Nine
Grace me no grace, nor uncle me no uncle.
Othello, William Shakespeare
 
 
 
 
“I ran into Abel Trask today,” Bree said casually. She sat curled up in one of the big wicker chairs that lay scattered across the wide verandah. Francesca perched next to her on the porch swing. Her mother was dressed in her usual fashion when she was at home: a long cotton skirt, a brightly colored tee, and comfortable old loafers. Her bright gold-red hair (recently “refreshed” at a darling new shop in Raleigh, she had informed her daughter) was coiled in a careless way on the top of her head. She wore small gold earrings in the shape of a heart.
Plessey surrounded them both like loving arms. Wisteria vines curled around the porch railings, the leaves a yellowy green. The dried heads of hydrangea clustered among the hedges hugging the brick walls of the house were a creamy beige that only faintly recalled the riotous pink of summer.
The old house stood in the middle of five hundred acres of cotton, and had something of the appearance of an oasis among the wide flat fields. Royal’s great-great grandfather had planted sycamores in the half acre surrounding the house and old outbuildings, and the trees had grown to huge, dignified heights. On this, the last day of October, the last of their leaves provided a minimal shade from the autumnal sun. Two large canvas tents had been erected on the wide front lawn. The whole party area was a hum of activity. White-jacketed waiters set up chairs, smoothed the linens on the two big bars, and fussed with the wooden dance floor that lay open to the sky.
The road was a quarter mile away from the house. Since Bree had last been home, her father had skimmed another coat of blacktop on the long drive, and the lawn on either side had been neatly mowed. She looked down the length of the new tar to the wrought-iron gates, open in welcome, as they always were during the day, and said, “Mamma?”
“Yes. I heard you. Abel Trask.” Francesca fiddled with her hair, and said, suddenly, “You’re looking thin.” Her mother nudged the porch floor with her toe and set the swing going. “Have another one of those shrimp thin gies.”
Bree took another tiny shrimp sandwich from the plate on the wicker table at her elbow. Sasha’s ears went up and he cocked his head at her engagingly. Bree gave him her sandwich.
“How is he? Abel Trask.”
“Fine, or so it seemed. Hasn’t changed much. He has a little gray in his hair.”
“That woman,” Francesca said with an audible snap of her teeth, “would put gray in the hair of the Kaiser.”
Bree wondered if she should ask why the Kaiser, and not, say, some Episcopalian saint, but decided against it. Her mother’s thought processes were a continual delight to her family, but rarely logical.
“Virginia,” Bree said. “He said she’s doing pretty well.”
“Virginia. Yes, indeed.” Francesca lay back in the swing and stared at the porch ceiling. She looked so much like Antonia at that moment! “There are very few things harder than living with long-term illness,” Francesca said. “So I should shut my mouth and hope for glory.” She sat up and fixed her brilliant blue eyes on her oldest daughter. “The two of you have much to say to each other?”
“Not much,” Bree said. “He’s moving to Savannah, I hear.”
“Yes. That nice big brother of his, Charles, that was his name. Well, Charles up and got himself kicked to death by a horse last week. Stands to reason that Abel would step in to help out Missy Trask. That’s what—”
“—brothers are for, yes, Mamma. Kicked to death? That’s not a usual thing.”
“I should hope not.” Francesca rubbed her nose, which was small and pert, like the rest of her. “Maybe he wasn’t kicked to death. Maybe he broke his neck going over a fence. Cubbing’s started,” she added, not all that irrelevantly, since if he had been riding to hounds, Charles Trask very well could have fallen to his death. “Anyhow, yes, we heard. Word like that gets around, of course.” She rocked violently, and then stopped the swing’s motion with a sudden stamp of her foot. “Your father and I always liked him. Abel Trask.”
A short silence fell.
Francesca had never questioned Abel’s abrupt resignation. And after he’d gone, his name never came up in family conversations. It was as if he’d never existed. But Bree remembered that in the weeks after he’d left, her mother had engaged in a sudden flurry of activity: hauling Bree to Charleston to visit one of Bree’s best friends; a series of unwelcome, but pretty, gifts of clothes, shoes, and purses.
If her mother didn’t want to discuss it then, she surely wouldn’t now. Bree gave it up. “Has word gotten around about my wild child client, Mamma?”
“Lindsey?” Her mother’s face cleared into a smile. “Well, now, we haven’t heard much. The Chandlers weren’t Southern originally, you know. They came from the Midwest someplace.” She waved vaguely. “Ohio? Is that right?”
“Iowa, I think,” Bree said. “Ames, to be precise.”
“Anyway, you know what it’s like, their not being local, I mean.”
Bree knew. Her mother was openhearted and open-handed. But even she tended to close ranks to outsiders.
“Besides, they were just the most tight-assed people.”
“Mamma!” Bree couldn’t help but laugh, although a little shocked.
“That was truly vulgar, wasn’t it? I do apologize. But the man was stingy, Bree. He had a stingy heart. You know how much he gave to the Overseas Orphans Fund when Bea Forester asked for a donation? Fifty dollars. Fifty dollars! And the man had an income bigger than the annual revenues of Southern Rhodesia. Or so your father says.” Her face brightened to the glow she kept for Royal Winston-Beaufort and nobody else. “And here he is. You can ask him about those Chandlers yourself, Bree.”
Royal came around the side of the house, walked up the verandah steps, and settled himself into a wicker chair with a sigh. He reached over and gave Bree’s hand a gentle squeeze. “How’s my best girl?”
“Just fine, Daddy.”
Royal Beaufort was tall and thin, with a long, horsey face and a deceptively gentle manner. “Glad you could make it up, darlin’. Looks like we’re going to have ourselves a real party here tonight. Wouldn’t want you to miss it. Now, that sister of yours . . .”
“She’s just desolated she can’t make it,” Bree said promptly. “But she can’t run out on her play.”
“I suppose she can’t.” He sat back and folded his hands over his lean stomach. “So, you’re looking a little worn-out, child, since I saw you last.”
“You saw me last a few weeks ago, and not much has changed since,” Bree said a little tartly.
“You finished up that Skinner case okay?”
“No problems at all. I gave two depositions in evidence. And I got a check from the client.”
“Prompt payers are a blessing,” her father said piously. He winked at her. “So I guess you won’t need a check to tide you over.”
“No, Daddy, I surely won’t.” Bree felt a familiar surge of chagrin, annoyance, and exasperated love. “I’m doing just fine.”
The front door opened, and General’s dark head peeked out onto the porch. “Can I get y’all something? A whiskey soda, Mr. Royal?” He let the screen door shut gently behind him. “And it’s Bree! How’s by you, my girl? We haven’t seen you this age.”
Bree jumped up and gave General a brief, warm hug. She couldn’t remember a time when the old man hadn’t been an important part of their lives. “I’m just home for the weekend, General, but I sure am glad to be here.”
“I musta been out back with them deliveries when you come by,” he said regretfully. “And I see that you ain’t eatin’ enough to feed a birdie. I’ll get you a nice chunk of Adelina’s pecan pie, shall I? Along with that whiskey soda. Glad you’re back where you belong. And you brought that nice dog with you, too. I’ll see about some scraps for him.” He twinkled gently at Sasha and disappeared back into the house.
Bree found herself smiling. Her mother reached over and nudged her. “What?”
“It’s good to be home, Mamma.”
“It’s good to have you home, darlin’.” She clapped her hands briskly. “Now, Royal. My little round of phone calls to make discreet inquires about the Chandlers turned up bukiss.”
Bree and Royal looked at each other. Finally, Bree said, “You mean bubkes, Mamma?”
“Whatever. I didn’t get much of a handle on Probert at all. He kept himself to himself, as the Irish say. A proper Methodist, he seemed to be, and that isn’t much of a compliment when you consider John Knox.”
“Knox was a Presbyterian, Francesca,” Royal said. “But don’t be blaming him, either. What your mother is saying, Bree, is that the man stuck to business and family, and ran the both of them in what might be called a parsimonious way.”
“You’re being gentlemanly, Daddy. Marlowe’s known worldwide for predatory pricing practices. They’re notorious for driving competitors out of business with cut-throat tactics. And they’re perfectly horrible to their suppliers. I know that much from skimming the business pages every day.”
“The liberal press version of the business pages,” Royal murmured. “Now, don’t get your feathers ruffled. Any laissez-faire economy’s bound to have a version of Mar lowe’s. It’s the price of doing business.”
“It doesn’t have to be,” Bree said hotly.
General came back onto the porch with a whiskey soda, a fine slice of pecan pie, and a small, steaming teapot. He handed the drink to Royal and the pie to Bree (who set it aside on the table) and poured a cup of tea for Francesca. He dropped a large hambone at Sasha’s feet, and then went gently away.
Royal put his right leg over his left knee and sipped his drink. “I made a few calls myself, on your young client’s behalf. Did you know Probert had a partner?”
Bree thought a moment. “Yes. I think I did. Lindquist, his name is.”
“John Allen Lindquist. He and Probert were frat brothers at the University of Oregon in the pharmacy program. Lindquist’s kept pretty much in the background all these years, but he carried a lot more weight than you’d guess, just looking at the company from the outside. He’s a registered pharmacist as well as an MD, and has in fact done a whole lot of research into developing generic drugs.”
“That’s where Marlowe’s makes most of its profits, isn’t it?” Bree said. “They have a huge plant down in Ames, I think it is, and they manufacture a lot of the generics themselves.”
“Actually, the largest plants are in China.” Probert held his glass up to the sunlight and gazed appreciatively at the amber color. “Labor’s cheap. No one inquires too much into their employee practices, and so far, no one has imposed a whole lot of tariffs on the imports.”
Francesca cleared her throat loudly. “Isn’t this interesting ?” she said fervently.
Royal grinned at her. “Francesca. Light of my life. If you wish to duck out on this conversation, I can’t blame you one iota.”
“Thank mercy.” Francesca got up in a flurry of skirts. “If I told you talk about some old plant in China was going to be the conversational highlight of my day, I’d be lying like a rug.”
“You’d perk up right enough if you saw what those plants in China are like,” Bree said. “They stick those poor workers in warehouses you wouldn’t want a cat to live in, and they make them pay for the privilege.”
“Now, Bree,” Royal said.
“Sixteen tons,” Francesca said.
Bree, about to spout off like the fountain in their rose garden out back, was abruptly silenced.
“Of course,” Royal said. And then, in a chancy baritone he sang, “Sixteen tons, what d’ya get? Another day older and deeper in debt.”
Francesca chimed in: “St. Peter, don’t you call me, ’cause I can’t go, I owe my soul to the company store.”
“You’re both crazy,” Bree said, laughing.
Royal set his glass down with a flourish and rose to his feet. “Crazy like a fox. Guess who’s coming to the party this afternoon?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Tennessee Ernie Ford’s been dead a while. So, who?”
“John Allen Lindquist was pleased to accept an invitation to Plessey’s annual Guy Fawkes Day Dinner and Dance,” Royal said. “What do you think of that?”
Bree shook her head at them both. Parents. “I think that’s just fine.”
“Then that’s all settled,” Francesca said with satisfaction. “Bree, honey, I have to go check on the caterers and make sure that Adelina isn’t cooking herself dumb and exhausted in the kitchen. And I talked to Antonia this morning. She said you didn’t get a lick of sleep last night. So I want you to trot right on up to your old room and take a nice long nap. I’ll come and wake you up in time to get ready for the party.”
This was the best idea Bree had heard in a week. Her father made his leisurely way down the steps to the front lawn, and Bree followed her mother into the house.
Plessey had been rebuilt as a center-entrance Georgian in the late 1820s, replacing the low-ceilinged cedar wood frame building that had preceded it. The house was three stories, surrounded by verandahs on all three levels. All of the large rooms—the parlor, library, sewing room, and dining room on the main floor, and the bedrooms and sitting rooms on the upper stories—had mullioned double doors that led out onto the porches. When Bree read Pride and Prejudice for high school English, she read about the inside of Mr. Bingley’s home, Nether-field, with a little jolt of recognition.
The ceilings were high and the walls were trimmed top and bottom with crown molding. Francesca had become very interested in the late Georgian period, so she’d gotten rid of the wallpaper and commissioned hand-painted murals in the public rooms. The private rooms for the family and the staff were painted in a variety of bright, cheerful colors like eau de nil, warm persimmon, and cadet blue.
And the house had a smell—one that Bree would have recognized anywhere in the world. It was compounded of lemon floor wax, lavender from Francesca’s potpourri bowls, and a comfortable moldy sort of odor that came from the wood frame itself.
She walked wearily up the main staircase to her old bedroom, Sasha bounding ahead of her. Her mother’s elderly retriever, Beau, lay in front of her parents’ set of rooms, which were directly at the top of the stairs. Beau got stiffly to his feet, wagging his tail slowly. He thrust his head close to Sasha, as if trying to figure out whether he was actually a dog or a fur-coated, four-legged Something Else. Bree had noticed this oddity about Sasha before; other dogs treated him as a noncanine. There weren’t any of the jousting, sniffing, tail-flagging behaviors that happened when two new dogs met one another. Beau greeted Sasha and backed off. Then he did what Bree’d seen other dogs do: he extended his forepaws, bent his graying head, and wagged his tail in the upright position, a classic offer to play.
Bree’s room hadn’t changed since she was six years old and moved out of the nursery and into her own room. A small fireplace occupied the back wall, flanked by a pair of shabby built-in bookshelves. Copies of her best-beloved childhood books were still there: Lad: A Dog; The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe; Philip Pullman’s Dark Materials trilogy; and a whole slew of Anne of Green Gables. Her bed was spindled four-poster, with an ancient patchwork quilt her grandmother Annette had made as a christening present. General had put her briefcase and her overnight bag under her little vanity table.
Bree was too tired to unpack her dress and hang it up in the pine wardrobe. She kicked off her shoes, fell onto the bed, pulled her pillow over her head to shut out the sunlight, and fell into a deep sleep.
She woke to a place she had been to once before. A field of grass so deep and green it felt like velvet beneath her feet. A scent of flowers and nearby water was in the air and the sound of silvery chimes. Bree opened her arms to a bronze flood of sunlight.
A slight hissing in the grass. A cold hand crept around her ankle. A smell of dead, decaying flesh hit her, as if Something had actually gathered the odor up and flung it in her face. Bree shouted, drowning . . .
And woke with a shriek in her throat and the feel of clawed hands around her feet. Sasha’s furious growls assaulted the air. Bree struggled to open her eyes, to get up, to get out, and fell off the bed onto the floor with a thump.
Sasha nudged his head into her side and pushed. Bree sat up slowly, leaned against the bed, and put one arm around his neck. After her breathing slowed, she said, a little hoarsely, “That was some nightmare, Sash.”
She bent forward to rub her ankles, and snatched her hands away. A smear of filth, grave-ridden and corrupt, covered them from palm to wrist. She looked at the smear in horror. She closed her eyes and took a deep, calming breath. Sasha nudged her again. “The professor said he was going to send some help, Sasha. I sure as heck hope it’s soon.”
Bree set her teeth. She struggled to her feet, and clutching Sasha by the collar as if he were a lifeline tossed to a sinking ship, she went to take a shower.
After a long, hot shower that scrubbed away every trace of the filthy hands on her skin, she dressed for the party and sat down in the little rocker next to her fireplace. She was still there when her mother knocked and walked into her room.
Not that little black dress again!” Francesca said in dismay. She clapped her hands over her mouth. “What I meant to say is that you look beautiful, honey. But what about that nice red dress you wore at the open house party a few weeks ago? You looked like a queen in that dress.”
Bree smiled. Her face felt stiff. “It’s still at the cleaner’s. If I’d stopped to think this week, I would have picked it up. But I only decided to come at the last minute, Mamma. There wasn’t time to go fetch it.”
“Well.” Her mother fussed around her. “I do have to say I like the way you’re doin’ your hair. Those braids are brilliant.” She looked at Bree with a soft smile. “Once in a while I miss the old look, though. I know it wasn’t professional to wear it fallin’ down your back. But it was so pretty! So. You ready to come down? You want me to send somebody up with a plate of sandwiches or you want to go down and grab some of that barbecue? People are starting to show up already.”
Bree tucked her arm under her mother’s. “You let me at the barbecue. I can smell it from here.”
She’d slept for several hours. The sun was low, and streaks of pink, orange, and a misty mauve spilled over the lip of the west horizon. White lights twinkled among the branches of the sycamore trees, and the smell of pulled pork and cracklings was mouthwatering. The canvas tents glowed with candlelight from the dining tables. On the opposite side of the low brick wall that separated the house and grounds from the cotton fields, a giant pyre of wood stood stacked and ready for the midnight firing. Once, when Bree was eight or nine, a relative had brought a Guy to throw onto the fire, the way they did in England. One of the brattier Carmichael cousins told Antonia it was a real body. Bree had plunged her hands into the fire to get the Guy out, to stop Tonia’s frantic screams, and Francesca had banned the Guy ever since. She’d dressed Bree’s burns with olive oil and gauze.
The evening was cool. Bree accepted a silvery wrap from her mother to wind around her shoulders. She paused at the top of the steps to the lawn and watched the milling flow of people. Most were old friends. Some were clients of her father’s firm. And more than a few were relatives from both the Winston-Beaufort and Carmichael sides of the family.
Bree spotted Aunt Cissy, waved, and plunged into the crowd.
006
“John Lindquist? I’d like you to meet my daughter Brianna. Up until a few weeks ago, she was a junior associate at the firm. She’s opened her own practice in Savannah now.” Royal clasped Bree’s wrist and gently drew her into the circle of his acquaintances as he spoke. Bree had wandered out to the wall where the pile of dry wood stood waiting for the torch, away from the noise of people chattering and the pianist. She watched her father expertly shepherd a small group of men toward her.
“So I hear.” Lindquist looked like a pharmacist, if pharmacists could be said to have a look. He was very clean and neat, of medium height, with a trim, flat body that spoke of dutiful work at a gym. He looked accurate, that was the word, as if he rarely made mistakes. He had pale blue eyes and a rather remote manner. Bree thought about it, later, and decided that he was a party watcher, as opposed to a party participator. Here was a man who saw little difference between strolling through a museum and talking to actual people.
“How do you do?” Bree extended her hand, and he shook it with an air of mild surprise. Maybe he thought she was an interactive exhibit.
“And you remember Francis and Arnie, Bree.” Bree smiled at two of her father’s golfing buddies, and waited until they had moved away before she turned to talk to Lindquist. He was looking at the pyre. “Pine, mostly? And a bit of cedar.”
Bree blinked. She didn’t know much about wood. “Yes. That is, probably. We collect deadfalls all year long and save them up.” She considered the height of the pile. “My guess is there’s some of the old chicken house in there, too.”
“Mm.” He shook the ice in his glass, and then drained it. “Carolyn tells me you’ve taken on Lindsey’s defense.”
“Carolyn? Carrie-Alice, you mean?”
“She was Carolyn when we were all at school together, and she remains Carolyn to me,” he said, rather pedantically. “She adopted this Carrie-Alice stuff when we decided to move some of our operations to Georgia.”
“So Marlowe’s has a manufacturing plant here, too? I thought most of your divisions were either in Iowa or China.”
“Just a small research facility,” he said. “And the store itself, of course. Both are under my control. Bert liked the area. Cost of living’s good, no state income tax, and what taxes there are, are low. Labor’s cheap, too.”
Mostly the poor, the broke, and the uneducated. A news story from several years before suddenly popped into her head. “And we don’t have as much oversight as some states,” she said. “For our aid to dependent children programs and our food stamp bureau. Weren’t y’all depending on the state welfare programs to make up for the low wages y’all pay your part-timers?” There’d been a memo, she recalled, that urged the local Marlowe’s managers to keep a list of state and federal aid programs on hand. Employees who asked for full-time employment—which would mean minimum medical benefits or more wages—were urged to turn to the state for help rather than to work longer hours and have state labor laws regarding full-time workers kick in.
She couldn’t read Lindquist’s eyes in the low light cast by the lights in the trees, but he said, without heat, “That’s right.” There was so much indifference in his voice, Bree had to make an effort to keep her temper. She shifted her glass of white wine from one hand to the other. “I was hoping you could give me a little guidance, as far as representing Lindsey.”
“Guidance?” he said blankly.
“I’m going to try and mount the best defense I can. And to do that, I need to get some idea of how Lindsey got to this point.”
“And what point would that be?”
The words were more insolent than the tone itself, so Bree said, patiently, “This is a seventeen-year-old girl who seems to have the world by the tail. Her mom and dad are still married after some thirty-odd years. The family’s worth the weight of the Sears Building in gold bullion, but they make a point of avoiding the extravagant lifestyle that brings so many kids of wealthy families into trouble. Her older brother and sister seem to have sane, adult lives, too. Her brother’s on the way up in the company, but it looks as if he has to earn his way. Nothing’s being handed to him because he’s the son of one of the five richest men in the world.” She let a little annoyance creep into her voice; it wouldn’t be a bad thing to rattle this doofus’s cage. “And her sister teaches middle school. Now. Does this sound like the kind of family that would send a teenager off the rails?”
“You seem to know a lot about the family.” He sounded disapproving.
“I have a terrific staff. Especially when it comes to research.”
Lindquist rattled the ice in his glass. “Well, I can tell you this much. Lindsey was a problem from the day she was born.”
“Oh?”
He nodded firmly. “Very different from the other two. It was a tough pregnancy, and things got even tougher after the child was actually born. Lindsey was a fussy baby. Didn’t sleep much. Had a lot of colicky stuff wrong with her. As a toddler, she was prone to temper tantrums. She even bit her brother once. On the arm. I remember the teeth marks distinctly.”
“Fancy,” Bree said dryly. “I don’t know much about babies and toddlers, Mr. Lindquist, at least not yet, but this doesn’t sound like a disturbed child to me. Just a fussy one. There are lots of those.”
He nodded eagerly. “Too many, wouldn’t you say?”
Bree shrugged. “Maybe. Anything else?”
“Well, she was a poor student. Pulling down Bs and Cs. Almost impossible to motivate her. Bert and Carolyn don’t—didn’t—believe in excessive reliance on doctors, but they did make an effort to get her treated.”
“I don’t understand. Treated for what, exactly?”
“She didn’t fit in. She was a disruptive influence on the family. Do I need to make myself any clearer?”
Bree made a face into the depths of her wineglass. “Let’s take a look at this from Lindsey’s point of view. I know that Mr. Chandler and you were close . . .”
“Close enough,” he said. “We met at school. We were all chem majors with minors in business admin. Funny, when you think about it. Not that usual, the combination of business and science, you see. So it was natural for us to gravitate to one another.”
“Mrs. Chandler is a chemist, too?” Bree said in some surprise.
“Carolyn?” he snorted. “Not on your life. Where in the name of God did you get that idea?”
Bree knew she shouldn’t let this guy get under her skin. “You said you were all chem majors,” she pointed out rather tartly. “ ‘All,’ not ‘both.’ So of course I assumed you were talking about three people and not just you and Probert. And why shouldn’t Carrie-Alice be a chemist?”
“Steve Hansen was with us for a time,” Lindquist said with a “gotcha” air. “And Carolyn’s never had much interest in anything outside the home and the kids. The kids, mainly.”
Bree bit down on her lower lip, to keep herself from continuing this inane verbal competition. “What I really would like to discuss with you, Mr. Lindquist—”
“It’s Doctor Lindquist,” he snapped, suddenly testy. “I added an MD to my PhD in pharmacology.”
Bree nodded agreeably. “Dr. Lindquist. I’m going to give Lindsey the best defense I possibly can. And to do that, it’d help to know as much as I can about her background. Do you have an opinion about Mr. Chandler’s parenting skills?”
“He was a good and devoted father. He loved his children.”
Right out of the press kit prepared for you by your New York PR firm, Bree thought. Aloud, she said, “And Carolyn—Mrs. Chandler—you’re closer to her? Or am I making another assumption?”
“I don’t think I care for the tone of your voice, Miss Beaufort.”
Bree shook her head in mock sympathy. “It’s a problem that’s plagued me all of my life, Mr. Lindquist. My tone of voice. So. You and Mrs. Chandler were how close? Too close?”
He looked at her in contempt and paused for a long, long moment. “She’s my sister.”
“Your sister.” Bree’s cheeks got hot. She remembered, too late, the hoary advice to defense attorneys: never ask a question to which you don’t already know the answer. His sister! Something she should have known, for sure. Well, she deserved the embarrassment; never, never, never get cocky without being willing to pay the price.
“My younger sister. I only have the one. No brothers.”
Bree drew a circle in the grass with the point of her shoe. “Hm. So. As the concerned uncle of this child, what can you tell me that might help me explain to a jury why she mugged an eight-year-old Girl Scout and stole her cookie money?”
“Genes,” he said, in an unconscious echo of Hartley Williams’s addled diagnosis. “It begins and ends with what you inherit.”
“Bullshit,” Bree said.
Lindquist made a small adjustment to his tie and gazed at her, his face utterly expressionless. “I don’t think I can help you, Miss Beaufort.”
“I don’t think you can, at that, Mr. Lindquist.”
He turned on his heel and marched off across the grass.
“Well,” said her father, from behind her shoulder, “that went well.” He looked sympathetic. Bree supposed he’d heard the entire conversation.
“It did, didn’t it?” Bree swallowed the remains of her wine and set the glass on the top of the brick wall. “Serves me right, I guess. That sanctimonious so-and-so.”
Royal chuckled.
“Honestly, Daddy. I suppose I should have handled that better.”
“No ‘suppose’ about it. You surely should have. You let your convictions get in the way of building a good case for your client. It’s a charming failing, Bree, but it’s definitely a failing. I’ve told you before, a good lawyer—the best lawyer—suspends her personal beliefs in defense of her client. You’re an advocate, my dear. It’s an important role.”
“It’s a lot more honest to be an advocate for the innocent.”
At that, her father looked seriously displeased. “I don’t need to remind you our whole legal system’s built on the presumption of innocence. And the question of guilt is not your job. You are not a judge.” He tugged at her ear affectionately. “Not yet, at any rate.” He glanced at his watch. “Nearly midnight. Time for the fire. I’ll get your mother.” He turned to walk away, and then turned back. “You’re going to be all right, you know. You’ll handle this case as well as you’ve handled all the others. I’ve got a lot of faith in you, Bree.”
She went forward and hugged him.
Royal smiled, patted her back, and then strolled over to the pianist, who struck a series of loud, trilling chords on the piano. He waited until the crowd of partygoers settled into expectant silence. She let her father’s speech to the guests wash over her, thinking of all the celebrations like this one, in the past. She wondered if she’d be around for the ones in the future. Sasha’s familiar warmth was at her knee, and she bent to stroke his head.
Help, Professor Cianquino had said. He was going to send help. Well, she hoped it got here soon.
She tilted her head back and looked up at the stars. The moon carried herself across the sky like a little ship. A feathering of clouds washed across the very top of the heavens, veiling the Pleiades and the Dipper. When her mother tossed the flaming brand on the fire, the flames shot up with a whoosh! The bright glow pitched the moon and stars into dark relief.
And from the heart of the pyre, two huge black dogs leaped over the wall and landed at Bree’s feet.