence. Not as a general rule. He
treats evidence as sacred. I've only seen him like that one other
time. In Iowa. When we found that shallow grave and we both
were certain we had found Ruby Morris' final resting place.

I know exactly how close to the edge he came with that case.

Mulder was looking at the ground and telling me exactly how the
little girl had died: strangled. How the killer took a souvenir, a
cloth heart cut from the child's pajamas after the death. It started
scaring me that he knew so much, and all from a dream.

But he told me that he knew all that, not from a dream, but from an
old case. An old case from 1990. John Lee Roche. Serial killer.
His victims were all little girls between the ages of 6 and 10.

Once he found the heart-shaped hole in the little nightgown, he
seemed satisfied. I was able to get him to go to the office, sit down
and tell me what was going on.

He had been asked in on this one by Reggie Purdue. Mulder was
the one to figure out that the killer was fairly ordinary, a traveling
salesman. His profile lead to the arrest and subsequent conviction
of Roche, who confessed to thirteen murders.

The look on his face was what really ate at me. Here he sat, having
successfully tracked and convicted a man capable of murdering
over a dozen little children, and goddamn him if Mulder didn't
look--guilty. That he should have known that there were others.
That he *did* know that there were others, and he hadn't looked
hard enough to prove that and find them. Like it was some kind of
sin for him to have gone on, gotten on with his life, when there
were other little girls left to find.

This dream is nothing. It's his unconscious mind, which has been working
non-stop for five weeks, breaking out and solving something that had been
bothering him for 6 years. He said it himself once: "Dreams are the
answers to questions we haven't yet learned how to ask." I always liked
that one-- well enough to note it down, well enough to remember it still.
It rings true. At any rate, I'm more concerned at his reaction to the dream
than at the dream itself. He was looking haunted, as only Mulder can look
haunted.

I wanted to wrap him in Grandma Scully's quilt, make him a strong
hot toddy (just like Ahab used to love when he was home for a few
days), and lock him in a room with just his couch and his bed for a
week.

Instead, I identified the body and we decided to go in the morning
to confirm the identification.

My clothes aren't out of the cleaners, yet. I'm letting him off the
hook this time. It's a good thing I lost weight on this last trip or
I really would have nothing to wear.

end part two

From summer@interlabs.bradley.edu Wed Jan 29 11:56:53 1997

Open Hearts
An X-Files Thing
by Summer (summer@camelot.bradley.edu)
In Tandem with Vickie Moseley

Part Three

The Journals of Fox Mulder

Monday 15 November

We found the hearts.

The little girl's name was Addie Sparks. Scully identified
her in just a few hours, matching mainly on the clothes.

She had a little pocket on her pajama top, embroidered
with a dollar sign. Scully said the distinctive $ clinched the
match.

Addie went missing in 1975. John Lee Roche started killing
in '79. Or that's what we thought. It's what I told Scully, but
she had the database look for any girls of the right age from 1970
to 1982, because that's where the preliminary forensic evidence
placed the time she was buried. If she had limited the search from
1979, we wouldn't have IDed Addie Sparks so quickly. Scully
usually doesn't abide by preconceptions when she's dealing with
evidence. That's something I've always valued in her. She always
finds and follows the evidence.

Even if neither of us wants to go where it leads.

We've done this so many times-- questioned people, brought
bad news-- it never gets any easier. It probably shouldn't. The
day it doesn't hurt a little to deliver news of a person's death
is the day you should retire, Reggie used to tell us. "If you
don't care about people, how can you care about justice?" he'd
say.

Mr. Sparks... the moment Scully said, "We're from the FBI,"
he knew.

He said, "You found Addie."

I remember once the police came by our house, a few months
afterward. Dad had a glove compartment full of speeding tickets
from around the time when it happened that he hadn't paid off...
didn't care enough to pay off... enough tickets that, as per
routine, a warrant went out for him.

When she opened the door and saw the officers, Mom put her
hands over her eyes and said, "Samantha."

The cops looked at each other uncomfortably, and one of them
said, "No, ma'am."

I thought she'd never stop crying. I was so glad Dad wasn't
home. And that Mom knew where he kept the cashbox so we could pay
off the tickets. I don't know what would have happened if they had
come when he was there.

Scully gave Mr. Sparks a fragment of Addie's pajamas, the
little pocket with the dollar sign. "Her mother sewed it for the
Tooth Fairy," he told us. "I used to put a quarter in it."

Samantha had a special Tooth Fairy doll. We called it
Peaseblossom. It had a pocket for the tooth and it was made so that
its plastic hand would hold a coin. Once Dad was on a trip, and
Mom didn't have any change, and Sam lost her lower right canine. I
got to put the JFK half-dollar in Peaseblossom's hand that night.
Took it out of my coin collection. Dad jumped all over me later
for breaking up the set, but he didn't mind once Mom told him what
it was for.

"You say the man who did this, he's in jail already?" Mr.
Sparks asked.

I was so glad to be able to say, this time: "Yes sir. And he
won't get out."

He said, "I used to think that missing was worse than dead
because you never knew what happened." He was crying by then, and
if I hadn't been so careful to prepare for this I think I would
have lost it. "But now that I know, I'm glad my wife's not here.
She got it luckier..."

He's right. What could you imagine, what darkness could you
dream, worse than a death like this-- god, a little girl strangled
with an electrical cord by a frustrated vacuum-cleaner salesman,
desecrated... he never, he didn't touch them except to wind the
cord, but... shut the door, that case is solved, the signature is
irrelevant now. --And once he'd played through his fantasies, he cut
out those trophies.

It wasn't enough to kill them. He had to possess each one of
them; he had to take their hearts. Not _really_, because reality
would interfere with the saccharine facade of his dreams. So he
took a paper pattern and put it on her chest, and cut around it
with little manicure scissors. He stole their hearts, stole them
from their families, and hid them so no one would ever know. And
they'd be young forever. I hated this case. Oh, I hated it.

I'd work on the profile for an hour and have to get away
from it somehow, anyhow. I took off at lunch a few times and went
to a movie theater, the same theater, the same second-run movie
every time-- just to escape from it. I wanted to bathe in
battery acid. Anything to stop imagining the empty salesman's
patter and the scoping, watchful eyes.

Eight gauge electrical cord, cut off one of his vacuum
cleaners. Once we knew the kind of cord, I could tell them he had
taken it off the appliances he sold-- where else would he get it--
and the only electrical appliance that's really sold door to door
is a vacuum cleaner. Broke the case. Broke my back. Broke my
paper heart.

Mr. Sparks gave the evidence bag with the pocket back to
Scully. "How many more people like me are you going to see today?"
he asked me. "Were there other victims you didn't know about?"

Scully looked at me; she knew it was like a mandate, that
now I couldn't rest until I knew for sure. She nodded to me, just
a little. Good. Relief. Good.

As we went out to the car, I could see the image from my
dream again. The white car... I saw now it was Roche's white El
Camino... my red light spelling MAD HAT on the side.

"The unsub is playing out a terrible fantasy formed from the
story of Alice in Wonderland, wherein he is the Mad Hatter,
offering an escape from a cruel and unjust world to little Alice,
whoever she may be. His high intelligence prevents him from
maintaining this fantasy for long; the unsub recognizes that
behind this dream lie darker, psychosexual motivations. But for
the duration of each child's abduction, the unsub is able to
pretend that he is a kind, whimsical liberator leading the girl to
a wondrous place... until the dream comes to its violent end."

Roche smiled at me when I read that profile on the stand.

I told Scully that I had seen Roche's car in my dream, that
I thought he might have kept the cloth hearts there, where they'd
be close by.

Why now? Why not before? Patterson was right. I never
let myself quite see into his head, and every time I did, I ran.
I could have found those hearts six years ago and it would all
be done by now. But once he confessed and I testified at his
hearing... I scuttled back into my safe little basement, back
to my X-Files, as fast as my legs would carry me.

We made a few calls on the way back to HQ, and found out
that Roche's car was sold at an auction in '92. Before we got the
news, though, Scully went down to put the pocket back in the
evidence room. I followed her, my mind on that car-- they searched
his belongings in '90, and I made them go through all the vacuum
cleaners, thinking maybe they were stuck into one of the machines
where the filter usually goes. The lining of his suitcases, the
pockets of all his clothes... I'm not sure I ever even thought
about the car.

Scully looked at the pocket with its sewn dollar sign as she
put it away. "I used to always wonder how my parents got a quarter
under my pillow without waking me."

"You didn't believe in the Tooth Fairy?" I asked absently,
and then I had to smile. "Of course you didn't... When I lost my
front tooth my dad taught me how to whistle."

"I've never heard you whistle," she said.

"Once my teeth came back, I couldn't do it any more."

Scully whistled a little of that marching song from Bridge
Over the River Kwai. I demonstrated my disability by attempting to
whistle along, but all I can get is a hollow sound.

We'd left the evidence room by then, and suddenly I
registered all the weird looks we were getting from agents in the
check-in room. Scully blithely whistled her way out the door, and
I have to say I relished going past them, ineffectually puckering
my lips and trying to make a little music.

She tried to teach me-- I kept waiting for a Lauren Bacall
imitation, i.e., "Put your lips together and blow", but that
didn't happen, unfortunately-- you'd never guess we were on a
case, but you take your downtime where you can get it. We both
knew that once the call came through we'd be on our way to
wherever Roche's car ended up. I don't think Scully was wild about
the idea of going on the road again already. It's been a while
since she's worn that grey t-shirt, and I'm pretty sure that one
only comes out when her blouses are all at the cleaner's.

But the car hadn't gotten far. Hollysville, Delaware.
Not such an bad drive. The trip was okay, though aside from the
occasional bout of whistling, we were both pretty much lost in
thought. Late afternoon we found the address.

The kid that got the car led us out to his garage. He'd
painted flames up the sides, very chic, and taken off the camper
shell. "Honest to God serial killer owned my car?" he asked, all
eager, breathless, scandalized and proud.

For that, kid, you get a knife in the upholstery. Detail
that. You can tell your friends the serial killer did it with his
machete.

We searched the all over the inside, and Scully looked
underneath, before I remembered the dream: MAD HAT in red, across
the back of the car.

The camper shell had been taken off and stored out behind
the garage, mummified in plastic, covered by dead leaves. Everything
rustled when we pulled it out. I felt all over the blue plush
lining and found a ragged edge, and there it was. A 1968 edition
of Alice in Wonderland with the original John Tenniel
illustrations.

And pressed inside, like dried flowers, old money, dead
leaves... paper hearts.

Sixteen.

Sixteen cloth hearts. Fourteen victims.

The bastard. He said thirteen. He took a polygraph.
Thirteen. It shouldn't surprise me, enrage me-- a child
molester, a murderer, and we expected him to tell us the
truth about how many little girls he strangled?

Tomorrow we go to question Roche. Two victims unaccounted
for. Two families still wondering.

Two hearts...

Tuesday 16 November

"Bring me my hearts, give them to me, and maybe I'll tell
you more."

Like an awful inversion of the fairy tales where giants
would conceal their hearts far from their homes to keep them
safe, John Lee Roche kept the cloth hearts of all his victims
hidden. We have them now. It should give us power over him..

But somehow, he's managed to take control.

"Maybe I'll tell you more."

The trip to the prison was tough enough. Then two hours
of processing the paperwork needed to see a prisoner in federal
custody, arguments from prison officials who kept insisting we
tell them why we had to see him, a phone call to clear it with
Skinner and another to run it by the lawyer who handled Roche's
plea bargain. Who tried to get him ruled not guilty by reason
of insanity. Who failed.

In court, Roche paid careful, solicitous attention to each
witness. He consulted his lawyer during questioning. Seemed very
interested and reasonable. The attorney looked understandably
distraught. You don't want your client to act bright-eyed and
bushy-tailed while you're arguing that he's too deranged to
answer for his crimes.

Roche would summon the lawyer back and whisper
something; the lawyer would straighten, unable to hide a puzzled
expression, and approach the stand.

"Mr. Mulder, how were you able to determine the
connection between the crimes of which my client stands accused,
and the children's book Alice in Wonderland?"

I remember bullshitting my answer. "A copy of the book
had been moved from a pile of toys and carefully placed on the
bookshelf at one of the abduction scenes." Big deal. He got each
of the girls silently, but not always cleanly. At some of the sites,
the blankets were hurled all around the room, dolls scattered,
stuffed animals piled randomly like drifts of snow.

Like all the "leaps" I made in profiling... or come to now,
in investigations... it wasn't any single, simple thing. It was a
whole collection of nuances that led to one inevitable conclusion.

I made them go back and get a photo album from every
family with recent pictures of each child. Patterson called me out
on that one. "Is this necessary? Do you need this for the profile?
These people are grieving. I don't want to bother them unless it's
important."

Like hell. Bill always wanted to keep tabs on just how
I was getting my conclusions. "Someday I'll figure out how to
catch that lightning in a bottle," he told me once, steel-eyed.

"It's necessary," I said. "And the families will want to do
anything that might help. Anything at all. They want to be
bothered, Bill. They need to feel like they're contributing
something."

They had the albums for me within a week. And I learned
each of their faces. Each girl had long blonde hair, fair skin, blue
eyes. There were pictures of eight of them wearing a headband.
Eight of the ten. We only knew about ten, then.

In the case reports on the kidnappings, peculiar details
stuck out. A stuffed white rabbit was missing from Kelli
Rochelle's shelf. Rene Harbison's blue hair ribbons were gone
from her dresser. A letter from a new overseas penpal that
Yvonne McGruder was writing to had been torn in half. That
might have been the one that tipped me off: the letter from
England, with the insignia on back. The lion and the unicorn.

Little things. Inconsequential things, never examined at
the time. I called the families and looked further. No, Kelli never
slept with the rabbit, it was stiff-jointed. She slept with a favorite
teddy bear, which had been left behind. (So the killer took it.) No,
now that I mentioned it, Rene always took off those ribbons
before bed, and she hadn't worn them since Sunday anyway. (So
the killer took those as well.) Yvonne was so excited about
writing to a little girl in England that she kept the letter under her
pillow. (When he saw the symbol with the lion and the unicorn,
he tried to snatch the letter away, but she must have held on until
the paper tore... and when she fought him, it was harder to
pretend he was charming her away to a wonderful, magical place.
By then I knew the fantasy was paramount for him.)

In John Tenniel's original illustrations for Lewis Carroll's
books, Alice is a little girl, ten at most, with long blond hair.
Nearly all subsequent versions of Alice were modelled on
Tenniel's artwork. The 1951 Disney Alice is also blonde, in a blue
dress with a starched white apron, white stockings, black Mary
Janes, wide blue eyes and a blue headband holding back her
yellow hair.

There were mushrooms growing on trees near two of the
shallow graves. He gave six of them cake and ice cream before he
killed them. Mostly later in his career. He was better at it, and
managed to get them to trust him enough to eat with him. Did the
cakes say EAT ME? The bottle, DRINK ME? Did he recite poems to
make them smile?

"How doth the little crocodile improve his shining tail, and
pour the waters of the Nile on every golden scale!"

Look for the names Dodgson, Tenniel, Lewis, Liddell,
Pleasance, Carroll, and Charles, I added to my profile. Probably
Dodgson, the author's true last name. If you have suspects, check
for chess pieces and playing cards. They were already looking for
childrens' books. After the first assessment went out, they were
looking for a travelling salesman in his forties or early fifties, no
family, very intelligent, who had anything childlike with him.

After the profile went out, they were looking for Roche.

He came under suspicion because he had-- like a dare-- a
pair of little lacy socks on the rearview mirror of that damned El
Camino. Some blessedly diligent cop in Fairmont noticed it when
he was giving Roche a parking ticket. The locals made a few
inquiries... he seemed like a nice guy... as a matter of routine,
sir, could we check out the items in question just to clear up
this misunderstanding?

The socks were new, had never been worn by a child,
murdered or otherwise. The odd thing was that he wanted them
back. The cops found it perplexing that Roche actually extended
his stay in Fairmont to get those socks back. They filed a report.
They answered our FBI alert. Patterson put his name on the list
and routed the report to me along with traffic infractions, B&Es,
priors and possibly related kidnap cases. It took me a week to sift
Roche out of the mix, to send back instructions on further
inquiry.

On the hotel register in Fairmont, Roche had signed his
name as Dodgson.

I cracked the spine of my Annotated Alice, getting ready
to question him. Patterson drilled at him first. Roche was stone,
but Bill was patient. "Do you remember where you were, the
night of August twelfth, 1987?"

Roche answered distantly, "Echoes fade and memories die."

I knew we had him. "Autumn frosts have slain July," I
quoted back. He looked up. "Did you slay Laura Thibault?"

"Still she haunts me, phantomwise / Alice moving under
skies / never seen by waking eyes." Roche nodded to me. "Yes. I
took Laura away. I took them all away."

Patterson, gruff but triumphant, "How many?"

"Pick a number." Always so casual. The bastard.

"We've found--" Reggie began, then redirected himself,
"several victims."

"All right," Roche said. "Thirteen."

Today we walked down the high-security passages; we
had to check our weapons. I hate taking off the Beretta. The
ankle holster is a hassle to get undone. And there's just something
about it-- Scully and I both hand over our service weapons, and
then I have to kneel down and wrestle with the other gun. I'm not
sure about carrying it... it's come in handy a grand total of once.
Then again, probably the day I don't wear the Beretta will be the
day the Glock blows up in my face while I'm chasing the latest
killer mutant.

And after all these precautions, locks and bolts and bars,
where is Roche? On a basketball court, shooting hoops.
Sometimes I wonder if the bars are to keep the inmates from
getting out, or to keep the rest of America from checking in for
free cable.

"Mulder," he said. Scully glanced from him to me. I don't
want to talk about how we caught him. Even to, especially to,
Scully. She seems to believe that I worked on cases for the ISU
the way I investigate X-File cases, and I'd like to let her think that
always. The last time Patterson dragged me back... and nearly
dragged me down... she saw a slice of what it had been like for
me then, and she was ready to skin me or Bill or both of us for it.
It really bothered her. I don't want to drag her into that again.

So I haven't really told her... Roche knows me. He's
familiar with me from the interrogation and the insanity hearings.
He knows I'm the one who made the Alice connections. I spent
hours trying to convince him to tell me where he hid those hearts.
Trying to gain his trust. Get him to confide in me. He knows me.

"You have a new partner," he observed. I wished I could
step in front of Scully then without pissing her off. I wished I
could make her stay away from him, from this.

I introduced her instead. And said, "We found Addie
Sparks."

Not a twitch. "Congratulations, I guess."

Scully dove in. "We also found your hearts. All sixteen of
them."

He paused-- and Roche is close to unflappable. I thought
maybe she'd struck just the right tone, or he was getting tired of
his games, or bored, and wanted to tell his story. But he went
back to shooting baskets.

I asked why he'd told us thirteen, and he said, "I dunno.
Thirteen sounds... more magical, you know...?"

"Who're the other two?" Scully asked. "You're in here for
life. You've got nothing to lose."

I winced; Roche is smart. I saw his answer coming.

"I've got nothing to gain," he replied, in that spacy,
offhand way he talks, like his mind is on something much more
interesting and these questions are merely bothersome, like bugs.

"You can gain one moment of decency in your life," I
said, though I know it's never a safe bet, gambling on a killer's
remorse. "You can let those families put their daughters to rest."
Scully would pummel me-- I was appealing to his sadistic side,
really. Think how they'll suffer, again, if you let us tell them their
girls are dead. I think Roche caught the gentle phrasing; his eyes
darted over Scully again as though he knew she was the cause. I
wanted to gouge his eyes out every time he looked at her.

"I understand you take this very personally, Mulder."

Scully telegraphed a look to me that said, I know. Hang on.
I know.

Then Roche turned. "Tell you what. Sink one from there--"
I was standing square on the free throw line; he tossed me the
basketball-- "and I'll tell you."

Easy shot. I made it.

He scooped up the ball. "Trust a child molester?"

I watched him treasure my reaction. Prison's only refined
his taste for pain.

"Bring my hearts and give them back to me, and I'll tell
you everything you want to know."

Trust a child molester? Enough to stop looking after he
named thirteen victims. Enough to believe for a second that our
answers would be as easy as a free throw. On the way out, Scully
observed, "If we go along with him, he could easily renege again.
He can use this to keep manipulating us as long as he likes."

"We've got nothing to lose," I reminded her. "And two
victims to identify."

"Let's see what forensics gets on the hearts first."

I considered it. "A couple of days?" At her nod, I agreed.
"If you want to wait, okay, we can wait. Roche isn't going
anywhere."

But dammit, neither am I. I'm tethered to the office,
cordoned in by those hearts. I can't leave. I mean, I really just
can't leave. There's nothing more I can do here, and as Scully was
so eager to remind me, it's been ages since I got an appreciable
quantity of sleep. I think she has a barometer that tells her how
much REM time I've gotten in any given night. She's right about
Roche. Everything I know about him affirms it. She's right.

But we have two hearts left. Two more shallow graves.

"In a Wonderland they lie / Dreaming as the days go by /
Dreaming as the summers die..."

No. Please. No.

Please no. Please not Sam.

It's not fair. She never hurt anyone. She doesn't fit his
victim profile. I love her so much. He can't take her away. The
timing is off... maybe... We thought he started in '79 but he killed
that other little girl in '75, but it couldn't have been Roche. He
can't be the one. We never found, we would have found-- no. No.
Please. He can't take Samantha.

It was a dream. It was a dream. But the red light led me to
her just like it took me to Addie Sparks. And the door opened on
the house in Chilmark, the living room, the Stratego game and
Samantha: "Fox, it's your move." Of course it is.

In the dream, it's always my move.

I've never been an adult in a dream about Samantha
before. Not about when she was taken. There's one, I'm grownup,
I'm at Sam's wedding, but that's a madeup dream not a memory
dream. I walked into the room and I was me. I was wearing this
suit and this tie, the Hermes one that Scully always threatens to
hang me with because she says it's hideous.

"Are you gonna move or not? Do we have to watch this,
Fox?"

On TV, Leon Jaworski said, "It would be very difficult to
reach the conclusion that it was an accident."

I said, "The Magician comes on at nine." How many times
has my mouth formed those words in dreams?

"Mom and Dad said I could watch the movie, buttmunch."
She always saved the choicest grade-school insults for moments
like this.

"They're next door at the Galbraiths--" it was like reciting
a passage from memory, and I looked around, marvelling at how
everything looked just the same. "They left me in charge."

I waited for her move-- she always changes the channel, I
change it back, she screams, I stand over her and tell her I'm
watching the Magician. There are several dreams, but each one is
consistent within itself. This one never changes.

Until now. The lights went out, half a minute early. The
game pieces, the things on the mantle, the picture all began to
shake. Out of control. I felt out of control. This wasn't the mental
movie of the dream. It was different. I'd been plucked out of the
present and cast in my own nightmare but I know how it ends and
it always ends alone.

"No. Not again," I said, and meant it. I went for the Glock
but my guns were gone. "Samantha, RUN!" and I knocked the
box with dad's gun off the shelf. Like always. This time I would
know how to use it, this time I would know what to do, this time
it would be different and I looked up expecting to see the alien in
the doorway, Samantha floating in midair calling my name...

Roche walked in the door. He looked directly at me. He
passed by me and he took my sister.

It's just like the dreams where I found Addie Sparks.
Found her body.

But this can't be real.

This can't be happening.

Please. No.

Please.

end part three.

From summer@interlabs.bradley.edu Wed Jan 29 11:57:08 1997

Open Hearts
An X Files Thing
By Vickie Moseley
In Tandem with Summer

Part Four

Dana Scully's Personal Log

Monday, November 15th

There are times when I really hate my job.

Today was one of those times.

It's the flip side of the coin, I guess. If there is a crime, there is
a victim. I never bought into all that 'victimless crime' crap that my
dorm friends used to preach about. If there was a law against, it's
because it hurt somebody.

I'm used to the victim. I get more than my share of interaction
with them, really. I see them, inside and out, every day. I have
to prepare myself for that. But I have worked hard to cushion
myself against the horror, the depressing knowledge that the
bits of flesh and bone under my knife was once a living, breathing
human being, who loved, liked, hated and received all those
emotions in return. I've become comfortable with the victim.

Today, I saw the other side. It's not very often that we meet with
the victim's family to tell them news. Usually we are there to learn,
and they are more than willing to give us all the help they can.
After all, they know what has happened, they know Bob or Jill or
Clarisse isn't ever coming home again. Usually, the funeral
arrangements have been made, the grieving process has been in full
swing for a while. We are there simply to try to bring some order
to their feelings of senselessness. To help them feel that there is
some justice in the world, however fleeting.

I don't remember feeling such a sense of dread as I did walking up
to that door in Norristown today.

Little Addie Sparks. I held the scrap of her nightgown in its
evidence bag all the way to her father's house. I couldn't get over
the irony. One day, almost twenty years ago, some woman happily
sewed a little pocket on her daughter's nightgown. A pocket with
a dollar sign on it. Must have been dreaming big--we only got
quarters for our teeth. But I could picture that woman, stitching
the dollar sign, folding the corners of the little pocket, sewing it in
place. I stared at the stitching. She must have been a quilter or a
seamstress. The stitches were handmade, not made by a machine,
but they were perfect, equal, done with a great care. And a lot of
love.

It was the description of that little pocket that led me to Addie
Sparks. Could that woman have imagined, all those years ago, that
one day that little pocket would be the one feature that would
identify her daughter's murdered body?

And Mulder. God, I couldn't look at him most of the ride. I knew
he was on autopilot. I let him drive. Sometimes he needs to do
something that mundane to keep his thoughts from straying to dark
places and engulfing him completely. But I dreaded his reaction to
this visit almost as much as I dreaded the visit itself.

I tried over and over again to convince myself that this was a
service. One of the Corporal Works of Mercy--visit the sick, bury
the dead. Father Sullivan taught us that sometimes the most
dreadful of jobs were the ones we needed to do the most. Who else
would come? Who else would tell this family that their daughter,
their Addie, had been found, but was never really coming home?

Corporal Works of Mercy gain us favor in heaven. I can sin for the
rest of my life, now, and not worry a minute about getting in the
Pearly Gates. I lived through Purgatory today.

And I watched Mulder walk calmly through the Gates of Hell.

I have to give him this. The man has incredible control--when he
needs to--and always for someone else. He was the picture of
professionalism today. Caring, compassionate, but strong. I think
he was drawing his strength from the air, from the sofa he sat on,
from me, from the lamp on the table--I know Mulder didn't have
that much strength left in him right then. Letting Mr. Sparks know
that Roche was NEVER getting out. It wasn't the death sentence
that I'm sure I would have required had that been my daughter, but
it was all we had to offer.

"Do you do this full time?" Mr. Sparks had asked. Oh, God, I
wanted to tell him no, but sometimes what we do, what we see . . .
but it's not worse. Just different. Awful, but not worse, not by a
long shot.

When we were in the house, listening to Mr. Sparks tell us that he
wife had died, I couldn't keep my eyes off Mulder. I knew that
however bad this was for me, it was battery acid on open wounds
to Mulder. Then Mr. Sparks rubbed some salt in for good measure.

Oh, he couldn't have known. He was a nice man, very gentle. My
heart broke for him. But I could have gagged him with the pillow
on the armchair if I could have stopped him from saying what he
said to Mulder. "I used to think it was better not to know." He
didn't know, couldn't have known what he was saying to my
partner. My partner, who for the last 23 years _hasn't known_.
Who lives for the day when he will learn, discover, _find_ her.
Mulder's personal Addie.

"Not knowing is better." He as much as told Mulder to stop looking.
The end, the discovery, might be worse than the void. He even said
that his deceased wife was the lucky one.

I know Mulder was thinking of his father right then. I remember
that night, the night his father was murdered. He came to my
apartment, blood soaked, raging with a fever. After he settled a
little, and I got some fluids and aspirin down him, he fell into a
restless sleep. He kept muttering. Kept saying over and over again
that 'He'll never see her, never see her when I find her'. It was
almost a mantra. I wanted to calm him, I wanted him to go into a
deeper sleep, but he hung stubbornly just on the edge. Saying those
words over and over again.

And when his mom was so sick, with the stroke. He came back
from Canada, covered in gasoline, in shock, enough bruises to look
like he'd been somebody's punching bag and all he wanted was to
tell his mother that he'd seen her. Samantha. He wanted to tell her
that he'd found Samantha.

Weeks later, he admitted to me that the little girl couldn't have been
Sam. For one thing, there were at least 20 of them, identical. We
have no way of knowing if the Gregor clones looked like
Samantha--they were adults. But Mulder believes they did.

Carbon copies everywhere, but not a sign of the original.

For Mulder, not knowing is killing him. But what would happen if
the truth, when we find it, is much, much worse...?

Then Mr. Sparks, that sweet, sweet man, threw the gauntlet down at
Mulder's feet. "How many others will you visit today? Were
there other victims you didn't know about?"

Up until that moment, I thought I was at the bottom of the barrel.
I didn't think it could possibly get any worse. Then I looked at
Mulder, and I knew, I knew by all that is holy that I could not hold
him back. He wasn't going to rest until he could answer that
question. Not just put it aside, like he feels he did 5 years ago.
No; this time, Mulder has to find the answer. Then he can rest.

What could I do? I didn't say a word, but he found my eyes and
with a look I let him know I'd back him up. I'm almost surprised
that he bothered to check with me. I don't want to think what he
would have done if I'd hesitated.

All I wanted to do when we left that house was put Mulder in the
passenger seat, turn the heat up in the car and hope to God that his
body would make him sleep. I have to stop living in a fantasy
world.

As we left the house, Mulder started staring at a car parked across
the street. At first, I thought he'd gone into a trance. I've read of
such things--similar to a waking coma. It frightened me at first.
But then he started talking.

The damned dream came up again. My partner needs to stop
relying so heavily on these dreams. I dreamt last night that
Harrison Ford decided to quit acting and joined the FBI and took
Skinner's place. And right after that, they dropped the prohibition
against personal involvment between agents and supervisors.
Mulder got to be Best Man at the wedding. But somehow, I'm
pretty sure it ain't gonna happen.

So how come my partner can remember, both from the dreams and
from his involvement in a case solved over 5 years ago, that Roche
had an El Camino, and deduce that was where he hid the cloth hearts
he took as trophies from the body of each murdered girl?

Maybe, if I can get him to have my Harrison Ford dream . . . nah,
with my luck, he'd screw it up and *I'd* end up being the maid of
honor at his wedding to Kelly McGinnis.

So off we went to find Roche's El Camino.

Found it in Delaware. In the hands of what I can only describe as a
'snotnosed kid'. "You mean a real serial killer used to own my
car?" I wonder if he would have been more excited if we could
have told him that the killer actually had _killed_ someone in it? I
really, really hate people like that. They go to accidents to watch
for the coroners wagon. They become television news reporters
who walk up to families after plane crashes and ask them how they
feel to have lost their loved one in such a tragic manner. Scum of
the earth.

Of course, Mulder feels pretty much the same way. So I wasn't too
surprised when he took out his pocket knife and got a little carried
away searching for the cloth heart collection. I thought about
stopping him--for about 3 seconds. Then I decided that I should
look _under_ the car and leave him to his own devices.

But the hearts weren't in the car. Suddenly, Mulder remembered
the cabtop. It was behind the garage, covered in plastic. Like
someone is ever going to *need* a cabtop to a late seventies El
Camino. It was pure luck that snotnosed's parents hadn't forced
him to haul the damned thing to the dump.

Mulder searched the crushed velvet ceiling cover. He stomped on
it, and finally found what he was looking for. A book. Alice in
Wonderland.

It all fit. In a really sick, demented way. Mulder said the dream
flashed 'Mad Hat' on the corner of the cabtop. When I read the
file, I saw in the profile yesterday that Roche had left clues that all
related to Alice in Wonderland. Took a stuffed rabbit at one house.
Little clues that led Mulder right to Roche in the first place.

We opened the book, . . . no, Mulder opened the book. Like it was
the only thing keeping him alive, like it was oxygen and he needed
it to breath. He opened the book and found the first heart and
knew he had what he was looking for.

Mulder talked yesterday about the cloth hearts. That he wanted to
find them, to count them. He knew that Roche had kept them near
him. Mulder knew that for every little girl now in heaven, there
was a cloth heart hidden where only John Roche knew about it.

One for one match. Find the cloth hearts and know exactly how
many children Roche had killed.

Mulder never really believed Roche when he confessed to just 13
murders. I could tell by the way he cited the polygraph. Mulder
knows as well as I do that if you ask the wrong question, you can
get a false answer on a polygraph. 'Did you murder 13 children?'
'Yes.'--and it would show that he was not lying. But go further,
ask the next logical question, 'Did you kill MORE than 13?' and
the answer can still be 'Yes' and be valid.

I get the impression that the second question was never asked.

And we found 16 hearts.

I counted them myself. Each was different. No two alike in any
way except shape. There could be no mistake. Roche had not lied,
he just hadn't told the WHOLE truth. He had killed 13 little girls.
Plus three more for good measure.

Mulder let me count the hearts once, and then wouldn't let loose of
the book again the whole ride home. He kept counting them.
Under his breath. He would get to 14 and then he would take a
deep breath, like he was going under water. Then he would count
the next two. Trace them with his fingers. Those last two. He had
no way of knowing if those last two were the two that were
unknown. At that point, I don't think it mattered. It was the
symbolism--what they represented that mattered.

As if the hearts themselves would tell him the names of the little
girls they belonged to. In all my life, I never wanted pieces of
evidence to sit up and speak quite as much as I did today. If
nothing else than to let Mulder have just a little bit of relief.

When we got back to the office, I wanted to take the book away to
put it in the Evidence room and I was afraid for a minute that
Mulder would object. It looked like he was thinking about it, but
then he changed his mind. He gave it to me without saying a word.
I took it down and he followed. We both stood there and he
watched the archivist process it and put it away. Each heart was
placed in a separate little bag, tagged, to be identified.

It didn't take long for them to match the hearts. The pictures in the
files of the bodies when they were uncovered were enough to make
the identifications. Before long, all that was left was two little
hearts. Orphans. Waiting for their owners to be found.

That's when Mulder decided we had to talk to Roche.

I've seen enough serial killers to know I don't like their company. I
remember back to Luther Lee Boggs and the way he manipulated
me--at a point where I was so easy to manipulate. I know how
tired Mulder is right now. How on the edge. How much this is the
absolutely LAST thing he needs. And so we are walking in that
prison with a big red target on my partner's chest and a sign
underneath that says 'shoot me'. This time I'm not just covering
his back. This time, I might have to be Mulder's shield, too.

I hope Mulder gets some sleep tonight. I'm not sure if I will.

Tuesday November 16

I got into the office early this morning. Mulder wanted to head out
to the prison about 8:30, hoping to avoid any long traffic lines by
going the 'wrong' direction. I got in at 7:30. I half expected him
to be there ahead of me--asleep at his desk.

He must have gone home to shower.

Anyway, I snuck a peek in the file cabinet. Not the X-Files, I can
dig through them to my hearts content and Mulder just smiles and
looks like he's gonna walk over and pat my head or something.
No, I was looking in the other file cabinets. The ones that're closer
to my desk, but that I've never felt brave enough to venture into in
front of him.

It's like his old high school yearbooks or something. He dragged
all those files from Quantico. The profiler gets a copy of every case
file he works on. Mulder's fill up two file cabinets--five drawer
jobs, too. I've seen him go through that drawer maybe three times
in our time together. It's like a security blanket--they're there if he
ever desparately needs to sink into a massive depression.

He doesn't know it, but I've read quite a few of them. I was all the
way through drawers A-G. I started right after the Boggs case,
when I almost lost my partner to a bullet from a madman. I
realized I better get up to speed on all of Fox Mulder's past
acquaintances. In case another of them happened to pop into our
lives.

I haven't had time to journey into the drawer marked R-S.

I'd only had a couple of minutes to look over the Roche file the
other day. And Mulder was watching me like a hawk the whole
time. He wanted me to look at the autopsy pictures, and the
autopsy report--see the section that told of death by strangulation.
He didn't really want me to read the profile, but he couldn't exactly
snatch it from my hand, so he started pulling out the pictures of the
recovered bodies and showing me where the cloth hearts had been
cut.

The man may be brilliant but I can read him like a book.

Mulder doesn't talk a lot about the time before I came around.
He's mentioned a few cases. I asked him once about Monty
Props--I was always fascinated with that case in the Academy. He
sort of smiled lopsidedly and said he'd have to save that for a really
boring stake out when I couldn't fall asleep in the car. He never
remembered--yeah, right. And I never brought it up again.

All those cases are like caged animals to Mulder. I could see it in
his eyes as he sat there and held the file folder from the Roche case.
It was like the lion tamer who never really got comfortable with the
idea of going into that cage with those lions. He's an excellent
trainer and knows how to do the right things. But he still wishes he
had gone to medical school like his mother wanted.

But, with Mulder out of the office, I could let the animals come out
and play.

I decided one thing immediately. There are no sicker bastards on
the face of the earth than those who prey upon and kill little
children. And if they all got together and held an election, they
probably would have made John Lee Roche their king.

The transcript of the interviews and his confession were like
something out of a Edgar Allen Poe novel. I kept hoping that I
would turn a page and see that it was from the fiction section of the
library. But it would disturb me almost as much to think that
somebody could have just imagined the way this man thinks.

He was an artist, in the strictest sense of the word. He was so cool.
So collected. And, like so many before him, he seemed to lead the
interviewer right to the subject he wanted most to talk about--the
kidnappings. He took such pride in his work. He was a master and
the rest, well, the rest didn't even hold a candle to him.

His ego was quite possibly taller than the man himself--no slouch at
6' 5" and a half.

And I was letting Mulder, oh he of little sleep, walk right in a put
his head in this bastard's mouth.

I should be the one to have my head examined.

Mulder showed at a quarter past eight. He had showered, he was
wearing a clean shirt, clean suit. Obviously either he has a faster
dry cleaners than I do or he pulled it out from the back of that
warehouse he calls a closet. I hadn't seen this one for a while; must
be a 'we're visiting the dregs of society today' suit. I know the tie
spoke to that activity.

But the Gentleman's Quarterly cover-boy looks didn't hide the dark
circles under the eyes or the way he held his hands--clenching them
into fist on occasion, almost like he was in pain. I thought about
calling this whole escapade off. Sure, Roche might give us some
insight. He has absolutely no reason to, but he might. He might do
it just to get the kicks of seeing Mulder squirm, too.

>From what I could read in the profile, there was a really skewed
relationship going on there. Mulder had Roche's number, that was
a fact. But reading the interviews, I got the sense that Roche had
Mulder's number on speed dial and his finger was on the pound symbol
ready to push at any moment.

The paperwork and rigamarole to get into see a federal prisoner is
somehow comforting to me. I don't want these sons a bitches
interacting with society any more than absolutely necessary. I
could almost hear Father Sullivan. Visiting those in prison is
another Corporal Work of Mercy. I always figured they were
referring to 'political' prisoners--not the jokers we put behind bars.

We had to check our guns and I almost laughed at how long it
takes Mulder to get out of that ankle holster. Bet it slows down the
old social life--but I know better. Mulder doesn't have a social life
to slow down. It's like mine--more like a social dead than a social
life. Or maybe just a social dormant.

I was expecting to meet with Roche in an interrogation room. Nice
cinder block walls. Nice one way glass mirror covering the wall.
Not to be. Roche only gets a half hour a day for exercise and
apparently the rest of the prison population likes him just about as
much as I do, because he takes it by himself.

I've heard what other inmates do to child molesters. I
wholeheartedly concur.

We walked into the basketball gym and it was so unreal. Here he
was, a man who had murdered 16 little girls, taken them out of their
beds at night, strangled them, buried them in shallow graves and he
was standing here shooting hoops like some fucking Michael Jordan
wannabe.

It was a good thing they took my gun.

Roche greeted Mulder like an old buddy. "Is that a new partner?"
I didn't miss the fact that Mulder stepped between Roche and me
when he answered. One of these days, I'm gonna pull his cuffs out
of his back pocket and hogtie him when he does that, but today
didn't seem like the right time. Mulder introduced me and got
straight to the point.

"We found Addie Sparks, John."

--And hey, wasn't that a great game last Sunday? My God, it was
like they really _were_ old buddies. Buddies who'd had a very big
falling out, but buddies at one time nonetheless. Is that why Mulder
won't talk about the old cases? He told me once, during that
horrible Patterson case, that he had to crawl into their minds.
Maybe, sometimes, it was just as hard to crawl back out again.

He was running from profiling as much as he was running to the
X-files.

Roche didn't miss a beat when Mulder told him about Addie. And
Mulder really didn't give him much time to make a comment
anyway. "Why did you tell us thirteen, John?"

And this is when the button got pushed. Ring, ring, calling Fox
Mulder--your haircloth shirt and bed of rusty nails are now ready.

Roche looked at Mulder calmly and smiled. "It sounded more
magical."

I felt like I was watching a cat play with a half-dead mouse. The
mouse was so punch drunk that it didn't even think of running. It
just lay there, and sort of watched the cat toy with it in some
kind of morbid fascination.

"Sink this shot and I'll tell you."

That's right. Play on something else Mulder loves. My partner, the
captain of the high school basketball team.

I doubt if he knows that I know. Actually, I found out in a strange
way. One of the clericals works in the computer room and saw
Mulder's old application to the Bureau. There's a section on
physical abilities and sports. He listed basketball first--captain for
two years. He was proud of that. Then he listed baseball, captain
for two years. Also rugby, one semester, and polo, three semesters
at Oxford. Swim team all four years. Not a captain. Must have
been slowing down.

It was taped to the mirror in the ladies' room for a week until I
took it down.

I was impressed with the shot. Swish. No rim. Damn. And in
leather wingtips and an expensive suit.

Roche just smiled. "You trust a child molester?"

I wish they hadn't taken my gun.

As Roche left, he said over his shoulder--"Bring my hearts and I'll
tell you all you want to know."

And I've got this bridge that's just too hot to keep, ready for the
first sucker that walks up.

Mulder sort of wilted on the ride back to town. I was hoping that
he was asleep, but he was doing that 'playing possum' shit he pulls
on me sometimes when he wants me to think he's sleeping. He
should know better. Like I can't tell the difference between a sigh
and a snore. Huh.

I wanted to drop him off at his apartment, barricade the door and
gas the place (nothing too harmful--just a little something to knock
him out), but he pointed out that his car was at the office. Damn. I
hate it when he's reasonable. So I left him there.

But not before we had a little discussion. Well, mostly I had a
discussion. He sort of listened.

"How much sleep did you get last night?" I think I even sounded
calm when I asked that.

"Enough," came the reply, followed by an enormous yawn. Yeah,
right. At least his body knows better than to try to lie to me.

"Obviously not enough, Mulder." I wasn't being bitchy. OK,
maybe I was, but damn it, this was bad enough, going out to see
Roche, looking for two little girls missing for 20 years or more
without Mulder being asleep at the switch. I decided to drop that
one and go to my next favorite topic to nag Mulder about.

"Did you eat breakfast?" It was past 2 in the afternoon. He came
in at quarter to eight. I knew that even if he had eaten, it was
through his system already.

He surprised me, or maybe just figured it would throw me off the
scent. "A bagel on the way out the door. Wanta grab something?"

I picked my jaw up off the floor, dusted it off and said yes.

'Something' turned out to be a greasy burger with soggy fries at
some little stand halfway to nowhere off the interstate. But the fat-
and calorie-laden milk shake looked like it almost made up for it. I
think he ordered it just to piss me off. I munched cow fodder and
patiently waited.

My partner, Mr. Manners, couldn't talk to me while eating. I'm
sure he was afraid the tobacco farmers in the booth next to us
would have been aghast at his lack of gentility. He even folded the
fucking paper napkin and smiled at me when he was done.

So many bullets, so little time.

I dropped him off at the office with my sternest command to go
home and get some sleep. I even told him that I was alerting the
security guard to check the basement and if he was there, to call me
ASAP.

He blinked at me and frowned.

"Don't give yourself a stroke, Scully. I'm fine." The subtle
reference to his mother wasn't lost on me either.

Sticking your head deeper in that old lion's mouth, Mulder. One of
these days, he's going to sneeze.

end part four

From summer@interlabs.bradley.edu Wed Jan 29 11:59:54 1997

Open Hearts
An X-Files Thing
by Summer (summer@camelot.bradley.edu)
In Tandem with Vickie Moseley

Part Five

The Journals of Fox Mulder

17 Wednesday November

My hand hurts.

I don't care. I want him dead. I want to wring his neck
until he tells me the names for the last two hearts and neither
of them is my sister. And then I want to kill him.

I want to use a vacuum cleaner cord.

"I understand you take this very personally..."

Was that it? Did I pick up on that casual remark, when he
made it yesterday, and then fill in the blanks with my fears,
with my dreams...?

I shouldn't have hit him. But I'm so tired... god, I'm so
tired of being fucked with, I'm so sick of being knifed in the
heart.

Roche never said outright-- he implied-- what else could he
mean? But he didn't back it up. He didn't offer any proof. Not
really.

Scully's right. Oh, god, she's got to be...

She's got to be pissed at me right now, too. This morning I
went to the prison without her. I waited until I knew she was on
her way to work before I called and left the message on her
answering machine: I think he knows something about my sister.

She phoned ahead and checked with their records while she
was on her way to the prison, and found out that Roche had been
in the library both before and after we visited him, and he'd had
access to computers and the Internet... hell, I'm a federal
agent and I don't even have Net access from my apartment and some
fucking pedophile can log on whenever he wants. Find out whatever
he wants.

Scully's right. It's no secret that I lived on Martha's
Vineyard. And there's a police report of the abduction in the
federal database. Roche was more than ordinarily interested in me
back when we caught him-- he must have seen that the things he
did were getting to me. Now the opportunity has presented itself
to exploit that, have a little sick fun with it. I don't care,
I'm glad I hit him. I shouldn't have done it, I ought to regret
it, but to hell with that. I'm glad.

He must have seen it during that marathon session six
years ago. Three hours of going around and around... I tried,
but it wasn't enough.

"The case is closed. He confessed." Patterson folded his
arms like a martinet.

"We have to find those trophies--"

"He probably destroyed them before we brought him in, but
it doesn't matter anyway. We've got him on thirteen counts of
murder. He'll be in for life." Bill never saw victims. Just
convictions.

"Just let me question him one more time. I'll get him to
tell me where they are." He hesitated, so I kept pushing. "I'll
wring some more indicators out of him. His delusion's pretty
unique... it ought to be good for a monograph..."

Patterson arched his brows at me over his glasses. "You
would have walked away from this one after two days and a lame
summary if I hadn't pushed you, Mulder."

"Your monograph, Bill. Your case. Just let me talk to him."

I had to laugh when I saw his monograph, later. It was my
profile and my interview with Roche, dressed up in Bill's
textbook psych-speak. I could laugh, then, that much later. I had
given him the case and the credit, but I ended up getting called
to the stand during the insanity hearings. And the prosecution
had me read my profile. Got that commendation, even though on the
books, it was supposed to be Patterson's case. It was a good
thing I'd left the ISU by the time that was settled.

Three hours I talked with John Lee Roche. We discussed the
best highways to travel up and down the coast. Chatted about
Frank Baum's Oz books and C.S. Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia. I
remember Roche telling me that he always liked the book The
Wizard of Oz much better than the film, though everyone else seemed
to like the movie.

By that point, I was ready to pounce on anything and call
it a profound insight. "Why do you think that is?"

"I think," he said, as though he were really searching the
bottom of his soul to get the answer, "it's because I read the
book first. Most people see the movie first." He gave me a sneaky
sidelong look that said, I know what you're trying to do. Can't
catch me. "It's all about your preconceptions. Which did you see
first? The book? Or the film?"

"The film."

"And you liked it better, right?"

"I don't know. It was my--" and I caught myself before I
said, _my sister's_-- "my favorite movie. But I really liked the
Oz books when I was a kid. I couldn't say."

I must have given myself away with hitches like that,
fragments, pauses... nuances. He's had six years to think it
over. Hell, maybe he's been waiting for this-- another victim to
be found. Another round of questions. He may have been preparing
for this all along.

But I never would have considered the possibility that
Roche was the one who took her if I hadn't dreamed it last night.
If it hadn't seemed so real. Just like the dreams that led me to
Addie Sparks and let me find those hearts. That red will-o-the-
wisp light leading me right to the living room of our house in
Chilmark, Samantha sitting impatiently on the other side of the
Stratego board. She was so small. I've always been twelve in
those dreams, before. To see her, now, when I could easily have a
daughter of my own that age... And still to be as paralyzed as I
was then. It was like living through it all again for the first
time.

If it ever happened for a first time. Any of it.

There's no reason to believe him. The only detail he really
gave me was the place. He said he'd been on the Vineyard. He
didn't even have to come up with the date; I gave it all away
from the beginning. "Where were you in 1973?"

"What, the whole year?"

Scully's right. He's fucking with me. He found out where I
lived, he read the report about my sister, and he used it to get
his rocks off. Maybe he was planning this all along, to claim
that one of those hearts belonged to Samantha. Maybe he just took
the opportunity when I charged in this morning, frantic and still
dazed by that dream. But he's lying. He has to be.

I don't believe him, but the doubt's still there, poking an
elbow into my ribs and whispering, "Maybe it WAS him..."

There has to be a way to be sure. Think. He said he came to
the Vineyard. Visited our house. Sold Dad a vacuum cleaner for
Mom-- he named the model. "An ElectroVac Princess, or maybe it
was the Duchess model."

Scully unitarily banished me from the office for the day. I
don't think she'll report me for punching Roche, though it looked
like she was thinking about it for a minute there. She
understands. She doesn't approve, but she understands.

But once we were out of the prison-- we walked out to the
cars together, and she shook her head at me, and I knew she'd
never say anything, not now, but she's disappointed in me. For
running off half-cocked again, for circumventing her again, for
letting someone pull my strings again. Well, Scully, if you had
strings, you might know what it's like...

She told me to come home and get some sleep, but she's also
going to call me "this afternoon". I need to go the Greenwich and
look for that damned vacuum cleaner, prove to myself that Roche
was lying. It's two-thirty. She said she'd call. She didn't
explicitly say that she expected me to be here. I'll leave a
message on her answering machine. Another one.

That's a shitty thing to do. She has her cellphone with
her. She'd understand this. She might even agree, might offer
to come along and help me look. Or she might be disappointed
again... I can't deal with that right now.

I'll leave a message.

My hand hurts, my head hurts... the drive from Greenwich
never seemed so long. I pulled over more than once. Kept finding
myself drifting toward the center line, eyes too fogged to make
out the road signs.

Please. No. Not again. Not now. If I could just have some
time, if I could just get some distance... It's been a long, long
year. And I'm so tired.

He has to be lying. He has to be. John Lee Roche did not
take my sister. And oh, Sam, I want to be strong for you. I want
to be able to pierce through all these lies in a moment,
effortlessly. To say with pure and perfect certainty: No.
My sister is alive. I will find her.

But that sounds more and more like a fairy tale, concocted
to hide the terrible reality... Sam, I know you're out there. I've
never given up. Never. I've always been looking for you. Even when
I hardly knew it, I was looking for you.

I don't want to find you here.

--It's selfish to be this wrapped up in it. I have to think
of her, now, put myself aside and come to the truth.

But it hurts. It hurts and I'm so tired.

...Answering machine light is blinking. Sorry, Scully. I
don't think I'll treat myself to your tender ministrations
tonight. I never know the limits of your sympathy, and that's
scary. Sometimes I'll be prepared for you to dress me down for
being totally boneheaded, and instead, you say everything will be
okay and hold my hand. Then I'll do something I think is still
within the bounds of reason... my reasons, anyway... and suddenly
you lay into me with the scorched-earth treatment.

If there's anyone I'll chance it with, it's Scully. There's
no one I'd chance it with tonight.

So what are the odds that Roche could somehow guess the make
and model of a vacuum cleaner that my father bought my mother more
than twenty years ago? One in a hundred? A thousand?

ElectroVac Princess. Even Scully would have a hard time
coming up with a rational explanation for this. Maybe there's a
complete inventory of the contents of my mother's basement on the
Internet.

It was so hard to try to smile and reassure Mom, to come up
with some lame reason for tearing up her packrat nest looking for
that ancient vacuum cleaner. When I found it, I had the strongest
sense of deja vu, and I was reeling... Couldn't have been good for
Mom. I had to stay twenty minutes to calm her down, settle her in
with a cup of tea and tell her again and again, it's all right.
Everything's all right.

If Dad was still alive... I could tell him. He'd say I'm
being an idiot, he'd run me through the wringer for this, but I
could tell him. I could say: What if it's true?

He'd say, Find out.

It's not the answer that scares me. It's voicing the
question. I've already asked one that I'd managed to avoid for so
long... at the prison. Asked Scully if she had ever really thought
that my sister was abducted by aliens. My hard-won memories, my
holy grail. We both know that she never believed it. She just
looked away.

It's a little after eight. And what if I listened to my answering
machine, and what if I called... I could tell Scully. I only hesitate
because I don't know what she'd say. But I could tell her. She might
have an answer. Any answer.

I'd accept any answer, right now.

Nearly ended up in Scully's spare bedroom tonight. I
might even have wanted that if the place didn't have such lousy
memories for me-- last thing I need now is an acid flashback.

I did manage to knock her back a step or two when
she offered. Did my best Hannibal Lector (which is pretty
good, if I say so myself): "People will say we're in love."

She wasn't expecting a joke just then, and for once
I actually got a laugh out of Scully. Even in the midst of
everything... it was good to hear. "Yeah, well, people also
say Elvis is dead."

When I called, said I'd been to Mom's, she asked if
I wanted to talk about it, and after a second, said, "I'll
start some coffee." Simple as that.

Usually I try not to infringe on Scully's apartment.
Our work has taken over so much of her life... I owe it to
her to stay out of her home, keep it sacrosanct. Tonight
isn't "usually".

I don't know how she can stand that sofa-- it's so
soft and gooshy that when you sit in it, the cushions nearly
swallow you alive. There was a little ball with a bell on it
sitting in the corner... must've been a toy for that orange
tumbleweed she called a dog. Queequeg. I hadn't realized how
attached she was to it until the dog wound up as alligator
bait on one of our stranger cases. I guess I should've
insisted that we put it in a kennel, even if Scully did
have an ethical aversion to cooping animals up in tiny cages.
Conditions in the alligator were probably way more cramped
than any kennel.

I told her about the vacuum cleaner. (If I type or
even see the words "vacuum cleaner" one more time, I'm going
to lay siege on every housewares department in Virginia...)
Her face took on that resigned, patient look that means she
thinks I'm overlooking some small fact that provides a reasonable
explanation.

But whatever that small, vital fact is, neither of
us could find it tonight. Scully said, "When I got your
message, I went back and looked at the ElectroVac sales
records." She shook her head. "Those records only go back
to 1985." Then she ran through a variety of possibilies... none
of which were all that plausible-- even proposed an outside
accomplice who was fact-gathering for Roche, but she let that
one collapse under its own weight, admitting that the Princess
was too small and specific a detail for him to know.

Finally she offered, "I'm having ElectroVac run down
Roche's whereabouts in 1973. We should be able to find out
if he was really on the Vineyard."

"What if he was?" I could hardly hear my own voice.
"What if he did it?"

"Mulder, I don't think he did."

I just stared into my coffee. Decaf, of course. She'd
probably put Valium in it if she wasn't bound by the Hippocratic
oath. Confidentiality and consent. I think that's in there...
or maybe it's just "First do no harm".

Then she ventured, quietly, "What about everything
we've learned? About... the smallpox vaccinations, the tests..."

"What about it."

"We were told that they took Samantha. To keep your
father from talking about the tests."

"Sure. And who told us that? One of them. We can't
trust anything they say."

"You told me that you talked to your mother--"

"She'd say anything to get me to shut up and stop
asking her about it." I had to stare at my hands to keep them
from balling up into fists again, pounding them against the desk
until the knuckles split. "And she didn't say they took Sam."

Scully's voice tried hard to be gentle.. "She told you
that your father asked her to choose."

"It doesn't have to mean anything that he asked that.
It could have been rhetorical. Maybe he was reading _Sophie's
Choice_, maybe he was just-- you didn't know my father, he
read a lot of philosophy, he used to ask that question about
the sinking boat and who should you save, the doctor or the
priest or the pregnant woman--"

"Mulder," she insisted, then took a breath. "Is it
easier to believe it may have been Roche than to put the
blame on your father?"

I hate the way it sounds when I yell. It sounds like
Dad when I yell. It gets away from me so quickly and I can't
lower my voice, can't listen anymore. This time I managed
to stop after How could you even ask me that, but it made my
chest hurt to hold it in.

Scully didn't back away, though. She came over to
the chair and leaned against it. "I'm sorry," she said.

I sounded so calm, maybe even a little amused: "Yes,
Scully, it's much easier for me to think it was Roche. Strangulation
with a vacuum cleaner cord is far preferable to the alternatives...
let me review my options... either my father allowed Samantha
to be taken away by a bunch of powermongers who subjected her
to DNA experimentation, cloned her, who knows what they did to
her. Or she was abducted by aliens who likewise put her
through endless, probably painful tests. Or she's lying in
a shallow grave with a heart cut out of her nightgown. Yeah,
give me the most hopeless scenario, Scully, I'll take door
number three."

"I don't think it was him," she persisted, voice as
low and soft as mine was tight and harsh.

"I don't know." After twenty-three years and so much
searching, still no closer... "Scully, I was there and I don't
know."

She put her arms around my shoulders, just enough to
let me know she was there. I forget sometimes how little she
is, only remember when her hand's so small on mine.

Eventually we had to dump out the coffee and say
goodnight. And at least I managed to make her laugh before
I left.

Even now... _especially_ now... it's good to hear.

end part five