Angel Condemned (18 page)

Why did dogs always look so mournful? Even Sasha, who wasn’t mortal but something more than that.

Bree slipped the necklace over her head and held it in her hand. The scales and the wings were smaller than her thumbnail. She closed her hand around it. She concentrated on the images she thought, hoped,
knew
must be her birth mother. Pale face. Silver eyes. Dark hair. A tender, haunted expression barely glimpsed on the deck of the ship in the painting
The Rise of the Cormorant
.

Nothing.

Nothing.

After long moments, Bree opened her hand and looked at the small gold pendant.

Sasha’s tail thumped against the kitchen floor.

Bree got up and got ready for bed. She took a shower, letting the hot water wash away the day’s horrors, the day’s triumphs, the day’s defeats. She got into bed and lay staring at the ceiling. On some nights lights from the surface of the river danced in the window. Tonight was such a night, and for a long time, she stared at them.

She fell asleep and plunged into the dream, the dream that had tormented her sleep for years, a dream she thought was gone, banished by the work she did for the angels on Angelus Street.

Bree sat bolt upright in bed, shrieking.

The door to her room burst open. Antonia flipped on the light. Her eyes were black with fear. “Hey!” she said. She rushed to Bree’s side and grabbed her. “Hey!”

Bree choked, gagged, and vomited dirt onto the sheets.

Antonia grabbed at the phone beside the bed. Her voice was surprisingly calm. “I’m calling 911. Then I’m going to clear your throat. You take it easy, sister. Just quiet. Quiet . . .”

Sasha leaped onto the bed, and Antonia batted at him. “Not
now
, Sasha.”

“No.” Bree coughed and coughed again. The room steadied. The air thinned. She could breathe. “No emergency. I’m fine. Honestly.” She sat up, and brushed her hair away from her face. She smiled at Antonia. “It’s okay. Really. Just one of those dreams, you know? The kind I used to have.”

“But the sounds you made and the dirt . . .”

Sasha licked Antonia’s hands, his tail wagging. He whined—a comforting sound—deep in his throat. Slowly, Antonia put the phone back in the cradle.

“Really, sweetie, I’m okay.” Bree cleared her throat. Her voice was hoarse. “I’m just going to get up and get a glass of water. Okay? Let’s go into the kitchen.” She swung herself out of bed. Seaweed coiled around her ankles. She wore sweats to bed these days. The bottoms were soaked with sea water.

Sasha barked.

Antonia shook her head, as if to get rid of flies. “Bree?”

“Right here,” Bree said.

“You okay?” Antonia looked around, as if unsure as to why she was standing in the middle of Bree’s bedroom.

“I’m fine.”

“I thought I heard you shout in your sleep.”

“I was having a bad dream. But I’m fine now.”

“Oh.” Antonia patted Sasha on the head. “I’ll bet he was lying on your belly. You really shouldn’t let him sleep with you.”

“You’re right.”

“I’m going back to bed now.”

“See you in the morning.”

Antonia didn’t forget to turn out the light when she left Bree’s bedroom.

But she’d forget the rest of it.

Cissy had a housekeeper named Lindy who came in by the day. With Francesca’s help, she’d created a lavish breakfast. It was too bad that the only person in the mood to eat it was Antonia.

Bree and Antonia arrived at the dignified old house just off Washington Square a little before eight. Their aunt had bought the house just after her divorce from Ash Smallwood, and she worked off a lot of her postdivorce angst bringing it back to its former glory. Built just before the War Between the States, the house was a mix of Southern Plantation and Southern Gothic. Wide verandahs completely enclosed all three stories. Cissy had replaced the rotting white clapboard, repointed the four brick chimneys, and hired a landscaping team that turned the gardens inside the wrought iron fence into a lush and fragrant Eden. Inside, the house was lavishly comfortable, with cherry-wood floors and oriental carpets.

Francesca had set the breakfast in the Palladium-styled conservatory attached to the back of the house. Bree and Antonia walked in to find their father and mother, Cissy, and the attorney Lewis McCallen seated at their aunt’s round glass-topped table.

“There you are.” Francesca bustled to her daughters and kissed them both affectionately. “We’ve got some of that nice smoked ham and shirred eggs. I want you two to eat up before we start your meeting.”

Cissy was dressed in a cream-colored silk pantsuit with a turquoise blouse. The bright color made her look sallow. She shoved back her chair and stuck out her leg. “How do you like my new ankle jewelry, Bree? I’m going to make it the new fashion accessory in town.” She wriggled her foot. The ankle bracelet reminded Bree of the kind of boot the police put on illegally parked cars, only smaller.

“I’ll be the first to go out and get one on
my
ankle,” Antonia said loyally. She sat down at her father’s left. Bree took a chair on his right. Royal paused in the careful dissection of his grapefruit half. He was a tall man and thinner than he had been the last time Bree had seen him. Had it only been a month? There was more gray in his hair than she remembered, too. He spent a lot of time outdoors at Plessey, and his face was tanned and wrinkled with too much sun. “I’m sorry I didn’t get over to see you two last night.”

“No problem, Daddy.” Antonia set aside the grapefruit sitting on her plate and reached for the eggs and ham.

“He and Lewis here were slaying dragons, busy gettin’ me out of the slammer,” Cissy said brightly. She stretched forward and fiddled with the arrangement of white roses and ferns set in the center of the table.

Her aunt didn’t look good. She’d pinned her hair up in a careless French twist. Her face was drawn, as if she hadn’t slept. There were circles under her eyes, imperfectly concealed by smears of makeup.

“We’re happy to slay any number of dragons on your behalf, Celia,” Lewis McCallen said gallantly. He had proposed to Cissy several years before. Bree wasn’t entirely sure why her aunt had turned him down. He was nice-enough looking—balding, middle height, about Cissy’s own age—and a truly brilliant litigator. Cissy had dismissed him as stodgy, but Bree had seen him in court and witnessed his passion for his work firsthand.

Bree cut into her grapefruit. “That had to be some kind of record for setting up an arraignment, Lewis. She was in by one and out by ten. You must have been wielding a mighty big sword.”

“I rousted Judge Farber.” Lewis nodded at Royal. “With your father’s help, of course. And it was a deck of cards, not a sword. Farber was losing a bridge tournament at the club and was only too happy to have an excuse to bow out.” The housekeeper came in with a carafe of coffee, and he held out his cup. “Thank you, Lindy. The prosecutor’s office wasn’t too happy about it.”

Bree smiled. “I’ll bet Cordy Blackburn gave you an earful.” Assistant district attorney Cordelia Blackburn was smart, assertive, and set on becoming Georgia’s first African-American female governor. Bree was certain she’d do it, too.

“Both ears. She would have added a kick up the backside if I hadn’t jumped out of the way just in time.” He set his coffee cup carefully back into the saucer. “They appear to have a pretty tight case. There’s no flies on that lieutenant of yours, Bree. Sam Hunter.”

“He’s good at his job.”

“Runs a tight ship,” Lewis said. Then, with a vagueness Bree knew to be deceptive, “Word on the street is that you and he are an item.”

“On the street?”

“Local media,” Lewis said. “This Felicia Fairfax? The local anchor? I didn’t catch the news last night myself, but my partner Jim Santo did.”

Antonia swallowed a spoonful of shirred egg and waved her hand in the air. “She was there at the scene, Fairfax was. She reported that you and Hunter were ‘very close.’ It was all over the news last night.” She beamed at McCallen. “I made a DVD of all the news clips I could find. The major networks carried the story, too.” Antonia rolled her eyes at McCallen’s frown. “Not good, huh? I was just trying to help, Daddy.”

“Very good, Antonia. We might be able to use it to get an injunction against the local news stations. You did a fine job.”

Antonia glowed. Francesca had been right. Antonia’s natural ebullience seemed to make everyone feel better, including Cissy.

“Glad I could help. But Hunter’s a peach. There’s no way he believes Aunt Cissy did this. You’ve met him, Mr. McCallen, right? You like him. It’s not so bad, is it?”

“Depends,” McCallen said thoughtfully. “How long have you two been seeing each other, Bree?”

Bree gave him a measuring glance. One of the things that made Lewis so good at defense was his complete focus on winning. If Hunter’s relationship with her could be used to cloud the integrity of his investigation, McCallen would do it.

Royal said easily, “We’re keeping Bree out of this, Lewis.”

McCallen raised his eyebrows. There was no way of mistaking the implacable warning in Royal’s voice. He held up his hand in a placatory way. “Of course, of course.”

“They aren’t seeing each other,” Antonia said. “At least not while the investigation’s going on. Hunter came over last night to dump her.”

“That’s me,” Bree said sourly. “The dumpee.”

“Well!” Francesca said brightly. “Are we all finished with breakfast here? Lewis, maybe you and the others want to go into the library with Cissy. Antonia, let’s you and me go shopping.”

“I don’t have any money to go shopping, Mamma.”

“We’ll look for an early birthday present.”

“But I thought you wanted me to keep Aunt Cis—ow!” Antonia bent down and rubbed her knee. “Okay, okay. Can we go out to the Tybee mall?”

“Whatever you want, darlin’.” She got up, hauled Antonia out of her chair, and gave her husband a kiss. “We’ll see y’all later. Sister? We’ll be back in time for lunch with you. When you finish with Bree and these men, I want you to go straight back to bed and catch yourself a good nap. Come along, Antonia.”

The two of them left, Francesca trailing the scent of Tea Rose.

Royal patted his suit-coat pocket, in an automatic search for a pipe he’d given up years before. “Your mother said that Mrs. Billingsley would be along to take notes, Bree.”

Bree glanced at her watch. “She’ll be here at nine. Another couple of minutes. She has a great-grandson to get to day care in the mornings. “

“Let’s go into the library, then,” Cissy said. “It’s always easier to talk business in there.” She craned her neck to look through the archway into the hall. “Lindy? You there?”

There was a faint response from the kitchen.

“We’re going to be in the library. You bring coffee and tea in, if you get a chance.” She smiled brightly at them. “There, now. We’re all set.”

She led the way to the front of the house. The library was on one side of the front foyer; the living room on the other. The double doors to both rooms stood open. Bree caught a glimpse of the living room. Cissy’s nineteenth-century furniture had been replaced with leather and steel. The occasional tables were glass. “You redecorated since I was here last, Cissy?”

“I did. Prosper just hated the French. All that furniture in there was Empire, if you remember.”

“He hated everything French?” Lewis said. He followed them into the library, which was traditionally furnished in leather, forest-green damask wallpaper, and dark oak. “How can you hate a whole nation?”

“He said they have a cluttered mentality.” Cissy sat down in a large leather recliner to the right of the desk and propped her feet with up a sigh. “He had a lot of decided opinions, Prosper did.” She didn’t seem to realize she was crying.

Bree rummaged in her tote for a pack of tissues and handed them over.

“Thanks, honey. He wanted to redo this room, too. We were going to tackle it after we got back from the honeymoon.”

The front doorbell chimed. Bree heard the murmur of voices from the foyer, and EB came in. She carried a shiny brown briefcase. Bree greeted her with a smile. “Morning, Mrs. Billingsley.”

“Good morning, Ms. Winston-Beaufort.”

“You’ve met my father, and Aunt Cissy, of course. This is Lewis McCallen. He’s senior partner with McCallen & Santo.”

“Big defense firm out of Atlanta,” EB said. “Yes, indeed. Glad to meet you, sir.”

“Mr. Royal here speaks very highly of you, Mrs. Billingsley. Why don’t you sit at the desk? It will make it easier to take notes. That’s a fine briefcase you’re carrying. I hope it’s chock-full of yellow legal pads. We have a lot to get through this morning.”

Bree bit her lip. Mr. Royal? She was never more aware of the generation gap than when men of McCallen’s generation met women of EB’s age and color.

EB cast a sympathetic look at Cissy’s ankle bracelet. She nodded gravely at Royal. She assessed McCallen for a moment as she settled behind the big desk. With a rather pointed air, she opened the briefcase and took out her laptop. “Y’all shoot,” she said.