Set Change: A Nina Bannister Mystery (The Nina Bannister Mysteries) (9 page)

“I will.
 
Good night you two.”

“Good night.”

“Good night.”

And, save for a fish plopping near the pier, and a water bird yowling mournfully as it skimmed its way over the bayou current, Nina and Hope were alone.

On her own back porch, Hope no longer seemed to feel the need of looking up and out from under something. She did on the other hand seem to feel an equally pressing need to avoid being heard by something; and so she leaned forward, making the legs of the table scrape against the hardwood porch floors, while, her grinning face poised directly above a serving bowl filled with what appeared to be Bleu Cheese dressing, she paused.

For one second.
 
Two seconds.

Listen, listen…

Three seconds.
 
Four seconds…

…then the secret.

“July 6.”

The grin only broadened, while Nina pondered her response to this communication, this number, this enigma.

She could not bring herself to be so stupid as to ask something like, “So what’s happening on July 6, Hope?”

Clearly she was supposed to have known the burning question, whose answer was “July 6.”

It was like one of those game shows, in which the contestant, having been told the answer, is to guess the question.

But for the life of her she couldn’t think of any she could have asked, the answer to which would have been ‘July 6,’ except the question, “What day comes two days after the fourth of July?”

Which she did not want to ask.

And so she simply waited.

The grin only broadened.

We will be, she told herself, here all night.

Then a stroke of brilliance hit her and she said:

“So that’s the big day, is it?”

Hope exploded in joy.

“Yes! Yes, I’ve only learned of it today! July 6, Tuesday afternoon, at 8:00 p.m.!”

The dazzle of the brilliant idea seemed to have faded a bit by now, but why not ride things as far as possible?

“So then—things will start happening.”
       

Another explosion of joy.

“Yes!
 
Yes!”

But how long could she keep this going? How long could she avoid saying, “So
what
things will begin happening, Hope?”

“Do you think you’ll be ready by then?”

The grin disappeared, there replaced it an expression of pure panic, and finally an atmosphere of calm and resignation.

“Yes. Yes, I believe everything will be done. When Helen and her husband arrive, her room will be ready for them.
 
All of the workmen have assured me of that.”

Thank God!

Hope and her husband were arriving on July 6, at 8 p.m..

Now maybe they could eat.

They did so, with Hope chattering on about this and that, all subjects fair game and relevant as long as they were Helen and her famous actor husband. Nina got a few words in here and there, mostly about the splendor of the cucumber salad and about how she had always loved cucumber salads and about how her mother had made wonderful cucumber salads and about how much Frank had loved cucumber salads and of course it was all lies, lies, lies, but there wasn’t much else to talk about.

So she munched, and listened, and nodded, while the sun set over the bayou, and the shadows lengthened, and every now and then a gray log with one yellow eye floated by, indicating that it was either a very special log indeed or an alligator.

Finally:

“Nina, I wanted to ask you something. It’s a bit of a difficult subject; somewhat personal. I hope you don’t mind.”

“Of course not, Hope.”

“I wanted to ask…”

Silence again, except for the drone of an airplane passing low on its way to landing at the Bay St. Lucy Airport, and the sound of wavelets lapping at the pier outside.

“Do you ever feel—well, close to Frank?”

Nina thought for a while, and finally decided to tell the truth.

“Yes.”

“It’s as though he’s—somehow all around you?”

“Yes.
 
Yes, it’s that way.”

“Well—I feel that way more and more often now, as I walk through the house. Or as I sit out here and watch the water. There are presences. Old friends. Loved ones. They seem to be telling me that something will be happening soon.
 
I shall be 82 in two months, and…well, they seem to be letting me know that my time is coming.”

Nina would have commented, except she began to be lost in her own thoughts, which were occasionally similar.

Not often.

Just…

…just sometimes.

Mostly about this time of day.

“It’s a very strange thing. They make me feel as though there’s nothing to fear. That it will be all right. And do you know, Nina?
 
I don’t fear. I don’t fear anything at all.”

“Hope, I’m sure you’re right about there being nothing to fear; but you’re going to be with us a long time. You have many years in front of you.”

Nina had, of course, no idea how long Hope Reddington had to live.

She had no idea how long anyone had to live, herself included.

But there were certain things one was expected to say.

Or?

At any rate, Hope continued as though she had not heard the comment anyway.

“I just want to be sure that she’s all right.”

“Who, Hope?”

“Helen. I just want to have her here, and see her with a loving husband who will take care of her. And then I will be ready to go.”

“I’m sure…”

But Hope interrupted her:

“As it is, I have concerns.”

“What kind of concerns?”

A shake of the head.

“I’m not sure. I was unable to go to New York for the wedding. So far, so far…”

“I understand.”

“I’ve not seen Helen and her husband together. I don’t know anything about their lifestyle. Both of them famous now, in such a wonderful city. I assume it to be everything she dreamed of as a girl.”

“Of course it is, Hope.”

“But…her letters. She writes frequently, as she always did.
 
But...there’s been a change in them.”

“What kind of a change?”

“It’s hard to put into words. She writes about marvelous things, but without joy.”

“I’m not sure what you mean.”

“Nor am I. It’s simply…well, you must remember the nights all of us spent, sitting out here, knowing that we would wake up the next morning and go through our completely routine lives.
 
Lives spent at the pharmacy, or the law office, or the high school.”

“Yes.
 
I remember them.
 
I remember them very vividly.”

“Of course you do. Because there was a kind of wonder about them.
 
They were filled with love.”

“That’s true.”

“Helen’s letters…well, that wonder is missing, Nina. It’s simply not there. Perhaps it was during the first month or so of the marriage. But it’s gone now.”

Nina knew nothing to say.

The conversation stopped, then picked up again, then died by increments, as the night sky darkened.

Finally it was time to clean the dishes, put the remains of the hated cucumber salad in the refrigerator, where it would hopefully go unthought of until it died and disappeared, be sure that Hope was secure for the night…

…and go home.

During her ride back Nina thought about the presences.

Yes, they did hover around her at times.

And yes they did make her feel that everything was going to be all right.

They were not there now, though, and they were not there as she parked her Vespa and made her way up the stairs.

They were not there, telling her that everything would be all right.

She was soon to find out why.

PART TWO:
 
ARRIVALS AND DEPARTURES

CHAPTER 6:
 
WHAT IS SO RARE AS A DAY IN…

One of Nina’s favorite lines in literature had always been Tolstoy’s opening to
Anna Karenina
.

“All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
 
Except Nina applied these lines to months. Every miserable month had its own story, or stories.
 
Happy months, though, just rocked along as they chose, day to day, one pleasurable sensation following another, all equally luscious, all completely forgettable.

Such was her June in Bay St. Lucy, following the announcement of The Great
Hamlet,
which was to act as forerunner to The Great Summer Festival.

Every day she rose, breakfasted, Furled, Unfurled, went to run on the beach and ultimately walked on the beach, worked for two or three hours in Margot’s shop which meant she chatted for two or three hours with Margot, came home, Furled, Unfurled, lunched, napped, fished with Penelope Royal, dinnered with any one of a number of friends, came home after dark, Furled, Unfurled, had a glass of wine, went to bed resolved to read something truly great (there was a volume of Schopenhauer on the nightstand, where it had lain for several months), read instead a mystery, and then dozed off to sleep.

She remembered each one of these things vividly—how Margot’s shop looked, how it felt to catch a fish with Penelope, the lovely shiver of finding out who the murderer was—but she remembered each scene only once, which would have meant that, at month’s end, she would have missed something like 29/30ths of her life.

It bothered her.

What had happened to all those moments?

No matter, because this was no longer June.

This was July.

Different story entirely.

Hellzapoppin.

July 4 came and went, big tourist days, much business in the town, all the sea craft booked, fishing as good as it might be expected to be in midsummer when it was at its worst, and the town filled with weaponry. There were fireworks going off everywhere––from offshore oil platforms to high school and middle school stadia to beach condos with fancy rooftop launching pads—and there were battle re-enactments, soldiers on parade, military marches coming from every bandstand in town—everything, in short, to remind the citizens of Bay St. Lucy of how good a thing war was and how lucky we were to have it.

Nina spent most of the day inside.

Furl was too frightened to go out on the deck.

But the day passed, and gave way to July 5, the day for cleaning up used rocket flares and bottle blasters and roman candles and squealies and Whirling Dervishes, all in the hope that they were spent and not live, and that they would disappear into ponderous garbage trucks and not explode into the hands and faces of curious, five year old, would-be infantrymen.

Then came July 6.

At 8 p.m. Helen Reddington was coming home, flown in from New York City, via Memphis, and accompanied by her husband, Clifton Barrett.

The Great Clifton Barrett.

A crowd had begun to gather at Bay St. Lucy’s airport around 7:30.
 
It was not a huge crowd.
 
It was not the crowd that a head SEC coach would have drawn, nor the crowd that a star running back would have drawn.

For this was an actor, after all, and an actor’s wife.

It was the crowd that a good starting linebacker would have drawn.
  

But Nina, having been driven to the airport in Margot’s Volkswagen, still felt a tingle of excitement as the lights of the small plane––and then the plane itself—appeared, flying in from the East, the sky in the middle stages of twilight, a full moon almost directly overhead.

“Look at Hope, Nina!”

“Yes.
 
She’s so excited.”

Hope was barely taller than the barrier rope that had been strung to show the crowd its limits.

And it was a crowd that appreciated the effort.

The mayor; Alana Delafosse; several of the people who had been arriving from New Orleans during the previous days to help with the production.

Perhaps twenty five people.

Two newspapermen, their flash bulbs ready.

The plane landed, taxied, and pulled to a stop while Nina and Margot wormed their way forward.

“How are you feeling, Hope?”

For a second Hope had not realized who was standing beside her; when she did, she grasped Nina’s hand and held it with remarkable strength.

She could not, though, say a word.

A ramp was rolled to the doors of the small private jet—no commercial jets landed in Bay St. Lucy.

The door of the plane opened.

And there, within it, was Helen Reddington.

“Bravo!
 
Bravo!”

As much applause as could come from twenty five people, mixed with cheers and more shouts of adulation

“Bravoooo!”

Helen stepped forward, and then started down the ramp.

She was, Nina remembered, the tallest short woman she had ever seen.

For she was not large at all. But something about her bearing and grace magnified her. She was much bigger than her size. And her eyes, the deepest most penetrating eyes Nina could remember, sucked the world into them as one, and held it there before mentally digesting it, so that she could decide which parts to keep and which to throw away.

She was dressed in a red suit. But it was not quite the shade of red that Alana would have worn, nor was her belt the same depth of black, nor was her hat anything at all, for she wore none.
 
But all of her coloring, all of her subtlety, all of the immensely sophisticated and still hauntingly elemental simplicity of her bearing convinced Nina that, if ever Bay St. Lucy had ever produced a true princess turned Russian assassin, it had done so not with Alana Delafosse, but with Helen Reddington.

She poured down the steps and into the arms of her grandmother, who hurled herself upward and dangled a foot or so off the ground, green pumps pumping, while she attempted to drive her cheek bones through the skull of the woman holding her.

Flashbulbs exploded; there were small cries, tears, and the circle imploded.

Then—Nina was the only one looking up for a second or so, the only one to see—Clifton Barrett appeared.

He was from New York City.

NEW YORK CITY!

And he looked about him in wonder, much as Spanish explorers must have done centuries ago when setting foot on the New World.

His mouth fell open and his eyes sparkled in amazement; she could almost hear him perceiving THE REST OF THE WORLD and whispering to himself:

“My God!
 
It does exist!”

Then he, too, descended the stairway.

For a time he was engulfed in the same knot of people that was attempting to asphyxiate his wife; but somehow he forced the circle outward, so that a space of some two or three feet came to exist between the welcoming party of Bay St. Lucy, and the two people who stood before them.

Nina got, for the first time, a good look at the man. His appearance reminded her of an adage which she had once heard:
 
whatever you wear, include one truly superb item.

His outfit would have been simple enough: dark blue sports jacket, charcoal gray slacks, black shoes shined so brilliantly that the evening star reflected more brightly in them than it did in the actual sky, but that, otherwise, were simply shoes and not props for a fashion-shoot…

…but in the midst of all of that ordinariness, all of that richness so superbly subtle as almost to achieve normalcy…

…in the midst of all this ensemble, was the scarf.

It lay around his neck like a fat, drugged snake, imported for its color and venom from some hardly known island off the shore of Indonesia. Almost red, almost gold, almost purple, but none of these colors because two tints brighter, it was the only soft article of clothing that Nina had ever been afraid of.
 
It had not been tucked in; it had hidden itself—and any tie or other neck accoutrement that might dare make its way onto Clifton Barrett’s neck at the moment—it would have eaten.

This scarf turned, scarcely aware that there was a human being attached to it, took two steps toward the mayor, hesitated, and finally gave its wearer permission to speak.

“My dear Sir—it is a pleasure.”

To which the mayor mumbled something inaudible; but then what would not have been inaudible juxtaposed against the voice of Clifton Barrett, which could only have been compared to the roaring of a great waterfall, but amplified and made more elemental?

Whatever the mayor had said elicited the response:

“You are too kind.
 
Far too kind.”

“Clifton?”

This from Helen Reddington, who, taking her husband by the arm, all the time avoiding the scarf, which could have uncoiled and sprung at any moment—led him two steps toward Nina.

“Clifton, this is the teacher I told you about.”

Oh God
, thought Nina.
 
What is she doing?

“This is Ms. Bannister, the best literature teacher in the world!”

Her husband’s face became one of the first small towns to receive electric current, lamps all over it coming on simultaneously.

“This is the great lady! My dear, my dear—Helen talks of you whenever she talks of her school, her people.”
 
 
  

“I learned more from you, Ms. Bannister,” Helen interjected, “than from anybody else in school…or from anybody else ever!”

“My lovely Ms. Bannister,” intoned Clifton Barrett, bowing slightly. “I wonder if you might agree to teach me something of
Hamlet
one of these days. I must confess—great parts of the play still elude me, though I have devoted to it—well, more than an average amount of time.”

He stood, awaiting an answer.

They all stood, the reporters, everyone.

Nina realized she’d been asked by one of the greatest Shakespearian actors in the world to teach him Shakespeare.

And, while asking, Clifton Barrett had placed himself so that the moon rising over the airport’s control tower reflected itself precisely in the middle of his azure pupils like an orange in the blue summer sky. While he spoke to her his voice softened and lowered, softened and lowered, so that the sounds he was making translated themselves with perfect clarity to a) anyone who knew chivalry; b) anyone who knew actors; and c) anyone who knew women.

“Will you, dear lady, come to our rehearsals from time to time—and allow us to know your thoughts?”

Upon hearing these words, Nina composed herself, waited just an instant or two before answering, blocked from her mind the unutterable charm of the man so that it would not detract from the wit and sharpness of her reply, and finally said something like:

“Wadawadawada.”

Upon hearing which everyone laughed.

“Well! That’s answer enough for now! Now, you must accompany us to—well, to home.
 
To Helen’s grandmother’s house—where, as I understand it, there are to be some revelries!”