Niceville

listening to some cello music. A nice quiet Friday evening. Something disturbs her. Not the phone. Was there a bell down by the gate? He’d have to look. He didn’t think so. Maybe the doorbell. Yes, because before she got up to answer the door, she switched the television to the closed-circuit channel to see who it was at the door.
    So whoever was at the door was somebody she wasn’t worried about, somebody she knew, a friend maybe? The gardener? Gray Haggard?
    Was she expecting him?
    If so, why check the security camera?
    Maybe she was just a paranoid old bat?
    Beau and he would have to go through all her things, her files, her bank accounts, everything. Missing Persons already had her description out with all the local and County guys.
    If she had just wandered off—maybe a stroke—they’d find her. But it wasn’t likely that they had
both
wandered off, unless she was gone when Haggard got here and now he was off somewhere looking for her. Or they had gone off together?
    Without his car?
    Or hers?
    Did she have a car?
    Yes.
    A 1975 navy blue Cadillac Fleetwood, a huge barge of a boat that would have stood out if anybody had seen it on the roads. But, according to the file, the car was in the shop for repairs, which was why Alice Bayer was dropping by with groceries.
    No. They weren’t off on a road trip. There was more to this than a couple of doddering old geezers stumbling off into the night.
    So far the house wasn’t telling him much, other than that she owned a lot of very expensive stuff—all of which was still lying around everywhere, so robbery didn’t look like a motive. It was clear from the opulence of the house and all that it contained that Delia lived right at the top of the Niceville food chain. But then, she was a Cotton, wasn’t she, and that’s what they had always been, lords of all they surveyed for over a hundred years.
    He stood in the middle of the room, turning slowly around, trying to get some feeling about what might have happened here, and he noticed a set of tall glass double doors, leading, it looked like, into a wood-paneled dining room.
    The doors were shut and the ancient glass, as rippled as running water, conveyed only a rough impression of what was beyond them—dark wood and brass and bright shining things and a large chandelier over the table, glittering like a Fourth of July sparkler.
    He walked over and stood in front of the doors, looking through the glass, and was about to reach for the gilt handle to open them when he felt something grating under his foot.
    He looked down and saw a small lump of what at first looked likered coal, jagged and misshapen, about the size of a thimble. He picked it up and turned it in his hand. It was blood-warm, almost hot, and it wasn’t coal.
    He knelt down and ran his hand over the floorboards, which were also blood-warm, for some odd reason. Maybe a hot-water pipe ran under the doorway here?
    He felt another tiny lump under his searching palm, and picked that up as well, a star-shaped fragment with rough, twisted edges, as if it had at one point been ripped from something much larger, and by a powerful explosive force. To his military mind these lumps looked exactly like shrapnel.
    He stood up, pocketing the metal fragments, and looked more carefully around in the doorway. The varnish on the flooring near here was marked, discolored, almost as if it had been scraped or burned away. Whatever it was, the discoloration ran under the closed doors.
    He opened both doors wide.
    The dining room was neat, spacious, and elegant, the tall lyre-backed chairs lined up in close-order drill, the huge expanse of inlaid wood shining like topaz, reflecting the brilliance of the crystal chandelier above it.
    The corroded stain—the burned-out mark—whatever the hell it was—ran for another three feet into the dining room, as if whatever had been spilled here—something strong enough to eat away at layers upon layers of very old varnish—had run out across the flooring and then had been left there long enough to ruin the finish.
    This did not fit with the rest of the house, which was beautifully cared for. He stood there, looking down at the stain, and it came to him that the mark, the burn, whatever, was roughly in the shape of a human figure. The head was lying in the bandbox room, the waist across the threshold, and the legs stretching out into the dining room.
    Not a small figure either, from the size of the mark, a tall person, six feet