Charming Grace (17 page)

Frowning, I caught up with her just as she halted before a tall, dark door at the end of a sunny alcove. There were no fine antiques in this corner of the Bagshaw world; no crusty Bagshaw ghosts scowling in oil paint, no, just a simple red, braided rug in front of the door and a small black and white photograph of Grace and Harp framed beside it.

Grace put a hand on the heavy brass doorknob, turned and pushed, then looked back at me. Her eyes had the tight, wet gleam of polished rock. “This was his room as a boy.
Our
room, after we were married.”

I followed her into a big, woodsy den of a room, a different world from the elegant and coolly beautiful mansion around it. A heavy oak bedstead drew my attention like a magnet. It was swaddled like a baby in big artsy quilts with Cherokee basket-weave patterns. Yeah, I pictured her laying there. Tension fell thick, invisible static playing in the air, lifting the small hairs on my skin, igniting some chemistry that was all heart and sex to me but I don’t know what, to her. Her face was pink, her skin gleamed. I had never wanted a woman so much in my life or been so sure that one wrong move would close that door forever. I was hard outside and shivering inside.

Grace moved around the room swiftly while I just stood there, frowning and wondering what was about to happen, figuring it was nothing good. Her hands moved like angry birds as she flicked the switches on iron lamps with dark shades. Shadowy wisps of light highlighted a large, watercolor painting of ladyslipper orchids on one wall, a Bowie knife collection in a shadow box, a dresser full of pictures of Harp. The low light warmed the room the way firelight moves in a cave. That’s what the room was: Harp’s cave. Except for the ladyslipper painting, nothing in the room was about her.

Grace faced me with a fever-mad look in her eyes. “You tell Stone my husband was such a private man that no one came in this room but me. Ever. Not when we were kids, not after we were married. You tell Stone that Harp Vance asked for nothing but privacy and respect his entire life.
Privacy
. Respect. Simple things. Things he’d been denied as a boy. Prizes I swore to him he’d always have if he’d just try to fit in, here.”

She ran to a big armoire and pulled open its big, creaking doors. Crammed inside were tight shelves stuffed with books, music CDs, and movie videos. She jerked a stack of the videos from a shelf then held them out toward me. “
Twilight Zone
episodes.
The Quiet Man. Jimmy Stewart. Babette’s Feast, The Right Stuff. For godssake—Beauty and the Beast.
My husband never watched violent films. He hated them. He said the world was full of enough violence without glorifying more. He’d never want to be the
subject
of a Stone Senterra film.”

“This isn’t about making your husband look bad. Stone isn’t trying to turn him into a joke.”

“He has no right to turn him into
anything
.” She clubbed a fist to her heart. “He has no moral right to exploit Harp’s life story to the public and he has no right to exploit my life with Harp! I was always being paraded on some runway as a kid, and I swore I’d have privacy as an adult!”

“Is that why you made yourself invisible with Harp?”

“
What
?”

I nodded at the room. “I don’t see you here. Your things. Books. Pictures. Girly frills. It’s like you don’t exist around your husband’s memory. What do you dream about when you’re alone with yourself,
chere
?”

“That’s nonsense. Harp lived in my shadow. Not the other way around. He was Grace Bagshaw Vance’s husband. The rich girl’s husband. The beauty queen’s husband. The TV celebrity’s husband.”

“That wasn’t your fault. You got no reason to feel guilty for having a better life than he did.”

“I took care of him from the time we were kids, and I knew what he needed—” she slung a hand at the cave-like, all-Harp-all-the-time bedroom—“and he needed
privacy
.”

“Look, I spent nine years in a cell alone with myself. I know how it feels to be sucked into an empty place where you can’t see a window—hell, can’t even imagine what a window looks like, after awhile. I used to
dream
about windows. I even had a drawing pad full of sketches of nothing but windows. Dormered, arched, shuttered, six-pane, twelve-pane, you name it. But when I got out, the strangest thing happened. I was
afraid
to look out windows. Damn. For months I had to fight that feeling. Afraid to even
sit
near a window, and no way could I bear to look out. Finally I realized it was because windows showed me everything I’d missed for nine years, and I didn’t want to think about that. Grace, you
have
to look out windows. You have to open the drapes on this dark room and look out and admit you deserve a life, even if your husband never knew how to live one.”

She swayed. I’d hit her where it hurt. Not that I felt good for doing it. “I’m not ready to look beyond Harp,” she whispered. “And I don’t want anyone to look back and only see
me
.”

I held out my hands. “But people ought to know about
you
. How you bucked the system to take care of a strange kid named Harp Vance. You saved his life. You inspired him. He survived to grow up and become a good man and save those people at the hospital
because of you
. I’m kind of an expert on a lot of subjects—nine years of nothing to do but read will give a person a big range of interests—and I’ve read everything there is to read about heaven, hell, the afterlife, the point of being here, the point of living. And I’ve come down on the side of fate: We’re born and live for a purpose. Sometimes a big purpose, sometimes a little purpose that leads to a big purpose. Sometimes a whole bunch of little purposes that lead to big purposes.

“Look, I can tell you this much: Harp was born to save hundreds of innocent people that day at that hospital, and without
you
to save
him
when he was a kid, he wouldn’t have served his purpose. His whole life meant something because it came down to that. Without you, he wouldn’t have been that man; he wouldn’t have been there, saving those people. He would have died in a ditch in the woods with no one to grieve for him but ladyslipper orchids. But
you
were his ladyslipper. You saved those lives, too. You’re the hero, just as much as him.”

She gave a shaky, bleak laugh. “Me, a hero? I saw that movie: ‘George Bailey, the world would have been a terrible place without you—’ but it’s only a movie.”

“No, it’s true. Every time a bell rings, an angel gets his wings.” I let the silly quote settle for a second, then added, gently, “I know how it is to stay loyal to somebody who needs so much patience. You can rest, now,
chere. You made sure Harp got his wings
.”

She put her face in her hands and sobbed.

I gave myself a mental ass kicking. What the hell had I done? “Grace, I’m—”

Sorry
.

It never came out.

A phone rang somewhere in the hall. Grace kept crying. I just stood there, feeling like shit. After three rings an answering machine cut on. Helen Bagshaw’s bourbon-and-perfume drawl said please leave a message at the sound of the tone, darling.

“Mrs. Vance!” a familiar California-colleg-boy voice belted out. “Mrs. Vance, are you there? Is Boone Noleene there? Boone! It’s Leo! Mrs. Vance! It’s Leo Senterra, Stone’s son! And I need to speak with you or Boone, it’s urgent! Mrs. Vance! Your niece Mika has been caught trying to steal my dad’s final version of the
Hero
script.”

Both Grace and I were headed out into the hall at a run by then, leaving the no-man’s land of her marriage bed and our lonely lives behind us.

Chapter 9

Some men drive like fighters. Some men drive like lovers. Harp had been in the first category, gripping the wheel of any vehicle he commanded, wrestling the technology. Boone hugged the curves and caressed the wheel of Stone’s red Lamborghini with his fingertips. The six-figure sports car had been delivered to town weeks ago by tractor trailer, under the gawking gaze of shopkeepers, tourists, and old men who left their donuts behind at the Mountain Diner to trundle outside and say, in essence,
holy shit
. But Boone made me forget he was driving a wedge-shaped racing machine going twice the speed limit up steep mountain roads toward Stone’s wooded film compound. My eyes were puffy and I felt emotionally bruised. How had I let a near stranger get to me so badly? But above all, I was worried about Mika.

“Drive faster,” I said.

“You didn’t hint for your niece to pull a stunt like this, did you? Stealing a script.”

“No! I do my own dirty work. I’ve specifically told her to stay out of my troubles with Stone. But she’s been determined to help me.”

“Leo must have caught her in Stone’s office.”

“If he hurt her…if he so much as—”

“Hey. Leo’s no punk. Don’t forget he’s the one who called you for her sake.”

I clamped my mouth shut. Why was Stone’s teenaged son eager to help out a girl he didn’t know, a girl he’d caught stealing his father’s finalized version of the
Hero
script? Guilt pecked at me.
Mika knew I wanted that script. She did this for me.

Mika DuLane rarely needed anyone’s help or approval. Her IQ bordered on genius, she had a wealthy debutante’s air of confidence, and anything she couldn’t accomplish in this world she managed to pull off in cyberspace, where she was a computer wizard of astonishing skill. Her effect on people was cemented by delicate good looks encased in a funky sense of style. Her mop of curly black hair poofed from under pastel berets and torn straw hats; she wore stacks of expensive gold bracelets on her golden-brown arms, and the rest of her was usually outfitted in some esoteric mix of hip-hop sass and ballerina pink. Considering her mixed heritage—not just white and black, but white trash and black gold—it was no wonder she’d fervently carved out her own special identity.

By the time Harp tracked down his sister, Michelle, Mika was eight years old and Michelle had been dead for seven of those years. Mika’s father had died alongside Michelle when she ran his BMW off a Michigan highway following a high-octane party spree.

His name was William DuLane III, of the Michigan DuLanes, one of the oldest, richest black families in the northeast. In Detroit alone the DuLanes owned restaurant franchises, car dealerships, and big chunks of urban real estate. Their family tree glittered with lawyers, doctors, politicians, and business tycoons. DuLanes held huge family reunions at their Detroit mansion, and cast a unified evil eye on lesser human beings of all kinds.

“My God,” G. Helen said at the time, “they’re Bagshaws with tans.”

Harp and I met Mika for the first time in a Detroit hotel room, chaperoned by unhappy DuLanes and their lawyers. She looked like a child-sized Halle Berry, dressed in a dark linen jumper and patent leathers, and she stared up at us with the mournful, green-eyed scrutiny of a prize teddy bear at a bad carnival. She had green Vance eyes, but nothing else. “Uncle Harp Vance,” she said solemnly, “I don’t mean to be mean, but you are very, very white.”

Harp must have looked like every stereotype of a cracker cop, to her. He was tall, rugged, and mysteriously quiet— a wolf-lean, 28-year-old with deep squint lines and a brown bristle of military-cut hair. The custom-tailored suits I gave him for his birthdays only emphasized how awkward he looked in pin-stripes. His command of good English was still mountain-man casual, even after years of my coaching and his own respectable B average at college. He made a stiff bow to the niece he desperately wanted to impress, and he said, “I reckon I’m as white as they come, but I’m here to tell you I’m your uncle anyway and you can count on me forever, no matter what.”

Mika’s eyes flickered with surprise, then tears, and then a big smile lit her face. “I
knew
my mother was from a nice family! I just
knew
she wasn’t a bad person! You’re
proof
!”

“That will do,” Mika’s DuLane grandmother said sharply, then whisked Mika away and told Harp he was welcome to write to his niece but there’d be no more in-person contact. “I lost my son because of your sister,” Natalie DuLane said. “I will not have my granddaughter’s loyalties corrupted by you. She is a
black
child, Mr. Vance, and she will be raised among her people.”

“I’m her people, too, ma’am.”

“We can argue the limits of that fact in court, Mr. Vance.”

“I’m not gonna drag my niece through a legal parade, lady. But I’m not gonna forget about her, either.”

“Write her letters. Send birthday cards. When she’s old enough, she’ll decide for herself whether you deserve her affection. Frankly, I suspect you’re little more than a garden-variety redneck with an interest in her inheritance.”

Only Harp’s fist around my hand kept me quiet at that point in the situation, which I’d been observing in livid, rich-wife silence. I’d butted in too often over the years, struggling to help him express himself with my family and friends. He’d patiently warned me that this battle was his, alone. Harp cleared his throat. A muscle flexed in his jaw. “Ma’am, I’m not a garden-variety anything, and the only inheritance I’m interested in is the niece my sister left me. And she don’t have a dollar sign on her.”

Later, on the Delta flight back to Georgia, he was a study in misery. I held his hand tightly and watched him down a rare double Scotch. Harp didn’t usually like any mind-altering substance other than me. “Listen,” I told him, “it’s clear to anyone with eyes that Mika wants to get to know you. And you deserve to know
her
. We’ve got the resources to fight this.” I tried to smile. “G. Helen’s lawyers can beat up G. Natalie’s lawyers with one briefcase tied behind their backs.” I paused, the smile fading. “I’ll even . . . go to my father for high-powered legal help. I will.”

“No.” Harp took me by the chin and kissed me. He tasted like Scotch and love. “No. Just . . . help me write good letters to Mika. And pick out the right kind of girly gifts. Maybe, when she’s grown, she’ll come to visit. Of her own free will.” His throat worked while his expression took on the hard lines of self-protection, a look I’d seen many times since we were kids. “What is it about me? My sister ran off and never looked back. Now I can’t even make friends with her kid.”