Sea Change (The Nina Bannister Mysteries Book 1) (23 page)

CHAPTER SIXTEEN:
 
SCAPEGOAT

“A community needs a soul if it is to become a home for human beings.
 
You, the community, must get it this soul.”

Pope John Paul II

The day, as days are wont to do, worsened.

Having begun with a confession, it progressed to a meeting, and then a conference, and then a little temper tantrum, and then, thankfully, bed.

But as for the meeting—

––it took place on the beach, where, at two P.M., she had persuaded Jackson Bennett to go walking with her.

It was a wintry sea, not cold particularly, but cold looking, with its waves sullen and ill humored, and disguising themselves to resemble the sky, which roiled and darkened and rumbled and harbinged no good.

“So how is she, Jackson?”

He was ill-placed, with his suit on and shiny black shoes.

But they were on the hard-packed sand, and so it mattered little.

“Good as could be expected. They got some lunch in her.”

“That’s something.”

“Yeah.
 
Thanks for coming down this morning.”

“Of course.
 
How did her formal statement go?”

“All right. Good that she’d rehearsed it. She keeps asking for you.”

“Well. Maybe I can go back down again this afternoon.”

He shook his head:

“Too much going on. That girl is going to have herself a busy day.”

“Tomorrow morning?”

“Yeah.
 
Much better.”

“So how does it look?”

“How does what look?”

“Jackson! The case! You think I’m talking about the Super Bowl?”

He smiled, despite himself.

“No.
 
No, I guess not.”

“How does it look?”

“I think it looks pretty good; I’ve been on the phone with several doctors.”

“What kind of doctors?”

“Psychiatrists.”

“And they say?”

“It’s possible she could have—well, just zoned out.”

“What do you mean?”

“Dissociative response, is what they call it. She confronted the woman—and just lost control of herself.”

“Without remembering it?
 
Any of it?”

“It has happened.”

“So what does this mean regarding the plea?”

“Temporary insanity.”

“And that would mean?”

He shook his head:

“Incarceration, certainly. But in a medical facility.
 
And not for too long.”

“What is ‘too long’?”

“Two years.
 
Maybe three.”

“My God.”

“Nina, she killed somebody.”

“You’re sure of that?”

“Do you have another explanation?”

“She says she didn’t do it.”

“Like I say, do you have another explanation?
 
If so, I’m all eyes and ears.”

They walked for a time.

“What,” asked Nina, “have you been able to learn about Macy’s story?”

“Oh, it checks out. Checks out just fine. Phone records verify that the woman called her, and at almost precisely the time Macy says. Eleven thirty four, precisely.
 
Call lasted forty five seconds, so that would fit. Taxi driver confirms taking Macy over there, and dropping her just about where she said.
 
Security people found that tunnel. Of course, they’re kicking themselves that they didn’t always know about it; but then Eve Ivory never told anybody about it. So it’s not really their fault.”

“Now why was this tunnel built again?”

“That’s the interesting part. A lot of mansions were built around the middle of the nineteenth century with similar exit tunnels. But most of them were in Ohio, states like that.”

“Why Ohio?”

“Part slave, part free. These kinds of tunnels were built mostly by folks who wanted to help runaway slaves.
 
But the Robinsons used it differently.”

“They wanted to be able to run from the Mafia.”

“Or some similar organization.
 
But like we said this morning:
 
it didn’t work.”

“Big crime got them anyway.”

“Yes,” he said, “it did. The pitiable thing was the toys.”

“Were they found?”

“Yes. Her security, then our people. Dolls, toy trucks—apparently the Robinson kids used the tunnel as a play area, before––”

He let the rest hang out, and it floated, the unseen description of what must have been machine gun killings, over the ocean, which seemed troubled enough without adding more.

“So this woman,” said Nina, “called Macy about eleven thirty.”

“Right.”

“Macy went over.”

“Right.”

“Macy entered through this strange tunnel, just as she told us she did.”

“Yes.”

“And found Eve Ivory in the bedroom, sitting at her desk with her throat punctured.”

Jackson Bennett shook his head.

“That’s where it gets difficult.”

“How?”

“How?
 
Nina, Macy’s letter opener killed Eve Ivory.
 
And Macy was clutching that letter opener when security forces opened the bedroom door.”

“They’re sure it was the letter opener?”

“Absolutely. I just read the autopsy report. As though there were any doubt. It was the same ivory letter opener that, apparently, Macy received, in front of the whole town, at her wedding shower.”

“Yes.
 
I know the letter opener.
 
Tom Broussard and Penelope Royale gave it to her. We all saw it. We saw her take it home too.”

“Which is where it was, where it must have been, when Eve Ivory called her.”

“So she took it over there.”

“She
had
to, Nina! There’s no other explanation.”

“No.
 
Doesn’t seem to be.”

“In fact, every way you look at it, Macy’s story is ninety percent true. She got called, went over, went in—but then that last ten per cent comes in.”

“Yes.
 
There is that ten per cent.”

“The ten per cent that would have us believe:
 
Eve Ivory called Macy. Someone—apparently having overheard the call—slipped into Eve Ivory’s room, through a tunnel that only Eve Ivory knew about, took out the jade letter opener that only Macy could have been in possession of, and, with no signs of a struggle, stuck the letter opener precisely in Eve Ivory’s jugular.
 
Then watched the woman bleed to death and left.”

A ragtag patch of gulls had sighted a school of fish some fifty yards out, and were dive bombing a foaming matrix of flash-white and gills, screeching gleefully as they did so.

“That doesn’t seem very likely, does it?”

“No. The problem is, Macy keeps sticking to the story.”

“And that’s a problem?”

“You bet that’s a problem.”

“Why, Jackson?”

“Because it means neither I nor any other lawyer she can get, can plead her guilty. She would have to plead not guilty, and hope the jury believes a story that on its surface can’t be believed.”

“And if the jury doesn’t believe it?”

He shrugged.

“They’d have no choice. She’d have to be executed.”

That was the meeting.

The conference took place in Nina’s house.

Margot was the first to arrive, bringing food.

“They say, Nina, that you are the only one who can get in to see Macy.”

“Well. I’m as close to a mother as she’s got. And sometimes, you need your mother.”

“I baked some brownies for her.”

“You don’t bake.”

“I bought some brownies for her, took them out of the box, and put them in an antique container I had in the shop.”

“That’s good of you.
 
Except the grounds around the jail look like a supermarket now.”

“Well.
 
Everybody is pulling for Macy.”

“I know. She’s the town’s most popular killer in quite a long time.”

The conversation with Margot idled back and forth for a time, until it was enlivened by the arrival of Allana Delafosse, who’d brought pound cake.

“I thought,” she said, “that we might put a saw in it.”

“Not too funny, Allana, given the circumstances.”

“I’m sorry, darling. But I’m not certain the circumstances are as dire as they might seem.”

“How do you mean that?”

“Our little schoolteacher deserves every iota of our support.
 
So she murdered the woman; good for her!
 
I should have done it myself!”

“Allana––”

“Nina, tell me: where is the boat that housed the millionaire who was about to buy our town right out from under us?
 
Where is it, darling Nina?
 
You don’t know, do you?
 
Then let me tell you that no one else does either!
 
It’s gone!
 
The woman is dead, and, as far as I can learn or anyone else in the village can learn, the old will is now back in force. We own our own destinies.”

“As though,” Nina found herself whispering, “anybody does that.”

“What?”

“Nothing.”

“All right, then: so tell me why we should be so glum. One brave young woman did what none of the rest of us had the courage to do!”

“And may,” said Nina, quietly, “have to go to prison for it.”

“‘Stone walls do not a prison make,’ I believe the poem goes, ‘nor iron bars a cage’.”

“No.
 
Not if you’re outside writing poems.
 
If you’re inside the walls and the bars, they do a pretty good job.”

“But Nina––”

She was in turn interrupted by the arrival of Tom Broussard and Penelope Royale, who brought lamb casserole and many apologies for having given Macy the letter opener in the first place.

“We thought it would be—well, appropriate.”

No one said anything to that.

“Nina––”

“Yes, Tom?”

“Word around town is—well, that Macy actually killed this woman.
 
But that she was insane when she did it.”

“I don’t know, Tom.”

“We have,” Penelope said, “some money available.”

“My book royalties are up.”

“And,” Penelope interjected, “my family left me something years ago.
 
I know it doesn’t look like it, the way I live––”

“—but, Nina, you need to know, and you need to tell Macy when you see her. We can help with legal defenses, if we need to.”

The room was growing dark. Somehow Margot managed to find a candle, which she put it on the table between the four of them.

Wine appeared also.

They sipped, and listened to the mournful sound of the waves.

“She must have been insane with jealousy,” whispered Allana.

Margot said:

“So Paul really did sleep with this woman?”

Voices now helter skelter from around the table:

“Whether he did or not, Macy thought he did.”

“It doesn’t matter. Macy did what we all wanted to do.”

“Everybody in the town.”

“That’s right; there won’t be a problem setting up a legal fund for an insanity defense.”

“And we’ll all be character witnesses for her.”

“Everybody in the town will want to––”

Nina stood up suddenly and said:

“Go home.”

They looked at her in shocked silence.

“What did you say, Nina?” asked Margot.

“You heard me. Go home. Go home now. Go home right now.”

More silence.

Allana:

“Whatever for?”

“Because I don’t want you here anymore. I don’t want you sitting here, in my house, having a party.”

“Nina––”

“Our friend is in jail. One of us. One of this community, don’t you understand that?”

“Of course we understand it, but there’s nothing we can––”

“She says she didn’t do it.”

Silence.

Finally Tom:

“But Nina, from what I can understand, the evidence––”

“She says she didn’t do it.”

Silence.

Nina again:

“And nobody here believes her. Not one soul.”

A mixture now of the waves almost lapping against the poles below them, and gulls wheeling above, the constant gull sound, permanent as the sea.

Somehow, standing there in the middle of her friends, whom she was throwing out, she remembered Sophocles’ words:

“—and it brought into their mind the turbid ebb and flow of human misery.”

“But we want do everything we can for Macy!”

“Except believe her.”

“Nina, it’s just that––”

“Don’t you understand? Don’t you see?
 
Macy went over there in the first place because she didn’t trust Paul. She thought there was a tape or something. She took Eve Ivory’s word over the word of her fiancé.
 
And now you’re all doing the same thing. You think this community is going to be saved because we’re all willing to let a beautiful young woman, the best of us, our future, our teacher—go to prison?
 
Oh you can call it a ‘mental facility,’ but it’s still a prison! You think that’s the way to save Bay St. Lucy, to make this woman the scapegoat, the tragic heroine, the one to bear all the old sins?
 
Well it won’t work.
 
If Macy goes to jail, there will be no more Bay St. Lucy—and not because of some gangster’s will—because we didn’t trust each other. Because we stopped, right at the most crucial time, being a community.”

More silence.

Nina said again:

“So now go home.”

And they did.

Leaving her alone.

She poured out the wine and put up the glasses.

“Frank,” she said, walking from one room to the next.
 
“Frank?”

But, for the first time since she had lost him, Frank was no longer in the house.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN:
 
THE FOUL RAG AND BONE SHOP OF THE HEART

“I have always imagined that paradise will be a kind of library.”

Luis de Gongora

Through the combined efforts of many people—Edie Towler paramount among them—Macy Peterson was granted bail, and allowed to go home.

Where Nina visited her at ten o’clock the following morning. The crowds had diminished with the arrival of Christmas Eve. Too many Christmas errands still needed doing. A scattering of die-hard souls still came and went, but were rebuffed by Moon Rivard’s officers, who cited the need for Macy to have privacy.

It was one of these officers who ushered Nina though the kitchen, and through the voluminous piles of food that continued, as though by magic, to appear everywhere in the house.

Macy greeted her, coming out of the bedroom.

She was wearing dungarees and a sweatshirt.

It was the first time, Nina remarked, that she’d seen Macy in jeans.

“Hello, Nina.”

“Macy.”

“Thank you for coming.”

“Of course, Macy. I’m always here for you; you know that.”

“I do, Nina.”

The woman who took her hand, gripped it, and led her to the coffee table beside a bay window, looked as well as she had any right to look, given that she had not slept in forty eight hours, and that she faced the prospect of going to prison, being executed by lethal injection, or both.

“Paul was just here.”

“Is he all right?”

“Considering. We both just spent the time crying.
 
Then they made him go. I’m not allowed to have visitors for more than an hour at a time.”

“I understand. That’s just for now, Macy. It will be better later.”

“Yes.
 
I guess so.
 
Do you want coffee?”

“Yes.”

“Just wait; I’ll get us some.”

“Only if it’s not too much trouble.”

“Of course not. I made a fresh pot when Paul came.”

The coffee was poured, sipped, refreshed, sipped again.

“They say,” said Macy, quietly, “I went a little crazy.”

“I know.”

“They have doctors.
 
I’m supposed to be examined.”

“When?”

“This afternoon,
 
I think.”

“Where?”

“Here. In town somewhere. The doctors are flying in.”

“Is Jackson still handling it?”

“Yes.
 
I don’t want anybody else.
 
He says he’s not a trial lawyer, but—I still want him. I don’t know how I’ll pay him.”

“That won’t be a problem, Macy. The whole town will chip in.”

“Everyone,” she said, “has been so nice.”

“That’s because they love you. And admire you.”

Silence for a time.

Then:

“Do you think I killed that woman, Nina?”

Nina answered immediately, firmly, and without seeming to consider the question at all, even for an instant.

“No.”

At which Macy Peterson sprang to her feet, rounded the table, and embraced her, sobbing:

“Thank you!
 
Thank you!”

This went on for perhaps a minute.

Then Macy, eyes watery and bloodshot with tears, returned to her seat.

“They say I went crazy.”

“I know.”

“They say I just—that I killed a human being. AND THAT I DON’T REMEMBER IT!”

“I know that’s what they say.”

“Well it isn’t true!”

“I know.”

“It isn’t true, Nina!”

“Of course not.”

“Do they think I’m a monster? A lunatic? What have I done in my life that makes everybody think I’m—what?
 
Dr. Jekyll and Ms. Hyde?
 
Do they think this a stupid grade B movie?”

“I don’t know what they think, Macy.”

“Well I do. They think I went into that room, with my letter opener with me, that I had brought over from this house for just that reason—and that I fought with her, and plunged the thing down into her neck—AND THEN FORGOT ABOUT IT!”

Nina found herself wanting to laugh, given the stupidity of the whole thing.

She fought the urge.

“It’s like I told them, Nina.
 
Like I have been telling them.
 
I found her there.
 
At her desk. There was blood everywhere. And she was dead. The letter opener was sticking out of her neck. Somebody else got there before me and killed her.”

“Macy––”

“—but Jackson tells me to abandon that story. He tells me I should tell everybody that, after the woman’s phone call, it all became blurry. That I don’t remember exactly what I did. That I was enraged and hurt and scared all at once. That I may have picked up the letter opener. That I remember going through the tunnel.
 
And that I don’t remember anything after that, until they found me beside the desk screaming.”

“Well, I think if you say that, then he can––”

“BUT IT’S NOT TRUE! I remember everything!
 
Just like I can remember making coffee this morning!
 
I’M NOT CRAZY, NINA!”

Silence for a time.

Then:

“And I’m not a murderer.”

Nina sipped her coffee, put the saucer in front of her, and said, more quietly than she would have expected, so that she halfway sounded in control of some situation, which surprised her, given that there was no situation now which she was at all in control of.

“Okay.
 
Then let’s think about this.”

“I have been thinking about it, Nina.”

“I know. Just talk to me. Or let me talk. Or whatever.’

“All right.”

“Everybody in town hated this woman. She was psychotic. I know that. I saw her in action, only a few hours before she was killed.”

“How?
 
Where?”

“She came to my shack, with two of her security guards, one of whom Tom Broussard defenestrated.”

“De what?”

“Defenestrated. It means to throw through a window.”

“There’s a word for that?”

“It’s needed more often than you might think.
 
Anyway, the woman was hated all over town.
 
Anybody might have killed her. I might have killed her.
 
What happened was, though, that somebody actually did.
 
Somebody heard her call you, then slipped into her bedroom and murdered her.”

“With my letter opener.”

“Yes. That’s the problem. What did you do with the letter opener, after the bridal shower?”

“I brought it back here and put it under my Christmas tree. It stayed there, in its box, like one of the other presents.”

“Have you looked in the box since you got back here last night?”

“Yes.
 
The box is empty.”

“So it’s not like––”

“Like somebody could have bought a duplicate
 
letter opener,” said Macy.

“No. It was one of a kind. Tom and Penelope ordered it special from a gift catalogue. It came from Marcel’s Antiques in New Orleans.”

“Yes.
 
I remember Mrs. Wilson commenting on the shop.
 
She’d been there several times. And they only deal with originals.”

Silence for a time.

“It doesn’t make sense, Nina.”

Nina rose, crossed the room, and hugged Macy again.

“It’s like Frank always said, Macy. Start with the truth.
 
Then work back from there.”

“But what’s the truth?”

“The truth is, Macy, that you didn’t kill anybody.
 
And you’re not crazy.”

“You really believe that, Nina?”

“Of course I do.”

“Then I do, too. And—for the first time since this horrible thing happened—I think it’s going to be all right.”

“Good for you, Macy. Now I have to go and do some thinking.”

“Like I say, Nina.
 
I think it’s going to be all right!”

“I wish,” said Nina, walking out the door, “that I did.”

And that time, slightly before eleven A.M., on the day before Christmas in Bay St. Lucy, Mississippi—Nina Bannister felt the need to go to church.

Not to everybody else’s church.

Not to The First United Methodist Church, or the Cumberland Presbyterian Church, or the Oakhurst Baptist Church, or the Bayshore Congregational Church.

But to her church.

“We must go down where all the ladders start,” she whispered, driving the Vespa at approximately the speed one might perambulate, using a walker, in deep snow.

“We must go down where all the ladders start; in the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.”

Who had written that?

It did not matter.

Nothing mattered now.

Except finding out the truth.

And for some strange reason, this job had fallen to her.

She was Oedipus.

“Then we shall begin the search for the truth.
 
Right now! Right here! We shall find the killer, and drive him out.
 
We must—to save our city!”

A plague.

A plague on Bay St. Lucy.

A murderer still loose in the city.

And the citizens, blissfully unaware.

She thought of Tom, of Penelope, of Margot, all sitting around her table, all laughing, all thinking it was over.

The city was safe.

But it wasn’t.
        

It was in more danger than ever.

And somehow, she knew as certainly as she had ever known anything in her life, that she could find out what had happened.

She must only listen to the voices.

The voices that always helped her.

The voices that had gotten her through those months after Frank’s death.

Consoling voices.

Voices telling her all the combined wisdom of all those people such as she, and such as Macy, and such as all the rest of them, sitting on a little bay, looking out at a vast untrackless ocean, hurricanes coming toward them, horrible-toothed creatures rising up out of the depths to come and devour them.

Those voices.

That she could always hear in her church.

She pulled into the parking lot of The Bay St. Lucy Public Library, locked the Vespa to a metal bicycle rack, and went inside.

There were few people there, and it made her joyous in a small way even to realize that the place was open on Christmas Eve.

If it had not been––

––well, no need to worry about that.

It was.

Enough said.

The few expectable people were there. A librarian spoke to her; a teenage girl. A mother with two very young children.

She began to prowl the stacks.

No, it was not an imposing library.

But it was enough.

She began to Nina-pray, which was as close as she got to the more conventional kind.

“Who will talk to me today?”

She passed the familiar volumes.

Shakespeare.

Milton.

No voices yet.

There. Pull out that volume, that old Herodotus, which seems almost to be disintegrating.

The Everyman Library.

And there, on the frontispiece:

“Everyman, I will go with thee

And be thy guide

When all else fails

To be by thy side.”

She put her forehead against the metal frame of the stack and whispered:

“Be my guide.
 
I need a guide.
 
Where is my guide?”

She walked farther.

A stop more.

McCauley

Wordsworth.

A little farther and then—

––she heard it calling out to her.

She did!

She was not imagining it!

Of course not, because, there it was.

There
she
was.

Nina’s sister, closer than any sister could have ever been.

Whom Nina had neglected for too long now.

Calling out to her.

“Nina!”

“All right,” she said.
 
“All right, Jane.”

She carefully removed a copy of the book that had always been as close to a Bible as any other volume ever written.
 
Then she and Jane Austen’s Emma went to have a long talk.

They sat by the window, a portion of Bay St. Lucy’s foot traffic passing before them.

They chatted about this and that.

About Harriet Smith and Mr. Knightly and the useless but harmless Bates sisters.

Highbury was of course Bay St. Lucy.

And Emma was Nina.

Jane Austen was talking to her.

Book One.

Good, but not—not what Jane wanted to say. Not quite.

And then it happened.

The book seemed to fall open.

The passage that was meant for her to see, and to see now, right now, and to understand, to really understand, for if not now, then never.

“Emma went to the door for amusement. Much could not be expected from even the busiest part of Highbury. Mr. Perry walking hastily by, Mr. William Cox letting himself in at the office door. Mr. Cole’s carriage horses returning from exercise; or a stray letter boy on an obstinate mule. These were the liveliest objects she could presume to expect; and when her eyes fell only on the butcher with his tray, a tidy old woman travelling homewards from shop with her full basket, two curs quarrelling over a dirty bone, she knew she had no reason to complain, and was amused enough, quite enough, to stand still at the door. A mind lively and at ease can do with seeing nothing, and can see nothing, that does not answer.”

A mind lively and at ease can do with seeing nothing, and can see nothing, that does not answer.

A MIND LIVELY AND AT EASE CAN DO WITH SEEING NOTHING, AND CAN SEE NOTHING THAT DOES NOT ANSWER.

“Thank you, Jane,” she whispered.

Then she put the book away.

Then she unlocked her Vespa and began to drive back to Margot’s shop.

She had halved the distance when she was pulled over by Jackson Bennett, driving a limousine.