Charming Grace

Charming Grace

By

Deborah Smith

Bell Bridge Books

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons (living or dead,) events or locations is entirely coincidental.

Bell Bridge Books

PO BOX 30921

Memphis, TN 38130

Bell Bridge Books is an Imprint of BelleBooks, Inc.

Copyright 2004 © by Deborah Smith

Print ISBN 978-0-9802453-1-8

Printed and bound in the United States of America.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.

We at BelleBooks enjoy hearing from readers. You can contact us at the address above or at [email protected]

Visit us at www.bellbridgebooks.com

We like to hear from readers. Email us at [email protected]

Cover Design: Debra Dixon

Interior Design: Linda Kichline

Artwork Credits:

Cover photo: ZM Photography @ Fotolia

:M-01:

Ladyslipper, ladyslipper

What do you know?

Destiny’s dancers, on their toes

Pink shoes, green stage, pirouette in place

All for the joy of charming Grace.

            Nursery rhyme written by

             Grace’s mother, 1968

PART ONE

Los Angeles, California—

Do Tell! The Latest Hot Dish from Show Buzz Daily!

Beauty, Bodyguard Crack the Stone Man

Stone Senterra has fallen from grace—Grace Vance, that is—and the bodyguard he trusted to protect him helped it happen!

Hulky he-man action-film super-star “Stone Man” Senterra, along with his wife and kiddies, was spotted lunching morosely at
Spago’s
this week only days after fleeing the Georgia mountain locale of his film
Hero
for the safety of sunny L.A. Rumors are flying that final filming on Stone’s Oscar-hopeful directing debut ended in a brand of woman-trouble even the stalwart Stone Man couldn’t control.

The source of the bodacious babe brouhaha? None other than Grace Vance, Southern-belle widow of
Hero’s
true-life-inspiration, Harper Vance. Insiders on the
Hero
set say ‘Her Grace’ threw plenty of monkey wrenches into the Stone Man’s debut directing flick—not that people blame her for wanting to protect her noble-lawman hubbie’s image from a big-screen dumb-down by a no-necker like Stone ‘Action Figure’ Senterra.

(Dear Grace Vance:
Dahling
, don’t you understand that ‘dumb-flick deluxe’ describes almost all Hollywood block-bustas, so what did you expect from the Stone Man? Chekov on steroids?)

One casualty in the Widow Vance’s battle to control the flick about her brave, dead hubbie was the Stone Man’s ex-con bodyguard Boone Noleene, fired by Stone unceremoniously at film’s end. Sources say the world’s biggest action star accused his once-trusted sidekick of, shall we say, aiding and ‘a-bedding’ the Widow Vance’s war against the Stone Man’s film . . .

Now the notorious Noleene has disappeared in the company of some less-than-savory pals from his past, and stubborn Grace is holed up in her Georgia mountain mansion. Meantime, the Stone Man’s movie is on the rocks. Can more trouble be far behind in this twisted garden of magnolia-scented soap suds and Hollywood glam-glitter? More news as we get it,
dahlings
. . . 

FOUR MONTHS EARLIER

Show Buzz
Dateline: Dahlonega, Georgia.

Say it “Little Dah, big LON, little ega.”

The Cherokee Indian word for
gold
.

Mountain home of the first U.S. gold rush, 1838.

Been pretty quiet since then, and people like it that way.

Population 3,527

Plus now, one movie star

Chapter 1

“Grace Bagshaw Vance will end up in jail, in the gutter, or drunk on martinis in some fancy nut hatch for ex-beauty queens,” people whispered about me. “
Bless Her Heart
.”

It was true. By the day Stone Senterra came to my Georgia home town to make a movie about my husband, Harp Vance, I was ready to kill him and accept the consequences. I’d become a deadly, determined,
Bless Her Heart
kind of Southern belle. A cracked belle, you could say. Grieving can take over a person’s life like a sinister charm, inspiring good causes and noble dedication at the expense of true healing. It’s possible to both pity and fear a mourner who’s gone just a little bit funny and more than a little bit dangerous. I qualified on both counts. In the South, the dreaded BHH is attached to your name with admiring sympathy but also a dollop of fear. You are no longer a dependably entertaining person, and may even stoop to becoming an embarrassment.

Be afraid
, Dahlonegans whispered.
Be very afraid. Bless her heart
.

Two years ago, Harp, an agent for the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, tracked down a killer the media had dubbed the Turn-Key Bomber. After months of cat-and-mouse games through the mountains of Georgia, Tennessee, and the Carolinas, Harp and the serial-killing psychopath faced off on the roof of one of the largest hospitals in Atlanta. And there, on a hot summer morning when the sun rose over the city like an orange eye, my husband stopped the crazy bastard from exploding a bomb that would have killed a lot of people. Harp took six bullets to the chest before he sank a hunting knife into the Turn-Key’s throat. His police methods had never followed the rules. Neither did his death. The only rules he ever believed in were the ones I imposed on him out of love.

Helicopter cameramen from CNN’s Atlanta headquarters and the local TV stations broadcast the death-fight with the bomber as it happened, and so the whole world watched Harp sacrifice his own life to save the hospital. I watched, too, in horror, from my hostess chair on the set of a silly morning talk show called
Atlanta A.M.
My husband had been a loner and a damaged soul and an idealist and a cynic and a lover and my best friend since we were kids. I got to the emergency room only in time to cry my heart out and whisper, “It’s all right. Don’t be afraid of the dark. I’ll always be there with you,” before he took his last breath.

I had been there, in that darkness, fighting to keep a light burning for him, ever since.

So, on a cool May morning while Stone Senterra cruised up the mountain interstate in his limousine, I planned my ambush. Senterra and his people were scheduled to start on-location filming from an old campground Senterra Films had leased as a base of operations. I intended to block Stone’s way with the one material he respected. Stone.

“Stand back. I’m dropping the whole load on the count of five,” I called out the dump truck’s window. My Grandmother Helen—known to her three children and ten grandchildren not as Grandmother, Grandma, or Granny, but as the elegant and indomitable G. Helen, tucked her pearls inside her cashmere-trimmed denim jacket, fluffed graying auburn hair, then motioned to Harp’s teenage niece, Mika DuLane. “
Five
means ‘four and a promise’ to your impatient Aunt Grace,” G. Helen warned the sixteen-year-old.

Mika nodded. “Let’s boogie.”

My tall, elegant, Irish-pale grandmother sashayed briskly alongside the short, cute, mocha-skinned Mika, whose idea of fashion was an army jacket covered in computer game logos. When she and G. Helen reached the side of the steep road Mika called back, “Aunt Grace, maybe you should wait while I do some calculations to estimate the area of spillage based on the tonnage and the maximum angle of the dump truck’s bed.” She reached inside the army jacket for her Palm Pilot.

“Aim for the center line and let ‘er rip,” G. Helen called. Then to Mika, “Sweetie pie, sometimes we just have to dump our load and get the hell out of the way.”

I pulled a lever. The truck’s bed upended and gray dust gushed out as tons of silver-gray gravel spilled onto the asphalt. When I finished, a small mountain of rocks blocked both lanes of the only paved road that led to Stone Senterra’s mountain production headquarters. The road’s grassy shoulders dropped immediately into deep gulches filled with boulders and laurel. Stone Senterra wouldn’t be able to reach his luxury house trailer or his Quonset-hut film editing lab or his picnic-pavilion-turned-personal-gym. He’d have to deal with
me
.

Face-to-Stone Face.

I climbed atop my barricade of metaphorically crushed Stone Senterra, pulled Harp’s favorite leather-brimmed hat low over my forehead, laid G. Helen’s antique shotgun across my updrawn knees, and set a magnificent wild orchid beside me in her moss-stained clay pot. A pink, pouch-shaped bloom, as delicate as a ballet slipper, hung from the orchid’s slender stem. She had bloomed that morning as if she knew Harp and I needed her support. There was no way past me, the shotgun, and the native ladyslipper orchid Harp had named
Dancer
.

The morning grew quiet as the deep
shush
of settling rock faded away. Ridges of pines and greening hardwoods marched toward a horizon of rounded, fog-gray mountains and deep, mystic hollows. Deer and bear sniffed the air as if sensing the impending aroma of city slickers.

“I’m set,” I called to G. Helen and Mika. “Go home and call that list of media contacts I gave you, all right? Dancer and I’ll take care of the situation here. Don’t worry about me. A grand jury of Lumpkin County folk will vote a no-bill on the attempted homicide charge so fast they’ll be home in time for the lunchtime reruns of
Matlock
on A&E.”

“If you do shoot,” G. Helen said, “At least don’t aim for Senterra’s head.”

I nodded. “It wouldn’t do any good. He has no brain.”

G. Helen rolled her eyes. Mika stared at me, her eyes dark with amazement. She came from the very rich, very elegant DuLanes of Detroit, Michigan. In Detroit, tasteful people didn’t shoot at movie stars. They also didn’t name their orchids and talk to them. “I’ll visit you in prison,” she called.

G. Helen and Mika left in G. Helen’s dark-blue Lincoln. My hands sweated on the stock of shotgun, where a silver plate was engraved with words that summed up everything G. Helen had taught me about life.

Always fight back. And aim higher than you need to.

I bent my head and prayed.
Harp, I’ll never stop defending you. Please let me know that I’m doing it the right way. Please let me know that Dancer bloomed this morning as a sign to keep fighting.

Silence. Harp was whispering to me less and less, lately. Plus he’d never had a way with words and never believed in telling other people, or wild orchids, how to live their lives, as long as they hurt no one but themselves. Waiting for Harp to come back to life was no use. Of course I knew that. But I had no idea he was about to send me a stranger named Boone Noleene with his answer. Or that maybe Boone
was
the answer.