The Reckoning (15 page)

“Yes, we are. Everybody in this part of the state is looking for it. County, Highway Patrol, all of us. Can you tell us if your husband has a garage or a storage unit? Someplace big enough to park the Caddy inside it.”

Glynda thought about it. “Well, he has the dealership, but nobody there has seen the car around.”

“No storage unit somewhere?”

“Not that I know of, and I do the books, so I would have seen the bills.”

She was quiet for a moment. “I don't know why he would do this, but we have this other business…we buy houses and fix them up? Sell them, we make a little money, so…”

Nick was right on that.

“Do you have any houses like that now?”

“Actually, yes, we have three. One is—”

“Any with garages or covered parking?”

She thought about that. “I think they all do…Men like to store things in garages, so we always—”

Mavis had her book out. “Can you give us the addresses?”

“You think he might be in one of those? They are all being worked on, so there would be no—”

“We understand, Glynda,” said Mavis, staying calm. “But if you could just tell us where they are so we can follow up?”

She looked flustered for a moment, but then she pulled open a drawer in her desk, dragged out a fat file folder, opened it up on her desk, ran a finger down a list of addresses. “Okay, here are the ones we are working on right now—”

“May I have a copy of that, Mrs. Yarvik?”

She looked unhappy, but then she had every reason. “Of course,” she said, handing Nick the sheet. “I have another copy right under—”

“I'm seeing nine houses here, Mrs. Yarvik. But you're working on only three?”

“Yes, three we are renovating—I mean, our contractors—and there are two that we have rented out—”

Nick set the paper down. “Can you just put a check beside all the houses that are empty right now?”

She scanned the list, took a pen, and put a check mark beside seven addresses. Two of the houses up for rent but empty were on the northern edge of Tin Town. The three houses being renovated were all over town, and the final two vacant rentals were in Garrison Hills and Lower Chase Run.

Lower Chase Run was part of The Chase, Niceville's most exclusive neighborhood—gated mansions and treed deer parks and wrought iron fencing, old-money mansions and rolling lawns and ornate gates and cobbled driveways, all of this riding up the slopes at the base of Tallulah's Wall.

Nick looked out the window and he could see The Chase neighborhood on the eastern edge of Niceville, just emerging from the shadow of Tallulah's Wall. The cedar shake roof of Delia Cotton's mansion, known as Temple Hill, was partly visible through a forest of ancient live oaks.

Garrison Hills was Nick's home neighborhood. The rental in Garrison Hills was on Sable Basilisk Lane, on the far side of the Confederate Graveyard from Nick's own home on Beauregard.

Nick gathered the sheet up, folded it once. “Mrs. Yarvik, can we have your permission to send some police officers to these places, and if we have to, if there's no one home or no answer, can we open them up and go inside?”

“Go inside? You mean, like, you need my permission?”

“It would make things easier,” said Mavis, who didn't want to blow the rest of the afternoon setting up seven different search warrants. “You're the legal owner, right?”

“Well, our corporation is.”

“But you're an officer of the corporation?”

“Yes. I am the CFO.”

“Can you just write out a quick note then, saying that we have your permission to enter these properties? I mean, if Maris is inside one, he might be sick and need help, perhaps urgently, and we wouldn't want to waste any time with papers.”

Glynda got Mavis's point and went a whiter shade of pale. Mavis felt guilty as sin, or at least she tried to.

“Of course…just a handwritten note?”

“That would be great. And then sign it?”

Glynda wrote fast, leaning over the paper, her pen flying, and then a scrawled signature, and as an afterthought, the time and date. She handed the note to Mavis, who gave it a quick look. It would hold up.

“Thank you, Glynda. This will help so much.”

“So
everyone
is looking for Maris? The county people and the Highway Patrol too?”

“Yes,” said Nick, wary now.

Glynda looked grateful, then less so. “So much people. Is this…
normal
?”

A good question, and Mavis let Nick answer it. “No, actually, it isn't. Maris has only been missing for a few hours. With an adult, a male, we don't pull out all the stops until forty-eight hours.”

“Then why so many…I do not want to look ungrateful…”

Mavis could see that Nick, who was not a gifted liar, was trying to find a way to answer that wouldn't blow Glynda's mind, so she tried to distract the woman before she could zero in on exactly why Maris was getting all this official attention. “Tell me, Glynda,” said Mavis, radiating sweetness and light, “when you saw Maris, was there anything about him that was different? Was he worried, maybe some trouble with the business?”

“No, the business is fine, no trouble there. And no trouble between us, Detective Kavanaugh. We have a good marriage…”

And she was gone again. And she wasn't coming back any time soon. Mavis looked across her bowed head at Nick and gave him a silent
Don't tell her.

Nick got up, and Mavis came around to the front of Glynda's desk. Glynda looked up from her hankie, her face a red blotch, her eyes streaming.

“We have everyone looking,” said Mavis in a soothing tone. “If you think of anything…anything at all…that might help us figure this out, here's my card.”

Glynda took her card, set it down on her desk, wiped her nose. “There was…have you checked the hospitals?”

“Yes. There was no accident report involving a 1975 blue Fleetwood, and your husband hasn't checked into any clinic or ER in a two-hundred-mile radius. Why a hospital?”

Glynda looked back and forth between the two of them. “He had a terrible headache. Why he came home at two. Like a migraine. He
never
gets them. I said go to the doctor, but Maris never goes to doctors. He says doctors just make you sick.”

Nick registered the migraine element, but he said nothing. Didn't want to deflect Glynda's train of thought. Mavis promised that they'd keep checking the hospitals, asked her if she had thought to phone her husband's doctor herself.

“Yes, I did. To see if maybe Maris had some problem he didn't want to tell me. But the doctor said he hadn't seen Maris for a month, since his last checkup for…for you know, the…the glove thing they do? To men?”

“Tell me, Mrs. Yarvik, did either of you happen to know a young man named Jordan Dutrow?”

Mavis held her breath, but Nick was right. They weren't from Social Services. Glynda went inward, and came back with a smile. “Yes, I think Maris knows him. Maris goes to all the Sunday high school games. I think Jordan Dutrow is this football player. A kickbacker?”

“A linebacker?”

“Yes. Maris thinks much of him. Says he will go to Ole Miss one day. Maris plays rugby for fun, and sometimes they play against the young men in Boudreau Park. I know once Jordan was there, because Maris said he was a big tough boy. He give him a drive the other night too.”

“A
drive
?”

“Yes, was on Thursday, I think. Maris was coming home late, way after midnight, because of his poker playing, and he saw Jordan walking by the road, so he gave him a lift.”

“This was
Thursday
?” asked Mavis.

“Yes, but late, more like into early Friday morning, I think. It was maybe four, but Maris didn't like to see the boy walking alone so late. He told Maris his car had broken down.”

“Jordan had a car?”

“Yes. A nice red sports car. Shiny red. He told Maris it had broken down and he was just walking away to get help. Maris said the boy looked tired. So he helped him. Maris is…such a good man.”

Nick and Mavis exchanged looks.

Glynda missed that, went back to thinking about Maris. And then she was gone again. Mavis patted her shoulder, and they got the hell out.

Back in the Suburban, Mavis fired it up, but before she put it in gear, she called up the CID desk and got Beau Norlett.

“Beau, Mavis…Yeah, he's right here…Nick, Beau says hello.”

“Hello back.”

“Nick says hello back…okay…He did? When? Okay…okay…I'll tell him.”

“Tell me what?”

“Lemon Featherlight called, asking for you, said it was real urgent. Something about those bone thingies you guys fished out of the river, and some stuff about the Raven Mocker demon?”

“That's the Cherokee story…she's the eater of souls. Lemon had a theory about what was wrong with Crater Sink, had something to do with that old legend.”

“The Raven Mocker?
Really?
”

“I'm just saying, Mavis. He leave a number?”

“He leave a number, Beau? Yeah, okay, no, text it to Nick, otherwise we'll both forget it. Look, Beau, we think we might have a lead on a suspect in the Morrison case. Name Maris Yarvik…Yeah, the 1975 Fleetwood we're looking for…You've got his driver's license shot, get it onto everybody's MDT—okay, already done…good. Anyway, we need to have some people go out right now, like right this minute, go check a bunch of different addresses, 'cause Yarvik might be cooped up in one of them.”

There was some back and forth while she and Beau worked out who could do what and when and how long it would take them to do it.

“Okay, yeah, thanks, Beau. Thing is, tell these folks to take care. No saying what they're going to run into, so go in with their heads up…Yeah, very funny, Beau, heads up as in eyes open, not as in heads up their butts…and this Maris Yarvik guy, plays rugby, weighs in at two forty, he's six-three, built like a grizzly, has a head like an anvil, so warn our people, if he wants to rock and roll, they better get on top of him quick…Yeah, good…one last thing. That gangbanger chick, one of the ZeeZee Boys. Did she ever surface? Yeah, okay…yeah…okay good, I'll tell Nick. Thanks for this, Beau.”

She clicked off, looked over at Nick, who was reading a text from Lemon:

Left Charlottesville this morning driving down with Helga Sigrid filled her in on Nothing—maybe she's the Raven Mocker—and she has a wild theory about Nothing that you're going to want to hear we'll be in Niceville by this evening really want to meet ASAP text me back at this number we're just passing through Raleigh hope all is okay L

“What's he saying?”

After some hesitation, Nick read it to her.

“She has a wild theory about
nothing
?”

“Not
nothing.
With a capital
N
, as if it were a name. Like Odysseus used on the Cyclops.”

“And what is it? This Nothing thing?”

“To be honest, Mavis, I think it's what's wrong with Niceville.”

“And so does Lemon? And this Helga chick?”

“I don't know what she thinks, but Lemon, yes, we're on the same page about it.”

“Okay…demons, soul-eaters, obviously this is too complicated to get into here—”

“Absolutely.”

“But we
will
get into it, you and me, okay?”

“Okay.”

“Scout's honor?”

“Mavis…”

“Okay…this is me dropping it. Back to the case. They're rolling some people now, cover the house list Glynda gave us. I said we'd take the Garrison Hills one, okay? I figured we should cover that. Too close to home, right?”

“I was thinking that.”

“That girl, the ZeeZee Boys girl, she woke up this morning. Still critical, but they say she'll probably pull through. I had Boots Jackson with her, in case she woke up.”

“I remember you saying.”

“She told Boots they found the car by the side of the road. Just sitting there, keys inside. From the way she was doped up, Boots figured she was probably telling the truth.”

“So maybe Dutrow just walked away from it?”

“Well, getting caught with it would be pretty damned incriminating, wouldn't it? I guess, when he cooled down after the Thorssons, he sorta came to his senses and dumped the Benz.”

“And Maris Yarvik just…happened along?”

Mavis shook her head. “I don't know. We're going to have to find him and ask him a whole lot of questions.”

She put the truck in gear, started to roll, stopped at the curb and looked at Nick. “Didn't Jordan Dutrow…”

“Yes,” said Nick. “He had migraines too.”

What Rainey had said—and what he had not said—stayed with Eufaula all the rest of the morning. She set it aside for now, did what needed to be done, the daily Saturday routine, packed some box lunches for Rainey and Axel, saw them out the door and onto their bikes—they were going to ride down to the riverside park near the Pavilion and have a picnic—and Hannah had something called a playdate with Chloe, a little girl from down the street.

Chloe's mom showed up in a tan Maserati Quattroporte and it took the two of them to get the girls safely tucked inside. Eufaula watched the cruiser power away, making a sound like a tiger purring, and thought about what it would be like to have money, but not for long.

She climbed back up the curving staircase to the front door, stood there for a time on the landing, and looked across the street at the park with the live oaks and the marble fountain. Sunlight was sparkling in the fountain spray, making rainbows dance in the air.

Eufaula had once seen a woman there, surrounded by a cloud of green dragonflies. The woman looked like Kate but she was too thin and all she was wearing was an antique-looking cotton nightgown. The woman had waved to her, and then the light had changed and she was gone, and Eufaula, who was a practical woman and knew something about Niceville, understood that she had seen a ghost.

But then ghosts were as much a part of Niceville as the Spanish moss on the live oaks. They could be seen everywhere, depending on the light, if you had the gift, and her family had always had the gift.

She went back inside, looked at the clock, saw that Kate would be home soon, so she put on the kettle and laid out the silver tea set. The tea tray on top of the fridge she left alone.

She was sitting in the conservatory watching the light change in the forest at the bottom of the lawn when she heard the silver bell tinkle as Kate came in the front door.

“Kate?”

“Eufaula…where are you?”

“In the garden room.”

Kate came down the hall and through the kitchen, looking rumpled and weary, her long black hair tousled, her cheeks pink. She was wearing a pale green dress with something gold at her neck and golden earrings that caught the light and put teardrops of fire on her neck.

She kicked off her pale green ballet flats and sat down with a sigh on the end of the large yellow sofa that ran the length of the inside wall.

Eufaula had the tea ready—this was a Saturday ritual for the women of the house—and she poured Kate a cup, handed her a small saucer with three mint wafers on it.

“How did it go?”

Kate sighed, had a mint. She had a custody fight set for Monday and they always depressed her. “We're as ready as we can be…but the courts still favor the moms, and Judge Broom is one of the worst. Especially with little girls. I'm hoping…well, the best I can hope for is that Ryan will have regular access.”

“Maybe he shouldn't have been running around on his wife in the first place.”

“Eufaula, normally I'd say yes. But his wife is as mean as January rain. If she's the only influence on that poor little girl, the world will have
another
calculating coldhearted bitch to deal with in ten years. If Perdita Burke were my wife, I'd have poisoned her years ago.”

“Not the usual feminist position, Kate.”

“No. But I'm not a usual feminist, Eufaula. Neither are you. How are the boys?”

“On the way to Boudreau Park, with enough food to feed the multitudes. Hannah's with Chloe, and I haven't heard from Nick yet.”

“I have,” Kate said. “He texted me. He's with Mavis Crossfire. They're on that…investigation…from last night.”

Eufaula sipped her tea and asked no questions. Everyone in Niceville had a rough idea of what had happened to the Morrisons and the Thorssons and few of the sane ones wanted to know anymore. It did seem to Eufaula that Niceville was showing some cracks—more so than usual, at any rate.

They sat together in silence, looking out at the sunlight dappling the lawn, watching the leaves change color. Although the day was warm, fall was in the air, that slanting light, and the slightest chill in the shadows.

Winter is coming,
thought Kate, and that made her think of Rainey Teague again. She put her cup down on the glass tabletop, sat back, curling her legs up under her and hugging one of the bright blue feather pillows.

“Eufaula, you remember what we talked about, last night, before Nick came home?”

“I do, Kate,” Eufaula said, sitting back.

“I told Nick, about the cognitive behavioral therapy idea…”

“And about the schizophrenia diagnosis?”

Kate nodded.

“How did he take it?”

She looked at her hands. “To be honest, Eufaula, I think he pretended to believe it because he thinks I'm cracking up.”

Eufaula reached over, touched Kate's hand, let her fingers rest lightly on it. “It's a very…plausible…diagnosis, Kate. Dr. Lakshmi is…I have a lot of respect for her. She helped my brother with Jeremy, and you know how hard it is to deal with autism. And they haven't
confirmed
schizophrenia yet, have they?”

“No. Not yet. They're consulting with some people at Vanderbilt in Nashville, and we're waiting for that…but I really need something to hope for, Eufaula. I
need
this to be the answer. I really do.”

Eufaula left her hand where it was and waited to see if tears came, but Kate held them down, smiled at Eufaula.

“You spend a lot of time with Rainey, Eufaula. What do you think?”

This was a question Eufaula had been afraid to hear, and she had not yet decided how to answer it. Her talk with Rainey, about the two-way radios, had left her deeply shaken.

“Kate…we've never talked about last spring. About how Mr. Dillon disappeared, about that whole awful time.”

“No,” said Kate simply. “We haven't.”

“And we haven't said too much about Rainey going to see that lawyer a couple of months ago.”

“No, I guess I'm not…I don't see how it can change anything.”

“Can I ask what Beth thinks?”

“Beth,” Kate said with a weak laugh. “Beth thinks Rainey is a wild child…and Axel adores him. But then Beth wasn't around for what happened last spring, and even during the Warren Smoles affair…Byron had just been killed…I don't like to trouble her with…my fears.”

She stopped, studied Eufaula for a time. “Eufaula, do you have something you're trying to tell me? Something about Rainey?”

Eufaula tried not to look away but she did.

“You do, don't you?”

“I do, Kate, but I don't want…I hate you losing that baby. And I'm…scared for you.”

“Scared? Why are you scared?”

Eufaula looked down at her hands, realized she was mistreating a fine linen napkin.

Kate leaned over and put her hand on Eufaula's arm. “Eufaula, I'm not made of glass. Tell me what's on your mind? Is it to do with Rainey?”

“Yes, Kate. It's about Rainey.”

“Then please, Eufaula, we're friends. You can tell me anything. Is it so terrible?”

Eufaula looked at Kate then, and Kate felt the chill gather around her again, the way it had weeks before, the sense of oncoming grief, the loss of a child, the death of her happy life, a dread of the winter and what it might bring.

“Then tell me, sweet. Just…tell me.”

Eufaula sighed, gathered herself, and then told it simply, but then it was the kind of story that needed no drama added.

Kate, the lawyer in her, listened carefully and asked only one or two clarifying questions. Eufaula got to the end of it, the part where she had confronted Rainey with the two radios, and what he had said to her in reply.

“He actually
said
that?”

“Yes, he did. I'm sorry to—”

“He actually said, ‘
I don't know as I like the colored help poking around in my stuff…I may have to talk to Kate about setting some boundaries for the staff.'
…He
actually
said that? To your face?”

“I'm afraid so, Kate. I hated to—”

Kate's anger was right there.

Eufaula could see it in her face, and she tried to calm her. “Kate, he's just a kid. They lash out, especially when they get cornered. They don't—”

“Eufaula, first of all, I apologize to you, for what was said, and how it was said. You know what you mean to this family, don't you? You've been in it far longer than Rainey Teague has.”

“I do, Kate, and you mean as much to me. All of you. It's not what he said to me—I'm not made of glass either, and I've heard a lot worse—it's what he
did
that really worries me. Do you remember everything you talked about when Nick came home? Because you said you were sitting in the kitchen there, so if Rainey was listening…what would he have heard that maybe you wouldn't want him to?”

Kate went back to that moment and got much angrier, a bright flush of blood rising into her cheeks, her forehead hot, her throat tight…

“You don't feel sleepy right now.”

“What I feel is you.”

“I was wondering how long it would take for this nightgown to get to you.”

Eufaula watched as Kate's anger went from red-hot to blue-white cold.

“Kate…try not to—”

“Does Rainey have his cell phone with him?”

“I…yes. I put it in his pack, with his sandwiches and stuff. But Kate, I think you should take a moment to think—”

There was a phone by the sofa and Kate was already dialing it. Eufaula sat and watched her and waited. And worried. Worried for
all
of them.