Angel's Advocate (11 page)

“You had several conversations with Mr. Skinner, I believe.”

“Very spotty,” Bree said. “It was like being at the end of a tunnel. I think I solved that case through sheer dumb luck. And I’m running into the same problem with the ghost of Probert Chandler. I can barely understand what he’s asking me to do.” She hesitated, pretty sure that she didn’t want to know the answer to her next question. “Is there a . . . a place where I can sit down and talk to him properly?”

Archie shrieked, as if he’d been burned.

“There is,” the professor said dryly, “but it’s unlikely that you would return to continue his defense.”

“You mean I can get there but I can’t get back?”

“Not precisely.” The professor thought a moment, his eyes shuttered. “Probert Chandler’s keepers would be delighted to keep you with him. You would be an enormous asset.”

She recalled the black flames and the taloned claws that tore at Probert Chandler’s shade and shuddered. “Couldn’t Gabriel and maybe Petru and Ron go with me? Kind of like bailiffs? Or security guards?”

“No.” He lifted his finger to forestall her next demand. “We’re not keeping things from you out of choice,” he said testily. “Do you remember how you learned to swim?”

“I . . . huh?” Bree blushed. “Sorry. That was rude. Yes, I surely do. But I don’t see . . .” She stopped. The professor lifted his eyebrow. “You’d like me to say? Well, Mamma took me into the water and floated around with me. She held me up until I was able to figure out the strokes.”

“There is no one to walk into the water to keep you afloat until you learn the strokes.” He made an impatient movement. “Don’t you see? You do not. Very well. If there was no one to teach you to swim, how would you learn?”

“I’d wade into the water and paddle around until I figured it out, I suppose.”

“And if I were on the shore, shouting instructions?”

“I’d be listening!” Bree said indignantly.

“You would be concentrating on me and not on the task at hand. And, what’s more, you might take chances in the expectation that I would jump in and pull you out if you started to drown. You are a prudent and resourceful woman, Bree. And you like to win. You only go ahead when you are reasonably sure of a victory. I cannot prepare you for what lies ahead. It’s your decisions, your choices, and your free will that push you forward here. Those decisions must be unhampered by any considerations other than the success of the case and your own survival.”

The only possible reply to this was a polite variant of “That sucks,” so Bree kept her mouth shut, partly out of respect, but mostly because she’d get something along the lines of “Tough!” as a response, and that’d get her dander up for sure.

“Can I quit?” she said suddenly. “I mean, what if I don’t want to do this anymore?”

“There are those that would be delighted if you quit,” Cianquino said equably.

Bree thought about the pronoun: “that” as opposed to “who.” “That” applied to nonhumans. To things, not people. She thought of the yellow mist that chased her, and what terrifying thing it might conceal. “I see,” she said, although she didn’t, not quite. “So. Getting a sit-down interview with Probert Chandler is a no-go.”

“Your investigative skills are considerable,” Cianquino said with his characteristic obliqueness. “I have every confidence that you can answer the questions revolving around his death, and that you can prepare a spirited and truthful defense. He will get in touch with you when he is able to do so.”

“How tough is it? For him to talk to me, I mean? We’re dealing with a legal system here, and he seems to have the usual kind of rights. If he’s got the right to representation, how come he hasn’t got the right to use it?”

“You remember your logic classes and the argument against
argumentum in circulo
?”

Bree squinched her face up. She’d been a hardworking student, but not an inspired one. “That’s one in Aristotle’s list of flaws in logical argument, and it has something to do with the argument going around in circles.”

Gabriel muffled a laugh. Archie flapped his wings, stretched to his full height on his perch, and shrieked, “La-
ment
-able!”

“More or less. Mr. Chandler’s awareness of his own mistakes in life keeps him from giving full disclosure to you.”

“You mean, that’s the static interference I get when I talk to these guys? Their sins, so to speak? Sort of a visual pollution?” She rubbed the back of her neck in frustration. “The only thing he said that could possibly be a clue is that his death was connected somehow with his business. Marlowe’s. The static interfered with everything else.”

“Static. That’s as apt an interpretation as any of what prevents the dead from speaking to us clearly. It is the sense of sin carried within us. All men—and I use the term advisedly, Bree, since it applies to women, too—are error-filled. It is a perquisite of being human. And if he was not human and free of mankind’s sins of greater and lesser degree, he wouldn’t be in need of a lawyer like yourself.”

“‘Perquisite,’” Bree said. “That’s an odd word to choose.”

“A benefit and a boon, human failings,” Cianquino said. “As well as a curse and a damnation. As you might say yourself, dear Bree: ‘You betcha!’ ”

Gabe spoke from the shadows behind the desk, a let’s-get-on-with-it tone to his voice. “It’s close to midnight, Armand. Something urgent has come up. It’s why we came to see you.”

“And we’re nearing All Hallows Eve,” Cianquino agreed. “Yes. To the business at hand. You are aware, Bree, that there are those who want to”—he paused and thought for a moment—“disrupt your activities.” He smiled. “We are aware of all that happens, you know.”

“Yes!” Bree said indignantly. “I am. And it’s hardly fair, is it? Somebody on the defendant’s side is violating some kind of canon of ethics, aren’t they? At least, I presume there is a canon of ethics in celestial matters. I mean, where better? So I’d like to file a complaint against the harassment.”

“Do so, by all means,” the professor encouraged. “Petru should be able to draw up the necessary Summons and Complaint. But I doubt it will have much effect.”

“Those Pendergasts,” Lavinia said from the shadows. Bree jumped a little. She hadn’t realized Lavinia was in the room. She looked into the corner of the library. Gabriel’s tall, silvery form spun next to a short, lavender-tinted whirl of light. “Never did take much account of the law when they was alive. Even less so when they died off.”

“Ah, yes. Josiah.” The lamplight dimmed, as if a hand had passed over the flame. Cianquino frowned.

“The Pendergasts are an old Savannah family,” Bree said. “I was in prep school with one of them. Jennifer.”

“Who married that no-good son of Mr. Benjamin Skinner,” Lavinia said tartly. “Mm-hm. Josiah was her great-granddaddy. And a real no-good, for certain. Not much out of the ordinary for the times, though, since there were a lot of no-goods walkin’ the streets of Savannah back then.” Lavinia’s shade coalesced into her temporal form and she moved into the light. “My first sight of him, I’ll not forget, not for all the time left in this world and the next. I was a-playing in the Nile with my cousins.”

“The Nile?” Bree said.

“The part that’s in Africa,” the professor answered.

“He took the head off of N’tange with one sweep of his sword, and put the rest of us in chains.” Lavinia’s voice trailed on the air like soft dark silk. “And I spent the rest of my earthly days near this very place. Melrose. Melrose.” She fell silent. “Not too long after I come here, Josiah sold me to Melrose’s oldest boy. I didn’t see too much of the sunlight for the longest time.” She shut her eyes and hummed softly, all the while rocking gently on her feet. “There now,” she said to herself, “there now.”

Bree’s chest was tight. She drew a short, shallow breath.

“Betimes,” Lavinia said slowly, “betimes whilst I was living out my days in the dark, Josiah met and married Olivia.”

“Olivia,” Bree echoed. She’d come across Olivia Pendergast’s gravestone in the cemetery that surrounded the house at 66 Angelus Street.

“Olivia didn’t take to Josiah and his wickedness. So she run off with a handsome lover. It’s on her gravestone, her epitaph. One Chronicles twenty-nine, verse fifteen: ‘Our days on earth are as a shadow, and there is none abiding.’ Yes’m, Bree, and the rest of that verse was poor Olivia to the life and death. A sojourner and a stranger. A stranger to these parts and a sojourner who didn’t get too far with her fancy man before Josiah killed them, too.”

“Did he stand trial?” Bree asked.

“He did. And her poor corpse did, too, for a-killin’ of the child she was to have borned before she went off with her lover. They hanged Josiah. And they put her corpse in the murderers plot, alongside of his. And there they lie to this day, the revengeful dead.”

“Except that they’re not lying in their graves the way they’re supposed to,” Bree said. She looked at Gabriel. “You brought me here because the Pendergast graves are empty.”

“And so they are,” Lavinia said.

“What’s this?” Cianquino said. His eyes, brilliant and black, bored into Lavinia’s. “Are you certain, Lavinia?”

“I stand between those graves and this life each mortal day,” Lavinia said. “And I know when there’s been a harrowing. They’ve gone. Oh, yes. They’ve gone.”

Bree’s imagination whirled with terrible images. Lavinia as a young girl, lying chained in the hold of a slave ship. Lavinia in the hands of Burton Melrose, whose crimes against his female slaves had been so crazed, none of the older histories of Savannah detailed them. She wanted to wrap Lavinia in her arms, but the look on the old woman’s face kept her from moving an inch in her direction. Instead, she swallowed hard and asked, “But, where have they gone? Josiah and Olivia?”

“They’ve been unchained from the pits they lie in,” Lavinia said to Armand. “And I do believe they are after my girl. My Bree. I’m here to see what you are going to do about it.”

“Cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war!” Archie said, as if it were a suggestion and not a quote.

“Perhaps,” Cianquino agreed. He smoothed his chin. “I’ll make some inquiries about that, Archie. In the meantime, I’ll have to do some research. This doesn’t augur well, I must admit. I can only think of one precedent, and it’s not a comforting one.”

“What doesn’t augur well?” Bree demanded. “And what happens when a body leaves a grave? Except that the bodies would have rotted a century ago. So what exactly was in those graves? And what happened to it—them—the bones?”

“The dead exist in a universe parallel to this,” Gabriel said. “And the physical Bridge between the two is always closed. You will see them, hear them, perhaps even feel the cold of their presence, but they cannot touch you. Your body crosses it when you die. And your body can’t cross back.”

“Always closed,” Bree said, “this Bridge. That’s good.”

“It’s almost always, though, isn’t it?” Lavinia said. “Because they’re here now, the two of them. And they are loose.”

“Loose,” Bree echoed hollowly. She cleared her throat. “And what does that mean, exactly?”

“Always takes her fences head-on,” Gabriel said to Cianquino. “Brave as anyone we’ve ever had in the job.” He glanced at her. “You’ve asked a direct question. You deserve a direct answer. Do you want it?”

“Of course,” Bree said. She folded her hands on the table—to stop them from shaking, if truth were told—and looked at each of them in turn.

The professor spoke slowly, as if remembering a past life. “When the Bridge between the spheres is breached, it lets loose a certain amount of true evil into the world. Active cruelty. Deliberate malice. Destruction of a kind that, unchecked, could destroy most of what you and yours hold dear. Those large events that horrify mankind come from massive armies of the Adversary. Pogroms, massacres, genocide. The smaller, more private evils come from those like the Pendergasts, slipping through when the attention of the Guardians is elsewhere.”

“So I don’t have to save the world this week, at least,” Bree said. She was proud that her voice wasn’t trembling. Her mind was filled with the horrors of serial killers, torturers, rapists, and mothers who drowned their children.

Professor Cianquino smiled wryly. “Not this week. Just yourself. And those that are close to you. Take care, Bree.”

“And you’ll send some help?” Gabriel said.

“I’ll send some help.”

“Of all the gin joints in all the world . . .”

—
Casablanca

“So what do you think?” Antonia flung herself onto the living room floor and gazed up at the ceiling. It was cof fered. In a fit of Georgian-inspired artistic fervor, a long dead Winston-Beaufort had commissioned paintings in each of the squares between the moldings, and Antonia looked up at simpering shepherdesses and bilious sheep.

“I think I made a mistake when I decided to go to law school instead of becoming a veterinarian.”

“I didn’t know you thought about being a vet.”

“I didn’t think long enough. Or maybe I should have been a chef.”

“Get out!” Antonia shouted gleefully. “You’d starve to death without takeout!”

Bree was exhausted and wound tight as a guitar string. She was scared and angry with herself for being scared. Professor Cianquino had promised help. Of what kind, he couldn’t say. Except that she would know it when it showed up. She hoped it was soon.

She’d almost cried with relief when she’d pulled into her parking spot outside her town house and seen that Antonia was home. For the next few days, at least, she didn’t want to be alone.

“When I said what do you think, I meant about the play, not your career.” Antonia flopped over onto her stomach, shoved her fists beneath her chin, and looked at Sasha, who was sprawled next to her. “With all due respect, sister, your career seems to be having a totally negative effect on your outlook on life. Tim Adriansen said you were in the theater tonight for about five seconds and then you bombed on out with some good-looking guy, without so much as a peep about the show. I suppose you hated it so much you couldn’t stand it. Or it bored you so much you took off with the first good-looking dude that flexed his pecs at you.”