Niceville

tried to shake his head.
    “No. A farm.”
    “A farm?”
    “Yes. There was a lady. And a really big horse, brown, with a long yellow mane and big white hooves. His name was Jupiter.”
    Nick heard that, tried to take it in, thinking about the heavy horse he had seen last Friday night, running wild on Patton’s Hard.
    A really big horse, brown, with a long yellow mane and big white hooves
.
    The thought took him places where he disliked going, so he set it aside. Maybe he’d deal with it later, but not if he could avoid it.
    Lemon went on.
    “Do you remember the lady’s name?”
    “Yes. Her name was … Glyn … Glynis.”
    “Glynis. Was she nice?”
    “She wasn’t mean. She was in charge. I don’t want to talk about her. She wouldn’t like it.”
    “Okay. We won’t. When Merle woke you, did he say anything else to you?”
    A pause.
    The boy’s dry lips worked and Lemon held a glass of water with a bent straw up to him. The boy drank, softened into a sleepy state, his eyes closing. The doctors started to step forward but Lemon simply held up a hand and they stopped in mid-stride.
    “Merle told me to ask for a man.”
    “Did he say the man’s name?”
    “Yes. His name was Abel. Like in the Bible.”
    “Like Cain and Abel?”
    “Yes. Abel was the good one.”
    “Rainey, when you woke up, I heard you say some more of the man’s name. Do you remember what more you said?”
    Rainey closed his eyes again. Nick wanted to step in but he wouldn’t have done half as well as Lemon was doing. And Lemon was being careful about his questions. He wasn’t leading the kid at all.
    “It was my name. My last name. Teague.”
    “Abel Teague?”
    A shadow slipped across him and the boy flinched as if struck. Lemon straightened up and looked at the doctors, as if releasing them from his spell.
    They stepped in, shoving them out of the way, the Somali doctorhitting the red CALL button. Lemon moved away from the bed, his eyes on Rainey as the doctors started to poke and prick and stab. Nick touched Lemon on the shoulder, nodded at the door, and they all walked softly out of the room.
    As the door hissed shut they could hear Rainey asking for his mother.
    The three men stood together in the darkened hallway. Nurses were jogging towards them from down the hall, making squeaky sounds with their rubber soles, hissing at the men like geese.
    They gave way and headed for the elevator. There was a Starbucks down in the lobby.
    They got themselves three tall ones and sat down at a jiggly tin table while the towering temple-like lobby grew slowly less crowded and the light from the window wall over in the waiting area changed from bright gold to amber, slender needles of light shifting in the haze, giving the whole echoing space an underwater feel.
    “Well, what did you make of that?” said Nick, leaning back, checking his cell phone to see if Kate had called yet. She hadn’t.
    Lemon studied the surface of his coffee, and Beau waited in silence, feeling deeply blue and sad for the kid up there who was asking for his dead mother.
    “A caller. This Merle guy was a caller.”
    “And what’s a caller?” asked Nick.
    “Just a superstition. My mother believed in them. They were people who could live in some place between the worlds, not dead and not really alive, but sort of in both places at once. If a caller came to you in a dream, when you woke up you knew you had something important to do.”
    “What’d he look like?”
    “Tall, tall as me, shaved head, a hard-looking guy, like he had maybe been in prison. He had that yard boss look, or like a drill instructor, no looking away. Straight at me, eye to eye—”
    “What was he wearing?” asked Beau, writing this down under block letters MERLE—PRISON ?
    “Farm clothes. Rough jeans, heavy boots—looked old—the boots—marked up and dirty—jeans with the cuffs rolled up. His belt was old and worn and cinched in tight, way past the last hole, as if he had lost a lot of weight, or it was borrowed from a bigger guy. Wide across theshoulders, looked real strong, thick neck with what looked like a burn scar on one side, had on an old plaid work shirt, looked paper thin, like it had been washed too much. He was carrying some sort of canvas bag, on a strap over his shoulder. It looked heavy. It had markings on the side. Black Army stencil. First Infantry Division, and the letters
AEF
.”
    “American Expeditionary Force,” said Nick. “First World