Niceville

pressed a few buttons on a panel.
    “It’s all digital. Auto-erases every twenty-four hours, if I don’t cancel it,” said Moochie, as the video began to roll backwards, the time marker flickering in the lower right-hand corner of the screen.
    They stood there in Moochie’s crowded office and watched the people in the video walk jerkily backwards through time as the seconds coiled up again. A minute and thirty-eight seconds ran off and Nick saw himself standing on the walk outside Moochie’s, staring up at the video camera, and then Nick walked backwards away to the left of the picture. The marker spooled and flickered, the people in the video moving as in an old silent film, stiff and strange, as if they were all ghosts of the long-gone past.
    Nick was very aware of Moochie beside him and for a time he wondered if Moochie himself was the last thing Rainey Teague saw.
    Had Rainey come into the shop?
    And if he had, what had happened then?
    Was he upstairs right now, or in the basement?
    The next shop along was Toonerville, a hobby shop with a big Lionel train going around and around in a miniature version of Niceville. Rainey never failed to go inside and talk to Mrs. Lianne Hardesty, who ran the shop. Rainey was a favorite there, but today, no Rainey.
    Moochie?
    Nick had never heard anything hinky about Moochie, no hint of a pedophile streak or any other kind of chicken-hawk leaning. His record, although far from edifying, contained nothing that indicated any sort of sexual impulses at all.
    But you never knew.
    Moochie grunted, hit a button, and the image froze with the time marker stopped at 1509:22. There was Rainey Teague, just stepping into the picture, seen from an angle above and to his right, so that the kid seemed foreshortened.
    Moochie looked at Nick, who nodded, and Moochie hit a button that advanced the frames one at a time. Rainey’s clockwork figure ticked fully into the picture frame, exactly as Alf Pennington had described him, Harry Potter knapsack slung over his left shoulder, so full it was tilting him in that direction.
    Nick’s heart rate climbed as he watched the kid standing there, feeling a shadow of what Rainey’s parents must be feeling right now, but even the shadow of that dread was cold and cutting.
    Moochie kept the image moving, frame by frame, as Rainey came to a stop about a foot from the plate glass, shading his eyes to stare in at the pirate treasure, even, at one time, pressing his snub nose up against the glass, flattening it out in a comical way, his breath misting up the glass. People were moving past him in the image. No one was paying him any unusual attention.
    “Freeze it there,” Nick said.
    He leaned down to look at the kid’s face. The expression on it was utterly absorbed. He was staring at something in the display, and whatever he was looking at had completely fascinated him.
    He was held there, as if by a spell, frozen and transfixed.
    By what?
    “Did he ever come into the shop?”
    Moochie shook his head.
    “I don’t let the Regiopolis kids come in. They’re all thieves. Little Ali Babas. Just like the street kids in Beirut.”
    “Do you know what he was looking at, in the window? Whatever it is, it’s sure got his attention.”
    “He’s looking at the mirror. I finally figured out it was that mirror,” said Moochie, staring at the boy in the frozen frame. “From the way he’s standing, it’s right in front of him. He’s looking right at it. It’s the one in the gilt frame. It’s very old, prewar at least. I mean the Civil War. It came out of Temple Hill, the old Cotton mansion up in The Chase. Delia Cotton gave it to her housemaid, a lady named AliceBayer, she lives in The Glades, and Alice came in one day and asked me for fifty dollars on it. I gave her two hundred. It’s worth a thousand. I still have the ticket. Rainey liked to see himself in it, I think. He always stood there, looking into the mirror, anyway, just like that. Then he’d sort of shake himself out of it and off he’d go. The glass is rippled from age, so I guess it’s sort of a fun-house thing for the kid.”
    Nick made a gesture and Moochie started inching the frames forward again, Nick looking for something, anything he could use. At time marker 1513:54 Rainey started to move his head backwards, his mouth opening. At 1513:55 he was starting to step back onto his left heel, and his mouth was opening wider.
    At 1513:56 he wasn’t in the picture at all.
    The camera