Southern Ghost Read online

  It was very quiet in the elegant office, an office, Annie thought, that had rarely contained so much raw emotion, an office more suited to low-voiced, gentlemanly conferences, to the planning of wills and the ordering of estates. A pair of dark blue Meissen urns decorated the Adam mantel with its delicate stuccoed nymphs and garlands. The central panel of the mantel showed a fox hunt. A law book was open atop an Empire card table that sat between huge windows with jade-green damask drapes. A handsome mahogany secretary was open. A fine quill pen rested beside a filled cut-glass inkstand, as if waiting for a country squire to take his place to write in his plantation records. Cut-glass decanters sat on a Chippendale sideboard. A cut-glass bowl on Smithson’s desk held jelly beans.

  “All right.” His voice was crisp now, decisive. “I’ll tell you what I know with the understanding”—he paused, his eyes still probing theirs—“with the understanding that finding Courtney takes precedence over everything else. Is that a deal?”

  “That’s a deal,” Max said quickly.

  Smithson smoothed his beard and leaned back in his chair. “Very well. I have to go back some years. Twenty-two years. At that time, I represented the Kimball family, as had my father and my grandfather before me. Carleton Kimball and I were at the university together. We were boyhood friends before that. Carleton married my cousin Delia. A happy marriage. But there were no children. Both Delia and Carleton were only children. Not even nephews and nieces to love. They wanted children desperately, but finally, they didn’t talk anymore about when children would come, and the years were slipping away.

  “That was the situation in 1970. In December of that year, Carleton and Delia left town rather abruptly in mid-month. I saw them the evening before they departed. And I will tell you, as the father of five children, that the possibility my cousin, then in her early forties, might have been nearly full-term pregnant never occurred to me. I was astonished when Carleton and Delia arrived back in Beaufort just before Christmas with Courtney.”

  His face softened in remembrance. “They were enormously proud of their new daughter. Through the years, I tried several times to talk to Carleton about Courtney, but he always cut me off. He was a genial man, but this was one topic he would not discuss. The last time I brought it up, a few years before his death, I told him that if any question ever arose about Courtney’s parentage, it would be important to have adoption papers to prove she was indeed his daughter at law. He answered simply, ‘Courtney is our daughter.’ Their wills specifically provided for Courtney to inherit the bulk of the Kimball estate, which was considerable. And, finally, after time, I didn’t think about it anymore. Carleton died when Courtney was seventeen; Delia died this March. Courtney came into her inheritance. There were no other surviving relatives.”

  Max went straight to the point. “You don’t believe she is the Kimballs’ natural daughter.”

  “No.” A glint of humor. “Germaine, my wife, was pregnant too many times. It’s there, the way a woman carries herself, the look in her eyes. But, more than that, Carleton and Delia were both big people. He was well over six feet, Delia must have been at least five seven. Tall and big. And dark. He had swarthy skin and Delia was olive skinned. They both had coal-black hair and dark-brown eyes.”

  “Oh, I see.” Max turned to Annie. “Courtney’s slim and small boned and very fair skinned with blond hair and blue eyes. Like Laurel.”

  Annie shrugged. “Brown-eyed people can have blue-eyed children. It’s rare, but the gene for blue eyes is recessive and it does happen. And lots of children and parents don’t look at all alike.”

  The lawyer was quick to agree. “Oh, I know. We have a redheaded son and there hasn’t—officially—been a redhead in the Smithson family in two hundred years. Germaine gets a bit touchy about the usual kind of jokes people make. So yes, it could be. But that isn’t all. That isn’t even most of it.” Smithson absently straightened his perfectly aligned desk blotter. “There’s a matter of personality. Do you have children?”

  “Not yet.” Max flashed an ebullient glance at Annie.

  Her eyes narrowed. Not yet. She wasn’t ready yet.

  “Hmm. Well, let me say simply that heredity can’t be denied.” Smithson glanced at the row of photographs on his desk.

  “That’s for sure,” Max said emphatically. “I have three sisters.”

  Annie could appreciate the wealth of emotion in Max’s voice. Certainly only heredity could account for Deirdre’s penchant for marriages (four to date), Gail’s devotion to causes (the only California mayor to parachute into the midst of a North Carolina tobacco auction with a sign declaring SMOKING KILLS), and Jen’s free spirit (Bella Abzug with beauty). And they all knew whence sprang these militantly unconventional attitudes.

  Annie usually forced herself to avoid lengthy contemplation of this subject. After all, Max wasn’t spacey. But sometimes, his dark-blue eyes were uncannily like those of Laurel.…

  “Environment can play a major role,” Annie said determinedly, quashing the thought that she was whistling in the dark.

  “Certainly,” Max agreed. But he didn’t look at Annie.

  The lawyer nodded slowly. “Yes, that’s true. But the core of personality—Carleton and Delia were both extremely serious, extremely intense. Carleton was an excellent tax lawyer, cautious, conservative. He enjoyed Double-Crostic puzzles. He collected train memorabilia. He wasn’t an outdoor man or a sportsman. He was not well coordinated. Delia was interested in family history. She collected snuffboxes and china plates. She never engaged in a sport in her entire life.”

  “And Courtney didn’t fit?” Annie asked.

  The lawyer looked at her appreciatively. “Precisely. Now, I want to be clear. Carleton and Delia adored Courtney. She was the delight of their lives. But they always seemed fairly astonished by Courtney and her enthusiasms.” He reached for one of the silver-framed photographs on his desk and turned it toward them. “This is my youngest daughter, Janelle. Janelle never saw a dare she didn’t take, either. She and Courtney were inseparable growing up. They won the state junior doubles championship in tennis two years running. They both played field hockey. Watching Courtney play field hockey almost drove Delia and Carleton mad with worry. She broke her left arm one year, a collarbone the next. Courtney plays to win. She loves jumping.” He looked at them doubtfully. “Horses.” They nodded. “And she has a stubborn streak. If anybody tells her she can’t do something, well, that means she’ll try doubly hard to do it. She was suspended for two weeks her senior year because she climbed to the top of the town water tank and attached the school flag to it.” He returned the photograph to its place.

  Annie was just a little surprised at the admiring light in the lawyer’s eyes.

  He reached into the cut-glass bowl for a handful of jelly beans and popped several in his mouth. He pushed the dish toward them, but they shook their heads. He continued, a bit indistinctly: “Courtney was an excellent student, both here and at the university. She majored in archeology, got her private pilot’s license, and spent summers at digs in Peru. Delia and Carleton never enjoyed traveling outside the United States. They always worried about the water, the political situation, and the food. But they were never able to say no to Courtney. They never understood her, but they loved her. And when Courtney has an enthusiasm, it’s like a spring tide, there’s no holding her back. She lives every day as if it were the most glorious, the most exciting, the most wonderful day in the history of the world.”

  The light in his eyes died away. “I’d never seen Courtney subdued until last week. I thought the child was sick when she first came in. She didn’t give me a hug, the way she always had. She just walked to that chair”—he pointed toward Annie’s chair—“and sat down and looked at me, as if she’d never seen me before, as if everything here was strange to her. She had smudges under her eyes, as if she hadn’t been sleeping well for some time. She looked straight at me and, without any preliminaries, said, ‘I want to know the truth about my p
arents. My real parents.’ ”

  He pushed back his chair and strode to the fireplace. For a long moment, he gripped the mantel; then his hands fell away and he turned toward them, anguish in his face. “I couldn’t tell her! God, I couldn’t tell her—and she was so sure I would know, so certain that all she had to do was ask me—and I had nothing to give her. I should have made Carleton tell me.”

  Annie understood his regret, but that wasn’t what mattered now. “How did Courtney know Delia and Carleton weren’t her parents?”

  “She was clearing out Delia’s papers.” He stroked his beard. “I have to wonder, you know, if Delia intended for Courtney to know. Courtney was going through her mother’s things, packing a lot of them away, boxing up clothes to give to the Salvation Army. She found a blue silk letter case in Delia’s bedside drawer. And in it, Courtney found a letter—a letter that made it clear that her father was Ross Tarrant.”

  “And her mother?” Annie asked.

  “No hint. At all.”

  That was all he knew.

  The lawyer gave them a copy of that letter and Max added it to the file. But, when they stood to go, Max had one more question.

  “Just for the record,” he said quietly, “where were you, sir, from approximately four yesterday afternoon to, say, ten o’clock last night?”

  Smithson stiffened. Bright patches of color stained his pale cheeks above his beard. Then, abruptly, he nodded. “Fair enough, Darling. I was in conference with a client from shortly after four until almost six. I had a quick dinner at the cafeteria across the street because I’m on the city council and I had to be there for a meeting at seven. The meeting didn’t end until eleven-thirty.” A dry smile. “Zoning generates enormous excitement.” He reached for a pad from his desk, scribbled names and numbers on it. “You can check these.” The angry patches faded away. He reached out, gripped Max’s hand. “I’m very fond of Courtney. You’ll find her, won’t you?”

  Max pushed open the gate to the St. George Inn, holding it for Annie. In the street behind them, a car door slammed. Running footsteps thudded on the sidewalk.

  “You! Hey, you!”

  They paused and turned.

  Annie felt a swift thrill of fear, because this was a man out of control. He was young—probably her own age—the kind of person who normally would be immediately accepted, well dressed in a pale-green, crisp summer cotton suit, well groomed with short auburn hair, unobtrusively attractive with open, frank features. But his necktie was bunched at his throat, his suit jacket swung unbuttoned, a red gash on his chin from a shaving cut still dimpled with blood, his brown eyes flared wide and wild, and his chest heaved as he struggled for breath.

  “You—you’re Max Darling?” He was at the gate now, and no one existed in the world for him at that moment but himself and Max.

  Max nodded and his accoster grabbed his jacket with a shaking hand. “Goddammit, where’s Courtney? I’ll kill you if you’ve hurt her, I swear to God I will!”

  His eyes full of pity, Max stood unresisting in the young man’s grasp. “I’m looking for Courtney, too. My wife and I both are.”

  Annie chimed in and that got his attention. “Listen, my husband had nothing to do with Courtney’s disappearance. She hired him to find out about her family, and we’re doing everything we can to find her. Don’t waste our time. And don’t waste your time! Do you know who’s trying to hang her disappearance on my husband? The police chief! He wants to keep everything quiet for the Tarrants. Courtney hired Max to find out what actually happened the day her real father died. We’re still trying. If you want to find Courtney, the best thing you can do is make sure the Chastain police do their work.”

  Finally, he calmed down enough to listen. They took him to their suite and, while Max made coffee, they heard his story. His name was Harris Walker, and he was a young lawyer in Beaufort (Ogilvy, Walker & Crane).

  He paced up and down in their suite. “I’ve known Courtney all my life. She lived next door.” The shadow of a smile. “Irritating little kid, always hanging around the big guys, wanting to do whatever we did. I always called her Skinny. Drove her crazy.” He looked at Annie with eyes that held a thousand memories, and Annie winced at his pain.

  “Bullheaded when she was a little kid. Bullheaded now.” His chin quivered. “I told her that. I told her to burn that goddam letter. What difference did it make who her dad was? It was a long time ago. It was other people’s lives. It didn’t have anything to do with us. But she was set on coming over here. So she hired you.” He looked at Max. “Now she’s gone, nobody knows where. What the hell are you doing about it?” He was combative again.

  When Max finished an account of the past twenty-four hours, Harris scowled. “Jesus, you haven’t accomplished anything, have you?”

  He didn’t wait for an answer. He took a gulp of coffee and banged his cup down on its saucer. “Listen, I’m going back down to the river. And I’m going to round people up. Start a real search. Goddammit, it doesn’t do any good to talk to people. We have to look.”

  After Walker slammed out of their suite, Max reached for the phone. “Going to call Barb,” he said briefly to Annie.

  Annie dropped into a needlepoint chair and picked up the family tree of the recent generations of the Tarrants, but she listened to Max’s conversation.

  “We’re in a race against time, Barb, and we need more help. I’ve heard about a pretty good private detective in Savannah, Louis Porter. Hire him.” Crisply, Max described Harris Walker. “Yeah, that’s right. Harris Walker. I want everything possible about him—and I want to know where he was from four o’clock on last night.”

  Annie shivered. Surely not.

  “… and get Porter busy on the people who were in Tarrant House on May ninth, 1970. You’ll find the list in the Kimball file. Okay. Anything from your end?” Max leaned back against the bolster on the four-poster mahogany bed, then immediately sat up straight. “I’ll be damned. Now, that’s interesting. Annie and I went by her house this morning. Okay, Barb, we’re on our way.”

  Annie put down the sketch of the family trees.

  “Come on, Annie. Miss Dora has sent a royal summons.”

  “About time you got here.” The tiny figure in the long black bombazine dress and high-topped black leather shoes was the Dora Brevard Annie recalled, without pleasure, from previous meetings. The reptilian black eyes with their flicker of intelligence and disdain gazed commandingly at them. Shaggy silver hair streamed from the sharp-boned, wrinkled face. Half-gloved, clawlike hands grasped the familiar silver-headed ebony cane.

  The old lady turned and led the way with surprising speed across the age-smoothed heart pine hall into a drawing room where time had stood still for a century. Bois-de-rose silk hangings decorated the floor-to-ceiling windows. Two baluster-stemmed Georgian candlesticks rested on either side of a Queen Anne gaming table. For how many generations, Annie wondered, had the table stood on that same spot? And had the golden-cream candles been there for years and years, too? A Georgian settee was to the left of the fireplace, two Georgian chairs to the right, with a soft rose Aubusson rug between. The elegant Georgian mantel shone as white as an egret’s wing. It was a beautiful room.

  Miss Dora sped to the nearest chair, inclined her head briefly toward the settee, and waited until they sat opposite her, for all the world, Annie thought resentfully, like children called to account by a strict headmistress.

  “Well?” The sturdy cane thumped sharply on the floor.

  “You wanted to see us, Miss Dora,” Max prompted.

  Her glittering eyes settled coldly on his face for a long moment, then she reached into a capacious pocket and, with a rustle, pulled out a square of neatly clipped newsprint and a thick-lensed pince-nez. She perched the delicate gold-rim glasses on her nose, held the clipping close, and began to read in her sandpapery voice:

  Heiress Disappears; Police Are Puzzled

  A Beaufort heiress, Miss Courtney Kimball, 21, has been report
ed missing, according to Chastain police.

  Police Chief Harry Wells announced today that a Broward’s Rock businessman, Max well Darling, had an appointment with Miss Kimball on Wednesday night, and that Darling came to police with Miss Kimball’s handbag claiming he found it at the site of their scheduled meeting, but that Miss Kimball never arrived.

  Miss Kimball’s car, a 1992 cream-colored BMW, was found by police late last night at Lookout Point. Bloodstains were found on the front seat.

  Chief Wells said Darling was held for questioning when police discovered him at Miss Kimball’s apartment Wednesday night shortly after he had reported her missing to police. The apartment showed signs of a search.

  Chief Wells reported that the police laboratory confirmed the stains in the car are from human blood.

  Darling was released late Wednesday night on his own recognizance.

  Efforts by this reporter to contact Darling, owner of Confidential Commissions, a personal consultation company on Broward’s Rock Island, have been unsuccessful.

  An all-points—

  Annie couldn’t take any more. She jumped to her feet. “That louse. That rat. That slimebag—”

  “That will do, Annie,” Miss Dora snapped. “It won’t help to have a hissy fit at Harry Wells. The damage is done. Your young man is in a pack of trouble, and you both might as well get ready to face it.” There was more than a hint of satisfaction in her thin voice.

  Annie opened her mouth, looked into Miss Dora’s penetrating, raisin-dark eyes, and abruptly sat down.

  “Good. I’m glad to see you can sometimes be sensible. Now,” Miss Dora cleared her throat, “to continue”:

  An all-points bulletin has been issued. Miss Kimball is described as a slender, blue-eyed blonde. The missing woman is the daughter of the late Mr. and Mrs. Carleton Kimball of Beaufort, one of that city’s oldest and most prominent families. The family attorney, Roger Smithson III, declined comment today on what might have brought Miss Kimball to Chastain.