Niceville

we couldn’t give it away.”
    “Then you should break it. Smash it.”
    “Dad … I don’t get this. Any of it. Why did you stop working on what was going on in Niceville?”
    “I stopped because your mother died.”
    “That’s
when
you stopped. Was it
why
you stopped?”
    It took a time for him to answer.
    “In a way. I think I got the idea what I was doing was … unlucky.”
    “For whom?”
    “For us. The Walkers. And for the rest of the families.”
    Her father always used that phrase when he was talking about the Founding Four, the Walkers and the Cottons, the Teagues and the Haggards.
    The families
.
    As if they were all drifting down the river of time together, trapped on the same unlucky boat
.
    “How could it be unlucky? You were just looking things up in the archives. Who would care?”
    “Because I found something in the archives. It troubled me. When your mother was killed, I began to worry that maybe what had happened to her was … part of it. Part of the disappearance question.”
    “What did you find out?”
    “I found out something that seems to link all those disappearances over the years. The thing they might all have in common.”
    “And what is that?”
    “It’s possible that every person who disappeared was related in one way or another to the families.”
    Kate took that in, and then rejected it.
    “That’s absurd. Are you talking about, what, like a family curse? That’s simply nuts, Dad.”
    “Not a curse, no. But the linkage appears, and it’s the only connecting factor I could ever develop. Everyone who went missing was connected in some way to the same four families.”
    “Dad, you could almost say that everybody in Niceville fits that description.”
    “I took that into account. The correlation was still strong, higher than any statistical glitch. As a matter of fact, there was an even narrower connection. Everyone who had disappeared had, in one way or another, been related in some way to people who knew a young woman named Clara Mercer.”
    “Clara Mercer? I … do I know that name? I seem to remember something … she killed herself? Went into Crater Sink?”
    “Nobody knows exactly what happened to her. She was a distant relative of ours. A pretty wild girl. Back before the Great War, while still very young, she had an affair with one of the Teagues. She got pregnant by him.”
    “Oh dear. Back in those days …”
    “Yes. It amounted to ruin, an unmarried girl.”
    “What happened to the baby?”
    A pause here.
    “Clara was sent away for a while. In 1913, or thereabouts. To a private clinic in Sallytown. When she came back, there was no child with her. The story was that she lost the child in a miscarriage. That was where it was left.”
    “Do you know the man who did this to her?”
    “Abel Teague. He was what they used to call a rake. He wouldn’t marry her, in spite of being confronted by several of her male friends. Somehow, by some device, he avoided several duels. Nobody seems to know quite how he did that.”
    “What happened to Clara?”
    “In effect, as far as I could determine, when she came home after being … sent away … she had what they used to call a nervous breakdown. Her family tried to care for her—”
    “Who was her family?”
    “Her older sister, Glynis—”
    “Glynis?”
    “Yes, that was her name. Why?”
    “You
know
why, Dad. I told you last year that someone named Glynis R. signed her name to a card glued to the back of the mirror. It would have to be the same woman, wouldn’t it?”
    A pause.
    “Yes. I believe it is. I thought so at the time. Glynis Mercer had married into the Ruelle family. The Ruelles had extensive plantations south of Gracie. They took Clara in and did what they could. But then the local do-gooders stepped in. Somebody somewhere made a determination that she was a danger to herself and others. The records aren’t clear, because of that fire in ’35, but I got the impression that some medical officials came and forcibly removed her from the Ruelles and locked her up in that asylum in Gracie.”
    “Good God. Not Candleford House?”
    “Yes. I’m afraid so.”
    “Dear God. Poor thing. How long did she last?”
    “Nobody knows. According to the records, what bits are left, I was able to work out that something serious happened in 1931. She was on a medical trip to Niceville, with an escort. She needed some sort ofsurgery. They took her to Lady Grace and she underwent some