Angel Condemned

by Mary Stanton

  “Fifty thousand dollars. Said I’d spend that much in legal fees defending poor Prosper, and I might just as well give it to him now unless I wanted my future husband’s name drawn through the mud.” Cissy bit her lower lip. Then she tossed back the rest of her Cosmopolitan.

  “What did you say to him?”

  “I hung up on the little bastard, of course.”

  Bree rubbed her face with both hands. “Okay,” she said finally. “What do you want to do?”

  “I thought I’d ask you,” Cissy said, rather pitifully. “Chambers could get on the stand and tell all kinds of lies about Prosper, couldn’t he?”

  “Or all kinds of truths,” Antonia muttered.

  “What’s that? What’s that?”

  Bree gave Antonia a shut-up glare.

  “Nothing,” Antonia said.

  Cissy bit her lip, then turned in her chair and waved to the bartender. “I swear they make these drinks with as little vodka as possible. Another round here, please? Besides,” she added in a braver tone, “it’d just about wreck my plans for the honeymoon. What if we had to come back to testify or whatever? I’m thinkin’ fifty thousand’s little enough to pay for peace of mind.”

  “I’m thinking that’s crazy,” Antonia said. “And why should you pay anything, anyway? It’s White’s problem. Let him settle it.”

  Bree had the same question. She searched for a tactful approach. “Does he have available funds?”

  “Of course he doesn’t!” Cissy snapped. “He’s an artist! I thought that was understood, Bree. As for you, Antonia . . . Of all people, I thought you’d have some sympathy. I mean, with your life in the theater and all.” She blinked away tears and then, when that didn’t help, put the backs of her hands underneath her eyes to hold them back.

  Antonia opened her mouth, and then backed off at Cissy’s despairing look. “Of course, Auntie. Of course I understand. But if you just knew more about . . .”

  It was Bree’s turn to kick her sister under the table. Antonia glared at her. Bree jerked her head toward the door, and when Antonia stayed stubbornly in her chair, Bree drew her foot back to whack her again.

  “Okay, okay, Bree. I get the message.” She bounced up and wrapped Cissy in a fierce hug. “It’s a pure shame, that’s what it is. Y’all have to excuse me. I just remembered I promised to pick up some stuff for . . . somebody. Anyhow. Pack up my food, so I can eat it later, okay? I’ll just be off now.” She flipped her hair over her shoulder, then backed out of Bree’s reach. “By the by, Bree’s got something to tell you. Don’t you, Bree? You get it on out of her, Aunt. Don’t forget my tacos, Bree. There’s not a darn thing in that fridge at home. “

  Everybody watched as Antonia walked across the room and out the front door. But then, everyone always did.

  Cissy stared over Bree’s shoulder, her lower lip firmly between her teeth. After a long moment, she picked up her napkin, dabbed under her eyes, and sighed.

  The waitress set the artichoke dip in the middle of the table, then the platters of fish tacos in front of Bree and Cissy. She looked at Antonia’s empty chair. “Shall I wrap this third one up?”

  “Might as well,” Cissy said. “Take it away and keep it warm for her, if you would. We’ll get it at the end of the meal. If there’s ever going to be an end to this meal.”

  Bree waved the waitress away with an apologetic gesture. Cissy slammed her fist onto the table but not very hard. “I take it you’re the one who’s been elected to talk to me about Prosper?”

  “Would that be okay with you?”

  “Fine. Good. I’m ready. So you go ahead and tell me what y’all have wanted to say for the past month. You hate Prosper. Don’t you. All of you. My whole loving family. You think he’s after my money, and you think I’m too damn old and too damn foolish for any man to love me.”

  “That is just not true,” Bree said firmly.

  Cissy was in no mood to listen. “You know what? Y’all might be right. I don’t care. I love him, Bree. And since the good Lord blessed both me and your mamma with more money than either one of us will need in a lifetime, and if I want to spend it on this man, who gives a rat’s behind?” She stabbed the taco viciously with a fork. “Francesca’s on the phone to me every minute, talking about a prenup. Your father squinches his eyes up like he’s tracking down a fox after it’s raided the henhouse. Even Antonia looks crosswise at me every time I talk about him. And you! You won’t even call him by his Christian name!” She blinked away more tears.

  Bree took her aunt’s cold hands in her own. “We’re looking out for you as best we can, that’s all. We don’t hate him, exactly. We just have some questions about how good he’ll be to you. You don’t need a man to make you happy, do—”

  “You hush up!” Cissy shouted. She jerked her hands away. “Where’s Francesca when I need her? You’re no damn good at comforting, Bree. Not lately, anyway. Not since you moved to Savannah and got hard.” She stood up, knocking the chair over in her haste to leave. “Do I need a man to make me happy? I purely do not. And if I do, what’s it to you? And what do you know about it, anyway? Look at you, the way you’re living. Like some cloistered nun. There’s not one womanly thing about you. Do I need a man? Of course I do. What about love? What about companionship? What about sex?”

  The power couple one table over got up in a pointed manner and moved to a table against the wall.

  Five

  “So you can’t to go back to B. Mitchell’s again, that’s for sure,” Antonia said with a cheeky grin twenty minutes later.

  Antonia lay flat on the couch in their living room. Bree sat in the rocker next to the fireplace, still in her winter coat, Sasha on the floor beside her, the food from B. Mitchell’s packed neatly up in a plastic bag. She’d come back to the town house and had been overwhelmed by the feeling of total dislocation.

  Antonia sat up with a jerk. “She just slammed on out of there, Bree? After yelling all that out for everyone to hear? Without even a ‘bye-howdy’?”

  “It’s not funny. And no, she didn’t slam out for another twenty agonizing minutes. I agreed to meet White tomorrow at the Frazier and talk to him about an out-of-court settlement.”

  “Cissy’s going to pay up?”

  “Looks like it.”

  “Ugh. You’re right, sister. It’s awful. Poor Cissy. What are you going to do about it?”

  Bree didn’t want to do anything about it. She was tired, close to exhausted. Worse, the town house had a strange, foreboding atmosphere. The twenty-year-old couch in front of the fireplace looked unfamiliar. Her grandmother’s sturdy rocking chair felt fragile. She was almost afraid to move in it. Maybe she hadn’t recovered from the car accident that had broken her leg as well as she thought she had.

  “Bree? You’ve got to find some way to get this bozo out of Cissy’s life.”

  Antonia was right.

  Was it her imagination? Or were the walls and ceiling veiled with a dirty mist?

  An unaccountable depression settled over her. She wanted to be back in the Angelus office, where the angels formed a barrier between her family and things like Beazley and Caldecott. The town house, home to her family for generations, was alien territory to her now. She turned and looked up at the mirror over the fireplace, afraid that she would catch a glimpse of something that shouldn’t be there.

  She closed her eyes. She let her attention drift. The town house was at the end of a row of converted buildings that faced the Savannah River. Savannah had been the hub of the international cotton trade two hundred years ago, and the cobblestone embankments had carried warehouses, inns, and the offices of the shipyards. The buildings had survived pirates, slavers, the Civil War, and the Great Depression; Bree and Antonia’s home had been the headquarters for slave auctions, and Bree was always faintly surprised that her dreams weren’t troubled by the ghosts of the tormented victims. Maybe it was the echo of those poor souls that troubled her now.

  She felt as if she were floating over
the room, looking at it from a great height. She saw the narrow-planked pine floors. The floor-to-ceiling bookshelves that flanked the small brick fireplace. Double French doors that led to the small balcony that jutted out over River Street two stories below. In summertime, with the doors open to breezes from the river, the clangor from the street was a constant reminder that old Savannah was as vital as in her glory days. She’d known this place from birth.

  Hadn’t she?

  “Bree!”

  Bree jerked awake.

  “You all right?”

  “Fine.” Bree stretched a little. Then she stood up. Sasha gazed up at her with anxious eyes.

  “I think we should call Mamma,” Antonia said. “Maybe she can come on down and shake some sense into her.”

  Bree bent to one side and laid her hand on Sasha’s head. Bad enough that Cissy had a peripheral involvement in this case. She wanted both Royal and Francesca safe in North Carolina. “Not a good idea.”

  “What’s the matter with you? She’ll know how to handle Cissy. The wedding’s in four days, and she’s coming down for that. Why can’t she come a couple of days early?”

  Bree didn’t say anything.

  “Besides, you’ve got to tell both her and Daddy what happened today. Chambers called Prosper a thief, or as good as.”

  “I can do that over the phone.”

  “Better in person. We’ll call a family meeting. With all of us sitting there, Cissy’s got to see reason.”

  “You ever known Mamma to interfere? She’s always let us make our own mistakes. Did they cut you off when you dropped out of school to chase after going on the stage? All they did was point out how much better off you’d be with a college education.”

  “I’m perfectly able to make decisions about my own life,” Antonia said crossly.

  “Exactly.”

  “Oh, never mind.” Antonia scowled and bit at her thumbnail. “What a mess. That Chambers character’s trying to extort fifty thousand dollars from her. I suppose you think we should all sit by for that?”

  “It’s not extortion,” Bree said. She felt her confusion ebb as she concentrated on the legalities of Cissy’s position. It helped to focus on the task at hand. She’d have to remember that. “He made a legitimate offer to drop the suit.”

  “Is she going to pay up?” Antonia swung her feet to the floor and sat up. “You’d best tell Mamma if she is. I mean, honestly. Fifty thousand dollars. That’s a pile of money. If anyone can talk some sense into her, it’s Mamma.”

  Bree thought about the woman she called mother. Of all the unsettling events that had occurred since she’d taken on Great-Uncle Franklin’s celestial appeals practice, the most unnerving had been the discovery that she wasn’t the child of Royal and Francesca Winston-Beaufort, but their niece. Franklin had been her father. And her own birth mother, a woman named Leah, had died as Bree was being born. She knew nothing at all about Leah, except for the talisman she had left her. A tiny gold replica of the scales of justice, enfolded by a pair of angel wings. Francesca had given her the talisman four months ago, when Bree reopened Franklin’s cases. It was on a chain around her neck. She never took it off.

  She got up and walked up and down the small living room. Something was wrong. Off. She felt it like a pressure at the base of her skull. She stopped at the French doors leading to their little concrete patio and looked out. The lights across the river were dim and insubstantial. She turned and stood in front of the fireplace. The antique mirror that hung over the white-painted mantel was clear at the moment, reflecting Bree herself, and behind her, Antonia.

  That wasn’t always the case. Nobody in the family seemed to know just how old the mirror was; Francesca seemed to think Franklin had found it at an auction somewhere. Just lately, Bree found that if she stared into the mottled depths, she could see the shadowy outline of a pale-faced, dark-haired woman looking back at her. Leah. It had to be Leah. The slender, waif-like creature who had married Franklin when he was fifty-five and she no more than the age Bree was now.

  “I said, hey!” Antonia tossed a cushion at her. “You okay? You planning on sitting down and staying awhile? You haven’t even taken your coat off.”

  “I’m fine. A little tired, that’s all.”

  “Is your leg bothering you?”

  Bree tossed her coat onto the couch and flexed her right leg absently. It was an unintended consequence of one of her most dismaying appeals cases. “Nope. It’s fine.”

  “Are you upset by what Cissy said about you in the restaurant? Don’t pay her any mind. All that stuff she said about you living like a nun? Well, you are, but so what? That’s your choice, right? And she’s like, thirty years older than we are, and she’s got to be feeling that time is running out for her.”

  “At fifty-nine?” Bree said. “I don’t think so.”

  “That generation gets all squirrelly about guys and hooking up, anyway,” Antonia said. “So don’t go all moody on me, okay? Time’s not running out for either one of us. Honest to God, Bree, you’re walking around with a cloud over your head and depressing the heck out of me. Cut it out.”

  Bree looked down at Sasha. He met the look with a sort of mournful reassurance and thumped his tail against the floor.

  “Next time Hunter asks you out, you should go,” Antonia said.

  “Sam? What does Sam have to do with all this?”

  “Just that he’s a great guy, even if he is a cop, and you’re over Payton the Rat totally, right? So maybe it’s time to kick back a little. Give the work thing a rest.”

  “Give the work thing a rest, huh?” Bree said, suddenly fed up and in the mood for an argument. It helped to yell at somebody, and Antonia was handy. “And what the heck would you know about the work thing? You haven’t worked a real job a day in your life.”

  Antonia shot off the couch, put her hands on her hips, and exploded. “Excuse me? This is me, ignoring the sarcasm and overlooking that totally unjustified slam because you’ve obviously lost whatever passes for your mind. You think stage managing isn’t a real job? You think breaking my back six nights a week . . .”

  “Between partying . . .”

  “Making sure the lighting’s on cue . . .”

  “And sleeping with every good-looking bozo that calls himself an actor . . .”

  “Not to mention the props!”

  Sasha jumped to his feet with a bark. The phone rang. Bree picked up the receiver and yelled into it. “What?!”

  “Bree?” Francesca’s light, pretty voice came over the wire. “Bree, is that you?”

  Bree sat down on the couch beside her sister. “Yes, Mamma, it’s me.”

  “You two girls aren’t fighting, are you?”

  Bree glanced at Antonia. Her sister’s face was flushed, and her eyes glittered. “Not really.” Then, “How’d you guess?”

  “You only get that tone in your voice when you’re having a spat with your baby sister. And it’s Monday night, so she’s home.” Then, anxiously, “Unless she’s lost her job at the theater?”

  “Nope, she’s still employed. If you can call messing around in a theater employment.”

  “Bree, you are a total jerk!” Antonia yelled.

  “Put me on speakerphone, honey.”

  Bree punched the button, and Francesca’s voice flooded the small room. “The two of you cut it out right now, you hear?”

  “This is so not my fault,” Antonia said. “Bree started it, anyway.”

  “I don’t want to hear about it. Not one word. What I do want to know is what in the Lord’s name is going on with Cissy? She just called me, and she’s all kinds of hysterical. What on earth did you say to her, Bree?”

  “Nothing much. Not yet, anyway.”

  “Well, I wasn’t going to come down until the day before the wedding, but I’m thinking I should come down tomorrow. Your father will head down on Friday, like we planned originally. “

  “Yes!” Antonia said.

  “Maybe we could tal
k Cissy into going up to Plessey, instead,” Bree said. “Get her away from things for a while.”

  “Four days before the wedding?” Francesca’s voice was mildly astonished. “I think not. But maybe I’ll stay with Cissy, instead of y’all. She might feel easier talking about things without you two around.”

  “That’d be nice,” Antonia said disingenuously. “The two of you can have a good heart-to-heart talk.” The town house only had two bedrooms; as the youngest, she was relegated to the couch in the living room when her parents stayed over.

  “Did you talk long?” Bree asked. “Did she tell you about the lawsuit?”

  “She did. And I’m here to tell you girls she’s not making a lick of sense. Not that she’s made any sense since she met up with that man. It’s getting worse the closer we get to the wedding.”

  “You’ve got to talk her out of marrying Prosper, Mamma,” Antonia said.

  “Your father and I have to be there for her, honey, which is something altogether different. We can express our doubts about the man if she asks us. Otherwise, we stay strictly out of it. You girls understand that; I know you do. Now. I’m driving down tomorrow, and I’m going straight to her place, so I won’t see y’all until dinnertime. Why don’t I meet you at that nice restaurant across from the town house? B. Mitchell’s.”

  Antonia grinned at Bree. “Let’s go for the crab cakes at Huey’s instead, Mamma. You drive safe, now.”

  After further good-byes and assurances of love and affection, Francesca rang off.

  Bree, who had settled into the corner of the couch, got up and shrugged on her coat.

  “Where are you off to?” Antonia demanded. “I’m not mad at you anymore.”

  “I’m not mad at you, either. I’m just taking Sasha out for a walk.”

  “I already took him out for a walk when I got back from the restaurant.” She scratched Sasha under the chin. “Besides, that dog’s so smart he can take himself for a walk.”