by Mary Stanton
“I missed lunch.”
“Petru’s sister made scones. There’s a couple left. Shall I get you some?”
“Maybe later.” She stared up at The Rise of the Cormorant. The skies over the ocean were less bloody than they had been before. The cormorant itself had circled upward, away from the waves created over the prow of the ship. The dark-haired woman reached over the side of the ship. She looked down at the drowning souls. Bree couldn’t see her face. At that moment, sitting there, she would have given anything to see her face. “I think we’re ready to ask the Celestial Courts to allow a review of Schofield Martin’s sentencing.”
“That’s good news.” Ron set the tea tray on the oak chest. “Eat something, please.” He sat across from her. Bree picked up a scone and set it down again. Petru stumped in from the kitchen, leaned on his cane, and watched her. His thick beard made it hard to see his expression.
Bree held up her small recorder. “I’ve got Jillian Chambers’s statement. I’d like you to hear some of it.” She tapped at the keyboard, then placed the recorder face up on the chest. Jillian’s hoarse, exhausted voice was slurred.
Yes, I remember Scooey Martin.
“They had her on a number of medications,” Bree said. “But she seemed oriented to me. I hope the Angel in Judgment will show some leniency and agree to have it entered as evidence. If not, I’ve got a backup plan.”
He was a lovely boy, Scooey was. Under the thumb of his big brother, Bullet, of course. And trying to make his own mark in the world. It was my fault he got mixed up with Allard and that business about shipping the artifacts back to the States to White. He wanted me to run away with him. Just leave the dig, and my work, and Allard, too, and go live somewhere on a beach in California. Like I said, he was a lovely boy. I told him we couldn’t do it without money, and that the best chance we had was to take a box of the things we’d gotten on this dig, and sell them ourselves. He didn’t want to do it, but I told him Allard and Bullet and White were all in on it, and what did it matter who benefited from the stolen artifacts? Better the two of us than all of them.
He must have let something slip. Allard caught us as we were about to leave on the Indies Queen. There was a storm, a fight, and poor Scooey went overboard. Allard fixed it with the police. I don’t know how. I don’t remember much about the period right after Scooey died.
Who pushed Scooey? Nobody pushed him. He jumped, trying to get away from Allard. Jumped over the side. Just didn’t make it to shore.
Bree tapped the recorder, and Jillian’s voice stopped.
“I can argue that Chambers threatened Schofield and drove him to his death. That Chambers is guilty of contributory negligence at best, and of second-degree manslaughter at worst.”
Petru frowned. “That statement of Jillian’s? Uncorroborated? I am not so sure. As for Chambers—you will not get him to admit to that while he is alive.”
“I’ve got Martin’s statement that his younger brother wasn’t a part of the smuggling scheme, too.”
Ron went to his desk and sat at his laptop. “I’ll recheck that. As I recall, Bullet Martin said his younger brother ‘didn’t have any interest in the family business.’” The screen came up with Bree’s case notes. Petru leaned over Ron’s shoulder and stared at them. “Maybe. It is thin. But it appears as though we have little else.”
“I’ve got one more arrow in my quiver,” Bree said. “We’ll see if I need it. Anyhow. I’m ready. If you’ve got the box with my robes, Ron, I think I’d like to take care of this as soon as the documents are prepared.”
“It will, only take me a moment” Petru said.
Bree nodded. “All right. I’m going upstairs. I’ll be back in a bit.”
She didn’t wait for either angel to respond but went out to the foyer. She paused at the foot of the stairs. Her painted angel stood with hands folded, facing its gloriously robed cohorts parading up the wall, as if considering whether to rejoin the procession. Bree took her time ascending to the second floor. As she rounded the stairs to the landing, she saw there was a sign on the door to Lavinia’s living quarters.
FOR LEASE INQUIRE, BEAUFORT & COMPANY
The door was slightly ajar. Bree pushed it open and walked into Lavinia’s former home. The pine floors were dusty, with a shimmery violet dust that floated around her feet and glimmered in the sunshine coming through the windows overlooking the cemetery below. The air held the scent of flowers and spices of a kind Bree had only encountered in the company of her landlady.
The furniture was gone, except for a rocking chair near an old cast-iron stove in the far corner of the living room. As Bree watched, the scent of lavender grew stronger, and the chair creaked back and forth on the rockers, and then stilled.
Bree waited a long moment. Her heart ached. She wanted to say something. She wanted to embrace Lavinia, one last time. She opened her arms, as if the angel would rise from her chair and come to her.
The air stilled. The scent of lavender faded. Bree closed her eyes against a sudden rush of tears, and then turned and went downstairs.
Ron waited in the foyer, the parchment roll of pleadings under one arm, and her coat and tote in the other. He’d slung the strap of the wooden box carrying her robes over one shoulder.
Bree put on her winter coat and dug the car keys out of her tote. “Can we drive?”
“Sure.”
“I mean, is my car in one piece or not?”
“It’s fine,” he said easily. “It’s parked right outside in the usual spot.”
Bree decided she didn’t want to ask how she had gotten back to the town house the night before—or who had driven her car back to Angelus Street. But as she turned onto Montgomery, heading back to the Municipal Building, she couldn’t help casting frequent glances out the side window, just to be certain the street wasn’t taking her places she never wanted to see again. She avoided the parking spot on Market, too. And if Ron was amused, he didn’t show it.
He did, however, say hello to Cordelia Blackburn as they exited the security check into the lobby.
“It’s Ron Parchese, isn’t it?” Cordy said. “Nice to see you again.” Then, to Bree, “You’re looking a little ragged around the edges, girl. Did you have a rough night?”
“I was up late, settling a dispute.”
“Well, I hope you didn’t lose any sleep over that matter we discussed in my office yesterday. I had a word with Stubblefield. He won’t be sending out any inappropriate letters any time soon.”
“Thank you, Cordy. I appreciate that.”
“No problem. Nice to see you again, Ron. You ever decide to leave private casework for the state, you let me know.”
Bree didn’t say anything to Ron until they were in the elevator—which was, for once, empty of other people. “I suppose I should be flattered that that’s twice in two days somebody’s tried to swipe my staff.”
Ron smiled. It was the kind of smile that never failed to lift her spirits.
“Why did you decide to be visible to Cordy today?”
“I like Cordy. And I’m a little jazzed. Always am before a courtroom appearance.”
The elevator went past the sixth floor and stopped. The doors hissed open. Bree stared at the bronze medallion on the wall. The winged scales of justice seemed to glow more brightly than usual. “Lavinia was spending herself out. If I’d known from the outset that each time she appeared in temporal form it took energy away from her, I would have . . .”
“What? Asked her to slow it down?” Ron set the box on the floor, then shook out the red velvet robes and held them out, ready to drape them around her shoulders. “Not a decision for you to make, Bree. Not for her, not for Petru, and not for me.” He twitched the stiff collar up, so that it framed her face. “There. Shake out the lapels a little bit. Lavinia finished the border, by the way. Take a look.”
Bree lifted the hem. An exquisitely stitched figure embroidered in gold thread filled the last empty space on the edge of the robe. It loo
ked a little like the painted angel on the foyer wall. It looked more like Bree herself.
“Ready?”
She tucked the parchment roll more firmly under her arm. “Ready.”
Ron led the way down the hall to the door marked CELESTIAL COURT COURT OF APPEALS. ANGEL JUSTICE AZREAL PRESIDING.
The door opened into a vast, cavernous room that always reminded Bree of an airport terminal. An escalator took them down three flights to the courtroom below. The painted murals on the walls showed scenes from Schofield Martin’s life. Bree wanted to pause at the scene that showed Martin on the deck of the Indies Queen, but the mural faded to his family at his graveside before she could catch more than a glimpse of the shadowy display.
She stepped off the escalator at the bottom. The marble aisle led up to a huge dais, empty of the judge’s presence at the moment. The defense’s and the plaintiff’s areas were on opposite sides of the aisle, and were identical. Each had a long oak table with carved wooden chairs that faced the dais. Bree went to the right-hand side, sat down, and unrolled the parchment containing the motion to review Schofield Martin’s sentence. Ron busied himself with the pitcher of water that was the only other item on the table, and poured them each a glass. A few moments later, Lloyd Dumphey and Caldecott took their places on the left.
Somewhere in the reaches of the courtroom, a brass gong sounded. A soft voice announced that the Celestial Court was now in session. A gold replica of the scales of justice appeared on the dais. Behind it, a soft glow grew to twice the height of a man.
“All rise for the Honorable Angel Azreal,” the disembodied voice said.
The four of them got to their feet.
“Be seated.” Then, “Miss Winston-Beaufort, the Honorable Justice wishes you to present your case.”
“We are representing the soul of Schofield Martin, Your Honor, and requesting a review of his current sentence, an eternity in the seventh circle of Hell. The plaintiff will be offering facts not in evidence when the case was first adjudicated. These consist of statements made by witnesses privy to parts of Schofield Martin’s activities not made available to the defense at the time of this trial.
“But these statements are unsupported. In order to verify them, I ask that the Court call an independent witness to these events, and that her testimony be entered into evidence.
“I ask that the court call Leah Villiers Winston-Beaufort to the stand.”
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Epilogue
Bree stood in front of Lavinia’s grave. The stone angel’s gaze was turned to the heavens. Her wings were folded around her slight, fragile figure. Bree felt, for a fleeting moment, as though the feathery lightness was wrapped around her, too. A breeze stirred the flowers clustered at the base of the stone pedestal. The welcome scent of out-of-season roses filled the air. The smell of lavender was intense. Outside the circle of green hope and sorrowful joy, the graves surrounding the Angelus office lay as dank and grim as ever. Safely inside the circle, Bree was at peace.
“I couldn’t speak to Leah, of course. Not personally. Not mother to daughter.” Her cheeks were wet with tears, but it wasn’t grief that drove them. “The important thing was that I saw her. I heard her voice. In her death, she was as real to me as if she were alive and here in the world of mortal men.
“Leah is beautiful, Lavinia, at least to me. It’s not a soft face. It’s a very wise one. High cheekbones. Her eyes are a very pale blue, like the water at the edge of a clear, calm beach. Her hair is very dark. No reddish lights in it at all—more blue, like a blackbird or a raven.
“Ron thinks that we sound alike. So I have her voice. And at the very last, before she stepped down from the stand and went back to whatever part of the Sphere that her soul resides in, she looked at me. Really looked at me.”
Tears collected at the corner of her mouth, and she swiped her sleeve across her face to dry them. “You know how Goldstein always spouts off about ‘what is time to an angel?’ I got what he meant. Finally. That look we shared was a lifetime. All that I missed of her growing up—it was there, as if there had never been a hole to fill at all.
“I know everything now. There’s nothing missing. That she liked the Beatles. That she wanted to be an archeologist because her adoptive father loved old things. That she had a little sister, like Antonia, who drove her crazy, just like Antonia makes me crazy. And that her mother, my grandmother, loved a man who was killed in Vietnam, and never loved another.”
Bree scrubbed the tears away from her face. “There’s one last thing, which you knew, I think, before you left me, too. That I will have a daughter. All of us have daughters. The advocates.”
The thought of Hunter filled her with a fierce, momentary flare of pure joy.
“At any rate. I wanted you to know.” She reached out and touched the cold stone. It seemed to warm to life under the palm of her hand. She stood there, under the gray sky of a Savannah winter. She was never more at peace.
“Bree?” Ron stood at the cemetery gate. His fair hair was ruffled so that it stood up in tufts around his face. His smile made her feel even better. “I got hold of Goldstein. We’ve got a ruling.”
She left the protected circle of flowers and scented air around Lavinia’s grave and stepped into the mire of the cemetery itself. “How’d we do?”
“There was the little matter of adultery with Mrs. Chambers . . .”
“Dr. Chambers,” Bree said, momentarily diverted. “I’m thinking that this particular secular case is going to bear down on how much the poor woman was marginalized, both in her marriage and her profession.”
“It sounds like a tactic EB will greet with joy,” Ron said. “She’s left a couple of messages on your cell phone. She’s tracked down a colleague from the Chamberses’ former university who’s more than willing to talk about how Allard’s behavior hindered Jillian’s recovery. That’s going to help a lot with your petition to be appointed guardian.”
“Good. I’m feeling more optimistic about this case by the minute. And you said you called Goldstein about the disposition of Schofield’s plea?”
“The Court’s agreed to a thousand years in Purgatory for the adultery. Piece of cake, considering.”
“Good,” Bree said. “That’s one for the good guys.”
“There’s more news. Hunter found another body. Same place as poor Beazley, the parking lot behind the Bay Street building.”
“Caldecott?”
“You’d better hurry. Hunter wants to talk to you. And no, it’s not Caldecott.”
She stepped back, to allow Ron to open the gate so they could leave, and caught sight of a new grave, next to the headstones for the murderers she had brought to justice before.
ALLARD CHAMBERS
1947–2011
I AM JUSTLY KILL’D WITH MINE OWN TREACHERY.
The Hierarchy of the Crystal Sphere
PERFECT LIGHT
The First Sphere—The Guardians of the Light
Seraphim, Cherubim, Thrones
The Second Sphere—The Governors of the Spheres
Dominions, Powers, Virtues
The Third Sphere—Messengers in the Temporal World
Angels, Archangels, Principles
The Fourth Sphere—Temptors in the Temporal World
Fallen Angels, Fallen Archangels, Principles
The Fifth Sphere—Governors of Hell
Dominions, Powers, Sins
The Sixth Sphere—The Warriors of the Dark
Nephiliam, Fallen Seraphim, Fallen Cherubim
ENDLESS DARK
Mary Stanton is the author of eighteen novels, including five in the Beaufort & Company Mysteries, and the senior editor of three short story anthologies. Writing as Claudia Bishop, she is the author of more than twenty novels, including the bestselling Hemlock Falls Mysteries. A dedicated horsewoman, Mary divides her time between a working farm in upstate New York and a small home in West Palm Beach, Florida. Mary loves to hear fr
om readers, and she can be reached at her websites: www.marystanton.com and www.claudiabishop.com.
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