Book Excerpt

Avenging Angels: Chapter One

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Turn the key deftly in the oiled wards/And seal the hushed casket of my soul.
When I Have Fears, John Keats

Brianna Winston-Beaufort wasn’t interested in antiques, particularly, but the desk really was a beautiful old piece. Made of dark, hand-rubbed cherry, the desk had legs that ended in hand-turned lion’s paws. The top was inlaid with fine-grained leather, edged with a hairline of gold leaf. Gold-leaf bees danced in a fanciful design in the center. The auction people had set it on a raised dais, but it was crowded on all sides by the sheer weight of the other stuff due to be auctioned off.

Bree flipped through the auction catalogue and found the desk listed on a page all to itself. _(Probable) Empire campaign desk, circa 1809. May have carried by Napoleon Bonaparte in the Egypt campaign of 1814. _

An old silver inkstand sat to the right of the golden bees, and a cloisonné jar with a jade lid sat to left.

“Gorgeous,” Antonia said. “I think this is part of the lot that Tully O’Rourke’s trying to buy back from her husband’s estate.” She cocked her head speculatively. “It might even be the desk where he shot himself. Russell O’Rourke, that is.”

“Ugh” Bree said. Her sister had a ghoulish side. “So we should make a bid on it when it comes up?”

“Don’t be a jerk,” Antonia said crossly. “I’m here to…well…just sort of make contact with the widow.”

“No!” Bree said in feigned surprise. “I thought you were here to pick up some inexpensive stuff for your theater group.”

Antonia was the stage manager for the Savannah Repertory Theater. It had been her brilliant idea to attend the auction for the ostensible purpose of picking up props for the theater’s upcoming winter season. The O’Rourke estate was part of a larger (and much cheaper) sale of various items from the World of Art Auction Mart. Yesterday’s sudden announcement that the auction was to be held early Sunday morning had swept through Savannah’s gossip mills like brushfire. Bree’s Aunt Cecilia had called Antonia, Antonia had called Savannah Rep’s finance guy and talked him into handing over a modest budget, and here they were.

“You know perfectly well why we’re here. Aunt Cissy promised to introduce me if we just happen to run into each other here, and how can I pass up a chance like this? But I’ll tell you this! Trying to grab her dead husband’s desk out from under her nose isn’t going to make the best impression on Tully.” Antonia poked fretfully at her hair. “I don’t know why you insisted on dragging along with me, anyhow.”

“Well, here’s a fine thing,” Bree said indignantly. “This is the first Sunday I’ve had off in weeks. I’m only here because you flat-out begged me to come.”

“I don’t want Tully to think I’m trolling for a job.”

“You are trolling for a job.”

“Hush up. Somebody will hear you.”

Bree rolled her eyes. She could be jogging along the Savannah River with her dog Sasha. She could be drinking a nice cool glass of white wine at Huey’s. She could even be catching up on back copies of the Law Review. Instead she was stuck indoors with a couple of hundred gawkers all trying to catch a glimpse of the notorious Tully O’Rourke and maybe grab a piece of the bankrupt estate. And on top of it, she had to put up with the company of her aggravating little sister.

Rumors about Tully O’ Rourke had been flying around Savannah for weeks. The widow had recovered both her composure and a pile of insurance money after her late husband’s headline-grabbing suicide. The most persistent rumor—and the one most important to Antonia—was that she had decided to bring back the internationally-known The Shakespeare Players to her hometown of Savannah. But first, Tully was going to recover the contents of her several mansions from the bank that had grabbed them at the conclusion of O’Rourke’s bankruptcy.

“And since you did insist on coming along, you might have dressed up a little bit. You’ve got Sasha’s dog hair all over your sweater,” Antonia said. “Honestly. Of all the times to look like an unmade bed.”

Bree brushed futilely at the golden fuzz spread over her sweatshirt and thought about whacking her sister with the auction catalogue. Antonia had changed her outfit three times before they’d set off for the auction house. Then she’d driven Bree to screaming point about whether to wear her dark red hair up in a topknot or cascading down her back. Then she’d slugged back five cups of coffee, sending her nerves into the stratosphere. She dived into her purse for her mirror and checked her makeup every three minutes. At this point, Bree was beyond affectionate exasperation and into serious annoyance. Her little sister was beautiful, no matter how she wore her hair or what kind of t-shirt she put on, and despite the Bobbi Brown lip gloss smeared over her upper lip. Even someone as used to a celebrity-soaked life style as Tully O’Rourke could see that. And Bree was really tired of telling her so.

Antonia’s acting talent was another issue altogether. (Bree loved her sister dearly—but she really wasn’t very good on stage.) There was no way to convince Tully of her talent in Aunt Cissy’s carefully planned chance meeting, unless Tonia engaged in some highly suspect boasting. So that was Bree’s job, should the Great Mrs. O’Rourke actually ask about Antonia’s credentials: to brag on her sister. “Just say you’re my lawyer,” Antonia had said as they set out from their townhouse on Factor’s Walk to the auction house. “Which you would be, actually, if I ever needed one. And when you talk about my reviews in Oklahoma it’d be okay if you didn’t mention it was a high school thing.”

So Bree had spent most of that morning alternating between telling her sister to shut up and threatening to go home.

“You know, ‘Tonia,” she said, as she bent forward to take a closer look at the cherry desk. “This isn’t as much of a waste of time as I thought it’d be. There’s some pretty cool stuff here. Just feel this leather. It’s like silk.” She placed her palm on the desk top and swept her hand past the jar and the inkstand.

Help me!

Bree jumped back, as if burned. The scream was all the more agonizing for being silent.

HELP ME!

The air above the desk top rippled, as if stirred by a witchy hand. Bree took a deep breath, and glanced cautiously around. Antonia had drifted on to look at the contents of a glass-fronted cabinet some thirty feet away. There was a glimpse of people clustered at the far end of the narrow aisle that snaked through the clutch of auction stuff. For the moment, though, she was alone.

The eddy of cold air spiraled upward. Bree reached out to touch the desk again. The air thickened to a gray and white soup.

Let me out. Letmeout. LETMEOUT!

A skeletal hand formed in the middle of the gray and white mist and stretched out imploringly. Bree was never quite sure what to do under these circumstances. Should she try and give the ghostly hand her business card? She wished, not for the first time, that her prospective clients had clearer avenues of communication. Barring face-to-corpse conferences, which circumstances didn’t allow her to do—a phone call would be nice. Email would be even better.

“Mr. O’Rourke?” Bree asked. Then, feeling an obscure obligation to make certain her client knew how to find her, she said. “I’m Brianna Winston-Beaufort. I’m an attorney, and I can help you. My staff of angels and I represent dead souls who need to file appeals about their sentencing. Our office is at 666 Angelus Street here in Savannah. Can you tell me what the trouble is?”

I WANT TO GO HOME!

“Um,” Bree said, in a diplomatic way. “That isn’t possible, of course. But we can certainly try to get you moved to more comfortable quarters. Can you tell me where you’re located right now?” She gritted her teeth. She still wasn’t used to this. If it was Mr. O’Rourke—and who else could it be but the dead financier?—he must have a lot on his conscience. He was somewhere in the higher circles of Hell, she would imagine. And it was very hard to hear him. The clarity of her conversations with her clients was directly affected by interference from the Prosecution. The more static, the greater the crime, and the higher the stakes.

“Sir?” Bree said again.

Help me……I looked back. I looked back.

The hand clenched into a fist, then rotated suddenly and opened up, palm up, fingers splayed like a beggar pleading for alms.

The black and white stutter of light faded away. Bree stood looking at the smooth leather top of the (probable) early 19th century desk of the late Mr. O’Rourke, which held nothing now but the ink stand and the cloisonné jar. She rather liked the jar, which was covered with intricately worked enamel. She didn’t like the fact that she had almost nothing to go on except Mr. O’Rourke’s agonized desire to go home…

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