Set Change: A Nina Bannister Mystery (The Nina Bannister Mysteries) (7 page)

Bobby Jacobs had chosen, “There is a divinity that shapes our ends, rough hew them though we may.”

“There is….”

“Go on, Bobby.”

“There is…”

“You can do it.”

“There is a divinity that shapes our ends rough.”

She had lasted something like fifteen seconds before, explaining to the class that something had caught in her throat, she had rushed out of the room, down the hall, and into the teachers’ lounge.

“What’s the matter with you?”

No way to answer of course, just have to laugh uproariously for five minutes or so, and finally try to get one’s breath back.

Now Clifton Barrett was going to come here and say those lines with her in the audience.

Would she dare approach him for an autograph?

How, how in heaven’s name, had Helen Reddington from little old Bay St. Lucy, approached the deity that was Clifton Barrett?
 
And made him fall in love with her?

And marry her, to boot?

When had that marriage taken place? Ten months ago?
 
Yes, she could remember having read about it in both
The Bay St. Lucy Courier
and
The New York Times
, it being one of the few stories common to both of those illustrious publications.

And now Helen was coming home—

––bringing him with her.

Not only him, but a world class Shakespeare production!

She thought about the question and marveled about it for a time.

Then it began to rain.

Rain comes differently in Bay St. Lucy—and probably all coastal towns—than it comes elsewhere.
 
It does not warn of its approach. There are no sinister black anvil clouds stretching their way across the prairie sky far to the north, no distant rumblings of soft and ominous thunder, no warnings on Weather Telefacts, no fun involved in preparations, no remembering to take one’s umbrella, and no running wildly through the streets to get home and under shelter.

No, in a seaside community the sun was shining and then it wasn’t; it wasn’t raining and then it was.

Hard.

Straight down.
 
No wind involved in the operation.

Drenching rain.

The rain water, she could see, was pelting down into her champagne and diluting it.

Can’t have that.

She drank the rest of the champagne.

Then she set the glass on a table that happened to be next to her.

Then Jackson Bennett put his massive arm around her, turned her gently so that she was facing a different direction than she had been, and roared just enough louder than the roaring rain…

….that was a funny phrase, wasn’t it,
roaring rain
…

…all those ‘r’s…

Champagne, champagne!

The night they…invented…champagne…

Maybe they could do that play!

“Nina, come on!
 
You’re getting drenched!”

“Come on where, Jackson?”

“Over here! Come with me! We’ll get under this little trellis thing!”

It was, she found herself thinking, actually a gazebo.
 
But it was exactly in the right place—ten feet away—and it had a roof, and it had chairs and a table.

Within a few seconds they were seated, Jackson dripping and beaming, Nina burping and dripping and beaming.

“Where did this come from?”

“I don’t know, Jackson.”

“Are you all right?”

“I think so.
 
I’ve been drinking all afternoon so I’m drunk as a skunk.”

“All afternoon?
 
Really?”

“Well, let me look at my watch.
 
It’s one twenty three.
 
I started drinking at one sixteen.”

“Ok, I guess that’s pretty much all afternoon.
 
How much have you put away?”

“Three glasses of champagne.”

“My God, that’s more than six ounces.”

“Well.
 
I knew it was a lot.”

“I didn’t know you had it in you.”

“It probably won’t be in me for long.
 
I generally throw it up.”

“Thank you for telling me that, Nina.”

“It’s the least I could do.”

And so they simply sat there for a time, laughing and watching sodden shapes bent over and scurrying madly through the watery maze that the old Robinson gardens had become.

Jackson, the young running back out of LSU, the struggling African American recent law graduate whom Frank had taken in as junior partner…

…the young man whose family they both had come to love and admire…

…this Jackson was now leaning toward her and asking:

“So what do you think of the news, Nina?”

“Stunning.”

He nodded.

“I know.”

“But Jackson…”
     

She would have leaned forward too, but she probably would have fallen unconscious on the metal table and been unable to rise.

“…Jackson, how could this happen? Surely the city council must have been involved in this.”

He nodded.

“We missed you, Nina. We could have used you on the council.”

“I’m not sure I would have been much help.
 
But anyway, after the Robinson thing, I just felt like I needed a break from major decisions.”

“We all understood. But I think you would have been excited about this particular project.”

“I’m sure I would have.
 
So tell me everything.”

He smiled.

“Alana Delafosse is quite a lady.”

“Yes, she is.”

“The mayor called me in March, and told me he wanted a small subcommittee—actually it turned out to be me, Tom Landrieu, and Mary Phillips—to listen to Ms. Delafosses’s proposal concerning what she was characterizing as a summer festival.”

“Yeah.
 
I’d heard her mention something like that.”

“Well, we met in the old library. She talked, and, I admit, we were skeptical.
 
We had already voted money to redo the mansion, but so much was going on. And when she really went into the particulars of the scope of the thing:
 
New York actors, major national film companies—for a while we were just looking for a nice way to tell her ‘no.’

“I can imagine.”

“But she didn’t quit.
 
And we kept having meetings.
 
And the numbers she kept bringing in were—frankly, they were astonishing.”

“What kind of numbers?”

“Ten million dollars.”

“Jackson, we’re spending ten million dollars to put on this production?”

“No, we’re making ten million dollars.”

“What?”

He grinned.

“I know.
 
It’s hard to believe.
 
But—well, you were at the play last night, weren’t you?”

“Yes.”

“That whole thing at the end, that Salzburg thing?”

“The Salzburg Music Festival.
 
It’s famous.”

“Apparently.
 
But what Alana pointed out to us was, that it didn’t always exist. Salzburg in the early nineteen hundreds was just a sleepy little village, almost dying, because nobody could make money mining the salt beneath the city.
 
The salt that had made it famous centuries before.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“Neither did we.”

“Alana probably learned it in Russia when she was training to be an assassin.”

“Alana never was in Russia and she never trained to be an assassin.”

“You’re no fun.
 
But go on.”

“Salzburg got to be Salzburg because of a guy named Max Reinhardt, who looked at the city and said, ‘Hey, let’s put on a play!’ And they did. And they are still.”

“What did Salzburg have that Bay St. Lucy doesn’t have?”

“Maybe a few old castles, Jackson pointed out, “but we’ve got the ocean. We’ve got a beautiful little town full of artists.”

“And we have money.”

“That we do. Anyway, it turns out Alana had already started contacting people—she’s good at that—and a miracle happened. Whole bunch of them, actually. Alana somehow made contact with The New York Shakespeare Society and offered them a cool million dollars if they would come down here and produce
Hamlet
.”

“Had you authorized her to make such an offer?”

“Of course not; you think we’re crazy?”

“My fault. I’d just forgotten for a second or so that Alana was Alana.”

“Well, she is. Anyway, apparently the New York Shakespeare Company has bills to pay too, and the Reddington/Barrett couple has their ten thousand dollar a month upper West Side apartment to maintain—and they all just said, “We could use a million dollars, let’s go to the beach!”

“Ok, but I still don’t understand…”

“Other people got wind of it.”

“What other people?”

“The Arthur M. Vining Foundation.”

“Who are they?”

“A foundation. They give money to support art. So, by the way, does Amalgamated Petroleum, who just happens to have an offshore drilling rig two miles out from here.”

“Publicity, publicity.”

“Everybody found out about it; and everybody wanted to be involved, nobody more so than the entire state of Mississippi.”

“The state is involved?”

“Of course.
 
That’s why the governor is here today.”

“The governor of Mississippi is here today?”

“Nina, you just walked right past him.”

“I thought that was the president of France. I guess I should know those two people apart, shouldn’t I?”

“Well, you’re retired.”

“I guess that justifies it. So why does the state want to get involved in a Shakespeare production?”

“Mississippi is sensitive about our reputation.”

“Our reputation?”