Niceville

touched in over a hundred years. The mound was almost completely grassed over.”
    “I heard it took a couple of firemen to open it up, and they had to use sledges.”
    Nick could still hear the steely clank of iron on stone, and the faint shrieks from inside the tomb as each hammer blow slammed into the barrow.
    “Yes. The tomb was sealed shut. No sign that it had been opened since they put the coffin inside it.”
    “But Rainey was trapped inside it, wasn’t he?”
    “Yeah. He was.”
    “You ever figure
that
out, Nick? How he got inside without the grave being touched? I mean, that’s just … 
wrong
, isn’t it?”
    Nick waited, saying nothing, thinking exactly the same thing. The whole thing had been
wrong
from the get-go.
    But Nick didn’t believe that there really was an
outside
. One day he’d get an explanation for all of it, someone would figure out the trick and then the trick would lead them to the trickster.
    “Well, whatever … it scared the shit out of me,” said Featherlight. “There’s something really strange about it. You think so too, don’t you?”
    “Why am I here, Lemon?”
    Featherlight looked at his hands.
    “I should have talked to you about this a year ago. But I didn’t want you looking at me and thinking … maybe him. You understand?”
    “Tell me why I’m here.”
    Featherlight went back inside for a time.
    “You ever hear of a thing called Ancestry dot com? A website where you can research your family? You pay a fee; it has access to county records, census and military lists, Mormon files, parish hall stuff?”
    “I’ve heard of it.”
    “Before Rainey disappeared, like maybe two days before, I was at the house, we were all just sitting around the pool and talking. Rainey was playing in the pool, Miles gets a call, he has to go back to the office. He asks me if I want to leave, I look at Sylvia, she says she’d like me to stay for supper. This is okay with Miles and he leaves. After Rainey goes to bed, she’s a bit looped from the wine, she asks me how much I know about my people. My tribe.”
    “The Seminoles?” asked Lacy.
    He glanced at her, a rueful smile.
    “Everybody up here thinks I’m a Seminole. I’m not. My people were Mayaimi, not Seminole. They named Miami after us. Anyway, she started with that tribal stuff but went on into her own family. She had been using this Ancestry program to look up her family history.”
    “Why wasn’t she just going to the archives?” asked Lacy, intrigued. “They’d have her family’s whole story there.”
    “That was it,” said Featherlight. “She didn’t want anyone in town to know what she was doing.”
    “And what
was
she doing,” asked Nick, “that she wouldn’t want the town clerk to know about?”
    “I never found out. But it was something that worried her, like she was afraid of what she might find. I got the idea that whatever it was, it went back. A hundred years. Maybe more. She was saying the records were okay until the end of the Civil War, when things fell apart in the South. And there was that fire in the town hall here, back in 1935, where the archives were destroyed. It was like she was on the trail of something, and it meant a lot to her, but she was also worried about it. Anyway, I put it down to the wine, but then it all happened and after that I never saw her again. And the thing is, where did they find Rainey? In a grave. Right after Sylvia jumps into Crater Sink. Like they were connected.”
    “Connected,”
said Lacy. “How?”
    “Maybe it was a trade.”
    “A trade?”
    “Maybe she went so that Rainey could come back.”
    “Jesus, Lemon,” said Nick.
    “Back from where?” asked Lacy.
    “I don’t know. Back from outside. Maybe Crater Sink leads to the outside, and Sylvia knew it.”
    “We don’t know that she went into Crater Sink,” said Nick.
    “But wasn’t her car there, at the end of the road? And her shoes?”
    “Yes,” said Nick in a flat tone. “Doesn’t mean she jumped into it.”
    “Then where is she?”
    “I don’t know.”
    Featherlight, sensing Nick’s mood, sat back, looked at Lacy and then back at Nick.
    “So, well, that’s what I wanted to say.”
    “That Sylvia was worried about something in her past, and she was using the Ancestry program to look into it without letting the town clerk know what she was doing? And that when Rainey was taken, she killed herself so whoever was holding Rainey could send him back from—”
    “From