Set Change: A Nina Bannister Mystery (The Nina Bannister Mysteries) (5 page)

Finally it died down and the reverend asked:

“What is your joy, Hope?”

Silence for a second.

And then, was Hope looking directly at Nina?

Perhaps.
 
On the other hand the smile was of such a nature as to make everyone in the building think it directed only at him or her.

“What is your joy?”

“My great joy,” replied Hope, “is that my granddaughter—my beloved granddaughter Helen—is coming home.”

There was a sermon after that but nobody listened to it.
 
They were all thinking of Hope’s announcement and the lovely time they were going to have gossiping about it while eating the potluck lunch.

This happened at precisely twelve thirty, when the doors to the basement dining hall were opened and the congregation swarmed in.

There were 53 Methodist women and they had cooked and brought with them 237 bowls or platters of food.

Which they now tore into while talking only a little about the previous evening’s community theater performance and much more about the history of the Reddington family.

“Wasn’t Alana Delafosse simply wicked as The Baroness?”

“Oh I hated her!”

“It was so funny how the audience all hissed when she came on!”

“When she said, ‘It might be better for all concerned if the children are—sent away,’ somebody got up and shouted, “Go back to Vienna!”

“Wasn’t that funny?
 
Now, what is this?”

“Okra casserole, isn’t it?”

“I don’t know, but there’s shrimp in it.”

“How long has Helen been away?”

“She hasn’t been back here in, oh, it must be five years now.
 
No, no, you take more of it.”

“I’ve got enough.
 
Cranberry sauce?”

“Just a bit.”
 

“Oh, I got some on your plate.”

“It’s all right. Where was it she went away to school?”

“Some art school in Michigan.”

“Interlochen School of the Arts.”

“Is that what it was?”

“I think so. I just know it must have been so hard on Hope. Her husband died of cancer; then a year or so later there was that car wreck, and all she had left was her little granddaughter, Helen. And then about two years after that, there was this great offer to go and study acting. Helen was only seventeen.
 
It was exciting, but it meant Hope would be all alone.
 
Could you just hand me a piece of that chicken?”

“Here; do you want a slice of ham to go with it?”

“I shouldn’t.”

“Oh, go ahead.
 
It’s the Potluck.”

“All right; just one slice though. Now who did Helen marry?”

“A big-name New York actor; I don’t know his name. It was in the paper though—it happened
 
last September. Here, I’ll give you a little bit of this dressing, too. Samantha Slaughter made it.”

“She makes such good dressing.”

“I know.”
 

And so on and so on and so on.

Nina, her pancreas no longer bothering her, had made her way to a table where John Giusti was seated by himself.

“May I,” she asked, “sit at the captain’s table?”

He smiled, rose, smiled more broadly still, and gestured to one of the empty metal chairs:

“Are you always so much trouble, Fraulein?”

“Oh much more, Sir!” she said, setting the sixteen inch plate filled with indeterminate and multi-colored foods on the table before her.

“John,” she said, “you were just wonderful!”

“Thank you. High praise from a teacher of literature.”

“No, I don’t have anything to do with it. You were just good.
 
You all were.”

“It was very moving, wasn’t it?”

“Oh! That last scene, the last song—everybody in the little theater, singing…of course, we barely could sing, we were all crying so hard.”

“Me too. I was choked up. I didn’t realize they’d all sing along like that.”

“Well. Everybody over the age of thirty knows that movie so well. Who in the United States of America doesn’t know “Edelweiss?” It’s like an alternate national anthem.”

“Yes, I suppose it is.”

She deliberated a while about eating, not knowing whether to begin with the plum pudding, the raisin soufflé, the crab bisque, the green beans with onions, the crawfish etoufee, the sardine vinaigrette, the roast beef with hollandaise sauce, or the foods lying hidden under the ones she could see.

“Oh by the way, Nina, I meant to ask you today:
 
when am I seeing Furl again?”

“Do you need to?”

“I think so; it’s been six months, hasn’t it?”

“Surely
 
not!”

“Yep.
 
I was checking my calendar.”

“How could I have forgotten?”

“Well,” he said, smiling, “you had a lot on your plate.”

“You’re not talking about the Pot Luck––”

“That too. And in addition to that, there’s the fact that, around the time Furl was getting his last round of vaccinations, you were helping to catch a murderer.”

“My God, John. It’s true. Just a few weeks before that whole thing happened, we were in your clinic.”

“How is old Furl, anyway?”

“Same as always, as far as I can tell.
 
Runs the house.”

“Nature of cats.”

“And how have you been, John? Apart from your difficulties with the Third Reich, I mean?”

“I’ve been well, really well.”

“Still splitting time between here and Vicksburg?”

“More here than Vicksburg. I go to the Medical Research facility there once a month, and they let me watch. It’s the technical aspect of veterinary science. I like to fool around with it and they give me gadgets.”
        

“I’d ask you to describe them, but I know I wouldn’t be able to understand a word.”

“It’s not that hard. Mainly they make things to calm animals down.
 
Comes in handy.”

“Well, it will come in handy. You know how Furl likes shots.”

“We’ll make him the happiest cat in the world.”

“I’ll believe that when I see it.
 
But anyway, when should we come, John?”

“What about Tuesday at ten o’clock?”

“Perfect.
 
We’ll be there.”

Silence for a time.

Should she bring it up?

Would it be painful for John?

Or was he sitting there thinking about it anyway, knowing the question would have to be asked sometime.

Oh, the hell with it.

“So John, the news about Helen––”

He looked over her shoulder, as though seeing something no one else knew was in the hall. Then he shrugged, smiled a smile that was not quite a smile but too resigned to be a frown, and said:

“That was kind of a shocker, wasn’t it?”

“Yes, it was.”

More silence.

She amused herself to think that she was sitting here with Captain von Trapp while, all around them, tinkle tinkle scrape scrape scrape chew chew chew gossip gossip gossip—The Hills Were Alive With The Sound of Eating.

“You’ve not seen her in a long time, I guess.”

“No.
 
Not since she left for Interlochen.”

Something seemed to strike him as funny and he hummed:

“She was sixteen going on seventeen…”

“Was she, really?”

“Yes.
 
Turned seventeen three days after she left.”

“That has to be right. You had both taken my sophomore world literature class.”

“Which she aced, I remember.
 
I barely passed.”

“Barely passed indeed. You got a strong B +.”

“Although I didn’t deserve it. By the way do you remember all the grades of all the students you ever taught in thirty or forty years here?”

Yes, she was forced to admit to herself, simultaneously terrified and appalled by the thought.

“No, of course not.”

“I think you gave me a gift.
 
I was just not able to get into those plays.”

“Well, you were always a scientist. You were winning science fairs. When you weren’t making the all regional football team.”

“Yeah. It seems like a long time ago.
 
Helen and I were–”

He shook his head, and munched some salad.

“We were very close. We’d dated for two years. But then that offer came…”

He shook his head.

“––and she knew there was a lot more in the world than John Giusti.
 
But still, I remember the last night.”

He remembers, Nina mused, his last romantic night with the most beautiful woman in the history of Bay St. Lucy. I remember world literature grades.

How fair is that?

“I can visualize it,” he continued. “We were out on the rock jetty. It was August, but there was a wind, and spray kept coming up from the rocks. We just sat there, not caring very much how wet we got. She told me very calmly that it was over between us. She was, she knew, never going to come back to Bay St. Lucy. She didn’t want a long distance thing. I pretended to agree, because you didn’t really disagree with Helen.”

He was silent for a time, looking at the same point he’d been looking at, which was nowhere in the dining hall of course but in another decade, another life.

“Did you,” Nina asked, “ever try to contact her?”

John
 
nodded.

“I wrote a letter. Then another, a few weeks later. She didn’t answer.
 
So I gave up.
  
And that was that.”

“Well.
 
It would have been hard to…”

“Nina!
 
Tom!”

Hope Reddington had materialized like Glenda the Good Witch at a spot one foot behind Nina, who now turned to address her while looking for and not seeing The Ruby Slippers.

“Hope!” she said.
 
“What wonderful news!”

“Isn’t it?”