Sea Change (The Nina Bannister Mysteries Book 1) (17 page)

He was quiet, staring down into his drink.

“And now the really big question on the test. The only question, when you think about it, that really matters at all on the test: which of these women did you choose to spend the evening with tonight, Paul?”

He shrugged again.

Nina took a big drink of whiskey.

“She just seems really encouraging,” he said.

She spit the whiskey out.

It came out as part of a huge ‘guffaw’ and splattered on the table between them, a field of Jim Beam rivulets glittering amber on the glass.

She went into the kitchen, fighting the urge to draw her sleeve across her mouth and chin.

She found paper towels, wiped her face, took them back, cleaned the table, and tried to look at him with a straight face.

This failing, she looked at Furl, who, taking the raining whiskey to be possible food, was now standing beside her chair:

“She seems really encouraging?”

“Yes.”

“I bet she does.
 
I just bet she does.”

“But––she approached me first.”

“Good for her.”

“I told her about the school.”

“Bet you did.”

“She seemed impressed by the plans.”

“Bet she did.”

“She wanted to talk more.”

“Bet she did.”

“Will you stop saying that?”

“No.”

“Well—she told me I was integral to her plans.”

“Bet she did.”

“Nina––”

“Go on.”

“We might have the school. We might have a new fire department headquarters. We might have Allana’s Auberge des Arts.
 
But they would have to be part of a major comprehensive city-wide development.
 
Several bidders were offering visions of this development.
 
But she needed someone from Bay St. Lucy to help her—well, make sense of it all.
 
She needed a right hand man.”

“A right hand man.”

He took a note pad from the inner pocked of his navy sports jacket, and wrote a figure on it.

“She proposed a salary.”

“It’s not enough.”

“It’s more money than I’ve ever––”

“It’s not enough.”

“Would you just look at it?”

“Give it to me.”

She took the slip of paper.

“With that much money,” he continued, “Macy and I could––”

She tore it up, threw the pieces at him, got up, and went to the kitchen.

“Go home,” she said, opening one of the cupboard door and then slamming it shut, simply for the pleasure of hearing it go ‘bang.’

She listened as he walked out.

For five minutes or so she simply got herself together.

Then she walked downstairs and out toward the beach.

She could hear the cathedral bells of St. Mary’s chime the hour.

Eleven P.M.

She listened to the waves for a time, and then walked back to her parking lot.

There did seem to be other bells, from other directions.

It felt like Christmas night.

The world glowed blue in the street light.

But there, outlined against the light—

––was something falling from the sky?

No, it couldn’t be—

But, but look up, Nina.

Look up!

There is one, and there—

––fluttering down.

Fluttering down from the sky!

What are—

Then she heard the screech of the low wheeling band of gulls, and she realized what the objects were.

“Damn,” she whispered.

She climbed the stairs and went to bed.

CHAPTER TEN:
 
A SURPRISE FOR BAY ST. LUCY

“Everyone needs an editor.”

Tom Foote, commenting in
Time
magazine about the fact that Hitler’s original title for
Mein Kampf
was
Four and a Half Years of Struggle Against Lies, Stupidity, and Cowardice

“A man’s face is his autobiography.
 
A woman’s face is her work of fiction.”

Oscar Wilde

Eve Ivory’s security forces arrived on the morning of December 22, a few hours before the gala at which she was to announce her plans for the development of the village.

They came in several vans:
 
black, hearse like vehicles that parked bumper to bumper around the mansion’s circular driveway, their lustrous finish gleaming like black, elongated stars, and their grillwork sharpened, smiling, and ready to cut.

They spread first through the gardens, then through the house itself, then through the perimeter of the village, then through the center of the village, then through the very air of the village.

There they stayed.

They hovered like a virus.

They patrolled corners.

They moved in pairs, like twin stars, one the shadow of another.

They were identical. Some were black and some were white, some were male and some were female, some were Asian and some were Indian, some were younger and some were older—but taken all in all they reflected a perfect cross-section of American society, ensuring the awed and gaping community which watched them go about their business that any killing they did would be both diverse and sensitive.

The people of Bay St. Lucy accepted their presence as they would have accepted news of a residual hurricane, one that, if it could not be fled, at least promised not to destroy mobile homes. These newly arrived, black suited, white shirted, red tied people were doing no harm, and, on the plus side, were the only truly well-dressed people the villagers had ever seen who were not Jehovah’s Witnesses.

They created, if nothing else, one subject worth talking about.

The other subject worth talking about was the relationship between Paul and Macy.

They were two adult individuals and their privacy was to be respected, of course, so little was talked about after the evening of the shower, beyond the fact that he had not shown up for the shower, and had, in fact, been seen entering Eve Ivory’s mansion, with Eve Ivory, at ten o’clock in the evening.

Beyond that, Macy and Paul’s affairs remained shrouded in the mists of privacy, as they are generally allowed to do in a small community.

All that was known for certain was that Paul had called Macy at 6:45 the following morning and that she had refused to answer; that he had continued to call, reaching her finally at 7:03. She had, or so the rumor went, expressed her anger, even disgust, at his behavior the previous evening, but the matter of whether she’d actually used the word ‘jackass’ was conjecture only, and could not be certified one way or another.
 

It was certain that she had allowed him to come over for coffee, and that he’d stayed for forty five minutes, both of them leaving for school shortly after eight, meaning both of them had arrived somewhat late, but arm in arm, and smiling.

All of the people in the village were careful neither to form, or offer, any personal opinions concerning what might have happened in Marcy’s house during the forty five minute period between his arrival and their mutual departure.

“She made him breakfast,” said Margot Gavin, standing in the doorway of her shop, glancing at her watch, and observing the darkening streets and blue-glowing lanterns dotting the park opposite.

“Sure she did,” said Nina.

“Where is this car?”

“I don’t know.
 
Eve Ivory said she’d send a car for us.”

“She still likes you.”

“Yes.”

“And you don’t know why.”

“No idea.
 
I do have a suggestion, though:
 
when the thing arrives—and I suppose it will be some kind of limousine—I’ll get the driver’s attention, and you sneak around and slash a couple of the tires.
 
Or—no, maybe not such a good idea.”

“Why?
 
I would have been game.”

“Two security people.
 
Standing there, just behind the gazebo, at the edge of the park.”

“Yes. I see them. Gives one a sense of security, doesn’t it?”

“Nobody’s going to mess with that gazebo,” said Nina.

And then:

“There’s the car.”

“Where?”

“There.
 
Coming around the corner.”

“My God.”

“What?”

“It’s still coming around the corner. Still coming; still coming—Nina, is this a car or a train?”

“Well.
 
Only the best for us.
 
Everything locked up in the shop?”

“Yes.”

 
“Anything
 
of inordinate value?”

“A few things that are especially nice. But I’ve placed them well out of view; I don’t think we’ll have to worry.”

“Especially with these new security specialists watching out for things,” Nina said. “Look how tall those two are!”

“I know. Why isn’t Nazism more appreciated, Nina?”

“People just don’t learn history anymore. Oh, there’s Allana!”

And, in fact, beaming at them from the front seat of the limousine, which was now parking in front of the shop, Allana Delafosse, identifiable by her Which Color of the Zodiac Am I Going to Wear Today? outfit (orange today), and her full throated “Laaaayyydeeeez” warble, which always came out not so much as a greeting as a theme song.

“How ahhhhhhhhrrrrryou this maaaahhhhhvelous eeeeeeeeeevening?”

Hearing a simple greeting from Allana Delafosse was like listening to The Star Spangled Banner; one felt the need to stand.

“Fine,” said Nina, inadequately as always, approaching the car as the Na—the Security Official–– got out and came around opposite, preparing to open the back door for her.

“Good evening, ma’am.”

“Good evening,” she answered, regretting the fact that she did not know German, while wondering if her shoes were properly shined.

“Well! Are both of you properly excited?
 
It’s going to be an historic evening for Bay St. Lucy!”

It’s an historic evening anywhere,
Nina found herself thinking,
when anybody puts the words ‘an’ and ‘historic’ together properly.

“I have the most wonderful feelings about what is to happen tonight! There are so many ways the projects can go, such an array of possibilities! Ms. Ivory has seemed to take such an interest! And with Mr. Cox working along with her––”

Allana Delafosse continued to describe the varied possibilities, while the limousine wheeled its way through the quiet and somber evening streets of Bay St. Lucy, and Nina watched it all slide by––the shacks, the nicer bungalows, the few children in yards, playing.
 
She watched through windows as the blue patches that were television screens flickered, and through adjacent windows as women bent to wash dishes, raised to shout jokes or gossip or insults or nothings at all to their families inside.

She said the right things to Allana and Margot as the village flowed past her, but all the while she could only see a vision of Frank that would not go away. It was the cynical Frank, the one who, after decades of work, had learned what The Law really was.

It was paper.

It had no more substance than that.

A sheet of paper.

And upon it, everything depended.

That little corner lot, the one with the battered swing set on it.

It had been there forever, a part of the Bay St. Lucy she’d always known.

And there, behind it, the Old Philliber House. Not such a large place, a rickety front porch, some fine trees in the back, the two old ladies, Nancy and Patricia Philliber sitting out on warm evenings, speaking to passers-by.

The school playground.

Roscoe’s Gas.

There, down that street, the smaller and more disreputable shacks, where first poorer families lived, and then indigents lived, and then criminals lived, and then nobody lived, and then Tom Broussard lived.

But all a fixed and solid thing. Blocks and blocks and blocks of permanence that tethered Bay St. Lucy together.

And yet there was no permanence and all.

Kafka.

“There was a man from the land who sought access to the law––”

“But the law was protected by a gatekeeper––”

“And there are more gatekeepers, each larger and more ferocious than the last––”

The law.

Papers.

All it would take is one paper. And this entire community could be a vast parking lot.

She had seen it happen.
 
Frank had shown it to her:

Entire farms, hundreds of acres.

But these farms were not owned by human beings; they were owned by papers.

And one day the paper would come, like locusts, but much quieter, and with a power so much more awesome.

And then the farm would be gone, along with the people who had been its soul.

Now there was a housing development.

Or a Wal-Mart.

Such was the law.

“—But the law should be open to everyone, to all the people!”

“—and then the man from the land was dying––”

“—this gate, this access to the law, was meant only for you.
 
I’m going now to close it forever.”

The Security Forces are the gatekeepers,
she found herself thinking.

And Eve Ivory is The Law.

The limousine pulled onto Breakers Boulevard.

And the Mansion—huge, loud, obscene, gothic, godlike, musical, and glowing golden in the darkening twilight, appeared before them.

“All right,” she whispered, “we’ll see.”

Then she pressed her forehead on the cool glass window and listened to music.

The radio was not playing.

They were deposited at the main entrance to The Robinson Mansion, which, Nina realized even before entering, could not be viewed as a mansion at all, nor a house of any kind,
 
nor even a land-fixed dwelling.
 
The thing she was entering, with its chandelier spinning slowly and sparkling brilliantly like a Cinderella Ball Gown hanging from monstrous metal straps from a ceiling several hundred feet above—this thing could only be compared to the Titanic, dried, refurbished, upended, and wet-barred.

Nothing but the Titanic could have survived from those opulent years.

It had been sealed by millions of gallons of seawater just as the Robinson Mansion had been sealed by impenetrable layers of decadence, criminality, mortgages, hatred, intense sexuality, and The IRS.

The Titanic of course still lay under water.

The Robinson Mansion had been raised.

Nina was not at all certain this was a good thing.

She moved through the various state rooms, talking to Edwena Pelleter, Robert Barnsworth, Allana now and again, Jackson Bennett and wife, the Mayor, and City Councilman—

––but they were not really these people, for these people could not exist in surroundings such as this.

Champagne glass in hand, she entered the Music Room, where an improbable harp leaned against a stained-glass wall, the giant bay windows opposite giving out on a garden redolent with acacias and rhododendrons, which could not of course be growing in December, save for the fact that the garden, she could see now, was no garden at all but a greenhouse. She wondered where the access to the tunnel was in there.

And here before her was a person in a tuxedo, who might have been one of the village’s multitudinous insurance salesmen—yes, she was sure he was an insurance salesman, but she had not known that when she’d taught him, or he would have failed—but she would not talk to him as Charles Morgan or Phillip Talbot or whatever his silly name might have been.

For here, in this room, on this marble floor, with this music seeping in from the very walls—here he was Count Rudolf of Buxteholde, a nephew to the Emperor Himself.

“And how is the Emperor?” she found herself asking, in her imagination.
 
The answer she actually received was something about insurance, but the imaginary answer was, “Very well, he sends his greetings!

“Very well!
 
He sends his greeting!”

“Please return them for me.”

“Indubitably! Will you and your consort by joining us in Sarajevo for the Grouse?”

“So much,” she said, archly, “depends upon the health of the old countess.”

“Ah yes.
 
We hold her in our prayers.”

“So deeply appreciated.”

“Of course.
 
Will you be certain to greet Ferdinand and the Reich’s Chancellor, Baroness von Nina?”

“It goes without saying, dear Rudolf!”

This two-pronged––real and imaginary––conversation continued for a short time.

“Great! So you’ll come by next Thursday to talk about a policy?”

“I’ll try.”

What fun, what fun!

Be careful, though, and don’t get carried away.

Fine to go down for the grouse; but no insurance policies.

The passageways wound on and on, rooms opening into other rooms, the two hundred or so citizens of Bay St. Lucy strolling from upper deck to lower deck to mizzen deck or captains quarters to the pool area to the dance area to the whatever else area, all asking in quiet tones:

“How much money did it take to build this?”

Or:

“How much money did it take to remodel it?”

Or the biggest statement of all: “Eve Ivory is going to be making the announcement.”

And it was true.
 
There was no way to deny it, or to postpone it.

This was like opening the ultimate shower present.
 
Or getting in the mail the official results of the biopsy.