Angels (14 page)

As soon as she said it, I knew she was right. I looked around the table, and I could see everybody looked like I felt: Coleman had done it again. Miss Ida’s special recipes would sell a lot of cookbooks and make Miss Ida famous. Her cheeks were real pink, and I knew she liked the idea. I looked at Coleman—her bright hair like a halo, her eyes shinin’ like stars. I knew she wasn’t an angel, but she sure turned up in our lives when she was needed.

Then Coleman said a line from that story about Tiny Tim: “God bless us, every one.” We all said “Amen,” and I thanked Him silently for sending Coleman home and for the blessings she had brought on our house.

Reba White Williams worked for more than thirty years in business and finance—in research at McKinsey & Co., as a securities analyst on Wall Street, and as a senior executive at an investment management firm.

Williams graduated from Duke with a BA in English, earned an MBA at Harvard, a PhD in Art History at CUNY, and an MA in Writing at Antioch. She has written numerous articles for art and financial journals. She is a past president of the New York City Art Commission and served on the New York State Council for the Arts.

She and her husband built what was thought to be the largest private collection of fine art prints by American artists. They created seventeen exhibitions from their collection that circulated to more than one hundred museums worldwide, Williams writing most of the exhibition catalogues. She has been a member of the print committees of several leading museums.

Williams grew up in North Carolina and lives in New York, Connecticut, and Southern California with her husband and Maltese, Muffin.  She is the author of two novels featuring Coleman and Dinah Greene,
Restrike
and
Fatal
Impressions, along with the story of Coleman and Dinah when they were children,
Angels
. Her third Coleman and Dinah mystery,
Bloody Royal Prints
, will be published in October 2014.