Defending Angels Page 9

  “You live up there.” It wasn’t a question. He looked up at Front Street, which was one level above the shops and restaurants on the wharf. This part of the River Walk was constructed entirely of brick walls that rose twenty feet to the street above.

  “Well, yes, but I should real—”

  “Go home.”

  “I can’t leave my sis—”

  “I’ll let her know you’ve gone.”

  “Who are you?” Bree asked indignantly. “And what do you think you’re doing pushing me around like this?”

  “Am I pushing you around?” He stepped back and looked at her, amused. “Sorry.” His eyes were very silvery in the half light from the streetlamps. And he didn’t look sorry at all. “My name’s Striker. Gabe Striker.”

  Bree’s mind went blank for a minute, then, suddenly furious, she said, “The PI.”

  “Yes. Armand Cianquino thought I could give you a hand with the Skinner case. I just happened to be in the area when this little fracas with Payton the Rat blew up.”

  “Is there anyone in Savannah who doesn’t know Payton dumped me?” Bree demanded through gritted teeth.

  He backed up, his hands held up in mock surrender. She barely could make out his face in the gloom. “Hey. Sorry. I seem to have stepped out of line.”

  “No kidding.”

  “I do apologize.” His voice drifted toward her. She had the oddest sensation that he was suddenly bodiless, a mist in the air, liable to disappear with a breath. “Go home. I’m going to do what I can to make this go away.”

  Then she was alone in the alley.

  Eight

  And on the Tree of Life,

  The middle tree and highest that there grew,

  Sat like a cormorant ... devising death.

  —Paradise Lost, John Milton

  Bree squashed the impulse to make a rude gesture after Gabriel Striker, PI. Instead, she walked past the Dumpster to the edge of the sidewalk and peered around the corner of the building. A police cruiser headed the wrong way down the one-way street sat in front of the restaurant, red lights flashing. Either the crowd gathered outside had come from the restaurant or from the street, probably both. A pair of teenage boys held their cell phones up, taking pictures of the scene. Bree recognized the bartender, a cheerful woman in her midforties who didn’t look very cheerful at the moment. The shorter of the teenagers recognized the bartender, too. Huey’s was a popular place. “Hey, Maureen! What the heck happened in there?”

  Maureen shrugged, her face bewildered. “What started it is some woman dove over a table to get at this guy.”

  Bree cringed.

  “And then this freak wind came upriver and blew the place apart. Well,” Maureen amended, “not apart, as such. But it burst right through the doors and made one hell of a mess in there.” She looked up at the sky in a confused way. “And then it sort of sucked itself out.”

  “Anybody hurt?” The kid shouldered his way through the crowd to Maureen, his cell phone aimed at her. “Can you give me a quote?” Maureen held her hand in front of her face. “Will you cut that out? The two of you get on out of here.”

  “Anybody dead?” the other kid asked. He had a gold ring in his nose.

  “Not so’s you’d notice.” Maureen dropped her hand and made a hideous face at the cell phone. “Go on, you two. Get out of here. What are you hanging around making trouble for?”

  “Huh,” the shorter kid said self-importantly. “You know how much the TV stations pay for pictures of this kind of stuff?”

  “It’d be a lot better if there was a couple of bodies, Pauly,” said the kid with the nose ring. “Who wants to see pizza all over the floor? I can see that at home.”

  “You getting the message, Pauly?” Maureen said rudely. “You two, beat it. I already called the insurance company and the fewer people hanging around when they get here, the better.” She scowled at them. “Maybe they’ll figure you two had something to do with it.” She watched the two boys disappear into the thinning crowd, then shook her head and went back into the restaurant.

  A small breeze stirred in the street. Bree looked up at the sky. A thumbnail moon hung low on the horizon. A few clouds scudded past the stars overhead.

  It was as quiet as the grave.

  She trudged up the stairs to the town house, shaken, bewildered, and longing for sleep

  The phone sounded inside as she fumbled with the keys to the town house door. Sasha barked. Somewhere in the distance, sirens sounded, and Bree had a sudden, irrational conviction that the police were after her. Her mental equilibrium tipped further toward a genuine fit of the willies as she got past the front door and nearly fell over Sasha. She saved herself—and the poor dog’s leg—with a hugely athletic leap over his body and dived toward the phone.

  “Bree, darlin’!”

  “Mamma,” Bree gasped.

  “You all right, honey?” Waves of concern flowed over the phone line.

  “I’m just fine. I was rushing through the front door to get to the phone and tripped over the dog.”

  “Dog? You still have that dog?” Francesca asked.

  “Ah,” Bree said. “Things have been so hectic here, I forgot to tell you about the dog.” Holding the receiver to her ear, she put her back against the wall and sank to the floor. This pleased Sasha, who promptly tried to settle in her lap.

  “I think you should tell us about the dog,” her father’s voice said.

  “Well. He’s a rescue.” This was a guaranteed path to her mother’s soft heart. “And he’s a wonderful animal. Just wonderful. Antonia just loves ...” Bree bit her lip so hard she almost yelped. “I mean, if Antonia could meet him, she’d just love him, too. Here, he wants to say hello.” She put the receiver near Sasha’s muzzle and without much hope of a response said, “Speak!”

  Sasha barked.

  Bree put the phone to her ear again. “There! What do you think of that?”

  “I think he sounds big,” her mother’s voice said dubiously. “You remember the town house covenants. If he’s too big, Bree, you need to bring him on home to Plessey. As a matter of fact, when your father and I come in next week, we can take him back with us if we have to. Poor thing.”

  Bree looked at Sasha, who was getting healthier-looking by the hour, it seemed. “I don’t know. I really like having him around.” Suddenly, the rest of her mother’s message sank in. “You’re what?! Coming here?”

  “For your open house, Bree, for heaven’s sake. I knew you had too much on your mind getting your office set up. But now that you’ve found this darling little place, it’s time to let the professional community know you’re up and running.”

  “Now’s really not a good time, Mamma,” Bree said. “I mean, I appreciate the thought, but I’d really rather—”

  “We knew you’d say that. So your father and I have already sent out the invitations. He still has a lot of good contacts in the law community, don’t you, darlin’, and they’ll all turn out for him. It’ll be a wonderful send-off, Bree honey. You’ll see.”

  “You sent the invitations out?” Bree said.

  “We did,” her mother said firmly. “Next Thursday afternoon from five to seven at the Mansion.”

  “The Forsyth Mansion?” Bree said weakly. The hotel on Forsyth Park was rated five stars, and the restaurant, 700 Drayton, was fabulously expensive.

  “That gives you a week to get the caterer and the florist set up. The bills are to be sent to us, aren’t they, Royal?”

  “Mamma,” Bree said, “I really wish ...”

  Her mother’s voice rolled over her protests like Sherman through Atlanta. “Now, you know how proud we are of you! You’ll let us host this little reception, won’t you?”

  “You bet,” Bree said, suddenly exhausted. She couldn’t handle one more thing. Not one. All she wanted to do was take a long, hot shower and go to bed. “I appreciate the thought. Thank you, Mamma. Thanks, Daddy. You let me know before you begin the drive down, won’t you?”<
br />
  “Of course we will.” There was a long pause. “You sure you’re all right, dear? Royal, you think she’s all right?”

  From her position on the floor next to the phone, Bree could see into the darkened living room, but not around the corner to the fireplace. Suddenly, Sasha scrambled to his feet. His ears went forward and he stared intently into the living room.

  As she watched him, part of her mind still struggling with the incident at the restaurant, the other part listening to her mother’s light, pretty voice, still another longing for the total oblivion of sleep, a thin river of water seeped around the corner wall and headed toward her. Sasha barked once, and then fell silent.

  “I’ve got to run, Mamma. I think I left the water running.” She dropped the phone into the cradle and stumbled to her feet, her heart thumping. The water glowed with a yellow phosphorescence. It inched forward, changing direction every few feet as if encountering unseen obstacles.

  Sasha turned and looked at her, his eyes glowing with reflected light.

  It’s looking for something.

  Bree fought the impulse to run. Sasha looked up at her; then, tail set low, ears flattened against his skull, he moved cautiously forward.

  Bree went with him. The source was somewhere in the living room ...

  The painting.

  She moved quietly, but with an intensity of purpose that heightened her senses. She could hear the soft hiss as the fluid crept across the floor, the slow beat of Sasha’s heart, the up and down sweep of bird’s wings. She gave the water a wide berth and rounded the corner into the heart of the living room.

  The painting was alive. More than alive, it was absorbed in itself, with soft whispers and sly, low-voiced laughter. The flame red sea overflowed the frame, ran down the brick surround, and spilled onto the floor. The waves moved back and forth in slow, ominous swells, like a giant creature, breathing. The dark-haired woman with the pale eyes was gone. The shrieks of the dying were faint, almost inaudible. She heard them, though with that preternatural enhancement of her senses that let her hear the up and downward sweep of the bird’s great wings.

  Sasha growled and dropped to the floor.

  The cormorant is on the move.

  Not stopping to think, not wanting to think, Bree snatched at the first heavy object that came to hand: a bronze statue of a Chinese horse. She swung it around her head once and then let it fly, straight at the painting.

  The statue hit with a cr-a-a-ck of sound and a spray of sickly yellow light.

  The vision disappeared with a blast of wind.

  The lights in the living room snapped on.

  Suddenly, Bree was among familiar things, with no trace of what she’d seen except the chips of marble mantel on the living room rug and the dented statue of the T’ang Dynasty horse.

  From behind her, Antonia said, “It’s not enough that you, like, skipped out on me in the middle of a natural disaster, you’ve got to trash the living room, too?” She marched in, threw herself flat onto the couch, and stared at the ceiling. “I’m here to tell you, Bree, I think you’ve totally flipped out.”

  Bree stood rooted to the spot. Her whole body was icy. Sasha nudged her hip, and then thrust his nose under her hand. She stroked his ears without thinking; then, her knees shaking, she sank into the chair next to the fireplace.

  “Bree? Did you hear me? You swore you’d given up whacking people up the side of the head. I mean, the little creep deserved it ... but you took down the whole restaurant!” She chuckled to herself. “Pretty darn impressive, though.”

  “Yes,” Bree whispered.

  Something in her voice alarmed her sister. Antonia sat up and looked at her, genuine concern on her face. “Hey! I was kidding about you flipping out. You look awful.” She jumped up and twisted her hands together. “Can I get you something? A glass of water?” She moved halfway across the rug to the phone. “Maybe I should call the paramedics or something?” Her voice trembled. “Bree, you’re scaring me.”

  “No.” Her throat was tight. She cleared it and said loudly, “No. I’m fine.” She ran her hands through her hair. “I’m going to bed. I don’t want to talk about it.”

  Antonia bit her lip. “Fine,” she said nervously. “That’s just fine.”

  Bree got to her feet. She felt a hundred years old.

  “You want a hand, or anything?”

  Bree shook her head. “I just ...”

  “Just what?”

  Bree looked at her in despair. “I just want things to make sense.”

  Antonia’s face whitened. Bree suddenly realized that her little sister, for all her brave talk, wasn’t all that tough. It took everything she had, but she breathed deep, relaxed her shoulders, and sat back down. She crossed her legs and said with a fair assumption of carelessness, “It looks like I settled Payton’s hash good and proper, don’t you think?”

  Antonia smiled, tentatively. “You sure did!”

  “What happened to Ms. Suspension Bridge of 2007?”

  Antonia giggled. “Who knows? I’ll bet she ran like a rabbit. I’ll bet she’s halfway to Topeka by now.”

  Bree smiled and nodded.

  It was going to be all right.

  It had to be all right.

  Nine

  And we are here as on a darkling plain

  Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,

  Where ignorant armies clash by night.

  —“Dover Beach,” Matthew Arnold

  Bree folded the Wednesday edition of the Savannah Daily into neat thirds and dropped it into the recycling can.

  On a second thought, she retrieved it and set it neatly on the trunk that served as a coffee table in her new offices. She hadn’t had time to pick up any other reading material and the top of the trunk looked pitifully bare. Fortunately, nothing in the short news story titled “Freak Encounter Busts Up Huey’s” identified her as the woman who started it all by diving over the table at Payton McAllister, attorney-at-law. There was a brief quote from a meteorologist about the likelihood of a sirocco-like wind sweeping through the heart of the Market District (“infinitesimal”) and a longer op-ed piece about climate aberrations due to global warming. That was that.

  At least it’d happened too late to make the late news on KWYC, for which she was thankful. It had, however, provided a virtually inexhaustible topic of conversation for Antonia, who had been stuck with the bill for the pizza and demanded Bree pay her half.

  Bree had paid up and offered her a choice: shut up about the incident at Huey’s, or she, Bree, would get on the phone to their parents and rat her out about UNC. Antonia snapped, “Fine,” then asked for the name of her martial arts teacher; Payton had spun through the air like a Frisbee, she’d said, which was not only totally cool, but a skill that was bound to come in handy at some point. Especially if her sister kept persecuting her.

  Bree ended the conversation by going to bed.

  She’d risen early after a disturbed and restless night, bundled up Sasha, lifted the painting from the wall, and left the town house for the office while it was still dark outside. Antonia almost never got up before eleven, but there was always a chance that she’d bounce into the kitchen, full of questions Bree couldn’t, wouldn’t answer.

  Halfway down Montgomery, she stopped behind a Chatham County municipal garbage truck. Maybe she could bribe the driver to throw the accursed canvas into the grinder. She imagined the frame splintered, the torn canvas, and the red and maddened eye of the bird glaring at her from the mess of orange peel, decayed vegetables, and sodden paper towels.

  Sasha whined from the backseat, and then barked.

  It’ll find its way back to you.

  “Dammit!” Bree said.

  The truck engine roared clumsily down the street. She let it go. And the first thing she did when she got into the office was hang the thing back over the fireplace.

  She sat on the couch and stared at it. Mrs. Mather hadn’t come down yet, and the place was silen
t. The painting hung there, malign, awful, a haunt if there ever was one. She desperately wanted it burned, cut up, ground to ashes, destroyed. And she just as desperately knew that she couldn’t do it alone.

  She curled her hand into a fist and banged herself on the forehead in sheer frustration. The painting was just that. A painting. It was a bad copy of a painting she must have seen before, years ago, when she was little. She’d seen the original as a kid, been petrified by it, and had nightmares for years. Sort of a post-traumatic stress kind of thing. She couldn’t remember being scared by it, but people frequently forgot traumatic events, while still suffering the consequences of them. She remembered reading that somewhere. She hoped that this was true, and that it wasn’t something she picked up in the Your Health section of some half-baked popular magazine.

  Maybe her mother remembered what had started her nightmares. She could call and ask her.

  Or maybe not.

  She set up Sasha’s water bowl, left him some kibble, and went out to complete her furniture shopping. When she came back, hours later, Mrs. Mather had been down to brush his coat and tend to the healing wounds. He greeted her at the door with a happy swish of his tail and a contented sigh. She followed him into the living room, walked up to the fireplace, and stared defiantly at the wall. The painting still hung over the mantel, a sullen mix of gray, black, and the crimson of that hellish fire.

  “I’m going to take this thing outside and burn it, Sasha.”

  Sasha lay down with a thump on the floor, put his head on his paws, and looked up at her sorrowfully.

  It won’t burn.

  Bree stared resentfully at it, then dropped down on the couch and rubbed her forehead. She hated the thing. She looked at her watch. Her first interview wasn’t due for an hour. She could keep on sitting here like a dormouse with her thumb up her nose if she wanted to. If dormice had thumbs, which they probably didn’t.