Niceville

green.
    Although she had an air of sensuality, she wasn’t smiling at all, and seemed in some indefinable way to be unhappy with the company.
    Looking at her, Nick decided that she would have made a good friend and a loving wife but she would not forgive an insult easily and probably had a full measure of the Southern flair for honor, for the vendetta. He looked again at the word written against Abel Teague’s name.
    shame
    Something about the handwriting.
    Where had he seen it?
    Kate was still on the phone.
    Nick went up the stairs to his office, dug around in the closet, full of his old Class As and two sets of dress blues, his blues studded with medals and gleaming gold braid.
    He found the package right at the back, lifted it out, a medium-sized rectangle, wrapped in a cotton duvet, tied with yellow ribbon, heavy and solid. He unwrapped it carefully.
    It was the mirror that Rainey Teague had been looking at—or had seemed to be looking at—when he simply flicked out of existence. Theframe was baroque, the metal silver plated in gold, and the mirror glass was not original, but was much older than the frame, a type of silvered glass that, according to Moochie, dated back to the middle of the seventeenth century, possibly from Ireland.
    Nick looked at his own reflection in the mirror, staring into the thing as if defying it to come alive in his hands.
    His face looked distorted and strange in the glass, which was pitted and rippled, with patches of the silver coating on the back scraped away. The thing was heavy in his hands, and although he kept his office cool because of his computer, the frame felt warm, almost hot.
    He turned the frame over, looked at the linen card on the back, at the signature.
    With Long Regard—Glynis R
.
    He had the jubilee card with him. He held it up beside the handwritten card.
    shame
    He was no calligrapher, but even he could see the handwriting was identical. If Glynis Ruelle had written the card on the back of the mirror, then Glynis Ruelle had also written the word
shame
beside Abel Teague’s name.
    Kate was calling him.
    When he got back to the family room, carrying the mirror, Kate had her laptop open and was clicking through to her e-mail service.
    She looked up at him.
    “That was Lemon. The streetlights are off over at Garrison Hills.”
    Nick sat down, suddenly very tired.
    “What about his inside lights?”
    “All working. He says it looks like something is pressing up against the glass.”
    Something deep in his lizard mind made Nick say what he said next.
    “Tell him not to open a door. Or a window.”
    Kate stared at him.
    “Why?”
    “I have no idea. Just a feeling. Call him back, tell him that. Please.”
    Kate picked up the phone again, dialed.
    A silence.
    A minute long.
    She put the phone down.
    “He’s not answering.”
    A pause.
    “Power failure, probably.”
    “Yes. Probably. I’ll try his cell.”
    Kate did, got switched to Lemon’s voice mail.
    “Not answering.”
    “What did he call about?”
    “He found something on Sylvia’s computer. He sent it to me as an attachment.”
    She turned the machine around, showed him the screen. He could see two images, apparently scanned-in copies of some turn-of-the-century paperwork. And a third, a scanned-in newspaper column, also very old-looking.
    Nick leaned in and studied the official papers.
    “What are they?”
    “They’re conscription notices,” said Kate. “Made out in June of 1917. Two of them. They’re made out to John Hardin Ruelle and Ethan Bluebonnet Ruelle. Look at the signature of the conscription clerk at the bottom.”
    Jubal Custis Walker, Clerk of Records
    “Jubal? That’s your grandfather, isn’t it?”
    “Yes. It is. Lemon found these on Sylvia’s computer, along with a copy of the 1910 census. On the census, John and Ethan Ruelle are listed as Sole Supporters of Family. Lemon says that means they should never have made it onto a conscription list in the first place. Guess who was listed as John Ruelle’s wife?”
    “Glynis Ruelle.”
    “That’s right. Lemon also sent along a copy of a column in the
Cullen County Record
, dated December 27, 1921.” She hit a tab and the attachment appeared.
    G REAT W AR H ERO K ILLED IN I LLEGAL D UEL
    Authorities are investigating the unlawful death of Lieutenant Ethan Bluebonnet Ruelle in a pistol exchange that took place outside the Belfair Saddlery on Christmas Eve last. According to witnesses, Mister Ruelle, a hero of the Great