Southern Ghost

'Max was so abrupt, Agatha. And abstracted.' She put the latest title by Elaine Raco Chase face out. 'Like he was talking to a stranger.'

Agatha waited imperiously atop the coffee bar, which of­fered customers a different blend every day (Annie's favorite, of course, was Kona) served in mugs bearing the names of famous mysteries and their authors. Annie offered Agatha a fresh serving of dry food, received an unequivocal feline glare in response, and quickly reached for a can. Agatha did not tolerate frustration well. It was wise, Annie had decided after applying Mercurochrome to numerous scratches, to satisfy Ag­atha's needs, wants, and desires promptly. And, if she thought hard about Agatha, she wouldn't mull over that odd, unsatis­factory call from Max.

As she emptied half the can into Agatha's bowl, she re­marked conversationally, 'I have to hand it to you, Agatha, you're one of a kind.'

And so, she thought with admiration, were the tales of tangled lives and thwarted passions created by the authors

featured in this month's watercolors. As Agatha contentedly ate, Annie concentrated on the pictures on the back wall over the fireplace, the better to avoid other thoughts.

In the first painting, a slender young woman in a night­gown and housecoat stood midway between the living room of the playhouse, where flames flickered in the fireplace, and the indoor swimming pool. She stared in horror at the body lying next to the pool, so close, indeed, that one arm dangled over the side. The dead woman was middle-aged and expensively dressed. Her heavy blond hair, usually worn in a coronet braid, spread loose on the tiles.

In the second painting, the gully was choked with vegeta­tion, honeysuckle and wild grape, dogwood and redbud, flowering shrubs and looping vines. A small area, down one side of the gully, showed the effects of many trampling feet, the grasses bent, vines torn away. An attractive middle-aged woman watched in dismay as a younger woman reached to­ward a blood-spattered clump of Spanish dagger to pick up a black satin ribbon with an old-fashioned Victorian gold locket. The locket's front decoration was a spray of lilies of the valley, the stems and leaves made up of tiny encrusted emer­alds, the bells of pearls. A bowknot of rubies tied the spray of flowers.

In the third painting, a young woman, terror on her face, stared at a fog-wreathed, grim, gray Victorian house. A bloody kitchen knife was impaled in the front door. Six old-fashioned oval portraits circled the house. Each was named. The portrait at the top, labeled Pauline, was of a middle-aged woman with old ivory skin, black eyes, black hair in bangs, and a cold and unfriendly gaze. Clockwise were Sophie, plump, overrouged cheeks and blond hair piled high with too many curls; Anne, short curly black hair with distinctive wings of white at the temples and a warm smile; Elise, elegant and lovely with haunted eyes; Marthe, pleasant looking with a good-humored grin; and Rose, young and vulnerable with blue eyes and shiny brown hair.

In the fourth painting, the skyward gleam of the Bentley's headlights pierced the inky darkness of the night, cruelly illu­minating the fatal embrace of the Bentley and the Mercedes as they arced over the side of the cliff to plummet down into the rocks and the sea below. Two men and a woman watched, transfixed. In a hollow nearby, the little boy wrapped in a man's coat didn't stir from his unnatural sleep, despite the noise of the crash and the frenzied licking of his face by a large mongrel dog.

In the fifth painting, there was a strange tableau in the exquisitely appointed museum room with its array of gor­geously restored Egyptian antiquities. A young woman with dark eyes, olive skin, and a heart-shaped face framed by masses of thick black curls raised a mace as the handsome older man approached. Coming up behind the man was a figure clothed all in black with a gun held firmly in one hand.

Generations of readers loved these gothic adventures. Per­haps she should pick out one of her old favorites and take it home to while away the empty evening hours while her hus­band pursued the work ethic. (Max?) Not, of course, that she had to have dinner with Max every night to be happy, but...

Annie glanced up at the rows of cheerful mugs with the titles and authors inscribed in bright-red flowing script. She needed a mug that would brighten her empty evening. Per­haps Margaret Scherf's first Martin Buell mystery, Always Murder a Friend. Or Annie's favorite by Constance and Gwenyth Little, The Great Black Kanba. How about the zany humor in Lion in the Cellar by Pamela Branch? Or would her spirits improve if she spent an hour with Ellie and Ben in Mum's the Word by Dorothy Cannell?

'Perhaps,' wafted the husky voice, 'I am somehow lack­ing.'

Annie damn near jumped out of her skin. Jerking around, she gazed into limpid dark-blue eyes. 'Where the he —Laurel, where did you come from? I didn't hear the door.' Annie tried not to sound too startled and accusing, but, honestly, if Laurel didn't stop materializing without warning . . .

Her mother-in-law gave a lilting sigh. Anyone who didn't

believe sighs could lilt just hadn't dealt with Laurel. The lucky devils.

Her alarm past, Annie surveyed her gorgeous—yes, that was the only appropriate descriptive adjective for Laurel—mother-in-law and smiled. How did Laurel manage always to appear young, fresh, and vibrant, no matter how bizarre her getup? On Annie, the baggy tweed suit and mottled horn-rims, along with a stenographer's notebook and freshly sharp­ened No. 2 pencil, would have looked like a grade school librarian's trophies from a rummage sale. On Laurel, the effect was enchanting. The horn-rims gave a piquant accent to her elegant patrician features and shining golden hair (Dammit, how could anyone look so marvelous with hair drawn back in a tight, no-nonsense bun?), the droopy tweeds fell in becoming folds against her svelte figure.

'You see, I have to wonder if it's me,' Laurel continued earnestly. 'Annie, would you say that I am not simpatico?'

Annie's smile broadened to a fond grin. 'Laurel, nobody would say you are not simpatico.' And also flaky, but this thought Annie didn't share. Off-the-wall. Just one step (which way?) from certifiable. But, always and ever, simpatico—to peo­ple, to animals ranging from anteaters to dolphins to whales, to situations, to the whole damn world, when you came down to it.

But those dark-blue eyes, so unnervingly like other eyes that lately, when business was mentioned, slid evasively away from her own . . . Annie struggled back to the present, de­termined to focus on Laurel.

'. . . have always tried to be so open to experience, so welcoming. If you know what I mean?'

Annie deliberately turned her thoughts away from Laurel's five marriages. And why, after so many trips to the altar, was Laurel persisting in not marrying their neighbor, Howard Ca­hill, who would be such an attractive father- in-law, so stable, so respectable?

'. . . so disappointed when Alice didn't come.'