Annie picked up that list.
PERSONS KNOWN TO HAVE BEEN IN
TARRANT HOUSE
MAY 9, 1970
Nineteen-seventy. Annie was six years old. She didn't know now how much she truly remembered of that spring and how much she had learned in later years. But there were words that still struck a chill in her heart and would forever cast a shadow in her mind.
That was 1970 to Annie. She remembered her mother staring at the flickering black-and-white television, tears running down her cheeks.
The Judge sat behind the desk as he sat behind the bench, his back straight, his shoulders squared. He scowled at the newspaper. This kind of rebellion couldn't be tolerated. What was wrong with some of these college administrators, giving in, listening, talking? As for closing campuses, that was surrender. It was time to face down the mobs, time to jail those dirty, violent, shouting protesters. Burning the flag! Refusing to serve their country! Who did they think they were? He wished some of them would come before his court.
You had to have standards.
Standards.
Max knocked again. 'I can't believe she isn't here.' He rattled the huge brass knob. 'It's not even nine o'clock yet. Where can she be this early?'
'Out looking for a fresh supply of eye of newt,' Annie suggested as she pressed against the screen to peer into Miss Dora's unlit dining room. 'Or simply disinclined to answer the door.'
'We'll come back.' He said it aloud and a little louder than necessary for Annie to hear.
If the old lady was inside, listening . . . Annie suppressed a shudder. She couldn't think about Miss Dora with out remembering embittered old Miss Havisham in
The cordgrass in the salt marsh rippled in the breeze. Fiddler crabs swarmed on the mud flats. The exquisitely blue sky
looked as though it had never harbored clouds, though the evidence of March rains remained in overflowing drainage ditches on either side of the asphalt road. Thick, oozy-green algae scummed the stagnant water.
Annie welcomed the rush of the mild spring air through the open windows of the Maserati. There was an aura of decay and stagnation about Miss Dora's house, a sense of secrets long held and deeply hid. Had Courtney Kimball knocked on that door? What would have brought her to Miss Dora? Had Courtney stood on that porch, young and alive, intent upon her own mysterious goal only days before? Annie shivered.
Raising her voice to be heard over the rush of wind, she asked crisply, 'What about next of kin?'
'The sergeant got real cagey there.' Max fumbled in the car pocket, retrieved his sunglasses, and slipped them on.
Annie admired that familiar, so-handsome profile, thick blond hair now attractively ruffled by the wind, the straight nose, firm chin, good-humored mouth. A mouth now tight with worry and irritation.
The Maserati picked up speed. 'It's like there's some kind of conspiracy to keep me from finding out anything about Courtney. But at least I got the name of her family lawyer out of Matthews.' Max honked at a scrappy-looking black pickup nosing out of a side road. 'Honest to God, doesn't anybody down here know what a stop sign's for?'
