Frame Change: A Nina Bannister Mystery (The Nina Bannister Mysteries Book 5)

Frame Change

(A Nina Bannister Mystery)

T’Gracie and Joe Reese

Volker, Danielle und Graz: für die schönen Erinnerungen

PROLOGUE

Margot Gavin could remember the day perfectly.

She could, in fact, remember everything about the interview. Down to the last word, the last gesture.

How strange!

It had now been almost a year. At precisely nine thirty on the morning of Tuesday, October 14, she had entered her office prepared to deliver a standardized speech informing a young applicant for the position of docent at The Chicago Art Museum that she would not be accepted for the position.

She had opened her desk drawer, taken out of it a package of Galois cigarettes, and regarded the applicant, whose name was Carol Walker.

“They will not let us smoke anywhere in the museum, and so we have to go outside to a small area between the buildings. I hope you don’t mind, Ms. Walker.”

“I don’t mind.”

“You should mind. It’s barbaric; but then rules are rules.”

She had not met this young woman, but the Director of Educational Resources, Rebecca Simpson, had delivered an unenthusiastic, even scathing, report of the previous day’s interview.

“I just don’t––I just don’t see that she’s qualified at all. She does have a degree in Art History from…I don’t know where; but she’s primarily a literature person. She spent last year teaching English at some junior college. She just doesn’t seem to have the––well, the credentials for an institute of our standing.”

And here she was. Small, unimposing woman, rather slight, dark hair worn in bangs.

But something about her eyes…

And so she’d taken a package of matches from the same drawer—for she intended to smoke anyway, of course, rule or not—lit her cigarette, and blown smoke upwards, gazing out the window behind her, through which sailboats could be seen, seemingly motionless, idle, as sailboats always seemed to be.

“You don’t smoke?” she could remember asking.

“No.”

“Not ever?”

“No.”

“Drugs of any kind? Sorry, but I must ask these things.”

“No. Never.”

“Not even marijuana?”

“No.”

“My God, what are we teaching our children these days? Ever been arrested?”

“No.”

“I had been, at your age—what are you, twenty five?”

“Twenty eight.”

“Twenty eight! Well that changes the figure, doesn’t it? I had been, at age twenty eight, arrested five times, two of them even in this country.”

She could remember thinking then about the speech she was supposed to be giving:

‘While we certainly appreciate your enthusiasm, you must appreciate that, with such a large number of applicants…”

And…

“There are a number of other museums in Chicago, smaller, but more equipped to serve as training grounds for young people wishing to become involved in museum administration. I could suggest…”

And she could remember wondering why she wasn’t giving the speech.

“And you are from?”

“Georgia.”

“I see. I was once in Atlanta, for a conference.”

“Our farm is east of Atlanta. North of Athens. In the mountains.”

“You’re a farm girl.”

It was at that point she could remember thinking that this girl, this Carol Walker, had a very nice smile.

“Timber raising. Sheep raising. Never off the farm until I was nearly twenty or so––then somehow I got to go to Europe.”

“And you loved it.”

“Yes. I’m a language nut. And an art nut. I lived in classrooms in various cities; and museums. I almost slept in the museums.”

“I’m sure you did. Yes. I’m sure you did.”

There had been a pause, and Margot could remember herself drawing hard on her Galois and
 
saying for some reason:

“I once blew up a warehouse. Quite by myself, actually. There was no one in it, of course.”

“That’s good.”

“I don’t know. There are things to be said on both sides of the issue. In your interview yesterday with Rebecca Simpson you made a horrible pun.”

“Yes. I’m sorry about that.”

“She asked you how much money you’d expect to earn. And you said you only wanted to make a docent living.”

“Yes.”

“Why ever did you make such a horrible pun? And in an interview! Why, child, would you do that?”

“Stupidity.”

“Stupidity!”

“Yes. Must have been.”

“It’s a very old pun, you know. I must have heard it first at…where, Oxford? No. Sao Paolo. My God, what was I doing in Sao Paolo?”

“Don’t know.”

“No, you wouldn’t, of course. But a crucial interview, competing against so many other very qualified candidates. Were you so incredibly naïve as to think the thing original, or so incredibly stupid as to find it funny?”

“Both.”

“You would only make nine hundred a month, you know.”

“All right.”

“Do you have a personal life?”

“No.”

“Good, so you can be flexible.”

“I’m nothing if not flexible.”

“What do you understand concerning the duties of a docent here.”

“Nothing.”

“And yet you applied for the job.”

“I thought I would learn what a docent did, after I became a docent.”

“I see. You tried teaching for a time?”

“Yes.”

“I know because I read your teaching evaluations. The ones from––what god forsaken junior college was it?”

“There were several.”

“Yes, that’s true, now that I’m remembering. Dr. Simpson told me about them, and…well, let’s see what it says here—ah, you didn’t send in the mid-semester attendance reports, and the Dean of Liberal Arts emailed you and told you that the omission was ‘inexcusable.’”

“Yes, she did.”

“Is that why they fired you?”

“They didn’t actually fire me; they just said I shouldn’t come back.”

“Did you read your student evaluations?”

“I never saw them.”

“Of course, you didn’t; why should they show them to you? Several of your students said you were ‘the best teacher I ever had in my life.’ Those exact words. What do you think of that?”

“I suppose it shows the sad state of public education in this country.”

“What’s your favorite painting?”

“One on the third floor. It shows a town in Prussia.”

“Sourmire. French painter. He was a guest of the Duke of Brandenburg.”

“It’s a small town, you can tell. There’s a castle up on the hill in the middle of town. But the painting is about the main street. Only a few people are out. Some horses tied to hitching rails. It’s summer, and very early in the morning. The light is––I can’t really describe the light, but you can’t forget it. And it’s cold. It’s summer, but it’s cold.”

“How do you know it’s morning and not evening?”

“I don’t know; but you
do
.”

“Yes, you do, don’t you? Yes, you do. Well. Rebecca Simpson hates you and suggests that we not hire you.”

“I’m sorry she hates me.”

“Don’t be. She’s a chicken. Do you have any questions?”

“One or two.”

“Go ahead, please. Ask.”

“I was wondering what I was supposed to do here.”

“Oh, I don’t deal with that kind of thing. Anything else?”

“No, I don’t think so.”

“Then, that’s it. I have to go outside and smoke. Oh, by the way: try to develop some bad habits, won’t you?”

“I’ll try.”

“That’s all we can ask. Good day.”

And Carol Walker had left.

CHAPTER ONE:
 
THE AMATEUR PAINTER

Fall meant school for the children of Bay St. Lucy, and it meant a slowdown in the tourist trade for the shopkeepers and bed and breakfast owners, who heaved a collective sigh of relief, even as they stared toward the financially-challenging months when peace of mind was at hand, and money was not.

A difficult choice.

Early September—to be precise, the weekend of Friday, September 9 through Sunday, September 11––meant something different to Nina Bannister.
 

It meant a reunion with her best friend Margot Gavin, who’d shut down her plantation hotel The Candles for a period of some days, said adieu to her husband for an equal number of days (Goldmann had business in Chicago to deal with), and made the eighty-something mile trip south in her Volkswagen, pulling into the village in mid-morning and taking possession of one of the rooms in Elementals: Treasures from the Land and Sea, the bed and breakfast which she still owned.

And which Nina now ran.

It was splendid. Margot arrived early enough so that the two women could still reasonably trek over to Bagatellis’ and buy bagels, and still sit in the cool garden and drink coffee.

It was the same old Margot, kaleidoscopically garbed, smoking again, craig-faced and
 
wild haired, and utterly outrageous.

Marriage had proven tolerable only because she and her husband, early on, had so tired of it that they’d decided to consider themselves divorced and merely carrying on an illicit affair with a total stranger, or, better still, a married stranger.

This entire line of reasoning made no sense to Nina, of course, but not much else that Margot had ever said did either, so whatever.

The two of them still laughed like schoolgirls.

And then there was, of course, the opportunity for Nina, sitting beneath a huge hanging fern and sipping her second cup of dark roast, to recount all of the fantastic goings-on aboard Aquatica, the floating oil platform which Nina and Hector Ramirez had somehow saved from blowing up.

That took a bit of telling.

And it made her, Nina realized, mousy retired teacher that she was, just as outrageous in Margot’s eyes as Margot was in hers.

So it was all blissful until about ten thirty or so, when Margot took a closer look at the paintings which now encircled the garden.

Nina had been afraid of that.

“Those paintings—what are they?”

The best answer, of course, would have been:

“What paintings?”

But they were there, all twelve of them, all just as Nina and her friends had hung them there two days ago, as colorful by-products of the class they’d all just finished taking.

“What paintings?”

Might as well try, anyway.

“Those paintings! Those paintings you’ve hung around the garden! The ones where Ramoula Peters’ works should be! And Elsie Garvin’s! What
are
those paintings, for God’s sakes?”

“Well…”

“And Tom Mitkin! There’s nothing up there by Tom!”

“Actually, Margot…”

“Nina, what is happening to my shop? Our shop? What are you doing?
 
Who painted those things?”

“I did. At least one of them.”

Silence. A huge macaw should have shrieked at this moment, this pregnant pause, in order to add drama to the situation.

But Elementals possessed no such huge bird.

Pity
, Nina found herself thinking.

“You did?”

“Yes. I and…”

Another pause.

Where oh where was that bird when one needed it?

“…I and some friends.”

“Some friends?”

“Yes.”

“What friends?”

“The class.”

“The class. I’m sorry but I find myself repeating everything. I’ll try to stop that. So––what class?”

“My painting class.”

“How can there be such a thing as a ‘painting class’?”

“I don’t know. But there is. Was. It’s over now.”

“Thank God.”

“Oh, I don’t know. It was a lot of fun, really.”

“Nina—look, look up at the wall. Those twelve paintings are all the same. All exactly the same.”

“I know. It’s easier that way, painting I mean.”

“I’m sure it is.”

“Anyway, Emily Peterson came in about a month ago with an ad for what she called a “Wine and Watercolor” class. For fifty dollars apiece, people—women, actually—who were beginning painters could come and meet at O’Doule’s Pub. There would be wine. She’d have the easels set up, supply the paint, and…”

“I think I know what’s coming, and I’m going to be sick.”

“Supply a painting that we would all copy.”

“So you all painted the same painting.”

“Yes, the seascape with the old lighthouse, the choppy waves, the storm in the distance, the…”

“I can see what’s in the painting.”

“I didn’t think I would be any good at it. But it was late June, and the Aquatica thing had just ended, and I had a lot on my mind. I couldn’t really sleep. I kept seeing that shark eat Brewster Dale, well, you know, after he’d threatened to kill all of us. So I thought, ‘why not try it’?”

“Oh, Nina, there are so many reasons. You should have called me, dear.”

“They’re not so bad, are they?”

“As opposed to what?”

“But they aren’t really all the same. See, that one there above the clay pot? Patsy Stevens did that one. Can you see that the roofline on the old shack is—I don’t know––kind of whompejawed?”

Margot lit a cigarette, drew hard upon it, and then held it menacingly out to her side, as though preparing to use the burning end as a kind of detonator.

“Of course,” Nina said quietly, “that might have had something to do with the wine.”

Margot said nothing.

“We all thought it would be a good idea if we could hang the paintings somewhere. So I volunteered our space. It’s not for long, you understand. And by the way, weren’t there some great painters who just painted the same things over and over again?”

Margot had stood up, though, and was wandering around the glass-topped table aimlessly, like a water buffalo that had been stunned by a blow to the head by a pickax.

Nina continued:

“The impression people, I mean?”

With a great show of concentration, Margot managed to answer:

“The Impressionists?”

“Yes! Yes, that’s them! Didn’t one of them just paint water things all the time?”

“Water lillies. Monet. Monet’s Water lillies.”

“Right! So, they’re all hung somewhere, I’ve read, in a great big circle. Like we have here.”

“It’s the Louvre, Nina. The Jeu de Palm. Part of the Louvre.”

“I knew it was something like that. But isn’t that what we’ve got here? Like the Louvre?”

Margot sat down again, stared for a time at her cigarette, then stamped it slowly out, as though trying to inflict pain upon it.

“Part of the Louvre,” she whispered, her breath hissing like a snake though the dissipating smoke cloud. “Elementals. Now part of the Louvre.”

“And look! Look how my second wave, the one that’s almost reached the shore, is just a little frothier than, oh, Stephanie’s, which hangs there over the clock. I was worried because I didn’t have enough of that slate gray paint that water sometimes looks like—slate gray, I mean—so I thought about trying to borrow some, but nobody else seemed to have any either, and we were about out of wine, and so I thought I’d just substitute a little of the pure white. We all were given a lot of pure white at the first of the session. I thought it might make the wave look like ‘not water,’ but actually it kind of frothed up on the canvas, and I think it looks pretty good. If you compare it to…”

“We have to take them down.”

Nina looked at her.

“Well, we were planning to take them down in a couple of days, of course. But we thought if we could give Emily the advertising…”

“We have to take them down now.”

“You don’t think just…”

“No.”

“But if I...”

“NO!”

“Oh, all right. I have to say, though…She could not say, though, being interrupted in mid-protest by the jingling of the front bell and the jingling of Alanna Delafosse, who, having heard of Margot’s visit, had brought pound cake.

“Nina! Margot!”

She swept through the front room as if it did not exist, and entered the garden area like the cataclysmic event that she was.

Margot, on the other hand, still seemed somewhat numb from having experienced twelve almost identical (except for a few whompejawed lines and too-white waves) paintings, and could only respond by lurching forward and uttering:

“Uhhh!” while Alanna enshrouded her and exuded for a few massive and dangerous breaths:

“It is
so wonderful
 
to see you again! I’d forgotten whether you eat pound cake, my dear—but I so hope you do!”

“Uhhh!”

“You must tell me everything! How is life on a plantation? And your marriage, are you loving every blissful moment of it? How long can you stay with us? You must have dinner with me—and Nina of course—at the Auberge; I simply insist on it. We’re getting the most delicious oysters! What time did you arrive this morning? Was it a difficult drive down? Did you come via the interstate? The interstate is so fast, and there are so many trucks, huge trucks that run over everything in their path.
 
But on the smaller roads there are the speed traps. It’s never easy to…”

And then Alanna, her eyes darting upward to watch for angels that might have been attracted by her enthusiasm, saw the paintings.

There was silence in the room while she studied them, her head swiveling.

“Oh my God,” she finally whispered.

Nina spoke, but nothing came out.

She felt like the proprietor of a horrible prison camp, upon opening its doors to the victorious army.

“They’re all the same painting!” gasped Alanna.

“Well, actually they’re from my class. We…”

“We have to take them down.”

“Margot and I were just talking about that. I thought…”

“We have to take them down! Margot, I’m so sorry that you had to see this. In your shop.”

Margot nodded, weakly:

“If I could have been warned…”

Alanna embraced her again, and the two women seemed to weep on each other’s breasts for a
 
time.