Niceville

by Carsten Stroud

  “Resulting from a rape?”

  “Probably. The guards at Candleford House were utterly corrupt. Little better than animals. No, worse. At any rate, during her recuperation, she broke her restraints and ran away. Three days later her dress and shoes were found at the edge of Crater Sink. Her body was never found.”

  Silence.

  “But how did this story connect with all those disappearances?”

  “The disappearances began soon after Clara’s escape from Lady Grace. And all the victims were people who had, in one way or another, injured Clara Mercer, either by being members of the Teague … I don’t know … faction, if you like, or because they put her, or allowed her to be put, in Candleford House against her will.”

  “Dad. You’re a historian, not a Victorian novelist. The whole thing is … crazy.”

  “I couldn’t agree more. I’m just giving you the facts as they presented themselves to me.”

  “Did you ever tell Nick any of this?”

  “Yes. I did. He dragged it out of me, just as you’re doing. Not in this kind of detail, but the basics.”

  “When?”

  “I guess maybe a month ago.”

  “What did he think?”

  “Same as you. Found the whole thing crazy.”

  “But he listened?”

  “Kate, he was there when they pulled Rainey Teague out of Ethan Ruelle’s grave. You may not like this—neither do I—but there’s no denying some kind of pattern here.”

  She uses the mirrors.

  In her mind she could see the writing on the linen card—

  With Long Regard—Glynis R.

  “She uses the mirrors? That’s what Mom said?”

  “Yes.”

  “Who do you think ‘she’ was? Was it Glynis?”

  “Glynis Ruelle is dead and buried.”

  “Nick didn’t tell me about any of this.”

  “I didn’t think he would.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because you’re a Walker. One of the families.”

  “You mean he’s afraid someone is stalking me?”

  “You could say that.”

  “The same person who is stalking the other members of the families? Do you really think that?”

  A long pause.

  “I’m wondering about it. That’s all.”

  “Dad. Think about it. You’re saying that people have been disappearing in Niceville since the late twenties? There’s no way one person could have done all that. He—or she—would have to be …”

  “A reasonable guess would be a hundred years old. Possibly older.”

  “That’s impossible. Is that really what you think?”

  “No. Of course not. It just nags at me. You asked me what was wrong with Niceville. I agree that it’s absurd. If there really is anybody behind this, it will probably turn out to be a descendant, a relative, acting out a private obsession. But the fact is that Clara Mercer’s body was never found.”

  “Dad, nothing that goes into Crater Sink ever comes back out. Everybody knows that.”

  She shook her head, waved it all away with an open palm, a gesture her father couldn’t see but one he sensed as she did it.

  “And this is what’s wrong with Niceville?”

  “Perhaps something more basic is going on, Kate. Evil invites retribution, evil generates chaos and cruelty. You and I both know that bad acts have a way of reverberating down through families. Dealing with that sort of thing is how you make a living, Kate.”

  After a time, Dillon spoke again.

  “You may have heard this. The Creek and the Cherokee both have a legend about a cursed place, a place where some kind of evil presence lived. It’s in the archives, recorded by a fellow named Lanman, working back around 1855. The Cherokees believed that somewhere in the vicinity of the Savannah River—Lanman was vague about exactly where—there was a high stone bluff, and at the top of the bluff was what he called ‘a terrible fissure.’ From his description, I gathered it was some sort of crack or opening in the mountain.”

  “Dad. You’re not trying to tell me that Crater Sink—”

  “Crater Sink has been here longer than we have, Kate. Far longer. Thousands, perhaps millions of years. And it’s a very strange place, you’ll have to grant. It’s not surprising that the Cherokee would have some mythology around it. We do ourselves. I mean, we Niceville people. Things go into Crater Sink, but nothing ever comes out? You just said it yourself. You grew up with those stories. We all did.”

  “Campfire tales. Ghost stories to make the kids shiver. Every town has some scary place.”

  “True, but Lanman says the Cherokee called the place Talulu, which sort of nails the location down. Mind you, this is all hypothetical stuff. Hearsay. Nothing I’d care to repeat in a court of law. Look, sweetheart, we’ve gotten a little off the track. Do you still have my records there. In the basement?”

  “Yes.”

  “The families had a jubilee, at Johnny Mullryne’s plantation in Savannah. In 1910. There’s a picture of it, of all the families together. There’s some writing on the back of the picture. I think that’s when this all started.”

  “What’s written on the back?”

  “All the names of the people in the picture. One name is underlined. And next to the name that’s underlined is a single word. The word is shame.”

  “What’s the name?”

  “I mentioned him earlier. Abel. Abel Teague.”

  “As in Rainey Teague?”

  “Yes. Although, as we know, Rainey was adopted. Miles Teague was Abel Teague’s grandson. Abel Teague’s father was Jubal Teague, and his father was a man named London Teague. Back in the 1840s, London Teague had a plantation in southern Louisiana called Hy Brasail. There was some talk that London Teague arranged for the murder of his third wife, Anora Mercer—the lady they named the golf club after? It’s a matter of record that John Gwinnett Mercer, Anora’s godfather, fought a duel with London Teague over Anora’s death. So the Teagues have a checkered past, don’t they? Do you still have Rainey’s papers?”

  “How could I not? You ask about them a lot.”

  “Where are they?”

  “In Rainey’s file, at my office.”

  “You went back over them, didn’t you? Just to be safe, to make sure he was the only inheritor?”

  “Yes. Due diligence.”

  “Of course. His birth parents, the Gwinnetts, the record is they died in a fire, right?”

  “Yes. When he was two. They had a farm outside Sallytown. They raised Clydesdale horses. A hay fire started in the horse barn. They were both killed trying to get their animals out. They had no relatives, so Rainey went into foster care.”

  “In Sallytown?”

  “Yes.”

  “You were able to confirm all this?”

  “Not really. But the papers were in order, as far as I could determine.”

  “And did you manage to talk to the foster parents when you were taking on Rainey’s file?”

  “No. I was told they left the state a year after Rainey was adopted. I tried to trace them—just so one day I could tell Rainey about his past, if he ever asked—but I never found them.”

  “Do you recall their names?”

  “Yes. Palgrave. Zorah and Martin.”

  “No trace of them? Either of them?”

  “Not that I could find. I didn’t look all that hard. They were sort of peripheral to the issue.”

  He was quiet again.

  Kate waited patiently.

  “Who initiated the adoption process, Kate?”

  “Miles did, according to the papers. Sylvia had just gone through a long series of in vitro attempts. I remember Miles thought she was suicidal. We were all pretty worried about her.”

  “So, the story is, Miles went out and, somehow, found a boy who might actually be a distant relation to the family, an unknown boy in a foster home two hundred miles away in Sallytown?”

  “Yes. I guess so. Wh
y? Is there anything strange about that?”

  “This lawyer named Leah Searle, did you ever speak to her?”

  “No. She died, a year later.”

  “How?”

  “Drowned, according to her daughter-in-law.”

  “Where?”

  “Not in Crater Sink, Dad. Come on, you’re starting to scare me. Are you saying there’s something odd in Rainey’s adoption?”

  Another long silence. Her father was quiet for so long she began to think she’d lost her connection. Eventually he spoke.

  “Kate, would you mind if I came down?”

  “Dad, we’d love it. When?”

  “I can be there in four hours.”

  Bock Meets Chu and Chu Meets Bock

  Bock and Chu had agreed to meet at a place called the Bar Belle, on the Pavilion overlooking the Tulip River, a nice sunny patio with round metal tables and umbrellas flapping overhead that advertised Dubonnet and Heineken and Stella Artois, the same place where, as it happened, Nick and Beau had been wrapping up their lunch break.

  Bock had made it a point to get to the Bar Belle before Chu—a good hour early. This was a tradecraft trick he had learned while watching The Bourne Identity. He sat alone at a table next to the railing, where he could get his back up against the wall, just like Matt Damon would do. On the other side of the teak panels the Tulip River was hissing like a big brown python.

  Bock was wearing all black for the meet because he felt it made him more intimidating, whereas it actually made him look like an off-duty mall cop. He ordered a drink they were calling a Tequila Mockingbird and received it from a girl with her knockers overflowing their C cups like melting ice cream cones and a smile that would have warmed the cockles of a dead man. Bock might as well have been a dead man, for all he gave a damn right then, although they were lovely to look at, in an abstract if-only-my-life-were-different way.

  Most of the tables had been empty when he got there, except for one a few yards away, where he noticed a couple of guys sitting quietly, one white guy, lean and kind of scary-looking, in charcoal suit pants and a crisp black dress shirt, with short black hair going white at the temples and these odd gray eyes that, when he had glanced over to watch Bock take a chair, seemed to have him bagged and tagged in under two seconds.

  This unsettling guy was sitting with another guy, a black guy as large as the federal deficit and so muscular that if he’d wanted any more muscles he’d have had to hire someone to carry them around for him. The black guy was sitting canted to the left as if he had hurt his right butt cheek or something.

  These guys were up and gone a few minutes after Bock arrived, long before he got the Tequila Mockingbird down to its slurpy bits, the lean white guy giving Bock a long backwards glance as they paid up and split.

  Perhaps they sense my power, Bock was thinking, before the profoundly humiliating purpose of this meeting came crashing back to his surface.

  In that connection, Bock, being a man of the world and capable of bold strokes in a crisis, especially a self-inflicted one, as most of his were, had taken some precautions about this meeting with Andy Chu. Firstly, he had a small voice-activated Pearlcorder hidden in his pants, attached by a thread-thin cable to a mike that looked like a button sewn into the pocket of his black shirt, and he had a tiny video camera hidden inside a fake pen stuck in the same shirt pocket.

  Furthermore, in case this Andy Chu person got violent, Bock had an impressive mail-order badge made of genuine chromium-plated German silver and a laminated ID card that certified Bock as a Bail Bond Recovery Agent fully empowered with all the power that mail-order badges can confer.

  And, as a backup, he had a collapsible steel baton stuffed into the back of his pants.

  Tactically speaking, this last had not been such a good idea, since it kept sliding down into the crack of his ass. Next time he’d put it in his pocket, but it was too late to move it now.

  So, there Bock sat, generally pleased with all these careful preparations, plus feeling the fortification that comes naturally from the rapid inhalation of three consecutive Tequila Mockingbirds in under thirty minutes. He was becoming much more confident that, in the event that bold assertive action should ensue, he would be ready to do whatever was needed in the sacred cause of Tony Bock Getting Away with Stupid Shit.

  Over the next hour, as Tony Bock lapped up a fourth Mockingbird, the deck tables filled up with happy chatty college types in loud shirts and cargo shorts with their ball caps on backwards.

  Bock watched one guy with his ball cap turned around so the bill was hanging down his neck and the guy was literally shading his eyes from the sun with his left hand.

  What a complete putz—turn the cap around, you dipshit dork.

  He was still looking at the guy with withering contempt when a skinny shadow fell across his table and he looked up at the silhouette of a slender bite-sized guy in a white short-sleeved shirt and beige nerd-slacks.

  Bock, who had forgotten that he too had his ball cap on backwards, used his left hand to shade his eyes and managed to make out the features of a small-boned Asian guy, beardless, wearing wraparound iridescent bug-eye sunglasses and a diffident smile. The guy actually put out his hand.

  “Mr. Bock, I am Andy Chu.”

  Bock, seizing the high ground right off, glared at the boy’s hand as if it were a dead bat. The boy withdrew it and took a chair, still smiling.

  “How do you know who I am?” asked Bock. “We’ve never met. I don’t know who the hell you are.”

  “Well, I am Andy Chu and forgive me if I feel we have already met,” said Chu, picking up the menu and looking more at ease than Bock felt a sleazeball blackmailing midget gook wearing the Full Geek had any right to look.

  “I know what you look like,” the kid went on, speaking in a conversational tone, “since I have seen the naked pictures you take of yourself in front of the computer, sitting on that big black leather sofa.”

  Quite suddenly, Bock found that he had nothing snappy to come back with. His heart had jumped up his throat and was now trying to squeeze out his left ear. His hearing was gone and his voice was nowhere to be found.

  The kid seemed to understand this.

  “Try to be calm, Tony. I mean you no harm. But you see I have been all through your computer. I have seen all of your dirty-picture collection and your dirty-story collection. I know the websites you go to and how long you stay there and I have seen the webcam pictures you take of yourself while you are there.”

  He paused, saw the way Bock was taking this—he looked like he was going to either faint or throw up or both. Chu patted Bock’s arm in a comforting way, and then went back to his menu, speaking in the same calm voice.

  “Settle down, Tony. Don’t take this so seriously. This is not so bad. I only meant to say—I hope I can call you Tony?—that in the two hours I have had to study you, I feel that I know you better than I know my older brother in Macao, who is also a man who likes to use Photoshop to take the heads off his girlfriends and sisters and put them on the bodies of naked whores.”

  Bock’s eyes were on his hands.

  A vein was hammering at his temple and from somewhere deep down an alarm was going off.

  Heart attack stroke heart attack stroke.

  Chu, if he was aware, rolled on anyway.

  “Once, if you will believe this, he even did this to a picture of our mother. He and I do not talk anymore after I let him know that I knew what he was doing, but he also stopped doing it. And so will you, if you are wise, and let me help you. I think I will have the red snapper and the wild rice. It looks good. Will we have some wine too? A white wine? Maybe a cold Pinot Grigio?”

  This was said in the same calm, clear voice, Chu smiling at Bock as he handed the menu across.

  Book took it in shaking hands, his guts turning into dishwater and flushing pink in the sun. He found that his lips were stiff and his cheeks cold and slack, as if all the blood had left them. He felt that he was melting dow
n into himself, that the only solid and steely part left of Antony Bock was a collapsible baton located somewhere deep down in his underwear.

  He stared at what was left of his fourth Tequila Mockingbird, his hands in his lap, clutching the menu, and could not for any price have brought himself to look up at Andy Chu.

  “Please. You look sickly. I do not judge you,” said Andy Chu, not unkindly. “From what I can see, until yesterday, you have just used those pictures to please yourself, and I am not the one to say you are bad to do so. I would not be surprised to hear that everyone around us on this patio has sexual secrets they would not like to see exposed. That is just human nature.”

  Chu paused, changed his tone, and was now mildly scolding him.

  “But what you have done to that poor man down at the church, and to those innocent police officers who risked their lives—now that was very wrong. And I think you sent an e-mail this morning around ten thirty to somebody named Twyla Littlebasket. It had a very large attachment, after which you shredded a graphic file. I was unable to retrieve all of it. Was this more of your troublemaking, Tony?”

  Bock worked his mouth, trying to find enough spit to be able to talk, because something had to be said, if only to stop this kid from saying anything more. Chu, sensing this, handed him a glass of water and watched with cool sympathy as Bock drank it down in one long swallow.

  “You couldn’t. I shredded all my—”

  “Tried to, Tony. I got most of it. Enough.”

  “Look … Mr. Chu …”

  “Please, call me Andy.”

  “Look … Andy … this stuff, this is just too crazy to be talking about here … we oughta go—”

  The waitress with the ice cream bazookas shimmered up and smiled down upon them. Chu ordered his red snapper—well grilled—and the wild rice, and, glancing at Bock, seeing the state he was in, ordered the same for him.

  “May we also have a bottle of Santa Margherita, on ice, if you would?”

  The girl beamed upon them some more and shimmered off. Chu looked at Bock for a time over the top of his glasses, and then leaned back.

  “I think, since you are finding it hard to talk, I should tell you what is going on in my own mind. Is that okay? Do you need a pill or something? No?”