by Mary Stanton
“And you’re at ease with them? Caldecott, I mean?”
“Don’t like ’em much, if that’s what you’re asking. But who says you have to like your lawyer? Long as they hang White out to dry, I don’t care about their character.”
Bree regretted not bringing Sasha. Chambers seemed untainted by Dark Sphere forces, but who really knew? “You taught at a university before you bought this shop?”
He tamped the tobacco carefully into the bowl, struck a kitchen match against the sole of his boot, and lit his pipe. He puffed away for a second or two and then regarded her through the clouds of smoke. “How old are you? Twenty-eight? Twenty-nine?”
“Twenty-nine this year.”
“Hm. Your expression’s older than that, Athena. Bet you’ve seen a lot in those twenty-nine years. Which means you ought to figure the fools from the get-go. Do I look like a fool to you?”
“How can I possibly tell at this point?”
His bark of a laugh wasn’t amused. “Take it from me, I’m not. Was, maybe, at one time. I learned my lesson about the kind of lawyer to hire a little too late. So if I look like a former fool to you, then you’d be right on the money. Yes, I taught at a university, and yes, your client Prosper White was instrumental in my teaching there no more. The bastard.” His teeth clenched around the pipe stem so hard, she heard the wood crack. “You know he’s called a press conference tomorrow? To tout his bloody magazine exhibit? With my cover? The man’s a poseur and a fraud. We’ll see just how far the bastard gets with the press.”
Bree nudged Chambers back to the task at hand. “When did this all happen? The business over the provenance of the Cross of Justinian?”
“Started about eight months ago. I’ve been searching for the Cross for thirty years. And finally, finally . . .” He looked at Bree, without really seeing her. He was looking, she decided, at a memory. “My wife and I found it. In the back of a cave along the Dalmatian coast.”
“Outside authentication was required by the university?”
“Yes,” he said abruptly. “For the insurance. Insurance companies know damn-all about antiquities, much less the so-called experts they hire as consultants. It was my bad luck that they believed in White’s bullshit credentials.”
Bree made a mental note to check out White’s background if this thing went to court—White’s credibility might very well be on the line.
“He thought the Cross was, umm, not from the period.”
“Said it was a fake. A twenty-first-century fraud.” He rapped his pipe on his boot, spilling ash on the floor. “What’s your interest in this case? You really represent Prosper White?”
“Yes,” Bree said cautiously.
“Hope you got your retainer up front.”
“That’s not an issue. He’s engaged to marry my aunt.”
“You have to trust me on this, Athena. He’s not a man you want in the family circle.”
“I can understand your desire for vindication,” Bree said. She would have to step carefully here. She couldn’t discuss the actual case. “But why choose this way to do it? Surely there’s a better opportunity to get Mr. White’s attention than to quarrel over something like a magazine cover.”
“Oh, it’s more than that.” Chambers smiled rather charmingly. “I didn’t have any idea the bastard would show up here in Savannah two months after I bought this shop. You could have knocked me over with a feather when he came waltzing in here looking for old magazines. And”—he pointed the stem of his pipe at her dramatically—“true to form, the bastard tries to chisel me. The opportunity presented itself. How could I pass it up?”
Bree bit her lip so she wouldn’t laugh. “It might be worth reflecting on whether you want to confuse the two issues, sir. While I sympathize with your career difficulties over the relic—”
“The relic,” he said. “A good man lost his life in pursuit of what you call ‘the relic.’ My wife lost any hope of a comfortable old age because of what Prosper White did to us over ‘the relic.’” His face flushed dark red. He clenched one hand into a fist. “I’m going to take White down. I’ll take you and your aunt down with him, if I have to.”
Bree didn’t like threats. She pulled herself up, concentrating on the man before her, pulling on the strength of will that made her what she was. A breeze came up from nowhere and stirred the catalogues piled at their feet. Her voice was icily level when she finally spoke. “If my aunt’s determined to marry him, what I want or don’t want doesn’t matter. You should know—you need to let your lawyers know—that I’ll defend him against anything they might try. Is that clear, sir?”
Chambers drew back and paled. “Who are you, anyway?” Then, as if ashamed of his momentary fear, he blustered, “What is this, some kind of threat? You can’t bully me!”
Bree felt her lips part in a smile. She’d caught a glimpse of her face once, when she was angry like this. She hadn’t liked herself much. “No threat. Just a statement of fact.”
Chambers shoved his office chair as far away from her as he could get without standing up and running away. He hunched his shoulders and crossed his arms across his chest as if he were cold. “My wife says . . .”
Bree waited.
“My wife says the thing’s cursed.”
“The Cross?”
He nodded, mute.
“You’re a scientist, Professor. I didn’t think scientists believed in curses.”
“Haven’t had a day’s luck since I found it again.”
“Again?”
“Long story.” He rubbed his hand over his face. “Bad story. Want to see the artifact that caused it all?”
“The Cross of Justinian?”
“Prosper would say the purported Cross of Justinian.” He bent sideways and pulled open the lower desk drawer. He scrabbled around in its depths and then emerged with a small wooden box. He tossed it to her. Bree caught the box in midair. “Go ahead. Open it up. I . . .” The door chime rang, and he leaped to his feet, clearly glad for a chance to get away from her. “A customer, by gum! Here’s a rare chance! Take a look at the piece of crap that started it all. I’ll be right back.”
The box didn’t weigh very much. Bree hefted it in her hand. It was made of pine, with a cheap brass latch. She flipped the lid open with her thumb and took out the small jeweled cross and held it up.
White had described it perfectly, although the cedar base was so heavily inlaid that her first impression was that it was solid silver. The work wasn’t refined, at least not to twenty-first-century eyes, but it was very beautiful. Semiprecious stones were inset with great care into the metal. The green must be jasper, and there were tiny bits of coral and lapis lazuli. Bree held it up . . .
And a wisp of dark shadow rose from its center.
Bree closed her fist. The Cross was warm, almost hot, in the palm of her hand. Her clients came to her through objects that had been near them when they died. She didn’t want another client. Not now. Not this case, with her mother’s cherished sister at the heart of it.
The dark light seeped through her fingers and coiled around her wrist with a touch that was almost loving. Bree closed her eyes. She didn’t have to take every case that came along, did she?
“It’s not a customer; it’s a damn dog!” Allard Chambers shouted from the front of the store. “Ha!”
The shadow was an absence of light. A shape of nothingness. It crawled up her forearm and then rose in a slender pillar, taking shape in front of her eyes.
“Whoops! Heads up!” Chambers shouted. “It’s headed your way.”
Bree put the Cross back into the box, slid the cover shut and put it back on the desk. A familiar nose nudged her hip. Bree smoothed her hand over the golden head. “Hey, Sasha,” she said. “Sniff out any demons, lately?”
Sasha looked up at her, his feathered tail waving a gentle welcome.
Take it.
“I can’t just take it,” she said. “It’s not mine. Besides, I don’t want to.”
“Sorry about that.” Chambers said. He was slightly out of breath. “Slipped right past me. The lock on the front door doesn’t catch unless we slam it shut. All kinds of street people wander in when it’s cold, but this is the first time I’ve had a dog take advantage. The street people drive Jillian crazy. The dog would really put her over the edge.”
“Mrs. Chambers? She’s joining you in the suit against my client?”
“Yeah.” He looked at her hand on Sasha’s head. “Dogs send her right around the bend. I see that dogs don’t bother you, though.”
“Not as a rule,” Bree said. “Besides, I know this one.”
“Yours, is he? Handsome animal.”
“He is, isn’t he?”
Sasha stood thirty inches at the shoulder. His chest was all mastiff: broad and heavily muscled. His thick, glossy coat was a color between amber and gold coins.
“Where’d he come from? He know how to open car doors, too?”
“I have a town house on Factor’s Walk. I think he just decided to take a stroll and find me.” She ran her fingers over his silky ears and stood up. “I’d better take him on home.” She extended her hand and said politely, “I’m glad to have met you, Professor Chambers. I’ll be in touch with your lawyers. I hope we can resolve this dispute amicably.”
“I don’t know about that. I’m not in a real amiable frame of mind.” He sat down in his desk chair and squinted at her. “Did you take a look at the Cross?”
“I did.”
“Doesn’t seem like much to wreck a career over, does it?”
She hesitated. “How did you come to be mistaken about it?”
“I’m not,” he said flatly. “Or at least I wasn’t about the original.”
“This isn’t the original artifact?”
“Hell, no. This is a fake.” He grabbed the box from his desk and threw it at her. Without thinking, Bree caught it. “Take it!”
“But you had the original?”
He glared at her, suddenly venomous. “I’m not saying another word to you, Miss Winston-Beaufort. You want the original? So do I. I want my job back. I want my life back. That isn’t going to happen. So I want your client to roast in Hell. You want to know where the original is? You ask your goddamn client.” He leaned across the desk, his face close to hers. His breath smelled of bread. “I know things about that bastard that your rich aunt isn’t going to like to hear. You want to keep her out of a scandal? You tell her to pay up. Or else.” He was so close that his breath was hot against her cheek. So close she could see the tears in his eyes. “I don’t know how in hell I got into this mess. But somebody, somebody owes me something.”
Four
“You have to tell Aunt Cissy that Prosper stole the real antique,” Antonia said. “I mean, my God. The guy’s a crook!”
“Shh!” Bree said.
Bree’s little sister took after the Carmichael side of the family. She was small—an asset for a stage actress, since so many leading men were short—and had thick, dark red-gold hair that set off her blue eyes and camellia-like complexion to stunning effect. She’d insisted on acting lessons the day she turned thirteen, and the years of training gave her voice a resonance that could be heard in every corner of the restaurant. At seven on a Monday night in February, B. Mitchell’s wasn’t all that full, but several couples were openly listening. Antonia was a hard person to ignore when she was silent, much less when she was in full cry.
“Shh, yourself,” Antonia said. “If you don’t tell her, I will.”
“Well, you can’t,” Bree said firmly. “All of this is unsubstantiated. The two men hate each other, that’s clear. But I don’t know a thing about Chambers, and neither do you. He could be delusional. He could be lying through his teeth. He could be setting White up.”
“But you don’t think so.”
Bree sat back and looked at the menu. She didn’t really need to look at the menu. She had the same thing every time she came here, and she’d have it again. Fish tacos.
“Bree?”
“Keep your voice down, Antonia. And no. I don’t think so.”
“So?”
“I think he’s a pitiful little guy who’s scared out of his mind.”
“Scared? Of what?”
Bree shook her head in self-disgust. “Of me, probably. I leaned on him a little. He’s in over his head, that’s for sure. But he’s stubborn. He really believes he’s been cheated. But it’s a guess, Antonia. Guesses aren’t facts. Guesses don’t settle lawsuits.”
“You’ve always had an excellent baloney detector, Sis. Best in the family, except for Daddy. I say we tell Cissy that White’s a thief. Then she’ll ditch him, and we can all stop worrying about it, and this Chambers character can ride off into the sunset without Cissy’s money.”
“It doesn’t seem to be that simple.”
It wasn’t—and she hadn’t figured out why. Not yet. She and Sasha had gone straight home from Reclaimables. It was too soon to take on another case. Handling the Cross had left her feeling odd, as if she’d been displaced from the here and now and set down in another universe. She didn’t like it.
She had needed time to herself before meeting Cissy and Antonia at dinner. She’d locked the fake cross in her dresser drawer to give herself time to think about when—or if—she would pick it up again to allow the manifestation of a new client.
Chambers himself was probably just what he seemed to be: definitely out for a pathetic kind of vengeance; definitely a Bay Street case; definitely someone she hadn’t needed to threaten the way she did.
The new client who had died clutching a fake Cross of Justinian? That was a different matter entirely. She was inclined to settle the White lawsuit by negotiating a settlement—using White’s money, and not her aunt’s. She wasn’t at all inclined to take on another Angelus Street case—not so soon after the last one, despite Sasha’s insistence.
She’d fallen into a deep, coma-like sleep on the couch in the living room of the town house on Factor’s Walk before she’d gotten any further in her decision making. She’d wakened only when Antonia banged into the house from a shopping trip at six. Jerked from that deep, almost unnatural sleep, for a scary minute, she hadn’t recognized her own sister.
Both of them scrambled to be on time for dinner with Aunt Cissy at B. Mitchell’s. Since the restaurant was almost kitty-corner from their town house, they ended up being too early. They’d been sipping white wine for half an hour before Bree brought up her concerns about Prosper White. Antonia had exploded with indignation.
Her sister kicked her under the table to get her attention. “So? Are you going to tell her, or shall I?”
Bree looked at her cell phone to get the time. “Neither one of us is going to do a thing until I get a better handle on the facts. Anyhow, Cissy’s late. Maybe she won’t show up.”
Antonia rolled her eyes. “She’ll show up. When is she ever on time?”
“Like you can talk.”
“I am extremely punctual,” Antonia said firmly, which was true only when she had a theater commitment.
Bree grinned. This familiar squabbling was reassuring. For a moment, she felt totally herself again. “You’re punctual with ‘except-fors.’ Except-for the dentist, except-for when you’ve agreed to meet me, except-for dinner.”
Antonia kicked her under the table again. “Hush up. There she is.” She waved one arm over her head and shouted, “Coo-ee, Aunt Cissy,” to the marked displeasure of the power couple the next table over.
“Not a word about White and Chambers,” Bree warned. “I mean it.”
Cissy sat down in a swirl of Prada perfume. “How are y’all? Antonia, you’re looking gorgeous, as usual. Bree, you’re looking more peaked by the day.”
She had changed for dinner into a tailored navy jacket, a green-apple silk turtleneck, and artfully worn jeans. “You need to put on ten pounds, and I never in this life thought I would say that to any woman.” She leaned a
cross the table and gathered their hands into hers. “And aren’t I just the luckiest female this side of paradise? Don’t you just love my Prosper?” She released them and sat back with a sigh. “This dinner’s on me, darlins. I am just so happy!” The waitress hovered, and Cissy said, “A nice little Cosmopolitan for me. And one each for my girls. Now! You met with that awful Allard person, Bree.”
Startled, Bree looked at Antonia, who shrugged, “not me.” “Why would you say that, Aunt Cissy?”
“’Cause the little guttersnipe called me right after you left that trashy shop.”
“He did?”
“He did. What do you suppose he wanted?”
Bree had a hunch. She didn’t like it. She didn’t like it at all. Wealthy divorcée Celia Carmichael made the “People about Town” column in the Savannah Chronicle on a regular basis. Her upcoming wedding to White had been news only last week. Chambers wanted money, and by now he undoubtedly had a pretty good idea of what her aunt could afford.
The waitress set the Cosmopolitans in front of them. Bree pushed hers aside. Cissy took a big sip, set the glass down, and said, “A private settlement, that’s what.”
“Oh my God,” Antonia said. “The man wants money. I knew it. I just knew it. This is plain lousy, Bree!”
“Would you like to order a starter?” the waitress said, clearly wanting to linger. “No rush about it. I can see y’all need to talk.”
“Artichoke cheese dip and fish tacos all around,” Cissy said. “Unless you girls want something else? No? That’ll be fine, then. You can bring it all at the same time, too. Thank you.”
Bree waited until the waitress was out of earshot. B. Mitchell’s was a big, low-ceilinged room with a bar across the long wall at the back and round tables set well apart from one another. As long as Antonia kept her voice down, it was one of Savannah’s better spots for private conversation. “Did he mention a figure?”
