Defending Angels (2 page)

Bree walked around the small empty room and stopped in front of the one window. It had a head-on view of mossy gravestones. The dirt in front of the gravestones was sunken. Bree had taken an elective in forensic science at Duke; bodies that weren’t en-coffined decayed so quickly that within a month the dirt on top would sink, sometimes more than a foot. Bree peered at the graves through the wavy glass. It looked as if all the bodies had been dumped unceremoniously into the pits, certainly without coffins. Perhaps even unshrouded.

Ugh. Not a happy view for prospective clients.

A whiff of hot breath on the back of her neck made her jump. “See anything moving out there?” Lavinia leaned her fragile frame into Bree and peered over her shoulder. “That Josiah Pendergast, especially.”

“Moving?” Bree exclaimed, astonished. “Why, no, ma’am.”

“Good,” Lavinia said with a grunt of satisfaction. “Maybe the place is takin’ to you already.”

“What exactly,” Bree said, after a long, unsettled moment staring at the grave marked RIP J. PENDERGAST, “do you mean by ‘moving out there’?”

“You got to ask that kind of question, I don’t need to tell you. Something you should know for yourself, honey. Seein’ as who you are.” Suddenly stubborn, Lavinia jutted out her lower lip. “So. You’re takin’ the space?”

“I ... well ...” Bree turned away from the window, floundering. A cemetery! Her family would have a fit. “I didn’t think I’d be looking for office space,” she admitted. “My great-uncle Franklin died and willed his law firm here in Savannah to me.”

“Franklin Winston-Beaufort.” Lavinia ran one hand over her mouth in distress. “That fire ’bout done for him, didn’t it? Poor soul. Poor soul. He reached beyond his grasp, that one. You salvage any of that furniture? Or did it all go up in smoke?” For a brief, hallucinogenic instant, the old lady appeared engulfed in flames. Her gray hair flew around her dark, wrinkled face in a fiery halo.

Bree took an involuntary step back, and the illusion disappeared. In a near-whisper, she demanded, “What do you know about my uncle?”

Lavinia shook her head slowly. “Accidents like that make headlines in a town like this,” she said. “You can just imagine.”

“I can just imagine,” Bree echoed. She rubbed her eyes. She hadn’t been sleeping well since she’d come to Savannah. She was overtired, that was all. “Nothing much was salvaged. His desk. A chair. The fire that killed him had been fierce, confined to the law offices. The rest of the building had escaped damage.”

“It’s that building over to Temple that you’re talkin’ about, isn’t it? I hear some construction company’s fixin’ the whole place up.”

She smiled a little ruefully, “A developer’s doing some major renovation to the building and I can’t move in quite yet. His will was quite specific. It’s the client list that I’ve inherited. So, I’m looking at several different venues, as a temporary measure, and this . . .”

“Ven-ues,” Lavinia mused, tartly. “Huh. Any of these ven-ues just four blocks from where you live?”

“Well, no.” Bree ran her fingers through her hair. How did this old lady know where she lived?

“And these ven-ues. They take dogs?”

Bree blinked at her. “Mrs. Mather. I don’t have a dog. And I surely didn’t mention where I live.”

Lavinia pointed a skinny finger at Bree’s beautifully tailored gray pin-striped suit, fresh from the second floor at the Saks Fifth Avenue in Raleigh-Durham. “Dog hair,” she said succinctly, “or I’m a white-assed Dutchman. Single girl like you usually thinks more of her dog than her ma.”

Bree brushed at her skirt. There was a collection of sunny fur around the hem, as if a large golden retriever had nudged its head against her knee. She opened her mouth to protest. She didn’t have a dog. She hadn’t run into any dogs on her way to this meeting. And why would Lavinia think it was dog hair, anyway? She rolled a bit of the fluff between her forefinger and thumb.

Actually, it looked and felt a great deal like dog hair. So Lavinia was right about that. Surely, she would have remembered running into a dog this morning.

“As for where you live?” Lavinia rolled on. “T-uh. My nephew, Rebus, made me get caller ID years ago. That 848 exchange means that old set of town houses on Factor’s Walk. And it’s an old exchange, too. Means you been here a while.”

“Well, the family has been here a while,” Bree admitted. “Owned a town house here, I mean. We used to come here in the summers, my sister, Antonia, and I.”

“So here you are, fresh from your father’s fancy law firm in North Carolina, ready to take on the world, and you don’t want to rent this place for three hundred dollars a month?”

Had she mentioned her father’s law firm? Bree didn’t think so. “Well, I . . .” Bree floundered again. She wasn’t used to floundering. If three years practicing law had taught her anything, it’d taught her to be decisive. “I’m just not sure, Mrs. Mather.”

“Call me Lavinia, honey,” she said. “One thing I don’t approve of these days is youngsters’ manners. But it’s clear to me that your mamma taught you some. So you go right ahead and drop the Mrs. Mather part.”

“I do thank you,” Bree said, rather absently. From where she stood, she could see into the little kitchen. The refrigerator was the old, humpbacked sort that you saw in
Leave It to Beaver
reruns on the oldies channel.

“I mean to
say
,” Lavinia continued, with quavering emphasis, “where you going to find a nice place as cheap as this?”

Bree surveyed the rooms more slowly this time. The secretary and the paralegal could share the living room. And there was enough space for a small love seat and a coffee table. The bedroom would suit her very well as an office. With the addition of a microwave, the small, 1950s kitchen would be fine as a break room. She hoped she wouldn’t have to spend too much on setting the office up; the smaller the space, the less she had to furnish.

“I got my own rooms and my workshop upstairs,” Lavinia said. “But I work mainly at night, so I won’t bother you a bit. And I’ll keep the small folks from coming down the stairs and hassling you.”

Bree managed to keep the astonishment from her voice. “You have children?”

Lavinia’s giggle was so infectious Bree found herself laughing, too. “And at my age, young Bree! No, no
children
upstairs at all.”

Pets, then. Bree tended to trust people who had pets. She looked around one more time. Lavinia was right. The office space was a bargain, even with the hideous surroundings outside and the mysterious golden dog hair inside. A few dedicated gardening weekends in the old cemetery would make a dramatic difference.

Take it,
the voice in Bree’s head said. She trusted that inner voice. It’d been with her all her life. It’d led her to law school, to the job in her father’s firm, and here, to Savannah. It had also warned her against her last lover, Payton the Rat. She hadn’t listened to it then. And look at all the misery that had come from that.

She’d take it.

“I would very much appreciate the opportunity to rent this space from you, Lavinia.”

“I would very much like to rent to you, honey.”

Solemnly, they shook hands. Lavinia’s fingers were dry and cool and felt like the bones of small birds.

The decision made, Bree stood a little taller in relief. “Now, if I could take a look at the lease?” A contract was familiar territory; she’d been feeling a little out of her depth until now.

“Lease,” Lavinia snorted. “Honey, what would I need a lease for? You work out, you can rent this place from me as long as you like. You don’t work out, we’ll just agree to part ways.”

“But I’ll be making quite an investment, Mrs. Ma—I mean Lavinia. And I don’t believe either one of us—”

“No lease.” Lavinia shook her head. “Don’t trust the courts. Don’t trust the law. Trust in God. And,” she added firmly, “my own good digestion.”

Bree hesitated.

She
did
trust that voice; it was her own highly developed intuition, wasn’t it? It had led her out of Raleigh and working for her nutty—if adorable—father, Royal Winston-Beaufort, and here to Georgia, where the very air smelled of freedom. She didn’t have to take on her great-uncle’s clients; his bequest had been “to see to their needs,” and she could have parceled them out to existing law firms if she’d really wanted to. But Savannah was a chance at a life of her own and she’d grabbed at it.

“That’s all right then.” Lavinia, who seemed to have heard this internal dialogue, trotted out of the dining room, across the living room, and back to the foyer. Bree followed. Bree had long legs, especially measured against Lavinia’s short ones, but she had to hurry to catch up. She found Lavinia wriggling the door latch impatiently.

“I’ve a lot to do upstairs, honey. So if you don’t mind, you can show yourself out, as the saying goes. You can come back tomorrow and start moving in.” She peered out the door, and up and down the street. “You be sure it’s locked behind you. This here’s a good neighborhood, but you just never know about kids these days. Not to mention the Josiah Pendergasts of this bad old world. This murderers’ cemetery is the only place for a beast like that.”

Bree’s lawyer’s conscience prodded her. “Don’t you want to have a lease for your own protection, Lavinia? I mean, I’m surely flattered that you trust me on sight. But it
is
a hard old world out there. You’re right. Just in case, why don’t I bring a copy of a standard contract with me tomorrow?”

“T-uh,” Lavinia said. “You can put your standard contracts where the sun don’t shine.” She reached up and curled a strand of Bree’s long hair around one finger. “That’s natural, isn’t it, honey?”

“Well, yes.” Bree blushed. She had very few vanities. Her luxuriant hair, long, white blonde, and as fine spun as sugar, was one of them.

Lavinia leaned in close. Bree caught the spicy scent of dried herbs and another, sweeter smell of exotic flowers. “You see those angels I painted on the stairs, don’t you? Your hair’s exactly the color of the bravest and the best one a-them.” Her smile lit her face like a sun breaking over the horizon. “It’s meant that you rent this place. Couldn’t be clearer.”

What
was
clear, Bree thought, was that her new landlady had a very small screw loose. But Lavinia’s screws were definitely tighter than Aunt Corinne-Alice’s or Great-uncle Franklin’s. Both of those relatives had dabbled in some pretty weird stuff. And Bree had survived those eccentricities of her childhood just fine. “I’ll see you tomorrow, then,” she said. “And thank . . .”

Lavinia whisked up the decorated stairs like a puff of smoke, leaving nothing but the scent of herbs and flowers behind.

“Mrs. Mather? Lavinia?”

No answer. Just the decisive slam of an upstairs door. Bree raised her voice a little, “I’ll see you about ten o’clock, then?”

Not a word from her putative landlady. But the scent of unfamiliar flowers drifted down and she caught the sounds of skittering feet. A cat, maybe, or a small dog. As for the perfume, Bree inhaled with pleasure. Roses, perhaps, and something more than roses. She waited a long moment to see if Lavinia would call down to her, then let herself out the front door.

Outside, the breeze had quickened and swung round from the west, bringing with it a foul odor of decay from the cemetery. Bree stopped short, horrified. She sneezed heartily. No wonder Lavinia perfumed the air. The stink was horrendous. Strange that she hadn’t noticed it before.

She stood on the top step, irresolute, struck with the conviction that this rental was a really, really dumb idea. Unless Uncle Franklin’s practice was limited to the smell-impaired, nobody would come back for a second appointment. And her clients would have to be really nearsighted not to disapprove of the derelict cemetery. The Historical Society wouldn’t mind if she weeded and mulched, but she doubted sincerely that she’d be allowed to transform the place into something more habitable by moving the graves to a proper cemetery.

She thought suddenly of Josiah Pendergast. Lavinia didn’t think he belonged in a proper cemetery at all. “This is the only place for a beast like that.”

Phooey. Corpses didn’t inhabit a place. They just occupied it. Like furniture. Highly unattractive furniture, from any prospective client’s standpoint, and it was furniture that couldn’t be tossed out in the trash.

On the other hand, the office was quiet. It was tucked far enough away from Bay Street that the noise of the city and the wharf was diminished to a mere grumble. And that was a plus, surely.

But the rotten scent hung around her like a dreadful cape. Bree pinched her nose shut, to see if it helped. Nope. The smell was everywhere. Quiet wasn’t enough. This wasn’t going to work. She turned to face the front door and stretched out her hand to knock again. She’d tell Mrs. Mather she was sorry. Somebody else would surely want the office space.

A scream of agony split the air.

Vex not his ghost.

—
King Lear
, Shakespeare

Bree froze, hand upraised. The shriek came again, not, Bree realized almost at once, a human shriek, but the sound of an animal in pain. And it came from behind the decayed magnolia tree. She was off the steps and running toward the gravestones before she’d actually thought to move.

The howl trailed off to whimpers. Bree skidded to a stop in the middle of the graveyard. She took one deep, calming breath. It was stupid to rush into whatever it was. She stared intently at the magnolia tree. It was old and almost leafless, the bole the width of her shoulders. The terrible sounds came from behind it, she was sure of it. She set her briefcase down and slipped off her jacket.

“Hey!” she shouted. “Hey!”

The whimpers trailed off into silence.

A scrabble of dead leaves made her jump. She caught the back view of a skinny figure enveloped in a smoky mist. Bree blinked hard and rubbed her eyes.