Niceville (8 page)

Always.

He braked the Packard in the entrance and extracted his long, lean frame from behind the wheel, straightening up with an effort and peering over his glasses at the big house up on the rise, a tall, bent old man wearing tan slacks and a plaid shirt, gardening boots, with a tanned, hawkish face, a crest of snow white hair, and clear blue eyes with a fan of deep wrinkles at each corner.

He was looking at
another
puzzle.

Delia’s house, called Temple Hill, was a classic High Victorian mansion, with a wide curving porch running all the way around the building, gingerbread carvings and gables and turrets here and there, and very fine stained-glass windows in all the rooms.

Tonight these rooms were shining like red and violet and green jewels in the fading light. It looked like Delia had turned on every light in the entire house. It stood out in the blue evening like a cruise ship on the far horizon.

As he was wondering about the open gate and the house all lit up like this, he heard the sound of music floating down the grassy hill-side—a deep resonant droning melody, a cello or a viola or perhaps an organ.

The sound, although very graceful and moving, was also very loud, and loud was one of the many modern innovations that Delia did not approve of.

Gray stood there for a moment, taking it all in and wondering what the hell Delia was up to, and then he got back into the Packard and rolled up the cobblestone drive, parking the car in the wide turning circle a few yards from her front steps.

The front door was wide open and the hallway was filled with shimmering light from the massive crystal chandelier that dominated the
foyer. The cello music flowed out of the house in a river of honey-colored sound.

He stood there beside the car for a moment, wondering if he had been taken back in time to those buttermilk days before the goddam Nips hit Pearl and he’d gone to serve with the First Infantry, a distant age that was, in his long memory, a glowing bygone era full of balls and cotillions and picnics along the Tulip with leggy girls in gauzy dresses and wide straw hats and baskets full of fresh strawberries, a time of light and music that had filled all the old homes in The Chase, until the war opened up under everybody’s feet and they all fell into the fire.

But tonight Delia’s rambling old Victorian stood open, full of lovely music, an invitation to a dance.

Gray called out Delia’s name a couple of times but doubted that she could have heard his voice over the cello sonata that was pouring out of every window and streaming through the doorways.

He sighed and straightened up his shirt and smoothed out his slacks and walked unsteadily up the steps to the open door, hesitating at the threshold. He was aware that his breathing had become difficult and the skin and muscles across his shoulders were tightening as if he were expecting an assault. He shook that off with an effort, gathering himself, and knocked heavily on the frame of the door.

“Delia? You home? Delia, it’s Gray.”

No call.

No movement.

Just the music ebbing and flowing all around him, like an undertow now, pulling him in. He came slowly down the hall, walking, out of habit, to one side of the long Persian runner that Delia hated to see abused by a gardener’s shoes.

He reached the door to the music room, which seemed to be the source of the cello sonata, looked in, saw the elegant octagonal space filled with light and sound. The cello music was coming from Delia’s old but powerful hi-fi set.

This close to the source, and at this volume, the cello sounded less honeyed and more like the deep bass growling of a monstrous creature buried under the parquet floor, the heavy vibration thrumming through the soles of his feet and crawling up his shins.

Every lamp in the room was on, including the big Tiffany dome in
the center of the ceiling. He walked in a few more feet, looking around, saw nothing out of place and no sign of any disorder.

There was a crystal glass with an amber liquid in it, half full. He picked it up.

Scotch, now warm and flat.

The chair where Delia liked to sit and watch TV was dented and ruffled, her white fox comforter in a heap on the parquet floor, as if she had been in the middle of something when either the phone rang or the doorbell sounded.

No. Not the phone.

There it was, the cordless handset that Mrs. Bayer had insisted she buy, just in case.

He stared down at the chair for a time, trying to put his impressions together into something useful, and failing. He was reaching out to shut off the music when he noticed movement beyond the closed French doors that led into Delia’s wood-paneled dining room.

The glass panes in the doors were old and rippled, but it looked to Gray, as he peered through them, as if something—no, someone—was on top of the rosewood table in the center of the room. He could make out a blurred shell pink figure, spinning and spinning, arms spread wide, head back, and pale white face lifted up to the crystal chandelier that hung over the table.

Even through the antique glass he could see that whoever was standing—whoever was
dancing
—on top of the table, it was not Delia.

Delia had a full head of silver-white hair. This figure—unmistakably a woman—had shoulder-length auburn hair that flared out in an arc as she spun in circles on the table.

Gray stood there looking at the woman for a long, timeless period, transfixed by the fury and the grace of her dance. After a moment, he realized that the woman was quite naked.

This feverish vision, the dancing nude woman flickering like fire through the rippled glass of Delia Cotton’s French doors, combined with the deep, resonant rumble of the cello vibrating through the entire house, even through his own fragile bones, held him fixed and frozen, as if he had been hypnotized. Something about that dancing figure was disturbingly familiar, and precisely as the name came to him—
Margaret
—the nude woman stopped spinning and turned to face him through the glass.

She opened her arms and opened her body to him and stood there, clearly waiting for him to come in to her, her face and body rippling and shifting as he watched.

Thinking that he might be having a stroke, or that he was at the threshold of some great illuminating event, possibly even his death, but not so very fond of his life that either of these possibilities carried much weight, Gray Haggard began to move towards the figure on the far side of the glass, like a man in a dream.

He reached the doors
—Margaret
—took the gilt handles in his rough, dry hands, his clear blue eyes fixed on the naked woman—
Margaret
—who was waiting on the other side of the glass, her arms open, her lush white body and her full breasts glowing like alabaster in the diamond-hard light
—Margaret
—Gray turned the handles and threw the doors open.

The dining room was utterly black.

Totally dark.

He could see nothing at all, as if a black cloth had been thrown over him.

He shook his head, blinking, thinking—
a stroke I’m having a stroke
—but then he saw pale light on either side of him, flickering and silvery. He looked down at the rippled glass in one of the doors and saw the naked woman
inside
the glass panes, still waiting with her arms open, smiling out at him. His chest tightened and one knee began to quiver. He looked back into the featureless dark of the dining room.

He heard a voice.

It might have been Delia Cotton’s voice.

Run, Gray, run
.

For the love of God run
.

Gray Haggard was about to slam the doors shut and run when something exploded out of the black like a huge flock of crows, flying directly at him.

He caught a brief flash of jagged black beaks and coal black eyes with a green light in them. The air was full of the fluttering of wings. The black cloud struck him full in the upper body and face with crushing force, a blinding violet light full of sizzling red wires flared up inside his skull, and he went down, falling backwards into the music room, the floor slamming into his back, his head striking the parquet tiles hard. Dazed, stunned, he was aware that the black cloud had settled
down onto him like dust, that it was coating him like oil, that it covered him like a shroud, that it was burning its way into him like lava, penetrating him in every place. He felt himself being fed upon.

This went on for much longer than his mind could deal with it. Towards the end he was not himself. The thing kept feeding and a long while later Gray Haggard was gone from the living world.

Kate was driving home when her cell phone rang. It was Nick, calling from his cruiser, by the background noise.

“How’d it go with Bock?”

Kate’s mood, darkened by the look she had seen on Bock’s face, lifted at the sound of Nick’s voice.

“We beat the bastard,” she said.

“Good. But we talked about him. I still think you need to watch him. You still have your Glock in the glove box?”

Kate rolled her eyes. Nick tended to be a bit extreme when it came to the defense of his family. Since Kate was the only wife he had, as far as she knew, she got all his attention.

“Nick, stand down, okay? You don’t have to be on point about me all the time. Look what happened in Savannah last week.”

“Hey. Guys begged for it. So I just tuned them up a little.”

“Nick. They were just a couple of steroidal jerks in Forsyth Park. And if that was just a tune-up, I’d hate to see the whole program. And right across the street from the hotel we were staying in. Everybody in the lobby saw it happen.”

“Nice hotel, though. Great pool.”

“You’re changing the subject.”

“I’m sure as heck trying.”

“Nick …”

“Look, I went too far in Savannah. Won’t happen again. But you’re out there driving around with everything I give a damn about in the world.”

“Yeah?” she said, point made and backing off. “What about the Oakland Raiders? Don’t you love them too?”

“They’re not in Oakland anymore. And anyway they all have guns.”

“So do I. Where are you?”

Nick’s voice changed again.

“You heard about the Gracie thing?”

“Yes. It was terrible. Have they put you on it?”

“Not yet. The First Third is a national bank, so it will go to the Feds and to Marty Coors at State.”

“So where are you?”

“I’m out at the scene. I’m walking it with Jimmy Candles and Marty.”

“How come, if it’s not going to be given to CID?”

Nick’s answer was careful.

Guarded.

“Well, mainly because I’m ex-military, and Marty asked me to.”

Kate was silent for a moment.

When she had first met him, he had shown up at one of her criminal justice courses, in his full Class A’s, a chest full of ribbons, as dark-skinned as a Bedouin, all his edges on, cold gray eyes, a sharp-cut face so lean he looked half starved, a wiry frame so hard it looked as if you could cut yourself on him.

Kate, although she had grown up in a military family and had a younger brother in the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center at Glynco, was as quietly left-wing and vaguely antiwar as a girl from the South could get.

Didn’t matter a damn bit.

For reasons she could never explain, to herself or any of her shocked classmates, most of whom were earnest young liberal women just like her, Kate was instantly transfixed by Nick, utterly fascinated by his compact body, his strangely liquid walk, his aura of latent menace, as if he were a leopard who had climbed out of his pit at the zoo and was now pacing around McDonough Hall sizing up the gazelles. She had dug around a bit and found out that he was there to try on the law, having been offered a slot in the Army’s Judge Advocate General’s branch.

When she had finally gotten up the nerve to talk to him, in the atrium at the Williams Law Library, his wry and totally unexpected
smile and the way it changed the lines around his eyes had lit a slow fire in her belly.

By the end of their first month together she would have opened a vein to take him home to Niceville. By the end of the fall semester, she had managed it. Her father, in honor of Nick’s first visit to Niceville, had come down from VMI to throw a semiformal bun fight for him at the Anora Mercer Golf and Country Club, where Nick first ran into Tig Sutter. By the end of the party Tig Sutter would have done anything to get this guy into the Belfair and Cullen County Criminal Investigation Division. By the end of the school term, Tig Sutter had, somehow, managed to do it.

To Kate’s amazement and delight, Nick had taken an early out from the Army, giving up on JAG as a career and accepting a spot on Tig’s newly minted CID unit. He’d explained it to her in a way that seemed persuasive—loved her, loved the town, a chance to make a life for both of them—but she had the idea that, although he meant every word—lying wasn’t in him—there was something he was keeping from her, something to do with his service, something, she suspected, that had happened to him overseas. Figuring that Tig Sutter would know, since he was the guy who had hired Nick and he was ex-Army himself, she tried to oil it out of him over several near-lethal mojiitos at the Moot Court bar.

Tig, who hated deception, had danced around it, confirming by his obvious unease that there really was something hidden there, so Kate kept at it, pushing the boundaries of their friendship a bit, but in the end he would only tell her, with affection, but firmly and finally, that although Nick’s service record was immaculate, covert combat always takes place in a cloud of ambiguity, and that whatever happens, or doesn’t happen, on a particular mission should stay there. That was the Army way, and it was Tig’s way, and if one day Nick wanted to tell her about it, whatever it was, or it wasn’t, if there actually
was
anything to tell, he would, but in his own good time.

In the meantime, Tig told her he was happy for her, and Nick was a very lucky guy but he really needed to put her in a cab right now because there were two of her and the middle one was all blurry.