Chapter Text
After a hundred years
Nobody knows the place,--
Agony, that enacted there,
Motionless as peace.
--Emily Dickinson, J. 1147 ("The Forgotten Grave")
The first question Scully had about the South Road Ghost was whether to classify it as a revenge or reenactment haunting. After seven years of working with Mulder's eccentric record-keeping system, this no longer seemed a strange question to ask. She scanned the one-page fax while sipping her morning coffee, making small notations in the margins with a red pen.
The fax had apparently come from a private citizen, a man named Irv Stuckey who wrote with an old typewriter ribbon and couldn't spell. He complained at some length about how no one at the FBI or his local sheriff's office took him seriously or answered his letters. Great. This kind of case was a nightmare to sell upstairs. Scully wrote at the bottom, "Jurisdiction?"
The relevant part of the letter read:
This aftrenoon at apprx. 3 pm Kristie Herron was found dead at foot of Wesquobsque Cliffs of a brken neck. As you know the South Road gohst does haunt these clifts and you know what for. Kristie had all the marks encluding knife cuts on her hands and leg & it was the right kind of night very cold & windy.
If you do the kind of work J. Luce, Jr. says you do and are not just wasting taxes you will come out and investegate the death of this poor girl. Even with what happend in Boston she deserves better then to die this way & her mother is very broken up. My ph. # is the same as the last letter I sent but since you proabably threw it out here it is again 963-0545.
Sincereley,Irv Stuckey
It wasn't the weirdest or most illiterate letter Scully had received while working on the X-Files, and she didn't let its eccentricities distract her. Irv's description of Kristie's wounds intrigued her particularly. He didn't seem to be a family member and he certainly wasn't a pathologist. Where had he gotten his information? She drew an arrow from his comment about knife cuts to the bottom of the page, where she noted sarcastically, "Clearly, falling over a cliff precludes the possibility these cuts were due to natural causes."
She tapped her pen cap against the former break-room table that served as her desk. Her options were to dismiss Irv's claims and round-file the letter, or accept the case and write it up as some kind of paranormal event. For years she'd left this duty to Mulder on general principles, but eventually her protests against his bookkeeping methods began to feel childish, and now she wrote cases up herself.
Should she go with reenactment haunting or revenge? Irv had hinted that the ghost's appearance was recurrent, which any good paranormal investigator knew was typical of the reenactment type. And yet there were the supposed knife wounds to think of.
Only Mulder would come up with a system that classified paranormal phenomena by motive. Fine -- eenie, meenie, miney, moe . . . Revenge haunting it is. Scully wrote the new case number across the top of the letter, "X-00-300.17-01." The first vengeful ghost of the year 2000.
At that moment the door to the office opened and Mulder came in, sipping coffee from his MUFON mug. "'Morning," he said.
"Good morning," she responded. Though their words were restrained and their manner professional, their gazes met and held too long for mere courtesy.
The familiar electrifying feeling began to build, and soon Scully looked away. The Hoover Building had not been a friendly place for her in some time, and she felt too exposed when she allowed herself to experience powerful emotions while on the job.
The gossip about her and Mulder was nothing new, of course, except that now some of it was true. Worse, the rumors were circulated with a barely-veiled hostility that made them more than just embarrassing. They were offensively intimate, like a dirty stranger peering in at the window. Lately she'd taken to saving up her photocopying until the very end of the day, when the copy room was likely to be deserted.
Holding out Irv Stuckey's fax, Scully said, "This came in early this morning -- a report of an unexplained death. I've just officially made it a revenge haunting,"
"Really. That's different." Mulder stood behind her -- too close for propriety, as usual -- and looked over her shoulder at the paper.
She repressed the urge to elbow him for teasing her. Obliviousness to gossip was all very well for him -- Scully had previous experience with "discreet" romances, and knew popular opinion tended to be much harsher toward the woman.
She persevered in her attempt to remain businesslike. "The fax's author is writing from a place called the Wesqobsque Cliffs, although I'd be lying if I said I knew where those were. He seems to know you."
For some reason, that information took all the playfulness out of Mulder. "Wesqobsque?" he asked, taking the fax from her hand.
"What?" she asked, turning to look up at him. A fine line had appeared between his brows -- a look of pain.
"You all right?" she asked. Office protocol forgotten, she rested her hand on his arm.
He did not meet her gaze as he edged out from behind her table and walked over to his desk. All intense focus now, Mulder set the fax down and began rifling through papers in a drawer. "Irv's a local crackpot -- most of his stories are worth their weight in crap. With luck, this one's as much garbage as the rest of them."
She got up and followed him. "Mulder, I don't understand," she said.
After a moment he stopped rummaging around and looked up at her. "I grew up near the Wesquobsque Cliffs. They run along the Vineyard's South Shore, from Chilmark to Aquinnah. The story of the South Road Ghost is just an old myth from that area, local color that plays well to kids and tourists. I doubt Irv even believes in it -- he's just using it for his own purposes." After that he went back to digging through the drawer again, cursing softly as he dropped handfuls of bent business cards and Post-It notes onto the blotter.
"Did you know her? The girl who died?" Scully asked softly.
He continued his search as he spoke. "A little -- just a little bit. Really I know her mother, or I used to. Patty Todd used to baby-sit us when we were little -- her mom was a friend of my mother's. Patty sent me a card when my dad died . . . " Frustrated, Mulder slammed the drawer back in the desk.
In the violence of the gesture, Scully sensed how much he was still suffering over the recent loss of his mother, as well as his grief at learning the truth about what happened to Samantha. She reached out to him again, offering a steadying touch.
Whether he noticed her outstretched hand or not, he knocked it away while straightening up. "Jesus, Kristie died down there on the beach and Irv wants to blame it on the South Road Ghost? He's such a little shit."
"Mulder, you want to tell me what's going on?" she asked. He still had the irritating tendency to draw her into his tortured inner monologues without quite acknowledging her presence.
"Sorry," he murmured. Mulder dropped down into his chair and ran his fingers through his hair, as if trying to soothe himself. “I’m looking for Joey Luce's number at the Chilmark police station. If anybody knows what's going on, he should. I hope he'll tell me Irv's full of it."
Still confused, Scully tried focusing on the basics. "So you’re saying I shouldn't bother with this case. This isn't an X-File -- it's just some guy on Martha's Vineyard who likes to stir up trouble."
Mulder sat back in his chair, as if forcibly relinquishing some inner tension. At last he looked up at her, and his expression was very sad. "I'm not saying you shouldn't bother. It's . . . complicated. The story of the South Road Ghost has a meaning -- there's a moral to it."
Scully sat down on the edge of his desk, willing to listen.
As she suspected, Mulder couldn't resist the chance to tell a good creepy story, even in his current distressed state. "Supposedly, the ghost is a widow named Mary Brown who was executed during the winter of 1778. That was a bad winter for the Island -- bad all around."
"That was the winter George Washington spent at Valley Forge," Scully said. Images from her childhood history books came to mind -- soldiers with black, gangrenous feet, shivering around the fire where they boiled shoe leather for food.
Mulder nodded. "Boston didn't have enough naval power to defend the islands off the Cape, and the British had them under siege. There was a lot of hunger, a lot of disease. Mary Brown's husband went down with his whole crew in Nantucket Sound when he tried engaging a British war ship in his fishing boat." He must have seen Scully's look of amazement because he added, "They say the Vineyarders were brave on the water -- no one ever said they were smart.
"After Captain Brown died, Mary gave birth to another baby and apparently something just snapped. She probably couldn't feed the kids and . . ." He seemed to be backing away from a too-accurate reconstruction of the woman's misery. "Anyway, she went nuts. Killed both her children with a kitchen knife and tried to cut her own throat."
Mulder fell silent a moment. He rubbed the back of one hand with his thumb, as if trying to wear away something unpleasant about his boyhood home. "From our vantage point we can say, 'Oh, it was post-partum psychosis brought on by stress. Nowadays she might get off with manslaughter.' The Chilmark fathers didn't see it that way. The women of the town nursed her back to health and a few days after the new year, they hanged her. They say her ghost wanders the land along the South Shore with her head held up like a lantern. I guess the townswomen didn't do as good a job of healing her as they thought."
Scully's medical training offered her a graphic image of the likely effects of hanging on a near-severed throat. "That would have been bad," she said.
"It must have been. She's supposed to appear on cold, windy nights to women who've grievously wronged their own children. Some say she slashes the mothers up with the murder knife, and some say just looking at her drives guilty women mad, and they kill themselves. It's a Lovecraftian, inversion-of-the-natural-order sort of thing. Very Freud, very Brothers Grimm. The only problem is that there's nothing to the story. No one's ever found a record showing that Mary Brown even existed, and I've been over every inch of those woods along the South Shore -- daytime, nighttime, summer, winter. The house I grew up in is about three-quarters of a mile from the South Road Burying Ground. There's nothing out there."
"So Irv Stuckey is implying that Kristie Herron deserved to die because of something she did to harm her own child?" Scully asked. "You're right, he is a shit." She hoped that Irv's little theory hadn't made it back to Kristie's family. "Do you think that's what he meant by 'what happened in Boston' -- something involving child abuse? Child neglect?"
"I don't know what he meant by that," Mulder said. "As far as I know, Kristie didn't have any kids. It sure doesn't seem right that Patty's old enough to be a grandmother. Christ, that makes me feel ancient."
"Don't remind me," Scully groaned. Only two months ago, she had spent her 36th birthday among a gaggle of relatives, most of them with sticky-fingered toddlers and baby carriers in tow. A cousin had managed to produce the first female Scully child in over 15 years, a red-haired, blue-eyed baby named Emily Christine. The coloring was the predominant one for their family and the name a coincidence -- "Emily" was one of the top ten most popular girls' names in the country. And yet, the experience had called to mind with terrible sharpness the passage of time and what might have been.
"You've got a long way to go before you're old, Red," Mulder said. He caught her little finger in his hand. Their relationship was still in flux, but there were moments of tenderness to anchor it, like stones at the edges of billowing fabric. At last, Mulder managed to find the much-bent card he was seeking, wedged in the cramped space where the drawer's side met the desk wall. He smoothed it out against the desk with the side of his hand, and Scully saw it read, "Sergeant Joseph A. Luce, Chilmark Police."
Mulder dialed the phone, and after a moment began the introduction she'd heard a thousand times. "Good morning, this is Special Agent Fox Mulder of the FBI and I --" He didn't get any farther far a long time.
"On hold?" Scully mouthed.
He shook his head and gave her a pained look. Eventually he said, "Great, Doreen, thanks. Listen, is Joey--" Apparently he'd been cut off again. Several seconds passed. Mulder pushed the speaker phone button and suddenly the air was full of verbiage.
"--and she only just came back from off-Island and was going to meetings and she met a nice guy and everything and it seemed like she was getting her life back together when suddenly this happens and people are saying suicide but they'd never say that if they knew her like I did--" Blessedly, Mulder hit the speaker-off button and Doreen's voice ceased.
"Wow," Scully said.
Doreen must have taken a breath because Mulder said, "I need to talk to Joe." Another pause. "Chief Joe, no kidding. Well, I need to talk to -- . . . Doreen . . . For crying out loud, Dori, would you just put me through to -- Thank you." Mulder glanced up, looking slightly embarrassed. Holding his hand over the mouthpiece of the phone, he whispered, "Inbred."
Scully looked away, trying very hard not to laugh. She had long been accustomed to the odd combination of nostalgia and distaste Mulder felt toward the one-stoplight town where he was raised. After a few moments, he said, "Hi, Joe, this is Fox Mulder. Yeah, I heard -- that's why I'm calling. Actually, I hoped you'd tell me Irv was just hitting the hash pipe and it was all a mistake. No, he faxed us late last night -- early this morning, really." Glancing up at Scully, he added, “Listen, my partner's here, would you mind if I put this on speaker phone? Great."
Mulder touched the speaker button again and said, "Chief Luce, this is Special Agent Dana Scully."
"Hello, Chief," Scully said.
"Good to meet you, Agent," Joe said. His voice sounded slightly canned coming through the speaker. "So, Fox, what exactly did Irv want? Don't tell me it was just to spare Patty the grief of telling you herself."
"He wants to bring the South Road Ghost into it," Mulder said.
A second or so of silence followed, and then Joe said, "Aw, Hell."
"Actually if there was a South Road Ghost he'd have called the right place," Mulder said. "My partner was about to classify this as another X-File."
"Refresh my memory . . . an X-File is a what again?" Joe asked.
"We investigate paranormal phenomena," Mulder said. He shot Scully a mischievous look and added, "You know, chasing ghosts, Big Foot, lake monsters . . ."
"Not all of which turn out to be what witnesses claim," Scully pointed out.
"Right, right . . . you did the monster-man thing, the Chernobyl guy Dori says washed up out of Nantucket Sound." Joe said.
Scully felt a surge of dismay that yet another person had read her out-of context quotes printed in the Midnight Inquisitor. A quick change of subject seemed to be best. "Chief, I thought it was a little odd that Mr. Stuckey knew so much about the manner of Kristie's death," Scully said. "He wasn't at the scene, was he?"
Joe sighed. Scully imagined him rubbing his eyes in weariness. If he'd been up as late as Irv had, he wouldn't have gotten much sleep. "No -- Irv took a job as an orderly at the hospital four nights a week. When things get slow he hangs out in one of the ambulances and listens to the emergency band channels. Gets all the good dirt on the neighbors that way. He must have heard someone from Crime Scene Services making arrangements to transport the body. Jesus, he knew Kristie was dead before her own mother did, and the first thing that crosses his mind is that old ghost story. Man, he's a creepy old SOB. I'll have to see that he doesn't harass Mark and Patty. I'm sorry he bothered you."
"No, not at all," Mulder said. "If there's anything Agent Scully or I could do to help we'd be glad." He seemed to hesitate a moment, then asked, "Do you have anything to go on? Any suspects? Dori was saying something about Kristie going to 12-step groups and meeting a new boyfriend . . ."
"Yeah, there's a guy named Randy Akers she was seeing. We haven't talked to him yet -- apparently he was out last night. He's not a suspect at the moment. Actually we don't have any suspects. Right now this is just an equivocal death investigation," Joe said.
"Can you give me an idea what happened?" Mulder asked.
"I can tell you Kristie left her parents' house sometime after 12:30 a.m., Thursday, wearing a real light jacket and her mom's shoes. It wasn't a nice night to go for a walk, either -- just above freezing with falling sleet."
Mulder was chewing on his pen cap, something he did when he was concentrating and didn't have any sunflower seeds. "She didn't have a fight, did she? Anybody hear her talking on the phone?"
"Her family says no. Her youngest brother's still living at home -- it's possible the two of them got into it over something and he was too ashamed to say so. Still, she had a car, she could have driven somewhere if she wanted to get out of the house. Her mom says running off on foot in the cold like that is out of character for her." Joe paused for a moment, then said, "The Herrons probably won't mind my telling you this -- it's not uncommon knowledge anyway. Kristie got into some trouble over in Boston last year. Drugs."
Mulder made a soft noise of dismay.
"She drew two years' probation, since she had no record and was able to give the DA's office some information on a guy they'd been looking for. The judge let her report over in Edgartown provided she stayed with her parents. It's only been about six months."
"And everybody's thinking the worst, right?" Mulder asked. Scully heard his own family's experience with Vineyard ostracism in the bitterness of his tone.
"I never said that, Fox," Joe said. "I honestly think she was done with the drug scene. I do. I'm just wondering if there was somebody in Boston who wasn't done with her. Someone sure put her through hell Thursday morning. She had a lot of what looked like knife cuts on her hands and a through-and-through stab wound to one leg."
"Defensive wounds?" Scully asked.
"Probably. There wasn't the kind of mutilation you sometimes see with a victim who's crossed a drug lord, but maybe he was just gearing up. I haven't discounted the possibility that she ran over the cliff in a panic while trying to escape," Joe said.
"Who's doing the autopsy?" Mulder asked.
"They're doing it in Boston, I don't know who specifically. Sergeant Tihkoosue from the Sate Police barracks in Oak Bluffs was going to attend, so he'd know as soon as anybody. I can ask him if you want," Joe said.
Mulder looked over at Scully. He didn't even need to say the words. "Could you give us just a minute, Chief?" Scully asked. "Sure," Joe said. Scully hit the phone's mute button.
"Mulder, the Massachusetts Chief Medical Examiner is Dr. Clarence Kreger. He's got a teaching position at Harvard Medical School -- he's been an international pathology lecturer. Any District Attorney would leap at the chance to work with him," she said.
"I don't care if he does 'pahk his cah in Hahvahd Yahd,' he hasn't seen the things you have," Mulder said.
"I thought you said there was no X-File here," she said.
"I said there was no South Road Ghost. In case you hadn't noticed, a connection to my family isn't exactly the key to great longevity. If there is anything strange about the way Kristie died you'll figure it out. If you say her death was straightforward then I'll be satisfied. Besides, if Kreger's schedule's as full as you say it is, he'll probably have some staff underling doing the autopsy. I'd rather have you do this than some overworked path resident," Mulder said.
Still sitting on the edge of his desk, Scully bent her head, her hair forming a thin screen against his hopeful look. Neither spoke of his mother's death. "Mulder . . . some news comes better from someone unconnected with the family. If I have to tell Kristie's parents something they don't want to hear, it could put you in a very difficult position."
"They can't ask for more than the truth, Scully. They shouldn't have to settle for less," Mulder said.
She looked up at him. Only two nights ago she'd been awakened by his bone-wracking sobs. His mother had shut him out in death as she had in life, and it had wounded him in a way that simply being orphaned couldn't have. He'd pulled Scully into a crushing embrace and asked, "Why didn't she tell me?" As always, Scully had no answer. She could only hold him until his ragged gasps quieted and he was able to sleep. Afterward she'd lain awake a long time, replaying Teena Mulder's autopsy again and again in her mind. What if she'd missed some tiny forensic clue that would have allowed her to come to any conclusion other than suicide?
"I trust your judgment." He spoke gently, as if to reassure her. "If you tell me bad news it's only because it's true."
Scully released her breath slowly. "I'll volunteer and let the family decide," she said. She hit the phone's mute button and asked, "Chief, are you still there?"
"Still here. What's going on?" Joe asked.
"I'm a forensic pathologist," she said. "Mulder thought I might be of help to the investigation. I'm willing to do the autopsy if you and the family think my experience would be useful."
"She's investigated a lot of strange deaths," Mulder said.
"Well . . . no offense, but I think the State ME has seen his share of strange deaths too," Joe said.
"Not like Scully has. Has Dr. Kreger ever seen a Level 4 biological agent crawl out of a rock, through the seal of somebody's space suit and into a body cavity?" Mulder asked.
"Good God . . . I hope not," said Joe. "Look, if you really want to help, I can mention your offer to Kristie's parents and see what they think. You should call Patty too -- she'd be glad to hear from you."
"I'll have to do that. I appreciate you talking to me, Joe," Mulder said.
As Mulder reached toward the disconnect button Joe said, "Hey, Fox? You know there's no hard feelings, right? My uncle and I didn't have the same opinions on everything."
"Sure. Talk to you later," Mulder said.
"Yeah, bye," Joe said. Mulder hung up the phone.
"What was that about?" Scully asked.
"It's a long story," Mulder said. "One of these complicated things that happens in small towns where people get cut off from the world during the winter." He started gathering up the pile of bent cards and notes and pushing them back in his desk drawer.
"Such as? Are we talking Donner's Pass or what?" Scully asked. She saw a flicker of amusement cross his face.
"Not quite." He shut the drawer and looked up at her. "Joey's uncle -- whose name was also Joseph Luce -- was the Chilmark Chief of Police back in the 70's. He never thought much of my family's story about how my sister disappeared."
"He blamed you," Scully said.
"He blamed my father, actually. No charges were ever filed but we became personae non gratae with the neighbors pretty quick. I had to listen to a lot of bullshit when I went back to the Vineyard to visit my dad. At one point Joey actually accused me of helping to cover up my sister's murder, so I punched his lights out for him. It didn't exactly endear me to the Island's premier law enforcement family."
"I bet not," Scully said.
"When my father was murdered, Joseph Luce, Sr., was Dukes County Sheriff," Mulder said. "Unfortunately he hadn't forgotten me."
"He called me," Scully said, remembering suddenly. "He left about three messages a day on my answering machine when I was in New Mexico."
"He called me too. He and Liz Hawley of the West Tisbury PD figured I was looking pretty good for the only up-island homicide in 20 years. Then you managed to trace the gun back to Krycek and the investigation stalled out over a literal shadowy one-armed man. I can imagine that went over real well with Sheriff Luce."
"He couldn't have wanted you to be guilty," Scully said.
"No," Mulder said. "It was the law of averages that bugged him. Do the Mulders: A., have the worst luck in history, or B., have connections to dangerous people they shouldn't? I think he had us pegged as an organized crime family. Might not have been far wrong, really."
"Mulder, that is completely unfair to your parents. Your father died trying to expose the men who killed him," Scully said.
"Yeah," Mulder said, as if unwillingly conceding the point. "Joe called me after what happened with Roche. He was with the Chilmark Police by then. He wanted to know why I'd let a sociopathic child killer loose on his island. I never called him back. What was I going to say?"
"The Luce family aren't your judges, Mulder," Scully said.
"No, but Cheryl Luce used to be Samantha's best friend. Maybe Joey was mine -- I don't know. We spent a lot of time at their house in the months before my sister was taken. Home wasn't so great just then. My dad wasn't working so hard to expose the men who killed him at the time."
"I'm sorry," was all Scully could think to say. She still felt awkward at moments like this. She was a fixer by nature. It was Mulder himself who'd helped her understand that suffering was normal, that a person could hurt without being broken. She kept silent and hoped she was a soothing presence.
Finally he said, "I lied to you -- the Vineyard is haunted. But only by the past." He got up and walked out into the hall. She repressed her urge to follow. When he wanted her, he knew where she'd be.