Set Change: A Nina Bannister Mystery (The Nina Bannister Mysteries) (24 page)

“She’s not capable of that.”

“I submit that you don’t know what she is or is not capable of. But I will tell you one other thing:
 
Clifton Barrett may be gone, and I may no longer represent him legally, but I am an officer of the court, and I have an obligation to the man.
 
Once that report comes in, I will put as much pressure on the local authorities as possible to arrest young Ms. Reddington. This thing will not be swept under the rug and labeled a ‘celebrity drug overdose.’ Clifton did not kill himself. And I will not stand by to watch his murder go unavenged.”

“We wouldn’t try to do that here.
 
It’s not like us.”

Barrett pursed his lips, and poured more tea.

“We’ll see.”

“Mr. Tomlinson…I know nothing about these things.
 
But let’s say the autopsy says what you predict it will. Isn’t it possible that Mr. Barrett did overdose, and purely by accident?
 
These things do happen, don’t they?”

He shook his head.

“Clifton Barrett had celebrated a hundred opening nights.
 
This was not the first time he’d drunk Scotch to celebrate.
 
He was thirty seven years old, Ms. Bannister, and whatever his lifestyle, he understood it. He was not a teenager experimenting with drugs. No. I do think he overdosed, but it was on something his wife gave him. His wife or her lover, or both.”

“Mr. Tomlinson…”

“Her lover, the man who threatened Mr. Giusti, is a veterinarian, is he not?”

“Yes.’

“He understands drugs?”

“I’m sure he does.”

Silence for a time.

Finally Nina asked:

“Why are you telling me all of this?”

He rose, turned his back, walked to the edge of the railing, took a deep breath, and stood facing her with his arms crossed.

“Ms. Bannister, every community has a moral leader.
 
And in this community, that person is you.”

“I’m not sure that’s true.”

“It is true.”

“And if it is?”

“Then listen to me: I’ve dealt all my professional life with people who commit crimes. Some of them can live with that fact.
 
Others can’t.
 
These two young people can’t. I’m telling you, Ms. Bannister, look to them. No one deserves to die, not even a man like Clifton Barrett. And if these two young people are responsible for his death, then that fact will destroy them.”

He took two steps toward the door, then turned and said:

“And it will ultimately destroy this community.”

Then he left.

Nina walked along the beach until shortly before midnight.

Sophomore World Literature.

“You fixed us up. We started dating because of your class.”

Oedipus Rex
.

There’s something unclean in your community. And the plague will remain on the community until the murderer is punished, or driven out.

The waves continued to crash in, break into foam, and dissipate into a film of water at her bare feet.

Did you do it, John?

Did you do it, Helen?

She had no idea.

But a small voice kept telling her as she walked that the world was about to find out.

And soon.

CHAPTER 16: HOPE SPRINGS

The following morning Nina drove Margot’s Volkswagen up the coast to John Giusti’s house.

It had been some time since she’d driven an actual automobile, let alone one that demanded a working knowledge of an actual gearshift mechanism.

But she managed it, glad in some ways that the mental effort involved in remembering German engineering (for she had driven a Volkswagen years ago, while in high school) displaced the other things—betrayal, divorce, philandering, death, murder, etc.––that would otherwise have been chasing around in her brain.

She found some consolation in the fact that there was no other traffic, and so she could wend along at a comfortable forty miles an hour.

She also took comfort in knowing the directions, and not having to ponder about this turn or that questionable road/lane/bog/ dog path.

So that, within an hour, and without too much consternation, she’d made the trip, and now found herself putt-putting up the drive.

She parked and cut off the engine.

Having unloaded part of the car, and with a suitcase grasped firmly in each hand, she began to make her way down through the dense pine foliage.

Breaking through the limbs and out over the beach, she found herself dazzled by morning sunlight wildly reflected by the clear glass Rubik’s Cube of a house that stood at the end of the pier.

During her first visit, the house had been daylight by moonlight, so intensely did it reflect the night sky; now, with the sun and the early sea light to work with, it simply went insane, each sprawling panel of glass flashing a different solar flare with every step she took.

She found herself remembering the pier, how it moved, almost imperceptibly, but never without the sounds of creaking boards mixed with the grating of incoming tidal currents.

“Nina!”

Helen spotted her first and rushed out of the door, April rather than August, her face free of makeup now, her dark eyes glittering like evening jewelry worn for an early occasion.

“Nina, thank you for coming out!”

The embrace almost lifted her off the pier planking.

“It’s so good of you to do this—to bring all of these things!”

“It’s nothing at all, Helen. But how are you? How are you holding up?
 
And how is your grandmother?”

“We’re both as well as can be expected. John has been wonderful to us. Officer Rivard has promised us privacy until more can be learned. There have been no reporters.
 
We’ve at least had a chance to get our thoughts together.
 
Grandmamma spent yesterday afternoon walking on the beach, and she’s down there now, reading.”

“Nina!”

Now John bounding out of the house, barrel chested, grinning…

“Nina, it’s so good that you’re here! Here, let me have those suitcases!”

The three of them in a general embrace.

Now various animals joining the knot…

…there, the great Labrador retriever, sauntering his way out of the house and along the planking…

Other dogs.

And out there, on the great platform that served as a base for the house, as well as in the open windows and doors of the house itself—all the animals in the world: squirrels, rabbits, cats––probably wolves, tigers and elephants for all she knew.

…it was like she was walking toward the middle of Noah’s Ark, the inhabitants of which, having just found land, were uncertain as to whether they wanted to leave their spot of brightness on the ocean.

“John, there are three other suitcases in the car.”

“It’s all right; I’ll go back for them in a minute. Come inside, though.
 
Come on.”

Helen and John made a sandwich of her, each taking an arm, and escorted her toward The Great Kingdom of Oz, which sat glittering at the end of a yellow brick road that was a brown wooden pier.

“Isn’t John’s house magnificent?”
   

“It is, Helen.
 
I’m not sure I’d call it a ‘house.’”

“No, no, it’s something different, isn’t it?
 
It’s not a house at all; it’s a jewel!”

They approached the jewel and she heard the appreciative and eager yowls and yelps of whatever animals were awake to welcome them; then horses of different colors—except they were small mammals mixed with the occasional iguana, the occasional wingless fowl—began to scatter before them as John reached out and opened the door.

They went outside into the house.

Things became, impossibly, brighter and breezier.

All around them was the Gulf Coast of Mississippi, laughing, luxuriating blue blue blue BLUE in a brightness it had never known, having been constrained for all its existence to show itself through human or animal eyes, and not these massive lenses created by a suicidal drunken architect.

Nina looked around her:
 
the thing that in most houses would have passed as a living room but here could only have been called a sub-solarium, had undergone a transformation.
 
The same pieces of furniture were still here, serving as resting places and launching platforms for the animals; but two women, having been in the space for almost a day, had tamed it and broken its spirit.

An armchair sat where it could actually have been sat in, if the dog were removed.

A white leather couch fronted a glass coffee table, which sat upon a thick—one would hope—panel of glass, beneath which sat the ocean.

Beneath which sat the bottom of the ocean.

Which one, vaguely but undeniably, from time to time but not too rarely, could actually make out.

Through fifteen feet of water.

The order of sight was:

Coffee, glass, legs and feet of guest, glass, water—and Bottom of the Sea.

In the Magic Kingdom of John Giusti!

Which was so fantastic, so transformative—that Nina almost forgot about reality.

She almost forgot the events of the last day.

Of course, that could not happen.

The great octagon of light and space drew them into it, through it, and out of it, so that within some minutes they were sitting on the same deck where, an infinite amount of time ago when the universe still made sense, John Giusti had given her shrimp.

Now they were drinking coffee.

Fifty yards or so out to sea, a school of white fish had adjourned class for recess, and the students were jumping ecstatically, each trying to outdo each other in height, all of the splashes audible above the constant grating of the waves around the deck poles.

“Nina, look back.
 
Back on the beach!”

She turned and did so.

The beach was some distance from them, and it took some instants of Earth Sight Replacing Ocean Sight for her to realize the small pile of brightly colored rags that had washed onto the beach and was lying, motionless and straw-hatted, a few feet in front of a dense wall of forest—was Hope, reading.

Silence for a time.

Of course she was going to have to break that silence.

Dammit.

Why was she always being put in these positions?

It was the schoolteacher thing, never going away, never leaving her alone.

There they all were in the office, she having to get to the bottom of something or other, who stole whose homework, or who cheated on what test.

Except these were her best two students.

“I have to tell you both that Mr. Tomlinson visited me last night.”

Helen’s brow furrowed and the darkness within her eyes intensified.

“He had no right to contact you. He has no right to do anything here.
 
He’s fired.”

“He knows that.”

“Then what did he want from you?”

“He came to tell me––and I have to tell you––that there’s to be an autopsy this morning. Actually it’s probably already taken place.”

A screaming patch of gulls tore over like World War II fighters, dropping on the deck and into the ocean objects that she wished might have been bombs, but that she knew were not.

John pursed his lips and said, quietly:

“That had to happen. A case like this…they couldn’t just let it go.”

“No, John, they couldn’t.
 
And Mr. Tomlinson thinks…”

“He thinks we committed a murder.”

Nina nodded, as the words, ‘Yes he does’ formed in her throat, thought of going out into the room, thought better of it, and retreated into her stomach.

“Is that,” whispered Helen, “what the town thinks?”

“The town, Helen, is a chicken with its head cut off. It doesn’t know what to think.”

“All right.
 
Then—is that what you think?”

Nina shook her head.

“No.
 
I told Tomlinson what I think.
 
I know you.
 
I know both of you.
 
I knew your parents, and their parents. I taught you.
 
No, I don’t believe you could kill anybody.”

“Thank you, Nina.”

“But I have to ask you, Helen…”

“Yes?”

“That night, after the play…”

“Go on.”

“There had to be a great deal of confusion. You were there in the bedroom with him. Did he ask you to give him his medication?”

“No. He never did that. He mixed a small amount of pain medication with a teaspoon of something to make him sleep.
 
It was always the same. The only difference was, this time he seemed extremely tired, more tired than usual. He drank the medicine and then went immediately to sleep.
 
I noticed this because…”

“Why, Helen?”

“He had drunk some Scotch after the performance.”

“I know. I remember watching him give his little speech to the city.”

“Often when he does that, and we go to bed…”

Silence.

John:
 
“He becomes angry at you.
 
And he beats you.”

“Yes.
 
Or, sometimes the other thing.
 
You know.”

“We know,” said Nina, quietly.

Helen half-smiled and said, softly:

“Sometimes I’m not certain which I prefer.
 
But night before last, nothing.
 
He just went to sleep.”

“All right. There’s nothing more, then. I’m sorry I even talked to you about it.”

“But Nina…”

John leaned forward.

“I have to tell you. All right, you know it, and I don’t mind telling everybody, if it should come to that. I wanted the man dead. He was a monster; he had no right to live.
 
Last night, during the play, I walked around the garden, clenching and unclenching my fists. If I’d have seen him then…”