Niceville

right down to the essentials, she found that the question was actually pretty simple.
    “Dad, what’s wrong with Niceville?”
    A long silence.
    “Niceville’s a Southern town, honey. The Old South. It’s haunted by history, Kate. That’s all.”
    “Dad. I love you. You know that. But things are happening here right now, and I need you to be straight with me. For once.”
    She heard him breathing.
    She could almost hear him thinking too.
    Looking for an exit.
    “For once? That’s a little harsh.”
    “I’m sorry, Dad. You know what I’m talking about. Niceville. The families. Why it is the way it is.”
    “I see.”
    “Do you?”
    Resignation was in his answer.
    “Yes, Kate. I do. You said things have been happening. What kind of things?”
    She told him.
    He listened without interruption.
    Kate laid it out as clearly and as simply as she could, leaving out details that she felt were … unreliable … such as her dream about a girl with a cat. When she finished, he was quiet again. She waited him out.
    “So Gray Haggard’s gone?”
    “No trace of him.”
    Her father was quiet for a long time.
    “Kate,” he said finally, his voice weary and full of sadness, “I’m going to tell you something that you can never tell your brother and sister. Do you think you can do that?”
    “I … yes, I can do that. If that’s what you want.”
    “You know Reed thinks your mother died because of a drunk driver.”
    Kate took that in.
    “She
didn’t
?”
    “I don’t know. Maybe a drunk driver had something to do with it. But I do know she was speeding, speeding dangerously, when she died.”
    “I heard about that. The OnStar system?”
    “Yes. It’s a GPS system too. OnStar has computers that can tell an investigator how fast a car was going at the moment of a crash. By the speed at which the car moved from one point to another. Are you certain this is something you want to get into, Kate? Once you hear it, you may wish you hadn’t.”
    “Okay, Dad. I can take it.”
    A pause.
    “Your mother was doing in excess of a hundred and forty-five miles an hour when the OnStar system registered her rollover. Now this is something you’re not going to like to hear, honey.”
    “Dad. Please.”
    “When a vehicle is being driven in excess of the speed limit by that much, sometimes the OnStar operator picks up on it. Sometimes the operator will place a call to the vehicle, to see if something is wrong with the driver. Or even the vehicle, perhaps a gas pedal malfunction. Or is she drunk, or having an attack, or has she been hijacked. That sort of thing. When your mother’s car got to a hundred and forty, a minute or so before the accident, the OnStar lady tried to contact Lenore. She opened the cell connection.”
    Kate had never heard a breath of this story.
    “Did Mom answer?”
    “Yes.”
    “What did she say?”
    Dillon was quiet for so long she thought she had lost him.
    “Lenore said,
She uses the mirrors
. She said it several times, in a panicky voice.”
    Kate tried to make sense of it, failed.
    “
She uses the mirrors
? What does that mean?”
    “I’ve thought about that ever since she died. The only conclusion that I was able to come up with was that your mom was having some kind of stroke, that she was seeing things in the car mirror, and that whatever she was seeing was terrifying her.”
    “You mean, she was speeding to get
away
from something she saw in her rearview mirror? That’s crazy, Dad. Crazy. That state trooper, Charlie Danziger, he was with her when she died. He never said anything about this to us.”
    “He did to me.”
    “He did?”
    “Yes. At the funeral. In the garden. She was still talking like that when she died. Charlie Danziger stayed with her, held on to her, right to the end. She literally died in his arms. He thought I should know what she was saying, at the end.”
    “Did it mean anything to you? What she said?”
    “Not a thing—at the time. But it was disturbing. That’s why I let the drunk driver story stand, at least for Reed and Beth.”
    “For me too, Dad,” she said.
    “I know. That was why I wanted you to stay away from the mirror that was in Uncle Moochie’s window. You still have it, don’t you?”
    “Yes,” she said, after a moment. “It’s still upstairs, in the closet.”
    “Why didn’t you get rid of it? Give it back to the cleaning lady, or to Moochie, or to Delia?”
    “Nobody wanted it. After the story got out about Rainey,