Fortunately for her sanity and the logistics of the week, the three featured homes were all here on Ephraim Street, right in a row. As she understood it, ticket holders would first tour the ground floor rooms in the three featured houses, then gather on the lawn of the Prichard House for a buffet dinner to be followed by the coup de grace, the Mystery Program.
She stopped in front of the wrought iron fence to look at the Benton House. A two-story frame built in 1798, it glistened with recently applied white paint and looked as crisp as Tom Wolfe in a fresh white suit. Double porticoes flanked three sides, supported by simple Ionic columns. Black shutters framed the windows. Stubby palmetto palms were spaced every ten feet along the fence, but the magnificence here was in the grounds. Annie’s eyes widened. SOUTHERN LIVING should see this garden. Lady Banksia, yellow jessamine, honeysuckle, pittisporum, a long shimmering arc of wisteria across the back of the deep lot, dogwood so brilliantly, pristinely white that it glittered in the sunlight, and azaleas—single blossoms, double blossoms, hose-in-hose blooms, in vivid splashes of color that included salmon, pink, orange-red, yellow, purple, and white.
Although an occasional car had passed as she made her way slowly from the Lookout Point bench past the Society Building and the Inn to this first historic home, Annie soon realized this part of Chastain didn’t exactly teem with activity. The Benton House reflected back the early afternoon sunlight. The Venetian blinds were closed, and the many windows offered no hint of its interior. Just then a middle-aged man came briskly around the corner of the house, pushing a wheelbarrow. He looked like a competent, no-nonsense gardener. If he were in charge of this garden, he deserved kudos indeed.
She propped her purse and the guidebook against the base of the fence. Removing her camera from its case, she held it up and took a series of shots. Returning the camera to its case, she picked up her belongings and continued down the sidewalk to the entrance to the grounds of Prichard House.
Each house along Ephraim Street sat far back on a large lot. This provided a great deal of space for the gardens and, the guidebook informed, accounted for the plantation-like appearance of many of the older homes.
When Annie saw the Prichard House, she realized it fitted Mrs. Webster perfectly. There was nothing casual, downhome, or unpretentious about the Prichard House. It was a two-story, brick, Greek Revival mansion, with six immense octagonal columns supporting the double porticos. Pale pink plaster coated the exterior walls. A five-foot-high decorated parapet topped the second portico and four massive octagonal chimneys thrust up from the roof. Shining marble steps led up to the main entrance. Enormous and ancient live oak trees, festooned with long, silky strands of Spanish moss, dominated the front lawn. Most of the action would take place here. There could be few lovelier homes in all the South. Prichard House was, as Mrs. Webster had advised and Annie had nodded gravely, the jewel in Chastain’s architectural crown.
The Prichard House garden featured a natural woodland with live oaks, mimosa, and magnolias interspersed with wildflowers and colorful banks of azaleas and yellow jessamine. Far to the back of the property, a tall stand of cane guarded a pond, providing only a tantalizing glimpse of dark water.
It was so imposing that she felt a twinge of hesitation in poking her camera through the wrought iron fence to take photographs. Thanks heavens, with the lovely speed of a .35 mm., it only took a few seconds.
The third historic home rivaled the Prichard House in beauty. McIlwain House was a lovely Georgian mansion, two stories, again on a high foundation, with a delicate extended front portico with slender columns supporting the second story partial verandah. Formal gardens ruled here, beds of roses flanked by dogwood, crepe myrtle, and azaleas.
Once again, she shot a series of pictures, then, returning to her vantage point in front of the Prichard fence, she made a rough sketch of the Historic Area.
Dropping the drawing into her purse, Annie pushed through a gate to the oyster-shell path that led to the grand entrance of Prichard House. She walked slowly, appreciating the soft crackle of the shells beneath her feet, the mixture of scents, jessamine, honeysuckle, and wisteria, and the silky freshness of the afternoon air. There was going to be plenty of room. She could order tents put up, three of them in a row, on the wide expanse of lawn embraced by the circular drive. What she needed now was to determine The Scene of the Crime, but she could only accomplish that by nosing around the gardens, and she had no intention of trespassing in these sacred precincts without permission. She wondered if Mrs. Webster would be surprised at her prompt appearance. Hired in the morning, at work by afternoon. Well, it should only endear her to the Board president.
It was a long walk to the shining marble steps. She was midway up when a car churned up the oyster-shell drive, spewing a plume of gray dust. Annie glanced toward the sound and glimpsed the face of a pale girl whose pretty face was contorted by fury. Then the gray Continental and its driver were beyond the house and only the cloud of oyster-shell dust hung in the air.
Annie’s insatiable curiosity was piqued. Obviously, the girl must belong in this magnificent house. Only an inhabitant would have the effrontery to drive like that on grounds such as these. Who was she and why was she so angry? And on such a beautiful day.
Mounting the steps, she rang the front door bell and, faintly, deep within the house, heard a somber peal.
The gleaming white double doors rose nine feet tall. They opened in a moment, and a middle-aged woman in a maid’s uniform nodded politely at her.
“Yes, Miss?”
“I’m Annie Laurance, and I’m helping Mrs. Webster with plans for the—”
A reverberating crash sounded from the back of the shining hall.
Startled, the maid swung around.
The driver of the car burst into the main hall. She was tall and willowy, with strikingly lovely auburn hair which she wore in an old-fashioned chignon. Her face was delicately boned and slender; her pale blue eyes were enormous. She would qualify as a beauty except that her face was white and pinched, the lips quivering in distress.
She ignored Annie. Perhaps, in her anger, she didn’t even see her. She spoke to the maid, her voice shaking with fury.
“Where is Corinne?”
SUNLIGHT FLOODED THE old and elegant hallway from the open doorway to the left. Tall double doors were open, revealing a drawing room decorated in muted blues and grays. Annie, standing frozen at the entrance, glimpsed an English Sheraton cabinet filled with leather-bound books, a decorated Adam mantelpiece with bronze candelabra, silk-upholstered sofas and chairs, and pieces of Meissen and Sevres china. Matching double doors opened to the right into the dining room, which had walls of Williamsburg green. Silk damask curtains, a lighter green patterned in yellow, hung from the tall windows.
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.
“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 activities 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 bookst
ore 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.
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