Set Change: A Nina Bannister Mystery (The Nina Bannister Mysteries) (4 page)

It would have been worth the price of admission—ten dollars for a front row seat, except nothing at all for Nina, who of course received her ticket free, as she received just about everything free these days, as a small show of gratitude from the town for saving it and making its continued existence possible—worth the price of admission, free or ten dollars or whatever it might have been, simply to see the theatrical spectacle that was Alana Delafosse, just being herself.

Applause applause applause.

Large spray of roses now being handed to Alana by the mayor, Alana kissing the mayor first on one cheek then on the other, the roses being handed to one of the stagehands, Alana, her splendid caramel creole skin shining in the footlights and her Cruella de Ville outfit glowing a red so bright that it seemed ready to burst into flame—Alana, preparing to make an announcement.

Alana, so the stories went, had been born on The Upper West Side in New York City, to a Creole mother and a Senegalese father, who happened to be the United Nations ambassador for his country. She had been educated at the finest private schools until, while still a teenager, she had run off to Paris with her lover, a Russian émigré. This man had been killed in a duel—allegedly fought over her—and she had been whisked away by forces unknown to Moscow, where she’d learned fluent Russian and been trained as a Soviet Special Forces Agent, or, more simply, spy. She had disappeared from sight for a while, but rumor had it that she herself had become an assassin, killing several high ranking generals while working to support revolutionary forces in Chile.

The fact that none of these stories were true held no importance. When juxtaposed to actual reality (Alana had been born and raised in a small trailer home four miles from New Iberia, Louisiana, and had never been west of St. Charles, or north of Lafayette, or south of New Orleans, or east of—well, where she was right now)—when juxtaposed against this abysmally boring and completely incomprehensible
 
(because how could anyone raised in such circumstances have become ALANA?)—reality, the Tolstoy novel that passed as her past simply had to be preferred.

And so that was the background everyone envisioned and savored every time Alana held forth.

Which she was preparing to do now.

“It both deliiights meee––”

(Alana had great fun with, and a deep love of, long vowels, which she seemed never to want to let go of. They became her children from the moment they entered her mouth, and she did not want to allow them out into the world, where who knows what would become of them.)

“––and it greeeeeeeves meeee, to remiiiiiind
 
uuuuuuuuuu, that this will be the last performance, in the hallowed spaaaaaaace, that is the Bay St. Lucy Community Theater Auditorium.”

General sigh.

“But as you all knoooooooo, better things are in store for us!
 
The Auberge des Arts is a Reee-ality!”
  

Applause.

“What had beeeen for so many years the Robinson Mansion…”

(Alana did not much respect words that contained only short vowel sounds, and so she got through them as quickly as possible).

“––has become, as we had dreeeeeeeeeeemed––)

Finally! A word (dream) whose ethereal meaning was commensurate with its vowel potentiality!

“––the cultural center of our community!”

More applause.

“The mansion has afforded us space for two theaters, a black box, and a larger venue, seating one hundred and fifty spectators.”

Ooooohs and aaaaahs.

(There might have been a problem getting one hundred and fifty Bay St. Lucyans to go to the theater on any Friday night, especially given the fact that, that hurdle having been jumped, there would have been no one left to go on Saturday or Sunday—

––but that was something for down the road.

Now it was time to celebrate.)

“And so, as you know, the Arts Council of Bay St. Lucy has sent invitations to all of you, to attend a Special Champagne Lunch to be held tomorrow at one p.m. on the grounds of The Auberge. At that time I will have a special announcement to make concerning the inaugural performance of our new space.”

Cheers.

Clapping.

Alana making a show of modesty, which was about like a Bengal tiger blending into a set of army-green curtains.

It took a few more shows of flamboyancy to get Alana off the stage, and in these moments, Nina did in fact remember receiving her invitation—which came special delivery, and had contained a handwritten supplication on the bottom of the elegant card the words:
 
“Please come, Nina! You will be our guest of honor!”

She also remembered a dull sense of dread.

Champagne in the afternoon.

Who drank champagne in the afternoon?

And why should she want to be in their company, whoever they were?

Oh well—she could go home at two and sleep the rest of the afternoon.

And so she left the theater, happy in the hope that neither she nor Bay St. Lucy had more to fear in the coming months than a surfeit of champagne.

It would take several weeks for her to learn how wrong she was.

CHAPTER 4:
 
JOYS AND CONCERNS

On Sunday mornings Nina attended worship services at The Second United Methodist Church at the corner of Jackson and Parry streets.
 
There was not a First United Methodist Church. There probably had been one, but something had happened to it, and no one much cared to talk about the matter now.

There was a newer Methodist church on the outskirts of Bay St Lucy, but she had never been tempted to attend, probably for that very reason:
 
namely, that it was newer.
 
Newer was not good in terms of religion. Newer did not promise the same dark burnished oaken pews that she and Frank had sat in for so many years—so many in fact that although Sandra McCallister sat regularly on her right hand now, the spot to her left was, as a matter of courtesy, always left open.

Just as was the spot immediately to the right of Sandra, the place where her husband Tom used to sit.

No matter if there were a space or two left vacant. The congregation had dwindled, was dwindling slightly through the years, and there was no need, as there had been for Christmas and Easter services two decades ago, to bring in folding chairs and place them in the outer aisles.

Indeed, there were some Sundays––the summer ones among them––when the early arriving Nina even wondered if she would be the only parishioner in the congregation.

This never happened of course.

The Barkleys, Benjamen and Darleen, always arrived early too, sometimes even before the minister.

Then came dribs and drabs, as Frank would have put it.

Mudge—Mudge had a last name, but it seemed so prosaic, whatever it was—Mudge, past ninety now, wobbling in and down the stairs that led into the sanctuary from the downtown-side door, helped along as she always was by one or two of the other ladies of the church who took turns giving her a ride.

The Miller family, all three pre-school children between them, all three stuffed there in the pew and being molested every second or so by first their father, then their mother, who saw Sunday mornings as the opportunity to show first hand to the children what the true wages of sin actually were, these being naturally the human condition of being imprisoned in an eight foot space on a gorgeous seaside summer morning and forced to sit in constant, motionless, silent prayer.

“Be quiet!”

“Sit still!”

“Stop that!”

“But he––”

“I don’t want to hear it!”

“But she––”

“No!”

Why not, Nina wondered, just bring them on time? Why bring them early?

She did not say ‘Why bring them at all?’ even to herself, for she knew that would have been blasphemous.

Of course you had to bring them.

“Get out from under that pew!”

“But I––”

“Get out from there!”

Or, maybe not.

At least they were three pews in front of Nina, except that once the children actually got under the pews and became mobile, they might turn up anywhere.

Jana Darnell, seventy three now—her birthday had been announced from the pulpit last week, so Jana’s age was fresh in Nina’s mind—radiant and beautiful as she must have been at seventeen, with the same sparkle in her eyes and the same straight bearing and the same immaculate and striking red scarf.

Leana Douglas; Florence Robinson; Earl and Nora Springer—

––dribs and drabs, dribs and drabs—

After a time the piano began to play, Nina rejoicing that it was, this morning, as it usually was:
 
one of the old ones.

“Blessed Assurance.”

Da da da deee deee…

As the blue robed choir filtered in and the pulpit crew—which she always enjoyed calling them, although they probably would not have appreciated it—prepared
 
to do their respective duties, announcement reading, scripture lesson, song leading, etc.—she prepared herself mentally for the first stages of the service.

Be prayerful, listen carefully, check your wallet to be sure there’s something to put in the collection plate, and try not to laugh at anything when you were the only one laughing.

There would be other things to laugh at later on, of course, but they were rigidly controlled episodes of group laughter, and it was just as bad to remain silent within them as it was to guffaw outside of them.

“Good morning!”

From a beaming Reverend Daniels.

“Good morning!”

From a Summer Sparse but Always Eager in the Will of the Lord congregation.

And now—begin.

She listened carefully to the announcements, especially the one she knew without having to hear it, the one pointing out that this Sunday, First Sunday, was Fellowship Sunday, which meant Potluck Lunch.

There were several ‘ships’ that had to be dealt with in church life, two of the most important being ‘Fellowship,’ and ‘Stewardship.’

Stewardship meant giving more money than you were used to giving.

Fellowship meant eating.

It was much more popular.

And Nina had, as she always did, prepared for it.

Tucked away on a vast drain board down below in the equally vast kitchen—for people in 1902 when the red brick church building was erected knew the importance of eating—sat her big bowl of tuna salad.
 
It was surrounded by countless other bowls, all of them single cells in the vast and complex creature that was fellowship.

Almost invariably Nina brought chicken salad to such events.

Every now and then deviled eggs.

But today—perhaps it was the summer gaiety that had descended on Bay St. Lucy with the luscious warmth and the new faces and the stands along the beach and the corn dog smells—whatever it was, it brought to her a sense of madcap revelry of Lord of Misrule, of Do the Unthinkable—

––and so she had made tuna salad and
not
chicken salad.

So there!

The announcements plodded along. She listened earnestly to them until they reached the phase that she had begun to dread terribly, and through which she knew that she must force herself to daydream about other things, any other things.

This phase was The Joys and Concerns.

She had, in years past, never really minded Joys and Concerns.

But that was a time of a younger congregation, when there had been approximately as many of the one as of the other.

Time had gone on, and the balance had shifted mournfully to the concerns.

Well, that was all right.

If one had no concerns, then of what use was a church anyway?

The problem was that the older women of the congregation had begun to enjoy the
 
thing too much.

They no longer simply said:

“Marge Riddlemeyer’s brother has gone into the hospital for surgery.”

No, they had learned to become much more specific about the matter, even much more clinical.

And they spoke more slowly, enjoying the dramatic pauses surrounding various organs and symptoms.

“As you know—Harold Witherspoon—was diagnosed—last month––”

Nods from everyone in the congregation, who were all listening to this broadcast as though it were an episode of
The Guiding Light
.

“—with heptomal non-recurring empheriarsis, which began producing malignant tumors on the anterior lobe of both his pineal gland and his lower distending femoral artery.”

Pause, for a second, then collective:

“Ooooooooo.”

Nina had ceased to be certain whether the low collective moan was a sincere expression or grief or a show of respect for the anatomical knowledge of the speaker.

Another hand in the air; and another, and another:

“I just felt I—had to tell everyone––”

Thousand one, thousand two—

“That Herschell Massey’s friend Richard––”

Thousand one, thousand two—

“Has had—a recurrence—of the lymphomatic—cytosis—which seems to have invaded—the non-distillary embolic membranous and subcutaneous––”

“Who,” Nina whispered to Sandra, “is she even talking about?”

“Herschell’s friend Richard who lives up in Oregon.”

“Sandra we don’t even
know
this man!”

“That doesn’t mean we can’t pray for him.”

“How can you pray for somebody you don’t even know?
 
Why don’t we just pray for everybody in the world?”

“Well, we should do that too!”

But it wasn’t any good. She couldn’t do it. The symptoms, at least those she could understand, sounded too awful. Besides, every time she heard a disease described so graphically she began to think she had it herself. Pancreatic cancer. That was incurable and killed you in two weeks.

Her pancreas began to hurt.

Which side was it on?

No.
 
She had to think of something else.

So she did. She thought of the performance last night.
 
What a fantastic job they had all done! And Margot, wonderful Margot, bringing down the house—which found itself brought down several times, a fitting ‘adieu’ for the old theater—with her “Climb Every Mountain.” Who knew she could sing like that?

And as for the finale, the last scene––

She found her eyes to the far side of the congregation.

There sat John Giusti.

“Good job, John,” she found herself whispering.

Like always.
 
In John we trust.

John had been playing Captain von Trapp for his whole life, when one thought of it.

Quiet, unassuming, brilliant, athletic—John had been the only football player in Bay St. Lucy’s history to get a Division One scholarship––
      

––and single.

Always something sad about that.

“AND NOW FOR JOYS!”

Thank heaven
, thought Nina,

“I have a joy!”

She turned.

And there, her head barely high enough to be seen over the back of the pew, stood Hope Reddington.

She was farther in the back of the church than usual, and Nina had not even noticed her entrance.

“Stand up!” exhorted Reverend Daniels.

This was a joke of course, since Hope already was standing.

She shook her fist at him a couple of times in mock outrage.

A collective laugh.