Niceville (3 page)

Nick made a gesture and Moochie started inching the frames forward again, Nick looking for something, anything he could use. At time marker 1513:54 Rainey started to move his head backwards, his mouth opening. At 1513:55 he was starting to step back onto his left heel, and his mouth was opening wider.

At 1513:56 he wasn’t in the picture at all.

The camera was aimed at an empty patch of sidewalk.

Rainey was gone.

“Is it the camera?” Nick asked.

Moochie was just gaping at the screen.

Nick asked him again.

“No. It never does that. It’s brand-new. I got it put in by Securicom last year. Cost me three thousand dollars.”

“Back it up.”

Moochie did, one frame at a time.

Same thing.

First frame, Rainey’s not there.

One frame back, there he is.

He’s stepping onto his heel, with his mouth wide open.

Another frame back, he’s still there, and now he’s close to the window, but beginning to …

To what?

Recoil?

From what?

Something he saw in a mirror?

Or someone behind him, reflected in the mirror. What the hell was going on here?

“What’s the recording stored on?”

“The hard drive,” said Moochie, still staring at the screen.

“Is it removable?”

Moochie looked at him.

“Yes. But—”

“I’m going to need it. No. Wait. I’m going to need the whole system. Do you have a spare?”

Moochie was far from thrilled by this development.

“I still have the old camera, hooked up to a VCR.”

“Run it again, one more time. This time go right through the sequence.”

Moochie pressed
ADVANCE
.

They stood and watched as Rainey Teague stick-walked jerkily into the frame, leaned close to the glass, stayed there, his expression growing more fixed as the seconds passed, Rainey drawing closer and closer to the glass until his nose was pressed up against it and his breath was fogging the window.

Then the recoil.

He steps back.

And … vanishes.

The camera kept rolling. They both stood there and watched it, riveted, locked on, with the utter
wrongness
of the thing rippling up and down their spines. In the frames they saw the feet of passing strollers, always that patch of bare sidewalk, now and then a piece of paper flickering through or the shadow of a bird rippling across the screen, and in the background people passing by, perfectly oblivious.

They ran the frames on until a uniform cop appeared in the image, crossing from the direction of Pennington’s Book Nook, reaching for the door of Uncle Moochie’s.

Nick recognized the big bulky shape and the pale freckled features of Boots Jackson, the Niceville cop assigned to canvass this block. They rolled it back and forth a few more times, but it was always the same.

At 1513:55, Rainey Teague is right there.

At 1513:56, the kid is
gone
.

He doesn’t leap out of the picture, or duck to one side, or jump way up high, or fade away, or turn into a puff of smoke, or get jerked away by the arms of a stranger.

He just flicks off, as if he were only a digital image and somebody had hit
ERASE
.

Rainey Teague is just
gone
.

And he never comes back.

•    •    •

Of course in the harrowing days and nights that followed, as the CID and the Niceville cops and everybody else who could be spared tore up the state looking for the kid, no serious cop believed even for a second that what the camera was showing was literally the truth, that the kid had just snapped out of existence.

It had to be some sort of computer glitch.

Or a trick, like something David Copperfield would do.

So they started with the security system that Moochie had installed, examining it and testing it and retesting it, looking for the glitch, looking for any sign that Moochie had rigged the entire thing to cover up a simple kidnapping. The security machine, a Motorola surveillance system, was sent off to the FBI for a complete forensic examination. It came back without a flaw, showing zero signs of having been tampered with in any way.

Next came Moochie himself, who was put through an interrogation that would have done credit to the Syrian Secret Police. He also came through without a hint of guilty knowledge.

They took his shop apart.

Nothing.

They took Delia Cotton’s antique mirror to a lab and checked it for—well, they had no damned idea what, but whatever they were hoping for, it wasn’t there. It was just a medium-sized antique mirror with a tarnished silver face inside a baroque gilt frame, with a handwritten linen card on the back:

With Long Regard—Glynis R
.

So Uncle Moochie got his expensive security system back, with their apologies, although he refused to have anything more to do with the mirror, which finally ended up in Nick Kavanaugh’s closet, and in the meantime they took Alf Pennington’s Book Nook apart, which he endured stoically, seeing it as a final confirmation of the innate brutality of the Imperium. They found nothing.

They took Toonerville Hobby Shoppe apart.

Nothing.

They looked at every available frame of every available surveillance
camera video up and down North Gwinnett between Bluebottle Way and Long Reach Boulevard.

Nothing.

Not a trace.

Naturally, Nick Kavanaugh went effectively nuts around the ninth sleepless day, and his wife, Kate, a family practice lawyer, at Tig Sutter’s urging, slipped a couple of Valiums into his orange juice and packed him off to their bed, where he slept like the living dead for twelve hours straight.

While Nick was sleeping, Kate, after struggling with the idea for a time, called her father, Dillon Walker, who was a professor of military history up at the Virginia Military Institute in the Shenandoah Valley. It was late, but Walker, a widower who lived alone in faculty rooms on the edge of the parade square, answered the phone on the second ring. Kate heard his whispery bass voice in those familiar warm tones and she wished, as she often did, that her father lived closer to Niceville and that her mother, Lenore, the heart of Dillon Walker’s life, had not been killed in a rollover on the interstate five years ago. Her father was never the same after that. Something important had gone out of him, some of his amiable fire. But he was sharp enough to hear the tightness in her voice when she said hello.

“Kate … how are you? Is everything okay?”

“I’m sorry to call so late, Dad. Did I wake you?”

Walker sat up in his leather club chair—while not actually asleep on his military-style cot, he
had
been dozing over a copy of
Pax Britannica
, James Morris’ history of the British Empire under Victoria. Kate’s voice had that faint quiver in it that was always there when she was stressed.

“No, sweet. I was up late reading. You sound a little worried. It’s not Beth, is it? Or Reed?”

Beth, Kate’s older sister, was in a toxic marriage to an ex–FBI agent named Byron Deitz, who was cordially loathed by everyone in the family. Reed was her brother, a state trooper who drove a pursuit car, a hard-edged young man who was never happier than when he was running down a speeder.

“No, Dad. Not Beth. Not Reed. It’s about Nick.”

“Dear God. He’s not hurt?”

“No, no. He’s fine. To tell you the truth I sort of slipped him a mickey so he could sleep. He’s upstairs now, dead to the world. He’s been on a case for days, and he’s a total wreck.”

There was a pause, as if she were trying to find a way to begin. Walker leaned over and stirred the fireplace embers into a soft yellow flickering, sat back in the worn leather chair, and picked up his scotch. Tepid and flat, but still Laphroiag.

He could hear Kate’s breath over the phone, and pictured her there in their old family home, a slender auburn-haired Irish rose with sapphire blue eyes and a fine-cut, elegant face, very much the picture of her mother, Lenore. He sipped at the scotch, set it down.

“You sound like you have a question, Kate. Is it about Nick’s case?”

A silence.

Then, “I guess it is, Dad. The fact is, we’ve had another disappearance.”

She heard her father’s breathing stop, and knew she had touched a sore point between them. Several years ago her father had begun an informal personal inquiry into the high rate of stranger abductions in Niceville, only to quit the project abruptly after Lenore’s death. He never picked it up again, and he had delicately but effectively evaded the topic ever since. When he spoke again his voice was as warm as always, but perhaps a little more wary.

“I see. And I guess this case is what’s keeping Nick from sleeping? Was it really an abduction? A stranger abduction? Like all the others?”

“So far they seem to think so. Can I tell you about it? Would that be okay?”

“Please, Kate. Anything I can do.”

Kate told him what they knew so far, Rainey Teague, on his way home from school, Uncle Moochie’s pawnshop, the security camera, and the way the boy just disappeared into thin air. Walker listened and felt his throat tightening.

“The boy’s name was Teague? Not Sylvia’s boy?”

“Yes, Dad.”

“God. That’s awful. How is she?”

“Terrible. Falling apart.”

“And Miles?”

“You know Miles. He’s a typical Teague, and they all have that cold spot. But he gets quieter every day. They’ve both given up hope.”

“Where does the case stand now?”

“Everyone’s in it. Belfair and Cullen County, the state police, the Cap City office of the FBI.”

“Do they have any leads?”

“Nothing. Nothing at all.”

A pause.

Then he spoke again, with a kind of forced calm in his voice.

“Did anything—anomalous—happen?”

“
Anomalous
, Dad? Like what?”

“I don’t know, really. I know you’re asking me because of the research I was doing, but I don’t know any more about this kind of thing now than I did then. That’s why I quit. It was pointless.”

“You quit when Mom died, Dad.”

He was quiet again.

She waited.

She had crossed his line—she knew that—but she also knew she was his favorite child, the one he had always been closest to.

“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.