Angel's Advocate (2 page)

Bree made a face.

“And besides, it’s something of a challenge, isn’t it? It’s going to be quite a trick to make this little girl look sympathetic.” Bree took a deep breath. Cissy raised both hands and yelled, “Sorry, sorry, sorry! You’ve got the same look your mamma gets when she’s about to give me a lecture on the overprivileged, which she thinks is you, me, and anybody with the least little bit of a trust fund.”

“We
are
overprivileged,” Bree pointed out. “You, me, Mamma, and Antonia, too.” She thought a minute. “I take that back about Antonia.” Her little sister lived at the town house on the incredibly feeble wages she made as a tech director at the local repertory theater. Somehow, she managed to pay her half of the living expenses and for acting and singing lessons, too.

“This is why you should take this case on,” Cissy said. “This is what I should have said from the beginning. What I really
mean
, Bree, is that this girl needs your help.”

Bree nudged her dog with her toe. There were times when her dog was more than a dog to her. “What do you think, Sasha?”

Sasha lifted his head and shoved his nose into the palm of her hand. Bree looked into his amber eyes. He panted happily, tongue lolling, lips drawn back in a doggy grin. Under her steady regard, he glanced away, glanced back, and barked. A wait-and-see sort of bark.

“That’s an awfully big dog to keep in here,” Cissy said, her attention momentarily diverted. “Haven’t the other owners gotten a little hissy? I thought the covenants didn’t allow any pets over forty pounds.”

Sasha stood thirty inches at the shoulder and weighed over a hundred and twenty pounds. His broad chest and powerful hindquarters came from his mastiff forebears. The gentleness of his expression and golden coat were all retriever. “Nobody’s noticed anything yet,” Bree said truthfully. And very probably, nobody would. The dog had a unique ability to make himself scarce when necessary. It was nothing short of . . . angelic. “As for representing this case”—she rubbed her nose—“I think I’ll take a pass. This girl sounds like she needs a shrink more than she needs a lawyer.”

“Your daddy didn’t raise a daughter fool enough to turn down a case from the Chandler family.” Cissy slung her tote over her shoulder with a knowing air. “So are you going to come out with me to Tybee Island?” She drew her eyebrows together. A Botox devotee, her forehead never wrinkled. “If you can’t find the time to give this little girl a hand, Bree, honey, you need to
make
the time. I suppose you’re all booked up this afternoon?” A trust fund baby herself, Cissy had a touching pride in the success of her professionally employed niece.

Bree didn’t have to look at her Day-Timer to know that the rest of her afternoon was depressingly free of client appointments. And she knew her aunt Cissy. She was as determined as a bulldozer. She sighed and threw both hands in the air. “Okay. I give. But I’d rather set up an appointment than show up unannounced.” She pulled out her cell phone and glanced up at her aunt. “And I don’t mean to come over rude, Aunt Cissy, but we’d both be better off if you didn’t come with me.”

To her mild astonishment, Cissy nodded agreement. “Be embarrassin’ for everybody if Carrie-Alice didn’t want to hire you after all.” She stooped over and kissed Bree on the cheek. “Thank you, darlin’. I’ll be off. Will I see you at Plessey this weekend?”

“At Plessey?” Her family’s estate was in North Caro lina, a good six-hour drive from the Savannah town house. Bree loved her family, but one of the reasons she’d settled in Savannah was because she
was
a six-hour drive from her loving, intrusive relatives. She shut her eyes in sudden recollection. “Hoo. I forgot. Saturday’s Guy Fawkes night.” For reasons lost in some time around the Civil War, the Winston-Beauforts had a huge party for it, but November fifth fell on a Thursday this year, so her mother had set the party for Halloween weekend. Bree’s excuses for staying put were lamer than usual. Everybody knew she was dateless since Payton the Rat dumped her three months ago. “I don’t think so, Cissy. I’ve got a ton of work stacked up.” Her aunt’s shrewd blue eyes twinkled, and Bree added feebly, “Research.”

“I thought that’s what your paralegal’s for.”

“Petru’s Russian,” Bree said. “Needs a little help with his English now and then.”

“Hm,” Cissy said. “That’ll not cut ice at all with Francesca. But it’s on your head and not mine. Go ahead. Stay home. Just don’t answer your phone, that’s all I can tell you.” She rummaged in her large tote, pulled out her compact, and examined herself critically in the little mirror. “I’m wonderin’ if I shouldn’t step up the Botox a little. What do you think?”

“I like faces that make faces back at me,” Bree admitted.

“You think? Wait twenty years. Once you’re nudging fifty you get a whole different perspective.” She snapped the compact shut, dropped a kiss on Bree’s head, and slammed out the back door.

Bree ran her hand over Sasha’s neck. It had been several weeks since she’d rescued him from an animal trap in the depths of the cemetery that surrounded her office. The cast had just come off his leg this morning. He’d put on a healthy amount of weight. His muscles rippled under his golden coat. Pink, healthy skin replaced the sores that had covered his hindquarters and chest. “This is another kind of rescue, dog. So I suppose I could at least give the poor woman a call. We’ll walk back to the office and do it from there.”

Bree put her lunch dishes in the sink, snapped on Sasha’s lead, and set out on the short walk to Angelus.

It was a fine late October day. The high humidity that plagued Savannah in late spring and summer was gone. The family town house sat above the warehouses and naval stores that had been built into the bluffs overlooking the Savannah River these two hundred years past. The town house was part of a series of converted offices connected to one another and to Bay Street by a series of wooden bridges and cast-iron arches.

Bree paused at the top of the cobbled ramp leading down to River Street. Huey’s beckoned. So did Savannah Sweets. Huey’s made a great cup of coffee and Savannah Sweets had the best pralines east of New Orleans. Sasha nudged her knee in a mildly reproving way.

“You’re right. And yes, I’m going to work. And no, I’m not stopping for pralines.” Bree inhaled the scent of the river, wondering if she caught a faint touch of brine from the Atlantic three miles to the east. With a sigh, she turned and headed across East Bay to Mulberry, walked one block down, turned east, and found herself facing Georgia’s very own all-murderers cemetery and the small Federal-style house that contained the office of Beaufort & Company, advocates for those who had died and gone to Hell (or, often as not, Purgatory).

Somebody, most likely her secretary, Ron Parchese, since he was the fussiest—and most able-bodied—of her employees, had weeded around the wrought-iron fence and sunken graves and tidied the kudzu from the grave-stones. The azaleas, camellias, roses, and rhododendrons that made such a glory of Old Savannah in spring and summer weren’t flowering now, of course. But Savannah in autumn had its own peculiar beauty. Silver-gray Spanish moss draped the live oaks like graceful shawls. Hedges of Russian olive, boxwood, and bougainvillea flaunted the full spectrum of greens, from pale celery to near black. It was a lovely spot, if you could ignore the noxious odors from the graves. Bree took a cautious breath. The dank, earthy smell was charged with a horrid undercurrent of decay this afternoon. She narrowed her eyes against the sunlight and looked under the magnolia tree. Was it her imagination, or did a faint smear of poisonous yellow smoke foul the air?

No. She wasn’t going to talk herself into a case of the heebie-jeebies. Bree shook her head, walked up the crumbling brick steps to the front door, and let herself in.

“Yoo-hoo!” Ron caroled. “Did you stop for pralines or not?”

“Not,” Bree responded. She was in the foyer, and Ron’s desk was out of sight around the corner in the living room, at right angles to the brick fireplace. He didn’t need to see her to know who it was. He always just . . . knew.

She set her briefcase on the first step of the stairs leading to the second story. Her landlady, an elderly woman with the energy and mischievousness of an eight-year-old, had painted the stairs with a parade of brightly colored Renaissance angels. The figures marched up the treads and disappeared into the shadowy recesses of the second-floor landing, a blaze of gold, red, purple, and royal blue.

Bree caught the odor of strange and exotic flowers and heard the faint skittering of paws on wood floors. Lavinia must be up there, tending to her “littlies.”

“I’m not going to stay long,” Bree said as she walked into the office area. “Cissy talked me into going out to see a new client on Tybee Island. I’m just going to call . . .” She stopped and looked around. “What happened to Petru’s desk? As a matter of fact, what happened to Petru?”

“He’s in the kitchen,” Ron said primly. “Him
and
his pesky desk.”

“He and his pesky desk,” Bree said; sloppy grammar sometimes made her itch slightly. “What about him and his desk?”

As usual, Ron was dressed in impeccably ironed chinos, a striped shirt, Countess Mara tie, and loafers without socks. He folded his hands on top of his own desk—also, as usual, furiously neat—and gave her a wounded look.

“When
I
said ‘him and his pesky desk,’ the clause was the object of the sentence,” Bree explained. “When
you
said . . .” She struck her head lightly with the palm of her hand. “Never mind. Just tell me why Petru’s moved his stuff into the kitchen.”

“Break room.” Ron corrected her with an air of mild triumph. “You did say that it’s more professional to refer to the living room as the reception area and the kitchen as the break room. And the reason he’s in the break room is I couldn’t stand one more minute of that Russian’s mess. And Bree, he hums to himself when he works.”

“So you made him move to the kitchen?”

“I didn’t
make
him move. He volunteered.” Ron wrinkled his nose. “I may have made a pretty heavy suggestion, though.”

Bree had discovered very quickly that working with angels did not guarantee angelic temperaments. Ron liked things pathologically neat. Petru worked best as a little mole, hiding behind teetering stacks of files. And he did hum when he worked, a lugubrious drone that made her think of peasants starving to death in the revolution of 1917. She drew a breath and yelled, “Petru!”

There was a brief pause from beyond the door to the break room, and then the shuffle-thump that told her Petru was walking across the floor with his cane. Her paralegal came into the reception area, stopped, folded his hands over his cane, and peered benignly at her through his thick black beard.

“You moved your desk into the kitch—that is, the break room?”

He shrugged. “Ronald was reacting ke-vite badly to my singing, perchance.” Petru’s spoken English was heavily accented, and somewhat idiosyncratic. His written English was exemplary. “Also, he kept filing those papers which I did not wish to be filed.”

“Because his idea of a filing system is to throw everything all over the floor,” Ron said. “Honestly, Bree. Why should I have to put up with that?”

Bree cleared her throat. “Gentlemen,” she began.

Petru thumped his cane onto the pine floor. “I am ke-vite happy in the kitchen. It’s closer to the coffeepot, for one thing, and it is quieter, for another. I like it.”

“You do?”

Petru nodded.

“And Ron?”

“As long as I don’t have to stare at his mess or listen to him hum,” her secretary said crossly, “it’s fine. Just fine. Though I suppose if we don’t get a case pretty soon, I won’t have anything to file anyhow, so never mind.”

“About new cases . . .” Bree settled herself onto the leather couch that faced the fireplace. She cast an involuntary glance at the painting propped on the mantel. It was similar in style and content to Turner’s
Slave Ship
: a three-masted schooner surrounded by drowning men struggling in the depths of a roiling sea. It was a horrible subject, and it hung there as a reminder of Beaufort & Company’s mission to save those unfortunates, abandoned by fate, who came to them for help. Even though, as Bree had learned with their last case, their clients might not have been the kindest of men and women in life. “Although I’m not sure if this is our case or my case.”

Ron looked confused. Petru blinked at her wisely. “You have, perhaps, a question about the scope of our cause? Do we defend the living as well as the dead?”

“Exactly,” Bree said.

“That’s easy,” Ron said promptly. “Souls in the temporal sphere don’t need us. There are thousands of real-time lawyers out there.”

“Oh, dear,” Bree said. “I suppose I’ll have to turn this one down, then.” She tugged irritably at her ear. “To be blunt about it, it would have been a pretty decent fee, too.”

“On the other hand,” Ron said, “the living are the pre-dead, so to speak. Souls in transit.”

“ ‘Life itself is but the shadow of death, and souls departed but the shadows of the living,’ ” Petru said. “Sir Thomas expresses it ke-vite well, I think.” Ron scowled at him. He scowled back. “Although, of course, he was not thinking of the need to pay the electric bill.”

Bree’s head began to ache. Whoever Sir Thomas was—More? Could Petru be referring to Thomas More? Anyhow—she’d bet he was a soul departed and not a shadow of death. Petru had an unsettling way of referring to long dead poets and philosophers as though he’d just met them for lunch. For all she knew, maybe he had.

“Which is to say,” Petru went on, “that you may take on cases outside the venue of Beaufort & Company. And that we can assist you in the normal way.”

“Nonangelic,” Ron explained. “No extras, if you know what I mean.”

Bree didn’t have a clue what Ron meant. She did have a million questions about what her employees did—and where they were—even what they looked like—when they weren’t helping her at the office. All of the questions seemed incredibly rude and impossible to ask. She had once asked Lavinia the actual form and function of her “littlies” and received, accompanied by an ominous roll of thunder, a sweet, impenetrable smile in response. She supposed they’d let her know when the time was right. In the interim, she roundly cursed herself for a well-mannered coward and let all of her questions boil around in the back of her mind.