Southern Ghost

by Carolyn G. Hart

  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.

  Annie sighed. What heartbreak. Two in a family lost the same day. Poor Amanda Tarrant. Her husband and youngest son dead with no warning, no preparation.

  Tragic, yes. But what in that family tragedy prompted a young woman to hire a private detective twenty-two years later? (Annie called a spade as she saw it. She didn’t have to pretend about Max’s occupation, no matter how Max avoided the appellation of private detective.) Why did Courtney Kimball hire Max? Who was Courtney, and why did she care about the deaths of Judge Tarrant and his youngest son?

  Annie carefully reread the article, then skimmed the other news stories and the formal obituaries. The facts remained the same. The only additional information concerned funeral arrangements.

  She studied the newspaper photograph from the May 12, 1970, Chastain Courier. The mourners wore black. They stood beneath umbrellas in a slanting rain among a gray and cheerless sea of tombstones. A veiled woman leaned heavily on the arm of a young man.

  The caption read: The family of Judge Augustus Tarrant and Ross Tarrant bade them farewell Monday at graveside rites in St. Michael’s Cemetery. The judge’s widow, Amanda, walks with her oldest son, Milam. Also pictured are Mrs. Milam Tarrant, Mr. and Mrs. Whitney Tarrant, and Mr. and Mrs. Harmon Brevard.

  Annie concentrated. Mr. and Mrs. Harmon Brevard? Oh, of course—Amanda’s parents, grandparents of Ross, Whitney, and Milam.

  The veil hid what must have been the grief-ravaged face of Amanda Tarrant. Her son Milam had the stolid look of a man enduring great pain. His wife’s face was white and pinched. Whitney Tarrant frowned, the kind of frown a man makes to hold back tears. His wife, Charlotte, pressed a hand against her mouth. Harmon Brevard stared grimly at an open grave site. His wife touched a handkerchief to her eyes.

  A sorrowing family.

  Annie riffled through several more stories and found nothing that changed the import of the initial report.

  She returned the photographs and clippings to the file and picked up The Tarrant Family History and Guide to the Tarrant Museum, both cream-colored pamphlets with crimson printing. A yellow tab on the outside of the history carried an inscription in Max’s handwriting: Received from Courtney Kimball.

  Annie looked through the Guide to the Tarrant Museum. She was startled when she realized the museum was housed in former slave quarters toward the back of the Tarrant grounds. Wow, this was Family and History in capital letters, although it was clear, despite the obviously biased introduction by Mrs. Whitney Tarrant, its founder, that the museum housed some interesting and valuable collections, including playbills from early traveling shows. The Orphan or the Unhappy Marriage was presented in 1735, shortly after its initial production in Charleston. In 1754, a traveling troupe put on A Bold Stroke for a Wife, The Mock Doctor, and Cato. The museum housed the personal letters of Hope Tarrant, who spent her life opposing slavery and was one of the earliest to speak out in South Carolina, along with Angelina and Sarah Grimke. Copies of many of the various Chastain newspapers from 1761 to 1815 were featured. (Three had belonged to Tarrants, of course.)

  Annie put down the guide reluctantly. A hodgepodge, yes, but such an interesting mélange from the past.

  The Tarrant Family History was also written by Mrs. Whitney Tarrant. Was she perhaps a trifle obsessive? Annie skimmed the introduction: … distinguished family from the outset of Mortimer Tarrant’s arrival … the author’s aim is to provide ensuing generations with a record of bravery, devotion to duty, and honor … gallantry both in war and peace … exemplary conduct which can ever serve as a shield in good times and bad….

  The introduction was signed by Mrs. Whitney Tarrant and dated September 14, 1987. In parentheses following the date, it read: Marking the two hundred and fifty-second year of the Tarrant Fam
ily in Chastain, South Carolina.

  Annie raised a blond brow. My, aren’t we proud of ourselves! But she turned to the first page and dutifully began to read.

  “Chief’s not in.” Sergeant Matthews’s pale eyes returned to the papers on his desk.

  Max leaned on the door jamb and drawled, “No doubt he is leading a posse in search of wrongdoers even as we speak.”

  The sergeant looked up, blinked once, then ostentatiously began to straighten the papers before him.

  “Any trace of Courtney?” The drawl was gone.

  Matthews ignored him.

  Max crossed the brief space to the desk in two strides, leaned over, and knocked sharply. The papers quivered.

  Sergeant Matthews’s head jerked up, and his pink cheeks deepened to tomato. “You want to go back to jail?”

  “Jail?” Max exclaimed. “Jail? In law school, I must have missed the section where it’s against the law to undertake polite intercourse with the properly constituted authorities of a municipality.”

  As always, the magic reference worked. Max almost felt a moment of shame and wondered anew at the undeserved deference paid—even if grudgingly—to anyone possessing a law degree.

  “The chief 11 be in around ten.”

  “That’s all right. You can help me.” Max’s tone was brisk. “What progress has been made in the search for Courtney Kimball?” At Matthews’s look of dogged resistance, Max continued crisply. “I want everything that’s part of the public record.”

  He knew damned well the sergeant wasn’t certain what constituted a public record.

  Max didn’t enlighten him.

  • • •

  When Annie closed the cream-colored pamphlet, she knew with certainty that Mrs. Whitney Tarrant was not going to be a bosom chum. Annie was willing to bet that Charlotte Tarrant was extremely serious, extremely humorless, and quite boring. The Tarrant Family History resounded with grandiloquence: the Tarrants were not only a leading Family, but they always “enjoyed prominence in Society even among their own kind.” Of course, in Texas, Annie’s place of origin, it mattered most how a man conducted himself today, not where he came from or who his family was. In fact, it was still not considered mannerly to ask where people came from, a harkening back to the days of the Old West when a man might not be exactly eager to reveal his past. Now, as then, it was the present that counted.

  However, there were glimpses of the past that not even Charlotte’s labored prose could trivialize.

  The heartbreak when five daughters—Anna, Abigail, Ruth, Margaret, and Victoria—were lost to yellow fever in 1747.

  The loss of a younger son, Edward, his wife, Emily, and their three children in a storm at sea when he was taking them to safety in Philadelphia as the Revolution began.

  With her husband, Miles, gone from Chastain to serve in Sumter’s army, his wife, Mary, sallied forth to oversee the outlying plantations. Mary managed a bit of work for the Revolution as well, smuggling papers or food, information or boots, whatever the moment required. Her devotion to her infant nation was repaid with grief: Miles perished in a British prison camp just two weeks before the end of the war.

  But happier days were to come. The land overflowed with plenty when Tarrant rice was sold in every market at home and abroad and wealth poured in. Oh, the dances and the convivial dinners when nothing was too grand for guests. These survivors of war and deprivation embodied in their lives the ideals for which they had fought. Of first importance was a man’s honor.

  The code of chivalry was understood:

  A man’s word was his bond.

  A woman’s name was never uttered except with respect.

  A promise, whether wise or foolish, must be kept.

  A man must always be prepared to fight for his name, his state, or his love.

  Tarrant men died in duels in 1812, 1835, and 1852. Michael Evan Tarrant was seventeen years, three months, and two days of age when he bled to death “near the great oak on the bluff above the harbour after meeting in combat in an open field.” Another, Roderick Henry, shot his own gun into the air, refusing, he said as he lay dying, to permit another man to make him into a murderer.

  Tarrants had survived or been felled by warfare and pestilence. Then came fire. Tarrant House, the first structure on the present grounds, burned to the ground in 1832. All were rescued from the inferno except Catherine, the mistress of the house, a victim of paralysis. Catherine was tragically trapped in her bedroom on the second floor.

  A daughter, Elizabeth, defied her family and eloped with a young man from Beaufort. Her father wanted her to marry an older widowed planter. The breach between Elizabeth and her family was never healed.

  South Carolina on December 20, 1860, was the first of eleven states to secede from the Union.

  Four Tarrant sons perished in The War Between the States: Philip, twenty-five, at Fort Beauregard in one of the earliest engagements; Samuel, twenty-two, who drowned trying to run the blockade; and William, nineteen, of yellow fever at Manassas. The second son, Robert, twenty-four, was a graduate of West Point, who served in the Union Army. During the third year of the War, he made his way through the lines to come home as he’d heard his sister Grace was ill with typhoid. His father, Henry, home with a wound suffered at Chancellorsville, met him at the door and refused him entrance. They struggled. Robert was stronger and he pushed his way past to go upstairs to his sister’s sickroom. There was a gunshot. Robert fell on the stairway landing, mortally Wounded. A dark stain marks the top step, and no manner of scrubbing has ever been able to remove it. During the long war years, the women of Tarrant House cut up curtains to make clothes, tore down the copper gutters, which were melted and used for torpedoes, took in sick and injured soldiers and nursed them back to health or buried them. But one by one came the news of the deaths of the sons of the house. Henry Tarrant did not recover from his wound, though some believed he died of a broken heart. His widow, Emma, and their remaining son, Thomas, by guile and wile, despite the loss of all the outlying plantations, somehow managed each year to pay the taxes and so were able to hold onto Tarrant House.

  Quiet years followed after the War. Then in 1895, Nathaniel Tarrant wed a wealthy young woman from Detroit. One son, Peter, was disowned in 1920, his name never spoken. It was said that he ended his short life in Paris, a painter. He was Augustus Tarrant’s older brother. Augustus had three sisters. Two, Sophie and Catherine, were lost in the great flu epidemic of 1918. His other sister, Abigail, scandalized the family by going to work for a newspaper. She married a foreign correspondent in 1933 and for almost a decade letters with exotic stamps arrived at Tarrant House erratically. She was killed in the bombardment of Singapore in 1942.

  Annie felt awash with tragedy. Certainly, the death of Ross Tarrant in a gunshot accident and the Judge’s demise were part of a long chain of bloodshed and sorrow.

  And why had any of this mattered to Courtney Kimball in the Year of Our Lord Nineteen Ninety-Two?

  The wooden front porch was painted white. A green wooden swing hung at one end. Wicker chairs were interspersed with potted ferns. The white paint of the frame house glistened and had almost certainly been recently applied. Although converted now from a private residence, the St. George Inn was an excellent example of the typical Chastain house: freestanding on a large lot among magnificent oaks, a two-story, frame construction on a brick foundation. Wide porches across the front extended around the sides, and huge bay windows rose from floor to ceiling.

  Beyond the screen door, the front door was open wide, as it had probably stood in good weather for two hundred and fifty years, to take full advantage of the prevailing southeasterly breezes.

  Max poked the doorbell beside a smaller sign with the insouciant dragon.

  “Come in,” a woman’s deep voice ordered.

  Max obeyed, stepping into the dimness of a wide hall floored in gleaming heart pine. The wallpaper, green, dark brown, and rose, pictured Greek ruins amid trees that looked vaguel
y like eucalyptus.

  Through a door to the right, a remarkably large woman rose from behind a delicate Chippendale desk. Smiling, she walked toward Max. “I’m Caroline Gentry. Welcome to the St. George Inn. How may I help you?”

  Her voice was a rich contralto. It matched her size—almost six feet—and bulk. She had large, expressive brown eyes in a heart-shaped face and dark-brown hair in a tidy coronet braid. Garbed in some kind of loose-flowing black dress, she stood as straight as a statue.

  Max introduced himself. “I’d like to rent a room for myself and my wife for several days, if you have a vacancy.”

  But Mrs. Gentry was staring at him, her eyes suspicious. “I saw you,” she said abruptly. “Last night. When the police came to my garage apartment.”

  He met her gaze directly. “That’s right. I came here to look for Ms. Kimball. She is a client of mine—and she didn’t show up for an appointment.”

  “In the paper this morning, it said she’d disappeared. So why do you want to come here? Why do you want to stay at my inn?” She folded her arms across her solid midriff.

  “Because I don’t intend to leave Chastain until I’ve found her.” Max’s eyes never wavered. “I don’t care how long it takes. And here’s where she was staying. Maybe I can learn something from that, from you.”

  “I don’t know anything about her. I’d never seen her before in my life until she came here Monday.” Her deep voice was angry.

  “Did she tell you anything—”

  “I showed her the apartment. That’s the only time I ever talked to her. If I’d had any idea she was going to get in trouble, I’d never have let her in. This kind of publicity can ruin an inn. I’ve already had three cancellations since the paper came out this morning. A wedding party.”

  “Mrs. Gentry, the sooner we find Ms. Kimball, the better off you’ll be. Give me one of those cancellations.”

  It hung in the balance, but finally, grudgingly, she nodded.

  Max had one more question as he filled out the registration. “Do you know why Ms. Kimball came here? Why she picked this place to stay?”