Niceville (45 page)

“Yes. The State Police finally began to investigate the place back in 1935, but somebody set it on fire before they could find out very much.”

“Same year as the fire in the Niceville Town Hall,” said Kate. “It’s almost as if somebody was wiping out the traces …”

“Traces of what?”

“I don’t know, Nick. Maybe to Rainey?”

“To Rainey?”

“Dad was asking me a lot of questions about Rainey’s adoption.”

“What about it?”

“How Miles found Rainey in the first place. Up in Sallytown. How his birth parents had died—”

“The Gwinnetts. A barn fire, right?”

“Yes. Another fire. Then his foster parents go missing—”

“They did? You never told me.”

“Well, at least I could never find them. And then the lawyer who did the adoption for Miles—Leah Searle—she drowns a year later.”

Nick found his inner cop waking up.

“So, what you’re saying is, fires and drownings in 1935—”

“And more fires and drownings seven years ago.”

“And all connected to the Teague family.”

“Yes.”

Nick looked at the file box on the floor and then up at Kate.

“I could look into all of this tomorrow, if you want?”

“Tomorrow’s Sunday.”

“FBI link still works on Sundays. Computers all work. Census records—it’s all—”

The phone rang.

Kate picked it up, was deep in an intense conversation within thirty seconds. She looked up at him, mouthed the words
Lemon Featherlight
.

Nick nodded, picked up the jubilee card again, turned it over, ran his fingertip down the list of names, looking for a particular one.

He found it halfway down the third row.

Glynis Mercer Ruelle

He flipped the card over, found her in the third row, a tall strong-faced woman with an erect bearing, aristocratic, with gleaming black hair ribboned around a long, well-turned neck.

She had a direct, penetrating gaze. Her eyes were pale in the sepia-tinted shot and Nick figured they might possibly be green.

Although she had an air of sensuality, she wasn’t smiling at all, and seemed in some indefinable way to be unhappy with the company.

Looking at her, Nick decided that she would have made a good friend and a loving wife but she would not forgive an insult easily and probably had a full measure of the Southern flair for honor, for the vendetta. He looked again at the word written against Abel Teague’s name.

shame

Something about the handwriting.

Where had he seen it?

Kate was still on the phone.

Nick went up the stairs to his office, dug around in the closet, full of his old Class As and two sets of dress blues, his blues studded with medals and gleaming gold braid.

He found the package right at the back, lifted it out, a medium-sized rectangle, wrapped in a cotton duvet, tied with yellow ribbon, heavy and solid. He unwrapped it carefully.

It was the mirror that Rainey Teague had been looking at—or had seemed to be looking at—when he simply flicked out of existence. The
frame was baroque, the metal silver plated in gold, and the mirror glass was not original, but was much older than the frame, a type of silvered glass that, according to Moochie, dated back to the middle of the seventeenth century, possibly from Ireland.

Nick looked at his own reflection in the mirror, staring into the thing as if defying it to come alive in his hands.

His face looked distorted and strange in the glass, which was pitted and rippled, with patches of the silver coating on the back scraped away. The thing was heavy in his hands, and although he kept his office cool because of his computer, the frame felt warm, almost hot.

He turned the frame over, looked at the linen card on the back, at the signature.

With Long Regard—Glynis R
.

He had the jubilee card with him. He held it up beside the handwritten card.

shame

He was no calligrapher, but even he could see the handwriting was identical. If Glynis Ruelle had written the card on the back of the mirror, then Glynis Ruelle had also written the word
shame
beside Abel Teague’s name.

Kate was calling him.

When he got back to the family room, carrying the mirror, Kate had her laptop open and was clicking through to her e-mail service.

She looked up at him.

“That was Lemon. The streetlights are off over at Garrison Hills.”

Nick sat down, suddenly very tired.

“What about his inside lights?”

“All working. He says it looks like something is pressing up against the glass.”

Something deep in his lizard mind made Nick say what he said next.

“Tell him not to open a door. Or a window.”

Kate stared at him.

“Why?”

“I have no idea. Just a feeling. Call him back, tell him that. Please.”

Kate picked up the phone again, dialed.

A silence.

A minute long.

She put the phone down.

“He’s not answering.”

A pause.

“Power failure, probably.”

“Yes. Probably. I’ll try his cell.”

Kate did, got switched to Lemon’s voice mail.

“Not answering.”

“What did he call about?”

“He found something on Sylvia’s computer. He sent it to me as an attachment.”

She turned the machine around, showed him the screen. He could see two images, apparently scanned-in copies of some turn-of-the-century paperwork. And a third, a scanned-in newspaper column, also very old-looking.

Nick leaned in and studied the official papers.

“What are they?”

“They’re conscription notices,” said Kate. “Made out in June of 1917. Two of them. They’re made out to John Hardin Ruelle and Ethan Bluebonnet Ruelle. Look at the signature of the conscription clerk at the bottom.”

Jubal Custis Walker, Clerk of Records

“Jubal? That’s your grandfather, isn’t it?”

“Yes. It is. Lemon found these on Sylvia’s computer, along with a copy of the 1910 census. On the census, John and Ethan Ruelle are listed as Sole Supporters of Family. Lemon says that means they should never have made it onto a conscription list in the first place. Guess who was listed as John Ruelle’s wife?”

“Glynis Ruelle.”

“That’s right. Lemon also sent along a copy of a column in the
Cullen County Record
, dated December 27, 1921.” She hit a tab and the attachment appeared.

“They’re all there,” said Nick, after reading it twice. Kate nodded.

“My own grandfather signed the conscription papers sending them off to the war. So they couldn’t keep going after Abel Teague. I can’t believe it. What a terrible thing to do.”

It was hard to disagree with that, so Nick didn’t try.

“Is there any other record of the Ruelles’ actually doing that? Challenging Abel Teague?”

“Lemon couldn’t find one. He’s still looking. But Dad felt that it had to have happened, given the times, and that Abel Teague dodged the challenge. Maybe more than once.”

“So John dies in the war. Ethan comes back—”

“Wounded. Crippled.”

“And of course the resentment is still there,” said Nick, looking at the article. “Probably much worse. Maybe he went back after Abel Teague again?”

“He would have had plenty of reason. His brother’s dead and Clara’s back at the farm going quietly insane and there’s Abel Teague, walking around the town with a smile on his face.”

“So somebody—probably Abel himself—brought in a ringer to finish it. This Colin Haggard guy.”

“Ethan should have declined the fight. No one would have thought any the less of him.”

“Except for him,” said Nick.

Kate looked at the jubilee card, all those faces, all those lives. She dropped it back into the box, flipping the lid shut, leaned back into the couch.

“Did you get an mpeg made from whatever you saw in Delia’s basement?”

“Yes. Beau gave me a flash drive.”

“Do you have it here?”

“Yes.”

“May I look at it?”

“Why?”

“Because I’m your wife.”

“And you’re … what? Curious?”

“Just show it to me. Please.”

Nick hesitated, reached into his pocket, drew it out, a small Sony USB drive.

Kate took it and plugged it into her laptop. The machine worked on it for a while, and then the media player popped up and the clip began to run, grainy, stuttering, but clear enough.

Nick saw himself standing in front of a long stone wall, lit up by the reflected glow of what was flickering on the wall of Delia Cotton’s basement, a shimmering field of green, a brown bar, a blue glow along
the bottom. The image jumped and righted itself. Beau had found a way to turn the image right side up when he copied the tape.

Now the image showed a broad line of pines and oaks, a thick forest line hemming in a tilled field, people working in the field, spades chopping into the earth, something long and dark being lifted up. A sled pulled by a tractor.

“Can you stop it there, Kate?”

She froze the video.

“Can you zoom in?”

Kate hit a button and the image jumped closer. Nick leaned in and focused on the sled, on the pile of white stones. Kate was leaning in close, so close he could smell her scent and feel the heat of her body. He felt her stiffen, and she drew back.

“Nick. Are those skulls?”

“Yes,” he said. “That’s what I thought. Let it run some. A thing happens, about now. I want to see if I was right.”

Kate hit
PLAY
and the video jerked into life again. Nick was still in the picture. On the sound track they could hear Beau’s voice.

“Nick, honest, don’t touch it.”

“I’m just going to—”

And then a hissing sound, deep and resonant, loud enough to fill the room.

Nick leaned into the screen, intent.

A moment of time, and then the image of the farm flickered and disappeared, changing all at once into a section of rolling green lawn, a black iron fence, a red and white security van at the curb, a young black man in a uniform.

“What
was
that?” Kate asked. “What happened? What was that hissing noise?”

“Delia’s cat. She was under a furnace pipe. What happened was the picture
changed
. It was a field with people digging in it, a tree line—”

“A sled piled with skulls—”

“Yes. And then it changed into the street scene outside Delia’s house.”

A silence.

“What does it mean, Nick?”

“I have no idea.”

“It was a real place, wasn’t it?”

“Looked real enough. Maybe a burial ground? The South is full of them.”

“We could search the photo archives, see if we can find a match. The pines, the countryside, it looks like someplace in the Belfair Range.”

“The Ruelles had a place south of Sallytown. Your dad mentioned it. That would put it right in the middle of the Belfair Range. That’s where you’d see a stand of old pines like that. Can you save this video?”

“Yes,” she said, hitting
SAVE AS
.

The video shut down.

There was a flicker outside, and the streetlights blinked off.

“Oh, great,” said Kate. “I guess we’re next.”

“Kate. A power failure, okay?”

“Go do something manly about it, then.”

Nick got up, went to the living room window. Not a glimmer from outside, but the house lights were still on. Nick could see lights through the trees, which meant the power was still on in the other homes along the street. Kate was sitting on the floor, staring up at him, her face white.

“Like I said. A rolling blackout.”

“Then why are the house lights still on?”

“The streetlights are on a different cable.”

Nick picked up the phone, listened to the steady dial tone, dialed the number for Sylvia’s house, listened to it ring and ring. He set it down, looked back out at the street.

All he could see was his own reflection in the window, a figure in the light, Kate on the floor beside him, staring out.

“I’ll go check the breaker panel.”

“In the horror movies, the first guy who gets killed is the guy who goes to the basement to check the breaker panel.”

“This is not a horror movie.”

“Then maybe it’s a ghost story.”