Southern Ghost (2 page)

Always, it was a young man.

But, passion spent, the latest youth sprawled asleep beside her, Sybil slipped from beneath the satin sheets, drew the brocaded dressing gown around her voluptuous body, and prowled restlessly through the dark house, anger a hot scarlet thread through the black misery in her heart.

Despite the fitful gleam of the pale April moon, Tarrant House was almost completely hidden in the deep shadows of the towering live oaks. A wisp of breeze barely stirred the long, dangling wisps of Spanish moss. A single light shone from a second-story window, providing a glimpse of plastered brick and a portion of one of the four huge Corinthian columns that supported the elegant double piazzas and the pediment above.

Pressed against the cold iron railing of the fence, the young woman shivered. The night pulsed with movement—unseen, inimical, hostile. The magnolia leaves slapped, like the tap of a woman’s shoes down an uncarpeted hall. The fronds of the palmettos clicked like ghostly dice at some long-ago gaming board. The thick shadows, pierced occasionally by pale moonbeams, took the shape of hurrying forms that responded to no call. She stood alone and alien in a shrouded, dark world that knew nothing of her—and cared nothing for her. The scent of magnolia and honeysuckle and banana shrub cloyed the air, thick as perfume from a flower-strewn coffin.

“Ohoooh!”

Courtney Kimball drew her breath in sharply as the falling moan, tremulous and plaintive, sounded again; then, her eyes adjusted to the night, she saw the swoop of the owl as it dove for its prey. One moment a tiny creature moved and lived; the next a scratching, scrabbling sound signaled sudden death.

But nothing could hold her gaze long except the house, famed as one of the Low Country’s loveliest Greek Revival mansions, home for generation after generation of Tarrants.

The House.

That’s how she always thought of it.

The House that held all the secrets and whose doors were barred to her.

Courtney gazed at the House with unforgiving eyes.

She was too young to know that some secrets are better left hid.

The tawny ginger torn hunched atop the gravestone, golden eyes gleaming, muscles bunched, only the tip of his switching tail and the muted murmurs in his throat hinting at his excitement.

The old lady leaning on her silver-topped, ebony cane observed the ripple of muscles beneath the tom’s sleek fur. She was not immune to the power of the contrast between the cat, so immediately alive, and the leaf-strewn grave with its cold, somber headstone.

Dora Chastain Brevard stumped closer to the monument, then used the cane’s tip to gouge moss and dirt from the letters scored deep in granite.

As she scraped, a thumb-size mouse skittered wildly across the grave. The cat flowed through the air, smooth as honey oozing from a broken hive, but he was too late. The frantic mouse disappeared into a hole beneath the roots of a huge cypress. The feline’s tail switched in frustration; then, once again, he tensed, but this time, despite the glitter in his eyes, the cat didn’t pounce.

The sluggish, slow-moving wolf spider, a huge and hairy tarantula, would have been easy to catch.

But the ginger torn made no move.

Did the prowling cat know that the slow-moving arachnid possessed a potent poison? Or was it merely the ever-present caution of his species, the reluctance to pounce upon an unfamiliar prey?

The cane hissed through the air.

Miss Dora gazed without expression at the quivering remains of the spider. She wished she could as easily dispose of the unexpected communication that had brought her to this mournful site.

Max Darling whistled “Happy Days Are Here Again” as he turned the Maserati up the blacktop toward Chastain. He was looking forward to the coming meeting with more excitement than he’d felt in a long time. In his mind, he heard once again Courtney Kimball’s intriguing voice, young but self-possessed, a little breathy, very South Carolina.

He walked into the new waterfront restaurant and his spirits rose when vivid eyes sought his in the mirror behind the bar. The young woman who swiftly turned and slipped down from the stool and walked to greet him, a graceful hand outstretched, would capture attention anywhere.

Max was assailed by a mélange of immediate impressions: remarkable blue eyes, a beauty at once apparent yet elusive, a projection of confidence and dignity. But, paramount, was her intensity.

Her first words caught at his heart.

“I need you.”

Annie Laurance Darling put down the telephone at the front desk of Death on Demand, the loveliest mystery bookstore this side of Atlanta, and didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

Whichever, she had only herself to blame.

Who was always exhorting her husband to apply himself, to work hard, to devote himself to duty?

She, Annie Laurance Darling. Although, in truth, she had eased off recently, ever since Max began to avoid talking about his office. She had stopped asking about his cases or lack of them, concerned that she might have hurt his feelings with her well-meant admonitions to hew to the course. She hadn’t pasted any helpful dictums to his shaving mirror for at least a week. (Amazing—and soul-satisfying to strivers—the encouraging mottoes intended for underachievers:
The early bird gets the worm. Little by little does the trick. Put your shoulder to the wheel. Toil, says the proverb, is the sire of fame. Under the influence of poverty or of wealth, workmen and their work are equally liable to degenerate.
…)

Obviously, however, her efforts had not gone unappreciated; witness the call she’d just received from Max. So now that Max was involved in a case, how could she complain?

“Dammit, Agatha, you’d think he could arrange work for office hours!” Annie slammed her hand down on the counter-top.

The sleek black cat atop the bookcases devoted to Agatha Christie lifted her elegant head to stare with unblinking amber eyes at Annie. (Was it simply coincidence that the cat considered these particular shelves to be her own or were there matters involved here beyond ordinary human understanding?)

“And what’s so confidential he can’t even tell his own wife?”

Annie heard the hurt in her own voice. And what was so urgent, so important that Max had called to say he wouldn’t be home for dinner—and not to wait up for him tonight. She glanced toward the front windows. She’d just put up the
CLOSED
sign and was tallying the day’s receipts while waiting for Max to walk down the boardwalk from Confidential Commissions, one of the more unusual businesses on the South Carolina resort island of Broward’s Rock. Annie always thought of Confidential Commissions as a modern-day equivalent to the good offices performed by Agatha Christie’s detective of the heart, Mr. Parker Pyne. Max rather liked that analogy, but he was also quick to point out that he was neither a private detective nor a practicing lawyer, but merely a consultant available to those with problems outside the ken of the licensed professionals.

It had become a happy ritual, the two of them coming together at the close of the business day, each with much to tell. At least, she always had much to tell. But this week Max had said even less than usual. In retrospect, she realized he’d been quite closemouthed, merely observing that things were picking up at the office. Of course, Annie’d swept right on with her reports, how Henny Brawley, her best customer, had sent a postcard from England to report on her tour of Shrewsbury Abbey, the home of Ellis Peters’s incomparable Brother
Cadfael (“
Annie, I actually saw the small altar to St. Winefride
!”), and how busy it had been in Death on Demand—“
Would you believe a busload of clubwomen from Charleston
?”—since Ingrid Smith, her chief assistant, was bedridden with a spring flu.

Annie felt deflated, a suddenly empty evening ahead. Max hadn’t even said where he was going. Dusk was falling, and soon the air would cool sharply. Nights could be shivery in the spring despite the reassuring harbingers of the new season: the call of the chuck-will’s-widow, the rachet of swamp frogs.

“I wonder if he has his sweater with him?” Her voice seemed to echo in the empty store.

Agatha yawned, a nice equivalent to a human shrug, then rose, stretched, and dropped to the floor to pad lightly down the central corridor toward the back of the bookstore.

Annie followed, pausing to alphabetize several titles in the Romantic Suspense section:
My Cousin Rachel
by Daphne du Maurier,
Danger in the Dark
by Mignon Eberhart,
Widows’ Plight
by Ruth Fenisong,
Alive and Dead
by E. X. Ferrars, and
The Clue of the Judas Tree
by Leslie Ford.

“Max was so abrupt, Agatha. And abstracted.” She put the latest title by Elaine Raco Chase face out. “Like he was talking to a stranger.”

Agatha waited imperiously atop the coffee bar, which offered customers a different blend every day (Annie’s favorite, of course, was Kona) served in mugs bearing the names of famous mysteries and their authors. Annie offered Agatha a fresh serving of dry food, received an unequivocal feline glare in response, and quickly reached for a can. Agatha did not tolerate frustration well. It was wise, Annie had decided after applying Mercurochrome to numerous scratches, to satisfy Agatha’s needs, wants, and desires promptly. And, if she thought hard about Agatha, she wouldn’t mull over that odd, unsatisfactory call from Max.

As she emptied half the can into Agatha’s bowl, she remarked conversationally, “I have to hand it to you, Agatha, you’re one of a kind.”

And so, she thought with admiration, were the tales of tangled lives and thwarted passions created by the authors
featured in this month’s watercolors. As Agatha contentedly ate, Annie concentrated on the pictures on the back wall over the fireplace, the better to avoid other thoughts.