The Reckoning
Authors: Carsten Stroud
R
ECKONING
Carsten Stroud is the author of the
New York Times
bestselling true-crime account
Close Pursuit
. His other novels include the first two volumes of the Niceville trilogy,
Niceville
and
The Homecoming
, as well as
Sniper's Moon
,
Lizard Skin
,
Black Water Transit
,
Cuba Strait
, and
Cobraville.
He lives in Florida and Toronto.
Niceville
The Homecoming
The Reckoning
A VINTAGE CRIME/BLACK LIZARD ORIGINAL, AUGUST 2015
Copyright ©
2015
by Esprit D'Escalier
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Ltd., Toronto.
Vintage is a registered trademark and Vintage Crime/Black Lizard and colophon are trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Library of Congresss Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Stroud, Carsten, 1946â
The reckoning / by Carsten Stroud.
pages ; cm. â (Niceville trilogy)
I. Title.
PR9199.3.S838R43 2015
813'.54âdc23
2014047944
Vintage Books Trade Paperback ISBNâ9781101873021
eBook ISBNâ9781101873038
Map by Robert Bull
Cover design by Henry Steadman
Cover photograph © Günter Flegar/Westend61/Offset Bird © Henry Steadman
v4.1
ep
For Linda Mair
The things we remember best
are those better forgotten.
âGRACIAN, 1647
Cruelty is not softened by tears.
It feeds on them.
âPUBLILIUS SYRUS, 1ST CENTURY BC
In the fall of 1814, under a harvest moon, the people of Niceville came together on the banks of the Tulip to talk about the evils that had come upon their town and to consider what should be done about them.
Amity Suggs, the minister, said it was God's Holy Wrath. Dr. Cullen said there was something in the water. The mix-breed John Brass said that a Kalona Ayeliski, a Raven Mocker demon, had always been in this place and the town should be abandoned. The debate went back and forth.
In the end the elders decided. Naming calls. God will shield the righteous. Sinners will be taken. Go about your day's work as Christians and let the pagan nights go about theirs. For over two hundred years this covenant held up.
Then, on one rainy Friday night in October, it all went straight to Hell.
Friday night, nine-thirty, and everybody in the Morrison family was safely tucked away in their white stucco home at 1329 Palisade Drive in The Glades. The Glades was a prewar Art Deco neighborhood in the northwest corner of Niceville. It had started out as Old Hollywood and gotten a lot older by staying there.
The Glades had shady curving lanes lined with palms and cypress and live oak trees. The rain streaming down put a misty halo around all the streetlamps and hammered on the red tile roofs of the houses. The gutters were choking on leaves and muddy water. A thick fog drifted through the trees. The warm air was heavy with the graveyard scent of wet earth.
Inside the Morrison house everything was serene and cozy, dinner done, the day ending well. Doug, the dad, was a short round man with a friendly streak, a forensic tech with the Niceville PD. Ellen, the mom, was a neonatal nurse at Our Lady of Sorrows down in Cap City. Jared, the eleven-year-old sonâskinny, big-eared, with shaggy brown hairâwas flat on his stomach in front of the 52-inch Samsung. An immense and overweight Maine Coon cat named Mildred Pierce was stretched out along his spine, the huge cat purring like a well-tuned motor.
And Ava, the fifteen-year-old daughter, was tucked away up in her shell-pink bedroom with the door locked, leaning in to her iMac, Skyping with Julia, her latest OMG-BFF, gleefully slagging the new girl in their class at Sacred Heart High.
Ava, black hair and blue eyes, had a body that a loving God would never have issued to a fifteen-year-old, and she was only dimly aware of the power it radiated. She was on the cheerleading squad at Sacred Heart and loved to taunt the players at the Sunday-afternoon football games. Weekdays, after school, she went out in the town with her friends, strolling the Galleria Mall, riding the Peachtree Line trolleys in their navy blue Sacred Heart tunics and their scarlet blazers with the school crest. They hiked the tunics up too high as soon as they were out of school, showed lots of pale white thigh and knee socks, deliberately careless of how they sat, feeling all the eyes on them, savoring the burn. Well, everybody is doing it, aren't they, is what Ava would have said if you'd asked her, because she had no clue whatsoever about the risks they were running.
The cops figured Ava probably never heard what was happening downstairsâthe doorbell ringing or whatever it wasâbecause she was up in her room with the headphones on, busy with her Skype call.
Not to say that there was no sign of everything that happened that night, beginning with the front hall. The CSI people were pretty sure it started there, in the front hall, when Doug the Dad opened the door.
It went outward from the front hallway. Traces of what happened were all over the placeâthe walls, the ceilings, the living room carpet, the staircase. Signs were everywhere, but the worst of them were upstairs, in Ava's room.
Nine-thirty p.m. and up in The Glades, Hell was getting busy with the Morrison family. There were sounds, cries, pleas, but the neighbors weren't hearing anything over the pounding thunder and the lashing rain. As a result, what went on inside the house went on for two and a half hours. Shortly after midnight the lights flicked off and a kind of stunned silence came down inside 1329 Palisade Drive.
A few minutes later a large shuffling figure carrying a green garbage bag emerged from the door next to the garage, walked slowly down the driveway and off under the trees, moving into and out of the pools of light from the streetlamps, wrapped in a dark gray rain slicker. The figure reached the end of the block, stepped left into darkness, and was gone.
Five minutes passed. Then an old navy blue Cadillac Fleetwood rolled through the intersection of Palisade Drive and Lanai Lane, trailing a veil of rainwater. The Caddy reached the traffic lights at River Road, ran the intersection against a redâgot itself duly snapped by a traffic cameraâand accelerated south and east, disappearing into the southbound traffic on River Road, a shiny blue tank glittering in the streetlights, windows tinted dark, dashboard dials glowing, lighting up the face of the driver, his chest heaving, his heavy hands at the ten after ten position on the black leather wheel, heading out of The Glades as fast as that Caddy could go.
