Frame Change: A Nina Bannister Mystery (The Nina Bannister Mysteries Book 5) (3 page)

She had pulled a chair before the farthest of the boxes, one labeled “Carpathian Landowner’s Villa, circa 1923, and had lost herself in it.

“They’ve put the chair,” said Carol, to herself, “in the wrong place.”

No one wanted her.

“How funny. The chair is in the wrong place. It destroys the order of the room. The stupid museum. They’ve put the chair in the wrong place. And they’ve fired me. What will I do now? Where will I go?”

Her cell phone rang.

She took it out of her purse and flipped it open.

“Hello?”

“Carol?”

“Yes?”

“This is Margot Gavin.”

“Oh, Margot!”

“Carol, we have a lot of money here in Bay St. Lucy, which is a town on the gulf shore in Mississippi. We’d like for you to come down and give one of your incredible presentations. Just name your price. And let us know what kind of equipment you need. I know you’re busy, but––do you think you could squeeze us in?”

It took her fully two minutes to stop crying, so that she could say ‘yes.’

CHAPTER THREE:
 
TRANSITIONS

It took the better part of a week for Nina to get over Margot’s and Alanna’s response to her entry into the world of art.

At every trip to Bagatelli’s, the word ‘insipid’ came into her mind.

At every step she took along the shore line, she heard the phrase ‘take it down now!’

Every sight of the frothing waves on the incoming tide reminded her of her own masterful use of white in the seascape that she and twelve others had painted with such care.

It wasn’t
that
bad,
she continually told herself.

Or maybe it was.

Margot had been, after all, for many years, the managing director of The Chicago Art Museum.

She probably knew
something
about these matters, or so one would think.

Gradually these thoughts dissipated into the mild sea air, and were replaced by visions of the great spectacle which was to happen in only a few days at the Auberge des Arts. For the apparently quite talented Carol Walker had replied to Margot’s telephone invitation to say that, yes, there was an opening in her schedule; she could come quite soon to Bay St. Lucy, and, yes, she would be delighted to give a presentation.

On Monet’s Water lillies, as it happened.

As for the equipment necessary, it was quite easy to obtain, from any good store that specialized in computers and electronic devices.

Of which there was one in Bay St. Lucy and an even larger one in nearby Hattiesburg.

And so the date was set: September 16.

Three days away.

There was nothing to do, then, except look forward to it.

Well, almost nothing.

There was worrying to be done.

For something was definitely wrong with Penelope Royale.

Nina had heard rumblings for some days.

“Somehow she just doesn’t seem the same.”

“I know––it’s—something’s bothering her.”

But she’d given little credence to such mutterings.

True, Penelope and Tom Broussard, married a little less than a year now, were the unlikeliest of couples. He’d been a rebellious student in Bay St. Lucy’s high school, managing to get himself expelled and then sent to jail before taking a turn for the worse and becoming a writer. For her part, she’d also been expelled from the high school (on numerous occasions, actually), but, as opposed to Tom, who usually did no more than get into fights or insult various classmates or teachers, she’d actually managed to do severe and costly damage to the physical plant.

Now, she’d become the town’s Tugboat Annie.
 

If Tom was Marlon Brando she was Marie Dressler.

Their marriage, though, had seemed to work out, for the simple reason that neither of them acted married.

Neither of them changed lifestyle in even the smallest degree.

Penelope continued to live at the far end of the wharf, in a corrugated iron shed beside her square, flat bottomed boat, The Sea Urchin.

Tom continued to live in a square, flat-bottomed shack in the most disreputable part of town.

She continued to live for only two things: fishing and obscenity.

He continued to live for only pornographic writing.

So it was hard for Nina to believe either could be dissatisfied with the arrangement.

But such was clearly the case, no doubt.

She realized it early on Wednesday morning as she approached the shed and boat, walking gingerly along a quay moistened by a small predawn shower and still slightly slippery.

“Hey, Penn!”

This was her standard greeting; it almost always called for Penelope to emerge from the shed, clad in dungarees, hip boots, and a plaid shirt, beaming, and saying something like:

“Hey you------------! Ready to-----------------------some----------------------------- and get some---------------------- fishing done?”

The dirty words varied, of course, but they were always fiercely imaginative and even quite poetic in a Dantean sense, if Dante had only been a bit more daring in his wanderings through Hades, and a bit less concerned about being excommunicated.

It was just Penn saying, ‘Hi, let’s go fishing!’

Because they did go fishing every week.

It had become a part of each woman’s routine.

It gave Penelope a chance to keep up with the comings and goings of her favorite ex-teacher (the only teacher, actually, who had not attempted to have her removed, not only from the high school, but from the city, and even the state).

And it gave Nina a chance to be sure that Penn was still living comfortably in the far west end of the wharf, and thus would not be a danger to any of the town’s infrastructure.

It also supplied Nina with four or five nice, foot-long whitefish (They sometimes caught other things, of course, but whitefish was their prey of choice), which Nina would put into her freezer and thaw for various evening meals.

So it worked out nicely for everyone concerned.

Except, of course, the whitefish, but that was matter for a different time and place.

It was thus highly surprising this particular morning when, as a reply to Nina’s cheerful greeting, Penelope could only stare somberly at her across several buckets of bait and other aquatic refuse and say, quietly:

“Good morning, Nina.”

Uh oh.

Something definitely not right.

“You ready to go fishing, Penn?”

“Sure. Bait’s all ready. I’ve got your lines rigged. Come on and we’ll get started.”

Nina nodded and continued to approach the boat, but she was already genuinely concerned.

“How’s Tom?”

“Oh, he’s fine.”

“And your business?”

“Going well. Had three parties last week and two more scheduled for the next few days. It’s not summer business, you know, but it’s holding steady.”

“Glad to hear it. So. Where are we going today?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Maybe over in the Bay. Maybe out toward the oil rig. There seems to be some action out that way. Several of the other captains have taken sea bass. Just whatever you want to do, wherever you want to go.”

“Sure.”

Well, that settled it. Penn was sick.

No obscenities at all.

What could be wrong with her?

Her color was fine.

She moved around in a sprightly enough fashion, juggling thirty or forty pound barrels of this and that as though they were weightless.

But she was not swearing.

Nor did she swear during the entire ceremony of starting the boat, easing it through the various slips and other docks—usually one or two of the other fishing boat pilots would have left a line adrift or moored unevenly, breaking an unspoken captain’s code and eliciting from Penn some such outburst as:

“Flynn, you ---------------------! If you ever ---------------------------------- that again I’ll------------------------- and you won’t have enough------------------------------ to -------------------------------------------your------------------------for a -------------------------------!”

Or something similar.

But this morning, the boat just chugged its way out to sea.

What was going on?

The wind freshened; there was a slight chop in the surf. Nina basked in the morning sun as she sat in the prow and turned occasionally to watch Penn steer.

She probed.

“How’s Tom’s newest novel?”

“It’s coming along all right.”

“He hasn’t gotten arrested any more, has he?”

“Just once, last month. But the other guy in the fight didn’t press charges.”

“That’s good.”

“Yeah. I guess.”

What was wrong with her?

Maybe nothing.

Maybe she was just feeling blue, or moody.

Sometimes that happens to everyone.

But no—this was something completely different.

And the reason Nina knew it was completely different was as follows:

After fishing for little more than an hour, they came within half a mile from the offshore oil rig that could be easily seen from Bay St. Lucy.

This was not Aquatica, the huge drilling station that Nina had, incredibly, saved from utter destruction some bare months before, and which was still going about its mammoth pumping business more than ten miles out.

No, this was a much smaller installation; but still, it had its own business to do, and it employed drillers and riggers, and it fed them, and it threw overboard as garbage both the food they did not eat and the remains of the food that they did.

Fish came to eat these things.

One of those fish struck Nina’s line just as she was musing about what could possibly be wrong with Penn, and whether she should possibly ask something like: ‘Penelope, are you all right? Have you been getting enough beer to drink? Somehow you just don’t seem to be…”

WHAM!

Huge strike!

The rod bent double in Nina’s hands; the reel buzzed, and the prow of the boat was pulled in a tight circle by the submerged aircraft carrier that was now pulling them:

She heard the voice from astern:

“You’ve got a ------------------------! Don’t---------------------------! Just --------------------- the ------------------------, and then ----------------------------------------.”

It was then Nina knew that real trouble was at hand, and that something was terribly wrong with her friend.
 

For things had become exactly reversed.

It was as though Penelope Royale had been turned inside out, her entrails outside of her and her skin hidden within.

Penelope—the real Penelope, the normal Penelope—could never engage in casual conversation, which she had been doing for the past hour with Nina, without swearing.

But she had not sworn.

Not one bad word had she uttered.

On the other hand, she could not talk about fishing when a fish was actually on the line in any other than stolid, serious, prose.

“Hold the rod tip higher. Give him a little more line.”

Now all of that had been reversed.

Penn was swearing while giving actual fishing advice.

This was tantamount to an otherwise normal person drinking heavily in the morning.

It presaged evil.