Southern Ghost

The old lady gave an appreciative nod. 'You can follow a thread, can't you? Trouble is'—another shrill burst of laugh­ter—'nobody knows the truth. But you're going to find out,' and the cane pointed squarely at Max's chest. 'Because Harry Wells is sniffing after you, young man. He wouldn't pay me any mind when I told him about Courtney Kimball coming here. Harry said Amanda acted real funny a few weeks before she died, everybody knew it, and he was as sure as a 'coon dog after a possum that Amanda just walked right off that cliff, driven mad by grief. He's right about one thing. Amanda wasn't herself when she wrote that letter—'

'The letter to Delia?' Annie demanded. The letter was a fact, something to hold onto in the welter of emotion and inference created by Miss Dora. The letter and Courtney com­ing here, that was what mattered. As for Amanda's ghost, who knew what kind of turmoil existed in Miss Dora's mind?

'Yes'm, that letter. Date's on it and everything. Amanda wrote it. I know her handwriting.' The old mouth pursed, and she stared at them grimly. 'Amanda wrote it one week before she died.'

'The letter in the blue silk packet.' Max was making sure.

White hair shimmered in the sunlight as Miss Dora nod?

ded vigorously. 'Saw it with my own eyes,' the old lady said

fiercely. 'Harry Wells can't say that letter doesn't exist. But he

won't pay it any mind, even though Amanda wrote that her

son Ross was innocent and that someday, if ever Delia told Courtney about her parents, she was to tell her, too, that `they lied about her daddy. Oh God, Delia, they lied about Ross.' ' The last, the part that Miss Dora was recalling from the de­cades-old letter, was said in a high, clear tone completely unlike Miss Dora's. With a prickling of horror, Annie realized Miss Dora was mimicking Amanda Tarrant, speaking in a voice not heard since a grieving mother was found at the foot of a cliff.

'How did they lie?' Annie whispered. 'Who lied? What happened to Ross Tarrant?'

'If I knew that, do you think I'd have called you here?' Miss Dora snapped. 'That's for the two of you to discover.' Her eyes darted from one to the other. 'And you'll start here —tonight.'

9 A.M., SATURDAY, MAY 9, 1970

The neatly folded newspaper lay near the front of the desk. Judge Tarrant finished reading the plaintiffs brief and re­turned it to the file. The work of a second-rate, jackleg ambu­lance chaser. Obviously, the plaintiff had been negligent, and the mill shouldn't bear any expense for the injuries. A sum­mary judgment would answer. He lifted his head and squinted as he thought about his order. Anger still smoldered deep within, but he was a man who would never let his personal feelings distract him from his work. His cold, sunken eyes swept past, then returned to focus on the Sargent portrait of his mother, painted when she was a girl of seventeen. She wore a white organdy dress and, in her hands, held a closed pink parasol. The sudden softness in his melancholy brown eyes merely underscored the severity of his features, a long supercil­ious nose, gaunt cheeks, thin firm lips, bony chin. With that haunting sense of loss that had never left him, he stared across the sunlit study at the oil portrait above the Adam mantel. He had been only four when she died. She was a faint memory of warmth and softness and the scent of roses, a mystic sensation of safety and goodness and well-being. She had been the mother of five children but he could not—had never pictured her in a passionate, sweaty embrace.

What kind of difference might it have made to two genera­tions of Tarrants if he had seen his mother as a woman, not a Madonna?

Chapter 9.

Max didn't need to glance at his watch. He'd been sitting in the dusty, spittoon-laden waiting room of the Chastain court­house for almost an hour, waiting for His Highness, the chief, to deign to see him. He forced himself to remain at ease in a chair harder than basalt. He hated every ponderous click of the minute hand on the old- fashioned wall clock. It was late after­noon now, almost exactly twenty-four hours since that frantic call from Courtney.

Blood on the front seat of her car.

Dammit, where was Wells?

And where, dear God, was Courtney?

Annie was lousy at geometry and worse at what math teachers so endearingly call story problems. So her sense of accomplish­ment when she held up two sheets of paper, the Tarrant Fam­ily Tree in one hand and the Chastain Connection in the other, was monumental.

Because this was essential.

She and Max could easily slip into a morass of confusion if they didn't get a good sense of who was who both now and then.

Now she could see at a glance how Miss Dora figured in and why Courtney had come to see her.

Courtney knew from the letter to Delia that her father was Ross Tarrant, which made Judge Augustus and Amanda Tar­rant her paternal grandparents. Miss Dora was the sister of Ross's maternal grandfather (father of Amanda), and, there­fore, Amanda's aunt and Ross's great-aunt. It was interesting to wonder why Courtney chose to visit her father's great-aunt. Why not her father's brothers? She and Max needed to pursue this.

The laboriously drawn family charts also revealed, to An­nie's distinct amusement, that Miss Dora was related—a cousin of sorts—to Chastain's naughty lady, Sybil Chastain Giacomo, whom Annie and Max had met a couple of years ago during the house-and-garden mystery program. No wonder Miss Dora took Sybil's lustful life- style so personally. Not, of course, that Annie cared at all how attractive Sybil was to men, even to one particular blond whom Annie cherished.

Annie forced her mind back to relationships (other than carnal). After all, she wouldn't have to deal with Sybil during this visit to Chastain. In fact, Annie fervently hoped the in­credibly gorgeous mistress of another of Chastain's storied homes was at that moment far away. Far, far away. Maybe at her villa in Florence.

Annie double-checked her dates and put the sheets on the bedside table. She chewed on her pencil point for a moment, then marked a series of lines, connecting Dora to Amanda (and thereby Ross) and to Sybil.

The phone rang.