Niceville

outside.”
    “From outside. Like she had made a deal?”
    Featherlight shrugged.
    “A deal with who?” asked Nick.
    “I don’t know. But I think the answer is in there somewhere.”
    “Where?”
    “In the past. I think that’s where you need to look, if you want to figure out what happened.”
    Nick was quiet, looking at Lemon.
    “And that’s it?”
    “Yes,” said Featherlight.
    Nick was thinking about the Teague family, studying Lemon Featherlight’s face. Lemon looked as if he had retreated into a smaller space, like it was where he always went to wait for bad news.
    “Well, Nick?” said Lacy.
    “Where’d she do this online checking?”
    “From her office at the house.”
    “Her home computer?”
    “Yes,” said Lemon Featherlight. “She had a big Dell system.”
    Nick remembered it. He had driven Kate over to the Teague place last month, keeping her company on one of her usual walkabouts, Kate making sure the house was being kept up properly. The Dell was on Sylvia’s desk in her office.
    During the search for Rainey, they’d gone through it for clues, but he didn’t remember anything about this Ancestry search engine. But there was … something … here.
    He could feel it.
    “I’m going to check this out, Lemon. If there’s something in it, I’ll call Cap City and see what I can do.”
    “He doesn’t have a lot of time,” said Lacy. “He has a bail hearing next—”
    There was movement in the hallway, steps coming down it, rapid and sharp. Gwen Schwinner appeared in the doorway, glanced around, focused on Nick.
    “Did you come here with a large black detective?”
    “Yes.”
    “You’d better get out there. I think he’s been stabbed.”

Merle Zane Gets an Offer He Can’t Refuse
    Somehow the woman must have gotten Merle into a bed because that’s where he was when the heat of the sun shining in through the drapes woke him up. He was facedown on a lumpy feather pillow covered with coarse striped ticking, like they gave you at Angola. He had a brief surge of panic, thinking he was back there, but then he thought about the sunlight on his cheek and knew he sure as hell wasn’t in Angola, because, like another famous location, Angola was where the sun did not shine.
    He lifted his head off the pillow, which required him to flex the muscles in his lower back, which helped him to locate himself in space and time—on his face in a hard bed in a sun-filled room with a hole in his back from Charlie Danziger’s Sig Sauer.
    Merle tensed himself, and rolled over slowly, expecting a wave of pain but getting only a sharp tugging sensation in his lower back, as if he had barbed wire wrapped around him.
    He looked down at his naked torso and saw a wide band of unbleached cloth, maybe linen or cotton, wrapped tightly around his midsection. He reached around and felt for the wound in his back. Under the cloth he could feel a row of rough stitching. The move stretched his shoulder and the pain drew his attention to a row of stitching there as well, in a crude cross-hatched pattern that reminded him of the way a body gets stitched up after an autopsy. The skin around the wound was painted with some kind of deep reddish-orange stain—iodine, he realized.
    He swung his legs over and sat upright at the side of the bed, takingin the room. He was in the woman’s farmhouse, and not a jail, he was pretty sure of that, and, from the shape of the roof, in an attic room, small, and hot, but clean, with a rough-planked wooden floor and hand-plastered walls and an old beamed roof.
    There was one tall window at the far end of the narrow room, a wooden sash with thick rippled glass, framed by a pair of gauzy curtains that fluttered in the breeze. The window was open and a fat bumblebee was buzzing around in the space. Through the window he could hear the singsong rise and fall of cicadas in the trees, the plaintive
whoot-whoot
of a pair of mourning doves, and, closer, above the muttering putter of the ancient generator, the sound of a harness jingling, the snuffle and stamp and whinny of a horse—from the depth and force of the whinny, a very big damn horse.
    He got up and crossed, unsteadily, to the window, looked out across a sea of forest canopy painted in the pale deciduous greens of early spring and pierced by the darker spear tips of lodgepole pines, green forest rolling toward a horizon of blue-brown hills far away to the south.
    Nearer in he could see a large cleared section of tilled