“Damn, I’ve got to meet this woman.”
Annie wasn’t amused. “Your father should have warned you about females like her.”
“He might have,” Max said blandly.
“If he didn’t, I am.” She sighed wearily and looked around the dimly lit coffee area. “Golly, I’m tired, and I still haven’t put all the stuff for tomorrow in my car.”
“I’ll do it.”
“We’ll do it together.”
Annie drove the Volvo into the alley and parked it by the door to the storeroom. They perched their beer bottles on the car roof and carried the pre-packed boxes from the storeroom. As she lifted in the last one, she said, “Hey, with all the fireworks in Chastain, I forgot to ask about your painting case. Did you solve it?”
Max pushed down the trunk lid. “Yeah.” His voice sounded oddly flat.
She peered at him in the golden shaft of light from the lamp at the end of the alley. “What’s wrong?”
“It wasn’t much fun.”
“What happened?”
He reached up and retrieved the beer bottles and handed one to her, then leaned against the trunk. “I feel like a rat. But, I had to put a stop to it. Dammit, love can sure screw people up.”
“What’s love got to do with a missing picture?” She tilted her bottle and welcomed the sharp taste of the beer.
“Everything. You see, old Mrs. Hilliard is dead crazy about her nephew. She’s had a young girl named Edie keeping house for her and running errands. Her nephew, Alec, met the girl and fell for her—and Mrs. Hilliard doesn’t think the girl’s good enough. The usual objections. No education. No background. Too much make-up. And Alec’s the pride of her life. She sent him to college, and he’s a rising young junior executive at the bank.”
“Did Edie rip off the painting?”
“That’s the picture.” He grinned a little as Annie winced. “I went to the antique store. Got the description of the person selling it. Right enough, it’s Edie. I got the signed statement from the owner.”
“So why do you feel like a rat? Looks like Mrs. Hilliard—”
“Sure that’s what it looks like. Simple case, right? One more confidential commission executed. But I sat on that statement for a couple of days. I decided to nose a little harder. I hung around outside Mrs. Hilliard’s, waited ‘til Edie came out and followed her. I struck up a conversation. In a nutshell: her story is that Mrs. Hilliard asked her to sell the painting, and she turned the money over to the old lady.”
“I don’t get it.”
“Neither did I, so I nosed around some more. Found out Alec isn’t the sort of fellow to look past the obvious.”
Annie understood. A signed statement. Once love-struck Alec saw it—
“What did you do?”
“She’s a sweet old thing. Crazy about that guy.” He cleared his throat. “I told her I was on to the scam, and it was no deal.”
“So why do you feel so bad?”
“I told you. She’s a sweet old thing, and the funny part of it is, I think she’s right about Edie.”
“When good people do bad things,” Annie said quietly.
“All because of love,” he concluded.
He upended his bottle, finishing his beer.
She patted his shoulder. “Come on, let’s go take a swim. Tomorrow, we’ll be caught up in a script, and we won’t have to worry about real emotions.”
IN THE ORDERLY CONFINES of her imagination, Annie had pictured the opening day of the Chastain House and Garden tours: the weather would be April idyllic, soft puffy clouds dotting a turquoise sky; the participants would be genteel, interchangeable with an audience at, say, Sotheby’s, and there would be a general aura of Southern elegance, like a debutante’s garden party. That was how the month-long pageant unfolded in Charleston’s Historic District.
She got it right about the weather. The sky glittered like a blue enamel bowl, and the air was as soft and smooth as Scotch House cashmere. But half a mile from the historic area, she realized the Board of the Chastain Historical Preservation Society had neglected to inform her of some of Chastain’s native customs. Cars that had enjoyed their youth in the Truman administration, mud-splashed pickups, and a rickety hayrack pulled by a green John Deere tractor and carrying a bevy of bony teenage girls in long white dresses clogged Montgomery, the main artery (it actually boasted four lanes) to the River. There was a lengthy pause at Montgomery and Federal for the passage of the Chastain High School Marching Band in purple and black uniforms. The musicians were belting out a fairly good rendition of “The Saints Go Marching In” except for the proclivity of one clarinet to squawk on the high notes. Every parking place on both sides of Montgomery was taken. Energetic hucksters held up hand-painted signs, PARKING $5, offering five to ten spots per front yard. Pedestrians thronged the brick sidewalks. They didn’t look like garden party goers to Annie: farmers in high-bibbed overalls and women in freshly starched print cotton dresses; teenagers in so many layers of clothing, shirt on sweater on pullover on sleeveless jersey, it was difficult to imagine, much less determine, sex; and tourists of all sorts and shapes, fat, thin, tall, and tiny, but identifiable by the profusion of costly cameras and camera accessories that hung around their necks, including light meters, zoom lenses, filter cases, and even collapsible tripods.
It took twelve minutes to inch across the intersection once the band played past. Annie feared asphyxiation from the bilious fumes roiling out of the Mercedes Diesel in front of her. It didn’t improve her humor to recognize the driver as Dr. Sanford, who blasted his horn every foot or two. In a damn big hurry, wasn’t he? But he hadn’t made any effort to arrive on time for the rehearsal last night. Halfway up the block, he signaled and turned left. By the time she realized he was turning into the alley behind the historic houses, which provided access to the parking lot at the Historical Society, she was past the opening and fated to continue her snail-like inexorable progress forward.
Ephraim Street stunned her. Where yesterday there had been an occasional car and the placid calm of an unhurried backwater, there was today a chaos that at first glance resembled the deployment of several thousand extras in a Steven Spielberg spectacular. Sightseers milled about the street. Booths filled every inch of space along the river bluff, except for a broad space directly across from the Prichard House where workmen tussled with scaffolding to erect a grandstand overlooking the river. In the booths, Annie glimpsed painted wooden ducks; a Statue of Liberty fashioned from fused Coke bottles; hundreds of quilts; shiny wooden signs that announced The Joneses, People Love My Kitchen Best, Use It or Lose It, and Daddy’s Girl; stacks of Canton Blue china (manufactured in Taiwan?), and potholders shaped like roosters, cats, baseball mitts, and starfish. Hot dog stands dispensed coneys, chili, and pop, while vendors hawked barbecue, fried shrimp, cotton candy, and egg rolls.
She was halfway into a left turn, although realizing it would be slow going up Ephraim Street because of the crowds, when a whistle shrilled. Jamming on her brakes, she poked her head out of the window.
The uniformed policeman had patches of sweat under his armpits, and he looked like he hadn’t smiled in a millenium or so, the frown lines were so deeply engraved on either side of this mouth.
“Closed for the crafts fair. No left turn. NO LEFT TURN, LADY!” The whistle scalded the air.
“I’ve got to get to the Society parking lot. I’m already late—”
He held a hand behind his ear, then chopped a fist to her right. “Right turn, lady. RIGHT TURN.”
She tried again, yelling like a trader in the closing five.
Swiping sweat from his forehead, he lunged to the car. “Lady, no exceptions. The street’s closed.”
“I’ve got to get to the Prichard House. I’m in charge of the murder.”
“No need to get ugly,” he yelled back. “I didn’t make the street plans. You turn right, or you go to jail.”
Twenty-eight minutes later, after a circuitous route that riva
led the complexity of a maze, Annie wedged the Volvo between a yellow Winnebago (Wisconsin plates) plastered with stickers—Yellowstone’s for the Bears, Take Me Back to Texas, My Heart Belongs to San Francisco, and Chattanooga Choo-Choo Me Home—and a black Toyota pickup that smelled strongly of chicken manure.
She unlocked the trunk and looked at the boxes, none of them small, then sighed, and hefted the first one. It was awkward to carry, and she could scarcely see over it. She was rounding the corner when her knees came up hard against a metal obstacle, and she fell heavily forward.
“Here now, Papa, the lady’s fallen,” a soft country voice called out.
A large calloused hand reached down and lifted her as easily as setting a broom upright, but a hoarse voice howled angrily: “My placards. Don’t let those fools stomp on my placards. Clumsy idiots.”
And Annie was clambering around on her hands and knees trying to scoop up the mystery sheets which had tumbled from the box. Then she realized she was eye-to-eye with an enraged Miss Dora, equally vigorously pursuing the contents of her upended wagon, which had brought Annie down.
It sorted out in a moment, two friendly Georgians forming a blockade against the crowd. Soon Annie’s box was full and Miss Dora’s wagon and her placards restored.
Miss Dora gave Annie a venomous glare, then hunkered down and resumed pounding on the placard-adorned stake at the corner of Lafayette and Ephraim streets.
Annie read the message, written in a fine Spencerian script on white posterboard and covered with a protective sheet of Saran wrap:
“Here stood the waggon yards from 1802 to 1825. Cotton was unloaded here and sold for shipment abroad. Due east of this site rose the shops which served the planters, offering clothing for slaves, shoes, harnesses, groceries, satin, laces, and India china.”
In the background, pounding continued on the grandstand, holiday banter rose in a Niagara-like roar, and vendors shouted.
Annie rubbed her bruised knees, sighed, picked up her box, and set out for the Prichard mansion.
It was not an auspicious beginning.
Where the hell were the tables? With her luck, they’d been sucked into the crafts fair booths, never to surface again, or perhaps to reappear laden with tinware, log cabins made of matchsticks, or pictures painted-by-the-number of iron-gray Traveller with his black mane and tail. But she had to have tables—
“Miss Laurance.”
Annie pivoted. Corinne stood at the top of the marble steps to Prichard House. She wore a sky blue satin-finish wool gabardine that emphasized her youthful figure and the satisfied expression of a chatelaine who’s caught the maid snitching a bonbon.
“You certainly took your time getting here this morning. I’ve been watching for you, and I must say, you’re very late.”
The box of mimeographed Mystery Nights instructions weighed at least twenty-five pounds. Annie had lugged it from the parking lot, survived her encounter with Miss Dora, and maneuvered through tourists clotted like Devonshire cream on the sidewalks. Her once crisp mid-calf navy skirt and cotton cambric blouse with a deep frilled shawl collar clung limply to her aching body.
She glared up at Corinne. “Why the hell didn’t anybody tell me this place would be like Atlantic City when the casinos opened?”
Corinne stiffened haughtily. “Obviously, Miss Laurance, you lack the necessary experience to take part in a House and Garden week. I want to make it clear that I will certainly urge the Board to withhold full payment of your fee if the Mystery Nights are inadequately produced.”
Annie’s eyes slitted like Agatha’s on the approach of a blue jay. “Mrs. Webster, if anything turns out to be inadequate, it won’t be the Mystery Nights,” and she turned on her heel.
At three o’clock that afternoon, Annie wondered if her brave words could be fulfilled. Clutching a box of clues and a croquet mallet, she stood indecisively on her left foot, and tried to read her smudged list.
Tents.
Chairs. Tables. Platform.
Speaker’s stand.
Audio equipment.
Death on Demand display.
Crime Scene materials.
The candy-striped tents were in place, three of them: black-and-white, red-and-white, and green-and-yellow. A large poster was affixed to the main entrance of each: POLICE HEADQUARTERS (black-and-white), SUSPECT INTERROGATIONS (red-and-white), and DETECTION TEAMS CONFERENCE AREA (green-and-yellow).
Where the hell were the tables? She’d called three times, and they had yet to arrive. The long conference tables were to be set up in the headquarters tent to hold clues and copies of the suspects’ statements, and the round tables capable of seating ten in the other tents.
If there were six of her, it might all come off on schedule. As it was, she felt a frantic urge to race into the Society building to check on the audio equipment and an equally frantic urge to hotfoot it in the opposite direction down the shell path to the pond and strew clues. This inability to decide where to leap next accounted for her storklike wobble on one foot. Fortunately, she did have help. Max had arrived late, of course, held up by the traffic, but he was busy now talking to Harry Wells, the police chief, who had agreed to serve as technical advisor, and Edith Ferrier, obviously in her element, was crisply ordering about the extremely slow-moving minions from the rental company that was providing the tents, chairs, and platform, but that had, as yet, failed to come up with the tables. Meanwhile, Society members fanned out up and down Ephraim Street, making last-minute checks on contents of the rooms to be shown in the three houses. Every so often, Edith introduced Annie to an other docent, and she’d now perfected a response to “Isn’t it scary to plan a murder?”
As she tried to decide which direction to spring, Annie heard Edith’s high, rather humorless voice admonishing a catering employee to be careful in firing the butane-fueled steam ovens which would be used to roast the oysters. Out of the corner of her eye, she spotted Corinne making yet another foray. Annie turned to look down the path toward the gazebo. It would be better for her blood pressure if she didn’t tangle with Corinne again today.
Then she spotted one of Miss Dora’s placards. It was better than Kilroy Was Here, and it gave her an excuse to keep her back to Corinne. She crossed several feet of lawn to read it.
“The earliest home at this site was erected by Morris Prichard in 1746 for his bride, Elizabeth. It was a two-story frame structure built on a stuccoed brick foundation with a hipped roof and a small portico facing the river. It was lost in the Great Fire of 1831. Old Chastainians claim that a grieving spirit, Abigail McNeil Prichard, may sometimes be glimpsed crossing the lawn at dusk in early spring, searching for her husband, Donald, who was killed by the British at the Battle of Fort Balfour, April 13, 1781. The present Greek Revival house was built in 1834 by Abigail’s grandson, Nathaniel.”
Annie looked across the freshly mown lawn, much of it hidden now by the colorful tents, and she wondered what Abigail’s ghost would think of the brightly striped tents, the fluttering groups of women in pastel dresses, and the harried caterers frantically shoving together the last of the serving tables. Tables. That reminded her—she swung around and wished she hadn’t.
Corinne stood beside Edith, one hand on the younger woman’s arm, the other gesturing at the serving tables arranged on the drive east of the tents.
“I thought we’d included the she crab soup in the menu.”
“The Women of Old Chastain are serving the soup and shrimp salad sandwiches this week in their booth.”
“Oh.” The monosyllable hung like a block of ice between them. “I suppose it’s difficult to decide to whom you owe your loyalty, Edith, when you are active in so many organizations. But I do believe you should have remembered that the Chastain Historical Preservation Society is the oldest and most important society in Chastain—and we should, of course, during the Tour Week be offering the best low country food at our buffet.” Corinne lifted her shoulders in a delicate shrug. “However, it’s too late to
make any improvements in the menu now, so I—”
“The menu doesn’t need any improvement.” Edith’s deep-set green eyes burned in her sallow face. She looked like a Picasso pastiche animated by hatred: arms akimbo, sunken cheeks touched with fire, black-and-white silk dress, a half-dozen gold bracelets.
Annie held her breath, almost expecting the woman to explode, like a tangle of wire and steel blown apart by dynamite.
Edith’s tight, controlled voice rattled off the foods. “We have okra, shrimp, and crab gumbo, oyster pie, shrimp pilau, stuffed flounder, roast oysters, corn on the cob, black-eyed peas with bacon, orange halves stuffed with sweet potato, cheese souffle with oyster sauce, hush puppies, cheese popovers, lemon chess pie, sweet potato pie, and Carolina trifle.”
Even Corinne looked impressed. “Well, that sounds very good.” Her cherry red lips formed a patronizing smile. “Edith, you certainly do have a talent for organizing kitchen work. I do hope that you will continue to be willing to exercise your abilities for the good of the Society. I know it was a disappointment when you weren’t named to the slate for president, but I’m sure that you will continue to find your natural level.” Then she looked past Edith and raised her hand to wave, “Jessica, wait a moment, I want to talk to you.”
As she hurried away, Edith remained by the last serving table, staring after Corinne, her face rigid with fury. Annie tucked the croquet mallet under her arm and moved closer, reaching out to touch her arm.
“Hey, don’t let her get to you. She’s just a bitch.”
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