Southern Ghost

Annie had never mastered the precept (illustrated with such charm in Suzy Becker's enchanting book, All I Need to Know I Learned from My Cat) that it isn't essential to answer the telephone just because you're home. (As is often the case at mystery bookstores, Annie stocked a great many cat titles at Death on Demand. After all, reading mysteries and loving cats seem to go hand in paw.)

So, of course, she bolted from his arms with the same alacrity she would have shown had a boa constrictor poked a head from the jardiniere next to the telephone stand.

It was hard not to answer 'Death on Demand,' but Annie managed a simple 'hello.'

'My sweet.' Her mother-in-law's greeting burbled likebubbles in champagne. 'I felt sure I would be conversing with your answering machine. A mixed blessing, don't you think?'

Annie was unsure whether Laurel was indicating a prefer­ence for her or for the answering machine, but it was better not to think along those lines. It could lead to a sense of anomie, which she had quite successfully avoided ever since forswearing the kind of literary fiction written primarily by English professors for other English professors.

'But I feel as if it were meant.'

Annie had a sudden vision of a graceful hand with pink-tipped nails pressed against a bosom that was always shown to great advantage in low-cut ball gowns. Not, of course, that she begrudged Max's mother the opportunity to display her un­doubted beauty, blond hair that glistened like spun gold, eyes as brilliantly sapphire as a northern sea, finely chiseled fea­tures, and a figure almost unseemly for a woman old enough to have four grown children.

'I am most concerned that you and dear Max be quite cautious in your pursuit of justice. There is so much evil in the world, my dear.'

Annie managed a single intervening sentence. 'Miss Mar­ple never worried about her skin when she hunted for a mur­derer.'

Max, thumbing through a batch of mail left by Barb, looked across the room, a question in his blue eyes. Annie covered the mouthpiece. 'Your mom,' she mouthed.

Max smiled fondly and walked a few paces to settle in an easy chair with the mail. The chair was rather handily out of reach of the phone cord.

Annie realized the pause on Laurel's end was still in force. One hell of a pause, actually. It indicated, without a single word, that dear Annie was regrettably callow to refer in such graceless prose to the greatest elderly female detective of all time.

Annie attempted damage control. 'Not that Miss Marple would ever have thought about it in those terms. But, Laurel, you see what I mean.'

'Of course, my dear.' That resonant, husky, unforgettable voice radiated patience.

Annie's gaze fastened wistfully on a pair of crossed swords above the Adam mantel. It was a good thing Laurel had not progressed on the psychic plane to mind reading.

Mercifully unaware of the images—honestly, did it make her bloodthirsty to own a mystery bookstore?— cavorting in Annie's mind, Laurel swept on. 'I quite take pride in your and Max's dedication to duty. I feel impelled to point out, however, that it has been brought home to me in a most shocking manner how ugliness begets heartbreak which not even the passage of a great many years can ease. Take the grisly episode at Fenwick Castle on St. John's Island. That imposing man­sion is said to have resembled the castles in the family's En­glish holdings.'

Annie felt sufficiently embroiled in present-day heartbreak without adding dead-and-gone misery to her bag of emotions, but she knew that Laurel, once launched, was quite as imper­vious to deflection as Miss Climpson when in pursuit of infor­mation for Lord Peter Wimsey.

'. . . and so Ann Fenwick fell in love not only with the spirited racehorse her father ordered from England, but also with the groom who arrived with the horse. Ann was a favorite of her stern father, Edward Fenwick, who had always treated her gently and lovingly. But Fenwick lived up to his reputa­tion for anger and harshness when his daughter informed him that she wished to marry the young groom, Tony. Her father, a titled lord in England, was enraged. He swore that this would never happen, his daughter would not wed a groom. Ann protested that Tony was the younger son of a clergyman and her father could aid him in entering a profession. But Edward Fenwick, Lord Ripon, vowed he would rather see his daughter dead.'

A delicate sigh wafted over the wire from Charleston. 'My dear, I have loved as Ann loved.'

Annie bit her tongue. It wouldn't be at all the thing to ask Laurel if Ann Fenwick had also married five times. That wouldnot be a proper filial response. Besides, Max was within ear­shot.

'It is,' Laurel enthused, 'as if dear Ann were here with me.'

Annie also forbore to ask in which century Ann's problems occurred and whether the presence so near Laurel was moldy. And chilly. Graves did have a tendency to be both damp and moist. Especially in the Low Country.

'I feel her so near. Her tears have been mine as I contem­plate the horrible fate which awaited her. Suffice it to say—'

Did Laurel fear Annie's attention might be wandering?

'—Ann and Tony continued to rendezvous, albeit secretly, of course, because of her father's furious prohibitions. Ann tried one more time to persuade her father and was rebuffed, with equal anger. So she and Tony eloped. They found a min­ister who wed them and they set out for Charles Town.' (An­nie got the clue; a long damn time ago when that city on the Ashley River still bore a double name.) 'It was evening and too late to hail a boat to cross. They stayed their bridal night —I hope a glorious night—but when dawn came so did a search party headed by her father. It callously rousted out the newlyweds and placed them in a coach, with Tony bound in ropes, and set out for Fenwick Castle. When the coach arrived and jolted to a stop in the stable yard, Lord Ripon shouted for a horse to be brought. Then he ordered his men to place Tony on the steed and to take a rope, tie it to Tony's neck, then fasten it to the limb of the huge oak which Ann had climbed as a child.

'Ann, screaming and weeping, struggled with her father, pleading for the life of her new husband. Silent and grim, Lord Ripon placed a whip in her hand. Then, holding her tight, he lifted her arm and flailed down viciously on