Charming Grace

by Deborah Smith

  I could see Stone’s mind laboring over Tess’s mix of spite and magnolia-scented nonsense—trying to figure out if she was trouble or a usable ally or just plain goofy. He liked his philosophy simple: Good vs. evil, Might Makes Right, Do Unto Others, black and white. Tess Bagshaw’s confessions about her kin fell into some gray spot, a no-man’s land of useful info tainted by bald-faced meanness. Should he encourage her to whisper more purple clues about the Bagshaws or should he be a mensch, as Kanda’s Wisconsin-Jewish mother was always calling him with dry respect. To Kanda’s dairy-farming family, the Stone man was as kosher as a gentile could get, but about as sophisticated as mozzarella cheese.

  Finally I saw a light go off in his eyes. Stone came from a family of tradition-minded working-class Italian elders, and the rules of respect for old people were strict. Always be nice to old ladies. Even if they’re nuts.

  “You’re a talkative little sweetheart, Tessy,” he croaked out nervously, “and I couldn’t make this movie without your support.” Then he turned her over to Kanda and told me to fetch him a double martini from the Ritz’s bar.

  So, yes, Tess was no fan of her sis in law, Helen Bagshaw, that was for sure, and would definitely puff up as happily as a pearl-draped bullfrog at any embarrassment that befell Helen’s favorite granddaughter, but she wasn’t the one sending me trouble-making Grace Notes in snappy Star Trek lingo. No, whoever Uhura was, she had Helen’s blessing. Apparently, so did I.

  Make Grace remember she’s alive.

  Helen didn’t understand. I was doing this because Grace made me feel alive.

  Greetings to Grace

  From: Gandalf The Computer Wizard

  Look for a surprise visit from Boone. Stone is sending him back to Dahlonega early, expressly for the reason of charming you and preventing more trouble when filming returns there next week. Stone believes Boone has some influence over you. If this is true, please don’t forget what I’ve told you in response to your questions about Boone and his background. He is a true, good-hearted warrior, an Aragorn for the modern world, pledged in service to a thick-headed king, and he’s only trying to do his job. He’s loyal to Stone and to Stone’s family, but he thinks what’s happening to you and your husband’s story is wrong. He and I agree on that. So he’s caught in the middle, just like me.

  The ‘middle’ is no place for wizards and warriors to be.

  Sorry about the delay in this week’s reports. As you can see from my new Internet forwarding address, I’ve been reworking my personal matrix. Reality sometimes creeps too close to home, you know? But I remain your friendly, anonymous source for the inside news on Stone Senterra.

  Gandalf

  So, according to a Senterra insider whose real name I did not know but whose information I’d come to trust, Boone was being sent to charm and manage me. I could only hope there was something left to charm and manage. I was about to be killed by an unhappy horse named Snap. One of the three maniacal equines Harp had rescued just one trailer ride ahead of the dog-food factory. Snap was a lanky, washed-out gray who’d had a hard life and bore the scars to prove it.

  When one of the Down’s cats made the mistake of climbing the gate into Snap’s stall to chase a mouse, all hell broke loose. Snap cornered the yowling tabby—a favorite of Harp’s named Tangerine—and tried to turn him into meow meat. I was alone at the Downs that morning, and I heard the commotion. By the time I darted inside his stall Snap was whirling in circles with his head down and teeth bared, gnashing at the jumbled straw bedding as Tangerine alternately bounced off the walls then tried to burrow in the straw and hide.

  “Snap, stop it!” I yelled uselessly, and grabbed him by the halter. Snap decided to take out his grief and his cat issues on me, so he dragged me around the stall, slinging his head, rearing, banging me against the walls, and trying to bite me. If there were a headline that summed up that moment plus my attitude toward life, it would be this:

  Grace Hangs On. Bless Her Heart.

  I just knew I wouldn’t let go, even when he slung me against a wall so hard that I saw stars and bit my tongue. Black clouds began to close in, and I had one last, coherent thought of being found in the stall, trampled and half-eaten by the Hannibal Lecter of horses.

  The next thing I knew, I was hearing French. The language, that is. Spoken in Boone Noleene’s deep, soothing voice. To me, to Snap, to both of us. Coaxing phrases. Beauty queens know a language or two, so I translated.

  “Stop dancing, horse, rest, easy, easy. Stand still. Cats aren’t for eating. Women aren’t for slinging.”

  This was spoken like a love poem with just enough firm undercurrent to give the poem a hard spine. At the same time, I felt Boone’s long arm go around me from behind, and I let go of Snap. My ears rang. I sagged against Boone while he held onto Snap’s halter with his other hand. “Now, now,” he went on, in French. “Nothing to be so afraid of. Be still. There, that’s how. I won’t hurt you. You know it.”

  “Yes, I’m beginning to think so,” I answered groggily.

  Snap quieted, looking at Boone as if hypnotized. The big gray even craned his head and lipped the cuff of Boone’s soft shirt, the same color as the horse. Tangerine darted out the stall door, which Boone had left half open in his hurry to save me.

  I twisted inside Boone’s embrace and looked up at him. “What kind of voodoo do you do so well?” We were so close his breath brushed my face. He leaned over me slightly with both feet braced wide apart for balance as he anchored the horse. His arm fit perfectly around the small of my back, pulling me into a new moon curve against his hard body—head back, breasts up, pelvis forward, legs lagging behind, knees weak. He really did have a fascinating face, rough, elegant, with fine scars and a fighter’s nose, his eyes dark and intense and just a little bit hopeful. “So you have me figured,” he said in a low voice.

  “Voodoo queen?”

  He slid a gentle hand up the big gray’s head, and spoke again to the horse in French. Maybe he thought I couldn’t translate, or maybe he hoped I would. “Holding a fine woman,” he said, “is worth a horse bite or two.”

  “But I might bite, too.”

  He blushed a little. “Holding a fine woman . . . ” He let his voice trail off, but arched a brow.

  I stared at him. The ruddy color in his cheeks got to me. “Help me out of here before Snap comes out of his hypnotic stupor and bites both of us.” Boone half-escorted, half-carried me out of the stall. I turned to look at Snap, who hung his big, gray head over the stall door and eyed Boone with dewy affection. Down the way, Harp’s other two horses, Bug and Forrest Gump, poked their heads over their stall doors and admired Boone, too. Bug whinnied at him. Forrest Gump made kissy puckers, as if lipping an invisible lollipop.

  “Amazing,” I said. “The only other man they liked was—” I stopped.

  Harp.

  Boone carried me into the spring sunshine. The mountains towered around us and the air smelled sweet. He set me down in a pristine barnyard of neat graveled walkways and white board fences. He kept his arm around my back. My body remained willfully bent in his direction. I latched a hand in his shirtfront. “Thank you.”

  “My pleasure.”

  My legs recovered and I stepped away. The warm spot where his arm had circled me remained like an invisible hug. I gave him a furtive once-over that was too obvious. Soft loafers, soft corduroys, soft gray shirt, hard body. “I knew you were coming here. I just didn’t know when.”

  “Oh? Your spy is pretty good, chere. I just left Alabama yesterday.”

  “I hear a freak spring hurricane nearly washed Stone and his first day of filming into the Gulf of Mexico.”

  “Yeah. He thinks you’re putting Methodist voodoo on him.”

  “I only asked one minister to pray for a hurricane.”

  He frowned. “What else are you up to? What else do you know from your spy?”

  “That you’re supposed to spy on me. Make friends with me.”

  “No. I’m not here
to spy. I’m here to be your pal. Your link to the fine world known as Stone Senterra Land. Your manly manservant. At your service.”

  “Too bad for you. I’m leaving tomorrow for a week.”

  “I know.”

  “So you knew I had a trip scheduled.”

  “Yep. I know all about your work. In between scaring movie stars you travel around talkin’ to high school students. You talk up the Harper Vance Scholarship Fund. Your cousin Dew’ll go with you, for company. She helps you manage the fund. You used to think Dew was a snarky little pampered sissy, but you and her turned into best friends after the rest of the family put the thumb screws on her for liking the ladies a little too much.”

  I stared at him. Few people outside the family knew Dew was a lesbian. She lived with a beautiful, spike-haired biology professor from Emory University. They shared a restored bungalow down in Atlanta. G. Helen and I were about the only Bagshaws still on good terms with Dew. “Do continue your espionage de-briefing.”

  “All righty, let’s see: You have a sentimental thing for the under-dog. Whether it’s a cousin who’s kicked out of the family or a half-starved mountain boy lying in a gully with a busted leg. When you do these high school tours you spend all day telling high-risk kids they can be somebody because Harp proved he could be somebody. At night you work the rubber-chicken dinner circuit, giving speeches and collecting donations. You’ll go anywhere, speak to any group. You tell your husband’s true story as a kind of fable of hopes and dreams and inspiration.” He paused. “Then you go back to your motel room and you eat vending machine crackers and drink yourself to sleep with a little silver heirloom flask full of bourbon.”

  “For a man who doesn’t spy, you have good spies.” I brushed straw off my jeans and light cotton shirt as if brushing him off me, too. I hadn’t been this physically close to a man since Harp. This affected, since Harp. This . . . this, since Harp. “I owe you for saving me from Snap. I owe you . . . another favor. Again.”

  He said nothing, just looking at me, a little wistful, his tough, been-there-done-that face as dependable as a well-built wall. “Good. Here’s what I want as a favor: I want to sit on the veranda of your house.”

  “What?”

  He nodded toward the mansion. “Sit on the veranda at the Downs. Every time I’ve seen a picture of the mansion I’ve wondered about that view. You can’t just look at a house. You have to look with it—see what it sees. Its eyeball idea of the world. Because a great house gives the people inside it a special way of looking at things.”

  I studied him with a catch in my chest. Orphaned boy, streetwise teenage thief, young felon, convicted criminal, ex-con, devoted brother, devoted bodyguard, nomad, philosopher? My spy had reported extensively on him. The fact that Boone came from a background as bad or worse than Harp’s had not been lost on me. There was a danger of offering affection. A danger of heeding the same instincts that had guided me toward Harp without a moment of doubt. Boone looked from me to the house with an almost pained gleam in his eyes, a kind of heartfelt greed.

  I couldn’t help liking him.

  I strode up a stone path through the mansion’s front flower gardens. Tell this man to go away. You don’t need his friendship. You aren’t in the mood to be sentimental. You’ll never soften your stance toward his boss. Go away, Mr. Noleene. You aren’t Harp. Don’t touch me, again. Please. Don’t. God, please. Don’t.

  Harp spoke to me.

  Give the man a break. Snap likes him. And so do I.

  I did a perfect pirouette and scowled at Boone. “Well? Are you coming to sit on the veranda, or not?”

  He smiled.

  And took my breath away.

  Chapter 8

  Never trust a woman armed with law books and sweet iced tea.

  Grace served me raspberry-red, sugared iced tea in her grand mama’s crystal on her great grand mama’s wicker table, pouring it from a silver pitcher with her free hand curved like a spoon under the spout, to catch drips. She bent over me in a half bow as I saw in a big wicker rocker like the king of guests. I got my own silver coaster, my own china dish of thin mint cookies, a silver sugar bowl in case the tea didn’t curl my tongue already, and two slices of lemon. I was so lost in looking at her up close, I nearly dropped my glass. She eyed me, blushed, frowned, and moved away. Stacks of law books and notepads sat on a wicker table nearby. I went for a neutral start: “I hear you plan to start law school in Atlanta next winter.”

  “The school needed to fill its quota for ex-beauty queens and talk show hostesses.” She sat down hard in a rocker near mine.

  Try, try again. “I hear you aced your entrance exams.”

  “They were just impressed when I didn’t write with an eyebrow pencil.”

  I gave up. “You plannin’ to save the world, or just joke about it?”

  She turned hard green eyes on me. “Lawyers can’t save the world. They can only protect it from other lawyers.”

  “Now we’re gettin’ somewhere.”

  She faced forward, frowning harder.

  Careful, now.

  I stirred my tea with her great-great grandmama’s long silver teaspoon, engraved with a deep, smooth B for Bagshaw. Bagshaw women surrounded me, living and dead, the living one sitting a few feet away from me in a big wicker rocker, her beautiful head thrown back, her beautiful eyes somber and looking forward, lost in the gardens and the barns and the fields and the mountains of this paradise her people had always owned; her hair streamed in big rust-red waves over her shoulders, she had one knee drawn up and she’d kicked off her barn sneakers. She raked the air with her bare toes in the pearls of sunlight that fed through the jasmine vines that were just now greening up good for summer. I admired the shape of her thighs, the long line of her arms, the slung-back attitude of her body. She knew what she looked like but she’d forgotten what the effect was. The view I’d wanted was Harp’s view, to see the world she’d wrapped him in so warm and tight he saw only what was in her eyes. The view I wanted was her, beside me in the rocker.

  Saving my world.

  “Frankly, my dear,” I said in my best Clark Gable voice, “you got knotty ballerina feet.”

  She laughed. Then she stopped, sat up straight, turned around in her rocker, and looked at me as if I’d knocked her off it. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Nothing. You must not laugh much anymore. Startled yourself, huh?” Tangerine the cat shot out of the hydrangeas along the veranda’s stone edge. I nodded his way. “Scared the cat, laughing like that.”

  She sank back in the rocker, tapping a finger to her lips as she eyed me shrewdly. “You think you know me.”

  “I know your feet. You got those feet from dance classes.”

  “All right. Yes. Tap, jazz, ballet. A hazard of being a beauty queen. Always in training. A pageant contestant has to be light on her toes. Float like a butterfly, sting like a Miss America.”

  “Except you dumped the Miss America pageant when you were nineteen years old, to marry Harp. I heard your step-mama nearly had a nervous breakdown, and your papa never forgave Harp for luring you away. And you never forgave your papa for never forgiving Harp. Whew.”

  She stared at me like snakes stare at mice. If ice cubes had green eyes, they’d be Grace’s. “Since you obviously intend to tell me all about my own life, let me tell you what I’ve learned about yours. Stone Senterra hired you because he’s a law-and-order hoo-rah John Wayne type, and giving you a job makes him look both magnanimous and tough on crime. He likes to surround himself with tough bodyguards who fit his macho image.”

  “Tough bodyguards, right. I’ll have to introduce you to Tex and Mojo. Stone calls ‘em Larry and Curly. I’m Moe. The brains. We’re The Three Stooges of personal protection. Stone could do better, but he likes us.”

  “You like him. You respect him. I hear it in your voice.”

  “The man pays me a quarter-mil a year and treats me like a friend. Go figure.”

  “But he fired you
over the gravel pile incident. How petty.”

  “He fires me a lot. It’s his hobby.”

  “His sister hates you. Why?”

  “We got off on the wrong foot. On the day Stone walked me into his office in California and introduced me, she looked me up and down then said, ‘You look like a man who deserved to spend nine years in a prison cell. I don’t trust you to carry my makeup kit, let alone guard my brother and his family.’ It’s been downhill from there.”

  “It’d take two men and a mule to carry her make up kit.”

  My whole body tingled. I like this woman so much. “Good comeback. Wish I’d thought of it.”

  “Women usually reserve such overt hostility for men they used to date.”

  “I don’t date women with bigger biceps than me.”

  “Who do you date?”

  “Now, chere, that’s mighty personal. I could answer it, but then I get to ask you a real personal question you have to answer.”

  “True.” She sank back in her rocker. “None of my business. Never mind.”

  I threw up my hands. “Aw, you give up too easy. All right, I got women hangin’ all over me. All I have to do is snap my fingers. But I gave up women for Lent this year.”

  “Lent’s over.”

  “Okay, then I’m shy.”

  “You’re not shy.”

  “All right, I get what I need and I need what I get. I like women and women like me. But I travel a lot on Senterra business. I live in hotel rooms and guest houses. I got a brother coming out of prison this fall and when that happens I have to stick close and keep him away from the wrong crowd. What woman wants to fool with a two-Noleenes-for-the-price-of-one package like that? Now I get to ask you some personal questions.”

  “Such as?”

  I leaned forward, elbows on knees, as still as a hunter communing with a quiet dawn. I looked her straight in the eyes and she didn’t flinch. “I want to know,” I said, “How you recognized that Harp was worth loving.”