And then Deitz had started bellowing at Beth again, something about the air conditioner being out of order and what was she doing on the fucking phone, and she could hear the kids crying in the background, so Kate put the phone down, thinking that there was really nothing more she could do about anything. Except maybe one thing.
The last thing her father had said to her.
His records, in the basement.
Now that she was wide awake again, she got up off the couch and poured herself a large black coffee and went along the back hall to the kitchen and on down the stairs into the basement.
Up in the backyard, under the stars, the yellow glow of the yard lights shining on the trees at the bottom of the yard, Nick was listening—patiently—to Linus Calder, a guy every bit as exhausted as Nick was, but still at the crime scene, and Linus Calder was going over it again.
“There’s no organic material in the stain site. I mean, if it was … what … spontaneous combustion? … you’d find something organic—not that I believe in spontaneous combustion—but … Jesus … what the hell else could it be? I swear, Nick, you say something like alien abduction, I’ll shoot my dog. I don’t actually own a dog. But I’ll go out right now and buy one and shoot it.”
“I’m not going to say alien abductions, okay?”
“Your CSI guys file a report yet?”
“They’re off the scene, but no report yet.”
“You going to come up here, take a look? I mean, we already got the hotshot brother—”
“What’s Reed doing?”
“Driving me nuts. Until I hooked him up with some Virginia State Patrol guys. He knows people they know. Don’t get me wrong. Nice kid, bit scary, bit out there, reminds me of those thousand-yard-stare guys we had in Vietnam. Anyway, he’s out with the Virginia troopers and they’re doing a canvass of everybody at VMI, see if anybody saw anything—”
“At this hour?”
“These kids are military. They don’t mind. But that’s all harness work, stuff the uniform guys can do instead of munching honey-dip crullers up at Beanie’s. I need a real detective up here, not another steroidal keener.”
“I hear you. I’ll chopper up in the morning.”
“We going to get everything you’ve got? I mean, this prof was a well-loved guy. This is VMI. They don’t like scary random shit at VMI.”
A pause, a wheezing sigh.
“Seriously, Kavanaugh, what’re we going to do about all this? I been a cop since forever and I’ve never seen anything like this. Outside of the horror movies. You got anything for me?”
Nick thought about it, and then told the cop what he was thinking. Calder listened all the way through, and then he said, “Dear God. I was right all along. You are a fucking fruitcake.”
“I tried to warn you. What’s your theory?”
“Okay. Here’s one. This Delia Cotton broad, she’s loaded, right?”
“The Cottons are probably the richest family in Niceville. Maybe in the whole state.”
“Okay. There you go. But Haggard, he’s a poor lonely old gardener, and he’s best buds with our Dillon Walker guy here, they were at Omaha Beach together and all that heroic shit, so they decide to take her out—”
“The Walkers and the Haggards are loaded too.”
“Okay. Then it’s some sort of mysterious family vendetta, a terrible secret buried in the past. But now it’s about to come out, so they kidnap the old lady and make themselves disappear at the same time. They get hold of some scraps of shrapnel, get hold of a few leftover bone pins—”
“From your friendly local secondhand bone-pin and shrapnel shop?”
“Then they toss a bucket of acetone on the floor, slop it around, strip the varnish off in the shape of a body, maybe use a blowtorch on it to dry it all off—”
“Hence the warm spots?”
“Hence the warm spots. Scatter the metal around, and off they go—everybody thinks they’re like disappeared by these man-eating ghosts, I mean, everybody who’s a fucking fruitcake believes that, but really they’re on their way to Costa Rica with all of Delia Cotton’s money. Or secrets. Or whatever the hell it is.”
“Makes more sense than my theory.”
“Sure as shooting it does, my friend. But you’re still a fruitcake. Nobody says ‘hence’ anymore. Get some sleep. I’ll see you tomorrow morning.”
Nick rang off, looked into the house through the conservatory glass, and saw Kate in the family room just beyond it, taking things out of a large cardboard box, her hair hanging down over her forehead, her fine-boned hands white in the downlight, her expression intent and determined.
Kate looked up at him, her eyes strange. She was holding a stack of old photos.
“Nick. This is Dad’s file box, from that research he never finished. He said I should look at it. Want to see something interesting?”
“Sure,” he said, sitting down beside her on the couch. She smelled of old cardboard and cobwebs and there was dust all over her shirt.
She riffled through some faded sepia pictures, found one, a very large one, perhaps eight by ten, pulled it out, and set it down on the coffee table.
It was a formal picture, slightly faded but still quite clear, a turn-of-the-century family group, fifty or more people posed on a large stone staircase in front of a massive archway, live oaks draped in Spanish moss all around, horses in the foreground, a prosperous and attractive group, the men and boys in stiff black suits and starched collars, the women and the girls with high-piled Gibson-girl hair and lace collars and full billowing bosoms, waists cinched in tight, dainty feet visible under the hems of their lacy petticoats.
The photo was printed on stiff cardboard and framed in sinuous Art Nouveau engravings. Below the picture the card company—Martin Palgrave & Sons—had printed, in a fine copperplate script:
Niceville Families Jubilee
John Mullryne’s Plantation
Savannah Georgia 1910
Kate flipped the card over.
On the back, someone with a free-flowing script had recorded all the names of the people in the picture, in order, starting at the upper left and going all the way through to the bottom right. One name had been underlined: Abel Teague.
Written beside his name, in a different hand, was one word: shame.
“Okay,” said Nick, watching her face. “Abel Teague is the man Rainey was asking for when he came out of the coma.”
“Yes. Lacy told me. There’s more. And I don’t want you to think I’m a … what do cops always say?”
“A fruitcake?”
“Yes. There’s a face I want you to look at.”
Kate flipped the card over, tapped the image of a pretty young girl with her light-colored hair piled high, a long, graceful neck, a full figure under the lacy bodice, large direct eyes, pale in color, full lips partly open. Most of the women in the shot were very pretty. This one was a stunner, with an air of almost defiant sensuality that conveyed itself across more than a century and seemed even now to look directly into Nick’s eyes.
“Wow. She’s a heart attack.”
“Yes, she is. And she also looks exactly like the girl I saw at the bottom of the garden this afternoon.”
She said this without drama, but with an air of quiet certitude that Nick had learned to take seriously. Which he did.
“So then she’s a relative, an ancestor?”
“Yes, she must be.”
“Who is she? Her name on the back?”
“Yes. Her name is Clara Sylvia Mercer. The famous Clara Dad was talking about. Dad thinks she’s probably a distant relative by way of the Mullrynes and the Walkers. Mom was a Mullryne and her mother was a Mercer.”
Nick looked at the picture more closely.
Looks a lot like Kate.
“Now, you’re not thinking this is the same girl, Kate? I mean, here she is in 1910 and she can’t be more than fifteen or sixteen. She’d be … what, almost a hundred and seventeen now?”
�
��Is this a fruitcake check?”
“No. Not at all.”
“It’s not her, I know that. It can’t be her, but it’s somebody who looks very much like her.”
“Is Abel Teague in this shot?”
Kate moved her fingertip, placed it on the body of a broad-shouldered medium-sized well-set young man with a high clear forehead and eyes so pale they had to be either blue or light gray.
Abel Teague had a good face, thought Nick, intelligent, with humor in it, maybe a touch of arrogance, but they all did. He wasn’t wearing a jacket, just a shirt and what looked like striped pants in a military cut.
“So what’s the shame thing?”
Kate gave him one of her looks.
“Dad said he talked to you about what was wrong with Niceville. About the disappearances. About Clara being shut up in Candleford House.”
“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.
GREAT WAR HERO KILLED IN ILLEGAL DUEL
Authorities are investigating the unlawful death of Lieutenant Ethan Bluebonnet Ruelle in a pistol exchange that took place outside the Belfair Saddlery on Christmas Eve last. According to witnesses, Mister Ruelle, a hero of the Great War who had lost an eye and his left arm at Mons, was accosted outside the Saddlery by Lieutenant Colin Haggard. An argument ensued and both men agreed to a stand the
re and then. In the exchange Lieutenant Ruelle was shot in the face and died on the spot. Lieutenant Haggard, also a veteran of the Great War, was detained by citizens.
When questioned by the authorities as to the nature of the quarrel, Lieutenant Haggard stated that Lieutenant Ruelle had impugned his honor in connection with an action in the Great War. Charges are being considered but have not yet been applied.
The feeling of the citizenry runs against Lieutenant Haggard. Many feel that Lieutenant Haggard belongs to what is known as the Teague Camp in a long-standing disagreement between the Ruelle Family and Abel Teague in connection with what the Ruelle family has long regarded as a Breach of Promise matter involving Clara Mercer. Clara Mercer is the younger sister of Lieutenant Ruelle’s sister-in-law, Glynis Ruelle, the widow of Captain John Ruelle, killed in the same battle in which Lieutenant Ethan Ruelle received his wounds. Miss Clara Mercer suffers greatly from this clash of families and is in the loving care of the Ruelle family as of this writing.
Lieutenant Haggard is reputed to have been involved in a number of illegal stands over the years and is considered to be a gun hand, which has drawn the ire of the local citizenry.
The Chief Constable of Belfair County, the Honorable Lewis G. Cotton, has so far declined to act in the matter.
“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?”
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