Quaesti Noctu
 

LANGLY:

July 14, 2001

It's just midnight now. Ally and me've had a few beers, gone in the spa, sat out on the balcony...

We're hanging out in our towels right now, since we only got out of the spa a little while ago. Ally put her hair up to do it, but she takes it down, and it's not curly anymore because it's wet, but she looks cute anyway. She fires up a Marb, asks me if I want one...nah, not right now.

We had fun in the spa. I mean, it's kind of risky, seeing as Miranda and Shelby are up watching movies and stuff, but we figured, oh well...Patrick's asleep.

In addition to the pool, we decided we should build another room, but not on the house. We're gonna add to the offices instead. Easier and cheaper. Move the photo lab outside and let Patrick have that room. It's not real big, but it's big enough for him.

And it's got a door on it. This is a Good Thing.

"Langly," she says, real soft, "did I ever tell you you have a gorgeous ass?"

Only about 50 thousand times...but hell, she can say it another 50 thousand...and I'm not gonna get tired of hearing it. Even if it's not true.

She has a great ass herself. She's little, but she's got some okay curves...nothing real extreme, just enough you know she's a girl. And she's so cute.

"Can't believe how hot it stays out at night these days," and I can't. It hasn't gone below 85 at night all week. Virginia Power and Light's starting to threaten us with brownouts.

"I like the heat." Ally loves it warm. I think she was a greenhouse plant in a former life or something.

"You're the only one probably."

"Ah, you guys are wimps about heat...gets this hot all the time in LA," she grins at me.

"Yeah, but who dives for her parka when it gets below 50?" I tease her back.

"Hey, Langly, 50 is COLD!"

"Is not. You're a wussy about the cold."

"And damn proud of it. Feel like going inside?"

"Why, is it any cooler in our room?"

"Doubt it."

"Can we get an A/C unit for the bedroom?" I can barely sleep in this heat. I sweat all night.

"I suppose...if you can find one...Sears apparently has them on backorder...you'll probably have to wait about three weeks."

"I could have melted by then. I probably will."

"Hey, the offices are air-conditioned."

"Yeah, so our equipment doesn't melt." We had to do a lot of modification to get that configured, too. Doing the house and making it conform to code...well, could be done...but it would cost a lot and take a long time, and Ally's like, not gonna happen.

"And we are getting a swimming pool."

"This is true." It's not gonna be huge or anything, but big enough to swim in and get cool in. Junior is gonna be so jazzed when he finds out.

"Where did you tell them to put the heater, Langly?"

"What heater?"

"For the pool, babe. Unless you were planning to freeze your balls off. Which, by the way, I would not appreciate."

"You're joking, right?"

"No way."

"How warm does it have to be, anyway?"

"I think 90 is acceptable."

"90! Are you nuts! That's bathwater!"

"No, babe, that's comfortable!"

There are three constants in this life...death, taxes, and that Ally and me will never agree on temperature. In summer, I can barely stand the sheet over me...she's still got a blanket on her side. In the winter, one or two blankets will do me...she's got a pile of them, and thermies under her sweats...and she's still complaining she's cold...

Sort of like how we'll never resolve the dispute over plain or peanut M&M's. She says plain ones rule.

She is dead wrong, of course...the peanut ones are infinitely better.
 

We're sitting in the middle of the bed, we've opened up the backpack, and dumped all the contents into the bed. There's like barely any room for us with all the junk there.

"Christ, what was she collecting in here?" Ally shakes her head.

"Oh, that reminds me." I damn near forgot...I stuffed the money in the front pocket of my backpack. "Joanie left me a little pocket change." I show her the stack of fifties. She eyes it with some surprise.

"That's not exactly what I'd call pocket change...unless you're my mother's bookie."

She picks up the bills. "I wonder how long she was saving this...and what for."

"I think she was doing it to get away from her asshole of a husband."

"Probably. I would, in her position."

"I don't think that's going to be a problem."

"We don't get the pool heated, I'm gonna claim wife abuse." She's got such a wicked cute grin, but she loses it fast. "Seriously, I have a feeling she was putting this away for the eventuality of leaving Roy...I've known women who've done it. It's not an uncommon practice."

"Well, that was the easy part. There's a ton of crap in here...and it's all messed up. Maybe you could put it in chronological order?"

She looks at the stack in front of us that's threatening to fall off the bed, or push us off, or both of the above. "Shouldn't be a problem."

"Good, start with these." I hand her the Xeroxes of the bank statements.

She takes her stack on the floor and starts making sub-stacks of stuff.

"Looks like bank statements, don't you think?"

"Yeah, they're bank statements, all right...but there are other financial statements mixed in here...let's separate those out."

"Might be some more in one of these other envelopes."

"How about you arrange the tapes in order, babe? Then we'll have two things out of the way."

I suspect I could handle that easy enough...except sometimes there's more than one date on a tape, and then the order gets messed up...

I decide to take the first date on the tape as the filing date. I mean, not a perfect system, but in programming, choose your hierarchy.

"Hey, Ally? Do me a favor. Look at the writing on these." I hand her a few of Joanie's love letters from 'Walter.'

"Just a minute, let me get these at least broken down by quarter."

"I'm wondering, did you ever see anything in Walter Skinner's handwriting?"

"I think so. Why?" She's looking up at me. She's wearing her glasses and she put on my Korn T-shirt. And she probably has no idea how utterly yummy she looks.

"'Cause these letters...they're all in the same writing, and they're from this guy named Walter...to Joanie..."

"I might have some things that he wrote," she says. "I think you put them in the office safe for me...my file that I got before I came to DC, and my termination papers, and some contracts for independent work...I think we've still got them, if you want to check."

"Think I'll do that."

"Uh, Langly honey?"

"Yeah?"

"You might want to consider at least some pants."

Oh yeah. Good idea.
 

Did I put her stuff in the safe? I think so. I hope so. Because if I didn't, I am fucking screwed because I got no idea where it would be.

It's there, under Frohike's divorce papers and our wills and junk like that.

I look through her employment stuff...not a lot from Mr. Skinner, but he's signed a few things and written a few pithy comments.

Let's take a good look at this...I mean, we have the optics. Frohike's better at spotting fraudulent docs than I am, but I can always have him take another look tomorrow.

Guy's handwriting's nothing to brag about, but it's still better than mine, and way better than Junior's. Not that it takes much to have better writing than Junior. Typing was made for guys like Junior. I bet he flunked penmanship. Me, I squeaked by with C's.

Pressure and slant look about the same. He's not a lefty, that's for sure. He doesn't have that lefty weirdness like Ally and my dad had. Watching Ally write is still freaky. Lefties push it along, not pull it like the rest of us. This guy looks like he's pulling on his. A rightie, both on Ally's docs and in these letters.

Letters look about the same, too...some bizarre looking stuff, but everyone's got their own quirky forms of some things. Ally says I make the weirdest upper case A she's ever seen. I suspect she's seen a few, seeing as that's her initial.

Like I said, Fro is a lot better at document examination than me, but at first glance, looks like the same guy.

My big sis. Doing it with Walter Skinner.

This is like so rich. And so bizarre.

Still, given a choice of guys for my sister...

Think I'd have to say I'd have preferred her to have Walter Skinner.
 

Ally's got the stack I gave her all in order...even the edges are neat.

She's taken a dive into the stacks of letters.

"Langly, have you read these? They're beautiful."

"Yeah, well, guess what? They're from your old boss."

"My old...no way. Skinner? Doing your sister?" She looks like, get real.

"Looks that way."

"Most of these are dated, Langly...and she was married when she got these...what the...oh Christ."

"Whaddya mean?"

"Langly, maybe we better go to bed...it's getting late, and some of this...well, maybe-"

"Gimme those." I snatch them up from her. She stops me before I can get them all.

"Langly. I think we need to put these in date order as well. Let's do that. I think we need to keep these in context...in order not to draw the wrong conclusions."

"What sort of things?"

"Langly. Let's put them in order, read them in sequence...and take it from there. C'mon, babe, you're a programmer. You don't look at one line of code in the middle and say you've got the whole story."

And there are tons of these babies. Whatever you might say about Skinner, he sure as hell kept the post office busy...

Let's see how he was keeping my sister busy.
 

Ally's sorting the letters. I start working on the piles of newspaper clippings. I'm trying not to damage them.

"Babe, what time is it?" We've been listening to the Goo Goo Dolls, Offspring, Pink Floyd, Toad the Wet Sprocket...

I blink at my watch. "3:48."

"No wonder I can't keep my eyes open. C'mon, let's call it a night, shall we?"

I am getting pretty tired...but I'm dying to see what the hell was going on...

"And by my estimate, we have roughly 2 hours before Patrick decides we've slept enough."

Maybe I should try and catch some zzz's.

Besides, it's Saturday, and that means one thing.

Cartoons are on.

Can't miss those.
 

FROHIKE:

I feel as if I've been kicked in the guts, hard.

And my guts are sensitive enough as is.

I hate to say it, but I'm rather relieved that the boy is going to visit his mother.

He should visit her. He should have done it already.

I get the impression he's got a lot on his mind...but there's just no way I'm up to dealing with his concerns at the moment. I can barely deal with my own.

He looks to me for love and guidance...I should be able to provide them, no matter what.

If only he knew what a mess I was inside right now. I doubt he'd look to me for finding his way.

I haven't been able to sleep.

All I can think about right now revolves around two women.

Jo...she is my dear friend, and in possibly the most terrifying situation a woman can find herself.

And Martha...I ache for her. I looked up her phone number tonight.

And her credit report. And her work records. And her husband's military records. And his hospital records...

I can find plenty on that. There are records from the VA, of course...until a certain point...and then it's as if, he's all better now, go on home...

Except that his wife capitalized on her contacts in the private community, and he's definitely a thick-file case.

Gulf War veteran...Gulf War Syndrome...but with a twist...

And nobody will admit to it.

Seems to me that Mulder encountered someone in his travels that had more than a passing acquaintance with this.

Maybe he's even on-line. Mulder still doesn't sleep much.

Time to have a chat with our boy, who got us into this mess in the first place...

Along with Susanne Modeski.

How different our lives would have been...
 

Mulder is awake, and on-line. I receive a response five minutes after I post to him.

The e-mail contains a name. Michael Kritschgau. DOD.

That shouldn't be too hard...and what I can't get, Langly can, when he returns to work on Monday.

Michael Kritschgau.

I can hack from home...I prefer not to, the servers at the office are much better set up for such arcane tasks, but it's very early, and I really don't want to leave my boy.

I won't see him for two whole days. It's been a long time since he's been gone that long. I'm so used to him being here.

What will I do when he's finished college, moved out, gotten married...

No. That's not going to be for a while.

Kritschgau is a Pentagon employee. Easy break-in. Married, two children, one deceased...

I think I should follow up on the deceased child...Kritschgau is old enough that the child would be old enough to serve in the miltary.

I think of this, and my guts buckle. I cannot imagine having lost a child...of any age. There has to be nothing worse than the death of one of your progeny.

Parents are always supposed to die before their children. Anything else shoots the natural order to hell.

Michael Kritschgau, Junior turns out to be the name of his son.

There was no way that my boy was going to be Melvin, Junior. Jan and I decided on the name Michael back when we had Leslie. Had she been a boy, she would have been Michael...and after we had Leslie, we decided that if Michael turned out to be a girl, she would have been named Judith.

Time to hit the miltary database. Veteran records are very easy to get. No hacking necessary.

Except...where is Michael Kritschgau, Junior?

He's listed...his service record is there...but nothing about any illnesses, treatments in the VA, anything like that. Ends with a simple 'deceased' 1/30/95.'

How?

Focus, Frohike. You were doing this to find out about your newest ladylove...

And you have a morbid desire to see how long her ailing husband will linger on.

So you can get your paws on her.

You are sick, Frohike.

You should let it go. Forget her. Who is to say that even if her husband died, she would want to have anything to do with you? I mean, sure, she was grateful that you got her out of the slammer...but gratitude and love are two different things, much as sometimes we'd like to believe they aren't.

What would she see in me, anyway? I work underground basically, with intermittent forays into life in the outside world. I'm not independently wealthy like Byers, and I certainly don't have Langly's charisma (he may be a pain in the ass, but you can't deny that the boy has charm to spare). I'm a lousy conversationalist. I've had a failed marriage and an even more failed serious relationship. I live with my grown son in a place that makes the Langly household appear to be somewhat organized. I can't communicate with my daughter, I'm not in the best of health, I have a prison record...

Indeed, what could I offer this woman?

What did Dee see in me? I'm trying to think. What was it that kept her around for as long as it did, and then, years later, brought her back?

If only I could look through her eyes. Perhaps I would find something that I am not able to see. There had to have been something.

One of the great myths of modern life is that we always know everything about our own reality, all evidence to the contrary. How can this be, when at least half of everything is chance?

And haven't I always been the one to tell people, having is not the same as wanting?

I am drawn to my room, not to sleep, but to the drawer where my photos are kept.

Photos of my kids I keep out. I have them at all the ages I can remember them at, which in a way is a cruel reminder of the ones I don't. But I like seeing their young faces, and ultimately, these pictures bring me far more pleasure than pain. And I have recent ones of Michael now. Michael at the shore. Michael with Kelly. Michael arguing with Langly and Byers. Michael
with Tiny, Allison's late dog.

There will be no more gaps in my collection of Michael...and I pray to God that the same will be true for Leslie. Soon.

Someday I wouldn't mind adding some grandchildren to my collection.

The photos of Dee are easy to find in spite of the disarray in my drawer. They are always on top.

I look at her, with her lovely auburn hair, her freckles, her billion-kilowatt smile. The body of a real woman.

Martha bears more than a passing resemblance to this woman. Who bore more than a passing resemblance to Jan, what with the freckles, the buxom body, the wide smile.

At least you're staying true to type, Frohike. I suppose there is something to be said for consistency.

Dee, what did you know about me that I don't?

Help me to see it.

Because I realize in this moment, my feelings for this new woman in my life...were never mine to decide.
 

END OF PART 76