Avenging Angels (2 page)

Antonia’s acting talent was another issue altogether. (Bree loved her sister dearly—but she really wasn’t very good on stage.) There was no way to convince Tully of her talent during Aunt Cissy’s carefully planned chance meeting, unless Tonia engaged in some highly suspect boasting. So that was Bree’s job, should the Great Mrs. O’Rourke actually ask about Antonia’s credentials: to brag on her sister. “Just say you’re my lawyer,” Antonia had said as they set out from their town house on Factor’s Walk to the auction house. “Which you would be, actually, if I ever needed one. And when you talk about my reviews in
Oklahoma
it’d be okay if you didn’t mention it was a high school thing.”

So Bree had spent most of that morning alternating between telling her sister to shut up and threatening to go home.

“You know, Tonia,” she said as she bent forward to take a closer look at the cherry desk, “this isn’t as much of a waste of time as I thought it’d be. There’s some pretty cool stuff here. Just feel this leather. It’s like silk.” She placed her palm on the desktop and swept her hand past the jar and the inkstand.

Bree jumped back, as if burned. The scream was all the more agonizing for being silent.

The air above the desktop rippled, as if stirred by a witchy hand. Bree took a deep breath and glanced cautiously around. Antonia had drifted on to look at the contents of a glass-fronted cabinet some thirty feet away. Bree caught a glimpse of people clustered at the far end of the narrow aisle that snaked through the clutch of auction stuff. For the moment, though, she was alone.

The eddy of cold air spiraled upward. Bree reached out to touch the desk again. The air thickened to a gray and white soup.

A skeletal hand formed in the middle of the gray and white mist and stretched out imploringly. Bree was never quite sure what to do in these circumstances. Should she try to give the ghostly hand her business card? She wished, not for the first time, that her prospective clients had clearer avenues of communication. Barring face-to-corpse conferences, which circumstances didn’t allow her to do—a phone call would be nice. E-mail would be even better.

“Mr. O’Rourke?” Bree whispered. Then, feeling an obscure obligation to make certain her client knew how to find her, she said as she placed her card on the desk, “I’m Brianna Winston-Beaufort. I’m an attorney, and I can help you. My staff of angels and I represent dead souls who need to file appeals about their sentencing. Our office is at 666 Angelus Street here in Savannah. Can you tell me what the trouble is?” She thought a moment, remembering Benjamin Skinner. “Or you could call me. The cell number’s here, too.”

“Um,” Bree said, in a diplomatic way, “that isn’t possible, of course. But we can certainly try to get you moved to more comfortable quarters. Can you tell me where you’re located right now?” She gritted her teeth. She still wasn’t used to this. If it was Mr. O’Rourke—and who else could it be but the dead financier?—he must have a lot on his conscience. He was somewhere in the higher circles of Hell, she would imagine. And it was very hard to hear him. The clarity of her conversations with her clients was directly affected by interference from the Prosecution. The more static, the greater the crime, and the higher the stakes.

“Sir?” Bree said again.

The hand clenched into a fist, then rotated suddenly and opened up, palm up, fingers splayed like a beggar pleading for alms.

The black-and-white stutter of light faded away. Bree stood looking at the smooth leather top of the “probable” late eigthteen-nineteenth-century desk of the late Mr. O’Rourke, which held nothing now but the inkstand and the cloisonné jar. She rather liked the jar, which was covered with intricately worked enamel. She didn’t like the fact that she had almost nothing to go on except Mr. O’Rourke’s agonized desire to go home.

“Bree!” The all-too-human shriek of her little sister startled Bree into awareness. “The auction’s starting. We want to get seats up front.”

“Mr. O’Rourke?” Bree said again, a little louder. She swept her hand back and forth along the leather top. Her first two cases as an appeals attorney for dead souls had come to her in much this way: a faulty apparition of her client at the site of the client’s death, a sighting that resembled film from an old black-and-white movie, and then occasional appearances at the same spot after that. She wondered if she’d have to buy the desk to keep in touch with Mr. O’Rourke. Fake or not, it looked expensive.

Antonia tugged impatiently at her sleeve. “C’mon! Why are you still hanging around this old thing?” She drew her eyebrows together in a frown. “You’re not seriously interested in bidding on this desk, are you?”

Bree glanced at the reserve listed in the catalog. Even a (probable) late eighteen-nineteenth-century desk was way out of her price range. On the other hand—if she had a new client—and she was reasonably certain she did—how was she to keep in contact with him if somebody else bought the desk?

“Wait! Of course you have to bid on this desk! You’re brilliant!” Antonia grabbed Bree’s wrist and pulled her briskly along. “I should have thought of this myself! You buy this desk out from under Mrs. O’Rourke, and then, just as a, like, humanitarian gesture, I present it back to her, on behalf of a grateful public.” She shoved her way through the throng of auctiongoers settling into the rows of chairs facing the auction block and sat primly down in the aisle seat in the second row from the front. Bree stepped over Antonia’s feet and sat down next to her.

“I don’t think I can bid on this desk.” Bree showed her the reserve price. “Eight thousand dollars. I’d have to empty my office account to come up with eight thousand dollars.”

“You’re going to let a small thing like the rent and groceries stand in the way?” Antonia sighed. “And I suppose you think you have some sort of obligation to Ron and Petru. Well, nuts, sister. Just my luck to have a responsible relative.”

Bree didn’t think Petru, her Russian paralegal, and Ron Parchese, her secretary, relied on paychecks for their temporal existence. She wasn’t even sure, apart from their very human appearance when they were with her, that they had a temporal existence at all. As for Lavinia Mather, her landlady, Bree knew for certain that the last time Lavinia required human sustenance was in 1783 when she was sold to the notorious slave owner Burton Melrose. But her Company of angels and its needs wasn’t something even her sister knew about. And her immediate problem was what to do about the desk that was the contact point for her newest client.

A burst of singing from the front stage made Bree sit up and take stock of her surroundings. She’d been to auctions before, with her parents, but the auction house here was very different from those near the family’s North Carolina home, Plessey. For one thing, the room where the bidding took place was huge, as high as it was long, and stuffed like an Aladdin’s cave with ornately carved sofas, tasseled pillows, huge fake ferns, oil paintings in gilt frames, ten-foot-tall mirrors, and a herd of oversized marble statues of Greek goddesses and Egyptian pharaohs. And for another, it was a lot livelier than the auctions Francesca and Royal Winston-Beaufort attended. A group of red-shirted employees formed a line in front of the auctioneer’s platform and began a loud, off-key version of “Puttin’ on the Ritz” to mild applause. The employees scattered, and one of the auctioneers grabbed a microphone, shouted a welcome, informed the audience that many many
fine
items were here to be auctioned off today, and the bidding on the O’Rourke estate was to begin after an initial round of sales from the many, many
fine
items right up here on the stage. A few of the employees began to circulate with trays of food, juice, tea, and soft drinks. Several more stationed themselves along the rows and chairs and began a rhythmic clapping. The rest of them wheeled platforms of furniture, urns, statues, and boxes onto the stage. Two eight-foot-high stone vases stood to the forefront. Two sturdy guys hefted one up and rotated it around. It was like the first act of
Fiddler on the Roof
.

The lead auctioneer brought the microphone close to his mouth and said in a low, thrilling tone:

“Both of this fine pair of limestone planters are for sale, for one-money, one-money, one-money. Do I hear five hundred and a little bit
more
?”

The auctioneer was generic of his kind, middle-aged, middle-sized, with a bit of a potbelly and a cheerful grin. Like the adult half of the staff at the World of Art Auction Mart, he was dressed like a down-market riverboat gambler: red canvas vest, white shirt, black trousers, and a skinny black tie. The kids that lugged the sale items wore jeans, tennis shoes, and baggy red T-shirts labeled
ONE WORLD
in eight-inch-high iron-on letters.

The verbal cadence was hypnotic. Bree was disoriented by the shouting, the background music, and the bursts of applause from the auctioneer’s assistants, meant to jolt the audience into bidding. She sat up a little straighter in the folding chair, to get rid of the feeling she was trapped in a TV game show among people who knew her even though she didn’t know them.

“Do I hear four-fifty, four-fifty, four-fifty and a little bit
more
?”

Antonia raised her numbered paddle and called out, “Twenty dollars!” As loud as her sister was—and Antonia had trained with some pretty good coaches in her pursuit of a stage career—nobody noticed until she leaped to her feet and bellowed, “Twenty-
five
dollars,” louder than Patti Lupone bellowing “Everything’s Comin’ Up Roses” in
Gypsy.

“Thank you very much,” said the auctioneer, unflapped at the insult implicit in Antonia’s rock- bottom bid. “Do I hear fifty, fifty, fifty and a little bit
more
?”

Antonia stuck her chin out and got down to business. After a spirited exchange of bellows, she nailed the limestone urns for forty-five dollars and settled into her chair with a satisfied grin. “Am I good, or what?”

“Or what,” Bree said. “It’s because you’re louder than God and terrified the poor man into submission. What are you going to do with those urns, anyhow?”

Antonia followed the removal of the urns to the holding area with a watchful eye. “It’s for George Bernard Shaw,” she said darkly. “Otherwise known as Greatly Boring Shaw. I told you we’re doing
Pygmalion
at the Savannah Rep, didn’t I? We were supposed to be doing
My Fair Lady,
right? I would have nailed an audition for the singing Eliza. But no. John Allen Cavendish himself thought we should go back to the original Shaw. So we are. And let me tell you—that old Victorian had a mania for scenes on lawns and terraces. Also a mania for putting anyone under thirty to sleep, which is me, of course, and even you, although just barely.” She glowered. “I’ll have to kill you if you tell anybody I said that. About Shaw. Not about the fact you’re practically thirty. Anyhow, the urns will give the terrace a nice English manor house look even if they were made in China three weeks ago. I’ll stuff them full of fake ivy.” Suddenly, she clutched her head and groaned. “I’ve just got to move on from this, Bree. The tech managing part, I mean. I love anything to do with the theater, you know that. But I want to act!”

Bree didn’t give her sister a sympathetic pat, although she wanted to. Antonia had spent most of the last week happily memorizing huge chunks of Shavian dialogue for the previous day’s audition, and it’d been a bust. She auditioned faithfully for a role in each new production and it looked as if she was going to remain assistant stage manager for quite a while. Unless she could convince Tully O’Rourke she should be part of her newly resurrected Shakespeare Players.

“So,” Bree said brightly. “Did you get what you needed? Can we think about bumping into Tully O’Rourke and then going home?”

Antonia rolled her eyes. “Like, hello? Did you hear me mention fake ivy?”

“Right.” Bree settled back with a sigh and took a sip of iced tea. The World of Art Auction Mart was still keeping potential bidders happy. Those employees not engaged in clapping and hauling continued to pass around trays of sweet rolls, cold drinks, and fruit salad. The tea was brewed, not powdered, and tasted faintly of lemon, which made it more than palatable, but she hoped the fake ivy was coming up for bid pretty soon so they could get on with the O’Rourke estate.

Up on stage, three burly guys held a brocaded settee over their heads and rotated it in unison so that bidders could see it from all sides. There wasn’t a tendril of fake ivy in sight.

Bree drifted into a light doze. She’d settled her last case several days before, but it had required some heavy-duty nights, and she hadn’t caught up on her sleep. Beside her, Antonia slumped down in her chair and brooded. She roused when Antonia elbowed her in the side and hissed, “Wake up!”

Bree sat up and suppressed a yawn. “What’s the matter?”

“I’ve been thinking,” Antonia said gloomily.

Bree glanced at her. The last time her sister sounded this depressed, she’d gone to work as a pizza delivery person and gained thirteen pounds in three weeks.

Antonia bit her thumbnail and stared unseeingly into the distance. “Maybe I wasn’t cut out for the Savannah Rep. Or Tully O’Rourke’s Shakespeare company. You’re right. Maybe we should just go home and I should go back to delivering pizzas.”

Bree set her plastic cup carefully on the floor at her feet. Her sister was volatile—always had been. This self-doubt wasn’t new. There was nothing their parents wanted more than to see Antonia settled happily into a secure, rewarding life. The theater was at the bottom of their list, and her mother, especially, would have seen this fit of the glums as an opportunity to get Antonia back into school. Bree herself just wanted to see her sister happy and she didn’t think a career of unsuccessful auditions would make anybody happy. If Antonia was serious about giving up the theater, she had to be careful. “You were perfect for the part,” Bree said. “John Allen must have been insane to cast somebody else.”