French wallpaper from the 1820s decorated the hallway, and sunlight spilled in a warm golden pool across the wide-planked floor. The young woman was as clearly limned as if by a spotlight, her spectacular auburn hair glistening like the flank of a sundrenched Kentucky colt, her delicate, anguished face a study in anger. And something more. Heartbreak?
It seemed so unlikely a place for drama. Or melodrama. The long hallway was immaculate, the floor glistening. A French Empire card table with dolphin feet sat beneath an ornate Chippendale mirror with a gilt eagle at its apex. A smell of potpourri, crushed roses and ginger, mingled with the homelier odors of freshly baked bread and floor wax. And the girl seemed an unlikely candidate for passion, with her patrician face and tasteful yet understated dress, a crisp white cotton cambric blouse with a high neck, front tucks, and long sleeves, and a mid-calf length cotton skirt with an aquamarine stripe. But her face was twisted with emotion, and her breathing was ragged.
“Where is she, Marybelle?” she demanded hoarsely.
“Miss Gail—” The older woman, clearly upset, reached out a hand. She was in her early fifties, attractive in her highly starched pale brown cotton dress with white ribbing at the collars and cuffs.
A soft, cultivated voice sliced through the emotion-charged atmosphere as cleanly as a surgeon’s knife.
“Gail, you forget yourself.”
They all looked up, like obedient marionettes, at Corinne Prichard Webster. She stood at the landing of the stairway, one hand lightly touching the mahogany handrail, her face composed, her lips parted in a Mona Lisa half-smile. The Palladian window behind her provided a dramatic frame for her cool loveliness. Her silver-blonde hair was softly waved, her face smooth and unlined, her cream suede suit the last word in elegance. She was beautiful, and she knew it. She wore that knowledge as a knight might flaunt a royal coat of arms.
“Miss Laurance, how nice of you to call. I want you to meet my niece, Gail Prichard.” Her blue eyes blazed a warning at Gail.
The girl turned reluctantly toward Annie. She still breathed unevenly, with the half hiccups that signaled extreme stress. Her eyes slowly focused.
Annie watched innate good manners and long adherence to social norms struggle with emotions too deep to be ignored.
Corinne reached the foot of the stairs, and nodded toward the maid. “Thank you, Marybelle.”
The maid pulled her pitying eyes away from the girl and turned away silently, her rubber-soled shoes squeaking a little against the highly polished wood floor.
Trying to spare the girl, Annie rushed into speech. She would have recited “Thanatopsis” to distract the blonde viper from Gail Prichard.
“I wondered if I might look over the gardens, Mrs. Webster. For the Murder Nights. If it’s all right, I’ll take some pictures, too.”
“Of course, Miss Laurance. You are welcome to poke into every nook and cranny. We want you to feel very much at home while you work on the festival program. But we must observe the amenities before business. Gail, this is Miss Annie Laurance, who has so kindly consented to help us publicize the spring house-and-garden tours.”
It was worse than watching a butterfly squirm to its demise against the hurtful intrusion of a pin. Watching Corinne Webster force her niece to make the proper response, no matter what private agony the girl was enduring, was as ugly a demonstration of raw power as Annie had ever witnessed. It put her right on a par with Mrs. Boynton in Agatha Christie’s Appointment with Death.
Gail swallowed jerkily. She managed to hold out her hand and speak. “Miss Laurance—I’m glad—to meet you.”
As Annie touched that slim, shaking hand, she felt a white hot bubble of anger. If Max were here, he would recognize the signs. He knew her, knew that she could erupt, and the devil take the hindmost, when she was pushed too far. This vicious, golden woman was coming perilously close to pushing Annie Laurance too far. Who the bloody hell did Mrs. Sainted Webster think she was to subject her to this paralyzing scene? At that moment, she would have been delighted to be teetering on a hanging bridge over a Borneo chasm, if a magic carpet could have whisked her there.
With a Herculean effort, she held onto her temper and began to back toward the door. “I won’t trespass on your time. Thank you so much.” She groped behind her for the hamhock-sized silver handle.
“Of course you aren’t intruding.” Corinne lifted a perfectly manicured hand, the nails sleek and blood red, and gestured toward the drawing room. An enormous purplish blue sapphire in an antique gold setting flashed like a Hessian’s dress uniform. “You must have tea with us. I insist. I know Gail will enjoy telling you about the work she has done in planning the programs this year at the Prichard Museum.”
Gail’s face was the color of gray Sheetrock. Her anguished blue eyes looked like smears of rain-puddled ink.
Corinne smiled blandly at her niece.
A poison-ring tipped into Chablis would be far too good for Corinne Webster. That being out of the question and beyond her purview, Annie’s immediate goal was to remove herself from the poisonous presence of Corinne Prichard Webster without succumbing to the temptation to tell the woman just how beastly she was. Her hand found the doorknob and turned it.
“Thanks so much, but I’m due back at the island for tea shortly.” She tried to sound as if afternoon tea were an activity in which she unfailingly engaged, and her social calendar was filled weeks in advance. “I’ll just take a few shots and be on my way.” She waggled the camera at them, stepped out onto the front piazza, pulled the door shut, then turned and plunged down the gleaming marble steps as if pursued by the hounds of hell.
She didn’t look back until she’d crunched down an oyster-shell path and ducked behind a line of palmetto palms. Her chest heaving with exertion, she skidded to a stop by a wooden bench and paused to listen.
A lawnmower whirred in the distance. Nearer at hand, a blower tidied fallen pine needles into flower beds. She peered around the splintery gray trunk of the palm at the front door of the Prichard House. It didn’t open.
She had escaped without exploding.
And she had held her breath, too. She let it out with a rush and, for an instant, an infinitesimal space of time, wondered if she’d overreacted. No, Mrs. Webster rated on a scale with pirahnas, cobras, and Moriarty. Definitely not a choice for gentlewoman of the year. What a pleasure it would have been to let her have it.
That poor girl. Funny. She thought of her as a girl, though she must be about Annie’s own age. But there was something young and vulnerable about Gail Prichard. What could have happened to upset her so dreadfully? What had Corinne Webster done? For it came down to that, without doubt.
But it wasn’t any business of hers.
Her business was to create a successful mystery program, and she wasn’t going to accomplish that by standing flat-footed staring at a door that remained closed. Good. She didn’t want it to open. She wanted to mark the entire episode closed.
The temptation to march right back up those marble steps, punch the doorbell, and tell Mrs. Corinne Prichard Webster to stick it was almost overwhelming. To hell with the thousand-dollar fee. To hell with the Chastain Historical Preservation Society.
But she had given her word. If she didn’t provide the script for the Murder Nights, the Chastain Historical Preservation Society would be left dangling in the wind, as they said in Texas. She felt, too, that she owed a good job to the faceless individuals who made up the membership of the Society. Mrs. Webster may be president, but surely the Society consisted of other and, more than likely, worthier Chastainians. Besides, Mrs. Webster clearly was lukewarm about the mystery program. By God, she was going to have one—and a bloodcurdlingly marvelous one—like it or not.
Duty wrestled hotblooded temptation. Duty won.
She turned away from the mansion to study the geography of the garden. A long sweep of springy green lawn was embraced by the circular drive. There was certainly room for three tents, as much to mark various activi
ties as to provide shelter. And no one would even admit to the possibility of rain. The mystery would begin promptly at seven P.M. with the introduction of the suspects and an explication of their relationship to the victim. The mystery buffs would be divided into ten teams, each with a maximum of ten members. After electing a Detective Captain, the teams would, one at a time, be taken to The Scene of the Crime, where they would be instructed to follow good police procedure, i.e., prepare a detailed sketch of the premises, careful not to disturb any evidence, and list all possible clues. The teams would then repair to the tents. The first tent would house Police Headquarters. There team members could study the medical examiner’s report on the victim, the laboratory analysis of physical evidence, and obtain copies of statements which had been given to the police by the suspects. The second tent would provide areas for the interrogation of each suspect by the teams. In the third tent would be tables where teams could huddle to discuss the progress of their investigations.
Ducking beneath the low limbs of a gnarled live oak, she paced out the position of the tents. Then she scuffed a mark in the grayish dirt with her sandal. This would be a good place for the Death on Demand table. She could picture the table now, heaped with bookstore mementos, including blood-red, stiletto-shaped bookmarks, a stock of t-shirts with the store name, or pictures of favorite mystery sleuths, such as Hercule Poirot, Miss Marple, Sherlock Holmes, or Nero Wolfe, or slogans, such as I’D RATHER BE DETECTING, CRIME DOESN’T PAY ENOUGH, or POISON IN A PINCH.
Her irritation began to fade. She always enjoyed planning new and novel ways of spreading the good word about Death on Demand. And just think, most of the people signed up for the Mystery Nights must be mystery lovers. Why else would they come? She brushed away their interest in old houses and lovely gardens. These were crime enthusiasts, ready to swap knowledgeable tidbits about their favorites, ranging from Bleak House to Home Sweet Homicide.
And she had just had the marketing idea of the century. The watercolors! They were the first things everybody checked out at the store. The competition to be the first to name author and title was fierce. What would it cost to have the watercolors run off as posters and offer them for sale, too?
Whipping out a notepad from her purse, she scrawled a reminder to check the cost and confer with Drew Bartlett, this month’s artist.
“Genius,” she murmured to herself complacently. “Sheer genius.”
Okay. Practical matters. Order the tents, tables, chairs. Make up instruction sheets for the teams.
The teams would be racing against the clock in their investigations. As soon as a team was certain it knew the murderer’s identity, the Team Captain would write this information, along with the incriminating evidence they had detected, put the information in an envelope, seal it, and turn it in to Annie, who would initial it and stamp the time on the outside of the envelope. At the climax of the grand Denouement Ball Friday evening on the tennis court of Prichard House, the winning team would be announced. The winner would be the team which discovered the murderer in the shortest time, no matter which evening the team competed. A team which turned in its correct answer at 9:03 P.M. Wednesday would defeat a team which handed in the correct answer at 9:15 Monday night.
Now, where to put the body.
She looked again at the smooth lawn, bounded by beds of lavender-pink and rose-red azaleas, then paced along a wide oyster-shell path to the back of the enormous lot. Here a woodland garden bloomed with tangled dogwood, redbud, and wisteria. The snowy white of the dogwood contrasted brilliantly with the purplish red of the redbud. The path wound past a twelve-foot tall thicket of cane and emerged in a small clearing. A black water pond, ringed by clumps of royal purple irises, lay in the sculpted shadows of immense, dark, knobby cypresses and graceful willows. Annie took a deep breath, enjoying the faint, sweet scent of the irises, barely distinguishable against the stronger smell of the still water. It was a secluded spot. She felt a rising sense of excitement. Rapidly, she discarded her original plan for Thompson Hatfield’s body to be discovered in his bank office and substituted the background of the annual bank picnic. The Victorian gazebo among the willows would be a superb spot. Of course, this change would entail a whole new set of clues, but she could manage that easily. She got out her notepad and sketched The Scene of the Crime. Oh, it was perfect.
The body. A dummy? A store mannequin? She must attend to that today, also. She glanced at her watch. Almost two. Somehow, between fending off Max and traveling to Chastain, she’d missed lunch. She’d noticed a chili dog stand on her way into town. That would do nicely. But first, she’d drop by the Historical Preservation Society and leave some information to be stapled to the brochures. Mrs. Webster was clearly uninterested in promoting the Mystery Nights program, but she needn’t think Annie Laurance was going to be fobbed off or ignored.
She was feeling fairly combative as she pushed through the massive wooden door of the old fort.
Two-foot-thick walls, inset windows, low ceilings, and forty-watt bulbs in wall sconces recreated the dungeon-like atmosphere the place must have had almost two hundred years before. The musty smell from long years of dust hung in the damp air. A wooden rack filled with pamphlets and brochures ran along the brick wall to her left.
“Good morning.” An elderly woman with the soft, slurred speech of a native South Carolinian smiled and looked up at Annie with interest. She had masses of faded blonde curls and wore a shapeless baby-blue polyester dress and matching beaded earrings, but her heavy face radiated good humor and an unquenchable enthusiasm. She sat behind a mahogany Chippendale writing table. Both she and the old Remington on a typing stand behind her looked incongruously modern.
“I’m Annie Laurance, and Mrs. Webster has hired me to plan a Mystery Night program for—”
“The house-and-garden tours. Oh, I do feel this is going to be so thrilling. And such a wonderful idea. I think it was Mr. Merrill who thought it up. He and his wife went to a Murder Weekend in Atlanta last year and just had a wonderful time.” She heaved herself up and came around the desk. “I’m Louisa Binning, the secretary. What can I do to help?”
What a difference in blondes, a gorgeous viper and a frumpy delight. Annie began to nurture kindly feelings for the Chastain Historical Preservation Society as Louisa, who turned out to be not only chatty but efficient, loaded her down with brochures, provided the names of caterers and equipment rental companies, swiftly took down the details of the Mystery Nights program, and promised production, “Oh, by next Monday at the latest,” of a promotional blurb to be included in the previously printed House and Garden tour brochures.
“As for the body,” she riffled through a stack of papers on the writing table and handed Annie a Red Cross brochure, “you can stop on your way out of town and talk to Edith Ferrier, one of our very nicest Board members. I’ll call ahead for you. I just know she’ll be glad to help out.”
Adding the brochure to her stack of pamphlets, she said gratefully, “Mrs. Binning, I can’t thank you enough for all your help.”
“Oh, I love doing it. And it’s my job.” She beamed. “Now, about the slip-ins for the tour brochures. We can manage one color on our mimeograph machine. Do you think a dagger dripping blood?”
“Fantastic,” Annie crowed.
“Disgusting,” a voice hissed from the cavernous dimness of a bricked archway behind the secretary.
Annie jumped, but mellow Louisa merely turned her head and said, “Oh, there you are, Miss Dora. Come meet our young mystery expert, Annie Laurance. Miss Laurance, this is Miss Dora Brevard, who is the mainstay of the Society. No one knows more about Chastain and its history than Miss Dora.”
A tiny figure, more like a gnome than a woman, poked out of the shadow. Shaggy silver hair framed an ancient face, the skin crumpled in cross-hatched lines. But the deep-set eyes, dark as raisins, peered out with ferocious intelligence. Dora Brevard wore a heavy black silk dress that rustled around her high-topped leather shoes and a rakishly tilted
cloth hat with a purple feather. She gripped an ebony cane in one withered hand, but she moved with surprising speed, thumping across the stone floor to look up with keen suspicion at Annie.
“The goal of the Society is to preserve the heritage of Chastain.” She tapped the cane to the stone for emphasis. Her voice had a crackly, dry quality like the rustle of old paper. “Adding these Mystery Nights,” the words sounded like an epithet, “can do nothing but detract from our mission.”
The secretary interceded quickly. “Now, Miss Dora, this young lady has come here today to get materials about Chastain. She’s very interested in our history. And she wants to help us raise as much money as we can.”
“Desecration,” the old lady muttered. “That’s what it is. All these people tramping through our houses—”
Louisa patted the bony shoulder soothingly. “Tourists come because they want to understand the past.”
The old lady shrugged away the secretary’s hand. Her beady eyes glittered with anger. “Cheap, that’s what the world is today. Everything tawdry and false. And I won’t stand for it here in Chastain. Do you hear?” She thudded the cane against the floor. Then, in a swift and disturbing about-face, the wizened features reformed in a cunning smile. “So you’re interested in our history, are you, young woman. That’s as it should be. And I’ll see that you aren’t filled with jiggery and pokery. You can walk me home, and I’ll tell you about Chastain. Here now, you can carry my bag for me,” and she thrust a crocheted receptacle into Annie’s hands. It was surprisingly heavy. She glanced down and saw it was crammed to the brim with books, papers, and photostats.
“Records.” Miss Dora stabbed a gnarled finger at the bag. “Deeds, land grants, birth and death certificates, and wills. That’s the heart of the matter, wills.” She cackled and darted toward the heavy door, the cane a staccato accompaniment. “Come along now. I don’t waste time.”
Annie glanced helplessly toward the secretary, who said meaningfully, “Miss Dora is Secretary to the Board.”
Carolyn G. Hart Page 25
