The Christie Caper - Carolyn Hart [140]
Agatha Christie, A Biography, by Janet Morgan, Knopf, 1985.
A Talent to Deceive, An Appreciation of Agatha Christie, by Robert Barnard, revised and updated, The Mysterious Press, 1987.
Come, Tell Me How You Live, by Agatha Christie, Dodd, Mead, 1946.
Mallowan’s Memoirs, by Max Mallowan, Dodd, Mead, 1977.
The Agatha Christie Companion, The Complete Guide to Agatha Christie’s Life and Work, by Dennis Sanders and Len Lovallo, Berkley revised trade paperback edition, 1989.
The New Bedside, Bathtub & Armchair Companion to Agatha Christie, second edition, edited by Dick Riley and Pam McAllister, Ungar, 1986.
Agatha Christie, First Lady of Crime, edited by H.R.F. Keating, Weidenfield and Nicolson, 1977.
Murder She Wrote, A Study of Agatha Christie’s Detective Fiction, by Patricia D. Maida and Nicholas B. Spornick, Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1982.
The Agatha Christie Companion, by Russell H. Fitzgibbon, Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1980.
Agatha Christie, The Woman and Her Mysteries, by Gillian Gill, The Free Press, 1990.
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Carolyn G. Hart’s
SOUTHERN GHOST
Now available
1
Had he lived to be an old man, Ross Tarrant’s face, stripped of every vestige of youth and joy, would have looked much as it did that last hour: brooding pain-filled eyes deep-sunken, grayish skin stretched taut over prominent cheekbones, finely chiseled lips pressed hard to prevent a telltale tremor.
Slumped wearily in the battered old morris chair, a man’s chair in a man’s retreat, he stared at the pistol, horror flickering in his eyes like firelight against a night sky.
The sound of the motor reached him first, then the crunch of tires against the oyster shells.
The door was locked.
But it was no ultimate defense.
Ross knew that.
As the throb of the engine died and a car door slammed, Ross reached for the gun.
“Ross.” A commanding voice. A voice he knew from childhood, from crisp winter mornings when the men zigzagged across a field and lifted shotguns to fire at the flushed quail.
The gun was heavy. So heavy. Ross willed away the unsteadiness of his hand.
He was Ross Tarrant.
His mouth twisted bitterly.
Perhaps not an officer and a gentleman.
But he was Ross Tarrant, and he would not shirk his duty.
At the first knock on the door, the gun roared.
2
Sybil Chastain Giacomo would always catch men’s glances and inflame their senses. Especially when the unmistakable light burned in her eyes and she moved sensually, a woman clearly hungering for a man.
Always, it was a young man.
But, passion spent, the latest youth sprawled asleep beside her, Sybil slipped from beneath the satin sheets, drew the brocaded dressing gown around her voluptuous body, and prowled restlessly through the dark house, anger a hot scarlet thread through the black misery in her heart.
3
Despite the fitful gleam of the pale April moon, Tarrant House was almost completely hidden in the deep shadows of the towering live oaks. A wisp of breeze barely stirred the long, dangling wisps of Spanish moss. A single light shone from a second-story window, providing a glimpse of plastered brick and a portion of one of the four huge Corinthian columns that supported the elegant double piazzas and the pediment above.
Pressed against the cold iron railing of the fence, the young woman shivered. The night pulsed with movement—unseen, inimical, hostile. The magnolia leaves snapped, like the tap of a woman’s shoes down an uncarpeted hall. The fronds of the palmettos clicked like ghostly dice at some long-ago gaming board. The thick shadows, pierced occasionally by pale moonbeams, took the shape of hurrying forms that responded to no call. She stood alone and alien in a shrouded, dark world that knew nothing of her—and cared nothing for her. The scent of magnolia and honeysuckle and banana shrub cloyed the air, thick as perfume from a flower-strewn coffin.
“Ohoooh!”
Courtney Kimball drew her breath in sharply as the falling moan, tremulous and plaintive, sounded