Niceville

underlined: Abel Teague.
    Written beside his name, in a different hand, was one word:
shame
.
    “Okay,” said Nick, watching her face. “Abel Teague is the man Rainey was asking for when he came out of the coma.”
    “Yes. Lacy told me. There’s more. And I don’t want you to think I’m a … what do cops always say?”
    “A fruitcake?”
    “Yes. There’s a face I want you to look at.”
    Kate flipped the card over, tapped the image of a pretty young girl with her light-colored hair piled high, a long, graceful neck, a full figure under the lacy bodice, large direct eyes, pale in color, full lips partly open. Most of the women in the shot were very pretty. This one was a stunner, with an air of almost defiant sensuality that conveyed itself across more than a century and seemed even now to look directly into Nick’s eyes.
    “Wow. She’s a heart attack.”
    “Yes, she is. And she also looks
exactly
like the girl I saw at the bottom of the garden this afternoon.”
    She said this without drama, but with an air of quiet certitude that Nick had learned to take seriously. Which he did.
    “So then she’s a relative, an ancestor?”
    “Yes, she must be.”
    “Who is she? Her name on the back?”
    “Yes. Her name is Clara Sylvia Mercer. The famous Clara Dad was talking about. Dad thinks she’s probably a distant relative by way of the Mullrynes and the Walkers. Mom was a Mullryne and her mother was a Mercer.”
    Nick looked at the picture more closely.
    Looks a lot like Kate
.
    “Now, you’re not thinking this is the
same
girl, Kate? I mean, here she is in 1910 and she can’t be more than fifteen or sixteen. She’d be … what, almost a hundred and seventeen now?”
    “Is this a fruitcake check?”
    “No. Not at all.”
    “It’s not her, I know that. It
can’t
be her, but it’s somebody who looks very much like her.”
    “Is Abel Teague in this shot?”
    Kate moved her fingertip, placed it on the body of a broad-shouldered medium-sized well-set young man with a high clear forehead and eyes so pale they had to be either blue or light gray.
    Abel Teague had a good face, thought Nick, intelligent, with humor in it, maybe a touch of arrogance, but they all did. He wasn’t wearing a jacket, just a shirt and what looked like striped pants in a military cut.
    “So what’s the
shame
thing?”
    Kate gave him one of her looks.
    “Dad said he talked to you about what was wrong with Niceville. About the disappearances. About Clara being shut up in Candleford House.”
    “Yes. The State Police finally began to investigate the place back in 1935, but somebody set it on fire before they could find out very much.”
    “Same year as the fire in the Niceville Town Hall,” said Kate. “It’s almost as if somebody was wiping out the traces …”
    “Traces of what?”
    “I don’t know, Nick. Maybe to Rainey?”
    “To Rainey?”
    “Dad was asking me a lot of questions about Rainey’s adoption.”
    “What about it?”
    “How Miles found Rainey in the first place. Up in Sallytown. How his birth parents had died—”
    “The Gwinnetts. A barn fire, right?”
    “Yes. Another fire. Then his foster parents go missing—”
    “They did? You never told me.”
    “Well, at least I could never find them. And then the lawyer who did the adoption for Miles—Leah Searle—she drowns a year later.”
    Nick found his inner cop waking up.
    “So, what you’re saying is, fires and drownings in 1935—”
    “And more fires and drownings seven years ago.”
    “And all connected to the Teague family.”
    “Yes.”
    Nick looked at the file box on the floor and then up at Kate.
    “I could look into all of this tomorrow, if you want?”
    “Tomorrow’s Sunday.”
    “FBI link still works on Sundays. Computers all work. Census records—it’s all—”
    The phone rang.
    Kate picked it up, was deep in an intense conversation within thirty seconds. She looked up at him, mouthed the words
Lemon Featherlight
.
    Nick nodded, picked up the jubilee card again, turned it over, ran his fingertip down the list of names, looking for a particular one.
    He found it halfway down the third row.
    Glynis Mercer Ruelle
    He flipped the card over, found her in the third row, a tall strong-faced woman with an erect bearing, aristocratic, with gleaming black hair ribboned around a long, well-turned neck.
    She had a direct, penetrating gaze. Her eyes were pale in the sepia-tinted shot and Nick figured they might possibly be