Southern Ghost (5 page)

Max gave her an exhausted, despairing look. “God, Annie, this is a mess.”

“We’ll handle it.” She reached out to take his hand.

He looked down abruptly and smiled, the first smile she’d seen since he’d been ushered out of his cell.

Annie smiled in return. This was Max, her Max. “Tell me.”

He gave her hand a hard squeeze and nodded, then dropped
wearily into the bedroom’s sole chair. Annie propped up some pillows on the lumpy bed and curled up to listen. It didn’t take long to tell: the original assignment, his report, tonight’s phone call, the purse at the cemetery, Courtney’s apartment.

He popped up and began to pace the small confines of the motel room, the old wooden floor creaking beneath him. “I started looking for Courtney. It didn’t take long to be sure she wasn’t in that apartment. I was heading for the phone to call the cops when this voice yelled, ‘Hands up,’ and I turned around to look into the barrel of the biggest damn gun I’ve ever seen. It was my old friend, Sergeant Matthews.” Scowling, Max flung himself down again in the chair. “So I guess I’ve got to give the Chastain cops some credit. Matthews brushed me off at the station, but he did come to check Courtney’s apartment. Of course, he won’t listen when I say that’s what I was doing, too. Hell, no. He decides I’m ‘acting suspiciously’ and there’s evidence of a crime scene—did he think I trashed the damn place? So I wind up in jail. And I’m the one who got the cops stirred up! Can you believe it?” His voice rose in outrage. “Anyway, it was about an hour later that Wells lumbered in.”

“Chief Caligula,” Annie said resentfully.

That brought another brief smile, quickly gone. Max’s eyes narrowed. “Here’s where it gets interesting.” A speculative note quickened his voice. “Wells asked why I was meeting ‘the missing woman’ in the cemetery.”

Annie rolled to a sitting position and slipped her arms around her knees.

Max leaned forward. “Now, listen closely, Annie. I’m going to tell you exactly what I told Wells. Okay?”

“Sure.” She didn’t understand her role yet, but Max obviously had something in mind.

Max’s tone was formal. “On Monday, I received a call from a woman who subsequently identified herself as Courtney Kimball. She inquired about the kinds of projects undertaken by Confidential Commissions.”

Max had chosen his words carefully in dealing with Wells. The sovereign state of South Carolina has very particular requirements
for the licensing of private detectives, several of which Max could not meet (two years of work in an existing licensed agency or two years as a law enforcement officer), and Max was not licensed to practice law in South Carolina, which eschews reciprocity with other states (South Carolina has no intention of making it easy for retired lawyers from other climes to pick up some pocket change). Wells would dearly love to nail Max for acting illegally in either capacity. The chief still harbored resentment against both Annie and Max from their encounter several years ago during the Chastain house-and-garden tour mystery event that turned to murder.

“I told Wells how I explained to Ms. Kimball that the objective of Confidential Commissions was to provide information and solace to those in the midst of trying times.” A bland enough statement that nowise, Max would protest, could be equated to the investigative efforts mounted by private detectives or the counsel proffered by practicing atccorneys. “I made it clear that Ms. Kimball asked me to do a historical survey, and I was happy to be able to advise her that I would do my very best to be helpful.” Annie grinned. She wished she could have seen Wells’s face.

“I met her Monday at La Maison Rouge in Chastain. She asked me to do two things—”

Annie held up her hand and reached for her purse. When she bad a pad and pencil in hand, she nodded for Max to continue.

“One. To find out every possible detail in regard to the deaths of Ross Tarrant and Judge Augustus Tarrant, both of which occurred on May ninth, 1970, in Chastain.

“Two. To determine all the persons living in or present in any capacity at Tarrant House on Ephraim Street in Chastain on May ninth, 1970.”

Max’s eyes gleamed. “Up to this point, Wells just listened. No expression, of course. I’ve seen faces at Madame Tussaud’s that looked more alive. Until”—Max struck the chair arm sharply—“I mentioned the Tarrants and Tarrant House. All of a sudden, it was different. Damn different. Wells picked up a
cigar and lit it, taking his time. He looked at me through a haze of smoke and asked—and here’s exactly what he said, Annie—’Who the hell is Courtney Kimball?’ He didn’t ask me a damn thing about the Tarrants or whether I’d found out anything about their deaths or the people at Tarrant House that day. Oh, no. All of a sudden, he wanted to know about Courtney. That’s when he turned hostile and started making cracks about me and my ‘relationship’ with her, saying I’d be a lot better off if I told the police what had happened to her and stopped trying to create some kind of mystery. Not having slept entirely through Criminal Law, I decided to stop being so damn helpful to the constituted authorities and refused to say another word. So Wells dumped me in jail—”

“And came to the island to see how much I knew.”

Max looked at her with startled eyes. “I hadn’t stopped to figure out how you turned up with the magistrate. I called you and there wasn’t any answer so I called Howard Cahill and asked him to get his lawyer for me.” Then the import of her words struck. “Did the sorry bastard imply I was having an affair with her?”

Max’s outrage made Annie feel warm and cossetted.

“Don’t worry,” she said blithely. “I told him you had a business engagement with her.”

Max’s grin made him look like Joe Hardy (all grown up and sexy as hell) after a winning touchdown. “That’s telling him.” But the grin didn’t touch the dark core of worry in his eyes. He smacked his fist in his palm. “The hell of it is, Wells is concentrating on me. Nobody’s doing anything about Courtney.”

Annie heard the anguish in his voice. A business engagement, she repeated to herself. That’s all that it was. Max was here now with her, loving her. That didn’t mean he couldn’t be concerned about others.

Courtney Kimball.

Wells wanted to know who the hell she was. Annie made a wreath of question marks around Courtney’s name on the pad. Frankly, Annie shared Chief Wells’s interest. But she had another
question that mattered even more to her. “Max, why didn’t you tell me about this assignment?”

Her charming, unflappable husband looked, in turn, sheepish, uncomfortable, and embarrassed.

Very un-Max responses.

Annie tried to keep on breathing evenly.

As if it were just a casual question.

“Well”—it was the closest to hangdog she’d ever seen him—“you kept encouraging me to get involved in an interesting case, and, the thing about it is, I didn’t want to get your hopes up that I was into something big. When I finished checking on the Tarrants, everything looked on the up-and-up so I decided not to mention it at all—since it didn’t amount to anything.”

Dark-blue eyes looked at her mournfully.

Once again, Annie didn’t know whether to laugh or to cry, but she knew one thing for certain: Never again would she exhort Max to work harder.

“Max, I’m never disappointed in you. And,” she added a little disjointedly, “it certainly has turned into something.”

The worry was back in his eyes, but it was okay now. Now she could ask, “Who is Courtney Kimball, Max?”

He ran a hand through his thick blond hair. “The hell of it is, Annie, I don’t have any idea.”

“Then I think,” Annie told her husband gravely, “we’d better find out.”

Annie was glad she wore her hair short, but, even so, without a dryer and using the motel soap (no shampoo), she was certainly going to look totally natural, as in moderately unkempt. It didn’t help to pull on yesterday’s clothes. The pale-yellow cotton pullover was okay, but the madras skirt looked like something Agatha would happily have nested in. Max had slipped out early. His goals were to buy shaving cream, razor, toothpaste, toothbrushes, et cetera, and to call his secretary, Barb, who would activate the answering machine at Confidential Commissions and take over at Death on Demand in Ingrid’s
absence. Max won Annie’s heart anew when he returned with coffee and a biscuit with sausage for her. The coffee was acceptable, although not, of course, on a par with that at Death on Demand or at the Darling house on Scarlet King Lagoon.

He also brought in a file marked “Courtney Kimball.”

Annie took the thick manila folder and looked at him in surprise.

“Barb’s terrific. I called, and she brought it over on the first ferry. Said to tell you to relax, she’d take care of everything at the store and get some chicken soup to Ingrid, too. Now”—he was brisk and organized—“I want you to dive into that file. Maybe you can find something I missed.”

Annie put the folder down. “What about you?”

“I’m going to get some answers out of the Chastain cops. Whether they like it or not.”

As the door closed behind him, Annie almost called out. But Max would surely be careful. The chief was a tough antagonist. She took the file and her coffee and settled in the chair. The file contained:

The Tarrant Family History

Guide to the Tarrant Museum

Copies of several newspaper stories on the deaths of the Honorable Augustus Tarrant and his youngest son, Ross, on May 9, 1970.

Photographs of Ross Tarrant’s grave and of the urn containing the ashes of Judge Tarrant.

A photograph of Tarrant House.

A monograph on Tarrant House.

Photographs of Judge Tarrant and Ross Tarrant.

A list of persons likely to have been in Tarrant House on May 9, 1970.

Annie started with the photographs.

Judge Augustus Tarrant, in his black judicial robe, looked sternly down from the bench. His was an aloof, ascetic face, somber gray eyes, a high-bridged nose, hollow cheeks, a
pointed chin, firm, pale lips pressed tightly together. There was no vestige of warmth in his gaze.

Annie would not have wished to be charged with a crime in Judge Tarrant’s court.

This was a formal studio portrait.

There were almost a dozen newspaper photographs. Annie particularly studied two of them. One showed a smiling Judge Tarrant—it could have been a different man—handing a trophy to a teenage girl. The congratulatory smile softened that stern face. The caption reported:
Judge Augustus Tarrant presents the Class of 1969 valedictorian, Serena Michaels, with the National Honor Society trophy.
In the second photograph, Judge Tarrant, unspeaking, head high, was pictured brushing through a crowd of reporters and photographers on the courthouse steps. The caption reported:
Judge Augustus Tarrant declined to comment as he left the courthouse after giving the maximum sentence possible to David Wister Marton, a longtime friend and former state representative convicted of bribery. In a nonjury trial, Marton was judged guilty of accepting money from the Lumont Construction Company in return for achieving passage of legislation favorable to the company.

So the Judge was not a good old boy.

Good for the Judge.

Tough shit for Marton.

The photographs of Ross Tarrant were much more appealing. Annie studied the lively freckled face—a blond cowlick, merry blue eyes, an infectious grin—and realized her own lips had curved in response.

She thumbed through a sheaf of photographs: Ross astride a chestnut jumper at a horse show with a group of girls waving and calling to him; Ross, one of five sunburned happy faces on a tip-tilted catamaran just beyond the surf; Ross with his arms around two pretty girls, one dark, one fair, both laughing up at him; Ross in tennis shorts and shirt standing on a scuffed clay court, holding his racquet like a rifle. In a formal studio portrait, Ross wore full cadet regalia and stared straight into the camera. But wasn’t there just the hint of a smile at the corners of his mouth and a dancing light in his blue eyes? Over the years and the gulf that could not be
crossed, she felt a sense of loss that she’d never known him. She would have liked him.

Annie replaced the photographs and picked up the copies of the news stories from the
Chastain Courier.

Prominent Family Loses Father, Son in Double Tragedy

The Honorable Augustus Tarrant, 63, suffered a fatal heart attack Saturday after learning of the death of his youngest son, Ross, 21, in an apparent shooting accident.

Harmon Brevard, Ross’s grandfather, found the body of The Citadel senior at the family hunting lodge on Deer Creek in late afternoon. After calling authorities, Brevard went to the family home, the well-known Tarrant House, to inform the family.

Judge Tarrant collapsed upon hearing the news. The family physician, Dr. Paul Rutledge, was immediately summoned, but the jurist died before he could be hospitalized.

Funeral arrangements have not yet been announced.

The father and son were members of one of Chastain’s oldest and most influential families. Tarrants have played prominent roles in Chastain and in the history of South Carolina since Mortimer Tarrant arrived in Chastain in 1735. Family members have led efforts to preserve historic sites in and around Chastain.

Judge Tarrant was the son of Nathaniel Robert Tarrant and Rachel Wallace Tarrant. He was born in 1907. A 1928 graduate of The Citadel, he received his law degree from the University of Virginia. In 1937, he married Amanda Brevard of Chastain. Judge Tarrant served in the Circuit Solicitor’s office from 1931 to 1936. He joined his father’s firm, Tarrant & Tarrant, in 1937 and practiced there until the outbreak of World War II. Judge Tarrant served in the infantry during the War, rising to the rank of lieutenant colonel. He returned to private practice until he became a circuit judge in 1950.

Ross Tarrant was born Jan. 3, 1949. An outstanding student
at Chastain’s Wellston School, he was an honor student at The Citadel and would have been graduated this spring.

Judge Tarrant is survived by his wife, Amanda, and two sons, Milam and his wife, Julia, and Whitney and his wife, Charlotte.