Angel's Advocate (12 page)

“Isn’t Tim the usher that dissed me out for representing Lindsey Chandler? I thought so. You believe him over me? The guy’s a sneak, a rat, and a toad. Which brings me to who I was with. The good-looking guy was Payton the Rat. The ticket I bought sat me right next to him and his creepy boss, John Stubblefield. If
you’d
left me a real ticket, I would have sat somewhere else and stayed for the whole thing. Plus I would have saved myself seventy-five bucks.”

“Oh, shoot. I’m an awful sister. I’m the worst!” Antonia sat up and ran her hands through her hair, which was pretty frazzled to begin with. “They didn’t let you in with the pass I wrote for you? I suppose I should have known better. Was he awful to you? Payton?”

“No more than usual,” Bree said. “My main feeling when I see him is total self-disgust. I mean, how could I?”

“He’s gorgeous, for one thing,” Antonia said. “Not that
I
would have fallen for that, but never mind. Anyhow. I’m sorry. About the ticket, anyway. And about thinking you finked out on me. So, what’d you think? About the play?”

“Wonderful,” Bree said promptly. “The best part was the staging, no question.”

Antonia grinned. “Seriously?”

“Seriously, the staging was brilliant. You’ve taught me enough about that stuff so that I know it can make or break a play, or pretty nearly. And you made it. The guy who played Holmes was sensational. But Irene Adler—really, Tonia. Did Stubblefield give the Rep so much money they had to cast her, or what?”

“You think Gordon would cast a play because a backer bribed him? You’ve been watching too many old Preston Sturges movies. No, Gordon cast her because she’s sleeping with him. Also,” she added, in a more reasonable tone, “she was the best of a bad lot. I mean, the only other serious actor up for the part was me, and I know I’m way too young. Although I can
play
old, which is more than I can say for Lorie.”

“Lorie Stubblefield is sleeping with Gordon, your director?” Bree said with interest.

“Yep.”

“She’s sleeping with Payton, too.”

“Get out!”

“Well, he implied that she was. Maybe it’s just another one of Payton’s little maneuvers to get under my skin. Although it’s so like him. Sucking up to the boss’s daughter. Anyhow, I loved the play, I loved your work, and I’m going to bed. I’m wiped out.”

“You don’t want to go down to Louie’s for a pizza? Gordon’s probably there, and maybe Lorie, too.”

“Antonia, it’s almost one o’clock in the morning. I have to get up in five hours to drive home.”

“You’re going to the Guy Fawkes party?”

“Yes. Although why Mamma just doesn’t come out and call it a Halloween party beats me.”

“The fifth falls on a Thursday this year, and nobody would come, or not as many as would come on a weekend. Anyhow, I say God bless you for throwing your fair body into the breach.
That’s
why they haven’t given me much of a hard time about not showing up. You’ll be there.” She jumped up, grabbed her purse, and patted Bree’s knee. “You go on to bed. I’m going down for a pizza. I’m about starved to death.”

Bree bit her lip. She was afraid something was going to come out of the mirror. She was afraid to go to sleep. Afraid of her dreams. “You’re sure you just don’t want to go on to bed?”

“You’re kidding! You know about theater hours. During a show I never get to bed before three.” She headed toward the kitchen, and Bree stood up. Sasha got up, too, and stood with his head pressed anxiously at her knee.

“Hang on. I changed my mind. I’m coming with you.”

Antonia skidded to a halt and stared at her. “You’re kidding. You’ve changed your mind about going home?”

“No, no, no. I’ve changed my mind about pizza. All I had to eat tonight was some soup.”

“But you aren’t going to get any sleep.”

“I’ll be fine.” She gave Antonia little shove. “I’m right behind you.”

Antonia peered closely at her. “Is something wrong? You look—I don’t know—kind of run over.”

Bree thought:
Well, let’s see. In the past twenty-four hours, I’ve retained another dead soul as a client, dealt with a kid so screwed up she torments dogs, and discovered that yep, I’m being followed by a pair of corpses who’ve jumped through the barricades between this world and the next so they can take me on a permanent, highly unpleasant tropical vacation.
Aloud, Bree said, “I need to unwind with a cold glass of wine and a nice cheesy slice of pizza. Forget sleep. I can do that anytime.”

In fact, she fell asleep in the corner booth at Huey’s. A number of cast members had dropped by, after making a dutiful appearance at the cast party hosted by the Stub blefields. Bree was grateful for their presence, and the noise that accompanied it. She tucked herself into the far end of one of the booths, put her head back, and only woke to Antonia’s tug on her hair. “You’re drooling,” she announced. “I had to explain that you weren’t the sister that showed up on TV today defending that Lindsey character, but the idiot sister I keep locked in the closet like Mr. Rochester with his first wife. Everybody,” Antonia said with satisfaction, “believed me.”

Bree looked blearily at her watch. Four in the morning. She looked down at Sasha, who had positioned himself on the floor at the end of the booth, and said, “What d’ya think? Shall we take off for Plessey right now?”

“Now?” Antonia shrieked. “You’ve got to be kidding!”

“If I get there early, I’ll have time for a nap before the party. Much better than trying to get a couple hours of sleep right now.”

And much better than facing whatever awaited her, alone in the dark in her bedroom.

Antonia made her a thermos of strong coffee before she took herself off to her own bed, and Bree found herself driving down I-75 with the sun coming up behind her, and the clear road rolling in front. She was in a cheerful state of mind. Sasha sat strapped in the passenger seat next to her, and the fears of the night before ebbed like water down a drain.

She reached the turnoff for Plessey by ten o’clock, and was so pleased with her progress that she decided to stop for coffee and a bite of doughnut before wading into the maelstrom of her family’s affairs. “Time to brush my hair, wash my face, and get oriented, Sasha. Where do you think we should stop—Tim Horton’s? Dunkin’ Donuts?”

Once off the interstate, she’d slowed to forty-five, so she had time to brake when Sasha pressed his nose to the passenger-side window and barked once.

“The Saturn Diner?” She squinted at the printed slogan below the neon letters. “ ‘We run rings around the competition. ’ Cute. Very cute.”

She pulled up in front of the plate glass window. There was one other car in the front lot, an old Ford Dually that looked the worse for wear. She glanced at it again. It looked vaguely familiar.

At the rear of the diner, she could see a few other cars parked up against the dumpster; an older model Chevy and a Toyota that probably belonged to the waitress and the chef.

The glass door to the entrance was plastered with signs for community events: Denville Farm Days, the local Elks pancake dinner, a pumpkin festival sponsored by the local Baptist church. Inside, the large dining area was floored with black and white linoleum squares. A dozen or so red plastic-topped stools stood in front of the counter. A glass-fronted tiered stand held plates of pies and cakes topped with cherries and whipped cream. A fryer smell filled the air: fried chicken, chips, and barbecue. Bree loved diners. She loved the hash brown potatoes, fried peach pies, and grits swimming in butter. The only thing she didn’t love was the coffee, which was generally boiled to death and burned to perdition. Bree held the door open and waved at the waitress wiping down a table near the cash register.

“Y’all mind if my dog sits outside this door while I come in for some pie?”

The waitress, fortyish, with pale brown hair tucked back in a ponytail, waved lethargically back. “Hell, honey. Bring him on in. If the sheriff stops by, put on a pair of sunglasses and tell him he’s a guide dog.”

Bree seated herself at the counter. Despite the pickup in front, the dining room was empty of customers except for her and Sasha. The waitress slapped her rag down, pulled an order pad from her pocket, and put her elbows on the counter. The name Kayla was embroidered in red stitching on the pocket of her checked shirt.

“What’ll it be?”

“Iced tea, please. And maybe one of those fried peach pies.” Bree smiled at her. “I’m Bree, by the way. And this is Sasha.”

“Got it. Bree. And for big boy there?” She nodded at Sasha. “Think we got a blade bone from last night’s pot roast in the back.”

“He’d love that. Thank you.”

Bree resettled herself onto the stool and felt the tension leave her shoulders, neck, and back. She was twenty minutes away from home. A truly sensible person could stay there behind the big wrought-iron gates and phone in her resignation from life in Savannah and 66 Angelus Street. She could get a nice, undemanding job. Maybe like this one, where the only dangers lay in bad-tempered Bubbas wandering in from the beer joints down the road after a rowdy Saturday night. She closed her eyes against the glare of the sunlight through the plate glass windows and thought about nothing in particular for the first time in days.

Suddenly, Sasha jumped to his feet and growled.

“Bree? Is that you?”

Bree jerked upright. The owner of the pickup—it couldn’t be anyone else—stood at the end of the bar, a half smile on his face. Bree’s heart bumped twice in her chest. “Abel?” she said. “Abel?” Suddenly, she was off the stool and in his arms.

At six-foot-four, to Bree’s five-foot-nine, Abel always made her feel small and feminine. She gave herself up to his hard, muscled chest for a long moment, then drew back, suddenly aware of Kayla the waitress, grinning cheekily at them both, and Sasha, who looked perplexed.

“What’s it been—five years?” Her voice was husky. She stepped back, blushing, then sank onto the counter stool. She reached for the iced tea and took a long drink, resisting the impulse to pour it over the back of her neck. “Well,” she said, “well. It’s good to see you, Abel.”

He leaned against the counter, thumbs hooked into the belt loops of his jeans. It was the only sign of his own loss of composure. The steady gray eyes were the same. But there was a hint of gray in his black hair—how old was he now? Forty-two or -three, at least. His face was weathered, and his smile just the same.

“You look wonderful,” he said.

“Thank you kindly, sir. And you look well. Still opting for the outside jobs, I see.” She gestured at his hands. “You’re as tan as an old saddle. And those calluses on your hands didn’t come from scrawling quadratic equations on the blackboard.” She drew her eyebrows together. “It
is
quadratic equations you mathematicians go on and on about, isn’t it? Math is so confusin’.”

“Now, don’t go all Southern sappy on me, Bree. I like my women smart.”

“And my hubby tells me my romance novels are so much gush,” Kayla said with an exaggerated sigh. “Y’all want your pie now? I hope not. I can listen to this kind of stuff all day.”

“Yes. Well.” Bree took the peach pie in one hand and the glass of iced tea in the other. She looked around rather wildly for a booth, realized with a start they were all unoccupied, and nodded toward the one farthest from Kayla’s ecstatic grin.

“Blueberry for you?” Kayla said to Abel.

“Peach.” Bree looked at the pie in her own hand. “He always liked peach.”

“Peach coming right up.”

Kayla disappeared into the kitchen. Bree followed Abel to the booth. After a long moment, Sasha walked to the glass door at the front of the diner and sat down. He looked back over his shoulder at them.

“Handsome dog,” Abel said.

“Yes, he is. His name is Sasha.”

Abel craned his neck to look at the scar on Sasha’s hind leg. “Looks like that’s just about finished healing.”

“The cast came off two days ago.” She looked at him. “A spring trap. In the yard of my office building. Remember how you found those guys who were setting the spring traps at Plessey? And beat the tar out of them, too.”

He nodded. Abel’s job as manager at Plessey had lasted three years. It would have lasted forever if Bree hadn’t fallen in love with him. She never knew if he’d felt the same for her, although, in her wilder, Scarlett O’Hara moments, she was sure that if circumstances had been different, if he had been free . . .

Bree cleared her throat. “And Virginia? She’s well, I hope?”

“Just fine. Still working at the clinic. She’s steadier with a regular paycheck coming in.”

Bree was never sure how to approach asking about Virginia’s illness. Abel never discussed it, although he was a tender, attentive nurse to his wife. Virginia herself was exhaustively, comprehensively, endlessly focused on it. She had one of the many forms of multiple sclerosis. Sometimes she was wheelchair-bound, and sometimes she wasn’t.

“And you? Still finding the classroom too claustrophobic to stick at for long?”

He nodded, but didn’t volunteer anything more.

Bree shoved her pie back and forth along the table, almost overwhelmed with feeling. With a sudden, unwelcome flash of insight, she saw her infatuation with Payton McAllister as a blind and stupid hedge against her love for this tall, brilliant, caring man. She had a flash of amused comfort with herself, though: her affair with Payton was explained at last.

“And you, Bree? I hear you moved on to Savannah.” He leaned forward and moved his hand toward her. “You okay? You look a little”—he hesitated—“ ‘careworn’ is the word that comes to mind.”

“Yes,” Bree said. “Yes, I’m fine. Something just occurred to me that should have occurred to me long before.” She wanted to laugh and cry, all at once. Instead, she ate a piece of her peach pie, which was as good as she hoped it would be. “And I’ve opened a practice in Savannah. Uncle Franklin—you remember Uncle Franklin? Of course you do. Just before he died, he added a codicil to his will, leaving his practice to me.”