Bob Vance’s employees were disappearing.

One by one, they stopped coming into work…they stopped answering phone calls…they were nowhere to be found. They were eerily MIA in that way that made people not want to even mention it, because sometimes small towns shouldn’t be the center of attention and sometimes a single missing person was too much to handle and sometimes things were just…creepy. Sometimes seven missing people who all worked for the same mid-sized refrigeration company was just creepy. There really wasn’t any other word for it.

Jim and Pam certainly agreed that it was creepy.

Phyllis was inconsolable.

Even Stanley was a little bit spooked.

Michael was borderline hysterical and called meetings in the conference room at least once every two hours just to double check that everyone was present and accounted for. By the time the fourth refrigeration employee had gone missing Michael even started caring if Toby was around, because the truth was that any sort of crime or mystery made him nervous. Understandably and justifiably nervous.

Jim leaned against Pam’s desk and chewed thoughtfully on a jelly bean.

“What did your brother-in-law say?” he asked in a low voice, making sure nobody could hear them discussing the latest headline that had seeped its way onto the rolling news stories of CNN and MSNBC. Seven missing in Scranton, PA. Local authorities baffled. Pam shrugged her shoulders and lazily moved a jack onto a queen in her game of solitaire.

“They still have no idea,” she told him gravely. He nodded and swallowed. Pam’s brother-in-law was a Scranton policeman and usually at least once a day Jim felt the need to ask if he had heard anything…if they had found anyone…what the theories were.

“You know Creed’s suggestion actually sounds kind of plausible now that Jordan and Kim are gone, too,” he mumbled, not even trying to mask his own vague sense of worry and nervousness. These were people who worked literally right down the hall from him. People who he’d ridden the elevator with. People who sometimes came to office parties and who had families and kids and… he didn’t even like to think about it for very long.

“You think there's a cult? Really?…In Scranton?” Pam whispered, now blatantly ignoring her computer altogether. Jim lifted a shoulder and tipped his mouth to the side.

“Do you have a better explanation?” he asked. Her eyes glazed over in thought for a moment and a bittersweet kind of look crossed her face.

“Group trip to Disney World?” she suggested helplessly. He grinned at her without much humor or merriment.

“Yeah, that would be…let’s just go with that idea,” he agreed. She nodded at him and sighed like she did sometimes when he looked at her a certain way. He noted that with vague interest and popped another jelly bean into his mouth.

****

“You know, there are a lot of possible explanations for this.”

“Could you be any less original? I’m going to start making a list of synonyms for the word explanation so that you can change it up every once in a while.”

She sighed. “You know…there are a lot of viable elucidations for this,” she corrected blandly, her voice flat and her expression bleak. He glanced at her out of the corner of his eye and kept walking.

“I realize that,” he admitted.

“It isn’t necessarily paranormal,” she continued. He reached out and opened the door to Scranton Business Park, extending a hand and pressing it against her lower back as they entered the building.

“Yeah I realize that, too.”

Her eyebrow lifted as she turned to look at him over her shoulder, flashing her badge at the security guard as he did the same.

“Are you going to make me come right out and ask you why we’re here?” she wondered, stopping at the elevator and crossing her arms indignantly. “Talk about unoriginal,” she muttered. He pressed the up button and stared at her, his face an expressionless mask mostly meant to mirror hers. After a lengthy pause he finally opened his mouth to reply.

“Elucidations, Scully? What did you get on the SAT’s, like a 1600?” The elevator dinged its arrival and she grinned at the back wall as she entered it’s beige confines. The way her mouth curled up was not lost on him and he lifted his eyebrows at her just as her lips set themselves back into a stern looking line, her arms still crossed.

“1540,” she corrected flatly, and he chuckled because sometimes she astonished him. And that was a really hard thing to do.

“We’re here,” he interjected, returning to the question she had posed originally, “because seven people are missing and nobody knows why. No phone calls. No paper trails. No bodies. Just gone…vanished into thin air…local authorities are confused and have conflicting reports…sound like anything you‘ve heard before, Scully?” he asked cheekily, enjoying the blush of irritation that colored her cheeks. She shifted.

“This is not alien abduction, Mulder. It’s just not.”

“How do you know that for sure?” he asked, his impatience playing like a broken record that Scully seemed unable to silence or stifle.

“Because,” she began calmly, “statistically I have to be right sometimes. I know that‘s hard for you to accept,” she mumbled, her voice a bit self-deprecating and unenthused. He chuckled.

“I accept that you‘re right sometimes, Scully,” he promised her earnestly, and she simply raised an eyebrow as the elevator opened again and they stepped out and headed toward Vance Refrigeration. “You just aren’t right this time,” he added, and she rolled her eyes. He grinned to himself because he always loved getting that look of amused annoyance from her, and sometimes Scully in a small town was so much more entertaining than Scully in the city…and he had a feeling Scranton would bring out the small-town best in her.

****

Jim had left his lunch in his car.

It was the kind of thing that happened sometimes because some mornings he was distracted when he pulled into his parking spot, his mind on Pam and drifting across the way that they had fallen so seamlessly back into the routine that they’d had before casinos and Stamford and Karen and Roy.

Karen had gotten the job at corporate easily and without much effort at all, and when she had asked Jim if he would move with her, he’d said yes in his head. He had meant to say yes out loud. But something happened and he just couldn’t get that single syllable out of his mouth…he couldn’t get himself to say it and make her smile the way he knew she would if he agreed to the relocation. Instead he just stared at her silently, and she nodded after something like thirty seconds, tears in her eyes, taking his quiet, non-response for the break up that he guessed it was. She had moved by herself. She was his boss. Saying it was awkward was kind of an understatement.

And that was not the only thing that was awkward in his life at the moment. There was also the fact that he and Pam were just friends…for no real reason other than his own strange feeling of immobility. He guessed it was probably fear. Or pride. But something in him could not push them past where they’d been when she was with Roy or when he was with Karen. He was leaning on her desk again, and eating her jelly beans and making her smile and recruiting her to pull pranks on either Dwight or Andy on a regular basis, but there was still this static, “just friends” feeling. He was acting like she was unavailable. And he didn’t really like to analyze why.

Sometimes she would stare at him and sigh and he would hate himself a little because really they should just be together and both be happy. But maybe he was still punishing her. Or maybe he was punishing himself. He rolled his eyes and straightened his collar as he pushed his way out the door of the office and punched at the elevator button. Whatever, he thought, everything was weird. Literally everything.

The elevator landed on the main floor and he waved at the security guard, his keys dangling from his other hand and his long legs carrying him swiftly in the direction of his car. Once he got out into the parking lot, though, he stopped short, his eyes wide and his head swiveling to look around for something to explain this. For a second he thought maybe he’d stepped onto the set of Threat Level Midnight…he thought maybe he was seeing things. But then he blinked and he realized that there really were actually two people leaning against his car dressed in long black trench coats and sunglasses. And they were arguing. And he was really, really confused.

“My point, Mulder, is that you can’t just come out and ask things like that in this kind of a town. It’s small and people talk and panic and…didn’t you take sociology courses at Oxford?” the woman asked impatiently, her small frame and her fiery red hair not detracting from the seriousness of her countenance. ‘Mulder’ shifted on his feet and planted his hands on his hips.

“The guy seemed level headed,” he told her, and even Jim knew that with things the way they were in Scranton at the moment calling anybody level headed was probably a false assumption. The woman crossed her arms and tipped her head at her counterpart.

“Bob Vance, Vance Refrigeration seemed level headed to you?” she mocked, and Jim grinned to himself because something about her saying that was really, really amusing. Mulder stared down at his shoes, a small smile tugging at his mouth.

“Scully let me just ask you this…” he paused mostly for what Jim assumed was meant to be dramatic effect, “how did you get a 1540 on the SAT’s? Even I only scored thirty points higher than that.”

Jim wondered why they hadn’t noticed him yet since he was kind of tall and hard to miss most of the time. He decided it was probably because they seemed enthralled with each other. He also briefly wondered who the hell got over a 1500 on the SAT‘s. ‘Scully’ stared at Mulder’s profile icily and heaved what seemed like a very practiced sigh.

“I’m going to shoot you,” she announced. Jim thought Mulder’s surprised laughter was as much of a break in the discussion as there was going to be, so he stepped up to them and cleared his throat.

“Uh hi sorry but um…this is my…” he drifted into silence when they both turned and looked at him through their very dark lenses as if they had choreographed it. He swallowed. “This is my car,” he explained meekly, his eyes still wide and round like quarters. They didn’t respond for what felt like a half hour and Jim started to feel sweat on the back of his neck. Why did he suddenly feel like some kind of criminal? Eventually Mulder took a deep breath and straightened up and away from the trunk of Jim’s car.

“Do you work in this building?” he asked flatly. Jim turned around and looked behind him as if he’d never seen Scranton Business Park before…as if he hadn’t just come down the elevator and out the door on auto pilot because he’d spent like eight years doing it every day.

“Uh yes, yeah. I do work…I work for Dunder Mifflin?” he mumbled inarticulately. Mulder licked his lips and nodded, refusing to speak for some kind of weird reason that was not clear to Jim at all. Finally the woman, Scully, stood up and away from the trunk too, taking a step toward Jim and raising her eyebrows above the line of her sunglasses.

“We’re sorry, sir,” Scully offered harshly. Sir? Jim thought. If he’d had his wits about him he would’ve raised his eyebrows right back at her. Instead he just stood there dumbly as she gripped Mulder’s sleeve with white knuckles and dragged him away from Jim’s car and toward a burgundy sedan that Jim had never seen before. He heard her mutter “Mulder, will you stop deliberately giving these people heart attacks?” and something released in his chest. Maybe he wasn’t about to get gunned down…maybe he had just accidentally stumbled upon something that was none of his business. Mulder shrugged at her and turned his stare back on Jim, who promptly unlocked his car and retrieved his tuna sandwich with sweaty palms. He made quick work of relocking his Saab and heading back inside, staring nervously at the elevator and hoping it would arrive sooner rather than later.

The door of the building swung open and Jim turned his head and exhaled long and slow when Mulder strolled in after him. What was with this guy, dressed in a really expensive suit but walking around like he was wearing jeans and a t-shirt? Jim assured himself that the emotion he was feeling was not jealousy. It was something else like…uh…well just something other than that. Mulder offered him a nod. He nodded back.

“Sorry about that,” Mulder muttered, “We weren’t really paying attention to, uh…”

“Oh no that’s um…that’s fine,” Jim interrupted. They lapsed into an awkward silence and Jim watched the numbers above the elevator light up. 3...2...

“Fox Mulder, FBI,” Mulder introduced, holding up his badge as if Jim would know what it meant and whether or not it was genuine. “Would you mind helping me out with a few questions?” he asked and Jim recognized his practiced language for what it was as the door of the elevator slid open. He looked inside longingly before turning toward the agent at his side.

“Yeah definitely,” he agreed easily. “FBI, huh? You must be here about the Vance Refrigeration case,” he supposed. Mulder nodded.

“Have you noticed anything out of the ordinary?" he asked, his brow furrowing in interest, "Any strange people or activity?  Strange lights, or maybe...”  Jim leaned forward a bit.

"Excuse me?" he asked, wondering if he'd heard this guy wrong.

"Any kind of suspicious activity at all?" Mulder reiterated, and Jim decided he must've misheard.  Right?  He must've.  Mulder's hair was dark and newly cut, styled into that short but purposely messy kind of look that was really popular at the moment. Jim felt a little self-conscious and ran a hand through his long shaggy mop.

“They keep asking us that and I keep trying to think, but I just…I haven’t seen anything. I’m really sorry, I wish I could help more.” Mulder pushed his hands into his pockets and pulled one back out holding a business card.

“You might know something and you just don’t realize it,” he told Jim casually, and Jim nodded, accepting the card and shoving it into his coat pocket.

“Thanks,” he replied, reaching out to push the elevator button again. The door slid open automatically and Jim stepped inside. As Mulder turned to walk away Jim called out to him. “Hey was that your partner outside?” Years of watching cop shows on television had taught him a little something about how things worked. He stuck his hand out to keep the door from closing. Mulder nodded again.

“Yeah,” he affirmed and Jim nodded back at him. They just stood there for a second, Mulder almost certainly wondering why Jim had asked, and Jim just generally feeling stupid. “I got an eleven fifty on my SAT’s,” he finally offered. Mulder laughed quietly and pointed out through the glass doors at Jim’s bumper, the left corner of which read Philidelphia in a bold red and blue.

“That’s why you’re a Phillies fan,” he joked flatly. Jim huffed a half chuckle and let the door slide closed, shaking his head in disbelief.

What the hell was going on, he wondered, and when exactly had his life turned into a bad episode of Law and Order?