Niceville

dad would be in his office at the library, watching the cadets drill on the VMI parade square. She picked up thephone—held it in her hand, listening to the dial tone—and put it back down again.
    Getting Dillon Walker to give her a straight answer to anything about the Niceville abductions had been like chasing fireflies. Ever since Rainey had been found, her dad would happily talk to her about anything at all—football, politics, the military, chocolate chip cookies, Beth’s marriage, Nick’s war fever, why red wine drinkers live longer. Anything at all, except the Niceville disappearances.
    Even the news that Sylvia had disappeared, and that Rainey had been found—alive—sealed inside an ancient grave, hadn’t been enough to shatter his reserve. He listened politely to the news, offered no comments, and wished the boy a speedy recovery.
    Miles’ suicide a few days later hadn’t seemed to surprise him at all. If anything, it had sealed the matter for him, as if a kind of blood debt had been paid. When Kate, as Sylvia’s cousin, had been appointed Rainey’s guardian, her father had approved of it, but in a distant and guarded way, limiting himself to what seemed at the time to be a cryptic comment about making sure Rainey’s adoption papers were kept somewhere safe, just in case.
    “In case of what?” she had asked at the time.
    “In case they’re … needed.”
    “Why would they be needed, Dad?”
    “No idea. Just being a worrier, I guess.”
    She was in the sunroom, a glassed-in conservatory addition to the house. She sat there in the yellow and white room, surrounded by lush ferns and bougainvillea, looking out at the ancient pine forest that crowded the lower end of the lawn. A little stream ran through it, and a steep hill rose up on the far side of the forest, the rocky ground covered with red pine needles. Even with the afternoon light lying over it, the pine forest seemed to have a rich violet darkness inside it that looked deeper and more solid than simple shadows. Just like Niceville.
    This had gone on long enough.
    Clearly her father was keeping something from her. Knowinghim as she did, Kate was sure he thought he was doing it for her own good.
    Lovely man, Dillon Walker, but he could also be a condescending, stiff-necked …
    She let it go.
    She was a grown woman, and now the strangeness of Niceville seemed to be closing in on her own family. That was the point here. Rainey Teague was in a coma. Nick was seeing mirages on a basement wall. She was dreaming of green-eyed girls in sundresses. Delia Cotton and Gray Haggard were missing.
    Something was terribly
wrong
in Niceville, and she was convinced her dad knew something about it. It was time to drag it out of him.
    She pulled in a breath, held it, let it out slowly, sat up straight on the couch.
    Reached for the phone.
    Dialed the number.
    It rang twice, and then she heard her father’s whiskey baritone, his soft Virginia accent. She saw him at his desk at VMI, in his book-lined study, a fine-featured man with a weathered face, intelligent, calm, deep lines around his eyes.
    “Kate, you’re calling early.”
    She usually called him at the end of the day, a ritual as comforting to him as it was to her.
    “Is this a bad time?”
    “Never a bad time to hear from my favorite daughter.”
    “I thought Beth was your favorite daughter.”
    “She is when I’m talking to her. How are you?”
    Kate went through the formalities, but her father knew her pretty well.
    “Okay. Something’s wrong, honey. I can hear it in your voice. What is it? Is it Beth?”
    “If you mean is she still with Byron, yes, she is. For now.”
    “Nick and Reed should go talk to that man.”
    “Nick wants to. And it’s all we can do to keep Reed from doing something so extreme about Byron that it would get him fired fromthe State Patrol. But Beth has to be ready. It’s no good until she is. And she has the kids to think about, Dad.”
    “That’s exactly why she should leave that thug. Nick agrees with me. He said so last week.”
    “It’s Beth who has to agree, Dad. Not you and Nick and Reed. This can’t just get decided by the menfolk.”
    This was a sensitive topic, and one they had been over many times before. Her father was picking up the tightness in her voice now.
    “So Beth isn’t why you called early?”
    “No, Dad.”
    “Well, something’s on your mind. Let’s hear it.”
    She took a moment to get her thoughts in line. When she got