Charming Grace Page 2

  I got up and began climbing through the laurel. Inside orthopedic Hush Puppies, my left foot ached like a hangover. A beady-eyed parish cop had shot me in the foot when I was twelve. The bullet broke the joint of my big toe and it never healed right. Armand had cried over it. Ah, the glamour of the criminal life. Twenty-five years later, my foot throbbed its Hail Mary’s.

  When I reached the edge of the road I stopped in awe. Grace Vance. My first unhindered look at her. Mon Dieu, she was incredible—a long-legged redhead in hip-hugger jeans and a heavy blue sweater that held on like a glove, with a face like a good-looking stripper, a houseful of body with plenty of back porch and attic, and the smart green eyes of a bayou wildcat. She’d been crowned Miss Georgia in the late 1980’s. If she hadn’t ducked out on the pageant biz to marry Harp Vance, she’s have probably won Miss America, too. I didn’t doubt it. Grace Vance was every fine woman I’d ever regretted losing. Every classy meal I’d ever stolen from a New Orleans dumpster as a kid. Every ideal I’d hung onto in prison. Every dream of the good life I still dreamed.

  La femme, la joi, la vie. Woman, joy, life.

  But armed. Sad-looking. Dangerous. Beautiful. Maybe crazy. Sitting on a queenly mountain of pulverized stone. Next to a wild pink orchid. In a pot.

  I took one life-changing breath in rhythm with her, then stepped into the open road and headed for her gravel pile.

  If she shot me, it wouldn’t necessarily be a bad way to die.

  We turn our best face to the world every morning. We look toward what we expect is coming our way, and we put on a stoic smile, and we hope no one guesses how scared we are. Every day since Harp died, I’d been afraid to look at the future. So I focused on the road below my gravel pile, waiting for the Senterra limo caravan I expected.

  “Mrs. Vance. Your husband only killed to save other people, and so I’m bettin’ you won’t shoot me in his name. I hope.”

  I jabbed the stock of G. Helen’s shotgun into my shoulder and swung toward the voice. Its owner stood at the base of my gravel mountain, his long legs ending in the gravel-dusted weeds. He’d walked out of the forest like a hunter, without rustling a leaf, big and lean and dark-haired, dangerous-looking. His face was both rough and handsome; everything about him was a little tailored but rumpled, from his wrinkled brown leather jacket to his dark trousers, ending in suede lace-ups that would have looked tame and academic on a man who didn’t have an alligator tattooed on the back of his right hand.

  A man.

  You have to understand—there was no such thing as a man in my world anymore, only people of the opposite sex who weren’t Harp.

  The stranger seemed just as transfixed by me as I was by him. He frowned up at me sadly, more troubled looking than aggressive, as if someone had forced him to wash his dirty laundry in front of me. “If you shoot,” he drawled, “make it a clean kill. I’m a fan of old-fashioned open-casket funerals. I want to lay there lookin’ pretty while a street band plays Dixieland jazz and my friends get drunk on bourbon. If you shoot me in the head, it’ll put a damper on the festivities.”

  The voice was deeply Southern but not mountain-grown; dialects and accents in the South are as varied as chocolate, and this one came from some lowland coast where English duked it out for dominance. It made an exotic melody on a cold Thursday morning atop plain gravel.

  “Who are you?” I demanded.

  “My name’s Noleene. Boone Noleene. I work for Mr. Senterra.” He slid a wallet from the pocket of his jacket. “I have I.D.” His hand stopped in mid-air when I raised the tip of the shotgun toward his head. He looked from it to me. “You can take my word for it.” He put the wallet away.

  “What do you do, besides spy on me from down in laurel thickets?”

  “Some people say I’m in charge of Mr. Senterra’s personal security. I say I’m just a bodyguard. Either way, it’s my job to let you shoot me instead of him.”

  Trickles of ice ran down my spine. No limo caravan. A tattooed thug steps out of the woods. He doesn’t look surprised to see me and my gravel blocking the road. He works for Stone Senterra. I’ve been had.

  “I’d prefer to shoot Mr. Senterra. And his spies.”

  “Yeah, I know. But you won’t. You planned this thing here to get his attention. You’ve tried everything else. You never give up. Your history with your husband shows that. When push comes to shove, you’ll risk everything for a showdown. But you’re not a law-breaker, Mrs. Vance. Even if you were, your husband wouldn’t want to see you in jail, and you’ll honor his memory.”

  “You’re wrong. The ends justify the means.”

  The tall, breathtaking Boone Noleene didn’t budge. “You’re not mean,” he said. “And this isn’t the end.”

  I tucked the shotgun deeper into the crook of my shoulder and aimed at his crotch. “It is for you, if you take one more step.”

  He slowly eased one soft shoe in the edge of the gravel, then another. When I didn’t fire he began to climb. I stopped breathing, but refused to lower the shotgun. He never took his gaze off mine. His eyes were dark and thickly lashed, almost boyish in a face that had been used to break some fists. I was thirty-four. He might not be much older, except for that gladiator face.

  He reached the top and stopped no more than an arm’s length away me. “Okay,” he said, “If you’re not going to shoot me, let’s talk. You’re a smart woman. You know how to work the media. You used to be a TV reporter. You can get what you want without pulling a trigger.”

  I kept the gun trained on his crotch. “I was just a beauty queen running a morning talk show. Not a journalist. A glorified party hostess. More reckless and less ethical than you think.”

  “No. I’ve seen the tapes of your show. There was a lot more to you than good looks and a big smile.”

  “You think better of me than I do.”

  “Must be mutual. Otherwise, you’d have shot me by now. Since you haven’t, I’m goin’ to sit down right there. Nice and easy. Don’t worry; you keep the shotgun, and I’ll keep my distance.”

  He slowly sat down beside me. Only Dancer, the wild pink orchid, separated us. I was left pointing the shotgun at empty air. After an awkward moment, I lowered it to my knees and frowned at him. He looked at the ladyslipper. “Hello, Dancer.”

  He knew the name of my orchid.

  The amazing stranger, this Boone Noleene, propped his long, brawny forearms on his updrawn knees and focused with what appeared to be polite patience on the gray-green mountains in front of us. “Believe it or not, Mr. Senterra wants to honor your husband. He wants do right by him.”

  “His idea of right. His idea of making a serious drama instead of a head-banging cartoon. He thinks he can direct a movie and start an artsy new phase of his show biz career. That people will forget he’s just turned forty-five and his hair’s falling out.”

  Noleene coughed or laughed. Hard to say which. “All that may be true. But he wants to meet you on your own terms, and then he thinks you’ll come around.”

  “The only way I’ll ‘come around’ is if he agrees to drop this project.”

  “Is it so bad to have a big movie star want to show the world how great your husband was?”

  “Yes. If people don’t own their memories, what do they have left?”

  Silence. When he didn’t answer, I shot a furtive glance at him. He frowned and kept his eyes on the mountains, but idly massaged the crude tattoo on his hand. “Some people would be happy to unload their memories,” he said.

  A pang of curiosity made me forget to clutch the shotgun. I let the barrel droop. A second later, he had my shotgun in his hands. The grab and snatch was so quick my fingertips tingled. I leapt to my feet, called him several lovely names, and ended with “Give it back,” which was pathetic.

  “You don’t know how sorry I am to have to do this.” He deftly snapped the shotgun open and reached for the shells. Only there were no shells. My face began to burn.

  “Hmmm,” he went. “Huntin’ movie stars w
ith nothing but hot air. Might work. Who knows?”

  I spent a moment struggling to look defensive and appalled, then gave up. “My husband was killed by a man using a gun. Unless it was a matter of life and death, I would never point a loaded gun at another human being.” I paused. “Though Stone Senterra doesn’t qualify as human.”

  “Matter of opinion. No harm done.” Noleene held the gun out.

  I took it, sat back down, and faced forward, embarrassed. “Where is Sir Dumb-a-lot hiding? Tell him to come out.”

  Noleene raised a hand and signaled someone in the woods. The laurel thicket began to shake wildly. A tall, handsome, thick-necked bruiser plowed out of hiding and climbed up to the roadside. He had the well-preserved skin of a California tanning bed, a skull cap of receding brown hair clipped in a Caesar, and an aging, bodybuilder physique encapsulated in the kind of pin-striped suit that comes with its own fleet of Jaguars. The eager, Fred-Flintstone-Wilma-I’m-home expression on his face almost made me hesitate out of kindness. Almost.

  I stood, jammed the empty shotgun into my shoulder, and pointed it at Stone Senterra’s head. “You’re dead,” I called calmly. “You movie-making sonuvabitch.”

  Senterra threw up both hands and stepped back. An unlucky placement of one lustrous, reptile-skinned cowboy boot on some loose gravel sent him sprawling. He flailed his arms in a desperate effort to right the laws of physics, but it didn’t work.

  Stone Senterra went back into the laurel faster than he’d come out, feet in the air and ass first.

  I lowered the shotgun. Limbs rustled high in a fir tree across the road. A camo-suited man leaned out of the tree enough to wave at me. “Got it! Beautiful!” He peered at a nearby cluster of pines. “Ramone, did you get it, too?” The top branches of the pine rattled. The man named Ramone poked his head out, grinning. “Si! Perfect!” Both men waved at me.

  I nodded grimly then pivoted to meet the eyes of Stone Senterra’s betrayed bodyguard. Boone Noleene stood up slowly, staring at the thicket where his employer had disappeared into the mountain equivalent of quicksand. His only show of shock was a sardonic lift of dark, winged brows and an intense expression of disbelief, which he turned on me in a way that made heat rise in my face.

  “Photographers,” I explained. “From The National Enquirer. Mr. Noleene, you have your spies, but I have mine, too. I wasn’t sure what Stone was up to, today, so I set up a situation that would work to my advantage either way. If he’d driven up in a limo I’d have pulled the shotgun salute on him just the same, hoping he’d give the tabloid guys something to photograph. It worked like a charm. He’s just as stupid as I thought.”

  The laurel rattled some more. The deep voice of a laurel-entrapped, enraged movie star roared out, “Noleene, goddammit. This was your idea.”

  Noleene studied me with what appeared to be both admiration and a deep desire to take my empty gun away and spank me. “Next time, just shoot me.” Noleene’s backroads-been-there face shifted into some semblance of a smile, parting his lips like a slow zipper over a sliver of ferocious white teeth. “I better go before he gets a twig stuck in a spot twigs don’t belong.”

  “I’m sorry,” I told him quietly. “For your sake.”

  “I can go a long way on that. Thanks.”

  “Noleene! If she hasn’t clubbed you with a rock you better be on your way down here!”

  “Au revoir, Mrs. Vance.” Leaving that hint of deep-fried French perfume on his resume, he squared his shoulders, turned away, and went to pry Br’er Rabbit Senterra out of a mountain briar patch. The tabloid photographers climbed down from their trees, shrank back at the menacing look Noleene gave them, then toasted each other with a high-five. Next week everyone with a buck-fifty to invest would see photos of the world’s biggest macho action star doing a backward belly-flop in a haze of shotgun-induced terror, courtesy of yours truly and Boone Noleene, a brave man caught up in bad circumstances, who appeared to expect better of me but would tolerate worse.

  You did wrong by that bodyguard, Harp whispered to me. Now, he was talking.

  I picked up Dancer and cradled her to my breasts. Without much victory I whispered, “I know. But all’s fair in love and movies.”

  HERO

  DIRECTOR’S NOTES AND SCRIPT

  CLASSIFIED PROPERTY—STONE SENTERRA

  I MEAN IT! STAY OUT OF MY COMPUTER AND STOP TRYING

  TO STEAL THIS SCRIPT, WHOEVER YOU ARE!

  SCENE: DEEP MOUNTAIN WOODS, SPRINGTIME

  Ten-year-old Grace Bagshaw, late-1970’s, a beautiful and well-dressed little girl, clutches her Farrah Fawcett knapsack as she hikes nervously through the wilderness and stops to peer through tall mountain laurel down into a beautiful glen.

  GRACE

  (talking aloud to herself)

  This is it! Ladyslipper Lost! This is where my mother and daddy were hiking ten years ago when I was born! I was born right here! And this is where Grandmother Helen comes to find the secret flowers for her greenhouse!

  TAKES A FEW STEPS FARTHER DOWN THE HILL. LOOKS AGAIN. GASPS.

  Oh my.

  Pan to bigger view of glen. Now she sees hundreds of pink ladyslipper orchids in bloom.

  GRACE (CONT’D)

  (awed)

  This is it. The home of the ladyslippers. Look at them! Just look! Harper Vance has to be hiding here. It’s a magic place, just like Grandma Helen said.

  (Calls loudly.)

  Harper Vance! Harper Vance, are you in these caves around this magic hollow somewhere? I’ve come to save you, Harper Vance! I know you’re still alive! Please, Harper Vance, don’t run away again! I’m not just a rich little girl from a family who never pays attention to poor boys like you! I’m lonely and noble—just like you! And I’ve come to rescue you!”

  Silence. Holding her knapsack tighter, Grace sniffs back tears and continues down the hill toward the glen filled with rare orchids.

  END EXCERPT

  Chapter 2

  Look, all I really wanted that day was credit for finding Harp’s wormy corpse. I thought of him as the loneliest soul in the universe, next to me. Finding his rotting carcass would prove, in some strange way, that loneliness couldn’t hurt me anymore. After all, I had been born in the very spot where he was, most likely, dead.

  “Harper Vance,” I yelled in the deep shade of a forest older than all Bagshaws combined. “If you’re alive you better say so, and if you’re not alive then don’t you dare haunt these woods! Because I was born in these woods and these woods belong to me and my dead mother, Willy Bagshaw, who fell over from a blood clot at Ladyslipper Lost, and so if you’re dead here it’s because she wants you here!” I paused. “And so do I.”

  I wasn’t even to Ladyslipper Lost, yet. Just bellowing nervously as I walked. Harp had already become a kind of morbid legend, his missing status written up regularly in our own Dahlonega Nugget weekly newspaper, but also a favorite topic in the big newspapers down in Atlanta and even other major newspapers across the south. Imagine a twelve year old boy fading into the mountains so well even the best hunters and their trained dogs couldn’t find what was left of him.

  Land of Want and Plenty, one terrible urban rag had said, showing a picture of our white-columned mansion at Bagshaw Downs next to a grainy grade-school photo of a lean, unsmiling Harp. For the first time in my life, I knew just how privileged I was. And how unliked.

  I had seen Harp in a dream, sleeping the long sleep among our seductive orchids. The woods closed around me, silent and deep and suddenly revealing I was fully, completely, lost. It was as if the massive old oaks and beeches and hickories and cottonwoods had slyly shifted the earth to which they were anchored, moving that loamy carpet and me with it by subtle degrees, the way the tide moved me along the beach at Daddy and Candace’s summer house down in Florida.

  I walked on, yelling to Harp’s ghost, hearing nothing in return, peering down the hillsides, trying to remember all the instruction G. Helen had given me for finding Ladyslipper Lost. Sh
e would have made the trek with me, but she was hostessing the entire family tree of Bagshawnian splendor. On the May weekend of my corpse-hunting expedition about three hundred Bagshaws and Bagshaw relatives from all over the country convened at Bagshaw Downs for the biggest family reunion in American Bagshaw history. It was a safe bet that any Bagshaws still left in England were wishing they’d immigrated back in the early 1800’s, too. If they had they’d be sunning on the lawn behind a porticoed white mansion, eating Swedish meatballs and barbecued ribs washed down with champagne, and dancing to the music of a band trying hard to mimic The Carpenters.

  “You have to watch our Bagshaw kin closely,” G. Helen told me. “They’re far too dignified to steal the silverware, but they will count it and scheme to nab the serving pieces when I die.”

  Step by step I tiptoed into a dappled hollow, pushing aside the branches of tough green laurels much taller than I, peering in rebellious wonder, then gasping with delight. In front of me, the land opened into a broad, deep woodland like something from a fairytale. Soft mounds of brush and the occasional bit of handmade nail or a shred of an old board marked the ruins of gazebos where Victorian Southerners had sipped lemonade and dangled their lewd, bare feet in the springs. Crumbling stone walls circled soft pools of dark water. Somewhere in the nooks of the steep hills around me, the faintest trace of a forgotten buggy road had carried wealthy city ghosts up to the cool mountains to visit their Bagshaw hosts, escaping the muggy heat of Atlanta.