Set Change: A Nina Bannister Mystery (The Nina Bannister Mysteries) (13 page)

“Wow!” she could not help exclaiming.

For there, laid out before her, was a wide, long, pier, at the end of which glowed what would have been a magnificent beach house, had it been on the beach.

It was not.

It was an ocean house, perched as high above the surging waves—twenty feet or so, she judged—as her own shack was perched above the beach.

He stood in the doorway, beckoning.

The house, all vast glass windows, seemed to reflect a thousand images of him, the animals around him, and the sea beneath him.

She started forward, feeling the pier wobble a bit under her, boards swaying ever so slightly as she walked upon it.

The moon, which could be seen just over the jutting roof of the whatever it was because it certainly wasn’t a house because houses aren’t pure glass and they don’t hang suspended high in mid air above the sea—that moon, perfectly jovially white, laughed at her, enjoying her shock at seeing the thing.

“Come on out, Nina!
 
The pier won’t fall!”

“John!” she shouted back, trying to make herself heard over the grating and roaring of the waves, which became deeper more sweeping as the water deepened. “John, this is magnificent!”

“It’s a good place, isn’t it?”

“I’ve never seen anything like it!”

She turned. The beach was behind her now, narrow but perfectly white, dark pine forests impinging upon it, as though the trees were trying to drive the sand into the water.

“Come in!
 
Come in!”

She stepped inside.

And in so doing she stepped outside.

For there was, strictly speaking, no inside.

There was furniture. Heavy, mahogany, leather, couches tables chairs rugs and things a man would have to sit on and lie on and put things on and have some woman come in from time to time and clean.

But she was still more outside than inside, the vast glass walls magnifying everything on the coast, from birds that skimmed low over the ocean to lights twinkling miles to the south in Isle au Pitre, to slowly moving freighters that made their way like moving oil splotches hurled upon the clean azure evening sky and now oozing horizontally along it—to the waves, always the waves, swelling, throbbing, falling, and rising again, having vowed never to allow stillness to anything in the universe.

“How far out are we, John?”

He beamed.

“Maybe a hundred and fifty feet.”

“This is incredible.”

“I know.
 
Like I say, I fell in love with it when I saw it.”

He was standing in the kitchen—for it was a kitchen, and a modern one, with soft white light coming from a fluorescent tube above the oven, and a vast glass wall to his left showing an epic film version of The Ocean by Moonlight.

“It was supposedly built by an architect who drank himself to death.”

“But not while he was designing it, I hope. We’re not going to fall into the water are we?
 
The poles aren’t going to give way?”
 

“Haven’t yet!”

This place is wonderful!”

And it was. The walls were doors, the roofs were walls, and air seeped in from everywhere, delightfully cool,
 
whispering out of hidden crevasses that served as ventilation ports. There were animals all around, of course, most of them dogs, but cats here or there, and slinking little reptiles that peered around crags in the wall structure or out from gurgling fissures.

“Come on out!”

He opened a massive sliding door and stepped out into empty space.

She followed, expecting to fall to her death, sucked into the surge below.

This did not happen, though, and she soon realized that, if she were in fact to drown, it would be as a result of spray flying up from collisions with the support poles beneath.

John’s beaming face glistened with moisture.

“You like it?”

“It’s amazing! I didn’t know trees came so close to the water.”

“The Mississippi coast,” he said proudly, “is one of the most diverse in the country, in terms of pure ecology.
 
Forests everywhere.”

She realized she was in fact standing on a deck.
       

She walked closer to the edge of it and craned her neck.

“My God is that a lighthouse?”

“Yep.
 
Quarter of a mile down the beach.
 
It’s called Two Mile Point.”

“It’s dark, though.”

“Hasn’t been used in three decades. No shipping anywhere around here now. But there are fifteen lighthouses like it on the Mississippi coast, and, except for the one at Biloxi and a couple of others, most people don’t even know they exist.”

He took two steps toward what Nina took to be a point of no return, leaned over a rock ledge, and flipped a switch that, hanging as it were in mid air, she had failed to notice. Six feet above them a spotlight flashed on, illuminating the sea beneath.

“It’s ten or fifteen feet deep here. Look down; when the light hits it, it’s so clear, you can see fish.”

“I do!
 
Look! That’s a big one, just swimming next to the pole. What is that?”

He leaned over farther and seemed to think for a time.

“Hard to say.
 
Could be a sea bass.”

Then he looked up, and out toward the horizon, which now was marked by a slender line of lights from the beaches near Gulf Shores.

“Sometimes I sit out here and train the light further out.
 
I’ve seen Manta Rays, six or seven swimming together, maybe four feet from wingtip to wingtip. Sometimes you see schools of tuna.”

He shook his head:

“There are lots of things out there that no one would ever think about.
 
You can’t see them from a shallow beach, but here, where it’s deep—and where nobody seems to come—I don’t know, it just hypnotizes me. Even when there’s nothing in that light—just the ways the sea keeps changing color.”

She could feel it herself. After the fish disappeared she continued to watch, enjoying the soft stinging of the spray and lulled by the roaring of the relentless waves.

Finally he said:

“I can bring a table out here. Then I’ll just heat up the shrimp; we’ll have them with a little salad.”
 

He did so, and within some minutes Nina was enjoying her second free meal of the day.

“The shrimp are to die for.”

“Yeah. They do a good job at Duncan’s. Well, look:
 
Nina, I felt guilty on Tuesday after you brought Furl in.”

“Guilty?
 
Why would you feel guilty, John?”

“You’ve always been one of the people I had the most respect for, and I just…I haven’t spent any time with you. I thought I would bring you out here and—well, just ask you how you were doing.”

“I’m doing fine, John.”

“That’s good, that’s really good.”

They chewed for a time.

The shrimp were really good.

He brought out a jug of iced tea.

It was really good, too.

They ate in silence for a time, he having ascertained that she was in fact doing all right.

Then—finally because Nina was getting tired of waiting—he asked:

“So, how do you think she is?”

“Who, John?”

He looked at her not comprehending the question.

Finally Nina, realizing that it had been a massively stupid question, forgot she had posed it and answered the question as she should have answered it in the first place.

“I think she’s fine, John.”

“Really?”

“I think so; I’m not actually in a position to know.”

“She came into the clinic today.”

“Yes.
 
She told me she was going to.”

“You talked to her?”

“This morning.
 
She brought me bread.”

“That’s right, I remember she used to do that. And you think she’s really all right?”

“I don’t know why she wouldn’t be.”

But at the same time she could not stop herself from thinking of certain things.

The way Helen had winced as her husband’s glare—for there was nothing else to call it––had shot into the back of her neck, telling her—

––well no matter what it was telling her.
     

The main thing was she had felt it before.

And it hurt.

That and the sense of coldness she’d felt when the man had decided that she, Nina, no longer existed, and thus was not worth spending even a second’s worth of time with.

That and Helen, this morning, all smiles, except for a moment’s hesitation before saying:

“He taught me how to walk.”

What could that have meant?

What kind of a husband feels it necessary to teach his wife to walk?

Everything that Helen had said this morning concerning the rehearsal…

…she is, Nina thought, afraid of her husband.

But she did not say this, answering simply:

“I’m sure she’s all right, John.”

“Good. If you really feel that way, then—yeah, good.
 
Look!”

He lifted his head and gestured out to sea; then he rose, reached high, and adjusted the spotlight so that it was now pointing some fifty yards out.

The ocean was alive, sparkling, as though a shower of diamonds had been dumped from some low-scudding invisible cloud, and were now being churned about in the incoming waves.

“What’s that?”

He shook his head.

“I’m just a veterinarian. It might be shrimp; it might be mullet; it might even be some kind of phosphorescent plant.”

“Is that all one plant?
 
Or animal?”

“No.
 
Thousands of—of something.”

“What’s it doing out there?”

He smiled.

“Just what we’re doing here.
 
And what everything else is doing out there—eating.”

“You’re kidding.”

“No. All that brightness, that sparkle—it’s just tiny fish or tiny anemones or tiny sardines or tiny crabs or tiny sea urchins, all called together in one circle, because something smaller had been there before in a similar circle—just waiting to be eaten.”