Charming Grace (11 page)

“Please, Grace,” Candace said, “let your daddy send some of his lawyers to talk to Mr. Senterra. There might be one last chance for an injunction against Mr. Senterra’s movie. Please don’t do anything else to that man. He may be a Yankee and an actor, but he’s a guest in this town, too.”

“Tell Dad thanks, but no.”

“He wants to help, honey. Please. He worries about you all the time.”

“I’m fine.”

“Are you sure there aren’t going to be any repercussions?”

“None. Stone’s people know it would be bad publicity to file charges against me.”

“But what about this . . . this ungodly, unladylike sister of his? She practically
threatened
you in her public statement to the media.” Although nearly sixty years old, Candace still spoke like a tidewater debutante steeped in white-glove decorum. She busied herself working as a consultant for up-and-coming beauty queens, though the task was trickier than my era. How
did
one artfully hide a contestant’s arm tattoos?

“I’m not afraid of a woman whose biggest talent is flexing her breasts and selling pastel barbells on the Home Shopping Network.”

“Please keep your distance. Please stay calm. And please, please, call your daddy if you need a lawyer.”

I needed Dad’s help more than I could admit, but not as a lawyer. “I’ll be fine,” I repeated.

Fine
, as long as I kept my head down and my shovel full of horse poop. I put the phone away and went back to work. Shoveling shit was just my hobby. My real job was managing a five-million-dollar Harp Vance College Scholarship Fund. Donations had poured in after Harp’s death, and new ones arrived every time CNN replayed the footage of him fighting to the bitter end against the Turn Key Bomber on the roof of Piedmont Hospital.
Blood money, Harp’s blood.
Even after two years I couldn’t bear to watch the tape. I’d seen it live, the first and only time, sitting on the set of a TV show that prided itself on cooking demos and celebrity gossip. I still had nightmares.

“Grace, you better hide,” someone called. I looked up to see the well-dressed owner of Jones & Co. waving at me from the shop’s shady wooden porch. Gayle Jones sold jewelry, fine home accessories, and soothing, upscale knickknacks. Harp had secretly loved her herbal soaps. Gayle waved so hard her tiny dog wigged in her arms. He was a mixed Chihuahua named Scout the Town Dog because he had been found, as an abandoned puppy, on the square. In Dahlonega, even the smallest souls had a story to tell, not that Stone would notice anything that delicate. Gayle cupped a hand around her mouth. “A tour bus just pulled in at the Welcome Center! Don’t go up that way with your manure!”

“Thank you!”

I had become a celebrity against my will. Tourists looked for me, wanted my autograph, and often tried to say kind things, wonderful things about Harp, that he was an inspiration,
May God Bless Him, Bless Your Heart
. But they also pressed up close to me, wanting something, an autograph, a piece of me, something they could sell or show off.
Are you dating yet? Are you going to sell any of your husband’s personal belongings for charity, on e-Bay?

I ducked into the shrubs around an 1840’s house with wavy glass windows and the perfect porch for a fine-dining twosome.
Renee’s
, a carved sign said out front. It was one of the best local restaurants. Harp had liked it, though he was never comfortable with more than one fork and a wine list. One corner of Renee’s screened porch was hooded by tall snowball shrubs; they had made an intimate bower shading our special café table. I spread the crumbling dark fertilizer around those shrubs reverently, because they had shaded Harp.

“Psst. Grace. Grace!” I looked up from my shoveling.

“Brian?” A small brown-haired boy in a World Wrestling Federation t-shirt and camo pants burst from under the paddle-sized leaves of a huge magnolia. Brian gulped air. “I’ve seen the devil, and he’s Diamond Senterra!”

“What?” The hair rose on the nape of my neck. “You saw her? Where?”

“A little while ago I climbed up in the big trees behind Persimmon Hall, where Mr. Senterra’s stayin’, and Diamond Senterra drove up in a
limo
—” he paused for a six-year-old’s version of a deep breath—“and she really does have muscles and big boobs, just like in the movies, and she made that guard of Stone’s come over, that one who let you try to shoot him on the rock pile, and she yelled—”

“Whoa, slow down.” I knelt in front of Brian and took him by the shoulders. Any mention of Boone Noleene and the gravel incident made me unhappy. I was proud, I was ashamed, I was confused. Mr. Noleene should stay out of my way and not complicate my war with his employer. Not be a complication of any kind. Period.
Bless his heart
. “You promised me you wouldn’t spy on Mr. Senterra.”

“I’m only tryin’ to help. It’s for Harp!” Brian was a shy little loner. His parents were dead; he lived with an aging grandmother in a tiny wooden house on one of Dahlonega’s hilly back lanes. The grandmother assisted Sass in the house at Bagshaw Downs, and Brian came along with her when school was out. Harp had been his idol.

I pushed sweaty hair back from the boy’s pale face. “Promise me you’ll stay out of that tree. It’s dangerous, and it’s trespassing, and Harp wouldn’t approve.” I paused. “But first tell me what you saw Diamond Senterra do.”

“She called that guard a whole lot of names I could go to hell for sayin’! And she told him his job is to scare you into leaving her brother alone!”

“And what did Mr. Noleene say?”

“He said he wouldn’t do it! So then she called him some more names!” Brian huffed for air and looked around furtively. “I gotta go. Granny’ll be back from the Wal-Mart and I got to get home cause I’m supposed to be washing dishes! See ya at the Downs!”

“Stay out of those trees—” But Brian had already scooted through the restaurant’s small backyard and across a small parking lot, disappearing into a hedge as easily as one of the town’s fat wild cats. I sat back on my heels, stunned.
Mr. Noleene, don’t protect me. I don’t need protection. Obviously, you’re the one who needs protection, not me.

One of the restaurant’s waiters came out on the porch and saw me squatting in the shrubs. I stood and shook my shovel at him in greeting. “Just delivering the usual fertilizer, compliments of Harp’s horses.”

“Oh, hi, Ms. Vance.” He turned a large, tented RESERVED placard in his hands, and looked awkward. “Well, hmmm, I’ll just come back when you’re not, hmmm, waiting in the bushes—”

“You’re reserving this for someone.” I nodded at the special corner table. My throat knotted but I feigned a smile. “I don’t mind. It’s the best table in the house, especially this time of year. Go ahead. You can leave the card.”

He sighed, set the placard squarely on the small table Harp and I had shared on many warm, loving nights, then fled back inside. Frowning, I picked my way through some small nandinas to stand next to the porch’s screen and peer through it at the card’s personalized side.

Senterra.

I was in a
very
bad mood by the time my manure and I reached the Smith House, a big, handsome country inn and home of an eat-till-you-waddle restaurant specializing in platters full of fried chicken platters, vegetables, cornbread, relishes, and sugary desserts. It had been Harp’s favorite Sunday-lunch place.

I violently shoveled compost over the inn’s front flower beds. A few yards away, T-John snored again at the pickup truck’s steering wheel. I shoveled one last scoop of compost onto the inn’s flower beds then headed toward the truck and trailer. T-John snored louder, his gray head thrown back. An open
National Enquirer
lay across the chest of his overalls, showing Stone back-flopping into the mountain laurel while I pointed a gun at him and Boone Noleene watched. I covered my nose, opened the trailer’s double wooden doors, and tossed the shovel inside. Dried manure sifted from the ceiling and bits of compost fluttered into the air around me. I was about to close the trailer’s tall double doors when a Humvee pulled up too close behind me.

Dahlonega has a U.S. Army Ranger camp outside town and a major ROTC program at the college, so we see plenty of camo-painted military vehicles rolling along the main roads. Dahlonega’s military underpinning is a source of pride as familiar as our own names. But we didn’t see many shiny
suburban
Hummers, those big, hulking, faux-military tributes to bad gas consumption and conspicuous spending, owned not by hard-jawed soldiers in need of crossing the Afghani mountains but by Atlanta yuppies on a mission to buy lattes and fried apple pies. This Humvee blocked my way in the Smith House’s shady parking lot.

Diamond Senterra climbed out.

The woman voted “Sexiest Movie Babe” by
Gun and Knife Magazine
was dressed in black high-heeled boots and a sleeveless black leather jumpsuit. Her bare arms bulged; veins and sinews snaked down her forearms; she had the iron-pumped thighs and high, butt-clenching walk of a wrestler. Beneath fake blonde hair, colorized blue eyes blazed at me as if I were on the other side of a WWF ring.

“Grace Vance,” she said in a tight New Jersey squawk. She butt-clenched her way toward me. “It’s time I introduced myself and kicked your silly ass in return for the hell you’ve put my brother through for months and for the lousy cheap trick you pulled on him with the
Enquirer
.”

Clearly, her publicist had made her sound more literate and more elegant. I fluffed my overalls. “Back off, Irma.”

She stopped cold. “What did you call me?”

“Irma. Irma Magdalene Senterra.”

“
My name is Diamond.
”

“Not on your birth certificate,
Irma
.”

Irma.
I couldn’t call her anything worse. I’d done my research. Growing up in a middle-class New Jersey suburb with a passive mother and a tough, dock-working father who called her gentle names like “fatso,” and “sissy girl,” Irma Magdalene Senterra credited her older half-brother, Melvin “Stone” Senterra, for being her best friend and emotional protector. She’d always believed her big, hulking, ex-Army Ranger brother deserved to be a star. In return, he’d given her small parts in all his movies, and she was a star, too. I could respect that kind of sibling loyalty, but I wasn’t above twisting the screws. “Irma,” I repeated. “Back off before the wicked witch of the west drops a tabloid photographer on
you
, too.”

She looked around furtively, bless her heart, as if a guy with a Nikon and a long lens might pop out of the big oaks and photograph her birth certificate. An unnatural natural pink color rose in her bronzed cheeks. As my insult sank in, she rose on her stiletto tiptoes and eyed me. I recalled the small, vicious dinosaurs in
Jurassic Park
, the ones that looked so cute until they raised their fleshy hackles and went for the kill.

She looked like that.

“I’ve broken people’s fingers for calling me names I don’t like,” she said.

“You must scare your boyfriends.”

“Keep it up! Your campaign to stop this movie is great publicity for my brother—because you’re making people feel sorry for him!”

“No one feels sorry for a multi-millionaire movie star with bad hair plugs and the IQ of a rock.”

“Admit it. You just want to hog the spotlight. You can’t stand seeing your dead husband become a bigger deal than you. You were always Miss This and Miss That. Rich girl. Well, my brother and I came up from a two-bedroom row house in Jersey and we
worked
for what we have.”

“Making lousy cartoon movies is no claim to fame. You think I’m jealous of my husband’s heroism? You think I’m jealous of the attention he’s getting now that he’s dead? No. I resent that it took his death to make people see him the way I always knew he was. And I resent seeing his life turned into one of your goddamn cartoons.”

“What have we done in the script that isn’t seriously true?”

“For godssake, you’re playing a ‘partner’ of my husband’s who never existed. A GBI agent who packs more heat in her chest than her holster.”

“Hello? Phone call from reality . . . every movie needs a dose of tit and ass. We couldn’t use
you
as the hot babe because my brother respects your wishes and wrote you
out
of the movie as much as he could!”

“I’m supposed to be pleased because the actress playing me isn’t showing her boobs?”

“There are worst things than showing off what God gave you.” She jerked a thumb at her own breasts.

“Unless God’s dealing in silicone now, He didn’t give you those.”

“I’m self-made and proud of it! I wasn’t born like you, with a silver spoon and size C-cups. All right, so
what
about the character I’m playing—but look how far we went to put
real
people in the movie. My brother is playing your husband’s real partner and best friend. Stone Senterra plays Grunt Gianelli! That’s an honor! An honor! Don’t you get it?”

“Grunt is black!”

“This is a movie! The only color that matters is black on the bottom line and green at the box office! He has an Italian last name! That’s close enough!”

I stared at her. Just stared. Speechless in the face of absurdity. Finally I said, “I’m mud wrestling with a pig.”

“Go ahead—insult me—I don’t care! My brother is doing you a
favor
by making your nutty, holier-than-thou husband into a big-name legend, but all you care about is stealing the spotlight. Whazzup, beauty queen? Getting a little long in the tit and worried about your public appeal? You ditched your job as a glorified TV smiley face and the job offers haven’t exactly flooded in since then, right?”

“Listen, you idiot, every national talk show and news magazine and half-witted reality show in this country has offered me jobs—all based on my ‘fame’ as Harper Vance’s widow. If I wanted to exploit my husband’s legacy I could be reporting the latest Michael Jackson nose job on
Inside Edition
or sitting next to Barbara Walters on
The View
right now.”