Set Change: A Nina Bannister Mystery (The Nina Bannister Mysteries) (3 page)

“Just what I need. Why in heaven’s name is it being called
Sea Change
? The sea doesn’t have anything to do with what happened in the Robinson mansion.”

“How should I know?”

“The lunatic, the lover, and the poet,” Nina sighed, “are of imagination all compact.”

“You are, you know, going to have to give up the habit of quoting like that.
 
You’re not in a classroom, you know.”

“I tolerate your cigars, you tolerate my Shakespeare.
 
Looking back on the whole mess, though, and what they all thought Macy had done—and what everybody wanted to do to Eve Ivory—when I think of all that—there were times when it seemed pretty hopeless.”

“Hope is here, Nina.”

“It is now. We have the money; Alana Delafosse has made the Auberge des Arts a reality. What was the Robinson mansion has become an art gallery, new theater space, cultural center—and the school will be ready for the fall.
 
Yes, hope might be here now, but––”

“No, Nina.
 
I mean, really:
 
Hope is here.
 
In the shop.”

“What?”

Nina became aware that Margot was rising, gesturing, and smiling at a diminutive figure entering the garden.

“Hello,
 
Hope!”

“Hello, ladies!”

Nina turned in the chair, then smiled and greeted the new arrival:
 
Hope Reddington.

This lady had been often referred to around Bay St. Lucy as The Hope Diamond. It was a comparison not precisely accurate, for although Hope the human was slightly smaller than the jewel of the same name, she was much brighter, and she possessed many more facets from which a startling kind of radiance seemed always to be emanating. She was harder, too, or at least she would have had to be, given certain things that had happened in her past. They were not disreputable things, not Homer Baron Robinson murderings or
Supermarket Weekly
gossipings.
 
No, Hope Reddington’s griefs had been entirely of the mundane kind that make them less interesting to talk about and far more difficult to endure.
 
Her husband, Marshall Reddington, owner of the town’s leading—and for a time only—pharmacy, stricken with a cruel form of cancer and forced to wither in their stately home until mercifully delivered to the grave.
 
Her daughter and son-in law, quite happily married, killed in a freak automobile accident. And her granddaughter Helen, not of Troy but of Bay St. Lucy, stricken by three insidious diseases:
 
the first, beauty, the second, talent, and the third (the only one of the three to prove invariably incurable and unfalteringly fatal), success.

But if Hope did not quite spring eternal then she at least bubbled forth in a dogged mortality, coming as near to timeless as humanity, in its white-tight-ringlet haired, stooped, caned, hearing aided, ninety-genarian but who cares and damn the next century anyway form—could manage.

“Hello, Ladies!”

To which both Nina and Margot replied in chorus:

“Hello, Hope!”

It seemed an entirely appropriate thing to say.

“How delightful to see you!
 
Is that lemonade?”

“It is,” answered Margot.

“May I have some?”

“No, Hope.
 
I don’t think we’re going to let you have any lemonade today.”

“Oh, dear.
 
I was so looking forward to it––”

“Well perhaps another time, when we’re in a better mood.”

“Perhaps if I come over and beg?”

“You could try.”

“I believe I shall; it looks so inviting. Just wait for me:
 
I don’t move too quickly.”

Hope began making her way across the garden.
 
She was, Nina remembered while watching her approach, always looking up and out from under something. This was not hard in Margot’s shop, because there was always something or other—a painting, a vase, an ashtray, a pot, a bouquet, a spray, an engraving—to be looking up and out from.

But Hope simply lived life looking up and out from under something, even if nothing was there.

It was, Nina speculated, the end result of being eleven inches tall, or, if not quite that short, at least a height diminutive enough to make her the only Bay St. Lucyan (over the age of seven) to be shorter than Nina herself.

“Now that I’m here, it looks even better!”

“Well, since you’ve come all this way, we may relent.”

“Oh goody!”

She looked up and out from under nothing at Nina (beaming as she did so) and then looked up and out from under nothing at Margot.

Then she folded her bat-like hands in front of her, knelt at Margot’s feet, looked up in supplication and asked:

“Will you bless me, Holy Mother?”

Margot, missing not a beat, placed her own hand on Hope’s superbly tailored white white WHITE! jacket, and intoned:

“Go and sin no more, my child.”

I am, Nina found herself thinking, going to be sick.

But Hope, not moving, shaking her head and staring down at the floor, merely whispered:

“I am too old to sin, Mother Superior.”

“One is never too old to sin.
 
Sin is one of the gifts that God always offers us.”

Then Hope twisted her neck so that she was, once again, in the position of looking up and out from under something—the burden of sin, Nina surmised––and said quietly but with intense glee:

“Thank you!
 
Thank you!
 
And bless you for that!”

“It was nothing, my dear.”

“Both of you,” said Nina, as Hope began the painful and lengthy process of rising, “are going to be struck by a bolt of lightning. And I will be too although none of this is my fault and it isn’t fair.”

“Oh don’t be silly,” said
 
Margot, helping Hope as much as she could without breaking off one of the woman’s arms.
 
“She’s just trying to help me get into character.”

“Of course I am,” said Hope, who had now arrived at half-erectness and was pausing to catch her breath before continuing the ascension. “And I think Margot is going to make a wonderful Mother Superior. I’m
so excited
about tonight!
 
Aren’t you, Nina?”

“Nina,” Margot interrupted, “is skeptical.”

“Why are you skeptical, Nina?”

“Well, the truth is, I’ve never really thought of Margot as a nun.”

“Then I assure you, she’s going to prove you wrong tonight.”

“Ms. Reddington?”

The girl appeared again in the doorway.

“Ms. Reddington?”

“Yes?”

“Would you like me to wrap your painting?”

Hope beamed at her:

“No it isn’t necessary, darling. But would you bring it out here, please?
 
Let us look at it in the better light!”

There was no better light, Nina thought to herself, because of the volcanic cigar haze blocking the skylight; but still Ramoula Peters’ seascape radiated a light of its own—how could great painters do that, she wondered; how could they create light with paint?—and the water in the picture seemed to move and glow and respond in perfect keeping with the full moon, which now was shining in the middle of Margot’s garden.

“So you were the one who bought this!” said Margot.

Hope took it in her hands, held it up for a second, worshipped it quietly, and then set it against one of the chairs.

“I fell in love with it when I first saw it in your shop a week or so ago.
 
But I had no occasion to buy it.
 
Now I do.”

“An occasion?” asked Margot.

“Oh yes. One always needs an occasion. Look. Look at the lines that I’ve written here!”

She produced a card, on which she had written several lines of poetry in the superb handwriting of people who went to school sometime around the turn of the century and learned Latin, and true mathematics—and handwriting.

Margot read the line aloud:

“I love the soft collision here of harbor and shore, the subtle haunting briny quality that all small towns have when they are situated by the sea.”
 
William Styron.

“That’s beautiful,” said Nina.

“Isn’t it?”

“What is the occasion, Hope?”

Hope Reddington looked at her, then stepped back toward the splattering fountain—then put both palms before her mouth.

Then she let the palms drop, and, as though she was a puppet whose hands were attached by invisible strings to the corners of her mouth—which of course raised as the hands now dropped––said:

“Oh I can’t tell you that!”

She then placed herself squarely between Margot and Nina, encircled each of their waists with a birdlike arm, gazed upward first at one and then at the other, and kindled a smile that radiated like a small fire, burning purely white and emitting its own heat, as though a star precisely one foot in diameter—the size of Hope’s face—had gleefully exploded.

Then she whispered:

“It’s a secret!”

Then she swept the painting up and held it against her.

She kissed the card—

––and she turned and tottered out of the shop.

CHAPTER 3:
 
PERFORMANCE!

There is a magic about community theaters.

There is a force which breeds, even in the smallest of settlements, one person who is absolutely perfect for the part.

A village in central Texas, population eight hundred.

Somehow God will provide a hardware store owner, or a mail delivery man, or an attorney or a dog catcher or a whatever––because behind the footlights it matters not in the least—one person who is more like The King of Siam than Yul Brynner.

A ‘ville’ of some kind. Smithville or Jonesville or Johnsonville or Oilville or Cowville or whatever.

A ‘ville’ hidden away in the foothills of the Ozarks, two hours drive away from Little Rock

The Forces of Theatricality will combine to throw up, emit, disgorge, make happen some way—a huge South Seas Woman to sing “Happy Talk” from South Pacific and bring down the house.

One of Nina’s favorite sayings—she was never sure what culture it had come from, but suffice to say one of those groupings of people less civilized than we and thus infinitely more wise—was the proverb that “A child remains a boy until a man is needed.”

In the world of community theater that proverb read:

“An insurance agent remains an insurance agent until Stanley Kowalski is needed.”

And in truth, only three years ago––no one could forget it––Marvin Harper, State Farm Insurance agent for little Bay St. Lucy, prim, church-going, father of four, model husband, a bit bookish, somewhat timid except in matters of fender repairs and deductibles—

––this man had transformed much as a werewolf does in the spell of the full moon, into Marlon Brando, had hurled himself upon the stage floor, held his hands open to the floodlights above him, noticed that there was nobody up there except a stage hand or two, ignored that fact, and bellowed:

“Ellen!
 
Ellen!
 
Ellen!”

The audience had been transfixed.

Nor did it detract even in the least from that unforgettable moment when someone was gauche enough to mention, in the anteroom after the performance, over coffee and cheesecake, that the name may have been wrong.

What, the reply had been, is in a name?

Even Shakespeare knew that much!

And if Marvin Harper saw in those floodlights a woman named Ellen and not a woman named Stella, that was his own business.

(He must have seen her there quite clearly, since he shouted out to her in precisely the same manner in the Saturday night performance, the Sunday matinee performance, and the Monday night finale).

Then it was all over, of course.

And, the werewolf-moon having gone down, he returned to being an insurance agent.

Six months later the equally nondescript manager of The Piggly Wiggly became Curly, and Ida Sue Miller morphed herself into Ado Annie.

It was incredible.

And it kept happening.

The only problem with the whole thing was that it kept happening in such an obscure way. Millions might have been enthralled by seeing the citizens of one small community such as Bay St. Lucy outdo the combined efforts of Broadway and Hollywood, except that millions could not fit into the Bay St. Lucy Community Theater Playhouse.

Fifty three could.

The problem was not helped by the fact that certain seats were taken in advance, and could not be offered up for public consumption.

The Mayor, for example, had to be there.

The town council had, if not to be there in their entirety, at least to be represented.

Same with the school board.

“Wouldn’t miss it for the world!”

“Couldn’t keep me away!”

And whether these sentiments were entirely honest and heart felt, they at least had to be expressed, and they had to be expressed by people who were in fact there tonight, right now, sitting in seat five, row nine, knees held tight and almost up against chest, program held just as tight up to face, cell phones off please, all preliminary chatting and coffee drinking in the anteroom, done, because the time approached precisely seven o’clock, and…

…Mrs. Gertrude Throckmorton arrived.

Mrs. Throckmorton, oblivious to a trickle of applause, made her way through the teenagers standing in the back of the theater, the parents in the middle of the theater, and the town elders in the front of the theater. She adjusted her glasses, patted the bun behind her hair, put her meager body through a few light calisthenics, then turned and faced the piano.

She glared at it as though she hated it.

Nina, no more than eight feet away from her and feeling dangerously exposed in her first row seat, held her breath while the woman threw herself onto the piano bench, threw open the music, threw her shoulders back, and threw her head forward so that her eyes were no more than six inches from the sheet music, which began to glow yellow in a small sphere of light emitted by the piano light.

Then she attacked the music.

BOMBOMBOMBOMBOMBOMBOM—

And there they all came, realized a delighted Nina, closing her eyes and settling back into the three or four inch space that was all she had room to settle back into.

There they all came, cascading and serenading and melting one into another and climaxing and softening and loudening and harmonizing and soloing and intertwining like Rogers and Hammerstein ropes being twirled into Austria and Alpine Mountain Air!

There they all were, taking Nina back years into the day her father and mother—how old had she been then, ten?––
 
had taken her to Jackson, to the old and huge and red velveted Majestic Theater.

Where she, sitting in the second balcony, had seen Maria gambol out into her mountain meadow.

There they all were again, brought forth into the tiny rarified space of Theater Bay St. Lucy by the fingers of Mrs. Throckmorton, out of a frightened piano that seemed to shiver to the point of collapsing as she drove it like an engineer drives a freight train.

There they all were, the great melodies of
The Sound of Music.

And then, after a breathless pause during which the audience was too shocked and awed even to applaud the fact that Mrs. Throckmorton had in three minutes and twenty seconds played what seemed a hundred and fifty songs—Macy Peterson was on the stage.

Except she was not on the stage.

She was in that mountain meadow.

And Margot had been exactly right.

She was Maria von Trapp.

She inhaled…

…complete silence for only a moment…

…and it all came flooding back into Nina’s mind:

Macy’s statement.

The letter opener.

Eve Ivory, dead in the bedroom.

And Macy the Perfect, Macy the Sweet Young Teacher, crying to Nina, who’d been the only one to believe her:

“I didn’t kill her!
 
I’m not insane!”

Another moment; another pause, and then Macy pouring out her heart in another way, and carrying the town away:

Singing about hills being alive.

It was absolutely enchanting of course.

And it just got better.

It got better when Margot Gavin stepped onto the stage and proved, of course, that Alana, who for years had directed The Bay St. Lucy Community Theater just as she directed all things artistic in the town—that Alana’s eye had been perfect and that, improbable as it seemed, the little town that had produced the for all time definitive Stanley Kowalski had now produced the for all time definitive Mother Superior.

Nina
sensed
this from the time Margot, ramrod straight, stern, crag-faced and habit-enshrouded, called Macy toward her, and put her palms on Macy’s shoulders.

She
knew
it though when, upon hearing Margot say that Maria was going to have to leave the abbey…

…an entire crowd of fifty four people sighed as one:

“Ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.”

My God she’s good
, Nina said to herself.

They were all good, of course. Good were Alicia Matthews, age six, Thomas Peterson, age eight, Susan Thompson, age nine, Nancy Espinoza, age eleven, Robert Dowd, age thirteen, Dan Slocum, age fifteen, and Ramona Howe, age sixteen but “Going on Seventeen” and “On the Brink”—every one of whom Nina knew, because, although through with teaching forever, she still had the career educator’s habit of
 
seeing every human being in the town at age four and saying mentally, “I’d love to have that one in my classroom,” or “Uh, oh.”

Good also was Alana Delafosse as a director who, working with a fifteen foot square stage and a one foot high platform, had told Macy to sit with her legs crossed, fake strumming a guitar which she had no idea how to play, while Mrs. Throckmorton, eyes glued into the corresponding eyes of every child on stage, softly ever so softly insinuated the chords as they were the comings and goings of the sea itself:

Bum Bum Bum Bum

Bum Bum Bum Bum

And Marcy, who actually was going to teach these children in the classroom and was already teaching two of them, quietly, encouragingly:

…singing about deer…

…female deer…

…sewing, running…

First the children were hesitant, and then they were whispering, then louder, louder still, and finally standing while belting it out at the audience.

Then they were marching in circles and then they were bisecting the circles and marching rearwards and forwards again and over and under one another and sitting and standing and doing both at the same time and all the while smiling broader and broader and more and more joyously while the audience, hypnotized, began to clap, and stomp, and sing along, which of course no one could stop doing while the ever-moving line of total and absolute cuteness which was the sailor-suited Von Trapp children aka Children of Bay St. Lucy Our Children Will You Look at Them UP THERE?—

––until this model of absolute rightness stopped stock still; the children gazed in wonder at their new Mother Macy who slapped a palm down on the top of her head, sang a superb R over Q minor, the highest and clearest note ever allowed in the universe…

…gasped for air, bowed…

And the house dissolved in delirious applause.

The children stood, as though electrified.

Macy was RADIOACTIVEGIRL, her grin alone powering the cities of the Mississippi Coast.

Quiet was restored five minutes later.

But that was the way the play went, one triumph after another, culminating in the great scene at The Salzburg Festival, which even the real Salzburg Festival had never done quite so well.

At final curtain the applause lasted unabated for a full five minutes.

It was only stopped by the entrance of the play’s director, Alana Delafosse.

“My dearest Laaaaydeeez and Gennnntlmen, thank you thank you thank you sssooooo much for coming!”