Mulder glanced at her uneasily. "Nice enough."

"I suppose you talked about Goatboy's Revenge."

"Gothar's Revenge," he corrected. "And as a matter of fact, we didn't. You want to get a late lunch?"

"We have to swing by the sheriff's office first so I can drop off my notes," she replied. "And I want to look over the physical evidence. Shouldn't take long, though."

Mulder nodded. He hoped it wouldn't take long. He was hungry. "What did the preliminary examination show?" he said, starting the engine.

"Massive blood loss. Head trauma. Assorted edema, contusions, abrasions. Cuts, scratches. Something did a number on Eric Noonan."

Mulder's eyebrows arched as he steered the car out of the gym parking lot. "Some*thing*, Agent Scully?"

"We found what I'm pretty sure is fur, and there were claw marks, bite marks..."

"Bite marks? Like Mrs. Chernoff and Mrs. Stiller?"

"Similar." Scully laced her fingers behind her neck and stretched, arching her spine. Her neck cracked. "But bigger. Something decidedly vicious."

Mulder nodded. "How much bigger?"

"Hard to say."

Mulder grinned. "Guess."

"I don't know." She sighed wearily. "Mulder, you've got a theory. I know you've got a theory; you know you've got a theory. So, what's your theory?"

Mulder bit the inside of his cheek, and kept his eyes on the road. They'd finally reached his least favorite part of any case: the part where he told her exactly what he thought, and she told him he was crazy. "You know my theory."

She slumped in her seat as if the wind had been knocked out of her. "What? An evil spirit? A demon?"

Mulder nodded.

"I don't believe this..." Scully muttered under her breath. "Mulder, why are you doing this?"

"Doing what?"

"This. Why are you trying to make something out of nothing?"

"Nothing?" Mulder echoed. "Scully, there have been three suspicious deaths in a week, all of them revolving, to some extent, around Lawrence Kopeck. That isn't nothing."

"Agreed," she replied. "But all the evidence suggests he's not responsible for any of them."

"Not directly responsible, no."

"And not indirectly, either," she shot back. She paused, took a deep breath, then exhaled loudly. "Mulder, why do you so desperately need for this case to be an X-File?"

He turned to her, his jaw set. "And why, Scully do you so desperately need for it NOT to be?"

****

"Why are there, like, cop cars and stuff all over, Mr. K?" Kandee asked with a frown.

"There was...there's been an accident."

"Again?" Kandee pursed her cherry-red lips. "This is what happens when they let old people use the StairMasters. Someone is always, like, having a heart attack or breaking a hip." Just as she spoke, the somber-suited men from Highsmith's Mortuary pushed Eric's body through the health club doors.

"Ohmigod!" Brittany gasped. "Someone is...like, dead?"

Kandee frowned and planted a fist on her shapely left hip. "You know, Mr. K, when we like, lived in LA, my 'rents were all, 'in my day no one brought submachine guns to school, there's too much violence here, let's move back east, no gangs in Vermont, it's safer blah blah blah.' But like, lately," she shook her head, "I would have to say, in total seriousness, nuh uh."

Mr. Kopeck opened his mouth to reply, but Belinda spared him. "Girls," she called in an undertone, appearing again in the hallway intersection, her tone hushed out of respect for Eric Noonan's recent demise. She beckoned to the teenagers.

"Shouldn't the dead guy mean practice is cancelled?" Brittany asked in a wheedling tone, as she and Kandee trailed after Belinda.

Mr. Kopeck sat back down on the bench. With a sigh he leaned his head on his hand. He wondered how he was supposed to find the demon now -- or if the demon was going to find him.

****

Scully was silent a long time. Mulder wondered if the conversation was at an end, or if it were merely sliding into suspended animation. Nothing about this trip was turning out the way he'd expected, not one damned thing. He was starting to wonder if he should just stop pretending to plan anything in his life. He was getting too old to keep swimming against the current.

"I don't care if it's an X-File or not, Mulder," Scully said, finally rousing him from his meditation. "I really don't. I have always given -- tried to give -- one-hundred percent to all our cases, either way. I just wish -- I deserved some advanced notice on this one."

Mulder's brows knit in confusion. "Advanced notice of what?"

"I was under the impression that we were here for some token investigation and then to spend as much time as we could ruining Mrs. Alden's sheets," she explained in an even, steady tone. "Instead we're knee-deep in Goatherd's Revenge and you're spouting demonology, of all things. If you knew about the X-File right from the start, however ridiculous an X-File, you should have told me. I'm still your partner; I deserve that much."

Mulder was momentarily overwhelmed, uncertain which part of her tirade to respond to first. He went with the easiest. "What -- what makes you think I knew about the X-File right from the start?"

"What am I supposed to think, Mulder? That Kopeck and Kopeck's father and Vampire Vixens on Fire, all of that is just coincidence?"

He thought a moment and scratched his cheek. Scully was so brilliant and insightful and distractingly gorgeous that sometimes he forgot she didn't see the world quite the way he did. He'd long assumed it was simply because she refused to, but maybe...

"I didn't say it was just a coincidence, Scully," he said in what he hoped was a conciliatory tone.

She folded her arms across her chest. "So you did know, and you just didn't bother to share with the rest of the class, is that it?"

He shook his head and smiled, almost apologetically. "No, I honestly had no idea Kopeck's father had ever lived here. I would have been willing to buy that Mrs. Chernoff's death was simply an unfortunate accident, at least at first. But as more and more evidence accumulated, that seemed less and less the case, and I started looking for another explanation."

"The least likely explanation, you mean."

"The most likely explanation," Mulder countered. He hesitated a moment. "Come on, Scully. Almost seven years. You must have noticed by now: I'm a Weird Magnet."

Her eyebrows rose and she blinked rapidly at him. "I'll try not to take that personally."

"I mean it," he replied seriously. "Look at my history. Human/Flukeworm hybrids. Tooms. Vinyl-siding salesbugs. Mind-controlling fungi. Government-alien conspiracies. Nymphomaniacal vampires..."

"Excuse me?"

"Who else does this stuff happen to?" He shook his head in disbelief. "Face it; I'm Ground Zero for the strange."

Scully looked shocked, then disbelieving, then simply puzzled. Maybe even with that fine analytical mind of hers, Mulder thought, she really hadn't considered it before.

Finally, she frowned. "That's nonsense. I was there for all that, too."

"Yes, you were." He cleared his throat, feeling suddenly tired and alone. "Most of it. But profoundly strange things have happened to me my whole life. I don't think you can honestly say the same about yours, can you? For you, it's only been the last few years. In my case, though, weird stuff was happening to me before you came into my life and, um..." He cleared his throat again.

"And?"

He swallowed. "And it will still be happening to me after you're, um, gone."

"After I'm gone?" she echoed, her face clouded with concern. "After I'm gone where? Where am I going?"

Mulder pulled the car smoothly up to the curb and put it in park. "Right now, inside the sheriff's office," he replied, his mouth twisting. "We're here."

****

Yellow police tape was stretched across the men's locker room door. Kandee flicked it with her finger once and then twice, then again, frowning. Do Not Cross -- thwap. Do Not Cross -- thwap. Do Not Cross -- thwap. Craftsdorky Common seemed to be full of lines you couldn't cross, but this was the only one they'd bothered to mark so clearly.

Things were easier in LA, the rules of the popularity game simpler. All you had to do was dress hot, look hot, BE hot, and you were in. The latest look, the perfect shades, the right car, a nose that looked like, sure, you could have been born with it: those were the only things that mattered. No one cared what you did or thought or believed. People judged by what you looked like, not what you were.

Here, it seemed, the only routes to popularity involved sweating or thinking, neither of which had ever been high on her To Do list. Everyone in Mayberry was all about athletics and good grades and -- she shuddered involuntarily -- school spirit. Like anyone really cared about that crap. They were all such fakes.

She dropped her pompoms, looked down at her uniform. So yes, she looked terrific in it, but still, it was so phony. She'd taken up cheerleading as a compromise, because it wasn't really a sport and no heavy thinking was involved. If any of her friends, her real friends, could see her now...

She thwapped the tape again, wondering where Brittany was. The cops had locked up the women's locker room, like they were worried the dead guy would decide to get up and take a shower in there, or something. Brittany had bounced off to find Ms. Patteson and the key ages ago.

Kandee shook her head. Brittany, with her week-last-Thursday clothes and her Haircuts R Us 'do and her Keds and captain of the football team boyfriend. Miss Aren't-I-Nice? Miss Congeniality. No one was that nice. Brittany had to be the biggest fake of them all.

"Found her," Brittany's voice echoed along the empty corridor, interrupting her reverie.

"'Bout time," Kandee replied. "She give you the key?"

"She can't." Brittany shook her head. "Insurance or something." She slid down the wall and sat on the floor next to Kandee's discarded pompoms. "She's still talking to the police, but she promised she'd be here in a minute." She dropped her pompoms and leaned in close. "You know what I overheard?"

"What?" Kandee asked with as much fake interest as she could muster, afraid it would be something about the debating team or somebody's SATs.

Brittany's eyes widened and her voice became low and confiding. "One of the cops was talking to another one. The guy who died didn't just have a heart attack, like we thought."

"No?" Kandee joined her on the floor.

Brittany shook her head. "He thinks the dead guy was attacked by some sort of large animal."

"An animal?" Kandee blinked. "In the gym?" Another reason to hate Vermont.

"Yeah." Brittany nodded enthusiastically. "Something big. I looked over one cop's shoulder and he was holding a picture, you know, a Polaroid? Blood everywhere, even on the ceiling."

"That is so gross." Kandee curled her lip. "How would an animal get in the gym?"

"I don't know." Brittany shrugged. "They don't seem to either. And you know who found the body?"

Kandee shook her head.

"Kopeck."

"Oh, that must have been good." Kandee rolled her eyes. "I can hear it now. He'll be, like, telling us all about it in Latin or whatever. 'Quigquam wig wag ergo dead guy ibi sum.' No, thank you."

"I know." Brittany chuckled appreciatively. "Mr. Excitement. Speaking of which, you never told me if the two of you finally, you know..." Brittany winked suggestively.

Kandee lifted an incredulous eyebrow. "Excuse me? Me and LarryBoy?" She snorted. "He should, like, live so long."

"Well, you know, he's not bad looking, and..."

"Puh-lease!" Kandee groaned, even though, in truth, she agreed. While she may have offered, she had known all along that Mr. Kopeck would not follow through. Experience had shown her that in matters such as these, the teacher was usually either flattered or intimidated into giving her a passing grade. It had worked before, and since she had no intention of wasting prime tanning time in summer school, she was still hoping it would work this time.

"He isn't that bad. I mean, for an old guy."

"Yeah, right, he's the next Brad Pitt." She wished Ms. Patteson would hurry up. The dead guy would still be dead in a few hours, but if she didn't get into the shower now, her hair would be damaged beyond repair. "He's old enough to be my great grandfather twice removed."

"I swear you said you liked him. You said he was hot, at the beginning of the year."

Kandee scowled. "Ew. Ew ew ew!"

"Come on. You don't think he's at least a little hot?"

Kandee sighed, exasperated. "Like, I'm in school all day, where I'm failing World History, along with just about everything else. I'm on academic probation, which means if I cut a class, they tell the 'rents and I get shipped off to Our Lady of the Immaculate Loser Convent School in Middle-of-Nowhere, Alaska or Arizona or something. My parents have got me working in that dorky restaurant to pay off the damage I did to my mom's Jag, which takes up, like, every weekend and most of my time after school. Add to that cheerleading and all the time I have to spend pretending to study, and I haven't exactly got any time to waste lusting after the world's oldest living doof, okay?"

"Okay, okay." Brittany held up her hands in the universal sign of surrender. "Geez, touchy much?"

"It's just, like, disgusting." Kandee gave a theatrical shiver. "Like having sex with Bill Clinton or Charlie Sheen or something." She looked impatiently at her watch. "We've only got two hours before the football game. If she doesn't open this door soon, I can't be held, like, responsible."

"I know. My hair is so disgusting." Brittany raked her fingers through her brown ponytail. "Oh, that reminds me. Mike's cousin Phil plays for Burlington."

"And?"

"And Mike asked me to ask you if you'd double with us after the game."

"Double?"

"As in date. As in, Mike's parents expect him to" -- she drew some air quotes -- "'entertain' Phil while he's here. And you'd be perfect."

"I am perfect, but..."

Kandee was interrupted by the sound of jangling keys and cross-trainers squeaking against the polished floor. They rose.

"Sorry, girls." Belinda Patteson pulled down the yellow tape. "Where's the rest of the squad?"

"Most of them left right after practice," Brittany replied. "I guess me and Kandee were the only ones who got our stuff in the lockers before the police sealed everything off."

Belinda twisted the key and pushed the heavy door open for them. "Well, that'll teach you two to be on time," she said good-naturedly.

The two girls went inside.

"Well, I'm not so sure I want to go out with some guy who, like, can't get his own date," Kandee said, reverting to their earlier topic. She tossed her pompoms on a bench.

"You'll like him. He's cute."

"Yeah, but you think everybody is cute. Your standards are totally lower than mine."

Brittany laughed. "You are one King Kamehameha bitch." She reached for the bottom of her sweater, and pulled it off over her head. Kandee, too, began to undress.

Just then there was a sound above them, from atop the lockers. "Ahhhh! Roseas papillas vestras ostendite!" hissed someone, in the lewdest, most glottal voice Kandee had ever heard.

They both looked up -- and froze.

****

End 07/10

Plausible Deniability & Amanda Wilde (MaybeAmanda)
Address: pdeniability@hotmail.com / maybe_a@rocketmail.com