The Christie Caper - Carolyn Hart [141]
But nothing could hold her gaze long except the house, famed as one of the Low Country’s loveliest Greek Revival mansions, home for generation after generation of Tarrants.
The House.
That’s how she always thought of it.
The House that held all the secrets and whose doors were barred to her.
Courtney gazed at the House with unforgiving eyes.
She was too young to know that some secrets are better left hid.
4
The tawny ginger tom hunched atop the gravestone, golden eyes gleaming, muscles bunched, only the tip of his switching tail and the muted murmurs in his throat hinting at his excitement.
The old lady leaning on her silver-topped, ebony cane observed the ripple of muscles beneath the tom’s sleek fur. She was not immune to the power of the contrast between the cat, so immediately alive, and the leaf-strewn grave with its cold somber headstone.
Dora Chastain Brevard stumped closer to the monument, then used the cane’s tip to gouge moss and dirt from the letters scored deep in granite.
ROSS CARMINE TARRANT
January 3, 1949–May 9, 1970
Taken from His Family
So Young
in a
Cruel Twist of Fate
As she scraped, a thumb-size mouse skittered wildly across the grave. The cat flowed through the air, smooth as honey oozing from a broken hive, but he was too late. The frantic mouse disappeared into a hole beneath the roots of a huge cypress. The feline’s tail switched in frustration; then, once, again, he tensed, but this time, despite the glitter in his eyes, the cat didn’t pounce.
The sluggish, slow-moving wolf spider, a huge and hairy tarantula, would have been easy to catch.
But the ginger tom made no move.
Did the prowling cat know that the slow-moving arachnid possessed a potent poison? Or was it merely the ever-present caution of his species, the reluctance to pounce upon an unfamiliar prey?
The cane hissed through the air.
Miss Dora gazed without expression at the quivering remains of the spider. She wished she could as easily dispose of the unexpected communication that had brought her to this mournful site.
5
Max Darling whistled “Happy Days Are Here Again” as he turned the Maserati up the blacktop toward Chastain. He was looking forward to the coming meeting with more excitement than he’d felt in a long time. In his mind, he heard once again Courtney Kimball’s intriguing voice, young but self-possessed, a little breathy, very South Carolina.
He walked into the new waterfront restaurant and his spirits rose when vivid eyes sought his in the mirror behind the bar. The young woman who swiftly turned and slipped down from the stool and walked to greet him, a graceful hand outstretched, would capture attention anywhere.
Max was assailed by a mélange of immediate impressions: remarkable violet eyes, a beauty at once apparent yet elusive, a projection of confidence and dignity. But, paramount, was her intensity.
Her first words caught at his heart.
“I need you.”
6
Annie Laurance Darling put down the telephone at the front desk of Death on Demand, the loveliest mystery bookstore this side of Atlanta, and didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.
Whichever, she had only herself to blame.
Who was always exhorting her husband to apply himself, to work hard, to devote himself to duty?
She, Annie Laurance Darling. Although, in truth, she had eased off recently, ever since Max began to avoid talking about his office. She had stopped asking about his cases or lack of them, concerned that she might have hurt his feelings with her well-meant admonitions to hew to the course. She hadn’t pasted any helpful dictums to his shaving mirror for at least a week. (Amazing—and soul-satisfying to strivers—the encouraging mottoes intended for underachievers: The early bird gets the worm. Little by little does the trick. Put your shoulder to the wheel. Toil, says the proverb, is the sire of fame. Under the