by Mary Stanton
The name rang a faint bell. Then Bree said, slowly, “Yes. Wasn’t he O’Rourke Investment’s CFO? And isn’t he . . . ?”
“In the slam,” Fig said in satisfaction. “Serving five years for securities fraud.”
“And your mother thinks he arranged for the murder of your father?”
“It was either Cullen or those stinking Parsalls, Fig.” Tully swept into the room and propped the office door open. “Out of the way, Fig. The desk has been here for a couple of hours, for God’s sake, and those idiots in the kitchen just let it sit there in the backyard.”
Bree heard the shuffle-thump of a large object being moved along the carpeted hallway. The desk was propped upright on a dolly, wrapped in protective burlap. Two of Tully’s household staff maneuvered through the door and positioned it in the center of the rug. They removed the cloth and wheeled the dolly away, closing the door behind them.
“Well,” Tully said.
The desk dominated the small confines of the room. Tully ran her hands over the leather surface. Bree found herself wondering if there had been any blood.
“You’ll have to move those barrister bookshelves if you want the credenza in here, too,” Fig said. He slung himself out of the recliner and motioned Danica out of her chair. He placed it behind the desk and, with an exaggerated bow, indicated that his mother should sit.
Tully sat down carefully, arranging her skirts with precision. For a moment, she looked uncertain, and then she slowly raised both hands and held them level. “Russell!” she said, with a familiar kind of authority that gave a little more insight into the nature of her marriage. Then, in a more intimate, questioning tone: “Russell?”
Bree realized she was holding her breath. Maybe. Maybe. Maybe a miracle would happen, and she wouldn’t be the only person visited by the dead. And she was amazed at Tully, who seemed to have no inhibitions at all.
“Give it up, Mother,” Fig said.
Tully laid her hands flat on the table. Outside the half-open window, the church bells sounded again. “Amazing Grace” this time, but still at the funereal pace.
A sharp knock at the door made them all jump. Barrie Fordham opened it slightly and looked around. “There you are,” she said. “And for God’s sake, Tully. What do you think you’re doing?” She was wearing what she’d worn at the auction: a long, flowing skirt with a simple tee. Her sandals were dusty, and her brown hair floated around her face like soft fog. She was carrying the cloisonné pot and the inkstand and she waved them in a kind of salute before she set them down. “The credenza’s here, too. But you’re going to have to move those books . . .”
“I know, I know,” Tully said crossly. “And you’re not needed in here, Barrie. This is a business meeting. Go back to your husband.” She gave a sharp, nasty twist to the words. Bree felt her scalp prickle.
“Didn’t mean to intrude,” Barrie said mildly. “Just wanted you to know there’s two huge dogs in your garden. Big, mean-looking ones. You know how Ciaran is about dogs.”
“Well, chase them off, then!”
“I think your houseman called animal control.”
“Actually,” Bree began, “I think that’s my fault.”
Tully raised her eyebrows in supercilious inquiry, and suddenly Bree was seized with irritation. What was she doing here? What were the damn guardian dogs doing here? Why was she in the middle of all this craziness and not somewhere else? The feeling passed her by as quickly as it had come, and she said, “Actually, they belong to me. In a way. I’m taking care of them for a friend. I’ll come out and take them on home.” She got up and set her purse on the desk.
“It seems very odd that you would have brought them here.” Tully’s voice was cold.
“Yes. I apologize.” Then with more confidence than she felt: “They’re quite well trained and wouldn’t hurt a soul. I apologize again if they scared anyone.”
“They aren’t doing anything,” Barrie said with a reassuring smile. “But my poor Ciaran is terribly allergic. And anything that affects his voice is just fatal. And it’s even little dogs. We had the most darling little poodle that we had to get rid of. It came on,” she added wistfully, “rather late in life.”
“I understand completely,” Bree said, although the image of the great Ciaran Fordham sneezing his head off was somewhat at odds with his aristocratic composure, and made her want to laugh. “I’ll take care of it right now.”
“And you should really come out and see to your guests, Tully,” Barrie said. She had a remarkable voice, Bree thought. Light and rather bell-like, but very clear, so that the words carried easily on the air.
“All right, we’ll all go.” Tully stood up. If she was disappointed at her failure to raise her husband’s ghost, it didn’t show. Barrie was the first to leave, then Fig, then Danica. Bree followed Tully halfway out the door, then said, “Sorry, forgot my purse,” and slipped back inside. She walked over to the desk, reached for her purse, and felt the cold, cold swirl of a fetid wind.
Help me, the voice cried. Help me! I want to go home.
Damn, Bree thought. So he is there, after all.
“Bree!” Tully’s voice from the hall was sharp and imperative. “You are going to take care of those dogs, aren’t you?”
“I’ll be right there.” Bree slung her purse over her arm. The faint outlines of the desperate hand faded into nothing.
“Damn it all,” she said to the empty air. “Can’t I get just a little bit of time off?”
Four
Now entertain conjecture of a time
When creeping murmur and the poring dark
Fills the wide vessel of the universe.
—Shakespeare, Henry V
Bree made her excuses, turned down an invitation for drinks with Anthony Haddad, apologized again for the dogs, and left Antonia at the party. Miles and Belli sat where she had left them, underneath the mullioned windows on the north side of the house. She realized, as she stood on the brick pathway and waited for them to accompany her home, that the windows were those of the office where Russell O’Rourke’s hand—and presumably, the rest of him—waited to snatch at her peace of mind.
Belli took up her position at Bree’s right, Miles at her left. “I suppose,” she said aloud as she turned to walk back to her town house, “that I should thank you for saving my bacon a few days ago. And Sasha’s, too.” Her last case had featured a spectacular spray of bullets. Belli’s intervention had been quite welcome.
No response. Not a twitch of an ear or a brief wag of a tail, much less a mental message of the Sasha kind. (Most of the time, she knew what her own dog was thinking, or thought she did, which amounted to the same thing.) She didn’t have a clue about these two. They just paced along six feet to the rear, golden eyes watchful, the “tick” of their claws a faint distraction in the silence, a pair of animated Fu dogs.
“There’s a good fifty pounds of that Iams dog kibble left,” she said over her shoulder. She looked both ways across Broughton before she crossed to the park. The street was empty, almost eerily so. All the churchgoers had gone home, and the carillon itself was still. A cold wind swept up from the river, and she shivered a little, wishing she’d thought to bring a light jacket. November weather in Savannah could be tricky. “So at least you’ll have something for dinner. I suppose you’re both going to stick around. No way I could persuade you to go somewhere else? I can’t be the only person on the planet you’ve been sent to guard.”
She wasn’t, was she? The only person cursed with this awful responsibility.
“Oh, there are others, of course,” said a voice at her elbow.
Bree wasn’t of a nervous disposition, but she jumped. She stopped and turned around. “Oh, bloody hell,” she said. “You two.”
“Beazley,” said the taller one.
“And Caldecott.” He ducked his head in expressionless acknowledgment.
“As if I needed reminding.”
Bree looked at the two attorneys for the Opposition with barely co
ncealed distaste. Beazley was tall, and, at a distance, looked like an out-of-shape accountant, or maybe a seedy banker. Until you saw the vertical slits of his pupils. And if you ignored the furnace yellow of his eyes. Caldecott reminded Bree of her shop teacher in high school—slightly potbellied with thick, horn-rimmed glasses. But her shop teacher’s fingernails weren’t long, pointed talons rimmed with a dark red crusted substance that didn’t bear thinking about. They both smelled like burned matches. And both of them hovered several inches off the pavement. Caldecott, prone to sudden fits of fatigue, had a tendency to sit down in midair.
“So what’s up?” She glanced back at Miles and Belli. They sat on their haunches, looking bored. She swept her gaze around the square. Still empty, although on York, the next street over, traffic moved at a normal pace.
“Our visit . . .” said Beazley.
“A matter of professional courtesy,” said Caldecott.
“And not to be in any way construed as an attempt at undue influence.” Beazley grinned, showing pointed teeth stained a repellent brown.
Bree waited them out.
“This latest case of yours . . .” Beazley shook his head.
“Such as it is . . .” Caldecott muttered.
“There have been threats,” Beazley concluded with the air of someone disposing of an unpleasant obligation. “Significant threats.”
“And you two—with my best welfare at heart, I’m sure—are taking this opportunity to save me from myself? ‘Drop the case and no harm will come to you.’ That sort of thing?”
Caldecott looked offended. “Not at all.”
“We couldn’t guarantee no harm would come to you.”
“We’re in the business of doing harm, so to speak.” Caldecott reflected a moment. Then, in a pleased way: “As much as possible.”
“So why the concern for my welfare?”
“Oh, we’re not at all concerned for your welfare,” Beazley assured her. “Your immortal soul—now, that’s a different matter altogether. We would very much like to get our hands on that. No, no, this is procedural. We caught wind of an intent . . .”
“A stirring,” Caldecott mused.
“Regarding a party none of us have heard from for some time.”
“Millennia,” Caldecott said.
“Not that long, surely,” Beazley said. “But it’s old, very old. At any rate.” His head rotated on his shoulders and he looked at the two dogs. “You’d be advised to keep those two near . . .”
“And your guard up . . .” Caldecott whispered.
“And stay out of the Pendergasts’ way.”
“He’s made a bad bargain . . .”
“A terrible bargain . . .”
Beazley bent close. His breath smelled like a cesspool. “Even for a soul already condemned without hope of redemption of any kind . . .”
They were gone.
The wind picked up and a frigid blast of air nearly knocked her off her feet. Belli pressed close to her side. She buried her hand in the dog’s thick ruff and walked on home. “Intimidation,” she said several minutes later, when she let herself in through the kitchen door. “Phooey.” Then: “The Pendergasts again! Double phooey.”
But she threw the dead bolt, just the same, and sat down on the couch to think.
Antonia snapped on the overhead light, flooding the town house living room with a sudden glare. Bree shaded her eyes with her hand and said crossly, “For Pete’s sake, Antonia.”
“Why are you sitting here in the dark?” Antonia dropped onto the opposite end of the couch and swung one leg over the armrest. “I didn’t wake you up, did I?”
“No.”
“Well, what have you been doing here in the dark?” She was fretful. She’d planned to leave the party at five, to go on to handle the Sunday evening show at the Rep, and Bree assumed she’d done just that. “You got something to eat, didn’t you? You haven’t been sacked out here for six hours!”
Had she? Maybe she had. Bree dropped her hands in her lap. “Thinking about my new client.”
“That is so awesome, that you’re going to represent Tully O’Rourke.”
Bree didn’t say anything. She hadn’t been thinking about Tully O’Rourke. She’d been thinking about Russell’s skeletal hand clutching at her from the depths of God-knew-where. Hell, probably, given what the media said about him, and as close to the core of the Dark Sphere as it was possible to be. Her appeals cases came from all nine circles of the afterlife; those condemned to the periphery paid penance for lesser sins in milder ways. Surely greed, fraud, and outright theft carried grave and terrible punishments. Although, come to think of it, lying to the SEC had been the only provable charge. His death had stalled further investigations.
But the pitiable desperation in those fragile, shadowy bones had pulled at her as surely as chains. And that led to turning over the hundreds of questions she had about her law practice, about the exact nature of her inheritance from her great-uncle. Then there was the unsettling visit from opposing counsel; her difficulty sleeping; the recurring dreams, at night, of death and worse.
With a faint brush of unease, she realized she had been sitting here in the dark for six hours.
She got up and walked restlessly to the fireplace. The family town house had been built before the Civil War, when the Savannah River had been a busy port channeling cotton across the Atlantic to Europe and hemp to the mills up North. The lower half of the building had been offices for the warehouses on each side, with living quarters up top, at the street level of Factor’s Walk. Winston-Beauforts had always lived here, since 1813, warming themselves at this same fireplace. The bricks, the mantel, the wrought-iron grate of this fireplace had endured through a lot of family history. Bree ran her thumb along the pine mantel and looked into the depths of the elaborately carved mirror that hung above it.
Shadows moved there. She reached up and laid her hands flat against the cold surface. It seemed to pulse, faintly, under her palm, as if it breathed.
Antonia’s voice cut into her thoughts. “I said, where’s Sasha?”
Bree brought herself back to the present with an effort and turned around. “Sorry. He’s curled up asleep right over there.”
“No, he’s not.”
“He most certainly is,” Bree said. “Right by the rocking chair.”
“Where?” Antonia leaned forward, hands on her knees, and then said, “Oh.” Her voice dropped a few decibels. “That’s funny. I could have sworn . . .” She rubbed her face with both hands and shook her head violently. “I swear I’m going nuts. He was there all the time? Sasha? Sash?” She patted the sofa. Sasha got up and ambled over to her. He put his head on her lap and sighed as she rubbed his ears. A handsome golden retriever/mastiff mix, he was the only canine member of Beaufort & Company.
“Honestly, Tonia.” But Bree looked at her dog reprovingly. He rumbled a little—which she took for an apology. There were times when you could actually see Sasha, and times when you couldn’t. It was all part of her Company’s way of operating in the temporal world. Generally speaking, Petru, Lavinia, Ron, and even the imperious and irritating Gabriel Striker made the effort to keep an unobtrusive profile. Sometimes they slipped up and the people around Bree asked uncomfortable questions.
Antonia set her jaw in a determined way. “Sit down, Bree. I want to talk to you.”
Bree raised one eyebrow. “You sound exactly like Daddy when he wants to have a Serious Talk. Do you want to have a Serious Talk?”
“Don’t get lippy with me, Bree. Not now.”
Antonia was six years younger. From the time Francesca had brought her little sister home from the hospital, Bree had brushed her hair, read her bedtime stories, and watched over her on the playground. As time went on, she kept an eye on the dozens of dazzled teenage boys that trailed after her sister in high school like hounds after a particularly delectable fox. She’d thrown herself into the breach when their parents went ballistic over her sister’s merry distaste for c
ollege and took her in when she left home to chase after life on the stage. Not once, in all that time, had Antonia reared up and tried to come over the parent with her. Until now.
“Okay,” Bree said, amused.
“And if you keep on smirking at me, I’ll pull your hair so hard your scalp’ll be pink for a week.”
Bree tucked her hair behind her ears. It was long, silver-blonde, and, as Anthony Haddad had seemed to figure out, her one vanity. She wore it in a coronet of braids to keep it out of the way when she was at work, but she hadn’t bothered with that this weekend. It fell freely down her back, almost to her waist. “Got it.” Then, since her sister looked both worried and cross, she added a real apology. “Sorry. It’s usually me talking to you like a Dutch uncle. Not the other way around.”
“Yeah. Well. Get used to it. I mean, we’re here to take care of each other, right?”
“Right. Sisters forever.”
“Right.” Antonia took a deep, nervous breath. “So. What’s up with you, anyway?”
“What do you mean, what’s up with me? Nothing’s up with me.”
“Something’s wrong.”
Bree gathered her hair up and twisted it into a long tail. “Got a scrunchie on you?”
“Something’s really wrong . . . a what? A scrunchie? We’re having the most important talk of your life and all you can think of is your hair?”
Bree held her hair in one hand and extended the other. “Just keeping my hair out of the way of your grabby little fists.” Antonia dug a rubber band out of her jeans pocket. Bree sat next to her on the couch and fastened her hair up in a ponytail. “Now,” she said kindly, “spill it.”
Suddenly Antonia looked much older than twenty-two. “I don’t want the kindly big-sister act. I don’t want the mother-in-absentia act. I want you to take a good look at yourself and then . . .” She took a deep breath. “I want you to see somebody.”
Bree stared at her.
“A doctor, first. You know, like an internist. And then maybe a shrink.”
