The Windbells of Lovingwood — Juanita Tyree Osborne

The wind-bells haunted the dreams of serious-eyed Joby Etheridge long after she fled the Lovingwood with her mother. Now, thirteen years later, she was free to return to the magnolia-scented acres of the Etheridge plantation. It seemed impossible that such lovely surroundings could conceal a murderer, but Joby's mother, crippled and nearly killed in a fall, swore that she had been a victim of treachery. To her dying day Mrs. Etheridge had implored Joby never to return to Lovingwood lest a similar fate should befall her.

Joby was twenty-six when her mother died, but thirteen years of virtual seclusion had paled her complexion, and she skewered her black hair in a demure eggplant bun. But beneath her prim exterior Joby nurtured a passionate love for blue-eyed Kells Trexler, son of her father's first wife, the childhood playmate whom she had tagged after adoringly through the long, sunny Lovingwood afternoons. It was Kells, almost more than her beloved father, who was the focus of Joby's obsessing desire to return.

Even the wraithlike figure, familiar but elusive, that shadowed her mother's watercolors did not tempter Joby's eagerness, but the event that greeted her arrival at the plantation gave ominous credence to Mrs. Etheridge's impassioned warnings. When Joby attempted to untangle the dark skein of Lovingwood's mystery, she found that all the crystal wind-bells in the world couldn't sing her back to the security of her Lovingwood childhood.