Defending Angels (12 page)

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

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.

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.

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.

“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 silent. 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.

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.

On an impulse, she got to her feet and ran lightly up the colorful front stairs to the second floor. Lavinia had seemed to know something about the horrible thing. This wasn’t all in her imagination. It couldn’t be.

The landing was dim; there was no window here to look over the cemetery and no ceiling light. Lavinia’s door was in shadow.

The march of painted angels went up one side of Lavinia’s door, over the top, and down the other. The door itself was painted a sheer white that glimmered softly. Bree hesitated a moment, then tapped on the frame.

There was a soft, shuddery movement on the other side of the door, as if something large and feathery slid across the floor. The door opened, and Lavinia stood there in a flood of pale, silvery light. A gauzy shawl enfolded her, and her dark skin seemed to glow. “Well, child! This is unexpected!”

“I’m sorry to bother you,” Bree apologized. “I had a couple of questions I thought I’d ask.”

“No bother,” Lavinia said equably. “Come on in and sit yourself down for a spell.”

Hesitant, Bree stepped inside. For a moment, a very brief moment, the second floor seemed larger than she’d expected.
Much
larger. A velvety gray mist veiled the floor. The ceiling soared above her. A wall fixture lit with the softness of moonlight cast a gentle shine over a variety of large and small shapes. Lavinia’s voice was a soft whisper in her head:

“Some of my littlies. You know what a lemur is? I have me a few. And these here are a couple of baby owls that lost their mamma.”

A ring-tailed lemur curled its tail over the back of a rocking chair and stared at her with huge golden eyes. Bree stared dreamily back. The entire apartment seemed to rock to a slow, sleepy rhythm. The chair rocked with it. The lemur purred. She swayed lightly back and forth on her feet, as though on the deck of a ship.

The rocking, the lunar light, the scent of strange flowers all made Bree dizzy. She shut her eyes and opened them again.

The moonlit scene was gone in a flash, evaporated like mist in the hot sun. Lavinia stood in ordinary light on wide pine floors in a small, shabby room that smelled of lavender and roses. She pulled her sweater around her bony shoulders and smiled sweetly at Bree.

The rocking chair was there, though, swaying wildly as if something had jumped up in a hurry and pushed the chair away. A bit of soft gray fur still clung to it.

Bree pressed her hands to her ears and took a deep breath. “Please keep on with your chores. I’ve got ... quite a bit to do downstairs. What I wanted to ask you ... it’ll keep just fine.”

She walked downstairs at a much slower pace than she had going up. Sasha waited for her at the foot, ears up, tail wagging gently back and forth.

“That,” Bree said with a great deal of puzzlement, “was very confusing. Lemurs? Baby owls? Where do these things in my head
come
from, Sasha?”

Sasha yawned, walked back into the living room, and went to sleep.

Bree rubbed her temples hard. She needed more sleep. She needed to rid herself of nightmares. She’d dumped a pile of unopened mail in her briefcase before she left; she’d it tackle now, before her first appointment of the day. Uneasily aware of the painting looming at her, she settled down to go over her unread issues of the
ABA Journal.

Sometime later, a polite knock at the front door roused her from an infuriating essay complaining about tort reform. Bree got up to answer it, making a mental note to ask Mrs. Mather—Lavinia, rather—about a door chime. Or maybe an intercom. She’d decided after last night that she wasn’t going to leave any doors unlocked, anywhere.

Sasha gave her an encouraging sort of bark as she walked by. She bent down and fondled his ears, then stroked his forehead. “If you like this one, give me some kind of sign, okay? It’s Rosa Lucheta, the lawyer’s widow.”

But she opened the door to a short, thickset man with a black beard and a cane.

“Miss Beaufort?” He rolled the “r” slightly.

“Yes,” she said. “May I help you?”

“I am Petru Lucheta. Rosa’s brother.” The accent was Slavic; beyond that, Bree was at a loss. It could have been Russian, Latvian, or Serbo-Croatian for all she knew.

“How do you do,” Bree said politely.

“I am ke-vite well,” he said. “Rosa, she is, alas, not so well.”

“I’m sorry to hear that. But there was no need for you to come all this way to cancel the appointment. She could have called.”

“Rosa is not so well permanently,” he said. “She is unable to work, alas. I, however, am ke-vite able to work. I have come in her stead.”

“I see.” Bree considered Mr. Lucheta for a long moment. He had very black eyes. The beard covered most of his face, but what she could see of it had a benign, almost avuncular expression.

“You are willing to consider a man for this position?” he said anxiously. “The advertisement did not make a reference to gender.”

“Our laws don’t allow us to do that, Mr. Lucheta. Forgive me, may I ask? Are you a citizen? Of the United States, I mean?”

“Oh, yes. I mean, yes, I understand you. No, I am not a citizen. I have a g-r-r-reen card and I will be eligible for citizenship quite soon.” He cleared his throat, glanced from side to side, and shifted his cane from his right hand to the left in the politest possible way. “May I come in?”