Frame Change: A Nina Bannister Mystery (The Nina Bannister Mysteries Book 5) (12 page)

Another draw.

Six of spades.

Damn.

Discard the three of diamonds.

Carol’s draw

Four of clubs.

Would that do it for her?

No, apparently not.

Her discard.

The ten of diamonds.

Damn.

Rain rain rain.

Spatter on the sliding deck door.

Furl asleep beneath a cardboard box in the corner of the living room.

Carol drew, furrowed her brow, shook her head, wiped her glasses.

“Nina! Nina!”

A bull horn voice from the parking area below.

“Nina, for God’s sakes!”

The voice seemed to grow more desperate.

Carol put down her cards and stared:

“What is that?”

Nina shook her head while rising and walking to the living room window.

“I have no idea.”

She pulled the blinds back and looked outside, but for a time all she could see were shapeless gray forms through a film of rainwater.

“Nina!
 
Are you up there?”

“Who is…”

She went to the door. She could hear Carol’s voice from behind her.

“Are you sure you want to open that?”

She shook her head:

“No, but we have to do something to end this damned card game.”

And so saying, did open the door.

Standing at the base of the stairs, dressed only in an impossible open-collared flowered shirt and stained white pants, was Tom Broussard.

Tom, hulking and unkempt at his best, now (at his worst) hulking and unkempt and soaked, was Bay St. Lucy’s only genuinely successful pornographic novelist.

“Nina!”

His broad face upturned, his eyes gaping in horror, he reminded her of Stanley Kowalski, and if he’d chosen to shout ‘Stella!’ instead of ‘Nina,’ she would have thought herself in a play and would have attempted to remember her next line.

What was that line, anyway?

Everybody knew ‘Stella!’ Nobody knew the line that followed.

She knew she was supposed to depend on the kindness of strangers. But Tom was no stranger. So she had no idea what to do, except to step out on the stairwell platform so that she too was now getting wet.

“Nina, you’ve got to come!”

“Tom, are you drunk?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Have you been drinking?”

He nodded, floridly, dramatically, the nods almost amounting to bows, but his voice was flooded with rainwater and deep sobbing:

“Of course I’ve been drinking! But I don’t think it’s going to help!”

“Come up here! Get dry!”

He shook his head, water splattering from his tangled black mane as it would have from the tail of a black stallion that had just made its way out of a river crossing.

“Can’t!”

“Why not?”

“We’ve got to get back to the boat!”

“Why? What’s going on, Tom?”

“It’s Penn!”

“Is she all right?”

“No, she’s––oh God, I’ve never seen her like this!”

“Is she hurt?”

“I don’t know, Nina, I don’t know. You’ve got to come!”

“All right, Tom. But––do you want me to call 911?”

“No, this is a genuine emergency!”

“But what should we…”

“Just come! Just come!”

“All right! Let me get a slicker on!”

The rain was beginning to roar now, and the ocean was beginning to roar, and Tom was down there roaring, and Furl had disappeared into the bedroom.

Nina had half-finished the process of putting on the slicker when she heard Carol say, softly:

“Gin.”

She looked over at the table.

Carol was laying down her cards.

“I only needed a…”

“Oh, the hell with you,” she said, and went out into the rain.

It was toward an uncertain rendezvous with destiny that Nina found herself hurtling, the battered pickup truck Tom had somehow managed to find at an auction for scrap iron, splashing its way down Breakers Boulevard toward the mangy end of the harbor where Penelope kept her fishing boat, The Sea Urchin.

“Can’t you tell me what’s happened, Tom?”

“It’s just––I can’t believe it!”

‘What?”

But he merely shook his head and gripped the steering wheel tighter.

Dark shapes flowed past them on the left and they themselves flowed out of Bay St. Lucy proper and into Bay St. Lucy improper, the cheapest moorings of the cheapest boats. And so went the progression: yachts with stately mastheads, expensive pleasure boats, less expensive pleasure boats, scows, garbage haulers, and finally Penn’s Urchin.

They pulled to a stop, the rain rattling harder now than ever, and the quays glistening with oil and water.

She pushed open the truck door, which screeched in pain as metal tore against metal and the things that should have been oiled at some point in the vehicle’s existence and never were, cried out in their vengeance.

She jumped from the truck’s running board down into a six-inch deep puddle of rain or seawater––it hardly mattered which, the saline content of the substance having less relevance to Nina’s existence at this particular time than temperature, which seemed something to be measured in Kelvin degrees rather than Fahrenheit.

“Come on! She’s over here, in the shack!”

Nina would have thought about cursing because her sneakers had gotten soaked; but she was approaching Penelope Royale, around whom all attempts at obscenities always seemed amateurish, and thus hardly worthwhile.

They were running over the docks now, the square, flat-bottomed Urchin sitting tightly moored, rocking in the rain peppered waves, the equally square, flat-topped corrugated iron shed in which Penn and Tom incredibly and impossibly lived, now looming up before them.

They had gotten to perhaps twenty feet of the building’s entrance when the front door burst open and Penelope lunged out. She was dressed in what seemed to be a torn and ragged sail from some schooner that had been washed ashore in a neap tide.
No,
thought Nina,
that was not precisely accurate
. Penelope was not ‘dressed’ at all in any conventional sense of the word. She was more accurately ‘fitted out,’ as though all of her limbs had become masts and crossbeams, and, having spent her entire life on the water, her entire being had finally evolved into more of a water craft than a human being.

And the vessel that she’d become was storm-tossed now indeed.

She filled the doorway.

She glared.

Then, her mizzen cannon doors opening, she let forth a volley of grapeshot and dirty words, all directed at Tom.

“You ----------------------------------------------------------------------!!!
 
How could you ------------------------------------------------------------------!!!! Don’t ever try to -----------! If I-----------ever -----------------------------!”

As for Tom, he simply stood in the midst of the storm, big, vulnerable, and doomed, the Spanish Armada to Penelope’s quicker and far more deadly English fleet.

He floundered.

He moved his arms but seemed incapable of speech.

From some half mile distant, one of the great tankers that frequently made its way whale-like along the coast let out a loud honking bray.

Penelope stared at it, and would have sunk it had not the distraction from Tom proved too irritating.

So instead, she let loose again upon him:

“You-----------------------!!! You didn’t have the-------------------------- to-----------------------------! And if you ------------------------------I would have---------------------------------------------!”

Nina noticed for the first time that Penelope held a crowbar in her hand.

‘She’s,
she found herself thinking
, ‘going to kill him. She’s going to kill both of us.’

She flashed back almost ten years ago when Penelope, who’d been her student at the time—as had Tom––(How had she survived those two?) had almost single-handedly, dismantled a drinking fountain.

But Penelope had been a girl at that time, a mere slip of a thing.

She was a full-blown woman now, and much stronger.

The muscles in her upper arms, or those left visible through tears in the sail she was wearing, twisted and corded themselves like thick ropes.

Tom, Nina could see, was watching those muscles too.

And the black, oily, seemingly weightless (at least to Penelope) crowbar.

My God
, Nina found herself thinking.
What has he done?

Then someone, insanely, took two steps toward the building (and thus also toward Penelope) and said:

“Penn! Penn, let us come in!”

Who had said this?

Whoever it was had now incurred the same stare that had been fixed on Tom.

It was Nina.

Damn
, she told herself.

What was she thinking of?

(Of course, what was she thinking of, even being here in the first place?)

It was growing dark. It would have grown dark all on its own, even without the storm and the low scudding clouds to help it. It would have grown all cuddly and dark even without Penelope’s foul and tempest like fog of thick obscenities to intensify it impenetrability.

But now, aided by all these things, it was dark indeed.

So why was Nina Bannister not home in bed?

“Penn, let us come in!”

Penelope stared at her.

“Nina, --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------!!”

Well, there was not much to be said to that.

So she simply stood there and listened to the wind blow.

The wind did that very well.

And after it had dispersed over the docks the last fifteen or twenty words of the torrent that had been unleashed, it slackened enough so that Nina could hear this second person (the lunatic) who seemed to be impersonating her, say: