Niceville

there
, reminds me of those thousand-yard-stare guys we had in Vietnam. Anyway, he’s out with the Virginia troopers and they’re doing a canvass of everybody at VMI, see if anybody saw anything—”
    “At
this
hour?”
    “These kids are military. They don’t mind. But that’s all harness work, stuff the uniform guys can do instead of munching honey-dipcrullers up at Beanie’s. I need a real detective up here, not another steroidal keener.”
    “I hear you. I’ll chopper up in the morning.”
    “We going to get everything you’ve got? I mean, this prof was a well-loved guy. This is VMI. They don’t like scary random shit at VMI.”
    A pause, a wheezing sigh.
    “Seriously, Kavanaugh, what’re we going to do about all this? I been a cop since forever and I’ve never seen anything like this. Outside of the horror movies. You got
anything
for me?”
    Nick thought about it, and then told the cop what he was thinking. Calder listened all the way through, and then he said, “Dear God. I was right all along. You
are
a fucking fruitcake.”
    “I tried to warn you. What’s
your
theory?”
    “Okay. Here’s one. This Delia Cotton broad, she’s loaded, right?”
    “The Cottons are probably the richest family in Niceville. Maybe in the whole state.”
    “Okay. There you go. But Haggard, he’s a poor lonely old gardener, and he’s best buds with our Dillon Walker guy here, they were at Omaha Beach together and all that heroic shit, so they decide to take her out—”
    “The Walkers and the Haggards are loaded too.”
    “Okay. Then it’s some sort of mysterious family vendetta, a terrible secret buried in the past. But now it’s about to come out, so they kidnap the old lady and make themselves disappear at the same time. They get hold of some scraps of shrapnel, get hold of a few leftover bone pins—”
    “From your friendly local secondhand bone-pin and shrapnel shop?”
    “Then they toss a bucket of acetone on the floor, slop it around, strip the varnish off in the shape of a body, maybe use a blowtorch on it to dry it all off—”
    “Hence the warm spots?”
    “Hence the warm spots. Scatter the metal around, and off they go—everybody thinks they’re like disappeared by these man-eating ghosts, I mean, everybody who’s a fucking fruitcake believes that, but really they’re on their way to Costa Rica with all of Delia Cotton’s money. Or secrets. Or whatever the hell it is.”
    “Makes more sense than my theory.”
    “Sure as shooting it does, my friend. But you’re still a fruitcake. Nobody says ‘hence’ anymore. Get some sleep. I’ll see you tomorrow morning.”
    Nick rang off, looked into the house through the conservatory glass, and saw Kate in the family room just beyond it, taking things out of a large cardboard box, her hair hanging down over her forehead, her fine-boned hands white in the downlight, her expression intent and determined.
    Kate looked up at him, her eyes strange. She was holding a stack of old photos.
    “Nick. This is Dad’s file box, from that research he never finished. He said I should look at it. Want to see something interesting?”
    “Sure,” he said, sitting down beside her on the couch. She smelled of old cardboard and cobwebs and there was dust all over her shirt.
    She riffled through some faded sepia pictures, found one, a very large one, perhaps eight by ten, pulled it out, and set it down on the coffee table.
    It was a formal picture, slightly faded but still quite clear, a turn-of-the-century family group, fifty or more people posed on a large stone staircase in front of a massive archway, live oaks draped in Spanish moss all around, horses in the foreground, a prosperous and attractive group, the men and boys in stiff black suits and starched collars, the women and the girls with high-piled Gibson-girl hair and lace collars and full billowing bosoms, waists cinched in tight, dainty feet visible under the hems of their lacy petticoats.
    The photo was printed on stiff cardboard and framed in sinuous Art Nouveau engravings. Below the picture the card company—Martin Palgrave & Sons—had printed, in a fine copperplate script:
    Niceville Families Jubilee
John Mullryne’s Plantation
Savannah Georgia 1910
    Kate flipped the card over.
    On the back, someone with a free-flowing script had recorded allthe names of the people in the picture, in order, starting at the upper left and going all the way through to the bottom right. One name had been