The Christie Caper (44 page)

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 influence of poverty or of wealth, workmen and their work are equally liable to degenerate….

Obviously, however, her efforts had not gone unappreciated; witness the call she’d just received from Max. So now that Max was involved in a case, how could she complain?

“Dammit, Agatha, you’d think he could arrange work for office hours!” Annie slammed her hand down on the countertop.

The sleek black cat atop the bookcases devoted to Agatha Christie lifted her elegant head to stare with unblinking amber eyes at Annie. (Was it simply coincidence that the cat considered these particular shelves to be her own or were there matters involved here beyond ordinary human understanding?)

“And what’s so confidential he can’t even tell his own wife?”

Annie heard the hurt in her own voice. And what was so urgent, so important that Max had called to say he wouldn’t be home for dinner—and not to wait up for him tonight. She glanced toward the front windows. She’d just put up the
CLOSED
sign and was tallying the day’s receipts while waiting for Max to walk down the boardwalk from Confidential Commissions, one of the more unusual businesses on the South Carolina resort island of Broward’s Rock. Annie always thought of Confidential Commissions as a modern-day equivalent to the good offices performed by Agatha Christie’s detective of the heart, Mr. Parker Pyne. Max rather liked that analogy, but he was also quick to point out that he was neither a private detective nor a practicing lawyer, but merely a consultant available to those with problems outside the ken of the licensed professionals.

It had become a happy ritual, the two of them coming together at the close of the business day, each with much to tell. At least, she always had much to tell. But this week Max had said even less than usual. In retrospect, she realized he’d been quite closemouthed, merely observing that things were picking up at the office. Of course, Annie’d swept right on with her reports, how Henny Brawley, her best customer, had sent a postcard from England to report on her tour of Shrewsbury Abbey, the home of Ellis Peters’s incomparable Brother Cadfael
(“Annie, I actually saw the small altar to St. Winefride!”),
and how busy it had been in Death on Demand—
“Would you believe a busload of clubwomen from Charleston?”
—since Ingrid Smith, her chief assistant, was bedridden with a spring flu.

Annie felt deflated, a suddenly empty evening ahead. Max hadn’t even said where he was going. Dusk was falling, and soon the air would cool sharply. Nights could be shivery in the spring despite the reassuring harbingers of the new season: the call of the chuck-will’s-widow, the rachet of swamp frogs.

“I wonder if he has his sweater with him?” Her voice seemed to echo in the empty store.

Agatha yawned, a nice equivalent to a human shrug, then rose, stretched, and dropped to the floor to pad lightly down the central corridor toward the back of the bookstore.

Annie followed, pausing to alphabetize several titles in
the Romantic Suspense section:
My Cousin Rachel
by Daphne du Maurier,
Danger in the Dark
by Mignon Eberhart,
Widows’ Plight
by Ruth Fenisong,
Alive and Dead
by T. X. Ferrare, and
The Clue of the Judas Tree
by Leslie Ford.

“Max was so abrupt, Agatha. And abstracted.” She put the latest title by Elaine Raco Chase face out. “Like he was talking to a stranger.”

Agatha waited imperiously atop the coffee bar, which offered customers a different blend every day (Annie’s favorite, of course, was Kona) served in mugs bearing the names of famous mysteries and their authors. Annie offered Agatha a fresh serving of dry food, received an unequivocal feline glare in response, and quickly reached for a can. Agatha did not tolerate frustration well. It was wise, Annie had decided after applying Mercurochrome to numerous scratches, to satisfy Agatha’s needs, wants, and desires promptly. And, if she thought hard about Agatha, she wouldn’t mull over that odd, unsatisfactory call from Max.

As she emptied half the can into Agatha’s bowl, she remarked conversationally, “I have to hand it to you, Agatha, you’re one of a kind.”

Annie glanced up at the rows of cheerful mugs with the titles and authors inscribed in bright-red flowing script. She needed a mug that would brighten her empty evening. Perhaps Margaret Scherf’s first Martin Buell mystery,
Always Murder a Friend.
Or Annie’s favorite by Constance and Gwenyth Little,
The Great Black Kanba.
How about the zany humor in
Lion in the Cellar
by Pamela Branch? Or would her spirits improve if she spent an hour with Ellie and Ben in
Mum’s the Word
by Dorothy Cannell?

“Perhaps,” wafted the husky voice, “I am somehow lacking.”

Annie damn near jumped out of her skin. Jerking around, she gazed into limpid dark-blue eyes. “Where the he—Laurel, where did you come from? I didn’t hear the door.” Annie tried not to sound too startled and accusing, but, honestly, if Laurel didn’t stop materializing without warning …

Her mother-in-law gave a lilting sigh. Anyone who didn’t believe sighs could lilt just hadn’t dealt with Laurel. The lucky devils.

Her alarm past, Annie surveyed her gorgeous—yes, that was the only appropriate descriptive adjective for Laurel—mother-in-law and smiled. How did Laurel manage always
to appear young, fresh, and vibrant, no matter how bizarre her getup? On Annie, the baggy tweed suit and mottled horn-rims, along with a stenographer’s notebook and freshly sharpened No. 2 pencil, would have looked like a grade school librarian’s trophies from a rummage sale. On Laurel, the effect was enchanting. The horn-rims gave a piquant accent to her elegant patrician features and shining golden hair (Dammit, how could anyone look so marvelous with hair drawn back in a tight, nononsense bun?), the droopy tweeds fell in becoming folds against her svelte figure.

“You see, I have to wonder if it’s me?” Laurel continued earnestly. “Annie, would you say that I am not
simpatico?”

Annie’s smile broadened to a fond grin. “Laurel, nobody would say you are not
simpatico.”
And also flakey, but this thought Annie didn’t share. Off-the-wall. Just one step (which way?) from certifiable. But, always and ever,
simpatico
—to people, to animals ranging from anteaters to dolphins to whales, to situations, to the whole damn world, when you came down to it.

But those dark-blue eyes, so unnervingly like other eyes that lately, when business was mentioned, slid evasively away from her own—Annie struggled back to the present, determined to focus on Laurel.

“… have always tried to be so open to experience, so
welcoming.
If you know what I mean?”

Annie deliberately turned her thoughts away from Laurel’s five marriages. And why, after so many trips to the altar, was Laurel persisting in not marrying their neighbor, Howard Cahill, who would be such an attractive father-in-law, so stable, so respectable?

“… so
disappointed
when Alice didn’t come.”

It was not the first time in their acquaintance, which was surely long in content if not in time, that Annie was left staring at Laurel in hopeless confusion.

Alice?

Who was Alice? Had they been talking about someone named Alice?

“Alice?” she murmured uncertainly.

“Oh, my dear.” A wave of a graceful hand, the pink-tinted nails glossed to perfection. “Certainly you know all about Alice.”

Alice Springs? Alice in Wonderland? Alice Blue Gown? Annie pounced on the latter. “Alice Blue Gown?” she proposed
hopefully. It was just offbeat enough to be the answer.

But Laurel was pursuing her own thoughts, which, understandably, could well occupy her fully. Annie had seen the day when Laurel’s thoughts had occupied many minds more than hers. But it was better not to dwell upon the past. Though that period—the one with saints—had held its own unique charms. It was at moments such as this, indeed, that Annie herself was likely to call upon the excellent advice of Saint Vincent Ferrer.
(Ask God simply to fill you with charity, the greatest of all virtues; with it you can accomplish what you desire.)
Annie surely needed heaps of charity in order to attain patience, a definite requisite for an amiable relationship with her mother-in-law.

“… thirteen times backward. I know I did it right. I was counting.” Laurel gnawed a shell-pink lip in perplexity. “Annie, do you suppose I could have miscounted?”

“Certainly not,” Annie assured her.

Palms uplifted, despite the notebook and No. 2 pencil, Laurel exclaimed, “Then it’s quite beyond me! Because Alice definitely didn’t come.”

Annie decided to explore this cautiously. “You were expecting her?”

Her mother-in-law dropped the notebook and pencil on the nearest table, opened her carryall, and pulled out a sheaf of Polaroid pictures, the bulky self-developing camera, and several road maps. “It just came to me—you know the way things do”—an enchanting smile—“that it would be so
useful
to take photos on the spot. And, of course, if anyone should be there, how wonderful to be able to show skeptics.
Seeing
is, as someone once said so cleverly,
believing.”
The golden head bent over the pile of photographs. “I’m marking the exact date and time on the back of each picture. It’s easy as pie with the tripod and one of those clever electronic controls—so magical, just like the television remote—so I can be in the pictures, too.” She beamed at Annie and handed her a photograph.

Annie was halfway to a smile when she felt her face freeze. Oh, God. It looked like … Surely it wasn’t …

“Laurel.” Annie swallowed tightly and stared at the photo of_____

“… really, one of my better pictures. Of me, don’t you think?”

—Laurel gracefully draped on a marble slab atop a
grave, chin cupped in one hand, smiling wistfully toward the camera.

“It would have been quite
perfect
if Alice had come.” She stepped close beside Annie, and the scent of violet tickled Annie’s nose. “See. There’s her name. That’s all they put on the slab. Just ‘Alice.’”

“Alice,” Annie repeated faintly. “She’s dead?”

“Of course she’s dead!” Laurel exclaimed. “Otherwise,” she asked reasonably, “how could she be a
ghost?
And it would have been so convenient! It would be so easy to visit her often. It’s a delightful trip from here to Murrell’s Inlet, and the All Saints Cemetery is lovely, Annie, just lovely. So many people have seen Alice after circling her grave thirteen times backward, then calling her name or lying atop the slab. I did both,” she confied. A sudden frown. “Perhaps that was the problem. Too much. But”—a winsome smile replaced the frown—“I took some lovely notes.” She patted the notebook in satisfaction. “I do intend to devote a good deal of space to Alice. After all, it’s such a heartrending story, a young woman in love, separated from her beloved by her family because they thought he wasn’t suitable, spirited away from her beloved home to school in Charleston. One final night of gaiety at the St. Cecilia Ball, then stricken with illness and when they brought her home, they found her young man’s ring on the pale-blue silk ribbon around her neck, and her brother took it and threw it away and while she was dying and delirious she called and called for the ring. Is it any wonder,” Laurel asked solemnly, “that Alice is often seen in her old room at The Hermitage or walking in the gardens there? Everyone
knows
she’s looking for her ring.” A gentle sigh, delicate as a wisp of Spanish moss. “Ah, Love … Its power cannot be diminished even by the grave.”

If there was an appropriate response to that, Annie didn’t know it, so she tried to look sympathetic and interested while glancing unobtrusively toward the clock.

Of course, anyone attuned enough to subtleties to seriously expect to communciate with ghosts wasn’t likely to miss a glance at a clock, no matter how unobtrusive.

“Oh, dear, I had no idea it was so late. I
must fly.
” Swiftly, those graceful hands whipped the photographs, camera, and maps back into the embroidered carryall. “My duties are not yet done for the day.” Laurel backed toward the storeroom door, smiling benificently. “Give my love to dear Max. I know
you two would adore to have me join you for dinner, of course you would, but I do believe that mothers, especially mothers-in-law, should remember that the young must have Their Own Time Together. I try hard not to forget that. Of course, with my commitment to my Work, it’s unlikely that I should ever be underfoot.” Laurel had backpedaled all the way to the storeroom doorway. “I do believe my book shall be quite unique. It’s just a scandal that South Carolina’s ghosts have yet to be interviewed. Can you believe that oversight? All of these books are told from the viewpoint of the persons who saw the ghost and I ask you, should they be featured just because they happen to be present when a ghost comes forth—that’s a good term isn’t it”—the doorway framed Laurel’s slender form for an instant—“perhaps that should be my title,
Coming Forth.
Oh, I like that.” She was out of sight now, but the throaty tone, a combination of Marlene Dietrich, Lauren Bacall, and wood nymph, carried well. “Do have a delightful dinner, my darlings.” The back door opened and closed.