It was a straight shot to the back steps. It couldn’t hurt to take a peek through the window in the door. He probably wouldn’t see anything except an empty house and a dead end. Mulder moved around to the front of the scrap pile, and something hard jabbed his rib. He looked over, and it took him a second to realize what had poked him—the handlebar of a child’s bike.
A chill traveled up his spine. He squinted, examining the mound of metal. Metallic strips of plastic glinted in the moonlight. Streamers hanging from a different set of handlebars. He reached out and ran his hands over the metal. Vinyl seats not much bigger than his palm. Little tires. The curves of multiple sets of handlebars.
Dozens of tricycles and bikes—some old and rusty and others that looked brand-new—were haphazardly piled into a mountain of childhood memories.
Who did they belong to? Where are these kids now?
Billy Christian and Sarah Lowe hadn’t been riding their bikes when they were taken. Had that bastard kidnapped other kids who weren’t in the newspaper articles he’d found?
An image flashed through his mind. A chopper-style metallic blue tricycle with a white seat and matching white handlebars, and two steps in the back. Samantha had picked it out herself when she four years old. In the toy store, she’d walked past the pink tricycles and stopped in front of the flashy blue trike. “This one,” she’d said. Mulder remembered feeling like he spent the whole summer with one foot on the back of that thing while Samantha yelled, “Push me, Fox!”
A sudden wave of rage hit Mulder. He wanted to pull down every single one of the bikes and hurl them at Earl Roy’s decrepit house.
Mulder crossed the yard, walked up a few steps to the back door, and peered through the dirty window. He made out the shapes of the refrigerator and the oven, and, down the hall, the pale glow from the porch light seeping in. He tried the door without thinking about it. The latch clicked, and it swung open.
There are no coincidences.
It had become Mulder’s mantra, and this cemented his belief.
Fate had led him here.
In his gut, he knew Samantha wasn’t in this house. But Earl Roy might have answers to the questions that had haunted him for 1,952 days.
Was Samantha still alive? If she wasn’t, what had happened to her?
It might be too late to save his sister, but if Sarah Lowe was inside—or information that might help the police find her—maybe he could save that eight-year-old little girl.
He stepped over the threshold.
Take it easy. You’ll be long gone before he comes home.
Mulder took a deep breath and walked straight through the shotgun-style house to the front door. He wanted to let Gimble and Phoebe know why he was taking so long, even though she would kill him when she realized he’d gone inside.
I’ll make it up to her. All of it.
The tiny, outdated kitchen was surprisingly neat. In the hallway, black-and-white photos, in simple wooden frames, hung on the wall. The place seemed sort of normal until Mulder spotted an ornately carved gold sofa in the living room and six mismatched gold chairs in the dining room. The chairs were upholstered in velvet, each one in a different color, and they reminded him of the fancy furniture in his aunt’s sitting room that no butt had ever dented. They looked out of place in a house owned by a grown man.
On a small table next to the front door, a single silver frame was proudly displayed.
Mulder switched on the light and opened the front door to lean out. He waved, and Phoebe and Gimble emerged from the trees. Mulder couldn’t see Phoebe’s face, but he knew she was pissed.
Their silhouettes moved in the darkness, as if they were walking toward the house. Mulder ducked back inside and picked up the silver frame on the table. A child smiled back at him. He stared at the image, his heart galloping in his chest.
Then he caught a flash in his peripheral vision, and things happened in rapid succession, like falling dominoes.
An arm slid around Mulder’s neck and jerked him off his feet—
The silver frame slipped out of his hand and crashed to the floor—
Mulder gasped, but he couldn’t get any air.
A boy stared up at him from behind the spiderweb of broken glass in the frame.
Billy Christian.
The arm around Mulder’s neck tightened and dragged him out of the doorway. His vision blurred in and out of focus.
A boot kicked the door.
The last thing Mulder saw was the front door slamming shut.
CHAPTER 20
Earl Roy’s Residence
9:27 P.M.
X had trudged through the mud in his brand-new boots, following Mulder and his high-strung friends. He had sucked it up because the kid was smart, and there was a 90 percent chance that he was right about Earl Roy, a chaos magick fanatic who had gotten himself kicked out of the Illuminates of something-or-other, a club for new age weirdos.
In a less-than-genius move, Mulder and his friends had parked a bright orange AMC Gremlin next to the dirt road that served as Earl Roy’s driveway. Anyone coming down the road would see the automotive eyesore from ten yards away.