"Did Missy die before Mrs. Amanda fell from the cliff—or after?" Annie demanded. She saw Max's quick, curious glance.
Lucy Jane knew at once. "About a month before. They say death comes in threes. I thought we were all finished—what with Mr. Ross and the Judge and Missy all gone within a year —but Death wasn't satisfied yet."
Annie had a ghoulish picture of a dark-cloaked figure with a grinning skull face reaching out greedy fingers of bone.
"No wonder Julia was so stricken," Annie said softly. "Mrs. McKay, why didn't you tell us about Julia and Amanda and the fact that the Judge knew about them?"
There was a long silence; then, quietly, firmly, decisively, the receiver clicked in place.
Annie stared at the phone for a moment. She didn't feel good about it, but she had her answer. Julia had denied an affair and denied that the Judge could have known. Amanda wasn't alive to answer, but Lucy Jane McKay was an honest woman. She wouldn't lie—so she wouldn't answer.
Annie looked across the room at Max. "The Judge knew. About Julia and Amanda."
Max said quietly, "Julia would know where the gun was kept."
The telephone rang. Annie's hand still rested on top of the receiver. She snatched it up, glad to be connected to the here
and now, not part of a shadowy, frightful world of imagined evils.
"Time to go." There was more than a hint of displeasure that the telephone had been answered. It was clear Miss Dora thought Annie and Max should at that very moment be en route to their rendezvous with her at Tarrant House.
As usual, Annie had to grab her temper and hold on. Now was not the time to tell the old harridan that she was rude, overbearing, and obnoxious.
"We're just getting ready to leave." It was an achievement to enunciate through clenched lips. Perhaps it was Annie's irritation that gave her the courage to snap a sharp query. "Miss Dora, did Courtney Kimball contact you the day she disappeared, last Wednesday?"
The sudden silence on the part of Chastain's most voluble and opinionated old lady caught Annie by surprise. And so did the rather odd answer that finally came.
"Wednesday?" It was the only time in their acquaintance that Annie had the feeling that Miss Dora was at a loss. "Why do you ask?" she demanded brusquely.
"Enid Friendley talked to Courtney on Wednesday. She told her you were the only person connected to Tarrant House that Courtney should trust."
"I see." Miss Dora cleared her throat. "Well, if Enid indeed did say that to Courtney, it's a shame the child didn't call on me. Now, I wish to speak with Max."
Annie wasn't unhappy to hand over the receiver.
But Annie had the damnedest feeling. Miss Dora had lied. Why?
If Miss Dora had seen Courtney Kimball on Wednesday, why lie about it?
Miss Dora was an old woman.
That didn't mean she wouldn't cling to life, grasp it with fingers tight as talons, and do whatever she must to ward off death. Especially, perhaps, if she would die with murder on her soul.
If Miss Dora had lied about Wednesday, how many other lies might she have told?
4:04 P.M., SATURDAY, MAY 9, 1970
Ross Tarrant clung to the doorjamb for support. "Dad!" Footsteps sounded behind him. A hand clutched his arm. "Oh, God, did she shoot him?"
"She?" Ross's voice cracked.
"She ran upstairs. Just now."
"Mother?" Ross's voice shook.
"Yes. Oh, God, what are we going to do? We have to call the police."
Ross shrugged off the hand. He ran to the desk and stared down at the gun for a long, anguished moment, then grabbed it up. As he brushed past the figure at the door, he said roughly, "Don't tell anyone you saw Mother. No one, do you understand?"
Chapter 20.
Tarrant House lay straight ahead, framed between the avenue of live oaks. On this cloudy, sultry afternoon, the plastered brick varied in shade from pale green to beige to misty gray, depending upon the slant of sunlight diffused through the clouds.
The-air was moist and sticky, as humid as a July day. Not a vestige of wind stirred the shiny, showy magnolia leaves. Sharp-edged palmettos stood like sentinels on either side of the house. Gossamer threads of Spanish moss hung straight and limp on the low-limbed live oaks, their beauty as delicate as the brushwork in a Chinese landscape. Purplish clouds darkened the southern sky. It wasn't storm season, but a storm was surely coming.
This house had weathered more than a century and a half of storms and stormy lives. Tarrant House had seen happiness and loss, love and hatred, plenty and famine, peace and war. It seemed to Annie—though she knew it was fanciful—that the house had a wily, watching, wary appearance, drawing into
itself in preparation for the promised winds, the coming tempest.
It was a day as fated for storm and death as the day Faulkner's Addie Bundren lay listening to the chock and thunk of her coffin being constructed.
What would this day see?
Without question, a murderer would walk the halls of Tarrant House once again before the storm broke.
Annie wondered if she and Max would be clever enough to determine the truth of May 9, 1970.
Miss Dora appeared suddenly, stepping out from behind a hedge of pittosporum. "I've been waiting." There was, as usual, no warmth in her greeting or in the midnight-dark eyes that looked at them so intensely, as if to rake out the secrets of their souls by sheer impress of will.
But, dammit, it was Miss Dora who had lied!
Abruptly, as they looked at each other, the young woman and the old, Annie glimpsed—for an instant that seemed an eternity—a welter of emotion in Miss Dora's gaze, uncertainty and terror and a terrible resolution.
Then the moment passed. Annie was left to wonder, as the old woman lifted her stick, gesturing for them to hurry, if that glimpse of agony in those implacable eyes reflected nothing more than the turmoil in Annie's own mind. Certainly, Miss Dora gave no other hint of distress as she led the way up the crushed-shell drive, using her cane as a pointer.
"That oak—the huge one to the south—was the site of a hanging in 1862. A Yankee spy. Redheaded, they say." The old voice was brisk, matter-of-fact.
How old was he, Annie wondered, and why had he come to Chastain?
As if she'd heard the unspoken query, Miss Dora continued: "Scouting to see about the fortifications and whether the harbor could be captured. Said to be a handsome young man. One of the Tarrant girls fainted at the sight, and everyone always wondered if there were more to his coming than was
said to the world."
At least, Annie thought, it had not been the girl's arm,
raised in the iron grip of an angry father, that struck the mount beneath the victim.
The scene before them darkened, the sun now hidden behind thick clouds. Annie looked up at the old house, at the double piazzas, at the four massive octagonal columns supporting the five-foot-high decorated parapet, at the four huge chimneys towering above the parapet.
"There are seventy-two windows," Miss Dora observed, as they started up the front steps. The stairway was necessary because the house was built one story above ground, supported by brick columns. A sour, musty smell rose from the arched entrances to the space beneath the house.
Cemeteries weren't high on Annie's list of places to spend time, but she felt certain no graveyard ever smelled earthier than the dark nooks beneath Tarrant House.
She was glad to reach the broad, first-floor piazza. Pompeian-red shutters framed the immense windows. An enormous fanlight curved above the double walnut front doors. The glass panes were clear as ice.