“I hope she’s spinning like a dervish,” Sybil said coolly.
Dr. Sanford looked like an enraged eagle. “I don’t know what kind of attack is being mounted. But I don’t intend to tolerate it. My professional reputation is unassailable.”
Gail flushed to the roots of her auburn hair and averted her gaze from Bobby.
“I find it quite unbelievable that I should be held up to public ridicule.” Edith’s voice trembled with outrage.
“Please, please everyone.” Lucy’s well-bred voice rose above the babble. “There must have been a mistake of some kind.”
Roscoe pounded on the table, calling for quiet.
Not even the urbanity of a John Putnam Thatcher could salvage this board meeting.
“It’s a conspiracy. That’s what it is. A conspiracy to embarrass me. Well, I won’t let them get away with it.” Corinne flung out a hand toward her niece. “Don’t you see how vile he is?” She glared at the reporter. “He’s behind it. He and this girl. He’s probably been sleeping with her, and they—”
“Mrs. Webster, you’d better stop.” Annie had never realized that she could bellow. “And you’d better apologize—or I’m the one who will sue. I don’t know what the hell is going on here. What’s wrong with everybody?”
That brought a moment’s stunned silence.
Finally, Lucy spoke apologetically. “It’s your murder victim, Miss Laurance. Corinne thinks you’re talking about her. It’s such an odd coincidence.”
“Coincidence!” Corinne’s narrow chest heaved.
“Just a few home truths about Chastain’s leading bitch—” Sybil began.
To forestall another furious outburst from Corinne, Annie held up her hand. “Let’s get a few things straight. I didn’t write this murder plot.”
“Oh, yes, you did—you and that despicable muckraker!”
“Mrs. Webster, I gather you don’t care for Mr. Frazier. That’s your problem. I’ve never met him, never talked to him, and he had nothing whatsoever to do with this murder plot.”
“You do too know him. I saw him smile at you outside.”
The little flicker of fury lapping at her control blazed higher. Annie moved away from the lectern, pushed past the reporter, and stood inches from Corinne.
“Listen very closely. I’m going to say it once. I had never seen this man until I arrived here this morning. He likes pretty girls, so he smiled at me. I smiled back. That’s too innocent and genuine an action for you to understand, isn’t it, Mrs. Webster? Now, let me make myself perfectly clear. I don’t like you, but I also don’t like being used. Clearly, I’m the patsy here today. I was set up for this.” Moving back to the lectern, she picked up the plan she had received from the Chastain Historical Preservation Society. “Somebody sent this to me. I thought it came from you. The cover letter’s signed with your name.”
Corinne snatched the six typewritten pages, then scanned the cover letter. “That signature is a forgery.” She looked around the room. “This was written on Society stationery.”
The implication was plain.
Lucy objected immediately. “That doesn’t mean a thing. Everybody in town drops in here from time to time.”
“No member of the Society would do such a dreadful thing,” Miss Dora insisted.
“I’m going to find out who did this.” Corinne’s voice was metallic with determination. “And when I do—”
“Best thing is to let bygones be bygones,” Roscoe Merrill interjected persuasively. “It doesn’t do to take this kind of thing too seriously. You know, women get their noses out of joint, and—”
“What do you mean by that?” Edith demanded shrilly.
“Not a thing, not a thing,” he said quickly. “Obviously, this has been a foolish prank.” But his voice was worried and tense.
Annie eyed him with interest. Roscoe obviously didn’t like this situation at all, and he was determined to get past it.
He held both hands up. “I suggest we get back to the object of this meeting. Our guest has been put in an extremely difficult position. We will have to hope that she will overlook this episode. Ms. Laurance, we agree that you have been victimized, but hopefully we can go forward from here. As I see it, the main problem—”
“The main problem is to determine who perpetrated this outrage.” Corinne glared again at the reporter.
Frazier spread his legs and rocked back on his heels. “Nope. Guess again. I wish I’d thought of it. More fun than a whorehouse on Saturday night. But you’d better look among your snooty friends, Mrs. Webster. Who knew enough to dig all this dirt?”
“Young man, your attitude is reprehensible,” Miss Dora scolded.
Corinne bit into an idea and clung. “Why did you come this morning,” she demanded of Frazier, “if you didn’t have anything to do with it?” Then she bent a sharp look at Gail, who began to shake her head in negation.
Frazier’s good humor fled. “So now you want to slice Gail up, too?”
“Bobby, don’t,” Gail pleaded.
He ignored her. A vein throbbed in his neck. “Listen, lady, I’d rather stack crap than have anything to do with you. I’m here today because the city editor got a note in the mail saying all hell was going to break loose. Frankly, I thought he had a screw loose. You people are usually about as interesting as yesterday’s obits.”
“A note in the mail,” Corinne repeated sharply.
“I’ll look into all this.” Peacemaker Roscoe held out his hand for the letter. “I promise you, Corinne, I’ll get to the bottom of it, if at all possible.”
But Annie reached out and plucked the letter from Corinne’s hand. “Nope. This letter was sent to me. It’s mine. And I’m going to do some investigating myself.”
“Young lady, I appreciate your concern, but this is a matter for the Board,” Roscoe insisted, flushing.
Who did he think he was? Antony Maitland?
“We can all investigate,” she said drily. “I’ll send you a copy of it.”
“This is all very well and good, and I understand why Corinne and Roscoe and Miss Laurance will pursue this matter, but I do think we must face up to our immediate problem,” a reasoned voice urged.
Everyone looked at Lucy.
“After all, the Mystery Nights have already been advertised as part of the house-and-garden tours. I mean, we have only a little over a week before the festival begins.”
“Lucy is hewing to the main point,” Roscoe agreed. “Ms. Laurance, will you overlook this unfortunate contretemps and create a murder for us?”
8
Annie refilled Max’s white coffee mug (The Red Thumb Mark), then her own. Contrary to her usual habit, she shoveled a heaping teaspoon of sugar into her cup and stirred briskly.
It didn’t escape him, of course. “Well, old dear, you must be frazzled.” He stretched out comfortably, tilting the straight back chair on its rear legs.
Annie looked up from her ragtag collection of papers containing bits and pieces of possible Mystery Nights. “Have you been reading Sayers again?”
He grinned. “Nope. But maybe you should.”
“Civilized mayhem as opposed to Southern discomfort?”
“Right.” Then his dark blue eyes grew serious. “Actually, why don’t you jump ship? Working for those people is like afternoon tea at a nuthouse.”
“Quit now? Why, I can do any mystery I want to.” Visions of plots danced in her head. “Maybe a movable corpse. Like The Trouble With Harry. Honestly, Max, did you ever in your life see anything funnier than Harry? Every time somebody buried him, somebody else dug him up.”
He rubbed his cheek with his knuckles. “It’s comments such as that which make me wonder about you sometimes.”
“Oh, my God, it was wonderful.”
“It wasn’t one of Hitchcock’s successes.”
“Dumb audiences,” she said stubbornly. She took another swallow of the sugar-laden coffee. “Or I can do an academic mystery, something on the order of
Seven Suspects.”
“Not unless you want to bore everybody into a coma.” He took a big swallow of coffee.
“Or I could go for a grim background, like Moscow in Angels in the Snow.”
She suddenly felt warm and cozy. Was it the sugar and the caffeine, or the wealth of possibilities that lay before her?
Max tipped the chair upright and leaned his elbows on the table. “What’s wrong with good old Thompson Hatfield, the late, unlamented president of the bank? You already had suspects, clues, et al.”
“Oh, no. I’m not going to do any mystery where the victim or suspects could by the stretch of anybody’s wildest imagination have any relationship to anybody in Chastain, S.C. No, sir.” She shook her head decisively. Then she paused and rubbed an ink-stained finger to her nose, resulting in a distinct smudge. “You know, if I didn’t have so much to do for the Mystery Nights, I’d hit Chastain like Kinsey Millhone and shake some teeth until I got some answers.”
His eyes glistened. “Would you wear tight jeans?”
“Don’t be sexist.” But it was an absent-minded put-down, and her frown pulled her brows into a determined line. “Dammit, I don’t like being used—even if the end result was to take a cut at la piranha.”
“Do you think it was a Board member?”
“I don’t know. That was my first thought, but I talked to Lucy on the way out, and she said the Board had reported to the Society at the general meeting last month about the plans to have the Mystery Nights, and my name was mentioned then. I do think it must have been done by someone who belongs to the Society. Lucy said people drop in to the office all the time, but I’ll bet they parcel out their creamy stationery like gold plate. It’s that kind of place.”
“Sounds like a good lead. Who had access to the stationery? Let me see the letter for a second.”
She rooted around in her piles, found the green folder, and slid it to him.
He read it carefully, then announced, “First, it was typed on a typewriter, not a word processor, because the capital B jumps up half a line and the lower case r is worn.”
“Bravo.”
He ignored her sarcastic tone. “Moreover, the typist isn’t skilled because the pressure is uneven, resulting in erratic inking.”
“Ah, The Thinking Machine at work.”
“The allusion escapes me, but I will assume it is apt. Even though machines don’t think.”
“You, not the typewriter. The Thinking Machine was Jacques Futrelle’s detective.”
He clapped a hand to his head. “How can I not know of him?”
“Probably because Futrelle went down on the Titanic before he had time to write more than two volumes of short stories.”
But Max was still analyzing the letter. When he spoke again, the lightness had left his voice. “This is heavy stuff. Somebody really doesn’t like your Mrs. Webster.”
“She’s not my Mrs. Webster.” She sipped at the hot, sweet coffee. “But I don’t have time to worry about that mess. I’ve got to get the Mystery Nights ready to roll—and come up with a plot that can’t possibly have anything to do with anybody, living or dead, in Chastain. Listen, how does this grab you? I’ll make it a South Sea Island and one of those New England missionaries and he gets involved with this languorous beauty—Max, you’re not listening.”
He was staring at the letter, his eyes unaccustomedly grim.
Annie whistled.
Startled, he looked up.
“Hey, it isn’t all that bad.”
“I think it is.” His voice was grave. “I don’t know. I have a funny feeling.”
She quirked an interested eyebrow. “Are you coming all over psychic? Like the tweenie in a Christie country house murder?”
“It doesn’t take any psychic powers to pick up bad vibes from this.” He tapped the letter. “It’s more than an ugly incident. It’s dangerous.”
She didn’t laugh. “I agree,” she said reluctantly. “It’s just like the The Moving Finger. The villagers dismissed the anonymous letters as nasty but meaningless. And they were dreadfully wrong.” She picked up the heavy stationery, squinting thoughtfully at the first page. “But surely this was nothing more than an effort to embarrass Corinne Webster. That’s all there was to it—and certainly I was a kind of innocent bystander.”
Max slammed his fist on the table. “Annie, tell the Chastain Historical Preservation Society to go get screwed.”
She laughed aloud. “Oh, my. What a vision that conjures.” Then she shook her head. “Nope. They’re counting on me.”
“I mean it. I think you should drop the whole thing.”
“Oh, I couldn’t do that. Really. I promised.” She reached over the table and ruffled his hair. “Come on, don’t gloom. It’ll be okay. The letter writer can’t fool me—or anybody—twice.”
“That’s right,” he said slowly. “But, I think I’ll nose around Chastain, see what I can pick up. That might discourage any further activity.”
“Oh, that’s a good idea.” Once again, she spoke absently, and she gave an abstracted wave as he departed. She could do a Victorian mystery, such as Peter Lovesey’s Wobble to Death. Or dart back to the days of Richard the Lionhearted as Victor Luhrs did in The Longbow Murder. Or attempt the clever twist achieved by Selwyn Jepson when he presented a modern Macbeth in Keep Murder Quiet. Or emulate Edward D. Hoch’s talent for the preposterous, exhibited so well in The Spy and The Thief when his master criminal, Nick Velvet, stole an entire major league baseball team. Or perhaps she should go for that perennial favorite, an English country murder, à la Catherine Aird, Reginald Hill, or Elizabeth Lemarchand …
Max floorboarded the red Porsche off of the ferry. As he drove toward Chastain, gray dust boiled in the car’s wake. His urgency surprised him. Damn. Why did Annie have such an indomitably Puritan conscience? He was the New Englander, and he’d never had any difficulty in persuading himself to do whatever he wanted. He thought for an instant of that wonderful New Yorker cartoon of the devil explaining to some newcomers that after all, down here it was whatever worked for you. Annie would never receive that advice. He sighed. So he might as well stop trying to talk her out of putting on the Chastain Murder Nights. But, dammit, it didn’t feel right to him. Maybe if he just sniffed around, the letter writer would lie low—at least until he and Annie were out of town.
The place to start was the Chastain Historical Preservation Society. He followed the plaques into the historic district, took one wrong turn into a dead end, but finally ended up at Lookout Point. He locked the Porsche, dodged through Chastain’s version of five o’clock traffic (one milk truck, a station wagon filled with a wild-eyed mother and nine Cub Scouts, a stripped down Ford Mustang, and three Lincoln Continentals) and pulled on the front gate. It didn’t budge. He read the gilt sign. Hours: 10 to 4.
Sourly, he wondered why Fletch always found somebody to talk to.
Okay. Four-thirty and nobody home. He kicked the gate. That shut off at least until tomorrow any inquiry into disbursement of the letterhead stationery. But he sure didn’t intend to go back to the island without accomplishing something.
Annie had described all the participants in the morning brouhaha. He leaned back against a brick pillar, pulled a small spiral notebook from his pocket, and studied the list of names.
Corinne Webster, the object of attack. An ice maiden busy leeching the vitality from everyone around her. She probably wouldn’t talk to him and would be better left for later, in any event.
Sybil Chastain Giacomo. Max’s eyes gleamed. Annie described her as a Ruebens nude in an Oscar de la Renta dress. With the mouth of a termagant. Awesome.
Lucy Haines. Sounded nice. Annie said she looked rather serious. A lean, tanned woman with a firm handshake. A librarian.
Roscoe Merrill. A stalwart of the community, obviously. Treasurer of the Society. A lawyer with a face that kept its own counsel. He’d promised La Grande Dame Webster he’d look into the letter, but all the while he kept stressin
g that it was better to drop the matter.
Dr. John Sanford. Intense, self-absorbed, arrogant. And something in the letter made him mad.
Edith Ferrier. The letter made her mad, too. Why did she take it personally? And she didn’t like Corinne. Why?
Miss Dora Brevard, permanent secretary of the Board, and Chastain’s ancient historian in residence. But she seemed to aim her venom at Sybil, not Corinne.
Gail Prichard. The letter writer said Mrs. Moneypot’s niece was seeing a very unsuitable man. Obviously, that was a reference to the combative reporter. Max ran down the list again. If he had his druthers, he’d drop in on the luscious Sybil, but he had a feeling—just a faint niggle of warning—that Annie might take that amiss. And the letter seemed far too subtle an approach for Sybil. So, checking the map Annie had loaned him, he began to walk down Lafayette street toward the heart of town.
• • •
“She wants the one with the nun who detects.”
Annie looked blankly at Ingrid. “Nun?”
“Mrs. Canady. She’s called twice, and she insists she wants the new book with a nun.”
Dragging her mind back from the depths of its involvement in the rapidly burgeoning plot for the Mystery Nights, she repeated, “Nun?” Then, in a burst of animation, she rattled off, “Sister John and Sister Hyacinthe? Sister Mary Teresa? Sister Mary Helen?”
“A new series,” Ingrid offered helpfully.
Annie squinted her eyes in concentration. New series. Oh, yeah. An ex-nun. “Ask her if she wants Bridget O’Toole in Murder Among Friends?”
As Ingrid loped back to the telephone, Annie gathered up the strands that had been swirling together in her mind: A weekend at an English country home, croquet, tea, and murder. Perfect. Move over Sheila Radley and Dorothy Simpson.
Audubon prints of a red-shouldered hawk and a wood ibis hung against the Williamsburg green wall. Heavy brown leather furniture offered soft-cushion comfort and the aura of a good men’s club. A faint haze of autumn-sweet pipe smoke hung in the air.
Carolyn G. Hart Page 28
