Southern Ghost (4 page)

Until the call this evening, the shocking, incomplete call. Words tumbled over each other, frantic and incomplete: “Help … got to have help … the cemetery … Ross’s grave … oh, hurr—” And the line went dead.

He’d dialed her number.

No answer.

Ring after ring.

And now, this damn truck—impatiently, he swung out the nose of the sports car, then yanked hard right on the wheel.

A Mercedes blazed past in the facing lane, horn blaring.

Fuming and chafing, his eyes watering from the pickup’s bilious exhaust, Max finally found clearance to pass. The speedometer needle raced to the right. That broken cry, “… oh, hurr—” Help? What kind of help? The fear in her voice spelled danger. The Maserati plunged forward, born to race.

Annie’s hands gripped the telephone like a vise, but she had her voice under control. Just barely. “No, Cynthia, none of Max’s sisters are in town.”

Cynthia waited for amplification.

Annie smiled grimly and uttered not another word.

“Oh, well.” A sniff. “I just thought it had to be one of Max’s sisters when I saw him at that wonderful little restaurant in Chastain Monday. You know, the new one with the Paris chef. Especially since the girl was blond and
gorgeous.
”

Blond and gorgeous.

“And I was so
surprised
not to see you there.” A saccharine laugh.

“A business lunch is a business lunch,” Annie said lightly, all the while envisioning excruciating and extensive torture suitable for the middle-aged owner of the gift shop around the
corner whom Max had rebuffed at the annual merchants’ Christmas party. Cynthia had been snide ever since. “Besides, I’ve been tied to the store since Ingrid’s been sick.”

“Oh, that awful spring flu …”

Annie doodled on the telephone pad—Cynthia’s pudgy, beringed hand took shape. With a flourish Annie added an upward swirl of flame from matches jammed beneath the fingertips.

It was fully dark by the time the Maserati screeched to a stop beside the church. Max grabbed the flashlight from the car pocket, then flung himself out of the car. He thudded toward the massive bronze gates of the cemetery. As he shoved them open, the car lights switched off behind him.

The golden nimbus of light from the nearest street lamp offered scant illumination, succeeding only in emphasizing the shifting mass of darkness beneath the immense, low-limbed live oaks with their dangling veils of Spanish moss. The narrow cone from the flashlight wasn’t much help. Beyond its focus, the crumbling headstones, many awkwardly tilted by roots or undermined by fall torrents, were dimly seen patches of grayness. Leaves crunched underfoot. A twig snapped sharply. Max stopped and listened.

“Courtney? Courtney?” he called softly. “Miss Kimball?”

Palmetto fronds clicked in the freshening breeze.

A bush rustled, and the thick sweet smell of wisteria enveloped him. The lights of a passing car swept briefly across the graveyard.

A raccoon scampered atop a marble burial vault.

An owl in a live oak turned glowing eyes toward him.

He looked down and took a reluctant step forward. A silky strand of Spanish moss brushed his cheek, as gauzy and insubstantial as a half-forgotten memory.

The swinging arc from the flashlight illuminated a cloth purse, half open, lying on the leaf-strewn path next to the Tarrant family plot. The beam steadied. It was an unusual purse with pink and beige and blue geometric patterns. The
day he’d first met Courtney Kimball, she’d placed it on the bar when she opened it to reach inside for her checkbook.

The policeman’s head swiveled around at the muted roar from the television set flickering in the corner of the station house, then swung back to face Max. “Home run.” His stolid voice was surly.

Max was damned if he was going to apologize for interrupting a man obviously more interested in Braves baseball than a missing woman.

“Look.” Max didn’t try to keep the urgency out of his voice. God, how much time had passed? He’d called out for Courtney Kimball, searched as well as he could in a dark landscape that swallowed up the fragile beam of his flashlight, then, grabbing up the purse, he’d run to the nearest house and asked the nervous woman shielded behind a chained, partially open door for directions to the police station. It had taken another six minutes to get here. And now, this dolt wanted to watch a damn ball game. “We need to get men out there to—”

“Cemetery at St. Michael’s, right?”

Finally, finally. “Right.”

The policeman—his name tag read
SGT.
G. T.
MATTHEWS
—fastened faded blue eyes on Max. “Let’s see your driver’s license, mister.”

“Oh my God, this is a waste of time. We’ve got to—”

“License, mister.” Matthews stuck out a broad, stubby hand, palm up.

Time, time. Everything took time.

Max clenched his fists in frustration as Matthews laboriously wrote down the information from the license.

When the sergeant finally looked up, his gaze was still skeptical. “Okay, Mr. Darling. Let’s see if I got you right. You had a date with this woman—this Courtney Kimball—in a graveyard.”

“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.

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.