"Shit!"

Scully was wrenched from sleep by the sharp expletive, not so much by the word itself as by the fear in Mulder's shout. She felt the car moving under her in a dizzying skid, and reached out instinctively for the dashboard to brace herself against impact.

Lights flashed, horns blared, the world spun around. For one brief surreal moment they were sliding sideways across all three lanes of traffic, straight for the guard rail. Then Mulder, used to driving on ice, self-corrected by turning into the skid and regaining control of the car. They rocketed around a truck pulling a horse trailer, and landed back in the mainstream of traffic, unharmed.

Scully put her hand over her heart, her eyes wide and staring, for a few seconds. When she could speak, she said, "What happened?"

"Didn't you see her?"

"See who? Mulder, I was asleep. What did you see?"

"A girl, hitchhiking, right down the middle lane of the road."

Scully twisted around in her seat to look through the rear window, but all she saw was the lights of the cars behind her.

"A girl? Are you sure?"

"Sure I'm sure." His voice was on the cutting edge between anger and defensiveness. "She had long blonde hair and a checked shirt on, and jeans. She had a backpack, too."

"She was hitchhiking down the center lane of the highway?"

Mulder's response was to steer the car to the right so hard Scully had to catch herself on the door. He sped up to fit himself between two cars, and took the exit ramp.

"Mulder, what are you doing?"

"I'm going back there. Traffic must be doing eighty miles an hour, and there's no way someone hasn't hit her by now."

Scully was quiet. She was quiet when he made the u turn at the next turnaround, quiet when he went two exits down and made another u turn back up onto an entrance ramp. Quiet until they passed their original exit.

Then she said, "Maybe somebody picked her up."

Mulder fixed her with a deadly glare. "Damnit, Scully, I SAW her."

"Watch the road," she warned, and he reluctantly turned his head. She said, "I never said you didn't see her, Mulder."

Five miles passed by. Ten.

Scully said softly, "What's wrong?"

He hit the steering wheel with the palm of his hand, not hard, but with feeling. "I saw her."

"And I said I believed you."

He gave her a moody glance. "Bullshit. If you believed me, we'd be out there right now walking up and down the shoulder of the road looking for a body."

"Well, did anyone else swerve as if they saw her?"

"As if?"

"I mean, when they saw her."

"I don't know. I was too busy pulling us out of that skid."

"It was a good job, too."

"Don't patronize me, Scully."

"I wasn't--" Scully bit back a sharp reply, and tried to speak in an even tone. "Well, what do you want me to say, Mulder? That I saw her, too? Because I didn't."

"Of course not."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"It means what it means, Scully. You said you were asleep."

"I WAS asleep."

Silence again. This time Scully settled back down into her seat, her chin tucked down, scowling out the window. Mulder sat with his back rigid, staring straight ahead, jaw set.

In these positions, they passed the city limit signs and entered Houston, Texas.

********************

Lone Star Motel, 9:30PM

Even at thirty five dollars a night, the motel rooms they got weren't half bad. The beds were firm, the carpets grease-free, and the walls looked recently painted.

Scully, in her blue pajamas, sat up in bed and tried to find a television station out of a seemingly infinite cable selection. She paused in her surfing when she came across Patrick Stewart doing "Moby Dick." Although she had only seen the actor on Star Trek, she had the curious sensation that they had met before, and that she knew him on some level other than as a public performer.

Then she remembered on Star Trek he had been bald. Maybe it was just something about bald men. She wondered what Skinner would look like with hair, and smiled to herself. (He's got hair. Lots and lots of hair. It just doesn't show.)

When she heard Mulder's light four-tap knock on her door, two slow, two fast, she called, "Come in," and put the mute button on. She and Mulder always exchanged extra keys to their rooms; it was an old habit that had once mildly excited her whenever they did it. Just the idea of Mulder having her key in his pocket was somehow so...personal. But he'd carried them for years and never used them. Now she never lay awake in the dark anymore, wondering if some hot lonely night he would get it into his head to slip his key into her lock.

Well, almost never.

She gave one last regretful look at Jean-Luc/Ahab and turned to watch Mulder slink into the room. He leaned against things, clumsy and overly casual, apologetic but not wanting to say he was sorry until he knew she wasn't going to bite his head off.

"Going to bed so early?" he asked.

"Not much else to do."

There was a round table in the corner with two chairs. She had set up her laptop and briefcase there. Mulder pulled out a chair and straddled it, wrapping his arms around its back and resting his chin on one of his forearms.

"Sorry I was so edgy back there."

She made a little shrug/forget it gesture. "You must be tired from all that driving."

He said, "It's just that I feel like you don't believe me anymore, Scully. About anything."

She tilted her head to look at him from under her eyelashes. "Well, I never did, you know."

He smiled without humor. "But lately it's different. You used to love this job. Now sometimes I wonder."

"I don't love Texas," she said.

His smile had a little more warmth. "Maybe this time will be different."

"Well, it's certainly gotten off to a good start, hasn't it?"

He sighed. "Anyway...I'm sorry."

She turned the television off. "I thought for a minute you'd seen the famous Vanishing Hitchhiker."

"Who?"

"You know. The urban legend."

He nodded, his eyes distant as he recalled the tale. "Oh, that's right. How could I not make that connection? A man is coming home late one night and sees a hitchhiker along the side of the road. He picks him up and the hitchhiker insists on sitting in the back seat. As they drive along, the hitchhiker says, �The time of judgment is at hand,' or something like that, and then when the driver turns around, the guy is gone."

"I didn't hear that one," Scully said. "The way I heard it, a man is driving along a dark road one night and he sees a pretty girl in a soaking wet dress walking along the side of the road. She puts out her thumb and he picks her up. She tells him where she lives but she won't say another word. So he takes her to the house but when he stops she gets off and runs away. He sees a scarf in the seat. So he goes up to the house and knocks on the door, and these two old people answer. When he shows them the scarf, they tell him it belonged to their daughter, who drowned the day of her prom twenty years ago that day, and the scarf has been tied to her tombstone since that day."

Mulder laughed, his eyes sparkling green. "Or else he's given her his coat to keep warm in, and then when he stops she runs away in the dark, and the next day he comes back and all he finds at the end of the road is a graveyard, and a tombstone with his coat hung over it. And the tombstone is for some eighteen year old girl who drowned--"

"Exactly a year ago to the day," Scully finished.

"Ah, those hitchhiker anniversaries," Mulder said. "Did you know that you can ask someone to tell you that story, and by their version of it you can accurately guess what part of the country they come from?"

Scully said, "Why am I suddenly craving hot dogs and marshmallows?"

"But tell me you believed them when you were a kid, Scully." His eyes were suddenly serious.

"I guess I did. But you're supposed to believe them when you're a kid. That's the whole point. Urban legends are cautionary tales, told to teenagers by other teenagers so some message gets across they wouldn't listen to otherwise. I loved ghost stories of any kind when I was a little girl. But then," she said pointedly, "I grew up."

Mulder turned around restlessly and spotted her briefcase on the table. "Are you sleepy?" he asked. "Do you want to do some work?"

Scully pulled the sheet back and scooted to the edge of the bed. When his back was turned she did up the top two buttons of her pajamas. "What work is there to do?" she asked. "We meet with Senator Young tomorrow, and then talk to the local police."

"Did I tell you what Skinner said when I went to ask him to sign our travel vouchers for the case?"

When she didn't answer, he turned around again to look at her. "He said Young had contacted him earlier on the missing girl, and he was glad someone was going to at least make the gesture. He didn't even ask about the pawnshop. He was actually happy we were doing this investigation."

"Well, there's a break."

He opened her briefcase and pulled out two thick files he had given her earlier. "Have you looked at these?"

"Not really. Just what you showed me in the office."

He started pulling out papers and photographs, and Scully got up and put on her robe and then went to stand at his shoulder. He nudged the other chair out for her with his foot, and she sat down.

"Skinner had Marge give me the Young file before we left." He opened the folder and showed it to her. There were some witness reports from people interviewed by a Houston police team of Fernandez and Buckland, who were the HPD officers assigned to the case, and some photographs.

"Mm." Scully picked up a color snapshot of two girls, a blonde and a redhead, with their arms around each other's backs. "Cute kid," she said.

Mulder was silent. He stood with his shoulders hunched as if in pain, staring down at the table.

"Mulder?" Her voice was soft with concern, and she touched his arm lightly. He turned his face towards her, but kept his eyes fastened on a black and white picture on the table.

In a strained voice he said, "It's her, Scully." He put his finger on the photo as gently as if touching a human face. "It's the hitchhiker."

clickHEREfor next chapter