“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.”
“So you’re a saint, huh? No. Just a smug, silver-spoon southern belle. Most women can’t afford to turn up their noses at money and fame.”
“Don’t smear your values on other people and assume they’ll stick.”
“Do you understand what kind of responsibility comes with being famous? Do you understand what a responsibility my brother has to his studio, his film distributors, the movie theater owners, and his fans, for godssake? Do you understand what kind of power my brother will have once he proves he can direct a hit movie as well as act in one? Mel ‘Mr. Serious Director’ Gibson can kiss our collective Senterra asses, then!” She was in my face now, hissing hot breath on me. “And finally, do you understand that if you do anything else to screw up the filming of my brother’s directing debut I will personally stick one of your pissy-prissy southern belle beauty queen tiaras up your—”
“Your fans are headed this way.”
We heard a squeal. A handful of afternoon guests had wandered out of the Smith House. They were hurrying up the inn’s sidewalk, gaping at us, whispering, excited. Some pulled out cameras.
Diamond gave them a huge, phony smile, then pivoted back toward me with a pucker of pure disgust. “I have to go, now. I have fans. I have responsibilities to them. You are just a pimple on the ass of my world. Up your—”
“Hello!” I called to the advancing tourist group. “Did y’all know that Diamond’s real name is Irma Magdalene?”
Irma took a swing at me.
Never let it be said that we rich-chick beauty belles can’t dodge like a boxer when attacked. Years of ballet and tap-jazz are not for nothing. I ducked, she lunged, one of her stiletto heels snapped off, and she whooshed past me with both arms flailing. A cloud of dried horse manure poofed up as she landed inside the trailer. She scrambled to get a foothold in the floor’s deep muck. “You!” she yelled. “You! Dead! You bitch! Dead bitch!”
I shut the trailer doors and dropped a steel lynch pin in their latch. As I walked around front to the pickup truck’s open window, Diamond began pounding the trailer’s plywood walls. The trailer rocked. Strained through plywood, her muffled shouting produced a kind of weird new language.
“Let me mumble out of mumble here. Ah’ll mumble mumble your ass.”
“T-John?”
“Hmmm.” He jerked awake, smacking his lips and brushing the open Enquirer off his lap. “Sorry, hon.”
“I want you to take the trailer over to the Persimmon Hill estate. Give this note to Mr. Boone Noleene, when you get there.” I pulled a spiral pad and a little gold note pen from my overall’s front pocket, scribbled a few words, tore the page out, folded it, and handed it to him. “Then come back by here and pick me up. Here.” I handed him a cell phone from my deep hip pocket. “Call me if anyone gives you a hard time.”
“Hard time? Over manure, Hon? Why are you sending manure to— you’re sending manure to Stone Senterra?”
“Sort of.”
He frowned and fiddled with the turned-off hearing aid in one ear. “What’s that noise?”
“I’ll explain when you get back. Just ask for Mr. Noleene and give him the note.”
“Hmmm. Okay. I’ll be right back.”
He cranked the truck and drove off. The trailer rocked violently. I could just make out Diamond’s last, fading shriek.
Ah’ll mumble mumble get you for this.
The small crowd of fans stood on the Smith House lawn, open-mouthed and stunned.
“Don’t worry,” I called. “It’s for TV. We’re being filmed.”
Everyone looked around excitedly. “Is it for one of those reality shows?” a woman asked.
I nodded. “Surprise Celebrity Road Trip.”
Stone was out on the lawn at Casa Senterra giving an interview to a shrewd-eyed reporter from The Dahlonega Nugget, and occasionally looking over at me to say, “My bodyguard, there, he’s a good old boy Southern crack-neck. He can vouch for me and my respectful intentions. My film about Harp Vance’s life will boost tourism here in Harp’s hometown a thousand percent. Did I mention I’m donating twenty-thousand smackers to the library and twenty-thousand to the fire department, all in Harp Vance’s name? Tell this nice lady, Noleene. I’m a big fan of all you cra
ck-necks around here. Tell the lady, Noleene.” As if he were on safari and I was his native interpreter.
I leaned close to Stone and whispered, “It’s not ‘crack-neck,’ it’s ‘redneck,’ boss, or ‘cracker,’ and either way, it’s like somebody calling you a dumb guido or a greasy spic.”
Stone gaped at me. Then he recovered his public cool and grinned down at the reporter. “Come on up to the house with me, little lady. I’ll have one of my assistants show you around and let you take some exclusive pictures of my outdoor gym, while I call your publisher personally and tell him how much money Senterra Productions plans to spend on advertising in his paper.”
Stone glowered at me then led the reporter away. Across the lawn, Tex and Mojo pretended to guard the estate’s picket fence from the invading azaleas. Once Stone and the reporter were safely inside Casa Senterra, they leaned against the fence and laughed so hard I thought the pickets would split.
Mojo intoned in a fake announcer’s voice, “Coming next on The Stone Senterra Diplomacy Tour—Stone visits Harlem and talks jive with the brothers.”
Tex, nodding, wiped tears from his eyes. “Noleene, you better coach him on what to say and how to say it ‘fore we find him at the bottom of some old gold shaft wrapped in a Confederate flag with a ‘Fergit Hell’ bumper sticker slapped to his forehead.”
“I’m still tryin’ to get him to pronounce Dahlonega right.”
Stone never got it. But he tried. He really did. Little Dah, big LON, little ega, from the Cherokee Indian word for gold. Dah-LON-ega.
“Dah-la-NEE-ga,” Stone said on ET.
“Dah-LAWN-NEE-ga,” Stone said to Jay Leno, on The Tonight Show.
“You can’t separate the story of Harp Vance from where he grew up,” Stone told Barbara Walters on The View one morning. “I’m going to let the audience walk where he walked, see the town and the mountains he loved, feel like they’re part of his real life. Like those documentary guys do on the History Channel. Only it won’t be history. It’ll be now.”