"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 the horse's flank. As it bolted and her beloved swung by his neck in the air above her, twisting and turning, Ann gave a dreadful cry and collapsed."
"Laurel," Annie said faintly.
Max looked at her in alarm. Weakly, Annie waggled her hand that it was all right. But it wasn't all right. This dreadful
story would haunt her sleep for many nights to come. Whatever possessed Laurel to
"My dear, I know. Such nightmares I have had. But we must face the fact that evil acts create heartbreak that lingers through time. Poor little Ann never recovered. Oh, she regained consciousness, of course. But ever after, she wandered the halls of Fenwick Castle, crying out for Tony, searching for Tony. After she died, her spirit stayed. Even today, though Fenwick Castle lies in ruins, you can hear her footsteps as she paces halls that no longer exist and her mournful cry of 'Tony, Tony!' "
Annie shivered. On winter nights when rain hissed against the windows, did Sybil hear Ross's name? Or was the cry simply in her heart?
"I must say I now look forward to the day when I shall have completed my chronicle of South Carolina ghosts. As you know, dear Annie, I have never felt it my duty to wallow in tragedy. However, I—"
Actually, if Annie envisioned Laurel wallowing, it certainly wasn't in tragedy. In fact . . . Annie sternly corrected the drift of her thoughts.
"—must hew to the course as I find it, and I'm confident my insights shall be of inestimable value to you and dear Max. Ta."
Annie replaced the receiver and looked at her husband. As pleasantly as possible. "Wallowing in tragedy, but brave as hell."
"Now, Annie, you know the old dear means well." He got to his feet. "Lunchtime. Strategy time."
Annie wasn't altogether diverted, though she was ravenous. Was this the moment to point out to Max that he had a blind spot the size of Texas in his understanding of his mother, her motives and her actions? But, in this instance, maybe he had a point. Besides, how could Annie complain? After all, the old dear was in Charleston, not Chastain.
"So, trauma lingers," Max summed up as Annie concluded her report of the conversation. He put two plates on the golden oak table in their suite's breakfast room and began tounload the box lunches they'd bought en route to the inn. "Did you see the card from Henny?"
Annie rustled through the stack of mail and pulled out the postcard. She studied the Corinthian portico and baroque tower of an elegant church. Flipping to Henny's message, she read: I thought I'd died and gone to heaven—this is St. George's, Hanover Square, where Harriet and Lord Peter were wed in Busman's Holiday! Annie, I do wish you and Max were here. But I shall be home soon. Duty calls. Love—H.
As they raced through lunch—they had to hurry if they were going to be on time to meet Miss Dora for a guided tour of Tarrant House and its grounds—discussing whether they were prepared for the afternoon, Annie struggled to discipline her thoughts. Images whirled: Ann Fenwick's desolate cry for love and life destroyed, Julia's strangely passionate desire to protect Milam's memory of his mother, acid-tongued Enid's advice to Courtney Kimball that Miss Dora alone among the Tarrants could be trusted, a little girl waking early and hurrying outside to death, Lucy Jane pleating her apron and picking her words so carefully. . . .
Annie put down the last half of her sandwich. She checked her watch. Almost two. They mustn't he late to meet Miss Dora. She pushed back her chair.
Max looked across the table. "What's up?"
Annie hurried to the desk and grabbed the phone. "I need to make a couple of calls before we go." It was the first time in her life she'd ever left a smoked salmon/cream cheese sandwich unfinished. And she was hungry enough to devour a twelve-ounce T-bone. (As a native Texan, she fully subscribed to the ideal of real food for real people.) But the uneasiness that had plucked at her mind, conjuring up images of restless spirits and tragic losses, was too powerful to ignore. She had a dark vision that she desperately wanted to dispel.
Lucy Jane McKay answered on the first ring.
"Mrs. McKay, this is Annie Darling. We're still working for Miss Dora"—it wouldn't hurt to underscore their friend in high places—"and I wondered if you could give us some background information on Missy Tarrant's accident."
"Missy." The older woman's voice was soft. "One of God's angels, Mrs. Darling. That's why she went home to be with the Lord so young."
Annie could see the comfort behind this rationale, but theologically speaking it didn't appeal to her. "I know that she drowned in a pond, but do you know the circumstances?"
"Oh, Mrs. Darling, it was just so sad and it goes to show the evils of alcohol that every young parent should take to heart." Lucy Jane was firm, but her voice was thick with tears. "Now, there wasn't anybody who loved that baby better than her mamma and her daddy, but they liked to stay up nights drinking too much and then they didn't get up in the mornings like they should. A friend of one of my girls was helping out at Wisteree is how I know what happened. Missy lost one of her favorite toys, a big brown bear she called 'Bear-Bear." How she cried and cried for him. Anyway, that last morning —it was a Sunday—Missy woke up early, but her folks didn't get up and Cathy, my daughter's friend, had a flat tire on her way out to Wisteree so she wasn't there to take care of the little girl—oh, still just a baby—like she would have usually. Missy got up and went downstairs and nobody locks doors—or did then—out in the country or in town either. So Missy let herself out of the kitchen door and she wandered down to the pond. When her daddy found her, she was floating facedown in the water and there was Bear-Bear floating beside her. Nobody knows how he got there. You'd think if she'd thrown him in the water when he was lost, she would have said so. And why didn't someone notice him floating out there? Anyway, they think Missy saw him in the water and went in after him. That's how it was when they found them, Bear-Bear and Missy."
"That's dreadful," Annie cried.
"It was awful." Lucy Jane's voice was low and grieved. "It broke Mr. Milam's heart and for a long time they thought it would be the death of Miz Julia."
But it was never Julia who died. Annie tried to push the thought away. Julia's sister. Her father-in-law. Her daughter. Her mother-in-law. But never Julia.
So? Annie demanded of herself. That could be said of them all, couldn't it?
No. Not quite.
But why would Julia—and the very thought sickened Annie's heart—murder her own daughter?
There could be no rational reason. But there might be many twisted reasons in the mind of a woman as miserably unhappy as Julia.
She passionately loved her little girl.
The same way she'd loved her sister?
Annie forced herself to pursue the phantasmagoria taking shape in her mind, a vision of a mind and heart engulfed by evil, the kind of evil Poe described with hideous clarity in "The Black Cat" and "The Tell-Tale Heart."