Niceville (31 page)

“If you mean is she still with Byron, yes, she is. For now.”

“Nick and Reed should go talk to that man.”

“Nick wants to. And it’s all we can do to keep Reed from doing something so extreme about Byron that it would get him fired from
the State Patrol. But Beth has to be ready. It’s no good until she is. And she has the kids to think about, Dad.”

“That’s exactly why she should leave that thug. Nick agrees with me. He said so last week.”

“It’s Beth who has to agree, Dad. Not you and Nick and Reed. This can’t just get decided by the menfolk.”

This was a sensitive topic, and one they had been over many times before. Her father was picking up the tightness in her voice now.

“So Beth isn’t why you called early?”

“No, Dad.”

“Well, something’s on your mind. Let’s hear it.”

She took a moment to get her thoughts in line. When she got right down to the essentials, she found that the question was actually pretty simple.

“Dad, what’s wrong with Niceville?”

A long silence.

“Niceville’s a Southern town, honey. The Old South. It’s haunted by history, Kate. That’s all.”

“Dad. I love you. You know that. But things are happening here right now, and I need you to be straight with me. For once.”

She heard him breathing.

She could almost hear him thinking too.

Looking for an exit.

“For once? That’s a little harsh.”

“I’m sorry, Dad. You know what I’m talking about. Niceville. The families. Why it is the way it is.”

“I see.”

“Do you?”

Resignation was in his answer.

“Yes, Kate. I do. You said things have been happening. What kind of things?”

She told him.

He listened without interruption.

Kate laid it out as clearly and as simply as she could, leaving out details that she felt were … unreliable … such as her dream about a girl with a cat. When she finished, he was quiet again. She waited him out.

“So Gray Haggard’s gone?”

“No trace of him.”

Her father was quiet for a long time.

“Kate,” he said finally, his voice weary and full of sadness, “I’m going to tell you something that you can never tell your brother and sister. Do you think you can do that?”

“I … yes, I can do that. If that’s what you want.”

“You know Reed thinks your mother died because of a drunk driver.”

Kate took that in.

“She
didn’t
?”

“I don’t know. Maybe a drunk driver had something to do with it. But I do know she was speeding, speeding dangerously, when she died.”

“I heard about that. The OnStar system?”

“Yes. It’s a GPS system too. OnStar has computers that can tell an investigator how fast a car was going at the moment of a crash. By the speed at which the car moved from one point to another. Are you certain this is something you want to get into, Kate? Once you hear it, you may wish you hadn’t.”

“Okay, Dad. I can take it.”

A pause.

“Your mother was doing in excess of a hundred and forty-five miles an hour when the OnStar system registered her rollover. Now this is something you’re not going to like to hear, honey.”

“Dad. Please.”

“When a vehicle is being driven in excess of the speed limit by that much, sometimes the OnStar operator picks up on it. Sometimes the operator will place a call to the vehicle, to see if something is wrong with the driver. Or even the vehicle, perhaps a gas pedal malfunction. Or is she drunk, or having an attack, or has she been hijacked. That sort of thing. When your mother’s car got to a hundred and forty, a minute or so before the accident, the OnStar lady tried to contact Lenore. She opened the cell connection.”

Kate had never heard a breath of this story.

“Did Mom answer?”

“Yes.”

“What did she say?”

Dillon was quiet for so long she thought she had lost him.

“Lenore said,
She uses the mirrors
. She said it several times, in a panicky voice.”

Kate tried to make sense of it, failed.

“
She uses the mirrors
? What does that mean?”

“I’ve thought about that ever since she died. The only conclusion that I was able to come up with was that your mom was having some kind of stroke, that she was seeing things in the car mirror, and that whatever she was seeing was terrifying her.”

“You mean, she was speeding to get
away
from something she saw in her rearview mirror? That’s crazy, Dad. Crazy. That state trooper, Charlie Danziger, he was with her when she died. He never said anything about this to us.”

“He did to me.”

“He did?”

“Yes. At the funeral. In the garden. She was still talking like that when she died. Charlie Danziger stayed with her, held on to her, right to the end. She literally died in his arms. He thought I should know what she was saying, at the end.”

“Did it mean anything to you? What she said?”

“Not a thing—at the time. But it was disturbing. That’s why I let the drunk driver story stand, at least for Reed and Beth.”

“For me too, Dad,” she said.

“I know. That was why I wanted you to stay away from the mirror that was in Uncle Moochie’s window. You still have it, don’t you?”

“Yes,” she said, after a moment. “It’s still upstairs, in the closet.”

“Why didn’t you get rid of it? Give it back to the cleaning lady, or to Moochie, or to Delia?”

“Nobody wanted it. After the story got out about Rainey, we couldn’t give it away.”

“Then you should break it. Smash it.”

“Dad … I don’t get this. Any of it. Why did you stop working on what was going on in Niceville?”

“I stopped because your mother died.”

“That’s
when
you stopped. Was it
why
you stopped?”

It took a time for him to answer.

“In a way. I think I got the idea what I was doing was … unlucky.”

“For whom?”

“For us. The Walkers. And for the rest of the families.”

Her father always used that phrase when he was talking about the Founding Four, the Walkers and the Cottons, the Teagues and the Haggards.

The families
.

As if they were all drifting down the river of time together, trapped on the same unlucky boat
.

“How could it be unlucky? You were just looking things up in the archives. Who would care?”

“Because I found something in the archives. It troubled me. When your mother was killed, I began to worry that maybe what had happened to her was … part of it. Part of the disappearance question.”

“What did you find out?”

“I found out something that seems to link all those disappearances over the years. The thing they might all have in common.”

“And what is that?”

“It’s possible that every person who disappeared was related in one way or another to the families.”

Kate took that in, and then rejected it.

“That’s absurd. Are you talking about, what, like a family curse? That’s simply nuts, Dad.”

“Not a curse, no. But the linkage appears, and it’s the only connecting factor I could ever develop. Everyone who went missing was connected in some way to the same four families.”

“Dad, you could almost say that everybody in Niceville fits that description.”

“I took that into account. The correlation was still strong, higher than any statistical glitch. As a matter of fact, there was an even narrower connection. Everyone who had disappeared had, in one way or another, been related in some way to people who knew a young woman named Clara Mercer.”

“Clara Mercer? I … do I know that name? I seem to remember something … she killed herself? Went into Crater Sink?”

“Nobody knows exactly what happened to her. She was a distant relative of ours. A pretty wild girl. Back before the Great War, while still very young, she had an affair with one of the Teagues. She got pregnant by him.”

“Oh dear. Back in those days …”

“Yes. It amounted to ruin, an unmarried girl.”

“What happened to the baby?”

A pause here.

“Clara was sent away for a while. In 1913, or thereabouts. To a private clinic in Sallytown. When she came back, there was no child with her. The story was that she lost the child in a miscarriage. That was where it was left.”

“Do you know the man who did this to her?”

“Abel Teague. He was what they used to call a rake. He wouldn’t marry her, in spite of being confronted by several of her male friends. Somehow, by some device, he avoided several duels. Nobody seems to know quite how he did that.”

“What happened to Clara?”

“In effect, as far as I could determine, when she came home after being … sent away … she had what they used to call a nervous breakdown. Her family tried to care for her—”

“Who was her family?”

“Her older sister, Glynis—”

“Glynis?”

“Yes, that was her name. Why?”

“You
know
why, Dad. I told you last year that someone named Glynis R. signed her name to a card glued to the back of the mirror. It would have to be the same woman, wouldn’t it?”

A pause.

“Yes. I believe it is. I thought so at the time. Glynis Mercer had married into the Ruelle family. The Ruelles had extensive plantations south of Gracie. They took Clara in and did what they could. But then the local do-gooders stepped in. Somebody somewhere made a determination that she was a danger to herself and others. The records aren’t clear, because of that fire in ’35, but I got the impression that some medical officials came and forcibly removed her from the Ruelles and locked her up in that asylum in Gracie.”

“Good God. Not Candleford House?”

“Yes. I’m afraid so.”

“Dear God. Poor thing. How long did she last?”

“Nobody knows. According to the records, what bits are left, I was able to work out that something serious happened in 1931. She was on a medical trip to Niceville, with an escort. She needed some sort of
surgery. They took her to Lady Grace and she underwent some kind of procedure—from what I can figure out, it was very likely an abortion.”

“Resulting from a rape?”

“Probably. The guards at Candleford House were utterly corrupt. Little better than animals. No, worse. At any rate, during her recuperation, she broke her restraints and ran away. Three days later her dress and shoes were found at the edge of Crater Sink. Her body was never found.”

Silence.

“But how did this story connect with all those disappearances?”

“The disappearances began soon after Clara’s escape from Lady Grace. And all the victims were people who had, in one way or another, injured Clara Mercer, either by being members of the Teague … I don’t know … 
faction
, if you like, or because they put her, or allowed her to be put, in Candleford House against her will.”

“Dad. You’re a historian, not a Victorian novelist. The whole thing is … crazy.”

“I couldn’t agree more. I’m just giving you the facts as they presented themselves to me.”

“Did you ever tell Nick any of this?”

“Yes. I did. He dragged it out of me, just as you’re doing. Not in this kind of detail, but the basics.”

“When?”

“I guess maybe a month ago.”

“What did he think?”

“Same as you. Found the whole thing crazy.”

“But he listened?”

“Kate, he was there when they pulled Rainey Teague out of Ethan Ruelle’s grave. You may not like this—neither do I—but there’s no denying some kind of pattern here.”

She uses the mirrors
.

In her mind she could see the writing on the linen card—

With Long Regard—Glynis R
.

“
She uses the mirrors
? That’s what Mom said?”

“Yes.”

“Who do you think ‘she’ was? Was it Glynis?”

“Glynis Ruelle is dead and buried.”

“Nick didn’t tell me about any of this.”

“I didn’t think he would.”

“Why not?”

“Because you’re a Walker. One of the families.”

“You mean he’s afraid someone is stalking me?”

“You could say that.”

“The same person who is stalking the other members of the families? Do you really think that?”

A long pause.

“I’m
wondering
about it. That’s all.”

“Dad. Think about it. You’re saying that people have been disappearing in Niceville since the late twenties? There’s no way one person could have done all that. He—or she—would have to be …”

“A reasonable guess would be a hundred years old. Possibly older.”

“That’s impossible. Is that really what you think?”

“No. Of course not. It just nags at me. You asked me what was wrong with Niceville. I agree that it’s absurd. If there really is anybody behind this, it will probably turn out to be a descendant, a relative, acting out a private obsession. But the fact is that Clara Mercer’s body was never found.”

“Dad, nothing that goes into Crater Sink ever comes back out. Everybody knows that.”

She shook her head, waved it all away with an open palm, a gesture her father couldn’t see but one he sensed as she did it.

“And
this
is what’s wrong with Niceville?”

“Perhaps something more basic is going on, Kate. Evil invites retribution, evil generates chaos and cruelty. You and I both know that bad acts have a way of reverberating down through families. Dealing with that sort of thing is how you make a living, Kate.”

After a time, Dillon spoke again.

“You may have heard this. The Creek and the Cherokee both have a legend about a cursed place, a place where some kind of evil presence lived. It’s in the archives, recorded by a fellow named Lanman, working back around 1855. The Cherokees believed that somewhere in the vicinity of the Savannah River—Lanman was vague about exactly
where—there was a high stone bluff, and at the top of the bluff was what he called ‘
a terrible fissure.
’ From his description, I gathered it was some sort of crack or opening in the mountain.”

“Dad. You’re not trying to tell me that Crater Sink—”

“Crater Sink has been here longer than we have, Kate. Far longer. Thousands, perhaps millions of years. And it’s a very strange place, you’ll have to grant. It’s not surprising that the Cherokee would have some mythology around it. We do ourselves. I mean, we Niceville people.
Things go into Crater Sink, but nothing ever comes out
? You just said it yourself. You grew up with those stories. We all did.”