Niceville (44 page)

“Give Mr. Teague your pistol, Albert.”

“John, he’s not worth that. Just shoot him like the coward he is.”

“She asked me to try him, see if he’d fight. He says he will. So will you give him your weapon?”

Albert looked at the old man.

“He could kill you.”

“Yes.”

Albert smiled at him.

“Worse yet, he’s got my gun, he could turn around and shoot me after he shoots you. What a pair of flats we’d look then.”

“I won’t shoot you,” said the old man. “Against the rules to shoot the second. Come, let’s do this.”

Albert checked the cylinder again, walked over to the old man, handed him the pistol, grip first.

The old man turned it in his hand, studying it.

“Don’t know this kind. Is it a single-action?”

“No. It fires with the trigger pull.”

“You’re bleeding, boy,” he said, looking at Albert’s belly.

“Yes. I am.”

“May I try a round or two, just to get the feel?”

Albert shrugged.

“He asks can he try a round or two?”

“Tell him yes.”

Albert stepped back as the old man lifted the revolver, steadied it with both hands, aimed it at a bench about the same distance away as Merle.

He squeezed the trigger, the little revolver jumped with a muffled crack and a chunk of wood flew off in the middle of the back rail of the bench. He steadied the weapon, fired again, and the second shot struck less than an inch from the first.

“All right,” he said. “I think I’m ready.”

He turned his right side to Merle, narrowing the target he offered, holding the pistol in his right hand, down by the side of his leg.

Merle stood the same way, his right side turned to the man, his Colt down. There was a silence. Merle could feel his heart beating in his chest.

He did not want to die, but then he thought,
Maybe I won’t. Maybe I’ll get through this and someday somehow I’ll get my old life back
. The old man was staring back at him with his flat shark eyes.

“I’ll call it,” said Albert.

“Please do,” said Abel Teague.

“On the count of three. Ready?”

Teague considered Merle, his expression alive with cold calculation.

“I don’t want to go to that harvest, son.”

“You can’t stay here.”

“Well, I don’t know about that. Took her eighty years to find someone like you. Someone who could walk between two worlds. Might be eighty years before she finds another. If I can stay alive long enough, maybe my docs will figure out how to cure dying. All I have to do is kill you.”

“That’s true.”

There was nothing more to be said.

After a pause, Albert began to count.

“One.”

“Two.”

“Three.”

Both weapons came up, and they fired at almost the same second, the heavy thump of the Colt, the brittle crack of the .38. The sound died out quickly, muffled by the dense mist. Crows began to caw and chatter in the distance.

They stood there for a few seconds, staring at each other, and then Merle went down on one knee, the heavy Colt falling to the grass, blood pumping out of a small round hole in his throat, just under the Adam’s apple. He had a much larger hole in the back of his neck. Albert ran over to him, bending down, catching him as he fell.

Abel Teague took a step forward, staggered, took another, went down on one knee.

He had a large bloody hole in his left cheek, just below the eye. The eye itself had exploded outwards like a shattered egg. The back of his skull was gone, and his brains were scattered all over the lawn behind him.

Abel Teague fell sideways, rolled over onto his back, looked up at the sky, gasping. He could hear the crows calling and from far away he heard Albert Lee’s voice, fading away. He closed his mind, trying to keep the spark going, thinking that if they could get to him in time the docs could do wonders. When he opened his mind a heartbeat later, he was looking up at Glynis Ruelle, a high blue sky behind her, her green eyes on him, her rich black hair shining in the sunlight.

“Get up,” said Glynis. “You have work to do.”

Sleep was out of the question, especially since Linus Calder had phoned back on Nick’s cell three times, and now Nick was out in the backyard again, talking the guy through every detail of what had happened at Delia Cotton’s house in The Chase.

Kate listened with part of her mind to the back and forth, theories about how it might have happened, how to explain these two events without stepping off the edge of the known universe.

Her father was not in his office or his flat, that much she knew. His car was in its parking space at the VMI lot. Kate had even begun to hope that he was just out for a long walk, or gone on a bender because the idea of driving down to see her and talk about Niceville had freaked him out.

Which she knew he would never do.

His car was still there.

He had never reached it.

So he was officially missing.

But Nick was on it, and this detective up in Virginia, Linus Calder, seemed to know what he was doing, and Reed had called her to tell her he was at VMI now and also on the case. And then she had made a call to her sister, Beth, and found out that she was having yet another fight with that man.

She told Beth what was going on, got the impression that she wasn’t listening very carefully, which was understandable, tried to make it sound as if Dad had just gone on a trip without telling anybody, felt she had half convinced Beth.

And then Deitz had started bellowing at Beth again, something about the air conditioner being out of order and what was she doing on the fucking phone, and she could hear the kids crying in the background, so Kate put the phone down, thinking that there was really nothing more she could do about anything. Except maybe one thing.

The last thing her father had said to her.

His records, in the basement.

Now that she was wide awake again, she got up off the couch and poured herself a large black coffee and went along the back hall to the kitchen and on down the stairs into the basement.

Up in the backyard, under the stars, the yellow glow of the yard lights shining on the trees at the bottom of the yard, Nick was listening—patiently—to Linus Calder, a guy every bit as exhausted as Nick was, but still at the crime scene, and Linus Calder was going over it again.

“There’s no organic material in the stain site. I mean, if it was … what … spontaneous combustion? … you’d find something organic—not that I believe in spontaneous combustion—but … Jesus … what the hell
else
could it be? I swear, Nick, you say something like alien abduction, I’ll shoot my dog. I don’t actually own a dog. But I’ll go out right now and buy one and shoot it.”

“I’m not going to say alien abductions, okay?”

“Your CSI guys file a report yet?”

“They’re off the scene, but no report yet.”

“You going to come up here, take a look? I mean, we already got the hotshot brother—”

“What’s Reed doing?”

“Driving me nuts. Until I hooked him up with some Virginia State Patrol guys. He knows people they know. Don’t get me wrong. Nice kid, bit scary, bit
out there
, reminds me of those thousand-yard-stare guys we had in Vietnam. Anyway, he’s out with the Virginia troopers and they’re doing a canvass of everybody at VMI, see if anybody saw anything—”

“At
this
hour?”

“These kids are military. They don’t mind. But that’s all harness work, stuff the uniform guys can do instead of munching honey-dip
crullers up at Beanie’s. I need a real detective up here, not another steroidal keener.”

“I hear you. I’ll chopper up in the morning.”

“We going to get everything you’ve got? I mean, this prof was a well-loved guy. This is VMI. They don’t like scary random shit at VMI.”

A pause, a wheezing sigh.

“Seriously, Kavanaugh, what’re we going to do about all this? I been a cop since forever and I’ve never seen anything like this. Outside of the horror movies. You got
anything
for me?”

Nick thought about it, and then told the cop what he was thinking. Calder listened all the way through, and then he said, “Dear God. I was right all along. You
are
a fucking fruitcake.”

“I tried to warn you. What’s
your
theory?”

“Okay. Here’s one. This Delia Cotton broad, she’s loaded, right?”

“The Cottons are probably the richest family in Niceville. Maybe in the whole state.”

“Okay. There you go. But Haggard, he’s a poor lonely old gardener, and he’s best buds with our Dillon Walker guy here, they were at Omaha Beach together and all that heroic shit, so they decide to take her out—”

“The Walkers and the Haggards are loaded too.”

“Okay. Then it’s some sort of mysterious family vendetta, a terrible secret buried in the past. But now it’s about to come out, so they kidnap the old lady and make themselves disappear at the same time. They get hold of some scraps of shrapnel, get hold of a few leftover bone pins—”

“From your friendly local secondhand bone-pin and shrapnel shop?”

“Then they toss a bucket of acetone on the floor, slop it around, strip the varnish off in the shape of a body, maybe use a blowtorch on it to dry it all off—”

“Hence the warm spots?”

“Hence the warm spots. Scatter the metal around, and off they go—everybody thinks they’re like disappeared by these man-eating ghosts, I mean, everybody who’s a fucking fruitcake believes that, but really they’re on their way to Costa Rica with all of Delia Cotton’s money. Or secrets. Or whatever the hell it is.”

“Makes more sense than my theory.”

“Sure as shooting it does, my friend. But you’re still a fruitcake. Nobody says ‘hence’ anymore. Get some sleep. I’ll see you tomorrow morning.”

Nick rang off, looked into the house through the conservatory glass, and saw Kate in the family room just beyond it, taking things out of a large cardboard box, her hair hanging down over her forehead, her fine-boned hands white in the downlight, her expression intent and determined.

Kate looked up at him, her eyes strange. She was holding a stack of old photos.

“Nick. This is Dad’s file box, from that research he never finished. He said I should look at it. Want to see something interesting?”

“Sure,” he said, sitting down beside her on the couch. She smelled of old cardboard and cobwebs and there was dust all over her shirt.

She riffled through some faded sepia pictures, found one, a very large one, perhaps eight by ten, pulled it out, and set it down on the coffee table.

It was a formal picture, slightly faded but still quite clear, a turn-of-the-century family group, fifty or more people posed on a large stone staircase in front of a massive archway, live oaks draped in Spanish moss all around, horses in the foreground, a prosperous and attractive group, the men and boys in stiff black suits and starched collars, the women and the girls with high-piled Gibson-girl hair and lace collars and full billowing bosoms, waists cinched in tight, dainty feet visible under the hems of their lacy petticoats.

The photo was printed on stiff cardboard and framed in sinuous Art Nouveau engravings. Below the picture the card company—Martin Palgrave & Sons—had printed, in a fine copperplate script:

Niceville Families Jubilee
John Mullryne’s Plantation
Savannah Georgia 1910

Kate flipped the card over.

On the back, someone with a free-flowing script had recorded all
the names of the people in the picture, in order, starting at the upper left and going all the way through to the bottom right. One name had been underlined: Abel Teague.

Written beside his name, in a different hand, was one word:
shame
.

“Okay,” said Nick, watching her face. “Abel Teague is the man Rainey was asking for when he came out of the coma.”

“Yes. Lacy told me. There’s more. And I don’t want you to think I’m a … what do cops always say?”

“A fruitcake?”

“Yes. There’s a face I want you to look at.”

Kate flipped the card over, tapped the image of a pretty young girl with her light-colored hair piled high, a long, graceful neck, a full figure under the lacy bodice, large direct eyes, pale in color, full lips partly open. Most of the women in the shot were very pretty. This one was a stunner, with an air of almost defiant sensuality that conveyed itself across more than a century and seemed even now to look directly into Nick’s eyes.

“Wow. She’s a heart attack.”

“Yes, she is. And she also looks
exactly
like the girl I saw at the bottom of the garden this afternoon.”

She said this without drama, but with an air of quiet certitude that Nick had learned to take seriously. Which he did.

“So then she’s a relative, an ancestor?”

“Yes, she must be.”

“Who is she? Her name on the back?”

“Yes. Her name is Clara Sylvia Mercer. The famous Clara Dad was talking about. Dad thinks she’s probably a distant relative by way of the Mullrynes and the Walkers. Mom was a Mullryne and her mother was a Mercer.”

Nick looked at the picture more closely.

Looks a lot like Kate
.

“Now, you’re not thinking this is the
same
girl, Kate? I mean, here she is in 1910 and she can’t be more than fifteen or sixteen. She’d be … what, almost a hundred and seventeen now?”

“Is this a fruitcake check?”

“No. Not at all.”

“It’s not her, I know that. It
can’t
be her, but it’s somebody who looks very much like her.”

“Is Abel Teague in this shot?”

Kate moved her fingertip, placed it on the body of a broad-shouldered medium-sized well-set young man with a high clear forehead and eyes so pale they had to be either blue or light gray.

Abel Teague had a good face, thought Nick, intelligent, with humor in it, maybe a touch of arrogance, but they all did. He wasn’t wearing a jacket, just a shirt and what looked like striped pants in a military cut.

“So what’s the
shame
thing?”

Kate gave him one of her looks.

“Dad said he talked to you about what was wrong with Niceville. About the disappearances. About Clara being shut up in Candleford House.”