Three
Hated by fools, and fools to hate,
Be that my motto, and my fate.
—“To Dr. Delany, on the libels written against him,” Jonathan Swift
Sasha whirled around and thrust himself at Bree. Both of them fell backward onto the sofa. The dog jumped awkwardly into her lap and for a moment, between the hundred-plus pounds of dog on her chest and stomach and her astonishment, she couldn’t breathe. She placed both hands on the dog’s muscular chest and shoved hard. “You’re goin’ to screw up that leg! Will you get off !”
Sasha stuck his nose under her arm and growled.
Bree made a huge effort to pull herself together. “I’m close to losing my temper,” she said mildly. “I’m going to count to three. By the time I get there, you’d better settle down.”
Sasha brought his head up and panted heavily into her face. Bree found herself panting, too.
Abruptly, the door buzzer shrilled. Sasha turned his head, hopped onto the rug, and limped to the front door, his ears pinned back. The buzzer sounded again. Bree got to her feet, tugged her T-shirt into place, and followed him. Her heart thudded hard in her chest and she was dismayed to find her legs trembly. There had been something horrible about that face. Just like the face in the graveyard. She took a deep, deliberate breath and quelled the impulse to root around in the closet for her baseball bat before she opened the door. She looked through the security hole. She snorted and looked down at the dog.
“It’s the UPS man. Or woman, rather.”
Sasha’s ears went up.
“You might guess from the tone of my voice that I’m not all that pleased about your behavior. Now, the poor girl shouldn’t have tapped at the French doors like that, to be sure. But don’t you think you overreacted just a little bit?”
Sasha’s tail wagged back and forth.
“If you’re thinking that maybe I overreacted a bit, you’re darn right.”
Sasha cocked his head.
“Will you lie down and behave?”
Sasha flopped awkwardly to the floor. Bree opened the door. The outside air was soft, damp, and smelled strongly of burnt matches. A large cardboard box sat on the doormat. The girl from UPS was already halfway down the walk, headed back to her truck. Bree called “thank you” after her retreating back.
Hesitantly, she stepped onto the small cement square that served as a front porch, and peered into the dark. Nothing. Familiar noises from Market Street drifted up toward her. She rubbed both her arms, to drive off the unnatural cold, then picked up the box and brought it in.
It was fairly heavy. When Bree shook it, the contents slid very little. She placed it on the dining room table. The address read: Brianna Winston-Beaufort, Esq, and the return address made her exclaim with pleasure. “Professor Cianquino,” she said. “You know who that is, dog? My law advisor, from Duke. He retired the same year I took the bar. He’s got a nice little apartment just outside Savannah, on the river. If you behave well enough for me to keep you around, you’ll meet him.”
Sasha pawed at a dining room chair and poked his nose inquisitively into the air. Bree peeled the packing tape back from the edges and opened it.
The contents were tightly packed. There was a small envelope on top, and a brand new cell phone still in the package. The rest of the box held stationery. She opened the envelope first. The card inside had Cianquino’s name embossed on the front: Armand Cianquino, Triad Professor of History of Law Emeritus. A line of small print at the bottom read: Act Uprightly, 5:11. The handwritten message inside merely said: So battle is enjoined, my dear Bree! With affection, Armand.
Bree pulled the contents out, one by one. There were two reams of letterhead, a package of number ten envelopes, a shrink-wrapped set of preprinted address labels, and a hundred legal-sized envelopes with the return address on the upper left hand corners. She opened the small square box that held the business cards and looked thoughtfully at the design.
Brianna Winston-Beaufort 66 Angelus (555) 567-9561
The font was attractive, if a little stuffy; a variety of Edwardian script, maybe. She wasn’t at all sure about the raised gold logo. Should a lawyer even have a logo? It was a pair of feathery wings cupping a justice scale. As for the cell phone that was obviously the source of the telephone number on the stationery ... Professor Cianquino was clearly eager to give her a running start on an actual caseload.
This was just plain weird. Professor Cianquino wasn’t into encouragement of his students before or after they graduated, and was, in fact, notoriously unsympathetic to human emotion of any kind. His twin gods were logic and reason. And here she was, his dear Bree? With a pile of expensive, unwanted stationery as a sort of office warming gift and a quote from the Koran from a guy who subscribed to the sayings of Confucius if he had any kind of religion at all. And how did he know her temporary office address? She’d just rented the space this morning.
And then there was the gift of the cell phone.
Bree picked up the package. It was the latest Apple, equipped with the kind of bells and whistles that encouraged messing around with the hot technology instead of getting any work done. She’d had her eye on this model, but she had a perfectly good cell phone of her own. Unlike the stationery, she could give this back to Professor Cianquino with heartfelt thanks for the thought. And a little white lie that she had one already.
The cell phone box played the opening bars of “O Thou That Tell’st Good Tidings to Zion,” which Bree could identify only because she’d had to sing it at the St. Christopher’s Episcopal Church Christmas pageant when she was sixteen. The first few bars played over and over again. O thou that tell’st ... O thou that tell’st ... until Bree stuck her fingers in her ears and yelled “Aagh!” so that she didn’t have to hear it anymore.
The ring stopped, finally, and through the layers of cardboard, Bree heard the automated message reply: You have reached Ms. Winston-Beaufort’s message service. Please leave your name, number, and a detailed message after the tone.
Then the quavering, confused voice of an old, old man. “Damn! Where in hell do they put the people?” He cleared his throat and bellowed, “Is there a confounded human bean at t’other end of this line? This is Benjamin Skinner. And I want me a goddamn person. And after I get that person, I want me a lawyer!”
The dial tone sounded. Benjamin Skinner hung up.
Bree stared at the box. Benjamin “Blackheart” Skinner—if it actually was Benjamin “Blackheart” Skinner—was Georgia’s most reclusive billionaire. He had a lifelong habit of relieving major corporations of closely held assets. “Which makes him, dog, the richest man in Georgia, if not the entire United States of America, as well as the meanest. At least for right now. So why is he calling me?” There wasn’t any friendly “woof” in reply. Bree looked under the table. Sasha was curled up on the carpet, fast asleep.
Not more than a week away from her family’s clutches and reduced to asking a dog for advice. “And even if you could give me any, you look so plain pitiful it’d be a shame to wake you up.” She got up. She needed a glass of wine and a to-do list, in that order. The wine would calm her down, and the to-do list would help make sense of the questions banging around in her head like so many bumper cars at the county fair.
Or she could call Mr. Skinner back on Professor Cianquino’s cell phone and get the two biggest questions answered right now:
Why did you call me, and not some white shoe law firm that’s been practicing law in Savannah since the Civil War?
And what do you want?
She glanced at the clock over the fireplace mantel; nine thirty. Too late to call Professor Cianquino, although clearly not too late for Mr. Skinner. She remembered an article about him in Forbes magazine. In addition to being pathologically camera-shy, he was a notorious night owl, supposedly existing on two to three hours of sleep at night. “Not that I believe that for a New York minute,” Bree muttered. All that told her was the man had a PR firm so powerful it could spin the toughest journalist. She sat at the table, sliced the cellophane covering the box with the tip of her fingernail, and opened it up. She paused and bit her lip.
The cell phone was wrapped in its component parts, just as it’d come from the factory.
The charger was in a sealed plastic bag. So was the phone. And so was the battery.
So how had the call come through? For that matter, why had she heard the automated reply?
She pressed the “send” button through the plastic bag. The little screen stayed dark. The phone itself was mute. Very curious now, Bree put the phone together and turned it on. The screen glowed. A text message appeared: “Missed Call.” Bree clicked on “send” and a phone number appeared on the screen, identified as “The Skinner.” She pressed “send” again. It rang three times before it was picked up, and a young male voice demanded, “Who’s this?”
“This is Brianna Beaufort,” Bree said, with more than a trace of annoyance. “I’m an attorney. Who’s this?”
“Jesus,” the voice said in disgust. Then, to someone near to him, “They’re circling already.” His voice came back on the line. “Call in the morning. Better yet, don’t call at all.”
Bree bit her lip, hard, which helped her manage to say politely, “I’m sorry to trouble you, sir. I’m returning a call from my cell phone, from a man who identified himself as Benjamin Skinner. May I speak to him?”
“This is Grainger Skinner, his son. Mr. Skinner isn’t available,” he said flatly. “If you have business with the family, I suggest you wait until tomorrow.”
“Mr. Skinner wanted to talk to me right away,” Bree said courteously. “Would you tell him that I returned his call as soon as I could?”
“Wasn’t soon enough, Ms. Beaufort. Turn on the news. Mr. Skinner died this afternoon at his home on Tybee Island.”
Bree’s face went hot with an immediate, profound embarrassment. Skinner’s call was a joke. A prank. Someone was jerking her chain, big-time. She wanted to crawl under the table and sit next to Sasha. Instead, she managed a deep breath and to stutter, “Sir, I am deeply sorry to have troub—” before the brusque and justifiably irritated Skinner, junior, shut her off.
It’d be rubbing salt in the wound to turn on the ten o’clock news and get the particulars of Benjamin Skinner’s death. She poured herself a glass of wine and settled on the sectional to watch as a kind of penance.
All of the stations led off with the story. There wasn’t any question about it. Eighty-four-year-old Benjamin “Blackheart” Skinner had keeled over from a catastrophic heart attack while sailing with his son and daughter-in-law and drowned in the coastal waters of the Atlantic. They’d hauled him back to the thirty-thousand-foot mansion he’d built on Tybee Island, but, as the perky news anchor said energetically, “All efforts at resuscitation failed.”
Enough time had gone by for reporters to nail down a few interviews with Skinner’s associates. Death hadn’t done much to improve the business world’s opinion of him. Comments came from Douglas Fairchild, his politely dubious partner in local construction projects, “You’re sure he’s really gone? Bennie’s a tricky son of a (bleep!), God bless him.” Carlton Montifiore, the overtly hostile plaintiff in Skinner’s latest and most notorious lawsuit, snapped, “A heart attack? Fat chance. The (bleep!) didn’t have a heart.”
On the other hand, Skinner’s departure was sincerely regretted by a silicone-enhanced blonde occupying the penthouse at a condo development called Island Dream. These multimillion-dollar luxury condos fronting the ocean on Tybee Island were one of Skinner’s newest projects. “He loved me,” Chastity McFarland breathed at the TV cameras. “And he would have wanted me to have the best. This apartment, f’instance. When he left me this morning, he was on his way to the lawyers to get me the deed. What I’ve got here is a verbal contract.” She glared into the cameras. “And I’m not moving one (bleeping!) inch. I got my rights, see. And if you ask me”—she leaned forward, giving the person behind the camera a good look at her cleavage—“it was murder!”
The station ran a months-old clip featuring Skinner himself—a thin, blue-suited figure with a newspaper held up his face to keep the cameras away. He’d emerged victorious from the Chatham County Courthouse after yet another class action suit over lead paint in his New York slums. His lawyer, John Stubblefield, offered “no comment.” Skinner dropped the newspaper, his bright blue eyes glaring into the camera. He snarled, “You want a comment? I’ll give you a comment. I told those bozos they could shove it up their (bleep!) when they first tried to sue the pants off’n me.” The newspaper shielding his face quivered as he chuckled. “So our great justice system done it for me.”
The camera cut to the perky blonde reporter standing on the beach at Tybee Island. Behind her rose a multistory condominium. The pink stucco wall at the entrance sported a sign that read: ISLAND DREAM. “Benjamin Skinner’s death is only the latest in a series of problems that have plagued the multimillion-dollar Island Dream. Early this morning, county building inspector Rebus Kingsley plunged to his death from the penthouse . . .”
With a brief “poor soul” for the unfortunate Rebus Kingsley, Bree switched the TV off and thought about Benjamin Skinner.
He had a distinctive voice. Raspy, high-pitched, easy to imitate. She frowned at the blank screen. Who’d set her up? And why?
The “who” part was easy. There was only one person who made a part-time career out of making her crazy.
“Antonia,” she said crossly.
Her tone of voice jerked Sasha out of a sound sleep. He raised his head, thumped his tail anxiously on the floor, then thudded over to the couch and put his head on her knee.
“You haven’t met her, dog. Antonia’s my adorable little sister.”
She had Antonia’s number on speed dial. She glanced at her watch. Quarter to eleven. Antonia had a bit part in the current revival of Oklahoma! at the Richmond Hill Community Theater. The cast should have finished up the final “Okla-Okla-Homa-Homa” fifteen minutes ago. She caught her sister on the third ring.
“Breenie!”
“Don’t call me Breenie,” Bree said automatically. “Where are you?”
“At the theater.”
“I know you’re at the theater. Where are you in the theater?”
“Headed out to Tybalt’s for the cast party. This was our last night. We only had one curtain call, Bree. And I thought they were going to give us a standing ovation, but no-o-o. Do you know why half the audience stood up?”
“To get a head start on the traffic,” Bree said.
“To get a head start on the traffic,” Antonia agreed in indignation. “I mean, here we are, dancing and singing our little guts out, and all those folks want to do is get to bed early. I ask you. Whatever happened to common courtesy? Whatever happened to decent manners? Doesn’t anybody care about craft anymore? On top of that, it’s not even nice.”
“Speaking of common courtesy, speaking of good manners, speaking of nice,” Bree said, suddenly furious. “I do not in any way, shape, or form appreciate the little joke you played on me.”
“What little joke?”
“I have two words: Benjamin Blackheart Skinner.”
“That’s three words. And who’s he?”
“I suppose that you and Professor Cianquino couldn’t know he was going to up and die on me,” Bree said, conceding that, at least. “But the old geezer did, this afternoon, and of course I called him back, and of course I got somebody from the family and I was absolutely, totally humiliated.” Bree felt herself choke up. She wasn’t surprised. What with the tortured dog, the weird little old lady at the cemetery, the police, and the scare put into her by the UPS delivery woman, she’d had a pretty bad day. “It wasn’t funny!”
“Are you crying?” Antonia demanded. “Bree, I can count the times you’ve cried because you were sad since high school on one hand. Well, maybe two,” she conceded. “There was the breakup with Payton the Rat. And when the old dog Sunny passed on. Now, if you count the times you cry when you’re totally pissed off, that’s another kind of crying altogether and doesn’t truly count. I’d have to be a centipede to keep count of those.”
“Just chill for a minute, okay?” Bree scrounged in the pocket of her jeans for a tissue and blew her nose. “I’ve had a long day, that’s all. And I wanted to let you know that your little joke backfired.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about. Honestly. Whatever it is, you want to tell me about it? You want me to skip the cast party and drive on over?”
“It’s hours to Savannah and it’s going on to eleven. No, I don’t want you to drive on over. Besides, haven’t you got class tomorrow?”
“School,” Antonia said thoughtfully, and then clammed up.
Bree rolled over the silence on the other end of the phone, noting, in passing, that it was a guilty kind of silence. Her aggravating little sister had probably dropped out of another school. This would send their parents into fits. Bree wasn’t going to worry about that now. “You’re telling me you didn’t get together with Professor Cianquino and set this up?”
“You mean that old geezer from law school? I haven’t seen him since you had the third-year reunion out at the house.”
“Don’t call him a geezer,” Bree said. “And that’s exactly who I mean. And why did you think I wouldn’t want to pick out my own stationery?”
“Why don’t you start by telling me what’s going on,” Antonia said, suddenly practical.
Bree told her.
“No! Of all the skunky things to do. And the old fart kicked off this afternoon? Holy gee. Well, it wasn’t me. I’m insulted that you thought it was.” Antonia sighed, her voice gentle. “It was a mean old trick to play on you, sister. I’m truly sorry.”
“If it wasn’t you, who, then?” Bree demanded.
“Gee, I don’t know. Try Payton the Rat? Nothing like an ex-boyfriend with vengeance in his heart.”
“Payton,” Bree said. “Good glory. You might be right.” That relationship had ended badly. It even went some way toward explaining why Professor Cianquino let Payton buy the phone, as he must have done. Payton graduated magna cum laude the same year she did. Professor Cianquino had a genuine respect for brilliance. And he wouldn’t have known about the breakup, which had been all of three weeks ago.
“You still there?” Antonia demanded. “If it was Payton, are you going to get mad and go after him with a garden rake?”
“I’m still here. And if it was Payton, I’m not going to go after him with any kind of gardening tool.”
“You went after that shoplifter at Home Depot with a garden rake,” Antonia reminded her.
“He knocked over that little kid on his way out the door,” Bree reminded her. “And I’m so over losing my temper these days it isn’t funny.” She stuffed the tissue back into her jeans pocket. “Sorry about bein’ weepy. I guess I lost my professional cool.”
“Save it for the clients,” Antonia advised. “Nobody’s better at professional cool than you. But you can cry into my ear any old time.”
“Okay. Thanks.”
“Of course, nobody’s better at losing it than you, either.”
“You can stop there right now,” Bree said.
“Forget the garden rake. Remember that time you dived over the desk at that guy in moot court? Had him by the throat in two seconds flat, that’s what I heard.”
“You heard wrong.”
“And they suspended you for how long?” Antonia asked innocently.
“A day. And I apologized. Actually, I crawled like a slug and ate dirt,” Bree said ruefully. “But that was years ago, and have I pulled a stunt like that again? No, I have not.”
“And I think I will drive on over, if you don’t mind. I was thinking about comin’ to stay with y’all for a few days anyhow. And it sounds like you need a hand settling in.”
“I do mind. And I don’t need a thing,” Bree said firmly. “I’ll stop in to see Professor Cianquino tomorrow, and he can clear this up. And then I’ve got a pile of people to interview to set the office up. You get on back to UNC.”
“School,” Antonia said in that thoughtful way. “About school.”
“You drop out of UNC, you’re going to have both Mom and Dad on your back like fleas on a hedgehog. And don’t count on me to stop them.”
“So much for sisterly solidarity.”
“You finish up your degree,” Bree said, “you might end up knowing how to spell it, at least.”
Antonia clicked off with a derisive shriek.
Bree swallowed the last of her wine, and addressed the dog. “We’re going to think about this tomorrow.”
She took a hot shower, pulled on an oversized T-shirt, and got ready for bed. She was drifting off to sleep when the face at the French windows popped up in her mind’s eye like a card trick. She sat up, suddenly chilled. It hadn’t been the UPS woman. She was sure of it. It’d been a man’s face on the other side of the glass, with the coldest blue eyes she’d ever seen, wrapped in a graveyard shroud.