Avenging Angels Read online

  “Wait! Of course you have to bid on this desk! You’re brilliant!” Antonia grabbed Bree’s wrist and pulled her briskly along. “I should have thought of this myself! You buy this desk out from under Mrs. O’Rourke, and then, just as a, like, humanitarian gesture, I present it back to her, on behalf of a grateful public.” She shoved her way through the throng of auctiongoers settling into the rows of chairs facing the auction block and sat primly down in the aisle seat in the second row from the front. Bree stepped over Antonia’s feet and sat down next to her.

  “I don’t think I can bid on this desk.” Bree showed her the reserve price. “Eight thousand dollars. I’d have to empty my office account to come up with eight thousand dollars.”

  “You’re going to let a small thing like the rent and groceries stand in the way?” Antonia sighed. “And I suppose you think you have some sort of obligation to Ron and Petru. Well, nuts, sister. Just my luck to have a responsible relative.”

  Bree didn’t think Petru, her Russian paralegal, and Ron Parchese, her secretary, relied on paychecks for their temporal existence. She wasn’t even sure, apart from their very human appearance when they were with her, that they had a temporal existence at all. As for Lavinia Mather, her landlady, Bree knew for certain that the last time Lavinia required human sustenance was in 1783 when she was sold to the notorious slave owner Burton Melrose. But her Company of angels and its needs wasn’t something even her sister knew about. And her immediate problem was what to do about the desk that was the contact point for her newest client.

  A burst of singing from the front stage made Bree sit up and take stock of her surroundings. She’d been to auctions before, with her parents, but the auction house here was very different from those near the family’s North Carolina home, Plessey. For one thing, the room where the bidding took place was huge, as high as it was long, and stuffed like an Aladdin’s cave with ornately carved sofas, tasseled pillows, huge fake ferns, oil paintings in gilt frames, ten-foot-tall mirrors, and a herd of oversized marble statues of Greek goddesses and Egyptian pharaohs. And for another, it was a lot livelier than the auctions Francesca and Royal Winston-Beaufort attended. A group of red-shirted employees formed a line in front of the auctioneer’s platform and began a loud, off-key version of “Puttin’ on the Ritz” to mild applause. The employees scattered, and one of the auctioneers grabbed a microphone, shouted a welcome, informed the audience that many many fine items were here to be auctioned off today, and the bidding on the O’Rourke estate was to begin after an initial round of sales from the many, many fine items right up here on the stage. A few of the employees began to circulate with trays of food, juice, tea, and soft drinks. Several more stationed themselves along the rows and chairs and began a rhythmic clapping. The rest of them wheeled platforms of furniture, urns, statues, and boxes onto the stage. Two eight-foot-high stone vases stood to the forefront. Two sturdy guys hefted one up and rotated it around. It was like the first act of Fiddler on the Roof.

  The lead auctioneer brought the microphone close to his mouth and said in a low, thrilling tone:

  “Both of this fine pair of limestone planters are for sale, for one-money, one-money, one-money. Do I hear five hundred and a little bit more?”

  The auctioneer was generic of his kind, middle-aged, middle-sized, with a bit of a potbelly and a cheerful grin. Like the adult half of the staff at the World of Art Auction Mart, he was dressed like a down-market riverboat gambler: red canvas vest, white shirt, black trousers, and a skinny black tie. The kids that lugged the sale items wore jeans, tennis shoes, and baggy red T-shirts labeled ONE WORLD in eight-inch-high iron-on letters.

  The verbal cadence was hypnotic. Bree was disoriented by the shouting, the background music, and the bursts of applause from the auctioneer’s assistants, meant to jolt the audience into bidding. She sat up a little straighter in the folding chair, to get rid of the feeling she was trapped in a TV game show among people who knew her even though she didn’t know them.

  “Do I hear four-fifty, four-fifty, four-fifty and a little bit more?”

  Antonia raised her numbered paddle and called out, “Twenty dollars!” As loud as her sister was—and Antonia had trained with some pretty good coaches in her pursuit of a stage career—nobody noticed until she leaped to her feet and bellowed, “Twenty-five dollars,” louder than Patti Lupone bellowing “Everything’s Comin’ Up Roses” in Gypsy.

  “Thank you very much,” said the auctioneer, unflapped at the insult implicit in Antonia’s rock- bottom bid. “Do I hear fifty, fifty, fifty and a little bit more?”

  Antonia stuck her chin out and got down to business. After a spirited exchange of bellows, she nailed the limestone urns for forty-five dollars and settled into her chair with a satisfied grin. “Am I good, or what?”

  “Or what,” Bree said. “It’s because you’re louder than God and terrified the poor man into submission. What are you going to do with those urns, anyhow?”

  Antonia followed the removal of the urns to the holding area with a watchful eye. “It’s for George Bernard Shaw,” she said darkly. “Otherwise known as Greatly Boring Shaw. I told you we’re doing Pygmalion at the Savannah Rep, didn’t I? We were supposed to be doing My Fair Lady, right? I would have nailed an audition for the singing Eliza. But no. John Allen Cavendish himself thought we should go back to the original Shaw. So we are. And let me tell you—that old Victorian had a mania for scenes on lawns and terraces. Also a mania for putting anyone under thirty to sleep, which is me, of course, and even you, although just barely.” She glowered. “I’ll have to kill you if you tell anybody I said that. About Shaw. Not about the fact you’re practically thirty. Anyhow, the urns will give the terrace a nice English manor house look even if they were made in China three weeks ago. I’ll stuff them full of fake ivy.” Suddenly, she clutched her head and groaned. “I’ve just got to move on from this, Bree. The tech managing part, I mean. I love anything to do with the theater, you know that. But I want to act!”

  Bree didn’t give her sister a sympathetic pat, although she wanted to. Antonia had spent most of the last week happily memorizing huge chunks of Shavian dialogue for the previous day’s audition, and it’d been a bust. She auditioned faithfully for a role in each new production and it looked as if she was going to remain assistant stage manager for quite a while. Unless she could convince Tully O’Rourke she should be part of her newly resurrected Shakespeare Players.

  “So,” Bree said brightly. “Did you get what you needed? Can we think about bumping into Tully O’Rourke and then going home?”

  Antonia rolled her eyes. “Like, hello? Did you hear me mention fake ivy?”

  “Right.” Bree settled back with a sigh and took a sip of iced tea. The World of Art Auction Mart was still keeping potential bidders happy. Those employees not engaged in clapping and hauling continued to pass around trays of sweet rolls, cold drinks, and fruit salad. The tea was brewed, not powdered, and tasted faintly of lemon, which made it more than palatable, but she hoped the fake ivy was coming up for bid pretty soon so they could get on with the O’Rourke estate.

  Up on stage, three burly guys held a brocaded settee over their heads and rotated it in unison so that bidders could see it from all sides. There wasn’t a tendril of fake ivy in sight.

  Bree drifted into a light doze. She’d settled her last case several days before, but it had required some heavy-duty nights, and she hadn’t caught up on her sleep. Beside her, Antonia slumped down in her chair and brooded. She roused when Antonia elbowed her in the side and hissed, “Wake up!”

  Bree sat up and suppressed a yawn. “What’s the matter?”

  “I’ve been thinking,” Antonia said gloomily.

  Bree glanced at her. The last time her sister sounded this depressed, she’d gone to work as a pizza delivery person and gained thirteen pounds in three weeks.

  Antonia bit her thumbnail and stared unseeingly into the distance. “Maybe I wasn’t cut out for the Savannah Rep. Or Tully O�
��Rourke’s Shakespeare company. You’re right. Maybe we should just go home and I should go back to delivering pizzas.”

  Bree set her plastic cup carefully on the floor at her feet. Her sister was volatile—always had been. This self-doubt wasn’t new. There was nothing their parents wanted more than to see Antonia settled happily into a secure, rewarding life. The theater was at the bottom of their list, and her mother, especially, would have seen this fit of the glums as an opportunity to get Antonia back into school. Bree herself just wanted to see her sister happy and she didn’t think a career of unsuccessful auditions would make anybody happy. If Antonia was serious about giving up the theater, she had to be careful. “You were perfect for the part,” Bree said. “John Allen must have been insane to cast somebody else.”

  “Which part?” Antonia asked skeptically.

  “Eliza,” Bree said promptly. “And Irene Adler, before that.” She waved her arm in a grand gesture. “All of them.”

  Antonia shook her head. But she smiled.

  “You’re gorgeous. You’re talented. You’re superb. But!”

  “But?”

  “But maybe you want to think about finishing your degree before you commit to the stage full-time.” Bree held her hand up. “Just wait. Have you thought about ageism?”

  “Ageism?”

  “Sure. You know what I think? I think you’re a victim of ageism. John Allen Cavendish knows you’re twenty-two, and these parts you’ve been auditioning for are for much older—Ow!” Bree rubbed her arm. “I’ve warned you about pinching. Haven’t I warned you about pinching?”

  “Look who just walked in!”

  “I don’t care if it’s the pope,” Bree said crossly. “Where do you get off pinching me like that?”

  “That’s Tully O’Rourke! She’s here!” Antonia looked rattled. “Gosh. I didn’t actually think she’d show up. And—I don’t believe it! Do you see who’s with her?!” This time she pinched Bree really hard, just above the elbow. Bree hated being pinched.

  “It’s Aunt Cissy!”

  “Oh?” This was not enough to justify battery, in Bree’s opinion. “And my opinion is worth something,” she said aloud, “given my law degree and all.”

  “Hush up.” Antonia’s fit of depression was gone, melted like snow in July. She quivered with excitement. “Of course Cissy’s going to come through for me! She’s always smack in the middle of anything that really matters in this town.”

  Bree left off rubbing her arm—Hell would freeze over before Antonia apologized, and it’d freeze over twice before she promised never to do it again—and turned in her chair and watched Tully O’Rourke pick her way down the aisle to the front row seats.

  Like a lot of celebrities, she was smaller in person than on the TV news channels. But she was unmistakable. Her hair had gone completely white in her midtwenties, and it cupped her cheeks in a severe bob in a look that hadn’t changed for thirty years. Her eyebrows were dark, her eyes darker, and she wore her signature gold choker close around her throat. She was thin, too, but without the sinewy gym look. She chatted in a languid way to Cecilia Carmichael, who chatted animatedly back. Aunt Cissy, who was blonde, and even thinner than Tully, did look like a gym rat, mainly because she was one. She practically lived at the Athletic Club. She was their mother’s youngest sister and all of the Carmichael charm and softness had disappeared with Cissy’s second husband, who in turn had disappeared with his much younger secretary some years ago.

  “I just told you that I’m not cut out for the Savannah Rep, didn’t I?” Antonia shone in the overstuffed, overcrowded confines of the warehouse. Her sister was beautiful—Bree had been truthful about that, if less truthful about her acting talent—and when she was alight with enthusiasm, she was flat-out gorgeous: blue eyes, auburn hair, and camellia-petal skin. “What I am cut out for is the Savannah Shakespeare Players.”

  “Oh, my,” Bree said.

  “Even you have to agree it was the best rep theater outside of the Royal Shakespeare Company.”

  “What do you mean, ‘even’ me?”

  Antonia patted her arm in a kindly way. “You’re so caught up in your cases that I’m amazed you even know it’s November.”

  Her new career defending the dead had been absorbing all of her time lately. This was absolutely true. But you’d have to be living on the moon not to know about the Shakespeare Players. Russell O’Rourke and his wife had been patrons of the usual charities when they lived in New York—the Met, MoMA, and the New York City Ballet—but their most famous excursion into the arts was the subsidy of the Savannah Shakespeare Players. Under the direction of a very hot, very talented young Egyptian director named Anthony Haddad, the Players’ productions of Hamlet, Shrew, and the Henrys had gotten amazing reviews. The Players had collapsed, of course, with the bankruptcy of O’Rourke Investment Bank.

  Antonia grabbed Bree’s hand. “What was that you just said? About the ageism thing? That I’m too young for those old fogey plays John Allen Cavendish loves to death? Well, whoo-ee, sister, I’m exactly the right age for the kind of plays the Savannah Players are going to stage. Modern. Cutting edge. A marriage of high tech and high drama. Stuff that London and New York have never seen before.”

  “I thought the Shakespeare Players would put on, well, Shakespeare,” Bree said.

  “Are you crazy? How old is Juliet? Viola? Portia?”

  “Fifteen, twenty-six, and thirty-four,” Bree said, who had no idea but was willing to guess.

  “Bull,” Antonia said inelegantly. “The average life span of a person in Renaissance Europe was twenty-seven. Heck, Bree, I’m practically too old for the parts.”

  “Well, that’s a point.”

  “I heard she’s putting ten million dollars into the Players,” Antonia said in an awed undertone. “And I work cheap.”

  “I wonder where she got the money.”

  “Her husband was rich.”

  “Her husband went bankrupt. All the assets of O’Rourke Investment Bank were seized by the feds.”

  Antonia shrugged. “Insurance?”

  “Maybe.” Bree wasn’t an expert in bankruptcy law, but the feds should have seized the policy along with the furniture.

  Bree nudged her sister. “That older guy she’s with looks familiar. I think that’s Rutger VanHoughton. Maybe it’s his money.”

  Tully and her entourage had paused at the foot of the auctioneer’s stage and turned to survey the audience. She and Cissy were trailed by two men in gray slacks, blue blazers, and cotton shirts and a browbeaten young black woman with the air of a hyperefficient assistant. Bree recognized the taller, older man from coverage in the Wall Street Journal. Rutger VanHoughton was Dutch, a banker, and one of the superrich who’d survived the volatilities of the international financial markets. He had white-blond hair, intense blue eyes, and a boxer’s body. There was something in the stance of the younger man with him that reminded Bree of Tully herself. She poked Antonia again and whispered, “They had a son, didn’t they? The O’Rourkes?”

  Antonia shrugged.

  “I’m pretty sure they do. Did. Whatever. He’s Russell the Second. I think they call him Fig.”

  “Fig?” Antonia leaned forward a little. “Looks like a spoiled brat.”

  “Like you can tell,” Bree said.

  “Actors,” Antonia said, “are good at sizing people up instantly. It’s part of our craft.”

  Aunt Cissy caught sight of them and waved wildly. Antonia waved enthusiastically back. Cissy nudged Tully and said something. For a brief moment, Tully’s eyes rested on Antonia and Bree. She bent her head sideways and, without directly addressing the young black woman who trailed behind her, spoke briefly.

  “Her assistant,” Antonia said. “I’m good at sizing up occupations, too.”

  Bree slouched back in her chair, shoved her feet under the chair in front of her, and sighed. Antonia leaned forward eagerly, her eyes locked on the group as they settled themselves in the front row seats. “S
o what do you think? I mean, I know her husband went bankrupt and all, but these superrich types are good at squirreling money in the Caymans and places like that. I’ll bet she’s got the bucks and I’ll bet she’s going to use them.”

  “She’s raising ten million dollars, from what I heard, not funding the whole thing herself,” Bree said in a near whisper. “She hasn’t actually said she’d put her own money into the Players. She got whacked by the SEC for lying about her participation in some of her husband’s other business schemes, so she’s being pretty careful now. I wonder if she thinks Cissy’s going to cough up a pile.” Like Bree’s mother, Cissy had been left a respectable fortune by the grandparents. “But I’ll bet you the Dutchman’s involved in some way.”

  VanHoughton’s bright blue glance met hers, and he smiled. Then he sat down next to Tully and put his arm casually over the back of her chair.

  Tully sat with her straight, tailored back facing them. The auctioneer, with a stiff nod in Tully’s direction, signaled the start of bidding again, this time on a huge oil painting of Oglethorpe Square in Old Savannah.

  Bree wasn’t sure what she should do when the O’Rourke assets came up for bid. She paged through the catalog. The desk was part of a lot that contained almost all of O’Rourke’s home office: a fine rosewood credenza, a set of worn leather chairs, a box of odds and ends, and a surprisingly utilitarian gray metal filing cabinet.

  The auctioneer disposed of an imitation Louis Quatorze lounge, a ten-foot resin replica of the Sphinx at Giza, and a large silk ficus before he got to the O’Rourke collection. First up was a twenty-six-piece set of Rosenthal china. The reserve was at eight thousand dollars. Tully opened the bidding at five thousand and dropped out at seven. The bidding reached eight and then stalled. The lot went to a quiet, gray-suited man in the last row of seats. The pattern was repeated each time an O’Rourke lot came up for bid. Tully started the bidding, dropped out just before the reserve was reached, and then sat in equable silence as the lot went to the man in the corner.

  Antonia nudged her sharply in the side. “What’s the matter with you?”