The Reckoning

Niceville

The Homecoming

The Reckoning

A VINTAGE CRIME/BLACK LIZARD ORIGINAL, AUGUST 2015

Copyright ©
2015
by Esprit D'Escalier

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Ltd., Toronto.

Vintage is a registered trademark and Vintage Crime/Black Lizard and colophon are trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Library of Congresss Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Stroud, Carsten, 1946–

The reckoning / by Carsten Stroud.

pages ; cm. — (Niceville trilogy)

I. Title.

PR9199.3.S838R43 2015

813'.54—dc23

2014047944

Vintage Books Trade Paperback ISBN 9781101873021

eBook ISBN 9781101873038

Map by Robert Bull

Cover design by Henry Steadman

Cover photograph © Günter Flegar/Westend61/Offset Bird © Henry Steadman

www.weeklylizard.com

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Cover

About the Author

Books by Carsten Stroud

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Map

Prologue

Never Get Out of the Car

Coker and Twyla Disagree on a Question of Civic Virtue

Career Choices for Caligula

Frank Barbetta Gets Out of the Car

High School Confidential

The Vice Principle

Charlie Danziger Fails to Sit Quietly in His Room

When the Very First Swallow Came Back to Capistrano, Did Anybody Notice?

Is It Okay to Staple Bunny Ears on Little Kids?

If You Do Have to Get Out of the Car, Then Don't Go Up the Stairs

If You Can Keep Your Head When All About You Are Losing Theirs, Then You Obviously Don't Understand the Situation

And What If the
Second
Swallow That Came Back to Capistrano Was Really a Crow?

One's Commitment to Slicing One's Head Off Tends to Taper Off Dramatically at Around the Halfway Point

There Is What We Know That We Know and There Is What We Know That We Do Not Know but the Real Danger Lies in Not Knowing What's on Top of the Fridge Hidden Behind the Tea Tray

In Iceland All the Heat Is Below the Surface, Which Is Worth Remembering if You Ever Meet a Girl from Iceland

Blue Eddie Makes a Suggestion

Twyla Discovers That an Apple Can Bite Back

Saturday

Sunday Morning

Six Months Later

Timeline of Niceville Families

For Linda Mair

The things we remember best

are those better forgotten.

—GRACIAN, 1647

Cruelty is not softened by tears.

It feeds on them.

—PUBLILIUS SYRUS, 1ST CENTURY BC

In the fall of 1814, under a harvest moon, the people of Niceville came together on the banks of the Tulip to talk about the evils that had come upon their town and to consider what should be done about them.

Amity Suggs, the minister, said it was God's Holy Wrath. Dr. Cullen said there was something in the water. The mix-breed John Brass said that a Kalona Ayeliski, a Raven Mocker demon, had always been in this place and the town should be abandoned. The debate went back and forth.

In the end the elders decided. Naming calls. God will shield the righteous. Sinners will be taken. Go about your day's work as Christians and let the pagan nights go about theirs. For over two hundred years this covenant held up.

Then, on one rainy Friday night in October, it all went straight to Hell.

Friday night, nine-thirty, and everybody in the Morrison family was safely tucked away in their white stucco home at 1329 Palisade Drive in The Glades. The Glades was a prewar Art Deco neighborhood in the northwest corner of Niceville. It had started out as Old Hollywood and gotten a lot older by staying there.

The Glades had shady curving lanes lined with palms and cypress and live oak trees. The rain streaming down put a misty halo around all the streetlamps and hammered on the red tile roofs of the houses. The gutters were choking on leaves and muddy water. A thick fog drifted through the trees. The warm air was heavy with the graveyard scent of wet earth.

Inside the Morrison house everything was serene and cozy, dinner done, the day ending well. Doug, the dad, was a short round man with a friendly streak, a forensic tech with the Niceville PD. Ellen, the mom, was a neonatal nurse at Our Lady of Sorrows down in Cap City. Jared, the eleven-year-old son—skinny, big-eared, with shaggy brown hair—was flat on his stomach in front of the 52-inch Samsung. An immense and overweight Maine Coon cat named Mildred Pierce was stretched out along his spine, the huge cat purring like a well-tuned motor.

And Ava, the fifteen-year-old daughter, was tucked away up in her shell-pink bedroom with the door locked, leaning in to her iMac, Skyping with Julia, her latest OMG-BFF, gleefully slagging the new girl in their class at Sacred Heart High.

Ava, black hair and blue eyes, had a body that a loving God would never have issued to a fifteen-year-old, and she was only dimly aware of the power it radiated. She was on the cheerleading squad at Sacred Heart and loved to taunt the players at the Sunday-afternoon football games. Weekdays, after school, she went out in the town with her friends, strolling the Galleria Mall, riding the Peachtree Line trolleys in their navy blue Sacred Heart tunics and their scarlet blazers with the school crest. They hiked the tunics up too high as soon as they were out of school, showed lots of pale white thigh and knee socks, deliberately careless of how they sat, feeling all the eyes on them, savoring the burn. Well, everybody is doing it, aren't they, is what Ava would have said if you'd asked her, because she had no clue whatsoever about the risks they were running.

The cops figured Ava probably never heard what was happening downstairs—the doorbell ringing or whatever it was—because she was up in her room with the headphones on, busy with her Skype call.

Not to say that there was no sign of everything that happened that night, beginning with the front hall. The CSI people were pretty sure it started there, in the front hall, when Doug the Dad opened the door.

It went outward from the front hallway. Traces of what happened were all over the place—the walls, the ceilings, the living room carpet, the staircase. Signs were everywhere, but the worst of them were upstairs, in Ava's room.

Nine-thirty p.m. and up in The Glades, Hell was getting busy with the Morrison family. There were sounds, cries, pleas, but the neighbors weren't hearing anything over the pounding thunder and the lashing rain. As a result, what went on inside the house went on for two and a half hours. Shortly after midnight the lights flicked off and a kind of stunned silence came down inside 1329 Palisade Drive.

A few minutes later a large shuffling figure carrying a green garbage bag emerged from the door next to the garage, walked slowly down the driveway and off under the trees, moving into and out of the pools of light from the streetlamps, wrapped in a dark gray rain slicker. The figure reached the end of the block, stepped left into darkness, and was gone.

Five minutes passed. Then an old navy blue Cadillac Fleetwood rolled through the intersection of Palisade Drive and Lanai Lane, trailing a veil of rainwater. The Caddy reached the traffic lights at River Road, ran the intersection against a red—got itself duly snapped by a traffic camera—and accelerated south and east, disappearing into the southbound traffic on River Road, a shiny blue tank glittering in the streetlights, windows tinted dark, dashboard dials glowing, lighting up the face of the driver, his chest heaving, his heavy hands at the ten after ten position on the black leather wheel, heading out of The Glades as fast as that Caddy could go.