Niceville

by Carsten Stroud

  “Connected,” said Lacy. “How?”

  “Maybe it was a trade.”

  “A trade?”

  “Maybe she went so that Rainey could come back.”

  “Jesus, Lemon,” said Nick.

  “Back from where?” asked Lacy.

  “I don’t know. Back from outside. Maybe Crater Sink leads to the outside, and Sylvia knew it.”

  “We don’t know that she went into Crater Sink,” said Nick.

  “But wasn’t her car there, at the end of the road? And her shoes?”

  “Yes,” said Nick in a flat tone. “Doesn’t mean she jumped into it.”

  “Then where is she?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Featherlight, sensing Nick’s mood, sat back, looked at Lacy and then back at Nick.

  “So, well, that’s what I wanted to say.”

  “That Sylvia was worried about something in her past, and she was using the Ancestry program to look into it without letting the town clerk know what she was doing? And that when Rainey was taken, she killed herself so whoever was holding Rainey could send him back from—”

  “From outside.”

  “From outside. Like she had made a deal?”

  Featherlight shrugged.

  “A deal with who?” asked Nick.

  “I don’t know. But I think the answer is in there somewhere.”

  “Where?”

  “In the past. I think that’s where you need to look, if you want to figure out what happened.”

  Nick was quiet, looking at Lemon.

  “And that’s it?”

  “Yes,” said Featherlight.

  Nick was thinking about the Teague family, studying Lemon Featherlight’s face. Lemon looked as if he had retreated into a smaller space, like it was where he always went to wait for bad news.

  “Well, Nick?” said Lacy.

  “Where’d she do this online checking?”

  “From her office at the house.”

  “Her home computer?”

  “Yes,” said Lemon Featherlight. “She had a big Dell system.”

  Nick remembered it. He had driven Kate over to the Teague place last month, keeping her company on one of her usual walkabouts, Kate making sure the house was being kept up properly. The Dell was on Sylvia’s desk in her office.

  During the search for Rainey, they’d gone through it for clues, but he didn’t remember anything about this Ancestry search engine. But there was … something … here.

  He could feel it.

  “I’m going to check this out, Lemon. If there’s something in it, I’ll call Cap City and see what I can do.”

  “He doesn’t have a lot of time,” said Lacy. “He has a bail hearing next—”

  There was movement in the hallway, steps coming down it, rapid and sharp. Gwen Schwinner appeared in the doorway, glanced around, focused on Nick.

  “Did you come here with a large black detective?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’d better get out there. I think he’s been stabbed.”

  Merle Zane Gets an Offer He Can’t Refuse

  Somehow the woman must have gotten Merle into a bed because that’s where he was when the heat of the sun shining in through the drapes woke him up. He was facedown on a lumpy feather pillow covered with coarse striped ticking, like they gave you at Angola. He had a brief surge of panic, thinking he was back there, but then he thought about the sunlight on his cheek and knew he sure as hell wasn’t in Angola, because, like another famous location, Angola was where the sun did not shine.

  He lifted his head off the pillow, which required him to flex the muscles in his lower back, which helped him to locate himself in space and time—on his face in a hard bed in a sun-filled room with a hole in his back from Charlie Danziger’s Sig Sauer.

  Merle tensed himself, and rolled over slowly, expecting a wave of pain but getting only a sharp tugging sensation in his lower back, as if he had barbed wire wrapped around him.

  He looked down at his naked torso and saw a wide band of unbleached cloth, maybe linen or cotton, wrapped tightly around his midsection. He reached around and felt for the wound in his back. Under the cloth he could feel a row of rough stitching. The move stretched his shoulder and the pain drew his attention to a row of stitching there as well, in a crude cross-hatched pattern that reminded him of the way a body gets stitched up after an autopsy. The skin around the wound was painted with some kind of deep reddish-orange stain—iodine, he realized.

  He swung his legs over and sat upright at the side of the bed, taking in the room. He was in the woman’s farmhouse, and not a jail, he was pretty sure of that, and, from the shape of the roof, in an attic room, small, and hot, but clean, with a rough-planked wooden floor and hand-plastered walls and an old beamed roof.

  There was one tall window at the far end of the narrow room, a wooden sash with thick rippled glass, framed by a pair of gauzy curtains that fluttered in the breeze. The window was open and a fat bumblebee was buzzing around in the space. Through the window he could hear the singsong rise and fall of cicadas in the trees, the plaintive whoot-whoot of a pair of mourning doves, and, closer, above the muttering putter of the ancient generator, the sound of a harness jingling, the snuffle and stamp and whinny of a horse—from the depth and force of the whinny, a very big damn horse.

  He got up and crossed, unsteadily, to the window, looked out across a sea of forest canopy painted in the pale deciduous greens of early spring and pierced by the darker spear tips of lodgepole pines, green forest rolling toward a horizon of blue-brown hills far away to the south.

  Nearer in he could see a large cleared section of tilled earth, hemmed on three sides by the forest, a patchwork of fields, some pale green with spring wheat, some darker green with the first shoots of what he thought, from the white blossoms, might be potatoes, and at the far end the pale gold of canola, all of this stretching out for almost a mile into the blue distance.

  At the far end he could see figures stooping over the dark brown earth, hacking away at it with picks and shovels, A work party, from what he could make out without binoculars, digging drainage ditches or a foundation for a shed or something like that.

  Beyond that distant plot there were more dark figures clustered around the heavier bulk of a tractor, dragging a skid loaded with what looked like a mound of small round river rocks.

  Farm labor, he thought. Better you than me.

  Looking up, he saw a sky that was clear and pure, without a cloud or even the scratch mark of a jet contrail, and the air smelled of hay, wheat, sweetgrass, budding flowers, turned earth.

  He looked down at the yard below him and saw the woman standing by a powerfully built workhorse, a Belgian or a Clyde—cars were his main thing but he knew horses and crops from the huge work farms back at Angola. The horse had a shining hide the color of old rosewood, four very long and feathery white fetlocks, a white blaze, and a blond mane that flowed down the side of his muscled neck.

  Merle figured this animal would have to weigh in at twenty-five hundred pounds. They had teams of them at Angola, none of them nearly as magnificent as this one, and yet each one was valued in excess of a hundred thousand dollars.

  The impression of genteel poverty Merle had formed in the dark of the evening was being rapidly revised. The place was primitive, and he could see no modern farm machinery, other than the tractor and the generator, but he figured the overall worth of the farm at somewhere between two and three million.

  The woman was soaping the horse down with a foamy sponge that she dipped in a wooden bucket on the ground beside her. She was wearing the same jeans as she had the night before, a man’s jeans, too big for her narrow waist, and a faded plaid shirt, also much too big for her. She was barefoot and her tanned feet were coated in muddy water. Her hair, set free, fell in a shining black cascade down her shoulders and the muscles in her strong left arm flexed and relaxed as she scrubbed away at the horse’s withers and barrel.

  He wat
ched her for a while, in a kind of trance, and was about to turn away and look for his clothes when she glanced up and saw him. She straightened, dropped the sponge into the soapy water, and used her hand to shade her eyes from the sun.

  “You’re up.”

  “I am,” he said, with a smile. “That’s a magnificent animal. He’s a Clyde, isn’t he?”

  The woman turned to stroke the horse’s neck, smiling with pleasure at the compliment.

  “He is. His name is Jupiter. You know horses, Mr. Zane?”

  “I’ve worked with Clydes,” said Merle, leaving out the bit about doing it at a maximum-security prison called Angola.

  “I approve of a man who understands horses. We thought we might have lost you. How do you feel?”

  He thought, but didn’t say, that he was glad not to be either dead or in jail. What he did say was, “You stitched me up. Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome,” she said, with a half smile, showing those fine but uneven teeth, her tanned face creasing and the lines around her eyes deepening. “I got that slug out of you too. Painted you up with iodine and sulfa powder. If you don’t go septic I guess you’ll live. I laid out some of my husband’s clothes for you. Also his safety razor and some shave cream are in the bathroom. With the stitches so fresh I don’t recommend you take a shower but you got a pretty good scrubbing last night. Your old clothes are soaking in a tub of lye out back. I doubt the blood will all come out, but we’ll see. You hungry?”

  Merle decided he was starving, and said so, and a few minutes later he was shaved and dressed in old-fashioned jeans and heavy farm boots, the soles worn down to the nails, a stiff white collarless shirt that smelled very strongly of mothballs, and he and the woman were sitting down in the austere kitchen, across the wooden table from each other, eating some sort of grainy porridge that she had spooned into bowls without a lot of ceremony.

  She set a jug of molasses down and poured out two glasses of something cold and amber-colored. Apple cider, he realized. A pot of cowboy coffee was heating up on the stovetop. Clearly this woman liked things simple. There wasn’t a Pop-Tart or a box of Cheerios anywhere in sight.

  She sat straight and watched him eat the first couple of spoonfuls, her pale green eyes bright against the rough tan of her skin, her black hair hanging straight down on either side of her face. She wore no makeup at all and showed signs of a hard life lived mainly outdoors, but she was, in the warm light of the morning, very beautiful, in an unadorned and countrified sort of way. Her expression was thoughtful and remote, as if she hadn’t quite decided what to do with him yet.

  From somewhere deeper inside the main floor he heard the tinny sound of music playing, and then a man’s voice, from the barking cadence some sort of radio ad.

  If she has a radio, Merle thought, she knows what happened in Gracie and she knows what I am.

  If she did, she wasn’t talking about it. Maybe the cops were already on the way. Not much he could do about that. She seemed to feel no need to say anything at all right now, but Merle did.

  “I want to thank you for what you did. My name is Merle Zane. I’m sorry, miss, I don’t know your name yet?”

  There was a pause while she seemed to come back to the here and now from some place quite far away.

  “My name is Glynis. Glynis Ruelle,” she said, in a low voice with that Tidewater lilt in it, pronouncing the last name “Roo-elle,” giving it a kind of New Orleans Creole twist. “I was born Glynis Mercer, but I’ve been a Ruelle now for twenty years. And where you are is Ruelle Plantation. We breed Clydes, got good cash crops of wheat and rape-seed and potatoes. Been in the Ruelle family since before the War Between the States.”

  “I saw people out in the fields.”

  Some indefinable emotion crossed her face. She lifted her head—she had a great profile—and looked off in the direction of the fields.

  “Not many left. They die off or disappear. I’m always trying to find new help for the harvest. Albert Lee takes the Blue Bird down to town now and then, and men come back, migrants, mainly, but then maybe I’m too particular. All the help we have lives in the Annex, a barracks we built down by Little Cut Creek. The help seem to like it better that way.”

  “You said you run this place alone.”

  She gave him a sidelong look.

  “These days I do. But I seem to be up to it.”

  Merle was conscious of sitting across from her in what she had described as her husband’s clothes.

  “Your husband … he’s traveling?”

  This brought a wry smile.

  “John went into the wars and got himself killed.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “So am I,” she said, with a flash of heat. “But it was a damn foolish war in the first place. The president should never have taken it up. I didn’t want John to go, but he was in the reserves so he went with the First Infantry. A married man with a farm, they shouldn’t have called on him, but they did. I guess they had their reasons, and they did them no credit. But the thing was done. His younger brother, Ethan, went too. Ethan came back, at least some of him did, but now the running of this place is up to me. But I’m not angry with John. He felt he had to go with his unit. I blame that dimwitted grinning fool of a president for taking up a needless war.”

  Merle, not being a huge fan of that particular president either, didn’t disagree with her. But since he was an accessory to the murder of four cops he didn’t feel that a detailed discussion of service to country and how it had affected her family was a subject he should get into. Her next question drove it off his list entirely.

  “Are you a man of violence, Mr. Zane?”

  Merle was going to say no, since he had never thought of himself that way, but given the events of the past couple of days, and what it had been necessary to do to survive Angola, he felt he needed to think about that again. Mrs. Ruelle watched him do it, patient, contained, seeming to have no particular expectations.

  “Yes,” he said. “I didn’t intend to go that way, but I guess that’s where I am.”

  “You had a pistol with you. From what you told me, you stood your ground while another man was shooting at you. With one bullet in you already and a grazing wound on your shoulder.”

  “Things happened fast. I did what I had to. I can’t say I shot well, since I emptied my gun and I think I only hit him once.”

  She frowned and made a dismissive gesture.

  “Not the point. That happens to everyone, even in a disorderly mêlée such as yours. Even in a formal duel, attended by seconds, it happens. John Gwinnett Mercer, my grandfather, exchanged seven pistol balls with London Teague in an encounter having to do with the untimely passing of London’s third wife, Anora Mercer. Anora was John’s godchild, and held in high regard by all who knew her, so I am told. I do not like to retail private family matters, but it is true that the Teague family and our line, the Mercers and the Ruelles, have had a very long-standing enmity, going back many generations, all the way back to Ireland. The Teagues conspired with Major Sirr during the Irish rising in 1798. This has never been forgotten, although the Teagues have given many new offenses since then.”

  Here she broke off again, and studied Merle’s face in silence for a time, as if trying to come to a decision about him.

  “Well, about that fight, London and my grandfather came to their stand at Johnny Mullryne’s plantation in Savannah, pistols being the weapons, since London, being challenged, had the selection. The New Irish Code requires that, once leveled, the pistols must be discharged within three seconds, aiming longer than that being considered unworthy of a gentleman. You must also remember that these old smoothbore pistols were not accurate weapons, which in a way explains the way the fight went.”

  She stopped here, took a sip of her cider, shaking her head, as if grimly amused. Merle, caught up in the story, sat motionless.

  She went on.

  “Seven rounds were exchanged this way, at twenty yards, a very drawn-out aff
air for a pistol duel, since after each exchange of fire the seconds are required to step in and urge the gentlemen to concede that honor has been served …”

  She paused here, smiled at him, went on.

  “But oh no. Not them. Not those two. So on and on it went.”

  She stopped again here, and went away somewhere, and Merle had the absurd feeling that she was remembering a fight she had seen herself. In a moment, she came back.

  “Well, both men lived, although John was scored by a ball along his cheek that blinded his eye and he got another in his thigh and London received a ball in the left hip—his leg withered all that winter and he never walked again. By the Irish rules, honor had been fully satisfied with such serious wounds, and the seconds should have ended the matter right there.”

  She sighed, ran a hand through her shiny black hair, and sat back, giving him a long look over the rim of her cider glass, a cool sea green appraisal.

  “Well, I can go on, can’t I? I do apologize. On the subject of the Teague family, I am afraid I can be a bit of a bore. As I said, there is a long and bitter history between our families, as this old story shows. It came down through the decades, and it lives on with us today, all these years later, while the modern world spins all around us like a top, and we Ruelles stand unmoving, a fixed point, stuck in the past. So. Enough of this. My point is, Mr. Zane, you stood your ground.”

  Merle, stung by her compliment, feeling unworthy of it, had a sudden urge to come clean with her.

  “You have a radio on, Glynis. I can hear it. You must have heard what happened in Gracie yesterday. You have a phone too, I think.”

  “Yes. I have one. I don’t like the telephone very much. The bell is disconnected. If I want to call out, I do. I don’t like the idea that somebody can ring a bell in my home anytime they like and expect me to come running and answer it. I do get the news from the radio, but it’s all about the wars and buildings falling down and hurricanes in the Gulf and how the economy is going bust again and what some celebrity whore is doing for the holidays. You do have the air of a man on the run, Mr. Zane. Did you kill someone for money?”