“I guess, by anomalous, I mean anything hard to explain.”
“Other than the fact that Rainey just vanished into thin air while being filmed by a security camera?”
“In front of Uncle Moochie’s pawnshop, right?”
“Yes.”
“You said he was standing on the sidewalk, looking at something in Uncle Moochie’s window?”
“Yes.”
“What was it?”
“It was a mirror.”
Silence from her father, but she could feel his tension, like a vibration humming down the wire.
“What sort of mirror?”
“An antique. Moochie said it was pre–Civil War. It came from Temple Hill. Delia Cotton gave it to the lady who does the cleaning and shopping.”
“Teagues and Cottons,” he said in a flat tone.
“Yes. Two of the old families.”
More silence.
Finally …
“Can you describe the mirror?”
“Gold frame, baroque, ancient glass, with the silvering coming off the back. Maybe seventeenth-century Irish. Or French. About thirty inches by thirty inches. Heavy. Has an antique linen calling card glued to the back.”
“What was on the card?”
“Very fine handwriting, in turquoise ink. ‘With long regard … Glynis R.’ ”
A taut silence again. Kate could hear him breathing, slow and steady, as if he were trying to calm himself. When he spoke again, all the genial warmth had left his voice.
“Where is it now? The mirror? Still at Moochie’s?”
“No. It’s here. It’s upstairs, actually. In our bedroom closet. Why?”
Walker was quiet for so long that Kate began to think he had fallen asleep.
“Dad? You there?”
“Yes. Sorry. I was thinking.”
This sounded like … not a lie, because he never lied to her, but at least an evasion.
“Can you make any sense out of all this, Dad? The connections between the old families? Nick tried to establish who Glynis R. was, but Delia said she had no idea. Does the name mean anything to you?”
“No. No, it doesn’t.”
Again that sense of … wary distance.
Evasion.
“What should we do, Dad? I’d like to help Nick. And Sylvia’s family. Rainey was—is—such a sweet kid. I know it’s late, Dad. I know you need to sleep. So do I. Can you think of anything at all?”
She waited.
“Do you use the mirror?”
“No. Of course not. It’s evidence, sort of.”
“You should give it back to Delia. Or to her cleaning lady. As soon as possible. I’m sure it’s quite valuable.”
“As I said, right now it’s part of the case. At least Nick thinks so. Anything else, Dad?”
“Yes. Don’t ever use it. The mirror.”
“I’m not sure I understand.”
“Neither do I.”
She tried to be light.
“Is it cursed?” she asked with a smile. “Like if we break it, we’ll get seven years of bad luck?”
“Maybe you should do just that.”
“Do what?”
“Break it. Smash it. Throw the pieces into Crater Sink.”
“You’re teasing me now.”
A silence.
“Yes. I’m just teasing you. I’m sorry not to have been more helpful. Honey, I need to sleep. You do too. How about you call me in the morning? Around eleven? We can talk some more?”
“I will, Dad. Love you.”
“Love you too, Kate. Love you very much.”
Kate never quite got around to calling Dillon Walker at eleven the next morning, mainly because of the flurry of activity following a call that came at daybreak, Tig on the line to say that Sylvia Teague’s red Porsche Cayenne had just been found by a patrol cruiser doing a routine check of the parking area near Crater Sink. Sylvia’s ballet flats were found at the rim of the sink itself. Of Sylvia Teague, no trace was found, in spite of the deployment of a robot dive camera which was brought in by Marty Coors, head of the State Police HQ in Cap City.
The camera went down and down into the sink, lights spearing out into the cold black water a way, only to die out, overwhelmed by the darkness. The control cable ran out at a thousand feet.
The attached sonar mapping system showed nothing but rock face and more rock face with a side channel running out of the sinkhole at nine hundred and eighty feet, leading, everyone assumed, eventually to the Tulip River in the valley below the cliff face.
If Sylvia Teague had gone into Crater Sink—and so far no suicide note had been found, and suicide was only one of several possibilities—they’d have to wait for natural processes to bring her back up again.
Or maybe she had been dragged into the side channel by a random current, which meant that perhaps someday what was left of her would come bobbing up in the Tulip River itself.
The Crater Sink search took most of the tenth day, with Nick, haggard and running on amphetamines, there for every minute of it. He stayed there until around six that same evening, the evening of the tenth day, when he got a call from Mavis Crossfire, who told him Rainey Teague had been found.
Nick got to the Confederate cemetery across the road from Garrison Hills just as the sun was setting. He saw the police vans clustered around a low hill on one of the meandering stone pathways that led through the rocky, uneven slopes of the graveyard, weaving past hundreds and hundreds of white stone crosses—here and there a few Stars of David—towards what was called New Hill, a part of the Civil War graveyard that had been set aside for the more prominent civilians of Niceville history.
New Hill had perhaps fifty miniature stone temples, most of them in the Palladian style, mostly family crypts with names like HAGGARD and TEAGUE, COTTON and WALKER, GWINNETT and MULLRYNE and MERCER and RUELLE carved into their lintels.
Each temple was made of marble blocks and each one had a solid oak door, locked and sealed, and then further protected by an iron grate. The ground in the cemetery was stony, so some of the lesser graves were simply a low mounded barrow of red clay brick with a long marble or stone cap, the barrow set deep into the ground and mounded all around with earth and grass. The crypt was accessible only by a low iron grating at one end, always padlocked.
The cops were gathered around one of these low mounds, watching two firemen with sledges who were attacking the roof of the crypt. Nick could hear their sledges clang with each blow, and he saw brick dust rising up in the glimmer of the headlights and the halogen work lamps that had been set up all around the mound.
Everyone turned to watch as Nick parked his Crown Vic down the slope and walked slowly up the hill to where they were working. Mavis Crossfire stepped out of the crowd—Nick could see the rangy form and Marine Corps crew cut of Marty Coors, the CO of the local state troopers, above the heads of the other cops, turning to stare at Nick, his face solemn and hard, his eyes full of uncertainty.
“Nick,” said Mavis, coming up to shake his hand. “He’s here.”
Nick looked past her, at the mound, at the men slowly hammering it into brick chips and marble splinters.
“He’s in there? How do you know? That crypt hasn’t been open for more than a hundred years. They’re all like that. The padlocks are all rusted and seized. The bars are half in the ground and they’re all grown over.”
“Yes. That’s true. That’s all true. Nick, are you okay?”
Nick looked at her.
“Hell, no, I’m not okay. Are you?”
Mavis gave him a smile that changed into an odd look.
“No. I’m not. None of us are. How we know he’s in there, Nick? We can hear him.”
Nick looked at her for a long time.
Mavis nodded, her expression blank, except for a wary look in her eyes and a pallor in her skin.
“Yeah. That’s right. I didn’t want to tell you before you got here. Didn’t want you to die in a crash racing over here. The grounds
keeper heard something in the afternoon. Sounded like maybe a bird, but then he thought maybe not. He traced it to this mound here.”
“Who’s in it?”
“Guy named Ethan Ruelle. Died in 1921. In a duel on Christmas Eve, so the groundskeeper is saying. One of the fire guys has a sound sensor, the kind they use to search for people in a collapse? He stuck it up against the roof of that thing. We all heard it plain.”
“Heard what?”
“A kid. Crying.”
Nick looked at her, and then past her at the workers, at the cops standing around, the ambulance waiting a ways back, lights churning red and blue, casting a crazy hectic flicker across the graveyard.
“It’s a trick,” he said finally, his temper flaring. “This whole thing has been some kind of sick stunt. Someone is jerking us around, Mavis. It’s all just some kind of twisted game.”
“If it is, it’s a damn good one,” said Mavis, taking no offense, speaking in a soothing tone. “The guy tapped on the stone and the crying got worse. Something’s in there. We all think—maybe I should say we all hope—it’s Rainey.”
They heard a muffled crump, a gravelly tumble, and then everyone was talking loud and fast.
Nick and Mavis got to the mound just as Marty Coors stepped up and put his Maglite into the hole the fire guys had opened. There was a terrified face looking up at them, big round brown eyes, dirty blond hair, his dusty cheeks streaked with tear tracks, his mouth round and stretched as he went way back and down for the scream he finally came up with a few seconds later. It rang out across the graves and a flock of crows went exploding up out of a stand of linden.
The boy was Rainey Teague, and he was alive.
When they got him out a few minutes later, still in his school uniform, they realized he had been placed inside a long wooden box, a coffin, and the coffin wasn’t empty.
Rainey Teague had been cradled in the withered embrace of a corpse, presumably the remains of Ethan Ruelle. They had no idea how this had been done, how the tomb had been opened without any sign of tampering, or by whom, or why, but Rainey Teague was alive. They took him to Lady Grace, where, over the next five hours, he slipped slowly but inexorably into a catatonic state.
He was still lying there three days later when his father, Miles Teague, came to see his boy once again in the ICU unit. Rainey was lying in the middle of all the usual medical machinery, IV drips and beeping monitors and catheter racks and catheter drains.
The ICU docs told Miles—a blunt-bodied Black Irish man in his early fifties, with a well-cut, handsome face going rapidly to hell—before withdrawing to leave the man alone with his son, that Rainey’s catatonia was not an uncommon response to unimaginable trauma.
Miles Teague stared down at his son for two hours, watching him breathe in and out, then he leaned down and kissed him on the forehead, straightened up and went out to the parking lot and climbed into his big black Benz. He drove himself back to the family home in Garrison Hills, where he was found the next morning, in the same clothes, in a marble folly at the bottom of the garden, a handmade Purdey shotgun lying by his body and his head blown off at the shoulders.
ONE YEAR LATER
Friday Afternoon
Coker’s Afternoon Required Some Concentration
The two-way radio in Coker’s pocket started to buzz, like a palmetto bug in a bottle. Coker was down deep inside himself, trying to see it all unfold. This Zen trick used to come naturally, but that was a long time back. He was looking through the yellow pampas grass at the snaky stretch of blacktop curving towards him through the long green valley, the heavy rifle in his hands as solid and warm as the neck of a horse.
The two-way buzzed again.
Coker pulled the handset out, thumbed the key.
“Yes.”
“We’re at mile marker 47.”
Danziger’s voice was flat and calm, but tight. Coker could hear the sirens in the background, hear the hissing rush of wind, and the rumble of tires on the pebbled surface of the highway.
“What have you got?”
Coker listened to a short hard-edged exchange between Danziger and Merle Zane, the driver, both voices a little adrenalized, which was only natural.
“So far only four,” said Danziger, coming back, “They’re right on us but staying back. We’ve got one news chopper with us, but far as we can see no cops in the air yet. Anything up ahead?”
Coker looked down at the little portable TV on the ground beside him. On the tiny plasma screen he could see a dull black bullet-shaped car with a front like a clenched fist, Merle Zane’s Chrysler Magnum, flying down a curving ribbon of county road, patchwork farmlands all around, with four cars in close pursuit, two charcoal-gray and black Crown Vics, what looked like a black and tan deputy sheriff car, also a Crown Vic, and one dark blue unmarked car, a flying brick with big fat tires and a rack of black steel bumper bars right up front.
The image was coming from a local news chopper following the chase. Coker could see the roof-rack lights on the patrol cars flickering red and blue.
Coker twisted the VOLUME button and heard the hyperventilating commentary of a young female newscaster describing the chase. The image pulled back as the chopper lifted to clear a line of transmission towers, briefly showing a rolling blue country with low brown hills far off to the south.
Coker was waiting in those low brown hills.
He picked up the radio, keyed it.
“So far no roadblocks, road is clear. Confirm you have four units. Two state and a deputy. The blue Dodge Charger is one of their chase units. A hemi, three sixty-eight mill, a roll-cage, those heavy-duty ram bars. They’ve got him laying back in the pack but at the first chance he’ll pull around and climb right up your tailpipe. He’ll use those bumper bars on your off-side taillight, put you into a spin. Don’t let him get close.”
“We won’t,” said Danziger. “So nobody up ahead?”
Danziger’s tone was still flat, but Coker could hear the tension in his throat. Coker was monitoring the police frequencies, listening to the cross talk between dispatch and the pursuit cars.
“They’ve called for units from Sectors Four and Nine, but so far only two units can respond, and they’re twenty miles off, on the other side of the Belfair Range. They’re spread all over the county and most of their guys are up on the interstate, helping with traffic around the crash site. That’s where their chopper is too.”
“Okay,” said Danziger. “Good—”
Coker heard a solid thump, and the sound of glass cracking, and then Merle Zane’s voice, swearing softly.
“Christ. They’re shooting at us.”
Coker glanced down at the television, heard the announcer’s excited voice, her words tumbling out in a rush. The banner along the bottom of the screen read HAPPENING NOW! POLICE CHASE ROUTE 311 SOUTH SKYCAM NEWS POLICE CHASE! HAPPENING NOW! but the crawl did not name her. Coker figured whoever she was, she was having a hell of a good time.
Good for you.
Get it while you can, kid.
“Like I said. You’re letting them get too close.”
Coker heard the sound of a pistol firing, a series of sharp percussive cracks, and then Merle Zane’s voice.
“Danziger’s shooting back.”
“Well, tell him don’t, Merle. Shooting back just motivates them. He oughta know that. Tell him to keep his head down or they’ll take it off.”
He heard Merle Zane barking at Danziger, heard Danziger’s heated reply, but the shooting stopped, and then Merle was talking again.
“Mile marker 40. We’re two miles out.”
“I’m here,” he said, and clicked off.
He turned the sound on the plasma screen down and shut off the police radio. Didn’t really matter what the State guys were doing right now.
Whatever it was, it was too late.
The news chopper—now that was a problem.
He looked at the TV screen, trying to get an idea of how high up the chopper
was, the angles, the kind of machine. Most of the news and some of the police choppers in the state were Eurocopter 350s. What he could hear of the rotor noise and the engine sounded like that’s what this one was. Nice fast machine.
But light and thin-skinned.
A flying egg.
He leaned back against a tree trunk, eased the rifle in his lap, took a slow breath, and opened himself up to what was going on around him.
In a stand of cottonwoods on the far side of the road a bunch of crows were bickering with another bunch of crows. The wind off the flatlands was stirring the pampas grass, making its shaggy heads bob and its brittle stalks hiss and chatter as they rubbed together. The afternoon sun was blood-warm on his left cheek. He looked up. The sky was a cloudless blue. Down the slope of the hill a possum was digging in the red earth, its tail showing like a curved black stick above the pale yellow grass. Three hawks were circling overhead, wings spread and fixed, gliding in lazy circles, riding the thermals as the day’s heat cooked off the lowlands. The air smelled of sweetgrass, clover, hot earth, and baking tarmac. It reminded him of Billings and the sweetgrass coulees down in the Bighorn valley. In the distance, faint but growing, Coker could hear the wail of sirens.
He looked down at the TV screen, saw the line of cars following Merle’s black Magnum, that dark blue interceptor weaving up through the pack, closing in on Merle as the two-lane started to rise up into the grassy foothills of the Belfair Range.
Across the street the crows fell silent, as if listening, and then they exploded upwards in one swirling black cloud, amber light shimmering on their wings.
He felt the drumbeat of a chopper, coming in low, hidden by the tree line, and then, under the siren wail, the squealing of tires as Merle pushed the Magnum through a curve a quarter mile away.
The sirens grew more shrill, crazy echoes bouncing off the hills all around, mixed up with the snarling sound of engines racing.
Coker hefted the rifle, put on a pair of ear protectors, let out a long slow breath, got into a seated brace, resting the rifle’s bipod on a stump in front of him, and depressed the stock until the squared-off muzzle brake was covering the top of the tree line.
Niceville Page 3
