Oil Change: A Nina Bannister Mystery (The Nina Bannister Mysteries Book 4) (12 page)

“How long have you known Guidry?”

“Oh. What time is it now?”

“It’s seven o’clock.”

‘”Then—five minutes, I guess.”

Nina could find nothing to say for a moment, and finally stammered out:

“I thought you two were a couple.”

Annette nodded, impatiently:

“We are. Now. Remember how I told you I discovered men in my mid twenties…”

“…and never looked back.”

“That’s’ right, ma chere, that’s right.”

“And you’re not looking back now.”

“Not a bit of it.
 

Nina knew nothing to say.

Finally, she tried to stammer something out, but nothing came.

“What? What is it, Nina?”

“Annette—it’s just—it all seems so inappropriate. I mean—one of your classmates is dead.”

“That’s right, Babe. He is. He is dead.”

“I mean—how can you just go dancing?”

Then, from somewhere in the collection of half rooms that were nothing like an actual building, a clock started chiming.

Bong. Bong…

The Red Stick Ramblers belted out:

“GEAUX GEAUX GEAUX de GEAUX GEAUX GEAUX!

MEAUX MEAUX MEAUX de MEAUX MEAUX MEAUX!

And Annette shouted back at Nina:

“How can you not?”

The music pounded and throbbed and wailed and squawked and dipped and soared and cried and always tailed off in its plaintive syllables of “oh oh oh, de oh oh oh,” spilling out into the sweating air with five vowels and an ‘x’.

The dance floor, Nina estimated, was fifteen feet square.

There were now eleven thousand people on it.

Where had they come from?

True, there had been customers, lag-abouts and stragglers, disreputable types scattered about this trail of rooms furnished like an alley…but nothing like this!

Annette had disappeared, sucked into the dance quicksand that was heaving and boiling so close to the musicians themselves that dancers, their heads cocked back and eyes boring straight up into heaven, had to neck-jerk slightly to avoid fiddle-bows jabbed into earrings.

“May I?”

A man was standing just before her with an arm outstretched.

He looked…

Oh, hell, what did it matter how he looked.

“Do you wish to dance, Miss?”

“Sure.”
      

She took his hand, felt herself being led forward, albeit, coincidentally and irrelevantly, backwards…and bathed in the dance as she would have in the ocean swell of a beach.

There was no room on the dance floor, and there was everywhere room.

It was, perhaps, his skill in guiding them; or it was the massed radar of the beings around them, who, like a cloud of bats, emitted and received in return navigational force waves operational
 
only in fields of rhythm.

He held her closer to him, palm pressed firmly against her back. At that moment, she did not so much reconsider going to bed with him, as to postulate for the first time going to bed with all of them. They could every one…all of the bodies large and small, bespectacled and red haired, glamorous and wizened, mammal and near-reptilian…all sleep exhausted, some time far later in the night or early morning, in a bed of reeds and mango peelings, snoring out, like a huge multi-limbed Cajun bear, the muted syllables:

All bad things, all evil deeds, disappeared.

OH OH OH, de OH OH OH!

“You a good dancer, Miss!”

“Thank you!” she shouted to the six faces closest to her.

All of them smiled back.

Saturday morning.

Seven thirty, AM.

It was a little, dilapidated house and Nina loved it. What was this place where the strange Annette Richoux lived, and to which a taxi had dutifully returned her around midnight? A bungalow? No. A cottage? That would be putting an optimistic spin on the thing. It was literally no more than an outbuilding, a something that would have passed for slave quarters if slaves had existed at the time of its construction. It contained only one large room, partitioned by half walls and dotted here and there by what passed for a tiny kitchen, a questionable bathroom, a bed nook––and, at her first glance, it was semi-coated by badly peeling grey paint, seemingly bought as surplus from the German army.

Tucked away in the forest—well, all right, it wasn’t exactly a forest, but everything here in the swamplands, only some miles from the huge Atchafalaya Basin…everything in this coastal Cajun marshland seemed only a live oak, only a cypress spear away from what could have easily been called a swamp…tucked away in this near forest, with a crumbling red-brick wall separating it from the lane, and a delightfully dilapidated off-green swinging gate allowing entrance to the yard-patch––

…tucked away just far enough from the sight of those few students who might be passing en route to the mile distant campus…

…it looked exactly like what her own bungalow would have been, had it been surrounded by a swamp and not fronted by an ocean.

“So, you sleep ok, Nina?”

She was sitting beside the bed, having accepted a cup of tea.

“Best night’s sleep I ever had,” she replied. “I was dead tired.”

“Well, darlin,’ you looked good out on that dance floor.”

“I was just jumping around.”

“That’s all dancing is.”

“I don’t know…the rest of you made it look better.”

“Well, we were born here. Or close by, anyway.”

“What time did you get in, Annette?”

“I don’t know. Doesn’t matter.”

“Where is Guidry?”

“Where is who?”

“Okay. I get it.”

“Here.
 
Want a beignet? I got ‘em at Poupard’s Bakery when I was driving back, about five. That’s the best time. They’re fresh.”

She did want a beignet. Then another.

Sugar was getting everywhere.

It did not seem to matter.

“I had a good time last night, Annette. I really did.”

“You deserved it. You’ve been through some stuff.”

“I guess so.”

Silence for a time. Then:

“Nina, I can’t tell you how much everyone in the department thought of Edgar.”

‘”He had that effect on people.”

“I hated it, that he got hired by LP.”

“Why?”

Annette shrugged:

“Writing about oil companies…big oil companies…is what I do. I don’t like them.”

“Why not?”

“Because they’re frauds. They claim to understand what they’re doing. But they can’t. The whole damned thing is too big. The depth of the wells, the complexity of the operation—there are too many people involved. Too much chance of a mistake. A lot of mistakes. And then all hell breaks loose. It breaks loose, and they can’t put it right again. And everything dies. Hell, we don’t even know how long the dying goes on.”

“And this is what you write about?”

“Hope to make my career about it. Even though it’s sure to hold me down.”

“How?”

“When we go onto the campus, you look around you.”

“At?”

“The buildings. Especially the geology building.”

“What will I be looking for?”

“The money that built them.”

“Which comes from?”

“Big oil, baby. Big oil.”

“So they don’t like you because you don’t like them.”

“It would never be admitted. But that’s the way it is.”

“They hired Edgar anyway.”

“They have money. They need engineers now. Half the young people in our department are already under contract, even before the ink is dry on their diplomas. Hundred and twenty thousand.”

“What?”

“One hundred and twenty thousand dollars a year. Starting salary. They spend two years on the rig, then they start up in the company.”

“Edgar had his family to support.”

“Yes, he did. So there wasn’t much of a choice about the matter.”

“No. Guess there wasn’t.”

Pause.

“You want another beignet?”

“I’ve had plenty.”

“Well. The dancing is over then. You know what we need to do, Nina.”

“Yes.”

“So. Let’s go meet Professor Narang. And look at this mysterious flash disc of yours.”

Within ten minutes, they were walking into DeGolyer Hall, which, Nina ultimately realized, housed all offices belonging to the geological sciences. Then there was a stop at the departmental office, another at Annette’s office—small and crammed with books lying around like refuse—and finally they were opening the door of a larger viewing room, with computers hooked to overhead projectors.

“My esteemed Ms. Bannister!”

Professor Daruka Narang beamed at her.

He was standing behind a podium, looking up at the two of them as they entered.

It was a classroom meant for perhaps two hundred students, almost empty now except for the three of them.

“Dr. Narang?”

“Yes! Yes!”

He was a small man, immaculately dressed. He had a perfectly trimmed goatee, which shone black against his olive skin.

He gestured broadly:

“Come. Both of you, come down. I have some tea here. Could I offer you a cup of tea?”

And in fact he was standing beside a small table with a makeshift tea service on it.

They descended the steps.

“Thank you so much for letting me come, Sir.”

“No. It is our pleasure. Has Annette been gracious to you?”

“She has indeed.”

“I took,” said Annette, “Nina dancing.”

“Wonderful! Wonderful! Please—take a cup of tea. There is sugar here, if you wish.”

“Thank you.”

It was so strange
, thought Nina.
Tea. Dancing
.

And the memories of Edgar.

But she drank, and chatted, and talked about the flight into Lafayette…

…and went through all the common courtesies with this man, as though the three of them were celebrating the queen’s birthday at some salon in London.

Finally though, after she had said some words about her own identity, and what Bay St. Lucy was like, and what Edgar’ family was like…

…after the three of them had completed the pleasantries expected of them.

The work at hand was ready to begin.

She produced the disc, which she had been carrying in her purse.

Annette inserted it into one of the computers.

Another computer began buzzing, and finally the screen behind the podium broke into bright illumination.

Professor Narang, horned-rimmed glasses on now, fingers crawling over the keyboard like the legs of a tarantula, became immersed in the data filling the air and covering the walls around them.

And there was a mass of data.

The same data Nina had seen on her own computer, which now seemed woefully inadequate.

But the figures on the screen changed as the speed of Narang’s typing increased.

Now there were graphs—line graphs, bar graphs.