Charming Grace (16 page)

I stared at him. Few people outside the family knew Dew was a lesbian. She lived with a beautiful, spike-haired biology professor from Emory University. They shared a restored bungalow down in Atlanta. G. Helen and I were about the only Bagshaws still on good terms with Dew. “Do continue your espionage de-briefing.”

“All righty, let’s see: You have a sentimental thing for the under-dog. Whether it’s a cousin who’s kicked out of the family or a half-starved mountain boy lying in a gully with a busted leg. When you do these high school tours you spend all day telling high-risk kids they can be somebody because Harp proved
he
could be somebody. At night you work the rubber-chicken dinner circuit, giving speeches and collecting donations. You’ll go anywhere, speak to any group. You tell your husband’s true story as a kind of fable of hopes and dreams and inspiration.” He paused. “Then you go back to your motel room and you eat vending machine crackers and drink yourself to sleep with a little silver heirloom flask full of bourbon.”

“For a man who doesn’t spy, you have good spies.” I brushed straw off my jeans and light cotton shirt as if brushing him off me, too. I hadn’t been this physically close to a man since Harp. This affected, since Harp. This . . .
this
, since Harp. “I owe you for saving me from Snap. I owe you . . . another favor. Again.”

He said nothing, just looking at me, a little wistful, his tough, been-there-done-that face as dependable as a well-built wall. “Good. Here’s what I want as a favor: I want to sit on the veranda of your house.”

“What?”

He nodded toward the mansion. “Sit on the veranda at the Downs. Every time I’ve seen a picture of the mansion I’ve wondered about that view. You can’t just look
at
a house. You have to look
with
it—see what it sees. Its eyeball idea of the world. Because a great house gives the people inside it a special way of looking at things.”

I studied him with a catch in my chest. Orphaned boy, streetwise teenage thief, young felon, convicted criminal, ex-con, devoted brother, devoted bodyguard, nomad, philosopher? My spy had reported extensively on him. The fact that Boone came from a background as bad or worse than Harp’s had not been lost on me. There was a danger of offering affection. A danger of heeding the same instincts that had guided me toward Harp without a moment of doubt. Boone looked from me to the house with an almost pained gleam in his eyes, a kind of heartfelt greed.

I couldn’t help liking him.

I strode up a stone path through the mansion’s front flower gardens.
Tell this man to go away. You don’t need his friendship. You aren’t in the mood to be sentimental. You’ll never soften your stance toward his boss. Go away, Mr. Noleene. You aren’t Harp. Don’t touch me, again. Please. Don’t. God, please. Don’t.

Harp spoke to me.

Give the man a break. Snap likes him. And so do I.

I did a perfect pirouette and scowled at Boone. “Well? Are you coming to sit on the veranda, or not?”

He smiled.

And took my breath away.

Chapter 8

Never trust a woman armed with law books and sweet iced tea.

Grace served me raspberry-red, sugared iced tea in her grand mama’s crystal on her great grand mama’s wicker table, pouring it from a silver pitcher with her free hand curved like a spoon under the spout, to catch drips. She bent over me in a half bow as I saw in a big wicker rocker like the king of guests. I got my own silver coaster, my own china dish of thin mint cookies, a silver sugar bowl in case the tea didn’t curl my tongue already, and two slices of lemon. I was so lost in looking at her up close, I nearly dropped my glass. She eyed me, blushed, frowned, and moved away. Stacks of law books and notepads sat on a wicker table nearby. I went for a neutral start: “I hear you plan to start law school in Atlanta next winter.”

“The school needed to fill its quota for ex-beauty queens and talk show hostesses.” She sat down hard in a rocker near mine.

Try, try again. “I hear you aced your entrance exams.”

“They were just impressed when I didn’t write with an eyebrow pencil.”

I gave up. “You plannin’ to save the world, or just joke about it?”

She turned hard green eyes on me. “Lawyers can’t save the world. They can only protect it from other lawyers.”

“Now we’re gettin’ somewhere.”

She faced forward, frowning harder.

Careful, now.

I stirred my tea with her great-great grandmama’s long silver teaspoon, engraved with a deep, smooth B for Bagshaw. Bagshaw women surrounded me, living and dead, the living one sitting a few feet away from me in a big wicker rocker, her beautiful head thrown back, her beautiful eyes somber and looking forward, lost in the gardens and the barns and the fields and the mountains of this paradise her people had always owned; her hair streamed in big rust-red waves over her shoulders, she had one knee drawn up and she’d kicked off her barn sneakers. She raked the air with her bare toes in the pearls of sunlight that fed through the jasmine vines that were just now greening up good for summer. I admired the shape of her thighs, the long line of her arms, the slung-back attitude of her body. She knew what she looked like but she’d forgotten what the effect was. The view I’d wanted was Harp’s view, to see the world she’d wrapped him in so warm and tight he saw only what was in her eyes. The view I wanted was
her
, beside me in the rocker.

Saving
my
world.

“Frankly, my dear,” I said in my best Clark Gable voice, “you got knotty ballerina feet.”

She laughed. Then she stopped, sat up straight, turned around in her rocker, and looked at me as if I’d knocked her off it. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Nothing. You must not laugh much anymore. Startled yourself, huh?” Tangerine the cat shot out of the hydrangeas along the veranda’s stone edge. I nodded his way. “Scared the cat, laughing like that.”

She sank back in the rocker, tapping a finger to her lips as she eyed me shrewdly. “You think you know me.”

“I know your
feet
. You got those feet from dance classes.”

“All right. Yes. Tap, jazz, ballet. A hazard of being a beauty queen. Always in training. A pageant contestant has to be light on her toes. Float like a butterfly, sting like a Miss America.”

“Except you dumped the Miss America pageant when you were nineteen years old, to marry Harp. I heard your step-mama nearly had a nervous breakdown, and your papa never forgave Harp for luring you away. And you never forgave your papa for never forgiving Harp. Whew.”

She stared at me like snakes stare at mice. If ice cubes had green eyes, they’d be Grace’s. “Since you obviously intend to tell me all about my own life, let me tell you what I’ve learned about
yours
. Stone Senterra hired you because he’s a law-and-order
hoo-rah
John Wayne type, and giving you a job makes him look both magnanimous and tough on crime. He likes to surround himself with tough bodyguards who fit his macho image.”

“Tough bodyguards,
right
. I’ll have to introduce you to Tex and Mojo. Stone calls ‘em Larry and Curly. I’m Moe. The brains. We’re The Three Stooges of personal protection. Stone could do better, but he likes us.”

“
You
like
him
. You
respect
him. I hear it in your voice.”

“The man pays me a quarter-mil a year and treats me like a friend. Go figure.”

“But he fired you over the gravel pile incident. How petty.”

“He fires me a lot. It’s his hobby.”

“His sister hates you. Why?”

“We got off on the wrong foot. On the day Stone walked me into his office in California and introduced me, she looked me up and down then said, ‘You look like a man who deserved to spend nine years in a prison cell. I don’t trust you to carry my makeup kit, let alone guard my brother and his family.’ It’s been downhill from there.”

“It’d take two men and a mule to carry
her
make up kit.”

My whole body tingled.
I like this woman so much
. “Good comeback. Wish I’d thought of it.”

“Women usually reserve such overt hostility for men they used to date.”

“I don’t date women with bigger biceps than me.”

“Who
do
you date?”

“Now, chere, that’s mighty personal. I could answer it, but then I get to ask you a real personal question
you
have to answer.”

“True.” She sank back in her rocker. “None of my business. Never mind.”

I threw up my hands. “Aw, you give up too easy. All right, I got women hangin’ all over me. All I have to do is snap my fingers. But I gave up women for Lent this year.”

“Lent’s over.”

“Okay, then I’m shy.”

“You’re
not
shy.”

“All right, I get what I need and I need what I get. I like women and women like me. But I travel a lot on Senterra business. I live in hotel rooms and guest houses. I got a brother coming out of prison this fall and when that happens I have to stick close and keep him away from the wrong crowd. What woman wants to fool with a two-Noleenes-for-the-price-of-one package like that? Now I get to ask
you
some personal questions.”

“Such as?”

I leaned forward, elbows on knees, as still as a hunter communing with a quiet dawn. I looked her straight in the eyes and she didn’t flinch. “I want to know,” I said, “How you recognized that Harp was worth loving.”

She froze. After a long, quiet moment, she said, “The same way I recognize that the sky is blue. Because it was obvious.”

“You stood up for him despite everybody in your family saying
Stop
.”

“I was raised by my very unorthodox grandmother and the ghost of my mother. Both of them were rebels.”

“So your papa doesn’t get any credit for worryin’ about you and trying to protect you?”

“My relationship with my father is too complicated to discuss over sweet tea without liquor in it.”

“Let’s go get a bottle of bourbon, then.”

“Speaking of fathers, my spy tells me that Stone likes to tell you endless details about his childhood so you’ll think you and he have something in common. His biological father abandoned him, and yours abandoned you. Stone was raised by a stepfather. Diamond is the daughter of that man, so she and Stone only share the same mother. Stone likes to think of himself as a noble orphan who protected his mom and half-sister from a villainous Big Daddy.” Grace smiled grimly. “And here I thought Diamond was hatched by velociraptors.”

“Quit dodging the subject. Your papa sounds like a good guy, from what I hear at the
Wagon Wheel
. Head of a big law firm, married to a great lady, your nice stepmother. People say when he retires from the law he’ll probably get appointed to the state supreme court.”

“I adore my stepmother. My father is a fine citizen and a good man. But he’s irrelevant to who I was as a child, and who I am now.”

“No papa’s irrelevant. I think about the papa I never knew. I wonder about him all the time. Only thing I know is he left when I was a baby and Armand barely out of diapers, and he liked Daniel Boone on TV. That’s why I’m named
Boone
. But your papa—well, I say he loves you. Bet you love him, too.”

“A moot point. Love is never just enough.” She fidgeted and looked away, exactly what a woman does when she’s avoiding the truth. “He forced me to make hard choices, and now he has to live with his regrets.”

“Just because he didn’t like Harp?”

She prickled. “Is this questioning part of your job, Mr. Noleene? Would you like me to provide a tape recorder so you can replay our conversation for Stone verbatim?”

I prickled, too. “The word of an ex-con may not mean much to you, but it means plenty to me. If I say you can trust me, you can trust me. If I want to know about you, it’s because
I want to know about you
.”

I set my crystal iced tea glass down on great-grandmama’s fine table, took a breather as I laid the silver tea spoon alongside it just so, then looked over at her. She was watching me with a tinge of uncertainty in her eyes, and it made a knot in my stomach. “Contrary to the evidence,” she said slowly, “I’m a crazy bitch, but not a mean one. I apologize.”

Okay, so my knees went weak. “Aw, Grace, so do—”

“I know a lot more about you than you think I do. In prison you earned a business degree by mail and Internet classes, saved a guard from being killed by a gang of inmates, was a champion bronc rider in the prison rodeo, and won an amateur architectural design contest sponsored by the Louisiana Home Builders Association.”

I shrugged and looked away—what a man does when somebody comes too close to a painful subject. “The association disqualified me when they found out I was drawing houses from a jail cell.”

“How stupid of them. Regardless. You won.
You were the best
.” She paused. “I’ve also unearthed the fact that your brother is running the biggest gambling ring ever hidden inside a federal prison. But you still refuse to believe he can’t be kept on the straight and narrow once he gets out. You’ve always believed in him. Always been loyal. Now you’re trying desperately to build a life he can’t resist—a life without more prison time in its future.” Her eyes bored into me. “I’ve also learned he was the one who got you into prison, too. Him and his schemes.”

I stood, on guard. “I was a grown man. I made my choices.”

“You’re sure? You loved your brother. From the time you were kids, he tried to take care of you the only way he knew how. You’ll never desert him. You’ll always believe in him.”

“I just narrowed your spy list to a few suspects. You’re getting confidential information I don’t talk about much, chere. I can name about three people who know about my bro and the gambling ring. Only three. Me. A priest. And the third one is—”

“Shit,” she said.

She got up—swaying, upset. “All right, let’s cut to the chase. You love your privacy. Then you surely understand why I love mine. If you want to know more about my husband, then come inside.” She strode inside the mansion, leaving big, carved doors wide open for me to follow. I caught up by the time she reached the end of a big foyer lined with antiques, marble, crystal lamps, and eyes-following-me portraits of long-dead Bagshaws. She went up a wide mahogany staircase in a rush of denim and a breeze of clove scent I’d smelled on her hair. I took the stairs two at a time then followed her running walk along an upstairs hallway wide enough for drag racing and lit by a cathedral-sized window at one end. More flinty-eyed Bagshaws stared at me. She darted down a smaller side hall, trotting now, one hand clenched to her chest.