THEIR FIRST NIGHT TOGETHER …
“Ingrid?”
Max’s call was soft. The cabin was so quiet. So still. Annie tried to batter down the horrid images that kept rising in her minds eye. Ingrid would have rushed to them, if she were there. If she were able.
The screen door was closed, but beyond it, Ingrid’s front door was ajar.
Annie would never forget the scene that flashed into view: Max leaning forward in a crouch, his fists balled, ready to attack; the familiar shabby gentility of Ingrid’s living room, petit point cushions on the cheerful chintz sofa, linen drapes in cobalt blue with a design of white shasta daisies, and, in the center of the room, staring sightlessly up at the stippled plaster ceiling, the body spread-eagled on the blue-and-grey hooked rug.
Bantam Books by Carolyn Hart
THE CHRISTIE CAPER
DEATH ON DEMAND
DESIGN FOR MURDER
SOMETHING WICKED
HONEYMOON WITH MURDER
A LITTLE CLASS ON MURDER
DEADLY VALENTINE
SOUTHERN GHOST
DEAD MAN’S ISLAND
SCANDAL IN FAIR HAVEN
MINT JULEP MURDER
To Kate,
Editor Par Excellence
ONE
Just before dawn
Wednesday, September 16
Jesse Penrick didn’t miss much on his solitary nocturnal rambles. Lights at an odd hour. A visitor never before seen. An unfamiliar car.
It was the car that attracted him in the ghostly hour just before dawn. The car and the window lighted at such an unusually for this cabin, early hour. Jesse sidled between the oleander and the exterior wall to peer through the smudged window. He liked looking in from the darkness, unseen, unfelt. He liked to slip inside unlatched doors, too, when occupants were absent. He liked finding out about people.
Knowing funny little facts could pay off Sometimes the payoff was slipping in the needle, the muttered comment that brought a flash of fear or fury to an unwary face.
Jesse Penrick liked finding out about people. But he didn’t like people.
His watery, nearsighted eyes strained to see as much as possible. The wooden shutters were closed, but a broken slat afforded him a narrow field of vision, the portion of the living room that held a couple of wicker chairs and a wooden chest. As he watched, the occupant of the room came into view, carrying an awkward, lumpy bundle. The bearer dumped the load on the floor beside the wooden chest, then lifted the lid.
But Jesse’s gaze was riveted on the floor and the red-and-blue quilt—just like one his grandmothere’d made—that gaped open to reveal its contents.
Jesse could have called the police.
It would have been exciting. Lights flashing. Sirens. Maybe even yellow tape like he saw sometimes in TV crime scenes. And Jesse could be a hero, interviewed on Channel 10. Hot stuff.
Instead, he waited, his gnarled hands gripping the window frame. In only a few minutes, the room was empty and dark, the bundle stuffed into the chest, the lights turned off, the car departed in a swirl of dust.
Jesse looked once over his shoulder, then trotted to the back of the cabin and the kitchen door he had learned to shake until the bolt slipped. He tiptoed inside. He had a little pocket flash which he aimed down at the opened chest. He tugged on the quilt. His impersonal blue eyes surveyed the interior thoughtfully, then he gave a satisfied nod. Without a qualm, he reached down and pulled. In a moment, he stared at the soft gleam of gold against his palm. That would prove he’d been here, all right.
He tucked the covering in place, closed the lid, then slid out of the house as silently as he’d come. Be interesting to see what happened next. And it would happen pretty quick, as hot as it was. He didn’t have to be in any hurry. But, when the time was right, he’d make a little phone call. Be a hell of a shock. His thin mouth stretched in a wolfish grin.
TWO
Thursday evening,
September 17
Lucinda Burrows darted through the crowd, her brown alligator heels clicking excitedly against the concrete.
She’d done just as instructed, and the whole operation had gone without a hitch.
She was good at this.
Soon there would be more to do. Her green eyes glowed with excitement. She caught a glimpse of herself in plate glass and was pleased. She still looked young—and tonight she felt so young. To think this fabulous week had begun with a chance conversation at her favorite bookstore. After all the years of reading about adventure, adventure had come to her. She’d never thought it could happen!
She paused once, a little daunted now, because the crowds had thinned, and she was at the far end of the long drive that led to the highway. Then lights blinked twice in the darkness beneath a line of loblolly pines.
She took a tighter grip on her overnight bag and broke into an eager trot, stumbling a little in her eagerness, careening like a moth toward extinction.
THREE
Thursday night,
September 17
The perfect crime.
Who said it couldn’t be done?
The solitary drinker raised the champagne glass in silent toast.
To crime.
It was then—and did some dark gods in a shadowy corner of the universe clasp their sides and shake with mirth?—that the phone began to ring.
FOUR
Early Saturday morning,
September 19
Ingrid Jones had no idea she was being observed, she and the whole expanse of Nightingale Courts. She was oblivious to her surroundings this morning, although she was one of the islands most fervent boosters. In the mornings, she often took time to stroll out on one of the long narrow piers to watch a passing sailboat or frolicking dolphins. At low tide, she’d stand very still and enjoy the antics of solemn-faced raccoons, the grace of small white-tailed deer, and the industry of scavenging blue crabs. But today she marched in the opposite direction, toward the row of silvery mailboxes next to the honeysuckle-laden arbor at the entrance to Nightingale Courts, her mind teeming with last minute chores for the wedding. Thank heaven the blistering heat had broken. Thursday and Friday had sizzled, even for September in the semi-tropics. Today’s breeze held a hint of freshening. Not cool, certainly, but not steamy. It would make the un-air-conditioned church bearable. She needed to be sure the bridesmaids’ dresses were at the church in plenty of time. Max certainly did have pretty sisters, all three of them. Though that one, Deidre, was probably a real handful. Of course, anybody with a mother like Laurel …
Thrusting her hand into Box No. 3, she pulled out yesterday’s mail. She hadn’t had a minute to look Friday, what with the tennis tournament for the bridesmaids and the golfing scramble for the groomsmen. And last night had certainly been spectacular—the rehearsal dinner aboard an island tour boat, complete with mariachis on one level, an Irish balladeer on the second, and a Mozart quartet on the third. And the food. You had to hand it to Laurel, she was really into round-the-world in eighty tastes. Ingrid herself considered American cooking plenty good enough and Low Country cuisine best of all, but the exotic foreign dishes certainly added spice. She just hoped Annie didn’t have indigestion today, after that Indonesian curry and reindeer stew. Seemed a shame to kill a reindeer; but, as Laurel said, what was an ecological sacrifice if it was made in the name of love?
A tiny smile touched Ingrid’s face. Dear me, if that woman couldn’t talk about love. And in half a dozen languages, too. Well, it was going to be an original wedding, even though Annie had managed to tone down some of Laurel’s notions. There was, Ingrid had to admit, certainly an aura about this union, though she wouldn’t go so far as to call it, as Laurel did, a Cosmic Statement on Love.
It was only happenstance that she saw the splotch of red. She was turning away, her mind still teeming with items to be done, when the brilliantly red, uneven marking caught her eye.
Though it was intended to attract attention, of course, that vivid scarlet A emblazoned on Box 6. Attract attention and cause pain. Her hand unconsciously tightened on the sheaf of mail, crumpling it. She knew who was responsible. There was no doubt in her mind, though she felt an instants surprise at his literary knowledge. But just an instant. As all old librarians know, you can’t characterize readers. They come in all persuasions, from bricklayers to physicists, from the vicious to the angelic. So Jesse Penrick knew Hawthorne. It didn’t raise her estimation of him. She had very strong feelings about Jesse Penrick.
She whirled to face his cabin and the inlet. Speak of the very devil, here he came, his boat gliding across the water, his blue-clad scrawny arms rising and falling with the oars. Returning from one of his cat-footed, voyeuristic nocturnal outings.
Ingrid hesitated for an instant. This wasn’t the day to face down Jesse Penrick. This was a very special day, Annie and Max’s wedding day, and nothing must detract from its beauty.
But she couldn’t let the sleazeball get away with this latest dirty trick.
She was standing on the pier waiting, when he skinnied up the ladder, agile as a monkey.
“I want that mailbox cleaned up, Jesse. Today.”
“Mailbox?” He had a slimy voice. Reminded her of old-fashioned hair oil. “Something wrong with a mailbox?” His watery blue eyes glistened with pleasure.
Take it easy, Ingrid warned herself. He was taunting her. He wanted her to lose her temper. That was part of the fun.
“Clean it up, or I’m going to throw you out of here. Your lease comes up next month. And don’t think I won’t do it.”
He hunched his bony shoulders beneath the thick all-cotton navy blue turtleneck. He must have a closet full of them. It was all he ever wore, navy blue turtlenecks and tight dungarees. The better to move unseen through the night. The wind tugged at the strand of iron-grey hair that straggled across his forehead. His thin lips drew back in a snarl. “You just try it. You just try! I’ve been to see a lawyer at Legal Aid. You can’t push me out on some trumped-up story. And I’ll tell you why. It’d be discrimination. That’s what the lawyer said: Dis-Crim-I-Na-Tion, and you can’t do it, hear?”
She stared at him and knew she was close to exploding.
The snarl eased into a satisfied grin. “I’m going to get me the last laugh, you’d better believe it.”
Ingrid was determined not to be drawn. This was a big day. An important day. The most important day for Annie and Max. She wasn’t going to let a festering piece of sewage like Jesse Penrick ruin this day.
Without a word, she started to turn away.
“And if you don’t take the check, maybe I’ll speak out about some of the goings-on in these cabins.”
Her head jerked around.
He grinned malevolently. “So maybe you won’t be so high and mighty, huh?”
Ingrid’s temper wasn’t as easily triggered as that of her employer at the famous mystery bookstore, Death on Demand, but even Ingrid had a flash point.
Her face flushing, she exploded, telling Jesse Penrick, in ringing tones and in full view of the Nightingale Courts, the sun-bright marsh, and the inlet, just how despicable she thought he was, in language both rude and Saxon-pungent, as might be expected of a very well educated ex-librarian.
FIVE
Early Saturday morning,
September 19
Annie Laurance slipped stealthily down the alley, crouching once behind a Dumpster to avoid an early morning encounter with Maisie Wellington, who owned the shop next to Death on Demand. It wasn’t that she didn’t like Maisie. She did, despite Maisie’s disdain for mystery fiction. (“I mean, honey, it’s so gruesome.”) Annie objected mightily, however, to Maisie’s determination to foist shell-pink lingerie on her. Annie preferred sleeping in a T-shirt and shorts in the summer and threadbare sweats on the occasional chilly days in January and February. (Oh, God, how could she reconcile seductiveness and comfort—although, actually, Max had always seemed quite enchanted with T-shirts and panties, and why should she have to change now?) And Annie found highly irritating Maisie’s unshakable conviction that it was her God-given duty, as an older woman, to prepare poor little motherless Annie for Married Life.
Annie peered from behind the Dumpster and saw Maisie’s plump rear disappearing into the service entrance of Lingerie for Loving Ladies.
With a leap as agile as a fawn evading a bobcat, Annie reached the back step of Death on Demand, fumbled with the key, and darted inside. As the storeroom door closed behind her, she let out her breath in an enormous whoosh.
For a moment, she didn’t even move. She just leaned against the door and tried not to think.
However, it was beyond her capacity for thought control to ignore the monumental truth: today was her Wedding Day.
She was thrilled, terrified, excited, panicked, profoundly sentimental—and poised for flight. Until she thought of Max. Dear, wonderful Max. How did he feel right now? She glanced down at her watch. Almost eight. He would be showering. Her lips curved in a smile. She enjoyed thinking of Max in the shower, warm water pelting his broad shoulders and nicely muscled legs. In fact, Max was nicely muscled….
Eight o’clock.
Annie swallowed. In half an hour she was due at the Wedding Day Breakfast. She wondered if, once past the ceremony, she would shed this proclivity to think in capital letters. It was the inevitable consequence of several weeks spent in close and continuing contact with Laurel, Max’s mother.
Laurel …
She was unlike anyone Annie had ever met. Annie determinedly ignored the nervous, wiggly little thought deep in the recesses of her mind that Laurel was merely Max intensified. In fact, Annie refused consciously to entertain that treacherous supposition. Max, of course, was laid back. His unflappability, his poise, his imperviousness to worry, accounted for much of his charm. But he was not spacey. Max was wonderful, and late this afternoon he would become her husband.
Annie pushed off the door like a shot and catapulted into the coffee area and began to pace.
She was too young to get married.
She was too old to get married.
She struggled to breathe. Was she having a heart attack? She was too young to have a heart attack. Then why was she breathless and feeling as if her chest were an expanding cavity? She was too old to be acting like this.
Panting, she drew in gulps of the wonderful, soothing aroma of her bookstore, which was, of course, the finest mystery bookstore this side of Atlanta, with its glistening heart-pine floors and row after row of books, all the mysteries any reader could want and more, from Aarons to Zangwill, and a coffee bar with Colombian, French, and Hawaiian blends, and a sleekly black, resident stuffed raven named Edgar, of course, in honor of Edgar Allan Poe, the dark genius who originated the mystery, and a resident (not stuffed) cat, also sleekly black.
“Agatha? Agatha?”
An ebony head lifted languidly from the coffee bar. In the light cascading luminously from the high south windows, the amber eyes glowed wickedly.
Annie flung herself toward the coffee bar and grabbed the sleek feline. “Agatha, love, I’m panicked.”
Agatha hissed, wriggled like an eel, and wormed free, scratching Annie’s right wrist as she dropped to the floor.
“Oh. You’re on Max’s side, I guess.”
But Agatha had fled into the deeper shadows of the rattan-and-wicker reading area, no doubt seeking sanctuary beneath her favorite Whitmani fern.
Licking absently at her wound, Annie turned back toward the coffee area. She must get a grip on herself. She was committed. Three hundred eighty-seven guests were at various stages of dress this morning on the island of Broward’s Rock in anticipation of a magnificent Wedding Day Breakfast, and Annie had to go. And to the Wedding a
t five P.M. Yes, dammit. Capital letters. Capital hysteria.
One chest-expanding breath.
Two.
Three.
She again drew deeply on the soothing scent of old bookbindings, leather, paper, and ink. Of course, mysteries. She would contemplate mysteries, immerse her mind in—
With a shock, she realized she’d scarcely been in the store since September began. She’d been too occupied with wedding plans—and with Laurel—but that was another story. Still, it startled her to realize she hadn’t even looked at this months display of mystery paintings. Obviously, Ingrid, her most patient and wonderful assistant, who would tonight serve as Matron of Honor (no, she wouldn’t think about the wedding!), had ordered and hung the five—and weren’t they excellent!
In the first watercolor, an imposing, broad-shouldered figure sat in a high armchair behind a red brocade-covered bench. He held aloft a blackwood gavel, poised to bang against the bench. He wore a glossy black silk judges cap, with gauze wings, and a long, official robe of heavy green brocade. Intelligence glowed in the dark eyes set off by almond-toned skin, a full black beard, and long sideburns. Dotting the painting like colorful butterflies were miniature renditions of a magnificent Buddhist temple, a tilted bronze bell, two golden hairpins, and the wooden hand gong often carried by mendicant monks.
A world sheathed in ice and snow glittered in the second painting. A monk, his habit covered by a thick traveling cloak, stood in snow-crusted boots by the edge of a frozen brook, staring grimly down at the body of a beautiful woman, held in the ice like a fly in amber.
Moonlight bathed a cliff face in the third painting, illuminating a grotesque figure, swathed in yards of crumbling bandages that covered both body and face. Against the rotting bandages of its breast, the creature pressed the unconscious form of a young woman. Two striking figures stared in astonishment and horror, a strong-featured, black-haired woman and a tall, well-built man with a bronzed face, bright blue eyes, and a dimpled chin. The man carried a limp, turbaned figure in his arms.
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