Charming Grace (33 page)

T-minus-10, and counting. Grace was about to be introduced. I smelled trouble.
Noleene, you always smell trouble.
But I was usually right. I stood in the shadows backstage with the rest of Stone’s gophers, watching Grace step up to the curtain and prepare her mental game. I bet this was how she looked backstage at a hundred beauty pageants. Tough, focused, ready to kick some runway butt. She shrugged the tension out of her shoulders the way a quarterback does before he calls a play. Stone had been talking on stage for nearly two hours, showing film clips, telling jokes. Every time I peered around the curtain, his faithful flock looked hypnotized in their homemade costumes. It was so quiet you could have heard a fake alien antenna drop.

“And now I want you to meet the woman behind the man in front of my first movie as a director!” Stone shouted into his hand-held mike. “Harper Vance’s true-life wife, Grace Vance!”

As the audience cheered, Grace slipped through the curtain on the balls of her feet, head up, arms loose, like a ballet dancer. Or a back-alley bare-knuckle fighter. “She’s up to something,” Mojo whispered.

“Does a bear shit in the woods?” Tex drawled.

I eased to the curtain’s edge and looked out. “Thank you,” she said to Stone, then let him hug her. He handed her the mike and she smiled beautifully at the audience. “What a handsome group of
heroes
,” she said. Inside garbage-can space armor and homemade monster suits, hearts melted and peckers rose. Stone’s fans whistled and applauded. It was as if Julia Roberts had waltzed out on stage and given them an air-kiss. They fell down at her feet and rolled around like puppies. Stone nodded his approval.

“It is my happy assignment,” Grace said sweetly, looking at Stone as if he were butter and she was a bun, “to announce that Stone has agreed to donate his entire personal salary for Hero—five-million-dollars—which, of course, is just a fraction of what he’s normally paid for a film—five-million dollars—to the Harp Vance Scholarship Fund.”

Stone stared at her. This was news to him. The audience whistled and applauded. The reporters snapped pictures, turned on their video cams, took notes. Stone wouldn’t be able to back-peddle from this public announcement. Grace didn’t bat an eyelash. Her smile never even twitched. “And!” she went on, as the applause began to fade, “Stone and I are also thrilled to announce the first Harp Vance Documentary Film Award at the Dahlonega International Film Festival, a $100,000 prize that includes a full production and distribution deal with Senterra Productions, and the first winner is—” Grace thrust out a hand toward Antwoine and his crew. “Antwoine Louis, producer and director of the documentary film,
Street Wise
!”

Antwoine clutched his heart, mouthed
Mofo
, like a prayer, and nearly fell over.

I had never loved Grace Bagshaw Vance more.

Stone recovered from my on-stage ambush during DIFF, but he wasn’t happy. We negotiated heatedly until I agreed to accept only
half
his salary for the scholarship fund, but I stood firm on the film award for Antwoine. One-hundred-thousand dollars and a production deal. Stone finally tossed up his hands and yelled, “All right, I’ll give your personal pet punk the award dough and set up some studio meetings for him. Did Noleene have something to do with this?”

“No. He didn’t know a thing about my announcements.”

“All right. But no more surprises and no more bribery. Do you think I’m
made
of money?”

“Since you’re on the
Forbes
top-ten-richest entertainers’ list along with Spielberg and Oprah,
yes
.”

He grumbled. We shook on it.

“Sammy Davis Junior and the
Marlboro Man
’s grandpa are here,” G. Helen announced drily, the next morning. Tex and Mojo showed up at Bagshaw Downs with a spectacularly wrapped package in hand.

“We’re just the delivery guys,” Mojo said firmly. “Ask us no questions, and we’ll tell you no
whys
.”

But Tex was more talkative. He pointed to the big package. “Boone made that in prison, for that architecture contest he won. He didn’t tell me to tell you that, but hell, I’m too old to be subtle. It’s like he gave you his heart.”

The package contained a miniature house—no, a tiny, sprawling, handmade log
villa
, you could say, with a red copper roof and red copper pergolas on the roof and three small stone chimneys and Adirondack twig porches. All done in the most amazing detail.

I went into G. Helen’s library—where she kept her personal liquor, guns, Tony Bennett albums and pictures of herself as a poor, pretty, determined mountain girl with big dreams—and I cried over the honor.

Then I went to G. Helen’s elegant little office at the back of the mansion, carrying the miniature house atop the blueprint portfolio Boone had given me earlier. “I hear you’re sleeping with a man who builds houses,” I said drily. “Tell him I have an architect for him.”

My grandmother eyed me over pearl-white reading glasses. One perfectly groomed auburn brow arched in a birdwing of smug victory. “I already have,” she said.

Primary filming on
Hero
was in full swing. Stone finished up the scenes from Harp’s childhood, squinting into camera lenses as his pre-teen Harp and Grace acted out Stone’s version of their history. The set design people converted sections of downtown Dahlonega back to the storefronts from the 1970’s and early 1980’s, meaning tourists looked confused when they wandered into the general store and found college girls selling
lattes
at a coffee bar. G. Helen and her fortyish-G. Helen lookalike, the soap opera actress, struck up a friendship and were gawked at regularly around town, usually deep in conversation about men, clothes, and money over glasses of wine on the breezy back balcony at
Wylie’s
restaurant. Crowds of Stone’s fans invaded town to watch the filming from behind barricades. The inns and motels stayed full, the restaurants stayed full, the shops stayed full.

All the Dahlonegans making money off of the above—including more than a few Bagshaws with local investments—were as happy as clams in mud. But I watched Grace and knew none of it made
her
happy. The circus had come to town, and her husband’s memory sat right in the center ring, whether she liked it or not. She’d pried a lot of money out of Stone for good causes, but she was hunting bigger alligators than that. Each time she watched the kid actors mouth Stone’s cheesy dialogue, I saw her cringe. Some how, some way, she had to get a rope around the one ‘gator that mattered most: Stone’s dumb script.

Naturally, the Stone Man didn’t have a clue she was still tracking him through his own swamp. I figured as long as I didn’t know exactly when or how or even
if
she’d come up with a workable plan, there was nothing to warn him about, yet. Not that he’d have listened, anyway.

“I’m saving my kiddie-time orchid scene until you bring me the goods, Noleene,” he reminded me with testy patience. “Can’t you persuade Grace to let me have one little peek at Ladyslipper Lost? Hmmm? So I can see where she found Harp as a kid? And where he’s buried now? And maybe she’ll let me film some scenes there?”

At the time of that conversation, I was in the big trailer that served as a commercial kitchen at Camp Senterra, making a ten-gallon pot of my mama’s jambalaya for the twenty full-time guys I’d hired for on-location security. I laid a whole, raw crayfish on a cutting board and made a show of straightening his feelers and all his little legs. “This is you right now, Boss,” I told Stone. “A nice lookin’ crawdad. All safe and sound. But
this
is you after Grace finds out you want to film scenes in her secret orchid hollow.” I chopped the mud shrimp into about five pieces. Little legs and feelers went everywhere.

Stone glared at me. “Either you get me into that orchid hollow, Noleene, or I’ll go to Grace’s nutty Aunt Tess and
she’ll
hook me up with people who can find it. I’ve already talked to her about it. She didn’t say no. Look, I swore I wouldn’t pry into your little friendship with Grace, but the least you can do is
use
that friendship for
my
benefit. You
get
me some access to that glorified flower bed, Noleene, or
else
.”

I picked up crawdad legs one at a time, along with my balls.

“I don’t want Boone embarrassed by this meeting with Jack Roarke,” I told G. Helen. “Or disappointed. Or to have his hopes gotten up or gotten, gotten down—oh, I’m drunk. I can’t even put sentences together that make sense. Am I doing the right thing?” We sat in the Downs gazebo at sunset, drinking martinis. I was nearly slurring my words.

G. Helen stubbed out a long cigarette, then set her fine-stemmed glass down so hard it rattled on the glass tabletop. Her eyes flashed. She went green-gold before my eyes. “Do you realize that despite my sexy good looks I’m an old lady with an old lady’s perspective about life, and you’re
pissing me off
with your naïve ideas about what’s important?”

I almost choked on a bite of martini olive. “I’m. . .sorry. You’re not old. And you’ve always been pissed off about something or other.”

“You can’t fix what’s wrong with Boone’s life, any more than you could fix what was broken about Harp’s. You can only try to help Boone and see if he’s smart enough to take your help. Now, stop worrying and meditate on the sunset and look at those beautiful red poppies over there. My opium poppies are as innocent as they are dangerous. It’s all in how you use the harvest God gives you.”

“But if Jack Roarke doesn’t—”

“Jack is in Boone’s corner. Trust me. Ssssh. Poppies.”

I stared at opium poppies the color of blood. “You’re putting a lot of trust in a man you barely know.”

“Look who’s talking,” she said, and finished her martini.

Sometimes, invitations marked ‘Trouble’ hear you calling their name, and sometimes the timing seems very, very weird.

“No excuses, you’re coming, Boone,” Helen Bagshaw ordered, on the phone. “It’s just a little
al fresco
lunch in the wilds of my private real estate sanctuary. I want you to meet Jack Roarke. Jack Roarke wants to meet
you
. Grace wants to meet Jack Roarke. Jack Roarke wants to meet Grace.
Every
one in Lumpkin County wants to meet the man I’m sleeping with in my dotage. Come on. You and Grace can be among the first.”