Southern Ghost

by Carolyn G. Hart

  “Not a date. A business engagement.” Even as he spoke, Max knew how odd that sounded.

  “Oh, yeah, excuse me. A business engagement back by the mausoleum with the broken palm tree. I believe that’s what you said.” Narrowed eyes now. “Mighty peculiar place to conduct business, Mr. Darling.”

  “I suppose there was something Ms. Kimball wanted to show me at the Tarrant plot.” Max tried to keep his voice level, his temper intact. “She was scared. She called me and she was scared as hell. The call broke off. I don’t know why or how.”

  The policeman rubbed his nose. “No phone booths at the cemetery. If she was scared, needed ‘help,’ why didn’t she tell you to come where she was? Why the cemetery?”

  “I don’t know.” Max spaced out the words. “But she did. I came as fast as I could, but when I got there, all I found was her purse, flung down on the path. Now, what does that look like to you?”

  “Looks like the lady lost her purse,” the sergeant said mildly. He held up a broad palm at Max’s fierce frown. “Okay, okay, we’ll check into it. We’ll be in touch, Mr. Darling.”

  Max almost erupted, but what good would it do? With a final glare at the uncooperative lawman, Max turned away. He banged out of the station house and slammed into his sports car. He hunched over the wheel. What the hell should he do now? Obviously, it was up to him. Would it do any good to check Courtney Kimball’s apartment? Max didn’t feel hopeful.

  But it was better than nothing.

  That took time, too. He had Courtney Kimball’s address, but he didn’t know Chastain. He didn’t find any help at the nearest convenience store or at the video express, but an elderly woman walking two elegant Afghan hounds finally came to his assistance.

  “Oh, you’re very close. That’s still in the historic district. The half number probably means a garage apartment. Turn left here on Carmine, go two blocks, turn right on Merridew, young man. It should be in that block.”

  It was.

  A street lamp shone on a bright-white sign: THE ST. GEORGE INN. A lime-green dragon lounged upright against the crimson letter S, his tail draped saucily over a front paw.

  Max hurried down a flagstoned path past a shadowy pond to the back of the property and an apartment upstairs over the garage. No outside light shone, but lights blazed inside and there was a murmur of sound. Voices?

  Max took the outside stairs two at a time, relief washing through him. Maybe it was going to be all right. Maybe it was a lost purse, just like the cop suggested. After all, Max had been late—though not that late—but Courtney Kimball was a driven woman. Certainly in the brief contact they’d had, Max had recognized a strong will. There was, in Courtney’s single-minded concentration on the Tarrant family, a chilling sense of implacability. Just so did the narrator seek to find the secrets of the House of Usher.

  At the top of the stairs, he realized two disturbing facts at the same time.

  The door was ajar.

  The voices, impervious to interruption, flowed from a television set.

  Max knocked sharply. The door swung wide.

  The voices—amusing light chatter from an old movie—continued unabated, as unreal as a paper moon, masking the absolute quiet of the unguarded apartment.

  Max stepped inside. “Courtney? Courtney, are you—”

  Disarray.

  A hasty search had begun. Cushions littered the floor. Desk drawers jutted open. Papers spewed from a briefcase tipped over on a coffee table. But across the room sat a Chippendale desk, its drawers closed, and through an open door, Max glimpsed a colonial bedroom, the four-poster canopied bed neatly made, the oxbow chest undisturbed.

  A search begun. A search interrupted?

  He called out again.

  The flippant voices from the television rose and fell.

  If Courtney Kimball was here, she couldn’t answer.

  Chapter 7.

  Annie recognized him at once and knew his arrival meant trouble.

  Chastain Police Chief Harry Wells wasn’t a forgettable man, not from his slablike face to his ponderous black boots, now solidly planted on her front porch.

  Wells hadn’t changed a whit since she’d last seen him. His wrinkled black jacket, white shirt, and tan trousers were just as she remembered. The crown of his white cowboy hat was as smooth and undented as a river-washed stone, and his rheumy, red-veined eyes surveyed her like a hangman measuring rope.

  Annie didn’t hesitate. “What do you want?” she demanded.

  Dislike flickered in his eyes. Dislike and a flash of malicious pleasure.

  Annie braced herself.

  “I’m investigating a disappearance in Chastain, Miz Darling.” Wells’s words had the lilting cadence of South Carolina, but even that glorious accent couldn’t mask the threat in his tone. “Your husband’s involved. I want to know about this woman he was meeting.” His eyes clung to her face, greedy for her response.

  The blows were so rapid, Annie felt stunned and sick.

  Woman.

  Chastain.

  Disappearance.

  Max.

  Only the adrenaline flowing from the shock of Wells’s unexpected appearance kept her on her feet.

  That and hot, swift, unreasoning fear.

  “Max! Where is he?” She gripped the door for support.

  “He’s safe enough.” Wells’s voice scraped like a rusty cemetery gate. “Right now he’s in the county jail. Under arrest as a material witness. Who was she, Miz Darling?”

  When she didn’t answer immediately, the burly police chief leaned forward. It was, she remembered, a favorite trick of his, using his commanding height to intimidate. His sour breath swept over her. “So you didn’t know about her. Well, that doesn’t surprise me, Miz Darling. I understand she’s good-lookin’. A mighty cute blonde. The kind a man would go a far piece to keep his wife from finding out about. Thing is, those kind of women get insistent, say they’re going to tell the man’s wife—”

  Later, Annie was proud of her quickness because she understood in a flash: Wells was going to accuse Max of an affair and blame the disappearance of this woman—what woman, oh Max, what woman?—on Max’s determination to keep the truth from her. But despite the shock, there was an immediate, elemental response too deep for words. Annie couldn’t know the truth of anything—except Max would never injure a living soul.

  Not Max.

  Never Max.

  She clapped her hands to her hips and thrust out her chin. “Get real, Wells.” Her voice dripped disgust. “Max had a business engagement this evening. If some client’s in trouble, if something’s happened to her, it’s because of the problem she brought to him. And no, I don’t know what that is. Or who she is. Or care. I run a bookstore, Chief, and I don’t try to work two jobs. Max takes care of his own business. But I’ll tell you this, you’re wasting your time talking to me. Did you say she’s disappeared? Then you’d better get back to Chastain and start looking for her—and listen real hard to what Max has to tell you.” With that she turned and marched back into the house.

  Wells started to follow.

  Annie yanked her coat out of the front closet and scooped up her purse from the hall table. “Nobody asked you in,” she snapped, facing him in the doorway like an outraged terrier staring down a mastiff, “and I’m leaving.”

  “Now wait a minute, Miz Darling.” He backed out onto the porch, his face turning a choleric purple. “If you won’t cooperate with lawful—”

  “You don’t run a damn thing on Broward’s Rock.” She slammed the door. “If you try and detain me, I’ll file the biggest lawsuit for illegal restraint you’ve ever seen.” She marched down the steps, heading for her Volvo. “See you in Chastain, Chief.”

  By the time a sleepy magistrate agreed to release Max on his own recognizance, there were no more ferries to the island. They found a motel, The Pink Flamingo, on the outskirts of Chastain. As the door shut behind them, Annie glanced at the clock on the bedside table. Almost three A.M.


  “The sorry bastard.”

  Annie knew who Max meant. The brief drive from the jail had consisted of one furious diatribe by Max.

  Max gave her an exhausted, despairing look. “God, Annie, this is a mess.”

  “We’ll handle it.” She reached out to take his hand.

  He looked down abruptly and smiled, the first smile she’d seen since he’d been ushered out of his cell.

  Annie smiled in return. This was Max, her Max. “Tell me.”

  He gave her hand a hard squeeze and nodded, then dropped wearily into the bedroom’s sole chair. Annie propped up some pillows on the lumpy bed and curled up to listen. It didn’t take long to tell: the original assignment, his report, tonight’s phone call, the purse at the cemetery, Courtney’s apartment.

  He popped up and began to pace the small confines of the motel room, the old wooden floor creaking beneath him. “I started looking for Courtney. It didn’t take long to be sure she wasn’t in that apartment. I was heading for the phone to call the cops when this voice yelled, ‘Hands up,’ and I turned around to look into the barrel of the biggest damn gun I’ve ever seen. It was my old friend, Sergeant Matthews.” Scowling, Max flung himself down again in the chair. “So I guess I’ve got to give the Chastain cops some credit. Matthews brushed me off at the station, but he did come to check Courtney’s apartment. Of course, he won’t listen when I say that’s what I was doing, too. Hell, no. He decides I’m ‘acting suspiciously’ and there’s evidence of a crime scene—did he think I trashed the damn place? So I wind up in jail. And I’m the one who got the cops stirred up! Can you believe it?” His voice rose in outrage. “Anyway, it was about an hour later that Wells lumbered in.”

  “Chief Caligula,” Annie said resentfully.

  That brought another brief smile, quickly gone. Max’s eyes narrowed. “Here’s where it gets interesting.” A speculative note quickened his voice. “Wells asked why I was meeting ‘the missing woman’ in the cemetery.”

  Annie rolled to a sitting position and slipped her arms around her knees.

  Max leaned forward. “Now, listen closely, Annie. I’m going to tell you exactly what I told Wells. Okay?”

  “Sure.” She didn’t understand her role yet, but Max obviously had something in mind.

  Max’s tone was formal. “On Monday, I received a call from a woman who subsequently identified herself as Courtney Kimball. She inquired about the kinds of projects undertaken by Confidential Commissions.”

  Max had chosen his words carefully in dealing with Wells. The sovereign state of South Carolina has very particular requirements for the licensing of private detectives, several of which Max could not meet (two years of work in an existing licensed agency or two years as a law enforcement officer), and Max was not licensed to practice law in South Carolina, which eschews reciprocity with other states (South Carolina has no intention of making it easy for retired lawyers from other climes to pick up some pocket change). Wells would dearly love to nail Max for acting illegally in either capacity. The chief still harbored resentment against both Annie and Max from their encounter several years ago during the Chastain house-and-garden tour mystery event that turned to murder.

  “I told Wells how I explained to Ms. Kimball that the objective of Confidential Commissions was to provide information and solace to those in the midst of trying times.” A bland enough statement that nowise, Max would protest, could be equated to the investigative efforts mounted by private detectives or the counsel proffered by practicing atccorneys. “I made it clear that Ms. Kimball asked me to do a historical survey, and I was happy to be able to advise her that I would do my very best to be helpful.” Annie grinned. She wished she could have seen Wells’s face.

  “I met her Monday at La Maison Rouge in Chastain. She asked me to do two things—”

  Annie held up her hand and reached for her purse. When she bad a pad and pencil in hand, she nodded for Max to continue.

  “One. To find out every possible detail in regard to the deaths of Ross Tarrant and Judge Augustus Tarrant, both of which occurred on May ninth, 1970, in Chastain.

  “Two. To determine all the persons living in or present in any capacity at Tarrant House on Ephraim Street in Chastain on May ninth, 1970.”

  Max’s eyes gleamed. “Up to this point, Wells just listened. No expression, of course. I’ve seen faces at Madame Tussaud’s that looked more alive. Until”—Max struck the chair arm sharply—“I mentioned the Tarrants and Tarrant House. All of a sudden, it was different. Damn different. Wells picked up a cigar and lit it, taking his time. He looked at me through a haze of smoke and asked—and here’s exactly what he said, Annie—’Who the hell is Courtney Kimball?’ He didn’t ask me a damn thing about the Tarrants or whether I’d found out anything about their deaths or the people at Tarrant House that day. Oh, no. All of a sudden, he wanted to know about Courtney. That’s when he turned hostile and started making cracks about me and my ‘relationship’ with her, saying I’d be a lot better off if I told the police what had happened to her and stopped trying to create some kind of mystery. Not having slept entirely through Criminal Law, I decided to stop being so damn helpful to the constituted authorities and refused to say another word. So Wells dumped me in jail—”

  “And came to the island to see how much I knew.”

  Max looked at her with startled eyes. “I hadn’t stopped to figure out how you turned up with the magistrate. I called you and there wasn’t any answer so I called Howard Cahill and asked him to get his lawyer for me.” Then the import of her words struck. “Did the sorry bastard imply I was having an affair with her?”

  Max’s outrage made Annie feel warm and cossetted.

  “Don’t worry,” she said blithely. “I told him you had a business engagement with her.”

  Max’s grin made him look like Joe Hardy (all grown up and sexy as hell) after a winning touchdown. “That’s telling him.” But the grin didn’t touch the dark core of worry in his eyes. He smacked his fist in his palm. “The hell of it is, Wells is concentrating on me. Nobody’s doing anything about Courtney.”

  Annie heard the anguish in his voice. A business engagement, she repeated to herself. That’s all that it was. Max was here now with her, loving her. That didn’t mean he couldn’t be concerned about others.

  Courtney Kimball.

  Wells wanted to know who the hell she was. Annie made a wreath of question marks around Courtney’s name on the pad. Frankly, Annie shared Chief Wells’s interest. But she had another question that mattered even more to her. “Max, why didn’t you tell me about this assignment?”

  Her charming, unflappable husband looked, in turn, sheepish, uncomfortable, and embarrassed.

  Very un-Max responses.

  Annie tried to keep on breathing evenly.

  As if it were just a casual question.

  “Well”—it was the closest to hangdog she’d ever seen him—“you kept encouraging me to get involved in an interesting case, and, the thing about it is, I didn’t want to get your hopes up that I was into something big. When I finished checking on the Tarrants, everything looked on the up-and-up so I decided not to mention it at all—since it didn’t amount to anything.”

  Dark-blue eyes looked at her mournfully.

  Once again, Annie didn’t know whether to laugh or to cry, but she knew one thing for certain: Never again would she exhort Max to work harder.

  “Max, I’m never disappointed in you. And,” she added a little disjointedly, “it certainly has turned into something.”

  The worry was back in his eyes, but it was okay now. Now she could ask, “Who is Courtney Kimball, Max?”

  He ran a hand through his thick blond hair. “The hell of it is, Annie, I don’t have any idea.”

  “Then I think,” Annie told her husband gravely, “we’d better find out.”

  Annie was glad she wore her hair short, but, even so, without a dryer and using the motel soap (no shampoo), she was certainly going to lo
ok totally natural, as in moderately unkempt. It didn’t help to pull on yesterday’s clothes. The pale-yellow cotton pullover was okay, but the madras skirt looked like something Agatha would happily have nested in. Max had slipped out early. His goals were to buy shaving cream, razor, toothpaste, toothbrushes, et cetera, and to call his secretary, Barb, who would activate the answering machine at Confidential Commissions and take over at Death on Demand in Ingrid’s absence. Max won Annie’s heart anew when he returned with coffee and a biscuit with sausage for her. The coffee was acceptable, although not, of course, on a par with that at Death on Demand or at the Darling house on Scarlet King Lagoon.

  He also brought in a file marked “Courtney Kimball.”

  Annie took the thick manila folder and looked at him in surprise.

  “Barb’s terrific. I called, and she brought it over on the first ferry. Said to tell you to relax, she’d take care of everything at the store and get some chicken soup to Ingrid, too. Now”—he was brisk and organized—“I want you to dive into that file. Maybe you can find something I missed.”

  Annie put the folder down. “What about you?”

  “I’m going to get some answers out of the Chastain cops. Whether they like it or not.”

  As the door closed behind him, Annie almost called out. But Max would surely be careful. The chief was a tough antagonist. She took the file and her coffee and settled in the chair. The file contained:

  The Tarrant Family History

  Guide to the Tarrant Museum

  Copies of several newspaper stories on the deaths of the Honorable Augustus Tarrant and his youngest son, Ross, on May 9, 1970.

  Photographs of Ross Tarrant’s grave and of the urn containing the ashes of Judge Tarrant.

  A photograph of Tarrant House.

  A monograph on Tarrant House.

  Photographs of Judge Tarrant and Ross Tarrant.

  A list of persons likely to have been in Tarrant House on May 9, 1970.

  Annie started with the photographs.