Niceville

by Carsten Stroud

  “You sitting here?” asked Nick.

  “Ayup.”

  “Good look at him?”

  “Ayup.”

  “Was he alone?”

  “Ayup.”

  “Did he seem in a hurry, or agitated?”

  Alf’s frown deepened as he worked that through.

  “You mean, like someone was following him?”

  “Ayup,” said Nick.

  Alf, a sharp old file, picked up on Nick’s mimicry and gave him a censorious frown, which Nick somehow managed to withstand.

  “Nope. Just lollygagging. He stood there for a while, looking at the books.”

  “He ever come in?”

  “Nope. Kids don’t have any use for books nowadays. Always on those tweeters and such. He looks in, moves off next door. Uncle Moochie’s.”

  “The pawnshop.”

  “Ayup. Every day the same thing, looks in here, waves at me, and then moves down to stare at all that crap in Uncle Moochie’s window.”

  “They spoke with Uncle Moochie. He says he saw the kid yesterday, saw him the day before, and the day before that, but not today.”

  “Moochie,” said Alf, as if that was explanation enough.

  “Moochie’s window is full of stuff a kid would like to look at,” said Nick.

  Alf considered this, blinked, said nothing.

  “Have you ever seen anyone who looked like he might be following the Teague boy? Anyone in the street who was paying too much attention?”

  “You mean like one of those peedo-philes?”

  “Yeah. One of those.”

  “Nope. I did come to the door to look at the boy, him standing there, staring in at Moochie’s window. Kid always spent a good five minutes in front of Moochie’s, looking at all the pawn stuff. I figure, what you should do, you should go stand there for a while, yourself, see what you get.”

  “You think?”

  “Ayup.”

  So Nick did.

  The store where Uncle Moochie ran what he liked to call his brokerage service had been a fairly ornate barbershop back in the thirties, and it still had faint traces of gilt lettering in an arch across the front of the glass—SULLIVAN’S TONSORIAL ACADEMY—but the window was so jammed to the ceiling with antique clocks and gilt mirrors and pocket watches and china busts of pocket dogs and rusted Art Deco lamps and cameos and brooches and gaudy costume jewelry and tiny bronze nudes that it looked like a treasure chest. Nick could see how a kid would find the window fascinating.

  According to Boot Jackson’s field report, Nick was right on top of the last place on North Gwinnett where anyone had seen the kid.

  No one in the shops farther down North Gwinnett had seen him go by, although he was a regular at Scoops in the next block, and people often saw him climbing the base of the bronze statue of the Confederate trooper in the parkette at the intersection of North Gwinnett and Bluebottle Way.

  But not today.

  Today, as far as the Niceville PD had been able to determine, this spot of sidewalk in front of Uncle Moochie’s was the farthest Rainey Teague had gotten before … before something happened.

  Pawnshops have security cameras, Nick was thinking. There it was, in the top left corner, one red eye blinking down at him.

  Moochie, a morose Lebanese with a sagging face full of guile and sorrow, had once been enormous, but a severe case of ulcerative colitis had left him looking like a melting candle. He was a notorious fence but also a good street source for Nick, and he was happy to let Nick see the security video, leading him through the clutter and litter and overloaded display cases to the back of the narrow store, where, in an office that reeked of sweat and hashish, he opened up a cupboard concealing an LED monitor and pressed a few buttons on a panel.

  “It’s all digital. Auto-erases every twenty-four hours, if I don’t cancel it,” said Moochie, as the video began to roll backwards, the time marker flickering in the lower right-hand corner of the screen.

  They stood there in Moochie’s crowded office and watched the people in the video walk jerkily backwards through time as the seconds coiled up again. A minute and thirty-eight seconds ran off and Nick saw himself standing on the walk outside Moochie’s, staring up at the video camera, and then Nick walked backwards away to the left of the picture. The marker spooled and flickered, the people in the video moving as in an old silent film, stiff and strange, as if they were all ghosts of the long-gone past.

  Nick was very aware of Moochie beside him and for a time he wondered if Moochie himself was the last thing Rainey Teague saw.

  Had Rainey come into the shop?

  And if he had, what had happened then?

  Was he upstairs right now, or in the basement?

  The next shop along was Toonerville, a hobby shop with a big Lionel train going around and around in a miniature version of Niceville. Rainey never failed to go inside and talk to Mrs. Lianne Hardesty, who ran the shop. Rainey was a favorite there, but today, no Rainey.

  Moochie?

  Nick had never heard anything hinky about Moochie, no hint of a pedophile streak or any other kind of chicken-hawk leaning. His record, although far from edifying, contained nothing that indicated any sort of sexual impulses at all.

  But you never knew.

  Moochie grunted, hit a button, and the image froze with the time marker stopped at 1509:22. There was Rainey Teague, just stepping into the picture, seen from an angle above and to his right, so that the kid seemed foreshortened.

  Moochie looked at Nick, who nodded, and Moochie hit a button that advanced the frames one at a time. Rainey’s clockwork figure ticked fully into the picture frame, exactly as Alf Pennington had described him, Harry Potter knapsack slung over his left shoulder, so full it was tilting him in that direction.

  Nick’s heart rate climbed as he watched the kid standing there, feeling a shadow of what Rainey’s parents must be feeling right now, but even the shadow of that dread was cold and cutting.

  Moochie kept the image moving, frame by frame, as Rainey came to a stop about a foot from the plate glass, shading his eyes to stare in at the pirate treasure, even, at one time, pressing his snub nose up against the glass, flattening it out in a comical way, his breath misting up the glass. People were moving past him in the image. No one was paying him any unusual attention.

  “Freeze it there,” Nick said.

  He leaned down to look at the kid’s face. The expression on it was utterly absorbed. He was staring at something in the display, and whatever he was looking at had completely fascinated him.

  He was held there, as if by a spell, frozen and transfixed.

  By what?

  “Did he ever come into the shop?”

  Moochie shook his head.

  “I don’t let the Regiopolis kids come in. They’re all thieves. Little Ali Babas. Just like the street kids in Beirut.”

  “Do you know what he was looking at, in the window? Whatever it is, it’s sure got his attention.”

  “He’s looking at the mirror. I finally figured out it was that mirror,” said Moochie, staring at the boy in the frozen frame. “From the way he’s standing, it’s right in front of him. He’s looking right at it. It’s the one in the gilt frame. It’s very old, prewar at least. I mean the Civil War. It came out of Temple Hill, the old Cotton mansion up in The Chase. Delia Cotton gave it to her housemaid, a lady named Alice Bayer, she lives in The Glades, and Alice came in one day and asked me for fifty dollars on it. I gave her two hundred. It’s worth a thousand. I still have the ticket. Rainey liked to see himself in it, I think. He always stood there, looking into the mirror, anyway, just like that. Then he’d sort of shake himself out of it and off he’d go. The glass is rippled from age, so I guess it’s sort of a fun-house thing for the kid.”

  Nick made a gesture and Moochie started inching the frames forward again, Nick looking for something, anything he could use. At time marker 1513:54 Rainey started to move his head backwards, his mouth opening. At 1513:55 he was startin
g to step back onto his left heel, and his mouth was opening wider.

  At 1513:56 he wasn’t in the picture at all.

  The camera was aimed at an empty patch of sidewalk.

  Rainey was gone.

  “Is it the camera?” Nick asked.

  Moochie was just gaping at the screen.

  Nick asked him again.

  “No. It never does that. It’s brand-new. I got it put in by Securicom last year. Cost me three thousand dollars.”

  “Back it up.”

  Moochie did, one frame at a time.

  Same thing.

  First frame, Rainey’s not there.

  One frame back, there he is.

  He’s stepping onto his heel, with his mouth wide open.

  Another frame back, he’s still there, and now he’s close to the window, but beginning to …

  To what?

  Recoil?

  From what?

  Something he saw in a mirror?

  Or someone behind him, reflected in the mirror. What the hell was going on here?

  “What’s the recording stored on?”

  “The hard drive,” said Moochie, still staring at the screen.

  “Is it removable?”

  Moochie looked at him.

  “Yes. But—”

  “I’m going to need it. No. Wait. I’m going to need the whole system. Do you have a spare?”

  Moochie was far from thrilled by this development.

  “I still have the old camera, hooked up to a VCR.”

  “Run it again, one more time. This time go right through the sequence.”

  Moochie pressed ADVANCE.

  They stood and watched as Rainey Teague stick-walked jerkily into the frame, leaned close to the glass, stayed there, his expression growing more fixed as the seconds passed, Rainey drawing closer and closer to the glass until his nose was pressed up against it and his breath was fogging the window.

  Then the recoil.

  He steps back.

  And … vanishes.

  The camera kept rolling. They both stood there and watched it, riveted, locked on, with the utter wrongness of the thing rippling up and down their spines. In the frames they saw the feet of passing strollers, always that patch of bare sidewalk, now and then a piece of paper flickering through or the shadow of a bird rippling across the screen, and in the background people passing by, perfectly oblivious.

  They ran the frames on until a uniform cop appeared in the image, crossing from the direction of Pennington’s Book Nook, reaching for the door of Uncle Moochie’s.

  Nick recognized the big bulky shape and the pale freckled features of Boots Jackson, the Niceville cop assigned to canvass this block. They rolled it back and forth a few more times, but it was always the same.

  At 1513:55, Rainey Teague is right there.

  At 1513:56, the kid is gone.

  He doesn’t leap out of the picture, or duck to one side, or jump way up high, or fade away, or turn into a puff of smoke, or get jerked away by the arms of a stranger.

  He just flicks off, as if he were only a digital image and somebody had hit ERASE.

  Rainey Teague is just gone.

  And he never comes back.

  • • •

  Of course in the harrowing days and nights that followed, as the CID and the Niceville cops and everybody else who could be spared tore up the state looking for the kid, no serious cop believed even for a second that what the camera was showing was literally the truth, that the kid had just snapped out of existence.

  It had to be some sort of computer glitch.

  Or a trick, like something David Copperfield would do.

  So they started with the security system that Moochie had installed, examining it and testing it and retesting it, looking for the glitch, looking for any sign that Moochie had rigged the entire thing to cover up a simple kidnapping. The security machine, a Motorola surveillance system, was sent off to the FBI for a complete forensic examination. It came back without a flaw, showing zero signs of having been tampered with in any way.

  Next came Moochie himself, who was put through an interrogation that would have done credit to the Syrian Secret Police. He also came through without a hint of guilty knowledge.

  They took his shop apart.

  Nothing.

  They took Delia Cotton’s antique mirror to a lab and checked it for—well, they had no damned idea what, but whatever they were hoping for, it wasn’t there. It was just a medium-sized antique mirror with a tarnished silver face inside a baroque gilt frame, with a handwritten linen card on the back:

  With Long Regard—Glynis R.

  So Uncle Moochie got his expensive security system back, with their apologies, although he refused to have anything more to do with the mirror, which finally ended up in Nick Kavanaugh’s closet, and in the meantime they took Alf Pennington’s Book Nook apart, which he endured stoically, seeing it as a final confirmation of the innate brutality of the Imperium. They found nothing.

  They took Toonerville Hobby Shoppe apart.

  Nothing.

  They looked at every available frame of every available surveillance camera video up and down North Gwinnett between Bluebottle Way and Long Reach Boulevard.

  Nothing.

  Not a trace.

  Naturally, Nick Kavanaugh went effectively nuts around the ninth sleepless day, and his wife, Kate, a family practice lawyer, at Tig Sutter’s urging, slipped a couple of Valiums into his orange juice and packed him off to their bed, where he slept like the living dead for twelve hours straight.

  While Nick was sleeping, Kate, after struggling with the idea for a time, called her father, Dillon Walker, who was a professor of military history up at the Virginia Military Institute in the Shenandoah Valley. It was late, but Walker, a widower who lived alone in faculty rooms on the edge of the parade square, answered the phone on the second ring. Kate heard his whispery bass voice in those familiar warm tones and she wished, as she often did, that her father lived closer to Niceville and that her mother, Lenore, the heart of Dillon Walker’s life, had not been killed in a rollover on the interstate five years ago. Her father was never the same after that. Something important had gone out of him, some of his amiable fire. But he was sharp enough to hear the tightness in her voice when she said hello.

  “Kate … how are you? Is everything okay?”

  “I’m sorry to call so late, Dad. Did I wake you?”

  Walker sat up in his leather club chair—while not actually asleep on his military-style cot, he had been dozing over a copy of Pax Britannica, James Morris’ history of the British Empire under Victoria. Kate’s voice had that faint quiver in it that was always there when she was stressed.

  “No, sweet. I was up late reading. You sound a little worried. It’s not Beth, is it? Or Reed?”

  Beth, Kate’s older sister, was in a toxic marriage to an ex–FBI agent named Byron Deitz, who was cordially loathed by everyone in the family. Reed was her brother, a state trooper who drove a pursuit car, a hard-edged young man who was never happier than when he was running down a speeder.

  “No, Dad. Not Beth. Not Reed. It’s about Nick.”

  “Dear God. He’s not hurt?”

  “No, no. He’s fine. To tell you the truth I sort of slipped him a mickey so he could sleep. He’s upstairs now, dead to the world. He’s been on a case for days, and he’s a total wreck.”

  There was a pause, as if she were trying to find a way to begin. Walker leaned over and stirred the fireplace embers into a soft yellow flickering, sat back in the worn leather chair, and picked up his scotch. Tepid and flat, but still Laphroiag.

  He could hear Kate’s breath over the phone, and pictured her there in their old family home, a slender auburn-haired Irish rose with sapphire blue eyes and a fine-cut, elegant face, very much the picture of her mother, Lenore. He sipped at the scotch, set it down.

  “You sound like you have a question, Kate. Is it about Nick’s case?”

  A silence
.

  Then, “I guess it is, Dad. The fact is, we’ve had another disappearance.”

  She heard her father’s breathing stop, and knew she had touched a sore point between them. Several years ago her father had begun an informal personal inquiry into the high rate of stranger abductions in Niceville, only to quit the project abruptly after Lenore’s death. He never picked it up again, and he had delicately but effectively evaded the topic ever since. When he spoke again his voice was as warm as always, but perhaps a little more wary.

  “I see. And I guess this case is what’s keeping Nick from sleeping? Was it really an abduction? A stranger abduction? Like all the others?”

  “So far they seem to think so. Can I tell you about it? Would that be okay?”

  “Please, Kate. Anything I can do.”

  Kate told him what they knew so far, Rainey Teague, on his way home from school, Uncle Moochie’s pawnshop, the security camera, and the way the boy just disappeared into thin air. Walker listened and felt his throat tightening.

  “The boy’s name was Teague? Not Sylvia’s boy?”

  “Yes, Dad.”

  “God. That’s awful. How is she?”

  “Terrible. Falling apart.”

  “And Miles?”

  “You know Miles. He’s a typical Teague, and they all have that cold spot. But he gets quieter every day. They’ve both given up hope.”

  “Where does the case stand now?”

  “Everyone’s in it. Belfair and Cullen County, the state police, the Cap City office of the FBI.”

  “Do they have any leads?”

  “Nothing. Nothing at all.”

  A pause.

  Then he spoke again, with a kind of forced calm in his voice.

  “Did anything—anomalous—happen?”

  “Anomalous, Dad? Like what?”

  “I don’t know, really. I know you’re asking me because of the research I was doing, but I don’t know any more about this kind of thing now than I did then. That’s why I quit. It was pointless.”

  “You quit when Mom died, Dad.”

  He was quiet again.

  She waited.

  She had crossed his line—she knew that—but she also knew she was his favorite child, the one he had always been closest to.