"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.
As she reached for the receiver, Annie was suddenly certain of her caller. But she refused to accept this intuitive knowledge as a presentiment.
". . . do hope that dear Dorothy L. is being cared for, as well as Agatha."
"Laurel"—Annie was outraged—"of course they're both fine! Barb's going by the house morning and evening to feed Dorothy L. And Dorothy L. purred like a steam engine when I went by the house this afternoon to pack a couple of suitcases." Annie felt no need to elaborate on her packing objectives, which included not only clothes and toiletries, but a coffeemaker, two pounds of Colombian Supreme, and a container of peanut butter cookies. She'd stopped by Death on Demand, too, and borrowed two coffee mugs, one inscribed in red script with The House on the Marsh by Florence Warden and the other with The Circular Staircase by Mary Roberts Rinehart. After all, even armies maintain troop morale with food. Besides, did Laurel think she and Max were cat abusers? Who could possibly forget Dorothy L., a cat with more self-esteem than Nancy Reagan and Kitty Kelly combined. And not, as habituйs of the bookstore knew, exactly a bosom companion of Agatha, Death on Demand's resident feline. Sometimes separate maintenance is an inspired solution.
". . . surprised that I don't know of a single cat!"
Annie knew she'd missed something. Laurel knew many cats in addition to Agatha and Dorothy L. Could this be selective memory loss? What might it augur for the future? Would Laurel soon begin dismissing from her memory persons, as well as cats, for whom she didn't cherish an especial passion? Such as Annie?
". . . it's curious to me because they are the most empathetic of creatures, as we all know. Instead, there is this huge white dog, apparently not the least bit charming. In fact, he quite terrifies travelers on the road that passes by the ruins of Goshen Hill near Newberry. And has been doing so for more than a hundred years. But I simply don't understand why not a cat! However, it isn't mine to criticize the workings of the other world; it is mine simply to report, and I did think, Annie, you would find it interesting to know that Chastain is quite a hotbed of ghosts!"