Niceville

into the sink, lights spearing out into the cold black water a way, only to die out, overwhelmed by the darkness. The control cable ran out at a thousand feet.
    The attached sonar mapping system showed nothing but rock face and more rock face with a side channel running out of the sinkhole at nine hundred and eighty feet, leading, everyone assumed, eventually to the Tulip River in the valley below the cliff face.
    If Sylvia Teague
had
gone into Crater Sink—and so far no suicide note had been found, and suicide was only one of several possibilities—they’d have to wait for natural processes to bring her back up again.
    Or maybe she had been dragged into the side channel by a randomcurrent, which meant that perhaps someday what was left of her would come bobbing up in the Tulip River itself.
    The Crater Sink search took most of the tenth day, with Nick, haggard and running on amphetamines, there for every minute of it. He stayed there until around six that same evening, the evening of the tenth day, when he got a call from Mavis Crossfire, who told him Rainey Teague had been found.
    Nick got to the Confederate cemetery across the road from Garrison Hills just as the sun was setting. He saw the police vans clustered around a low hill on one of the meandering stone pathways that led through the rocky, uneven slopes of the graveyard, weaving past hundreds and hundreds of white stone crosses—here and there a few Stars of David—towards what was called New Hill, a part of the Civil War graveyard that had been set aside for the more prominent civilians of Niceville history.
    New Hill had perhaps fifty miniature stone temples, most of them in the Palladian style, mostly family crypts with names like HAGGARD and TEAGUE, COTTON and WALKER, GWINNETT and MULLRYNE and MERCER and RUELLE carved into their lintels.
    Each temple was made of marble blocks and each one had a solid oak door, locked and sealed, and then further protected by an iron grate. The ground in the cemetery was stony, so some of the lesser graves were simply a low mounded barrow of red clay brick with a long marble or stone cap, the barrow set deep into the ground and mounded all around with earth and grass. The crypt was accessible only by a low iron grating at one end, always padlocked.
    The cops were gathered around one of these low mounds, watching two firemen with sledges who were attacking the roof of the crypt. Nick could hear their sledges clang with each blow, and he saw brick dust rising up in the glimmer of the headlights and the halogen work lamps that had been set up all around the mound.
    Everyone turned to watch as Nick parked his Crown Vic down the slope and walked slowly up the hill to where they were working. Mavis Crossfire stepped out of the crowd—Nick could see the rangy form and Marine Corps crew cut of Marty Coors, the CO of the local statetroopers, above the heads of the other cops, turning to stare at Nick, his face solemn and hard, his eyes full of uncertainty.
    “Nick,” said Mavis, coming up to shake his hand. “He’s here.”
    Nick looked past her, at the mound, at the men slowly hammering it into brick chips and marble splinters.
    “He’s in there? How do you know? That crypt hasn’t been open for more than a hundred years. They’re all like that. The padlocks are all rusted and seized. The bars are half in the ground and they’re all grown over.”
    “Yes. That’s true. That’s all true. Nick, are you okay?”
    Nick looked at her.
    “Hell, no, I’m not okay. Are you?”
    Mavis gave him a smile that changed into an odd look.
    “No. I’m not. None of us are. How we know he’s in there, Nick? We can
hear
him.”
    Nick looked at her for a long time.
    Mavis nodded, her expression blank, except for a wary look in her eyes and a pallor in her skin.
    “Yeah. That’s right. I didn’t want to tell you before you got here. Didn’t want you to die in a crash racing over here. The groundskeeper heard something in the afternoon. Sounded like maybe a bird, but then he thought maybe not. He traced it to this mound here.”
    “Who’s in it?”
    “Guy named Ethan Ruelle. Died in 1921. In a duel on Christmas Eve, so the groundskeeper is saying. One of the fire guys has a sound sensor, the kind they use to search for people in a collapse? He stuck it up against the roof of that thing. We all heard it plain.”
    “Heard what?”
    “A kid. Crying.”
    Nick looked at her, and then past her at the workers, at the cops