The Persian cat rose on hind legs and began to shred the curtain.
Annie regretfully turned away. She wanted to talk to Ophelia Baxter, who had so artlessly revealed Ingrid’s hot encounter with the soon-to-be-murdered Jesse Penrick. Time to find out whether that revelation had indeed been artless.
She passed Ingrid’s cabin. Yellow police tape fluttered in the breeze. When had Jesse’s body been removed? Was the autopsy done yet? When it was, how could they find out anything with Chief Saulter away? Maybe Henny would have some means of extracting information from the Southern Division Office of the Beaufort County Sheriff’s Department.
Cabin 4 had a disheveled air. The drifting needles from the yellow pines lay as they had fallen, with no effort to marshal them. The morning paper had been flung midway between the circle drive and the front steps. Drawn shades closed out the sun here, too. She hurried up the steps and knocked, sharply.
The door opened slowly. Duane Webb stared out at her stonily, his bleary eyes magnified through his thick-lensed wire-frame glasses. He hadn’t shaved yet, and the whitish stubble emphasized his receding hairline and sparse ring of greying hair. The scent of dust and old air rushed out at her, air that had been closed in for a long time. He was still dressed as he had been in those frantic hours of the night, in crumpled khakis and a faded sports shirt.
“Ingrid?” The slurred voice rose ever so little in inquiry.
Now she identified another scent, too, the sour reek of bourbon.
“Nothing yet. They haven’t found her.”
He turned away, shambled back into darkness.
Annie hesitated, then opened the screen door and entered.
Webb sank heavily into an armchair and picked up a tumbler half filled with whisky.
Although the room was dusty and cluttered with newspapers, it was well furnished. She stared in some surprise at the nubby linen-upholstered couch and matching chairs of Swedish design, with clean, plain lines. All the furniture coverings were variations of lemon. Against the south wall hung a huge modernist painting with splashes of black, orange, cobalt, and cherry. White bookcases, jammed with texts, books, and pamphlets, filled two walls. The chairs, the paintings, and the bookcases dwarfed the small living room. Annie felt certain they once had stood in cool, spatial elegance in another time and place.
It was a room that cried out for sunlight and laughter.
Without thinking, the words popped out. “Why are you sitting here in the dark?”
He slumped in the chair, staring at the tumbler that he held in both massive hands. His head looked like a candy skull for the Day of the Dead, pasty white with staring eyes. Deeply indented lines of pain were etched from nose to chin.
“Who the hell are you?” But the demand held little energy, as if the combative words erupted automatically. It was the roar of a toothless tiger.
“Annie Laurance.” She spoke quietly, gently. “Ingrid’s friend. We came last night, when Ingrid called. My husband and I.” Which reminded her. “Actually, Annie Laurance-Darling.”
“Oh, yeah. Yeah. I remember.”
“I thought you were Ingrid’s friend, too. You tried to help find her.”
“I was. I was.” The past tense weighted the words with despair. “Ingrid. Kind of a harsh name. And she wore it like an armor. But she was gentle—and kind.” He turned the glass of bourbon around, staring into the liquid. “Brought me soup last winter, when I was sick. She knew I wanted to die. But she didn’t care, told me it was my duty to finish the course.” A ghost of a smile tugged at his lips. “She loved mysteries, you know.” He looked up at Annie. “Sure, you know that. She worked for you. She told me to think about Andrew MacWhirter in Towards Zero.” A rumble that might have been laughter. “I told her to go to hell. She told me I was a spoiled kid. I asked her what the hell she knew about it. Turned out she knew a lot. She was alone, too. I’ll bet you didn’t know about Paul?”
He no longer looked at Annie. His mind was focused on knowledge beyond hers. She stepped nearer and sank into the chair opposite his. He stared into the whisky, and his words peopled the shadows with long ago places and dimly seen figures.
“Must’ve been a hell of a guy. For Ingrid to have cared so much. She showed me his picture.” The glass in his hands moved around and around. “She doesn’t have very many. They were young. Like you. Paul was going to be a professor. Chaucer. You ever read much Chaucer?”
“Not a lot.” The Canterbury Tales, of course. She always recalled with sympathy Chaucer’s plea at the end of Troilus, “Go, little book, and since there is so great diversity in English and in the writing of our tongue, I pray God no one will miswrite or mismeter you through ignorance of language, and wherever you may be read, I pray God you may be understood.”
“Chaucer’s full of laughter. And lust. And compassion. A man who loved Chaucer understood what life’s about. A bloody struggle. A bloody damn struggle.”
He fell silent.
“Ingrid and Paul?” Annie prodded gently.
Dark eyes focused on her abruptly. “Lou Gehrig’s disease. That distances it, doesn’t it? Name a goddam debilitating fatal disease after a big league baseball player. Makes it something that happens to other people. But it happened to Paul. They’d been married two years.” He lifted the glass, drank deeply. “She got to watch him die.” Anger flashed now in those dark eyes. The whisky couldn’t kill the pain. “So what the hells the point? Why? A good-looking guy with a good mind, and he loves a good woman? So why the bloody hell does it have to happen?”
“I don’t know.” Her words drifted in the dim air, like autumn leaves in a November wind.
“Hell, no, you don’t know.” Anger still pumped his voice. “You’re a bloody kid. You don’t know anything.”
She knew heartbreak when she met it. There might be the right words. Perhaps Father Dowling or Rabbi Small or the Reverend Randollph would have known them. She didn’t.
He downed the rest of the bourbon in a gulp, reached for the bottle.
“But if you care about Ingrid, why aren’t you helping in the search now?”
Those thick-lensed glasses turned toward the modernistic clock, green metal hands for the hour and minutes against a white background with yellow diamonds in place of figures. “If you don’t find them in twelve hours, they’re dead. After twelve hours, the chances go down faster than mercury in a blizzard.” The hand tilting the bottle was steady. “Missing persons. Anything else is hokum. I was a city editor for almost twenty years. Story after story.” He lifted the glass. “Body after body.”
Ingrid didn’t live in this room. She’d joined the shadows that moved in his mind.
“If she’s dead, somebody’s going to pay for it,” Annie retorted angrily.
He laughed at that, and the sound was ugly. “Oh, you are so goddamned young. Pay for it? Oh, sure, sure. So you find the murderer. Big deal. Case solved. Four-column head in the Gazette. Wonderful. The State prosecutes and, lo and behold, gets a goddam conviction. That’s great. And three years later, the bloody murderer’ll be appealing the death sentence and appealing and appealing and still alive, while Ingrid’s mouldered in a goddam grave. Kid, you’d better understand, nobody gives a goddam about the victim. All the rights are for the killer. But you’ll find out.” He raised his glass. “Here’s to the education of Little Miss Do-Good.”
Annie’s head was beginning to throb. The room was suddenly suffocating. “You—you’re disgusting. And no help to Ingrid.”
“She’s past being helped, you little fool.”
Annie almost jumped to her feet, then she forced herself to remain. “Look,” she entreated, “there’s a chance for Ingrid. A good chance. It doesn’t make any sense for a murderer to leave one body and take another one. Ingrid’s been taken for a reason. Our best chance of finding her is to discover Jesse’s murderer. You lived here. You can help me.” She knew he could. No matter how much whisky he had drunk, his mind wasn’t befuddled. “Who had a reason
to kill Jesse Penrick?”
He gulped more bourbon, then his heavy shoulders began to shake. He was laughing.
“Who had a reason to kill Jesse? Oh Jesus, who didn’t?”
“Why?” Annie demanded. “So he was hateful and quarrelsome. So what? What was there about him that could bring someone to kill him? What was he really like?”
“What was he really like?” His voice rose as he mimicked her. Slowly, the ugly laughter subsided. “He wasn’t the kind of man you’d know anything about, kid. He was tighter with his nickels than a hophead with his last benny. He had a nasty tongue and a mind that crawled with venom like maggots on the underside of a rock. He liked sleaze, and he’d go all the way to Savannah to see dirty movies because he was too cheap to buy a VCR. Oh, Jesse was a sweetheart, all right.” An ugly smile twisted Webb’s face. “Who wanted to kill Jesse? Who didn’t? If you knew him, you hated him. Oh, Jesus, I’d like to have taken his scrawny little neck in my hands and squeezed until his eyes popped out.” A vein bulged in Webb’s forehead and his eyes blazed. “God, I hated that sorry little bastard.”
Annie wished desperately to be free of that room and its freight of misery and anger, but she persisted. “Why? Why did you hate him?”
“He liked to see people suffer. So I’m glad he’s dead—and I hope it hurt like hell.”
She stared at him for a long moment. Was he drunk? How well could he think? So she asked, “What time did you see him last night?”
At first, she thought he wasn’t going to answer, then slowly the moon-face looked up at her. “Clever little bitch, aren’t you?” He had no trouble articulating the words. “Go to hell.”
The sense of enmity was so strong that Annie jumped up from the chair and began to back away.
“Actually, bitch, I saw him at Parotti’s. That’s where all the drunks gather on Saturday night. And I left just about the time he did. But I drove home, so I got here first. I could’ve waited for him. Somebody did. Glad they did. But it wasn’t me.” His tone was regretful. “Had a bottle to kill. Not Jesse.”
“What did he do to you?”
Webb carefully placed the almost full tumbler on the table by his chair. He began to shake his head. “Oh”—and now his voice was weary—“he didn’t do anything. I did it to myself.” He buried his face in his hands.
He didn’t look up as Annie closed the door behind her. On the cabin steps, she shaded her eyes. The September sunshine was blinding after the dimness of his living room—and the darkness of his soul.
Fear and anger warred in her. Duane Webb was angry and bitter. Was he also dangerous? Did he cease to look for Ingrid because he knew very well that she was dead? Had his urgent cry for an organized search been a killer’s clever ploy? Was he drunk? Or was every word calculated to impress his devotion to Ingrid? Annie had never heard Ingrid mention his name. But Ingrid was a very private person. Annie had not known of Paul.
And she didn’t yet know about Jesse Penrick and his neighbors. Certainly one neighbor wished him ill. What of the others?
A brusque voice rang through the air.
“Young lady! Young lady, come here!”
Annie looked up. A rangy, big-boned woman beckoned imperiously.
Noon Sunday
Confidential Commissions was not, of course, open on Sundays. As he unlocked the front door, Max admired anew his own cleverness in creating this most singular and original office. He had thought briefly of opening a private inquiry agency, but the Sovereign State of South Carolina has a most narrow view of the qualifications it exacted before awarding a private investigators license (two years of work in an existing licensed agency or two years as a law enforcement officer). Of course, he could have opened a law office, had he been willing to take and pass the South Carolina Bar exam. (There is no reciprocity in South Carolina. Resident lawyers take a dim view of retirees flooding their state with part-time offices. No, the only route to law practice is to take the bar exam, and Max thought life much too short to be required to take and pass more than one of those, and he had done his duty in New York.)
In fact, Max was convinced that life was much too short to spend an inordinate amount of time doing any kind of work whatsoever. Since his more acquisitive forebears had amply provided him with successive inheritances, he was in the delightful position of being able to do precisely what he pleased.
Until he met Annie, with her apparently rock-hard conviction that all able adults must hold jobs.
He passed through the outer office and noted that the Whitmani ferns needed watering. Annie had chosen them. She seemed to have some kind of obsession with Whitmani ferns, something to do with Mary Roberts Rinehart’s fondness for them in the sunroom of her Washington, D.C., home. (The house was also inhabited by the ghost of a previous occupant, Senator Primrose, as evidenced by furniture that went bump in the night and occasional blasts of frigid air. What interesting oddments had lodged in his mind through association with Annie.)
He opened the door to his office, switched on the light, and looked across the room at his enormous Italian Renaissance leather desk and Annie’s framed photograph on one corner. Although Annie didn’t know it, he spent more time enjoying her picture—and it captured her so well, her short blond hair streaked with gold, her serious grey eyes, and her eminently kissable mouth (damn, how long was he going to be sequestered on the Men’s Side?)—than he ever did working.
Why did Annie have such an American view of life?
He eased into his well-padded, high-backed chair and switched on the vibrator. Well, of course, she was American and there was that strong vein of Puritanism. Fortunately, her Puritan ethic did not extend to sensual delights. He smiled contentedly at the picture—and the serious grey eyes regarded him with their usual intensity.
“All right, all right,” he murmured. “I’m getting to work. Right now.” That is, as soon as he ordered a nice lunch—perhaps mesquite-grilled sole—from the Island Hills Country Club. That call completed, he picked up a yellow legal pad and wrote:
JESSE PENRICK, LIFE AND TIMES.
Noon Sunday
Although she found the peremptory gesture off-putting, Annie responded because the unsmiling woman motioned from the steps of Cabin 5.
She was a very big woman. She wore a plaid shirt with rolled-up sleeves and brown slacks. Her black hair, streaked with grey, was pulled tightly back into a bun, emphasizing the strength of her features, a high-bridged nose, large brown eyes beneath heavy black brows, and a formidable chin. “Adele Prescott,” she said gruffly, holding out a large, square hand, the nails cut short and unpainted. “You’re Annie Laurance.”
Annie nodded, then added hastily, “Annie Laurance-Darling.”
Adele Prescott wasn’t interested in her marital status. “Ingrid didn’t stab Jesse. But nobody’ll listen to me.” Oddly, for so large a woman, her voice lacked resonance. “I can’t get any satisfaction from that young man.” An enormous sapphire in an intricate mounting of white gold flashed in the sunlight as she gestured across the courtyard.
Annie looked and saw Billy Cameron backed up against the steps of Jesse Penrick’s cabin by Henny, who was leaning forward, her fox-sharp face alight with inquisitorial eagerness. Billy’s normally pleasant countenance was set and stiff.
“If he’s in charge, nothing will get done,” Adele continued dourly.
Annie rushed to Billy’s defense. “He can’t help it. The circuit solicitor’s taken charge since Chief Saulter’s out of town. Billy doesn’t have the experience to handle a murder case.”
“I don’t suppose he does have that kind of experience. But he’s pretty good at sneaking in and out of back doors in the middle of the night.”
Annie made a noise she desperately hoped sounded encouraging. What the devil was Adele Prescott talking about?
“I suppose it’s his doing that no one’s even talked to the residents of Nightingale Courts, some of whom are well pleased to see Jesse dead. Why, when I tried to tell him
about the trouble between Jesse and that Webb man, he brushed me right off. Said the investigation was continuing and all important facts would be considered.” She sniffed. “I just think he doesn’t want anybody to know about him and Mavis.”
“Who’s Mavis?” Annie was bewildered. “Are you talking about Billy Cameron?”
“Of course I’m talking about him. I’d know that young man anywhere, coming and going at all hours of the night next door, when that baby’s asleep. Pretty clear what those two are up to, and I wasn’t the only one saw them. Jesse was talking to that girl the other day, and he had that sly look on his face. He was up to some devilment. He made her cry. I saw it. But I say, if you make your bed, you have to sleep in it.”
Annie glanced involuntarily at Cabin 6. A child’s pull toy three baby ducks behind a mother duck, lay on its side by the front steps. A red rubber ball nestled behind a plastic dump truck. Last night, Annie recalled, a young woman had asked about Ingrid. And then she had hurried away to return to her little boy.
“Mavis?” Annie prompted.
“Mavis Beeson. Silly little empty-headed blonde,” the woman said spitefully. “Bleached, of course. I’ve tried to talk to her, but she won’t say a word about where she’s from, or her husband, if she has one. She doesn’t wear a wedding ring. But she sure doesn’t lack for company—late at night. If you know what I mean.”
The cabin door to number 6 opened and Mavis Beeson stepped out, holding a chunky toddler with curly brown hair The little boy jiggled in her arms, repeating exuberantly, “Ding dong. Ding dong. Ding dong.”
His mother stared apprehensively at the tent city and at Billy Cameron, glowering at Henny. Then her son reached up and tugged on her hair. “Ding dong, Mommy!” When she looked at him, her entire face changed, lightening, glowing, warming, the way a stark landscape brightens when sunlight emerges from a cloudbank. She held him up and nuzzled his tummy, then rained kisses lightly up his arm and behind his ear and on top of his head. He wriggled with delight.
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