Mulder returned to the apartment out of breath. At least his dad was gone. He still couldn’t wrap his head around what he’d seen at the cemetery. Someone had abducted two kids, and the way Sarah Lowe had been taken also mirrored Samantha’s kidnapping—the time of night, Sarah sitting in the living room, the power going out just before she was taken, and the front door left open afterward.
Did the same person take Samantha?
The possibility got under his skin. Actually, crawling around underneath it was closer to the truth. His nerve endings buzzed and he couldn’t stop moving. As he paced back and forth across the living room, the thought burrowed deeper and deeper with every step.
There was only one way to figure out if Sarah Lowe and Billy Christian’s kidnappings were connected to Samantha’s disappearance. Mulder needed to find more information about Billy Christian and the details related to his abduction.
Because I’ve been down this road before.
After Samantha disappeared, he became obsessed with the idea that whoever had taken Samantha could’ve been the same person who abducted a girl named Wendy Kelly, in New Haven, Connecticut, the day before. Wendy was kidnapped from her house, just like Samantha. But every time Mulder brought it up, his father bit his head off, and the small-time island cops refused to investigate.
The kitchen phone rang and Mulder jumped. He let it ring seven times before he finally answered it. “Hello?”
“Fox? Is that you, sweetheart? It’s Mom.”
As much as he loved his mother, he wasn’t in the mood to talk to anyone. “Yeah. Hi, Mom. How’s everything going?”
“Fine, but the house feels so much bigger now that I’m here alone.”
“I could come back,” he offered. Moving in with his dad for senior year had been her idea in the first place, not his. He had gone along with it to make her happy, with the smallest shred of hope that his father might change.
“Don’t be ridiculous, honey,” she said. “You’re graduating in two months. I’m fine. Really. With your father gone, the house feels peaceful. Of course, I would love it if you were here, too. I’m not sure Phoebe would survive until summer if she weren’t going to visit you. I ran into her at the library last week, and she spent fifteen minutes explaining why the technology in Star Wars could be developed within your lifetimes.”
“That sounds like Phoebe.” His best friend was the only person smart enough to challenge him, an activity she considered a hobby. It was one of the reasons he harbored a not-so-secret crush on her.
“I should’ve invited her to come over and take a look at the vacuum cleaner for me.” She paused, and he heard her banging something around. “Because the stupid ElectroVac your father insisted on buying from that salesman is broken again.”
“I’ll fix it as soon as I get home.”
She sighed. “Thank you. But I can’t wait until June to vacuum the floors. Enough about appliances. Are you and your father getting along?”
If ignoring each other qualifies as getting along, Mulder thought, before he gave his mom the response she wanted to hear. “As well as we usually do.”
A timer buzzed in the background on the other end of the line.
“I have to take a casserole out of the oven. Do you want to hold on for a minute?”
“That’s okay. We can talk later.” He wanted to see if there were any news reports on TV about Billy Christian.
“All right. I love you,” she said.
“Me too.”
It was just after eleven o’clock when Mulder hung up the phone, and the news didn’t air again until noon. But finding a dead child was big news. Maybe the local stations would interrupt game shows and sitcoms to report real news. He paced until noon, changing the channel every few minutes to make sure he didn’t miss any coverage. But they never broke in with a special report. When the news finally came on, he was going stir-crazy.
On TV, a reporter stood in front of the yellow crime scene tape Mulder had seen that morning. Her silky purple blouse had a huge bow in the front that looked as if it might strangle her any minute. “I’m here at Rock Creek Cemetery in Washington, DC, where a child’s body was discovered in a mausoleum early this morning. The child has been identified as eight-year-old Billy Christian, the boy who disappeared from his home nine days ago. The discovery is a shocking blow to the community, especially in the wake of Sarah Lowe’s disappearance two nights ago.”
The detective with the big gut ducked under the tape, attracting the reporter’s attention. She rushed over and shoved a big microphone in his face. “Detective? Has the police department uncovered any clues to the murder of Billy Christian? Is this case related to Sarah Lowe’s kidnapping?”