Defending Angels (6 page)

A third option suddenly occurred to her and she smiled. She should have thought of it before.

“You make no never mind about that dog,” Lavinia said confidently as Bree set the dog at her feet with a grunt of effort. “I’ll see to those nasty scratches right enough. And you feedin’ him that store-bought dog food?” She clicked her tongue disapprovingly. “I got me some stewed chicken and rice. That’ll put a spring in his step, no doubt about it.” She looked at Sasha sternly. “You know what they put into that canned stuff? If I told you, it’d turn your stomach for sure.”

Bree went back to her car, and returned with the rolled up duvet, the water bowl, and a cardboard box filled with dog food, ointment, and fresh bandages. She set them at the foot of the stairs in the foyer. Sasha limped once around the living room’s perimeter, then came back and curled up at the foot of the stairs.

“I truly appreciate this, Mrs. Mather.”

“Lavinia. You need to go back to callin’ me Lavinia.” She’d changed her soft wooly gray sweater for a soft wooly lavender sweater. Her black skirt drooped around her slippered feet. A bit of what looked like chamomile was stuck in the hair piled into a knot on the top of her head. She crossed her arms and beamed at her scruffy-looking patient, like some raffish fairy godmother.

“Lavinia,” Bree said obediently. “You’re certain it’s not too much of a bother? You said something about your own pets yesterday morning, and I thought you might not mind giving him a bit of a hand.” She looked up and past the brightly painted stairs, where her landlady’s apartment sat overhead. The pleasant herby smell was much in evidence, but no sound came from the second floor. “I surely don’t want to take advantage.”

“Tougher folks than you have tried,” she said. “This here’s nothing at all.”

“Thank you.” Bree took the rent envelope out of her briefcase and handed it over. “I’ve written out a check for one month’s security deposit and two months’ rent. And you’ll find a lease in there. I wish you’d take a look at the terms and think about signing it.”

Lavinia took the envelope with a pleased expression.

“I’ll be off now, to find office furniture and make a start on supplies.”

“Can’t do better than that Second Hand Rows for furniture,” Lavinia said. “That there’s a charity for the Sinai Temple. You’ll find those folks right off of Whitaker Street, near Montgomery. Got them a bunch of good bargains. You’d be amazed at what folks just throw away. Perfectly good sofas and all, just tossed out for the poor folks, God bless ’em.”

Bree thanked her for the idea, not sure whether Lavinia had blessed the poor folks or the folks at Second Hand Rows. The few pieces of office furniture her uncle left her were in storage while the offices were renovated. She planned on using his chair and desk for herself. But she needed to equip the place for her assistant. “I’d like to start moving in tomorrow morning? And then I’ve scheduled some employee interviews for tomorrow afternoon.”

“Be good to have live people around the place again,” Lavinia said.

“I’ll be off, then.” She bent down and ran her hand gently over Sasha’s head. He flopped back against the second tread with a sigh of pleasure. One of the brightly painted Renaissance angels with silver gilt braids peeked out between his ears.

“Guarding him, like,” Lavinia observed of the painted figure. “You hurry up and get better, dog, so she can get back to guarding the rest of us.”

“I’ll be back for him before six,” Bree promised. “You and the angel take care, now.”

She jogged down the brick steps, smiling at the old woman’s fancies, delighted that her day was beginning so well.

Her landlady was right about Second Hand Rows. She found a comfortably worn leather couch and chair, an old chest that would make a useful coffee table to put magazines on—for all those waiting clients—and a big oak table only slightly foxed from age. “Picked that up from when the old library over on Hudson Street closed down,” the laconic cashier said. “You don’t find tables that size no more. Gotta be twelve foot if it’s one.” He shifted his toothpick from the left side of his mouth to the right with an expert roll of his tongue. “Anything else I can do you for?”

“A desk,” Bree said, “if possible.”

He shook his head. He was tall and skinny, with the concave chest of a smoker. Bree could barely make out the Grateful Dead logo on his faded T-shirt. A paper label with a sticky back sat on his right sleeve that read: HELLO, MY NAME IS HENRY. “Fresh out of desks.”

Bree pulled out her credit card. “Then we can settle up, if you wouldn’t mind, Henry.”

He nodded, punched the totals from the price tags into the register, and slid her card through the machine.

“You think you could deliver these things for me?”

“Free-delivery-on-large-items-less-than-ten-miles-from -the-store,” Henry recited, clearly having said it before. “You setting up a new apartment or what?”

“Or what,” Bree said. “It’s an office. In a terrific old house by the cemetery on Angelus. I’m a lawyer, just starting out.”

He stared at her. “That a fact. Angelus, you say. Mrs. Mather send you?”

“Are you familiar with it? It’s that little old place right in the middle of the cemetery. Kind of an odd place for a law office, I thought, but then, it’s close to the Market, and the rent’s about right. I’m making the living room into a client waiting area. It’s got wood floors, a fireplace, wainscoting. It’s really quite, quite
professional
.”

“It’s not
me
you need to convince, lady.”

Bree smiled at him, and laughed a little. “You are absolutely right. I think I’m a little nervous about it. It’s my new clients I have to convince, if,” she added anxiously, “I’m to have any.”

“Angelus Street, huh? Got something over here you might want to see.” He slouched toward the jumble of boxes and racks of clothes, pots and pans and dishes at the rear of the store. He scrabbled in the pile farthest in the back, and emerged with a picture in his hands. He held it high, the cardboard back facing Bree. It was quite a large frame, at least forty inches square. Bree took a breath, prepared to be charming about her absolute refusal to have clown faces, or black velvet Elvises, or dogs playing poker over her vintage fireplace.

Henry flipped the painting around to face her.

Bree stumbled backward, as if from a blow. A fierce rush of light and sound crashed down upon her like a stupendous wall of water.

It was the landscape of her dream. The dark and bloody water roiled among the out-flung hands of the drowned and drowning. The dim hulk of a ship heaved on the horizon, and on the deck, the dark-haired, pale-eyed woman with her face obscured in shadow flung her hands out in despair. Over all, a giant bird spread its wings, a call to death and destruction. It was a cormorant, she realized, the Fisher King of birds. And for some, an avatar of the devil.

Bree fumbled for her cell phone in her purse with shaking hands. She had to call someone, she had to ... what?

Get a grip, get a grip, get a grip!
She pinched herself hard, then again, hard enough to draw a bead of blood from her forearm.

Henry, oblivious, peered down at the painting. “It’s the ocean,” he said. “Kind of a shipwreck, I guess, with all them hands in the water.” He looked up. “Kinda gruesome?”

Bree sat down on a battered metal chair and put her head between her knees. The first time and only time she’d fainted, she’d won a bet with her sister about who could bike up Market Hill the fastest. There wasn’t going to be a second. Not if she could help it.

“You ain’t pregnant or nothin’,” Henry said in a kindly way. “Took my wife like that with our first kiddie. Just the first coupla months.”

“I’m fine,” Bree said as evenly as she could. She smiled a little. “And I’m perfectly unpregnant.”

He flourished the painting. Bree faced it, the nightmare ocean in her dream, and said steadily, “Thank you kindly, Henry, but I think I’d better wait until I get all the furniture in place before I start adding . . . art.”

“Had some fella in here the other day, said this painting was by some guy named Turner. Or a copy of one, anyways.”

“He must have meant
The Slave Ship
,” Bree said. She was proud that her voice was level. “It’s a very famous painting by J.M.W. Turner, an English artist. In the late eighteenth century, the captain of a slaver threw all the slaves who were sick or injured overboard to drown. It was a terrible tragedy. Turner immortalized it.” She forced herself to look more closely at the painting. Maybe it was a copy of that grave and terrible work of art, and not the nameless ocean of her dreams, after all. The sky flamed with hellish red, orange, and yellows. The sea boiled with angry color. The ship looked like a coffin.

No. It was
her
ocean.
Her
nightmare. She was sure of it. For one thing, there was that shadow of a huge bird with outspread wings hanging in the sky. If fear had a form, it was that bird. And the drowned and drowning faces in the sea were all the colors of mankind. Not
The Slave Ship
, but something very like it.

She turned around and walked out of the store on trembling legs.

Ten minutes later, she found herself sitting outside the School of the Arts coffee shop at Liberty and Abercomb with a cup of Java Jolt. It was too early to order wine. A glass of wine before lunch didn’t mean she was a raving alcoholic, did it? Of course it didn’t. She wouldn’t even think about trying to find a bar this early in the day. Even though she was pretty sure Hooligan’s on Liberty Street was open and would serve her something even stronger. She took a shaky breath, laughed at herself, and ignored the concerned, sidelong stares of the two students sitting at the table next to hers.

When her cell phone rang, she grabbed it with hands that felt arthritic, and the sense that somebody had just thrown her a life preserver.

“Miss Beaufort?”

“Professor Cianquino!” She sank against the back of the metal chair. Calm. She had to be calm. She dug her nails into her knee and the momentary pain helped her focus. “I’m so glad you called,” she said cheerily. “I wanted to let you know how much I appreciate the thought behind your lovely gift.”

“So it arrived last night,” he said. He had a calm, light tenor voice. When something struck him funny—and not many things did—he had an unexpectedly high-pitched giggle. That, and his compact, perennial air of youthful muscularity, occasionally reminded her of that action star, Jackie Chan. Mostly, though, he made her of think of Michelangelo’s sterner representations of God. Professor Cianquino’s commitment to intellectual discipline and rigorous scholarship was total. At law school, his public lectures attracted a standing-room-only audience. But only a handful of students dared to take his seminars. Those who did, and survived, usually went on to become distinguished scholars in their own right. Bree squeaked through his courses with gentleman Cs, and felt lucky to have done that.

“UPS brought the package right to my door,” she said. “I hope you got my message thanking you? And I would just love to take you out to lunch.”

“I’m afraid I’m housebound these days,” he said. “A recurrence of an old problem.”

“I’m truly sorry to hear that.” Bree paused, slightly flummoxed. Professor Cianquino was a reserved and formal man. There was no way she could flat out ask about his health. But he’d said housebound, not bed-bound. He lived at Melrose, out on the river. She’d been there once before at a group seminar, and despite Professor Cianquino’s courtesy, she hadn’t liked the place, which was stupid, because it was gorgeous and the professor an excellent, if reserved, host. She shook off her hesitation. “May I drop by to see you?” His apartment, she recalled, had a garden patio out back. “If it doesn’t come on to rain, I might come by today with a small picnic?”

“I’d like that,” he said, a little distantly. “It sounds quite pleasant. About twelve thirty would be fine.”

“And is there anything you don’t care to eat these days?”

“It’s my leg that’s troubling me, Bree. Not my digestion,” he said crisply.

Bree bit back a “yes-SIR” and fought an impulse to salute the cell phone. “About twelve thirty, then.” She clicked off and made a face. Among the students at that long-ago Melrose seminar was Payton McAllister. Payton the Rat. She’d fallen in love with him while sitting in the rose arbor at the back of the house. He conducted a lengthy, erudite, impassioned defense of the Sullivan Anti-Trust Act, while pacing up and down the allée in a pair of shorts and a T-shirt that showed enough muscle to fire Bree’s imagination about the rest of him.

She wasn’t up to facing those memories now.

Not only that—something about the house itself had made her edgy even then. Maybe it’d been the last of her common sense trying to tell her Payton was going to break her heart. Maybe she’d been coming down with the flu, and she’d confused the fever and chills with a bad atmosphere. For whatever reason, she’d only been truly comfortable there in the presence of Professor Cianquino himself. The rest of the place gave her the creeps. And did she really want to talk to him about the events of the past twenty-four hours while dodging memories of Payton’s lips, eyes, and hard, muscular chest?

Maybe she could help Professor Cianquino and his limp into her car and take him out for lunch. If he’d been housebound for a while, he’d probably appreciate it.

“Dimwit!” she said aloud. Lack of sleep, that was her problem. The return of the old nightmare, after she was sure she would never have it again—that was part of it, too. Not to mention having to confront Payton himself if he was the jerk behind the phone call from Skinner.

Wimp. She was a wimp. She shook her head in disgust, to the snickers of the students sitting next to her at the coffee bar, and went off to find a suitably delicious picnic lunch at the Park Avenue Market. If she got a case of the Payton willies or the Melrose blues, she’d either attach herself to the poor professor like kudzu or go straight on home.