Niceville

by Carsten Stroud

  Nick was quiet for a time.

  “Yeah. That’s what it felt like.”

  “Is there anything about a figure in a burka that would upset you?” Silence.

  “Yes. There is.”

  The Wadi Doan, a leafy little gorge carved out of the horny brown hide of central Yemen, a chain of villages as old as the world. Three figures in head-to-toe burkas, walking all wrong, shoes all wrong, stumbling on the stones, eyes fixed on the middle distance, heedless staring robots, coming closer and closer to their idling Humvee.

  Exactly the profile of suicide bombers.

  The Wadi Doan.

  “I’m not going to ask you about it—”

  “Thanks, Kate. Just the war, I guess. We used to call them BMOs. Black Moving Objects.”

  This unknown thing that had happened back in the war, it was still the one unsayable thing between them. Maybe someday Nick would talk about it. Tig had said so himself, when she was plying him with multiple mojitos at the Moot Court bar.

  She doubted it, and it was true that part of her didn’t really want to know about it in the first place.

  “But this BMO thing, it does explain how a reflection like that would get to you, especially if you’re all keyed up, looking for a missing woman. Did Beau see anything?”

  Nick looked over at Beau, asked him the question. Beau shook his head.

  “No. Not Beau. Just me. Mavis Crossfire said she saw something; but she wouldn’t say what. And there was a guard there, Dale Jonquil; he said he saw a young woman in a green dress, holding a cat.”

  That shook Kate.

  She remembered her dream, the young woman in a green dress. Holding a cat.

  So did Nick.

  “Didn’t you have a dream last night about a girl in a green dress and a cat?”

  She hesitated.

  There was no point in saying no.

  “Yes. I did.”

  “Okay. Now that’s a tad freaky, isn’t it?”

  “Yes. It is. Did the guard, this Dale Jonquil guy, did he see the cat you have with you?”

  “Yes. We showed it to him on the way out. It’s the same one he saw in the mirror. But then he knew the cat from before. Her name is Mildred Pierce. She’s Delia’s cat, and Dale works security in her neighborhood, so that makes sense. But he doesn’t like Delia’s house much either.”

  He glanced across at Beau, checking him out, seeing the expression on his face.

  “Neither does Beau.”

  “Did Beau see a girl with a cat?”

  “You see a girl with a cat?”

  Beau shook his head.

  “No.”

  “But he did see the image on the basement wall. Did you try to take a picture of it?”

  “Yes. Beau took some shots with his cell phone camera.”

  “Did he get anything?”

  “Yeah. A short video.”

  “Can you make anything out of it?”

  “We haven’t tried yet. Beau’s going to transfer it to a computer and pull off an mpeg.”

  “But you both saw it?”

  “Yeah. Both of us.”

  “What did you see?”

  Nick hesitated.

  People working in a field.

  Coffins.

  Skulls.

  “The picture shifted. First a farm, and then it turned into the street outside the Cotton place.”

  “I’d love to see it.”

  “I’ll get a copy and bring it home.”

  Silence.

  “Kate, I have to say, that house is …”

  “Weird?”

  “No. More like insane.”

  They were at the lab.

  “We’re here, Kate. Gotta go. Love you.”

  “Love you too, babe.”

  She was turning into her driveway, into the home her father and mother had lived in for thirty years.

  Dillon and Lenore.

  Niceville.

  She climbed out of the SUV, remembering to take her Glock out of the glove box. The house was warm and musty, and the clouds were breaking up. The house was dim but pierced everywhere with afternoon light shining in through the tall sash windows.

  She thought about Nick’s experiences at Delia’s mansion in The Chase for a while, looked at the clock. It was the middle of the afternoon, a Saturday. Her dad would be in his office at the library, watching the cadets drill on the VMI parade square. She picked up the phone—held it in her hand, listening to the dial tone—and put it back down again.

  Getting Dillon Walker to give her a straight answer to anything about the Niceville abductions had been like chasing fireflies. Ever since Rainey had been found, her dad would happily talk to her about anything at all—football, politics, the military, chocolate chip cookies, Beth’s marriage, Nick’s war fever, why red wine drinkers live longer. Anything at all, except the Niceville disappearances.

  Even the news that Sylvia had disappeared, and that Rainey had been found—alive—sealed inside an ancient grave, hadn’t been enough to shatter his reserve. He listened politely to the news, offered no comments, and wished the boy a speedy recovery.

  Miles’ suicide a few days later hadn’t seemed to surprise him at all. If anything, it had sealed the matter for him, as if a kind of blood debt had been paid. When Kate, as Sylvia’s cousin, had been appointed Rainey’s guardian, her father had approved of it, but in a distant and guarded way, limiting himself to what seemed at the time to be a cryptic comment about making sure Rainey’s adoption papers were kept somewhere safe, just in case.

  “In case of what?” she had asked at the time.

  “In case they’re … needed.”

  “Why would they be needed, Dad?”

  “No idea. Just being a worrier, I guess.”

  She was in the sunroom, a glassed-in conservatory addition to the house. She sat there in the yellow and white room, surrounded by lush ferns and bougainvillea, looking out at the ancient pine forest that crowded the lower end of the lawn. A little stream ran through it, and a steep hill rose up on the far side of the forest, the rocky ground covered with red pine needles. Even with the afternoon light lying over it, the pine forest seemed to have a rich violet darkness inside it that looked deeper and more solid than simple shadows. Just like Niceville.

  This had gone on long enough.

  Clearly her father was keeping something from her. Knowing him as she did, Kate was sure he thought he was doing it for her own good.

  Lovely man, Dillon Walker, but he could also be a condescending, stiff-necked …

  She let it go.

  She was a grown woman, and now the strangeness of Niceville seemed to be closing in on her own family. That was the point here. Rainey Teague was in a coma. Nick was seeing mirages on a basement wall. She was dreaming of green-eyed girls in sundresses. Delia Cotton and Gray Haggard were missing.

  Something was terribly wrong in Niceville, and she was convinced her dad knew something about it. It was time to drag it out of him.

  She pulled in a breath, held it, let it out slowly, sat up straight on the couch.

  Reached for the phone.

  Dialed the number.

  It rang twice, and then she heard her father’s whiskey baritone, his soft Virginia accent. She saw him at his desk at VMI, in his book-lined study, a fine-featured man with a weathered face, intelligent, calm, deep lines around his eyes.

  “Kate, you’re calling early.”

  She usually called him at the end of the day, a ritual as comforting to him as it was to her.

  “Is this a bad time?”

  “Never a bad time to hear from my favorite daughter.”

  “I thought Beth was your favorite daughter.”

  “She is when I’m talking to her. How are you?”

  Kate went through the formalities, but her father knew her pretty well.

  “Okay. Something’s wrong, honey. I can hear it in your voice. What is it? Is it Beth?”

  “If you mean is she still with By
ron, yes, she is. For now.”

  “Nick and Reed should go talk to that man.”

  “Nick wants to. And it’s all we can do to keep Reed from doing something so extreme about Byron that it would get him fired from the State Patrol. But Beth has to be ready. It’s no good until she is. And she has the kids to think about, Dad.”

  “That’s exactly why she should leave that thug. Nick agrees with me. He said so last week.”

  “It’s Beth who has to agree, Dad. Not you and Nick and Reed. This can’t just get decided by the menfolk.”

  This was a sensitive topic, and one they had been over many times before. Her father was picking up the tightness in her voice now.

  “So Beth isn’t why you called early?”

  “No, Dad.”

  “Well, something’s on your mind. Let’s hear it.”

  She took a moment to get her thoughts in line. When she got right down to the essentials, she found that the question was actually pretty simple.

  “Dad, what’s wrong with Niceville?”

  A long silence.

  “Niceville’s a Southern town, honey. The Old South. It’s haunted by history, Kate. That’s all.”

  “Dad. I love you. You know that. But things are happening here right now, and I need you to be straight with me. For once.”

  She heard him breathing.

  She could almost hear him thinking too.

  Looking for an exit.

  “For once? That’s a little harsh.”

  “I’m sorry, Dad. You know what I’m talking about. Niceville. The families. Why it is the way it is.”

  “I see.”

  “Do you?”

  Resignation was in his answer.

  “Yes, Kate. I do. You said things have been happening. What kind of things?”

  She told him.

  He listened without interruption.

  Kate laid it out as clearly and as simply as she could, leaving out details that she felt were … unreliable … such as her dream about a girl with a cat. When she finished, he was quiet again. She waited him out.

  “So Gray Haggard’s gone?”

  “No trace of him.”

  Her father was quiet for a long time.

  “Kate,” he said finally, his voice weary and full of sadness, “I’m going to tell you something that you can never tell your brother and sister. Do you think you can do that?”

  “I … yes, I can do that. If that’s what you want.”

  “You know Reed thinks your mother died because of a drunk driver.”

  Kate took that in.

  “She didn’t?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe a drunk driver had something to do with it. But I do know she was speeding, speeding dangerously, when she died.”

  “I heard about that. The OnStar system?”

  “Yes. It’s a GPS system too. OnStar has computers that can tell an investigator how fast a car was going at the moment of a crash. By the speed at which the car moved from one point to another. Are you certain this is something you want to get into, Kate? Once you hear it, you may wish you hadn’t.”

  “Okay, Dad. I can take it.”

  A pause.

  “Your mother was doing in excess of a hundred and forty-five miles an hour when the OnStar system registered her rollover. Now this is something you’re not going to like to hear, honey.”

  “Dad. Please.”

  “When a vehicle is being driven in excess of the speed limit by that much, sometimes the OnStar operator picks up on it. Sometimes the operator will place a call to the vehicle, to see if something is wrong with the driver. Or even the vehicle, perhaps a gas pedal malfunction. Or is she drunk, or having an attack, or has she been hijacked. That sort of thing. When your mother’s car got to a hundred and forty, a minute or so before the accident, the OnStar lady tried to contact Lenore. She opened the cell connection.”

  Kate had never heard a breath of this story.

  “Did Mom answer?”

  “Yes.”

  “What did she say?”

  Dillon was quiet for so long she thought she had lost him.

  “Lenore said, She uses the mirrors. She said it several times, in a panicky voice.”

  Kate tried to make sense of it, failed.

  “She uses the mirrors? What does that mean?”

  “I’ve thought about that ever since she died. The only conclusion that I was able to come up with was that your mom was having some kind of stroke, that she was seeing things in the car mirror, and that whatever she was seeing was terrifying her.”

  “You mean, she was speeding to get away from something she saw in her rearview mirror? That’s crazy, Dad. Crazy. That state trooper, Charlie Danziger, he was with her when she died. He never said anything about this to us.”

  “He did to me.”

  “He did?”

  “Yes. At the funeral. In the garden. She was still talking like that when she died. Charlie Danziger stayed with her, held on to her, right to the end. She literally died in his arms. He thought I should know what she was saying, at the end.”

  “Did it mean anything to you? What she said?”

  “Not a thing—at the time. But it was disturbing. That’s why I let the drunk driver story stand, at least for Reed and Beth.”

  “For me too, Dad,” she said.

  “I know. That was why I wanted you to stay away from the mirror that was in Uncle Moochie’s window. You still have it, don’t you?”

  “Yes,” she said, after a moment. “It’s still upstairs, in the closet.”

  “Why didn’t you get rid of it? Give it back to the cleaning lady, or to Moochie, or to Delia?”

  “Nobody wanted it. After the story got out about Rainey, we couldn’t give it away.”

  “Then you should break it. Smash it.”

  “Dad … I don’t get this. Any of it. Why did you stop working on what was going on in Niceville?”

  “I stopped because your mother died.”

  “That’s when you stopped. Was it why you stopped?”

  It took a time for him to answer.

  “In a way. I think I got the idea what I was doing was … unlucky.”

  “For whom?”

  “For us. The Walkers. And for the rest of the families.”

  Her father always used that phrase when he was talking about the Founding Four, the Walkers and the Cottons, the Teagues and the Haggards.

  The families.

  As if they were all drifting down the river of time together, trapped on the same unlucky boat.

  “How could it be unlucky? You were just looking things up in the archives. Who would care?”

  “Because I found something in the archives. It troubled me. When your mother was killed, I began to worry that maybe what had happened to her was … part of it. Part of the disappearance question.”

  “What did you find out?”

  “I found out something that seems to link all those disappearances over the years. The thing they might all have in common.”

  “And what is that?”

  “It’s possible that every person who disappeared was related in one way or another to the families.”

  Kate took that in, and then rejected it.

  “That’s absurd. Are you talking about, what, like a family curse? That’s simply nuts, Dad.”

  “Not a curse, no. But the linkage appears, and it’s the only connecting factor I could ever develop. Everyone who went missing was connected in some way to the same four families.”

  “Dad, you could almost say that everybody in Niceville fits that description.”

  “I took that into account. The correlation was still strong, higher than any statistical glitch. As a matter of fact, there was an even narrower connection. Everyone who had disappeared had, in one way or another, been related in some way to people who knew a young woman named Clara Mercer.”

  “Clara Mercer? I … do I know that name? I seem to remember something … she killed herself? Went into Cra
ter Sink?”

  “Nobody knows exactly what happened to her. She was a distant relative of ours. A pretty wild girl. Back before the Great War, while still very young, she had an affair with one of the Teagues. She got pregnant by him.”

  “Oh dear. Back in those days …”

  “Yes. It amounted to ruin, an unmarried girl.”

  “What happened to the baby?”

  A pause here.

  “Clara was sent away for a while. In 1913, or thereabouts. To a private clinic in Sallytown. When she came back, there was no child with her. The story was that she lost the child in a miscarriage. That was where it was left.”

  “Do you know the man who did this to her?”

  “Abel Teague. He was what they used to call a rake. He wouldn’t marry her, in spite of being confronted by several of her male friends. Somehow, by some device, he avoided several duels. Nobody seems to know quite how he did that.”

  “What happened to Clara?”

  “In effect, as far as I could determine, when she came home after being … sent away … she had what they used to call a nervous breakdown. Her family tried to care for her—”

  “Who was her family?”

  “Her older sister, Glynis—”

  “Glynis?”

  “Yes, that was her name. Why?”

  “You know why, Dad. I told you last year that someone named Glynis R. signed her name to a card glued to the back of the mirror. It would have to be the same woman, wouldn’t it?”

  A pause.

  “Yes. I believe it is. I thought so at the time. Glynis Mercer had married into the Ruelle family. The Ruelles had extensive plantations south of Gracie. They took Clara in and did what they could. But then the local do-gooders stepped in. Somebody somewhere made a determination that she was a danger to herself and others. The records aren’t clear, because of that fire in ’35, but I got the impression that some medical officials came and forcibly removed her from the Ruelles and locked her up in that asylum in Gracie.”

  “Good God. Not Candleford House?”

  “Yes. I’m afraid so.”

  “Dear God. Poor thing. How long did she last?”

  “Nobody knows. According to the records, what bits are left, I was able to work out that something serious happened in 1931. She was on a medical trip to Niceville, with an escort. She needed some sort of surgery. They took her to Lady Grace and she underwent some kind of procedure—from what I can figure out, it was very likely an abortion.”