Carolyn G. Hart (45 page)

“Superstitions of the Low Country: Danger awaits the unlucky soul whose path is crossed by a rabbit. (Jimmy Carter might believe that one.) Death follows the hoot of a screech owl. Plant corn and boil soap under a waxing moon. A blue-painted door wards off ghosts. Thirteen at dinner signals death. A bird flying into a house or a mirror cracking without cause presages disaster. Never christen a child, marry, or begin a journey on Friday.”

Climbing the steps, she scanned the gazebo’s hexagonal interior. Good. Nobody had messed with the clues. Kneeling, she stretched Rhoda out on her stomach,
arms artistically outflung. She placed the railroad ticket in the pudgy, rubbery right hand, tucked the scrap of stationery with the scrawled, “I can’t come,” in Rhoda’s pocket, the edge just visible. When she stood and surveyed the scene, she frowned. That initialed handkerchief was too visible. Picking it up, she stepped closer to the railing, and dropped it in the shadows formed by the westering sun.

What a delightfully sinister ambience, the lengthening shadows, the brooding quiet, the black, still water. Her eyes narrowed. What was that clump of sodden cloth among the reeds at the marshy edge of the pond? Had it been there earlier? Her gaze traveled out from the bunched cloth, and she saw a hand languidly floating.

Annie didn’t give herself time to think. She moved, vaulting over the side of the railing and dropping five feet to the leaf-strewn ground, sprinting to the far side of the pond, then stumbling over knobby cypress roots to splash into the duckweed-scummed water. Her feet stirred rotting vegetation on the mucky bottom. She grabbed at the torso, then her hands recoiled at its lifeless weight. Gritting her teeth, she reached down again, fastened her hands at the waist and tugged. It was hard work. The sticky bottom sucked at her feet. Razor-sharp reeds slashed at her skin, and sweat filmed her face, dripped into her eyes. The cloying stink of dank water sickened her. And sometime during the hideous exercise, she began to scream. She heard her own voice, high and frantic, as if from a long distance.

The body was so damned heavy, and the reeds snagged it, holding it, impeding her. Then, blessedly, there was help, other hands, and, suddenly, they stumbled
out onto the bank, and the body lifted from the water, too.

Annie struggled to catch her breath. Lucy Haines, her face gray with shock, stared down at the sprawled figure. “Oh, my God. It’s Corinne.”

Gasping, Annie dropped to her knees and reached to check the slack mouth for obstruction. Then her hand fell away. CPR wouldn’t help here. A concave depression, about the size of the bottom of a glass, disfigured the crown of the blonde head above the right ear. A rusty stain streaked the pond-drenched hair.

Annie looked up at Lucy, whose wide eyes mirrored horror and the slow dawning of fear.

“This is dreadful. Leighton … Gail. Oh, my Lord.” Her lean hands twisted together. Today, probably in honor of the house-and-garden tours, she wore a sprightly figured silk dress with pink and rose flowers and matching low pink heels, dress and shoes now stained with mud and water. The lovely spring dress was in stark contrast to her putty-colored face and the tightly twisting hands with their fresh coat of pink nail polish.

Annie stood and repressed a shudder. “We have to get help.”

“I’ll go call.” Lucy stepped toward the path, then turned back. “I’m sorry. You won’t want to stay here. If you go that way,” she pointed to a well-defined gray path that curved out of sight behind a screen of willows, “you’ll come to the gate into my grounds. I live next door, the McIlwain House. You can call—”

“No, that’s all right, Lucy. You’d better go. It will save time. I don’t mind staying.” That wasn’t true, of course. She would have given anything to leave that silent place of death, but it was clearly silly to send a stranger to find a phone and make the proper calls.
Time might not be of the essence, but there was no point in squandering it.

Time! Annie glanced at her watch. Surprisingly, very little had passed since she had blithely whistled her way to the gazebo earlier. It was only 5:35. But the tours were scheduled to begin at 6. Everything would be canceled, of course.

Lucy still hesitated, peering anxiously around the quiet, secluded spot. “Do you suppose it’s safe? Perhaps you’d better come with me.”

Her fear was contagious. Annie glanced, too, at the sun-glossed fronds of the weeping willows, the black, knobby, sinister cypress, the blackish water. Only an occasional rustle as some creature stirred in the reeds broke the silence. The faraway tattoo of a woodpecker sounded. “It’s safe enough. I don’t suppose there’s a mad killer lurking around to bash me.”

The brave words echoed hollowly in her mind after Lucy’s reluctant departure. She backed away from the corpse, one step at a time, her eyes darting nervously into the thickening shadows. Every crackle of the cane, every vagrant rustle of the willow fronds made her skin prickle.

The sound of running footsteps brought a hot surge of adrenaline. She tensed, ready to run.

Bobby Frazier burst around the cane thicket. Skidding to a stop, chest heaving, he glared down at the sodden corpse. “So the old bitch got it. Where the hell’s Gail?” Before she could answer, he gave an impatient jerk of his head, turned, and pounded toward the gazebo.

Annie sorted out the geography in her mind. The path past the gazebo was probably the closest route to the Prichard House.

A siren sounded, than another. Tires squealed; doors
slammed. Heavy footsteps came from the direction of the alley, and police spilled into the clearing, led by a heavyset man in a black broadcloth coat, tan trousers, and a white, wide-brimmed cowboy hat. He shot her a cold, measuring look, then approached the body.

No one moved or spoke as he studied the scene, his thick gray eyebrows bunched, his heavy jowls puffed in concentration.

The pond bank reflected Annie and Lucy’s struggle to pull the body to land, drifted pine needles scattered, reeds bent and trampled. The corpse lay face up, eyes wide and staring, mouth gaping. That mushy depression in the skull—Annie searched the nearby area. Then she glanced at the pond, and tensed.

The croquet mallet—her very own croquet mallet—floated in the water a few feet from the bank.

“All right.” The lawman’s voice was a growl, deep in his throat, like a rusty gate opening. His team swung into action: a young, sandy-haired officer shoved short stakes into the sandy soil at four-foot intervals, then began to string yellow tape, a glum plainclothesman with a gimpy leg pulled out a dog-eared spiral notebook and began a painstaking survey of the crime scene, and a red-faced detective with a beer belly lifted a .35 mm camera to record Corinne at her final rendezvous.

The gaily colored lights strung on the gazebo roof for the tour week flickered into life, adding a garish glare to the twilight. Annie swallowed. So the lights were working. Turning them on was a duty she’d assigned to the Society secretary. Even now, bright yellow lights would be glowing in the tents. And all for nothing.

For a moment, there was no sound other than the clicking of the camera, the occasional crackle underfoot
as the men moved about. The lawman gave a satisfied grunt, and turned toward Annie.

He walked ponderously, a bear of a man with heavy shoulders and a thick chest. His face was heavy, too, a bulging forehead, slab-like jowls, a triple roll of chins. His watery blue eyes were murky with the memory of too many crime scenes over too many years.

Annie felt the muscles tighten across her back. When he loomed over her, the world shrank to the space between them. She heard his labored, asthmatic breathing, saw the tracery of red veins in his eyes, and smelled a sour odor of tobacco.

“Harry Wells. Chief of police.” His tobacco-roughened throat yielded the rasping introduction reluctantly. He looked at her without a vestige of warmth.

“Annie Laurance. I’m in charge of the Mystery Nights for the Houses and Gardens tour.”

“What’s your story?” Those dour eyes gazed at her unblinkingly.

Her story. The unease in her shoulders spread down her back. God, he was hostile, and she hadn’t told him anything. She started out, then realized her voice was high and rushed. She took a deep breath and controlled her pitch. When she finished, he glanced toward the gazebo, then at the pond. “You brought the mallet?”

“A prop. It was supposed to be a prop.”

“Turned out not to be, didn’t it?”

She didn’t like his words, or his tone.

“That’s hardly my fault,” she shot back.

He didn’t bother to answer, merely stared at her.

“Look, she was dead when—” She broke off at the sound of approaching voices. Oh, God. She hadn’t had time to wonder about Lucy, but she should have expected this.

“There’s no mistake, Leighton. Please, you shouldn’t—”

“Hurry, John.” Leighton Webster came around the gazebo, his hand tight on Dr. Sanford’s arm. “You’ll see, Lucy, Corinne’s just fainted. That’s all. John will take care of her. No one would—” His deep voice rumbled to a stop. He stopped in mid-stride. Behind him were Lucy, whose face held no shock, and Gail, clinging tightly to Bobby’s arm.

Everyone watched Leighton’s approach in profound, stricken silence: Lucy, Sanford, Gail, Bobby, Annie, the police, and newly-arrived Max, Edith, and Roscoe, who had hurried around the cane thicket, drawn by the wail of the sirens and the inevitable groundswell of rumor already sweeping across Chastain.

But Leighton was oblivious to them all. He stared down at the crumpled figure of his wife, his face frozen in puzzled disbelief.

“Corinne?”

“Leighton.” Lucy touched his arm, and then gently tugged, but it made no more impression than sea spume against volcanic rock. He stumbled forward and would have torn through the restraining yellow tape, except for the fresh-faced young officer who stepped between him and the barrier. “Sorry, sir. This is a crime scene now, and no one may enter.”

Slowly, his stricken brown eyes settled on the detective’s face, focused there. “We can’t leave her. She’s … We can’t leave her there.”

Chief Wells could move his bulk with surprising swiftness. “Mr. Mayor, I’ll take care of Mrs. Webster. You can’t do anything for her now. Go on back to the house. I’ll come and talk to you as soon as I can.”

Mr. Mayor
. The note of deference was unmistakable. Wells did everything but pull on his forelock, and Annie’s
sense of isolation increased. Nobody demanded to know Webster’s story. Mr. Mayor? My God, the interlocking power structure in this town was nothing short of incestuous. Did the Websters run everything?

Leighton’s dazed face was gray-white with shock. “Harry, who did this? What happened to her?”

“Nobody knows.” The massive head jerked in Annie’s direction. “She raised the alarm. Claims she found her dead.”

Leighton swiveled, looked at her. “Miss Laurance.” His gaze swept the gazebo, and understanding moved in his eyes. “The house tours.”

“We’ll cancel them.” Lucy spoke briskly. “We’ll take care of it, Leighton. Please don’t worry—”

“Cancel?” He shook his large head slowly, then with determination. “Oh, no, we mustn’t do that. Corinne wouldn’t want us to do that.”

“Of course they must be canceled. They should never have been started,” Miss Dora hissed. “Strangers tramping through our lives. I told everyone they were a mistake—and look what’s happened—murder.”

Annie stared at the wild eyes, the straight silver gray hair, the old twisted mouth working with excitement. Where had she come from? No one had seen her arrive, darting swiftly in those high-top shoes, her cane making no sound on the soft ground.

She lifted the ebony stick, pointed the silver tip at Annie. “Ask her about murder. She knows all about how to kill. Maybe she
likes
to kill.”

“Oh, now, wait a minute.” Max strode toward Annie, reached out and grabbed her hand. “That’s damn silly.”

“But we never had murder until
she
came.” Miss Dora’s head jerked and the black feather on her hat vibrated.

Everyone was staring at Annie, everyone but Max, who slipped a firm arm around her shoulders and glared angrily at Miss Dora. The watching faces looked inimical in the rose and yellow glow from the string of lights atop the gazebo.

Miss Dora rocked back and forth. “Cancel them. Yes, cancel them. Or a murderess will move among us tonight.”

The hoarse chant had the sound of madness, but Miss Dora’s eyes were as shiny and hard as new minted pennies.

Lucy cleared her throat. “Aunt Dora, you’d best go in now. It’s getting late. We will cancel the evenings, of course, but Miss Laurance certainly can’t be held responsible for this dreadful accident.”

“No, no, we won’t cancel.” Leighton spoke with a dogged stubbornness. “Corinne wouldn’t want us to cancel.”

Silence hung over the pond and the oddly assorted people standing there. A dragonfly veered away from them to skim over the dark water.

“How can we continue?” Lucy sought out Wells. “A decision does need to be made. People must be arriving even now. The gates open in minutes.” She looked at Leighton in distress. “But you won’t want Prichard House to be on the tour. That wouldn’t do at all.”

But Leighton was determined. Perhaps the thought of the gala helped him escape from the reality of his wife’s death—if only briefly. “It must go on. That is what Corinne would have wanted. Only the two front rooms are open, and Gail and I can stay upstairs so that will be all right. The tours last only an hour. No, I don’t want any of it canceled.”

Edith chimed in, “Leighton’s right. It will devastate the work of the Society if we cancel.”

“Harry, what harm can it do?” Leighton demanded. “And it meant so much to Corinne.”

In the instant before Wells replied, even as Leighton once again insisted that the program continue, Annie surveyed the silent, watching onlookers.

Lucy stood by the distraught widower with brooding protectiveness, giving an oddly militant cast to a middle-aged woman in soiled pink shoes and a muddy dress. Her concerned face was gray beneath her tan, making her coral pink lipstick startlingly bright in contrast.