Set Change: A Nina Bannister Mystery (The Nina Bannister Mysteries) (12 page)

“No, he doesn’t, does he.
 
Thank you, Nina.”

She descended the stairs, crossed the driveway, and strode away toward town.

That was Nina’s first free meal of the day.

The second was to be dinner.

She was not planning to have a free dinner; she was actually planning to have spaghetti and meat sauce, the ingredients of which were safely tucked away in the grocery bag which swung freely beside her leg as she made her way home from Greeley’s Market.

Seven thirty.

Sun just beginning to set.

Put the groceries away, go and run—no, why kid yourself, walk—along the beach for a mile or so in the twilight, wave and smile at the tourists, wonder why they let their ten-year-old boys swim what seemed half a mile out in the ocean where they would certainly drown or be eaten by a shark, realize that it was none of her business and that it was in the nature of ten-year-old boys to defy rip tides and marine predators—

––and then cook dinner.

But that was not to happen.

She reached her parking lot just as did a vehicle of some kind, which she heard crunching the shells in the driveway behind her.

She turned, taking note first of the vehicle itself, then of the animals inhabiting it, then of the person driving it.

Vehicle first.

It was not a car/truck/or van so much as a military casualty.
 
It was one of the worst and most battered looking mobile things Nina had ever seen. It was a metal box itself of no color—not white, not gray, not off-green—just the color of death or non-existence, punctuated here and there, in stripes and dots and gashes, with the marks of suffering and violence.

The animals inside it were not dead, however, but merely big. There was what seemed to be either a Labrador retriever or a musk ox panting in a cage which occupied the passenger’s side in the front seat; there were two weasels frolicking away in a slightly smaller cage in the far side of the middle seat; and there was a parrot squawking in a bird cage in the rear seat.

John Giusti parachuted out from beneath the steering wheel, holding firmly to the door as he did so, insuring that it did not fall off.

“Nina!”

“Hello, John! What a nice surprise! I’m just getting ready to go upstairs and cook some spaghetti; would you like to join me?”

He shook his head, leaned on what would have been the hood of a normal vehicle but was an indeterminate part of whatever this thing was, and smiled broadly.

“Just the opposite:
 
I wanted to invite you for dinner.”

“Pardon?”

“You’ve never been out to my place.”

“No, but––”

“I was at Duncan’s down by the dock today. I got twenty four barbequed shrimp.
 
You like barbeque shrimp?”

“Of course, but––”

“It’s a bit of a drive, but—I’d really like to have you as my guest.”

Nina immediately began speculating on reasons why John Giusti would be inviting her to his home for dinner.

The first reason that came to her mind was that he was sexually attracted to her—despite the thirty year difference in their ages––and was going to attempt to seduce her.

She discarded this reason immediately.

The second reason was that he was simply lonely and wanted conversation.
 

She looked around in the vehicle and remembered that John, wherever he was at any particular time, was always surrounded with animals, which he loved more than he loved human beings.

So she discarded that possibility.

Then she thought about barbequed shrimp.

Which she craved.

She said to herself:

The heck with it.

And she said to John Giusti:

“Sure.”

She could not sit in the front seat because, for various veterinarial reasons, the Labrador could not be moved. (It had something to do with his relationship to the two weasels.)
 
She did not want to sit in the middle of the middle seat, because she did not have or expect to have a good relationship with the weasels either.

So she scrunched against the door, used both hands to move aside an automobile part of some kind that sat––oozing oil onto the plastic covered seat––and
 
gingerly placed it on a pancake thin metal box that sat on the floorboard.

Then she simply listened to the animals chatter, trying once or twice to answer questions put to her by John as they made their way out of Bay St. Lucy.

This did not work, his questions and her replies, her questions and his replies, all sounding something like, “RRRRaaaarghhhh arrrrghhhe rrrgggh!”

And so they gave up.

She simply rode along, wondering from time to time what could be happening, reminding herself that she seldom if ever knew what was happening anyway, and making herself forget the whole thing and just enjoy the ride of what must have been ten miles, along coastal and not-so coastal roads that she’d never explored.

During these miles she entered a kind of coma, the not-quite-conscious state that she could recall experiencing—not without a kind of pleasure—as a child, when taken on long automobile trips in the rain. There was kind of a sound the windshield wipers made—which, like the smell of tomato plants on your hands after you’d picked and prodded at the lush green plants, or the taste of morning when it was a perfect morning—there were all these sensations that both isolated you completely while making you one with something else in the universe that was perfectly rare, utterly impossible to duplicate, and unimaginably common.

So for a time she simply breathed softly on the window glass while the yellow-pine forest wrapped itself around her.

The engine, which had seemed to be exploding at first, was now merely growling. The moon rose, horrible-red and massive––and the highway, now roadway, now dirt path meandered inward and downward.

They’d left the coastline for a few miles, she realized, and were now heading back toward it.

There—something darted across in front of them.

A deer.

Had that been a deer?

It was getting darker.
 
Craning her neck, she could see the stars up through the roof of pine needles. The Mississippi sky was ferocious and black, stars glittering in mute and yellow explosions.
 

It all remained like this for a period out of time, all changes elemental and thus of great and no importance, until they reached John Giusti’s house.

“So here we are!”

“John, this is a great place!” she shouted above the roars and chatters and squawks that had heralded their coming.

She had said the house was great because that was obviously the thing to say in this circumstance.
 
In truth, she could not quite see the house, at least not clearly. But it was certainly far different than she’d imagined it to be.
 
The path from the driveway led up to it, not down, and there were thick shrubs and trees everywhere.

Where was the ocean?

She could hear it, rumbling and grating not more than a few yards over the top of the trees; but she could only see a small yard, and the huge Labrador, released from its cage, jumping on John as he wrestled open the door.

“This is home!”

“How did you find this?”

“I had a client who lived here.
 
I drove out to take care of one of the animals that was too sick to move. Fell in love with the place. The client moved away a few years ago and asked me if I was interested in buying it. I’ve been here ever since. Look, would you mind waiting outside just a minute or so?
 
There are some animals inside that I need to pen up.”

“Definitely pen up the animals.”

“It won’t take long, and I’m sorry to make you wait…”

“Definitely pen up the animals.”

“All right. I’ll leave you and this big guy to get to know each other.”

He helped Nina down from the van, then strode off toward his house.

She walked a few steps behind him, still quite unable to see the shape of the dwelling, so masked was it by vegetation.

She noticed a bench by the walkway; she sat down upon it and began communicating with the Labrador Retriever.

“Hello, boy,” she whispered, petting a head which resembled a bowling ball.

“I love you,” replied the dog in its own language, resting the remainder of its head upon her knee and salivating on the hem of her blue jeans.

“What’s your name?” she asked, creating several in her mind and rejecting Prince, while the Labrador, breathing as hard as a motionless animal can breathe, answered, also in dog
 
(Nina spoke dog as well as cat; she did not know why, or remember where she had learned the language):

“It doesn’t matter; just keep petting me––right there, right on that particular spot on my head, while I drool on the bottom of your pants.”

They sat that way for a while, the summer air of the Gulf Coast filling her nostrils with as many aromas as human senses could recognize.
                     

“Rex,” she decided, would not work either.

What about ‘Marcel?’

No, that was just stupid.

This big, friendly, slobbering beast of a dog could not be named ‘Marcel.’

How did other people come up with such clever names?

“Could I be your dog?” importuned Certainly-not-Marcel, gazing up at her with the eyes of a desperate, starving child. “And go ahead, keep petting me––it’s SO GOOD!”

“I’ll come up with a name,” she said, sliding a finger under the animal’s leather collar and scratching its neck.

“Who cares?” answered whatever the animal’s name was, snuggling closer to her.

“Nina!” came a shout from the house, “You can come on now. Just stay on the concrete path, and don’t mind the trees!”

She rose.

The dog, grief stricken, worked his way between her legs, planting a paw the size of a bullfrog atop one of her shoes and driving it into the soft earth.

“That’s all right; that’s all right, boy.”

“No it isn’t!” he protested through horrified eyes.
 
“You’re LEAVING!”

“Just for a little while.”

“NO YOU’LL NEVER COME BACK!
 
I’M KEEPING MY PAW ON YOUR SHOE!”

“Gotta go now, boy.
 
Gotta go!”

And she did, making her way back toward the door of the house, while Marcel ran around and through her like a canine mountain stream.

“Come on through here!
 
It’s a little tricky!”

She made her way along a twisting narrow sidewalk, the limbs of pine trees reaching out to brush against her, and she felt as though she were walking through the Black Forest .
   

Finally the trees gave way and she could see.