Avenging Angels Read Free

this desk, are you?”
    Bree glanced at the reserve listed in the catalog. Even a (probable) late eighteen-nineteenth-century desk was way out of her price range. On the other hand—if she had a new client—and she was reasonably certain she did—how was she to keep in contact with him if somebody else bought the desk?
    “Wait! Of course you have to bid on this desk! You’re brilliant!” Antonia grabbed Bree’s wrist and pulled her briskly along. “I should have thought of this myself! You buy this desk out from under Mrs. O’Rourke, and then, just as a, like, humanitarian gesture, I present it back to her, on behalf of a grateful public.” She shoved her way through the throng of auctiongoers settling into the rows of chairs facing the auction block and sat primly down in the aisle seat in the second row from the front. Bree stepped over Antonia’s feet and sat down next to her.
    “I don’t think I can bid on this desk.” Bree showed her the reserve price. “Eight thousand dollars. I’d have to empty my office account to come up with eight thousand dollars.”
    “You’re going to let a small thing like the rent and groceries stand in the way?” Antonia sighed. “And I suppose you think you have some sort of obligation to Ron and Petru. Well, nuts, sister. Just my luck to have a responsible relative.”
    Bree didn’t think Petru, her Russian paralegal, and Ron Parchese, her secretary, relied on paychecks for their temporal existence. She wasn’t even sure, apart from their very human appearance when they were with her, that they had a temporal existence at all. As for Lavinia Mather, her landlady, Bree knew for certain that the last time Lavinia required human sustenance was in 1783 when she was sold to the notorious slave owner Burton Melrose. But her Company of angels and its needs wasn’t something even her sister knew about. And her immediate problem was what to do about the desk that was the contact point for her newest client.
    A burst of singing from the front stage made Bree sit up and take stock of her surroundings. She’d been to auctions before, with her parents, but the auction house here was very different from those near the family’s North Carolina home, Plessey. For one thing, the room where the bidding took place was huge, as high as it was long, and stuffed like an Aladdin’s cave with ornately carved sofas, tasseled pillows, huge fake ferns, oil paintings in gilt frames, ten-foot-tall mirrors, and a herd of oversized marble statues of Greek goddesses and Egyptian pharaohs. And for another, it was a lot livelier than the auctions Francesca and Royal Winston-Beaufort attended. A group of red-shirted employees formed a line in front of the auctioneer’s platform and began a loud, off-key version of “Puttin’ on the Ritz” to mild applause. The employees scattered, and one of the auctioneers grabbed a microphone, shouted a welcome, informed the audience that many many fine items were here to be auctioned off today, and the bidding on the O’Rourke estate was to begin after an initial round of sales from the many, many fine items right up here on the stage. A few of the employees began to circulate with trays of food, juice, tea, and soft drinks. Several more stationed themselves along the rows and chairs and began a rhythmic clapping. The rest of them wheeled platforms of furniture, urns, statues, and boxes onto the stage. Two eight-foot-high stone vases stood to the forefront. Two sturdy guys hefted one up and rotated it around. It was like the first act of Fiddler on the Roof .
    The lead auctioneer brought the microphone close to his mouth and said in a low, thrilling tone:
    “Both of this fine pair of limestone planters are for sale, for one-money, one-money, one-money. Do I hear five hundred and a little bit more ?”
    The auctioneer was generic of his kind, middle-aged, middle-sized, with a bit of a potbelly and a cheerful grin. Like the adult half of the staff at the World