Disclaimers, etc. w/ first part.

5/12

Madeline Roark's residence 12:27 PM

There can't be any preparation for it.

For years, before serial killers or aliens had taken their place in my dreams at night, I had braced myself for the call. If it were the best-case scenario, Mom or Dad would be the one making it. Samantha, it would turn out, was home and alive. We were all getting together, patching up all those years she'd been gone to make them sound slightly better than the desolate hell they were.

Family, heal thyself.

Suddenly, I'd have those stories everyone else had, about siblings. It wouldn't be some painful blind date that epitomized the whole family experience, whatever that was. Some dark-haired, smoky-eyed girl with legs out to there. "Do you have any brothers or sisters?" It was laughable, really. All I wanted was to say yeah. Yeah, I got a sister. Lives up in New Hampshire with her husband and the two kids. If my intention was to get laid, though, the little sister long gone and far away story would always get me the pity-fuck. Too bad that everytime I told it, I just wanted to go home and blow my brains out.

The worst-case scenario was the call from the police. Found your sister, they'd intone in that dull roar, resenting the role of messenger. They they'd ask if she had some dental records the coroner could look over, just to make sure, because she was just another surprise for some pipelayers digging up old gas lines, sir.

When I looked at her with whatever hope I might still have after all these years and said her name, only to have it reciprocated with a bewildered smile of confusion, I was reminded that life is *never* the best-case scenario.

But I *knew* it was her. The moment I saw her. When I walked up to the house that night and saw her talking to Mom, part of me knew something wasn't right, even though hope blinded me to the fact. That night she walked into the diner, that hope froze me out. But today, I had no hope.

So it had to be her.

Scully turned loose of my hand, mumbling about walking back to the car, and when I told her she's staying, it sounded so harsh. But it had become her quest too, hadn't it? She'd paid for it often enough, and she got to experience the bitter triumph, too.

"What's this all about?" Madeline Roark asked.

I'm still waiting for it to dawn on her that I'm her brother, that I'm familiar. She's changed since the meeting at the diner. Her hair was shorn short, curling just under her ears. I didn't remember her being rail-thin. It looked like it hurt her just to bend her fingers.

"It's me," I told her raggedly. "It's Fox."

On the sofa behind me, Scully puts her face partly in her hand. She knew. This is the part with the car wreck. One hope has gone on a sickening death spin, colliding with the fact that my sister -- the person that should be my sister -- is regarding me with a total lack of realization.

"Should I know you?" Madeline smiled, awkwardly polite. "Did we go to school together?"

Yeah, for about three years, I started to say, and suddenly I knew what Scully knew when she dragged me over here. I understood why she did it against her better judgement, because Madeline Roark was not going to crash to her knees and weep at my feet in joyful reunion.

"If you're one of the FBI agents who was out here before, I'm afraid I don't remember you." She sat down across from Scully, and though I didn't recall taking a seat, me. "I'd just gotten out of the hospital with major surgery, and the painkillers hadn't worn off yet. Who knows what I actually told those men about Pam?" Silence. "This *is* about Pam, isn't it?"

I glanced sideways at Scully, open-mouthed. My hand rested between us and she wound her fingers around my arm briefly. I pulled my wallet out of the inside of my jacket. Jammed between the video store cards and the other junk I accumulated just by moving was a picture of her I kept with me. I think she was seven at the time, but I wasn't sure. Her little league picture. It was the one that ran in the newspaper when she disappeared. "This *was* about Pam Wyeth," I heard myself say as she took the picture from me.

She held the picture up, looked away from it, and held it up again. "Where did you get this?"

"That's a picture of my sister the year before she went missing." I waited for the words to make sense to her. "She was a good catcher. Maybe she still is."

"Oh, I -- " She studied the picture then. "I understand now. You think I'm your sister." Her laugh betrayed her composure. "This *does* look like me. Really, it's remarkable, but I was born and raised here. I've lived here all my life."

I don't believe in coincidences. Either she was my sister, or she was one of a roomful of women who looked like her. The first explanation suggested she'd been brainwashed somehow. The second didn't leave her room to have been born or raised anywhere, not in any humanly comprehensible way.

Scully asked the question for me, a question that had been asked of her years before, worded slightly differently. "Have you had an unexplained event in your life?"

I cut to the chase. "Say when you were around eight?"

Her gaze traveled from Scully's face to mine, clueless. "What are you trying to say exactly? That I'm lying about where I came from?" she asked icily. "Sorry, I'm not your sister. I am, however, Pam's friend, and I'd like to help you catch the guy who's after her. That is your first priority, isn't it?"

Scully had my hand again. "I don't think this guy is after Pam Wyeth at all. I think he's after you."

"Excuse me?"

Taking over, Scully asked, "You carpool with Pam Wyeth, right?"

Anger now. Hostility. I got up to move around the place as she responded, eyes following me. "Back when they allowed her to actually do her job, yes, we carpooled to work together."

I was standing in her dining room. She'd been sitting there reading before we knocked. There was a pile of sunflower seed shells lying there next to the book. We Mulders and our oral fixations.

"What do you do at NeuroMast?"

"I answered this question about twenty minutes ago," Madeline said coldly. "If memory serves."

But memory doesn't serve, I thought to myself, finding a sandwich bag in a basket on her phone table. I scooped up some of the empty shells, those darkened with saliva, using the bag to cover my fingers. Twisting the plastic around and looping it into a knot, I slipped the bag into my pocket. Memory doesn't serve, so we have to serve ourselves. I refused to be fooled again.

"I'm asking these questions for my partner's edification."

"Your partner isn't in here." I heard Madeline rise from her chair. "In fact, he's prowling around my kitchen, and I don't believe he has a search warrant for the premises."

I met her there in the doorway. "I'm not prowling. I'm just stretching my legs. You work with Pam Wyeth? On the same project?"

She didn't sit back down until I did. "Pam did actual scientific research while she was there. I'm just a project researcher. I administrate. Desk job. Once we got out of the car, we barely saw each other until we left to go home." She released a breath and her eyes bore straight into mine. "So what's this about the stalker being after me?"

It made sense. If Krycek was staking out her house, he could've very well have done it from Pam Wyeth's house, or some strategic point in-between. If he was hanging around where they worked, Pam -- the one on the lookout -- would've noticed him first thing. Pam was only half-right, I suspected. Someone was being stalked, and it wasn't her.

And if Madeline Roark wasn't Samantha, what use was she to Krycek?

"We haven't ruled out the possibility that he's stalking someone besides Pam Wyeth," Scully replied, and I silently implored her to speak for me. She swallowed, wary. "It's possible it's you."

"First I'm accused of not knowing who I really am," she said incredulously. "And now you're going out of your way to frighten me?"

This was happening too fast, and against any scenario I had ever planned in my mind. "Is there a chance that you *aren't* who you think you are? The slightest chance?"

She took to questions about as well as my mother. Rock the boat and my mother would immediately fall out of it, slapping and pitching a fit. Like mother, like daughter. "I know who I am. My name is Madeline Roark. I was born here. You know what? My family lives about ten miles from here. Let me write down that address for you. My mother and father, my three brothers, my little sister...they'd all be just *happy* to verify that I am who I say." She angrily ripped a sheet of stationery out of a notebook, and I thought the pen would tear through the page she pressed down so hard. She wrote an address down and shoved it towards my chest. Mom to the letter, I thought. The same cleft in her chin, the same slight underbite, the same way of cutting identical blue eyes. "Any other questions, Agent Mulder?"

I folded the page carefully. "Not right now."

She looked from me to Scully, and back again. "Unless you need to ask me something else concerning Pam, I'd prefer you leave. I wouldn't want Pam to find out that you're not working on her case at all."

It's not her case anymore, I thought. In Pam, Krycek had the ultimate red herring and the most potent of jinxes. Regardless of who was being pursued, she'd blown his cover.

I watched the door close on my sister's face.

I'd found what had been lost. I was sure of that. But she didn't even know she was lost, and she didn't want to be found.

"I didn't think this case could get more confusing." Scully leaned back in the car seat wearily. "But I think it just did."

I had my face on the steering wheel, somewhere between hyperventilating and falling asleep. "It's as clear as it's ever been, Scully. Krycek found out she was here -- in what capacity I don't know -- and he's laying a trap for her. Somehow." I swallowed. "Okay, so we know why he's here now. That's more than we knew before."

"You really think it's her?"

Visible even from Pam Wyeth's yard, the blinds in the front window of Madeline Roark's house moved, two blades parting momentarily and then angrily snapping back into place. "I think it is, Scully...but I don't trust myself."

She breathed a relieved sigh. She had the lecture all ready, the quick crash course in skepticism. Now she wouldn't have to deliver it. "I don't trust her, Mulder. I -- the minute I saw her, it only took me a second to realize who she...who she's supposed to be. I said your name, just to see -- there was no reaction there, Mulder."

"Maybe she doesn't remember."

"Maybe there's nothing *to* remember." Nerves alone had drained the color from her face. "This case just took on a new dimension. You have to realize that. You told me about walking into that room, where everyone looked like her. You were so angry. Whatever you did with that anger, I want you to find it."

I laughed. How optimistic. Objectivity in a time like this. "Scully, when she -- when I talked to her, or someone I thought was her, in that diner...I rehearsed that moment ad nauseum. What I would say, how I would say it. And none of it came out right. She didn't say her part. She didn't want to see me, know me. She didn't ask how she could contact me later. Said she had another family somewhere, that the past was too disturbing." I caught myself growling the words. "As if I didn't know that. As if it wasn't disturbing for me. After that night, it became easier for me to just assume it wasn't her than to know it was and that she wouldn't talk to me." I felt the spreading sensation in my head that would manifest itself into tears at any moment. "I settled for uncertainty."

She was very still beside me. "The certainty is overrated, Mulder."

Oh god. Of course. I touched her arm gingerly. "I'm sorry."

"This isn't about any of that," she said firmly. "I'm tired of seeing you disappointed, Mulder. You think you've found something, and it's always been a trick. A mindgame. I'm sick and tired of it. You are, too, but you keep looking. The next time you see her, Mulder...I don't care what you have to do. You make sure it's her."

I shook my head, not understanding.

"You cut her," she whispered. "You make sure she bleeds red."

It reminded me of the bag in my pocket. I pulled it out. "These are hers. Can you get a DNA culture from a saliva-stained sunflower seed shell?"

She took the bag out of my fingers, something like admiration in her eyes. Maybe objectivity *was* possible, to an extent. She smiled. "That's what you were doing in the kitchen. Mulder --" She nodded. "We can get it out of the upholstery of a Ford Bronco. I don't know why we couldn't go back to Washington and run a comparison...her saliva and yours. It would at least give us a telling inconclusive result, if nothing else."

"Inconclusive?"

"Fifth and sixth nucleotides," she answered softly. "Remember? If it's not her, then she's not...one of us. The last time we saw something like this...the results came back that the DNA had been contaminated somehow."

"Do you know what you're saying, Scully?"

"Don't make me repeat it." She rolled the plastic bag in her hands. "I may not be able to."

I accepted that. "Washington...we won't be back in D.C. until Monday, and it could take them weeks to give us an answer. And it may not be the honest one that they give us."

"I'll supervise," she promised. "I won't let them snow us this time."

Scout's honor? I laughed under my breath. Three days without sleep had left me about two steps short of delirium, and coffee had stopped working this morning.

She read my mind. "I don't guess insisting that you go back to the hotel and try to get some rest would actually work, would it?"

I feigned faulty hearing. "Did you say something just now?"

She smiled. "Uh-huh. That's what I thought." She opened the glove compartment. " Let's find the nearest library on this map."

"I don't want a book, either."

"We're not looking for a book. We're looking for some newspaper archives. We know why Krycek's here now, or why he was here at any rate. What we don't know is Madeline Roark's history."

"It'd be faster to just go to Bartu -- whatever in the hell his name is."

"Bartusiak, and no." Smoothing the map over her knees, she pulled her hair away from her face. "Omaha field office agents could walk into that precinct at any moment and blow this entire case. One call to Kersh is all it would take, Mulder. If we don't find what we're looking for at the library, we'll hit City Hall. Bartusiak needs to be our last resort if we're going to keep a low profile."

It was always safe to defer to the partner who'd had the most sleep.

"I don't want to let her leave my sight, Scully." I watched the front of the house again. "I feel like I can't."

"She doesn't want us here, Mulder. She's more likely to call the police on us at this point than --" She waved her hand at the house next to us. "Pam Wyeth. That would bring someone besides Bartusiak, if I'm at all sure of what's going on here."

"So..." I rubbed at my eyes. My face felt numb. I caught the reflection of the Jeep Cherokee in the side mirror. "Then we'll have her watched."

"Put one of the guys on her?"

"Why not? If you and I are together, we don't need Jonson *and* McGrath." Jonson was already standing outside of the Jeep, and I rolled down the window, motioning to him slightly.

He jogged up, backpack jostling. "Yeah?"

"I want you to stay here and keep me posted on what happens at that house." I pointed across the open patch of grass. "Tell McGrath to get in the car and you stay with the Jeep. She leaves the house or...anything, you call."

"Roark's?" He adjusted the case. "Should I set up here or get closer?"

Down the street from Madeline Roark's, but out of Pam Wyeth's forcefield, if that was possible, I thought, telling him where to put the Jeep. "Get in touch with your sneaky side, Jonson. McGrath or one of us will relieve you in a few."

"On it," Jonson muttered, walking back to get McGrath.

"Let me drive, Mulder."

"I'm not that drowsy," I asserted.

Besides, I hadn't been this awake in a month.

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