Game Change: A Nina Bannister Mystery (The Nina Bannister Mysteries Book 3) (35 page)

This all changed on the night of the Hattiesburg victory.

Everyone loved one another. Everyone grouped together in little caramel-clusters of humanity and careened from street to street, forming streams of jubilation and singing and hugging and yelling out cheers to other groups of people, who were going in the opposite directions.

“Everyone’s meeting on the town square!”

“Come on come on come on come on!”

Nina Bannister was ultimately put down but she was never exactly let go.

Mobs of people continued to embrace her; the players cried in her arms, and she soon found that her voice, which had been screaming something or other for an indeterminate amount of time, had gone from Lauren Bacall to Woody Woodpecker.

Somewhere—she had lost track of the streets—she found herself encircled by reporters, flash bulbs exploding no more than a foot or so in front of her.

“Coach Bannister!”

“Yes!”

“Tell us about the last play!”

She took a deep breath:

“We work on it all the time!”

“Really?”

“No, that was a joke. We work on it all the time, but usually we like for Alyssha to wear a cast on her shooting hand. That makes it more challenging.”

“Really?”

“No, that…”

She shook her head.

Her voice had now moved from Woody Woodpecker to Minnie Mouse.

“Forget what I said before. The last shot was a miracle. The whole game was a miracle. God must have wanted us to win!”

She moved on down the street or up the street she did not know or care which, cheerfully oblivious to the theological implications of the notion that the supreme deity might take sides in a high school basketball game, and quite content simply to be carried along by a wildly swirling and cascading torrent of Bay St. Lucyans, moving inexorably toward a makeshift platform that had been thrown together just in front of the county courthouse.

“Speech! Speech!”

Alyssha Bennett was being herded up onto the platform.

She was waving now, as a microphone was placed before her.

“We thought we could win this game by giving two hundred percent. But it wasn’t enough! We had to give two hundred and fifty percent!”

“How did you hit that last shot?”

“I don’t know. I just threw it up and prayed!”

There it was. Theology again.

“I just want to thank…oh, there she is! Coach! Coach Bannister!”

And the chant began again:

“NINA! NINA! NINA! NINA!”

She was escorted to the stand. She had no idea what she was going to say.

Here was Jackson Bennett, leaning down and yelling in her ear:

“Incredible game, Nina!”

“Thank you, Jackson!”

And here was Edie Towler:

“Great game, Nina!”

“Thank you, Edie!”

And here was Tom Broussard:

“Unbelievable, Nina!”

“Thank you, Tom!”

And here was Moon Rivard:

“You better come with me, Ms. Nina. We just found out who killed April van Osdale.”

CHAPTER 23: THE WOLFMAN

“We shall not kill and maybe next time we even won't.”

––
William Faulkner
,
Intruder in the Dust

Within a minute she’d found herself in the back seat of a squad car.

The crowd was pounding on windshields and windows.

Moon Rivard had slid in beside her, after gesturing to the young, black-haired patrolman who was driving the squad car.

“Just go nice and easy, son. Don’t want to run into any of these folks.”

“Moon, what are you talking about?”

“April van Osdale is dead.”

“Oh God.”

“Yeah, I know.”

“And you know who killed her?”

“Looks like it.”

“Who?”

He ran a gnarled hand through his iron gray hair and breathed deeply:

“That English teacher of yours who we had to lock up.”

“What?”

The car was moving away from the worst of the crowd now, and they picked up speed as they entered Breakwaters Boulevard.

“Yeah, that guy who got drunk with Tom Broussard.”

“Max? Max Lirpa?”

“That’s the one.”

“But that’s who’s crazy. He’s down at the docks right now. He got himself out onto one of the big yachts.
The Sea Beagle.”

“That’s the senator’s yacht!”

“Yeah, that’s the one. Anyway, he’s up on one of the masts, yelling that he’s gonna throw himself off.”

“Moon, he’s probably just drunk!”

“Maybe. But it looks like he did the murder, all the same.”

“He couldn’t have!”

“There’s evidence.”

“What evidence?”

They were on the main road now, coastline to their left, heading west.

The patrolman turned on the siren.

Behind them, Bay St. Lucy glowed like a Christmas tree.

“The state men found it, going over that house on Fairway Drive one last time.”

“State troopers?”

“Yeah. As it happened, one the men assigned to go through all the drawers and stuff was the same one who was there when they had to escort that lady from the school.”

“Meg?”

“Yeah. You remember how bad that was.”

“I do, but how…”

“Well, this Lirpa guy made a fool of himself then, too.”

“Yeah. He yelled at the troopers.”

“He insulted them, apparently.”

“Oh, not really, Moon. He just called them Nazis.”

“Yeah. Well, some of them boys is overly sensitive.”

“People just can’t take criticism anymore.”

“No, ma’am. But when this patrolmen was going through one of the clothes drawers at Dr. van Osdale’s place, he found this silver jewelry-like thing. Something you would wear around your neck.”

Nina whispered:

“A werewolf pendant.”

“I guess that’s what you’d call it. Something crazy like this idiot would wear. Anyway, this patrolman remembered that Lirpa was wearing the same pendant that day at school.”

She continued to whisper as the dashboard glowed green, the moon sparkled on the waves, and the siren droned on:

“He was wearing it the first day I saw him. I won’t forget it.”

“No, ma’am; I guess you wouldn’t. The patrolman got to wondering why that piece of silver would come to be in Dr. van Osdale’s bedroom.”

“I wonder that, too.”

“So he went over to Broussard’s house. That’s where this guy’s been living.”

“What happened?”

“Found him. Showed him the damned pendant and Lirpa just kind of went crazy. I don’t know what happened, but I read the report. In fact, I got the report right here. Let’s see…”

Moon reached up and switched on the car’s overhead light; then he squinted down at a sheaf of official looking documents that lay on his lap.

“They asked him this and they asked him that, and he was getting more and more upset––and finally they asked him, ‘Did you kill this woman?’ And he laughed and answered: ‘Yes but that was in another country. And besides, the wench is dead.’”

“Marlowe.”

“What?”

Nina nodded.

“It’s a famous line of literature, Moon. Christopher Marlow.
The Jew of Malta
.”

“This Lirpa is a Jew?”

“Don’t worry about it. It just means he might have been quoting something. He’s crazy that way.”

“He’s crazy in a lot of ways. Main thing is, he broke free from the two patrolmen as they was taking him out to the car. Don’t know how he did it. But you know that place of Broussard’s out there. Not much more than a jungle anyway.”

“Yes. I’ve been there.”

“It was dark. This happened a couple of hours ago. And he got free. Then, no more than half an hour ago, one of the yacht owners called in. Seems he’s out there on
The Sea Beagle
, up on the mast, yelling.”

“Anybody else on
The Sea Beagle
?”

“No. It’s been moored up for the week and deserted. Nobody can figure out how he got onto it. But anyway, he’s yelling that he wants to see you.”

“Me?”

“Yeah.”

“Why me?”

“Don’t know. We was wondering if you could tell us.”

“I can’t begin to tell you,” Nina answered.

But she also began to think.

A man in my life.

He first came into my life years ago, when I was first at university.

Ice and fire.

Ice and fire.

Could this man have been Max Lirpa?

That was absurd!

Why the two were like…

…like ice and fire.

My God.

Could Max Lirpa have killed April van Osdale?

“Moon, could I see that report?”

“Yes, ma’am. Here it is.”

She took it, not knowing what she was looking at.

The words jumped off the page at her.

CONFIDENTIAL REPORT ON MAX LIRPA.

She stared at it.

MAX LIRPA.

LIRPA.

LIRPA.

Then she saw.

“Oh, my God,” she whispered.

“What is it, Ms. Nina?”

“Oh, my God.”

They were pulling into the main wharf area; she could see the tall masts standing like bare pines in the moonlight.

“That can’t be. That just can’t be.”

“Do you see something in the report?”

“Yes. No. Yes.”

“That don’t make no sense.”

“No. Yes. No.”

The car stopped.

It all did begin to make sense.

Piece by piece by piece by piece.

“I was conceived and raised in Oxford.”

“She’s a classic schizophrenic paranoid.”

“He has been in my life since university days.”

“But that was in another country. And besides, the wench is dead.”

The wench is dead. The wench is dead.

“You ready, Ms. Nina?”

“Yes,” she whispered, “I’m ready.”

And she was.

Because, finally, she realized what had happened to April van Osdale.

“A man will talk about how he’d like to escape from living folks, but it’s the dead folks that do him the damage. It’s the dead ones that lay quiet in one place and don’t try to hold him, that he can’t escape from”

                  
––
William Faulkner
,
Light in August

“What matters is at the end of life, when you’re about to pass into oblivion, that you’ve at least scratched ‘Kilroy was here,’ on the last wall of the universe.”

      
––
William Faulkner
,
Lion in the Garden: Interviews with William Faulkner, 1926-1962

The scene at the gangway leading out to
The Sea Beagle
was not the tangle of mass confusion one might have expected, the main reason being that a large majority of Bay St. Lucy was still in the center of town, reveling in Basketball Bacchanal. Here there were four police vehicles, an ambulance, and a cordon of gray uniformed officers, peering out at the yacht, where a searchlight was casting its sun-white circle of phosphorescence.

In this center of this spotlight, his shirtless body impaled against the mainmast, was Max Lirpa.

His hair was wild, his eyes were wild, his clothes—those he was still wearing––were wild and his eyes were alternately wolf-like and maniacal.

A bit of each quality intensified in them when he saw Nina making her way along the wharf.

“My headmistress!”

She continued to walk.

The officers closed in around her, and she could hear one of them ask:

“Are you Ms. Bannister?”

Why were people always asking her that?”

And why did she always find herself replying:

“Yes.”

Shouldn’t there have been an alternative?

Why wasn’t ‘no’ a possibility?

Because then she could go home!

“Yes. I’m Nina Bannister.”

“You know this man?”