Defending Angels Read online

  In desperation, Bree jiggled the call button in the handset and shouted, “Hello? Hello? Mamma? You’re fading on me!”

  “We’re losin’ you, Bree!” her mother shrieked. “Royal, it’s that cheatin’ phone company again! I swear that company has it in for you, Bree.”

  “Sorry, Mamma! You’re breaking up! Bye, Mamma!” Bree set the phone into its rest and sank into a nearby armchair with a sigh of relief. “Woof,” she said.

  “Woof,” said the dog at her feet.

  She sat up. “And you,” she said to the dog, severely, “are an illegal alien, pup.”

  The dog looked into her eyes and gently wagged his tail. He lay nested on an old duvet she’d found tucked in the back of the linen closet. A neat acrylic cast encased his injured leg from hock to ankle. The veterinary clinic she’d taken him to had bathed and clipped him, too. Free of burdocks and dirt, his coat was a yellow that would deepen to burnished gold once she got him onto healthy food.

  “The town house covenants don’t allow pets over forty pounds,” she added. “So you’re looking at a temporary stay. Just till you get on your feet.”

  The dog flattened his ears and cocked his head sorrowfully. Bree suppressed a stab of guilt.

  “When you get a bit better we see about taking you home to Plessey. Mamma and Daddy could use a project other than me and Antonia.”

  The dog cocked his head in the other direction, looking, if possible, even more sorrowful than before. Bree scowled at him in exasperation. “For heaven’s sake, dog. I’m just—” She stopped in mid-sentence. Was she really sitting here trying to justify her actions to a dog?

  She rose briskly from the armchair. “Think you can eat a bit more, pup?” The vet had been gravely shocked at the animal’s condition. A few ounces of digestible food every three hours was the most the dog could handle for the first few days. Bree had given him a cup of cooked rice and hamburger when she’d brought him home a few hours ago. It was time to give him another.

  The dog struggled to his feet.

  “No, no. You lie back down. You don’t want to jiggle that leg any.”

  The dog sank back against the duvet with a resigned sigh. The vet had guessed he was a cross between a Russian mastiff and a golden retriever. “That round skull is a characteristic of the golden, Miss Beaufort. And the square, rather intelligent face is wholly mastiff.”

  “Rather intelligent,” Bree said aloud, remembering the conversation. “You smart dog, you.”

  The dog grinned, reminding Bree of her own long-dead golden, Sunny Skies. He’d smiled at her in just that way until the day he slid into a final peaceful sleep.

  “You sweet old thing,” Bree said affectionately. This dog did remind her of Sunny, at least a little. “I’ll just bet you had a good owner at one time, didn’t you? You surely do respond to people. And I can’t just keep calling you ‘pup.’” Bree tugged thoughtfully at her ear. “What about Sam?”

  The dog looked at her, tongue lolling.

  “No? What about Goldy? That’s what color your coat’s going to be when we get you all cleaned up.”

  The dog closed his eyes, and then opened them again.

  “Well, I don’t suppose you have any ideas,” Bree said with some exasperation.

  The dog sneezed twice. It was an odd sort of sneeze. Almost sibilant.

  “Sneezy,” Bree said instantly. “Like one of the Seven Dwarves.”

  The dog curled his lip in a truly expressive sneer. Bree laughed. Her little sister, Antonia, would love this dog. And she’d come up with a good name, too. But Antonia was many miles and a state away at the University of South Carolina. “So I’ll just have to come up with something all on my own.”

  The dog sneezed again, almost deliberately. “Sha! Shaa!”

  “Sasha,” Bree said. “That’s it. For the Russian in you.”

  Sasha gave a great sigh of relief and settled his head on his paws. Feeling pleased with herself, Bree brought him another small bowl of food, and settled down in the armchair next to him with the stack of résumés and her own meal of salmon and salad.

  The ad she’d placed in the Savannah Daily was straightforward:

  Pleasant office ass’t for one-man attnys office. Computer-literate. Some bkping.

  The responses ranged from the hopelessly hopeful: “I think it would be, like, very cool to work for a lawyer. I can come every day after school” to the comically desperate: “I’ve got a PhD in English literature from the University of North Carolina. Will work for food.”

  Bree sorted through half a dozen replies, and set aside two. She held her first choice aloft for Sasha’s inspection. “This one seems likeliest, pup. A widow, poor thing. And she worked in her husband’s law office until he died. All the right credentials, I think. And this one ...” She reread the cover letter again. “This one’s so interesting I might just call him, too.”

  Sasha raised his head and gazed at her.

  “He’s a window-dresser, or was. And he wants to change careers. He’s been going to night school to better himself, he says. Just the kind of person you want to give a hand up to.”

  Sasha looked politely interested.

  “On the other hand, the widow’s experienced. And she doesn’t come right out and say it, but it appears she’s fallen on hard times.”

  Sasha growled quietly.

  “That’s right, pup,” Bree said, amused. “Tough section of town. So she might need a hand up, too.”

  Sasha growled again. This time he meant business. Bree set the résumés on the end table and got to her feet. The dog had propped himself up on his forelegs. He stared at the French doors to the balcony, his lips drawn back from his teeth. His growl snarled into a bark.

  “Hush, now, Sasha.” Bree went to the glass doors. She braced one hand against the bookshelf to the right of the door and peered into the dark. The moon was a quarter full in the misty sky. The lights of the city glittered on the banks of the river. “There’s nothing out there. Nothing except the moon.”

  Suddenly, Sasha leaped at the doors, knocking her aside and snarling like a demon.

  A white face grinned at her through the fragile barrier of glass. A white face enveloped in a column of smoke.

  Three

  Hated by fools, and fools to hate,

  Be that my motto, and my fate.

  —“To Dr. Delany, on the libels written against him,” Jonathan Swift

  Sasha whirled around and thrust himself at Bree. Both of them fell backward onto the sofa. The dog jumped awkwardly into her lap and for a moment, between the hundred-plus pounds of dog on her chest and stomach and her astonishment, she couldn’t breathe. She placed both hands on the dog’s muscular chest and shoved hard. “You’re goin’ to screw up that leg! Will you get off !”

  Sasha stuck his nose under her arm and growled.

  Bree made a huge effort to pull herself together. “I’m close to losing my temper,” she said mildly. “I’m going to count to three. By the time I get there, you’d better settle down.”

  Sasha brought his head up and panted heavily into her face. Bree found herself panting, too.

  Abruptly, the door buzzer shrilled. Sasha turned his head, hopped onto the rug, and limped to the front door, his ears pinned back. The buzzer sounded again. Bree got to her feet, tugged her T-shirt into place, and followed him. Her heart thudded hard in her chest and she was dismayed to find her legs trembly. There had been something horrible about that face. Just like the face in the graveyard. She took a deep, deliberate breath and quelled the impulse to root around in the closet for her baseball bat before she opened the door. She looked through the security hole. She snorted and looked down at the dog.

  “It’s the UPS man. Or woman, rather.”

  Sasha’s ears went up.

  “You might guess from the tone of my voice that I’m not all that pleased about your behavior. Now, the poor girl shouldn’t have tapped at the French doors like that, to be sure. But don’t you think yo
u overreacted just a little bit?”

  Sasha’s tail wagged back and forth.

  “If you’re thinking that maybe I overreacted a bit, you’re darn right.”

  Sasha cocked his head.

  “Will you lie down and behave?”

  Sasha flopped awkwardly to the floor. Bree opened the door. The outside air was soft, damp, and smelled strongly of burnt matches. A large cardboard box sat on the doormat. The girl from UPS was already halfway down the walk, headed back to her truck. Bree called “thank you” after her retreating back.

  Hesitantly, she stepped onto the small cement square that served as a front porch, and peered into the dark. Nothing. Familiar noises from Market Street drifted up toward her. She rubbed both her arms, to drive off the unnatural cold, then picked up the box and brought it in.

  It was fairly heavy. When Bree shook it, the contents slid very little. She placed it on the dining room table. The address read: Brianna Winston-Beaufort, Esq, and the return address made her exclaim with pleasure. “Professor Cianquino,” she said. “You know who that is, dog? My law advisor, from Duke. He retired the same year I took the bar. He’s got a nice little apartment just outside Savannah, on the river. If you behave well enough for me to keep you around, you’ll meet him.”

  Sasha pawed at a dining room chair and poked his nose inquisitively into the air. Bree peeled the packing tape back from the edges and opened it.

  The contents were tightly packed. There was a small envelope on top, and a brand new cell phone still in the package. The rest of the box held stationery. She opened the envelope first. The card inside had Cianquino’s name embossed on the front: Armand Cianquino, Triad Professor of History of Law Emeritus. A line of small print at the bottom read: Act Uprightly, 5:11. The handwritten message inside merely said: So battle is enjoined, my dear Bree! With affection, Armand.

  Bree pulled the contents out, one by one. There were two reams of letterhead, a package of number ten envelopes, a shrink-wrapped set of preprinted address labels, and a hundred legal-sized envelopes with the return address on the upper left hand corners. She opened the small square box that held the business cards and looked thoughtfully at the design.

  Brianna Winston-Beaufort 66 Angelus (555) 567-9561

  The font was attractive, if a little stuffy; a variety of Edwardian script, maybe. She wasn’t at all sure about the raised gold logo. Should a lawyer even have a logo? It was a pair of feathery wings cupping a justice scale. As for the cell phone that was obviously the source of the telephone number on the stationery ... Professor Cianquino was clearly eager to give her a running start on an actual caseload.

  This was just plain weird. Professor Cianquino wasn’t into encouragement of his students before or after they graduated, and was, in fact, notoriously unsympathetic to human emotion of any kind. His twin gods were logic and reason. And here she was, his dear Bree? With a pile of expensive, unwanted stationery as a sort of office warming gift and a quote from the Koran from a guy who subscribed to the sayings of Confucius if he had any kind of religion at all. And how did he know her temporary office address? She’d just rented the space this morning.

  And then there was the gift of the cell phone.

  Bree picked up the package. It was the latest Apple, equipped with the kind of bells and whistles that encouraged messing around with the hot technology instead of getting any work done. She’d had her eye on this model, but she had a perfectly good cell phone of her own. Unlike the stationery, she could give this back to Professor Cianquino with heartfelt thanks for the thought. And a little white lie that she had one already.

  The cell phone box played the opening bars of “O Thou That Tell’st Good Tidings to Zion,” which Bree could identify only because she’d had to sing it at the St. Christopher’s Episcopal Church Christmas pageant when she was sixteen. The first few bars played over and over again. O thou that tell’st ... O thou that tell’st ... until Bree stuck her fingers in her ears and yelled “Aagh!” so that she didn’t have to hear it anymore.

  The ring stopped, finally, and through the layers of cardboard, Bree heard the automated message reply: You have reached Ms. Winston-Beaufort’s message service. Please leave your name, number, and a detailed message after the tone.

  Then the quavering, confused voice of an old, old man. “Damn! Where in hell do they put the people?” He cleared his throat and bellowed, “Is there a confounded human bean at t’other end of this line? This is Benjamin Skinner. And I want me a goddamn person. And after I get that person, I want me a lawyer!”

  The dial tone sounded. Benjamin Skinner hung up.

  Bree stared at the box. Benjamin “Blackheart” Skinner—if it actually was Benjamin “Blackheart” Skinner—was Georgia’s most reclusive billionaire. He had a lifelong habit of relieving major corporations of closely held assets. “Which makes him, dog, the richest man in Georgia, if not the entire United States of America, as well as the meanest. At least for right now. So why is he calling me?” There wasn’t any friendly “woof” in reply. Bree looked under the table. Sasha was curled up on the carpet, fast asleep.

  Not more than a week away from her family’s clutches and reduced to asking a dog for advice. “And even if you could give me any, you look so plain pitiful it’d be a shame to wake you up.” She got up. She needed a glass of wine and a to-do list, in that order. The wine would calm her down, and the to-do list would help make sense of the questions banging around in her head like so many bumper cars at the county fair.

  Or she could call Mr. Skinner back on Professor Cianquino’s cell phone and get the two biggest questions answered right now:

  Why did you call me, and not some white shoe law firm that’s been practicing law in Savannah since the Civil War?

  And what do you want?

  She glanced at the clock over the fireplace mantel; nine thirty. Too late to call Professor Cianquino, although clearly not too late for Mr. Skinner. She remembered an article about him in Forbes magazine. In addition to being pathologically camera-shy, he was a notorious night owl, supposedly existing on two to three hours of sleep at night. “Not that I believe that for a New York minute,” Bree muttered. All that told her was the man had a PR firm so powerful it could spin the toughest journalist. She sat at the table, sliced the cellophane covering the box with the tip of her fingernail, and opened it up. She paused and bit her lip.

  The cell phone was wrapped in its component parts, just as it’d come from the factory.

  The charger was in a sealed plastic bag. So was the phone. And so was the battery.

  So how had the call come through? For that matter, why had she heard the automated reply?

  She pressed the “send” button through the plastic bag. The little screen stayed dark. The phone itself was mute. Very curious now, Bree put the phone together and turned it on. The screen glowed. A text message appeared: “Missed Call.” Bree clicked on “send” and a phone number appeared on the screen, identified as “The Skinner.” She pressed “send” again. It rang three times before it was picked up, and a young male voice demanded, “Who’s this?”

  “This is Brianna Beaufort,” Bree said, with more than a trace of annoyance. “I’m an attorney. Who’s this?”

  “Jesus,” the voice said in disgust. Then, to someone near to him, “They’re circling already.” His voice came back on the line. “Call in the morning. Better yet, don’t call at all.”

  Bree bit her lip, hard, which helped her manage to say politely, “I’m sorry to trouble you, sir. I’m returning a call from my cell phone, from a man who identified himself as Benjamin Skinner. May I speak to him?”

  “This is Grainger Skinner, his son. Mr. Skinner isn’t available,” he said flatly. “If you have business with the family, I suggest you wait until tomorrow.”

  “Mr. Skinner wanted to talk to me right away,” Bree said courteously. “Would you tell him that I returned his call as soon as I could?”

  “Wasn’t soon enough, Ms. Beaufort.
Turn on the news. Mr. Skinner died this afternoon at his home on Tybee Island.”

  Bree’s face went hot with an immediate, profound embarrassment. Skinner’s call was a joke. A prank. Someone was jerking her chain, big-time. She wanted to crawl under the table and sit next to Sasha. Instead, she managed a deep breath and to stutter, “Sir, I am deeply sorry to have troub—” before the brusque and justifiably irritated Skinner, junior, shut her off.

  It’d be rubbing salt in the wound to turn on the ten o’clock news and get the particulars of Benjamin Skinner’s death. She poured herself a glass of wine and settled on the sectional to watch as a kind of penance.

  All of the stations led off with the story. There wasn’t any question about it. Eighty-four-year-old Benjamin “Blackheart” Skinner had keeled over from a catastrophic heart attack while sailing with his son and daughter-in-law and drowned in the coastal waters of the Atlantic. They’d hauled him back to the thirty-thousand-foot mansion he’d built on Tybee Island, but, as the perky news anchor said energetically, “All efforts at resuscitation failed.”

  Enough time had gone by for reporters to nail down a few interviews with Skinner’s associates. Death hadn’t done much to improve the business world’s opinion of him. Comments came from Douglas Fairchild, his politely dubious partner in local construction projects, “You’re sure he’s really gone? Bennie’s a tricky son of a (bleep!), God bless him.” Carlton Montifiore, the overtly hostile plaintiff in Skinner’s latest and most notorious lawsuit, snapped, “A heart attack? Fat chance. The (bleep!) didn’t have a heart.”

  On the other hand, Skinner’s departure was sincerely regretted by a silicone-enhanced blonde occupying the penthouse at a condo development called Island Dream. These multimillion-dollar luxury condos fronting the ocean on Tybee Island were one of Skinner’s newest projects. “He loved me,” Chastity McFarland breathed at the TV cameras. “And he would have wanted me to have the best. This apartment, f’instance. When he left me this morning, he was on his way to the lawyers to get me the deed. What I’ve got here is a verbal contract.” She glared into the cameras. “And I’m not moving one (bleeping!) inch. I got my rights, see. And if you ask me”—she leaned forward, giving the person behind the camera a good look at her cleavage—“it was murder!”