Niceville

was aimed at an empty patch of sidewalk.
    Rainey was gone.
    “Is it the camera?” Nick asked.
    Moochie was just gaping at the screen.
    Nick asked him again.
    “No. It never does that. It’s brand-new. I got it put in by Securicom last year. Cost me three thousand dollars.”
    “Back it up.”
    Moochie did, one frame at a time.
    Same thing.
    First frame, Rainey’s not there.
    One frame back, there he is.
    He’s stepping onto his heel, with his mouth wide open.
    Another frame back, he’s still there, and now he’s close to the window, but beginning to …
    To what?
    Recoil?
    From what?
    Something he saw in a mirror?
    Or someone behind him, reflected in the mirror. What the hell was going on here?
    “What’s the recording stored on?”
    “The hard drive,” said Moochie, still staring at the screen.
    “Is it removable?”
    Moochie looked at him.
    “Yes. But—”
    “I’m going to need it. No. Wait. I’m going to need the whole system. Do you have a spare?”
    Moochie was far from thrilled by this development.
    “I still have the old camera, hooked up to a VCR.”
    “Run it again, one more time. This time go right through the sequence.”
    Moochie pressed ADVANCE .
    They stood and watched as Rainey Teague stick-walked jerkily into the frame, leaned close to the glass, stayed there, his expression growing more fixed as the seconds passed, Rainey drawing closer and closer to the glass until his nose was pressed up against it and his breath was fogging the window.
    Then the recoil.
    He steps back.
    And … vanishes.
    The camera kept rolling. They both stood there and watched it, riveted, locked on, with the utter
wrongness
of the thing rippling up and down their spines. In the frames they saw the feet of passing strollers, always that patch of bare sidewalk, now and then a piece of paper flickering through or the shadow of a bird rippling across the screen, and in the background people passing by, perfectly oblivious.
    They ran the frames on until a uniform cop appeared in the image, crossing from the direction of Pennington’s Book Nook, reaching for the door of Uncle Moochie’s.
    Nick recognized the big bulky shape and the pale freckled features of Boots Jackson, the Niceville cop assigned to canvass this block. They rolled it back and forth a few more times, but it was always the same.
    At 1513:55, Rainey Teague is right there.
    At 1513:56, the kid is
gone
.
    He doesn’t leap out of the picture, or duck to one side, or jump way up high, or fade away, or turn into a puff of smoke, or get jerked away by the arms of a stranger.
    He just flicks off, as if he were only a digital image and somebody had hit ERASE .
    Rainey Teague is just
gone
.
    And he never comes back.
    •    •    •
    Of course in the harrowing days and nights that followed, as the CID and the Niceville cops and everybody else who could be spared tore up the state looking for the kid, no serious cop believed even for a second that what the camera was showing was literally the truth, that the kid had just snapped out of existence.
    It had to be some sort of computer glitch.
    Or a trick, like something David Copperfield would do.
    So they started with the security system that Moochie had installed, examining it and testing it and retesting it, looking for the glitch, looking for any sign that Moochie had rigged the entire thing to cover up a simple kidnapping. The security machine, a Motorola surveillance system, was sent off to the FBI for a complete forensic examination. It came back without a flaw, showing zero signs of having been tampered with in any way.
    Next came Moochie himself, who was put through an interrogation that would have done credit to the Syrian Secret Police. He also came through without a hint of guilty knowledge.
    They took his shop apart.
    Nothing.
    They took Delia Cotton’s antique mirror to a lab and checked it for—well, they had no damned idea what, but whatever they were hoping for, it wasn’t there. It was just a medium-sized antique mirror with a tarnished silver face inside a baroque gilt frame, with a handwritten linen card on the back:
    With Long Regard—Glynis R
.
    So Uncle Moochie got his expensive security system back, with their apologies, although he refused to have anything more to do with the mirror, which finally ended up in Nick Kavanaugh’s closet, and in the meantime they took Alf Pennington’s Book Nook apart, which he endured stoically, seeing it as a final confirmation of