by Carolyn Hart
“What happened the second time?” Leah asked.
“Somebody planned for me to drown.”
“But how could . . .”
“I made it easy,” he said dryly. “Most evenings I’d row out into the river after I’d had supper. Then I’d put out the anchor and take a swim.” He saw her expression and shrugged. “Not too bright, maybe, but I’m a good swimmer, and I didn’t get too far from the boat. And it never occurred to me that anybody would cut my anchor line.” He glanced toward the well. “Somebody’s too damn handy with a knife around here. Anyway, that’s what must have happened, and I didn’t check the line before I threw it out.
“There’s a hell of a current out there. That boat was already out of sight, and there I was, seventy-five yards from the bank and looking for the boat—and the current swinging away from the shore. I swam diagonally and came in a couple of miles downstream. If I weren’t a strong swimmer . . .”
Once, twice, a third time. There could hardly be any question about it. Someone badly wanted to kill Kent Ellis.
“There must be a reason,” Leah said.
Kent shook his head, some of the color back in his face now. He wiped his hands on his jeans. “Look, I’d better bury Bill. Wait a minute while I go get a shovel.”
Why would anybody try to kill Kent Ellis? Why would anybody kill a dog? That was all Leah could think of as she waited.
Kent gave her a faint smile when he returned and began to dig a grave.
“There has to be a reason,” she said again.
“Right. Nobody goes in for murder unless the stakes are pretty high.” He paused for a few moments, then said, “I figure two things. One, Marthe is a smoke screen, a handy scapegoat for accidents somebody wants to happen. Two, somebody at Devereaux Plantation is a killer.”
It was very quiet in the clearing.
When Leah didn’t answer, Kent started digging again, the shovel thumping dully, the dry dirt rattling as it fell.
Somebody at Devereaux Plantation. That meant one out of five members of her family, Leah thought, not counting the servants.
“And perhaps,” she said aloud, “that person has killed before.”
She told Kent of the long-ago summer when her parents and Louisa and she had arrived on the boat. “The ghost had appeared twice that summer—and both times my grandmother was almost killed. Then the boat was lost, and the ghost wasn’t seen again until this summer.”
“Your grandmother went to Nice soon after your parents were lost, didn’t she?”
“Yes.”
“So the ghost appeared twice that summer and didn’t appear again after your grandmother left.”
“Do you think there’s a connection?”
“Don’t you?”
“I don’t know what to think,” Leah responded. “But Carrie hasn’t had any accidents this summer—you have. And it wasn’t my grandmother who died nineteen years ago, it was my parents.”
Kent stopped shoveling and looked at her somberly.
“If somebody murdered your parents, why did your grandmother Shaw grab you and run away? Why didn’t she call the cops?”
There it was. Out in the open. Leah licked lips that felt suddenly stiff and dry. The August sunlight poured over them in the little clearing cupped among the pine trees. Kent’s shirt clung to his back. Sweat beaded her face, but inside she felt cold, cold to the bone.
Why hadn’t Louisa gone to the police? What could have prompted her to gather up a small child and run away, leaving behind her own home in Atlanta, the life she’d always known, her friends and family?
“I don’t know,” Leah said tonelessly. Then she added, “My parents quarreled that night.”
“How do you know that?”
“My cousins saw them on the dock.”
“So you think . . .” His words trailed off.
“I don’t know what to think.” She reached down and rubbed the dusty dirt hard with her fingers. “Marthe killed Timothy, then shot herself. Didn’t she?”
Kent frowned. “What does that have to do with anything?” But he saw the parallel and understood what she feared.
“Why else,” she asked relentlessly, “would Louisa run away with me and let both of us be presumed dead? Why else?”
Slowly, he nodded in agreement.
Leah wanted to cry, but tears wouldn’t help. She could never wash away the horror of that reality. But after all, what did it have to do with her now? Everything, her heart cried, everything. You are what you come from. If there’s a weakness, a strain of darkness, within me, I must know it and face it.
Kent was absorbed in thought. “Yeah,” he said abruptly, “that must have been exactly what your grandmother Shaw thought. Otherwise, her running away with you doesn’t make any sense.” He looked at Leah and moved quickly, dropping the shovel and taking her cold hands in his. “Hey, don’t look so devastated. Just because your grandmother thought it, that doesn’t mean it happened that way.”
She held tightly to his hands. He was her link to sanity and faith.
“For Pete’s sake,” he scolded, “haven’t you figured out yet that half of everything people believe is an illusion? It’s easy to fool people if you set out to do it. Plus, everybody’s got a different picture of reality.”
Leah listened hard, wanting desperately to believe. And in the letter . . . “Kent, I hadn’t told you, but Louisa was writing to Carrie when she died. She wrote that if the ghost walked again, then she had been deceived that night. She said it meant there was great evil at Devereaux Plantation.”
“Evil” didn’t seem too strong a word when she looked down at the little mound that marked Bill’s grave and at the blood-encrusted bayonet lying beside it.
Kent squinted thoughtfully. “We have to reconstruct what happened that weekend.”
“How can we do that?”
“Ask people what happened,” he said simply.
They planned it out. He would tackle Lilac. The family was up to Leah. Hal didn’t count, because he’d left the house early that long-ago afternoon. Farther afield, Kent would talk to the sheriff, discreetly. Leah would visit with Mrs. LeClerc, and see Old Jason when he was well enough.
Kent frowned. “I wish Jason weren’t in the hospital, though we probably couldn’t get anything out of him that would make any sense.”
“Why not? He was certainly there. After all, he’s the one who wrote to Mary Ellen and asked her to come.”
“I know. But he’s really old now, and he gets confused. He comes and sits by the edge of the excavations and talks about the Devereaux past and present. Sometimes he gets things mixed up—tells me things his father said, as if he himself had lived through them. One time I got him talking about Marthe and Timothy. This was after he’d spotted the ghost in June. He got real excited and said, ‘Miss Marthe, she don’t think it’s right. She walks because they didn’t bury her proper and her soul can’t rest—no, it can’t!’
“Jason paced up and down by the edge of the pit, and I was afraid he was going to topple right in. ‘Oh, lost souls will haunt you, Mr. Kent,’ he said. ‘I knew it was wrong, just like my daddy knew it was wrong. He told me on his deathbed that it was wrong what happened about Miss Marthe. And I knew it wasn’t true about Miss Mary Ellen, no matter what they said. And she haunts me now, lying in that cursed ground. Her soul can’t rest! She’s comin’ for me!’I thought the old boy’s mind was gone. He had them confused, Marthe and Mary Ellen.”
“He actually said my mother’s name?”
Kent nodded.
“I’ve got to talk to him,” Leah said excitedly. “He must know something!”
“Maybe. Frankly, I think he’s pretty well around the bend. But I don’t suppose it would hurt to ask him.”
Leah left Kent standing by the small grave and walked slowly back toward the house. Would it do any good to poke and pry? Or would everything she discovered lead inexorably to the same horror-laden conclusion: Marthe had killed Timothy; Mary E
llen had killed Tom.
Chapter Nine
When Leah reached the pond, she walked even faster. She knew now what kind of horror had waited there the night before. If she had crossed the bridge then—Her footsteps clattered across the wooden planks as images whirled in her mind: the bloody hump of fur that had been a dog, her mother’s face, the storm driving in from the sea, Louisa . . .
At the foot of the rose garden, Leah looked up and saw Merrick standing on the first-floor veranda. She began to run toward him.
He met her at the bottom of the steps and caught her in his arms. “What’s wrong? What’s happened?”
She told him, starting with her troubled sleep the night before, the dog’s yelps, and the ghost.
He nodded toward the pond. “Down there?”
“Yes.”
“Don’t you suppose,” he said carefully, “that it’s possible you imagined it? After all, you’d just awakened. Perhaps you felt frightened and—”
“I saw it,” she insisted. She reached into her pocket and held out her hand. The piece of white silk glistened in the sunlight.
Merrick gave a tiny shrug. “The wind blows. That’s as light as a thistle. It could have come from anywhere.”
“That’s not all that’s happened.” The words tumbled out as Leah told him of her meeting with Kent Ellis and what they had discovered at the bottom of the well.
Merrick was silent for a long moment. Then, not looking at her, he said stiffly, “Maybe Ellis’s excavations made somebody mad.”
“Who?”
The single word hung in the air between them.
“How should I know?” he demanded irritably. “But it has to be something like that. Otherwise, it wouldn’t make any sense.”
“Wouldn’t it?”
Again the silence stretched between them. She waited for him to ask her what she meant.
Instead, he frowned and said, “I’ll go down and talk to Ellis.” Then he looked at her imploringly. “Leah, this doesn’t have anything to do with us. All this talk about ghosts is stupid. You have to understand that people around here are superstitious. Somebody sees some marsh gas, and a whole new story goes around.”
“I didn’t see any marsh gas.”
He stared down at the garden. “As for Ellis, we don’t really know anything about him. Maybe he likes attention.”
“Do you think he cut his dog’s throat?”
“We don’t know anything about him,” Merrick repeated stubbornly. “Anyway, I’ll go down and talk to him. Maybe he ought to stop his excavations for a while.” He paused, then asked quietly, “You’ll go see the plantations with me this afternoon, won’t you?”
She stared at him for a long moment, at his auburn hair that shone so richly in the sunlight, at his deep blue eyes that looked at her with so much longing. He was everything she’d ever wanted in a man; she felt a link between them that could one day explode into passion. But at this moment, while she fought to believe in her parents, he refused to admit that evil existed at Devereaux Plantation.
The silence grew.
Merrick’s chin jutted out. “I’ll pick you up at one.” Then he turned and strode off.
She stared after him, her heart twisting inside. He didn’t want to believe her, and she understood why. There was such a small circle of suspects—if suspects there were. But that didn’t help the ache inside her.
She looked up at the lovely old house, so proud and unvanquished. It sat out in the country in splendid isolation. There were the servants, of course. But other than the family, who would know or care that Kent Ellis was excavating at Devereaux Plantation—or where?
That left the family. Carrie Devereaux. Cissy and Hal Winfrey. John Edward.
And, of course, Merrick.
But why would he—Leah put it into words in her mind for the very first time—why would he or Cissy or John Edward have murdered Mary Ellen and Tom?
As she gazed up at the lovely mansion on the hill, she knew the answer. To inherit Devereaux Plantation, of course.
Everyone—meaning Leah’s three adopted cousins—had thought Mary Ellen was well out of it when she eloped with Tom. Carrie had cut her daughter out of her will. Who would inherit? The adopted Devereaux.
Slowly, Leah climbed the broad, shallow steps and began to walk in the shadowy coolness of the west veranda. Her mind continued to spin its dreadful logic.
When Mary Ellen and Tom had arrived, perhaps one of the cousins hadn’t wanted to risk an eventual healing of the breach between mother and daughter. Perhaps one of them had decided to make absolutely certain that the breach could never be healed.
Perhaps the truth was uglier yet. The ghost had already walked—and twice Carrie had been near death. Mary Ellen had announced on the windswept dock that she wouldn’t leave until she knew the truth about her mother’s accidents. Perhaps she had understood her cousins very well indeed and had discovered who might already have been tempted to try to gain Devereaux Plantation.
It was all so long ago and far away. How could Mary Ellen’s daughter ever hope to find the truth? But if Leah didn’t, dark imaginings would always exist in her mind.
Merrick, John Edward or Cissy.
One of them.
All of them?
“Leah.”
She turned, startled, and saw Cissy coming out onto the porch.
“Have you had breakfast yet?” Cissy looked lovely in a thin gray cambric dress with a ruche of lace at her throat.
“No. I’ve been out for a walk.” It was odd how true that was, yet how deceptive. Should she tell her about Kent Ellis and the dog?
Cissy came nearer, and Leah was shocked to see patches of rouge standing out on her cheeks. Dark hollows made her green eyes look huge and somehow lost.
“What’s wrong?” Leah asked quickly.
Cissy looked away. “Nothing. Come, let’s have breakfast.”
She led the way, and after a moment, Leah followed. She had a feeling that Cissy wanted to talk to her, that she hadn’t joined her just to share breakfast.
Two places were set at the breakfast table. Cissy sat where she could look down into the gardens. “John Edward’s already eaten, and Aunt Carrie always eats in her room,” she said absently. “Hal’s still in bed.”
Leah sat down. “I saw Merrick.” Her voice was carefully impersonal.
Cissy shot an avid glance. “I believe Merrick’s smitten with you.” She said it archly.
Leah looked at her in surprise. The old-fashioned term sounded jarring. Moreover, it seemed out of character for Cissy to notice or care. So far she had treated Leah civilly but coolly, yet now she waited eagerly to hear her response to a statement clearly designed to prompt girlish confidences.
“He’s very nice,” Leah replied stiffly.
Cissy’s fine eyebrows drew down in a little frown. “Don’t you like him?”
“I like him very much. I like everyone.”
As she said this, she knew it wasn’t true. She didn’t have any great liking for John Edward or Cissy or Hal, and what she felt for Merrick was a magnificent caring. She wanted to be near him, to love him. The intensity of her feelings shocked and overwhelmed her. She’d never seen him until just a few days ago. How could she respond this way so quickly?
Because it was right. She felt its rightness deep within. Whether their relationship ever came to fruition, she knew there was a bond between them that nothing could destroy. It had happened as suddenly, and as violently, as a spring storm.
Yet now she sat talking to Cissy, mouthing words she didn’t mean while a welter of emotions churned within her.
“It’s really very nice to have you here,” Cissy said.
Leah felt certain that Cissy didn’t mean a word of it, though her face was stretched in a smile. The smile did little to improve her mottled complexion. Leah realized with a sense of shock that Cissy looked wretched. Her lovely hair was swept up in a coronet of braids. Her makeup was flawless, her dress exquisitely tail
ored, but her eyes were big green pools of misery in her strained face.
“Something’s wrong, Cissy,” Leah said gently. “Tell me what it is.”
Cissy motioned with her hand, and Leah realized that Henry was rolling up a serving cart. He poured coffee and served them Belgian waffles and fresh strawberries.
When he had gone, Cissy said, so quietly that Leah could scarcely hear, “I’m frightened.”
Whatever she had expected, it wasn’t this. She would have judged Cissy to be hard as hickory, impervious to stress, coolly competent in all situations.
But now Cissy stared at her with wide eyes, and Leah knew that something dreadful lurked in the corridors of her mind. Abruptly, without warning, she thought of the horrid, dank air wafting slowly up from the uncovered well where Bill had died and where Kent Ellis had nearly been killed. Could Cissy know something about that? Or were her fears tied to the nineteen-year-old disappearance?
“Tell me.” Leah’s voice was sharp.
Cissy leaned across the table. “I talked to Tetine this morning. Do you know her? She’s my little maid.”
Leah remembered glimpsing her in an upper hallway. “Yes, I know who you mean.”
Cissy swallowed, then said huskily, “Last night Tetine saw Marthe.” Her face reflected strain and something more. Was it really fear? She stared at Leah, her eyes almost bulging. “Tetine was coming home late. She parked in the garage and began to walk.”
The garage. That was where Henry had put Leah’s rented Vega. The garage sat to the east of the gardens; the servant quarters were to the west, not far from the tower. So Tetine would have been walking through the shadowy gardens.
“I wonder why I didn’t see Tetine.”
Cissy looked at her intently. “Were you in the gardens last night?”
“Yes. But I didn’t see Tetine.”
“Did you see Marthe?” Cissy demanded.
Leah hesitated, then said determinedly, “I don’t believe in ghosts.”
Cissy’s eyes were even more wide and strained. “You did see her!”
“I saw something,” Leah admitted. “But let me show you what I found this morning.” She proffered the little scrap of white silk.
