Oil Change: A Nina Bannister Mystery (The Nina Bannister Mysteries Book 4)

by T'Gracie Reese

  She unlocked the chain, slipped it rattling into the compartment that had been made for it, and straddled the cycle.

  Vrrooom.

  Two of the geese stepped back as the engine started.

  The others continued to stare.

  The entire contingent of geese followed her, though, as she guided the Vespa onto a serpentine concrete walkway that bisected Gerard Park and led to the three apartment complexes that sat neighboring it.

  She increased speed slightly; the geese gave up and watched.

  Now the apartment buildings—which were the ugliest structures in Bay St. Lucy—surrounded her.

  The thrill of high speed—for she was making over nine miles an hour now—exhilarated her as she wove her way past ponderous and identical green doorways, all of them staring implacably into the street, all of them protecting the fascinating secrets of people so magical and creative that they would choose to live in such surroundings.

  After a time, Colonial Gardens Estates was behind her and she was entering a deserted area; nothing but weeds and scrub trees to her right.

  The great coulee that formed an intercoastal waterway and canal loomed before her. She approached it, then turned sharply right, and soon was driving beside it.

  This coulee formed one of the only distinctive features of “the wasteland,” as Bay St. Lucyans rather derisively called the area. It was in fact a kind of drainage canal, lined with concrete walls which formed a flat-bottomed “V” shape that led from road level down to a stream of filth and refuse that eddied along thirty or so feet below. The liquid in the bottom was curiously clear, or at least translucent enough so that an observer sitting on a small toy-like motor bike apparatus—much like the Vespa––could peer into it and see schools of ponderous black carp grazing like cattle at the drainage vents that fed the waterway.

  The innocuous gray walls of the thing stretched before her.

  Breakfast.

  BREAKFAST!

  What could she have for breakfast?

  She had done her penance, lived through The Ordeal of the Jog, suffered the pain, and lost perhaps some percentage of a pound, which she could now enjoy putting on again in any number of ways. There was normal old dry stick-in-the mouth oatmeal and brown sugar breakfast, but that been the stuff of a previous life, school day stuff. No more of that for her. She was an artisan now, the operator of a small shop that sold Ramoula Peters seascapes and Hummels by Bridgewater and clay pots by Emil Lanning and Sons.

  She deserved something better.

  Bagatelli’s?

  The shop was only a half mile away, toward the center of town. Perhaps Helen would have even arrived by the time her puttering blue cycle could transverse the distance.

  She could get a small basket of croissants, a cup of cappuccino to go, or a bear claw, or…

  These reveries were interrupted by the sight of something ahead of her, something down there, in the bottom of the coulee.

  What was that?

  From some distance it appeared to be a red tarpaulin that had been cast aside and had floated down into the water.

  But now, as she approached, she saw that it had a form.

  No, that was not a tarpaulin; it was a jacket, and those were red running pants.

  It was a corpse.

  CHAPTER TWO: CADDIE DIDN’T SMELL LIKE LEAVES ANYMORE

  Her cell phone, she could remember thinking, was the same color as the sky.

  Strange that she had never noticed that before. Both were light blue. The sky was larger, of course, and on some summer mornings it was the largest thing in the world, because it arched over and covered everything in the world; while her little phone was the size of a toad frog, a plastic toad frog with numbered keys in it that looked out at you when you flipped it open.

  Scroll down. Down a bit more.

  There was the number.

  How unfortunate that this particular number happened to be third in the list of places she most often called. One would have hoped a child, or a husband, or a best friend…

  …but there it was, and into that her life had somehow transformed itself.

  Press the green button.

  Look at the weeds and blighted trees while some kind of wave, some kind of acoustical disturbance shudders its way through the warm air of Bay St. Lucy and inexplicably makes its presence known in a dingy office tucked into the entrails of the village.

  Look at the Vespa beside you.

  Don’t look at the coulee, never look down into the coulee, not ever again, not at the whirling eddies of garbage and refuse, or at the fat sluggish carp bodies with their thick lips sucking air from the fumes just above water level.

  Just look at the deserted vacant lot while the phone rings at the other end.

  One ring.

  Two rings.

  “Hello, Sheriff’s office.”

  “Moon?”

  “Yes, this is Moon Rivard.”

  “This is Nina Bannister.”

  “Oh, how are you this fine morning, Ms. Bannister?”

  And for a second she did not know what to say. Certainly not:

  ‘Fine and you?’

  Because of course she wasn’t fine.

  “Moon, I think something terrible has happened.”

  Another pause, this time coming from the phone, which sat open in her palm as quiet and implacable as the sky, and, like that other elemental entity—for if phones and skies are not elemental, then what things are?—unmottled by clouds.

  “Ms. Bannister?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you all right?”

  “I’m all right.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes.”

  “Where are you, Ma’am?”

  “Do you know the coulee that runs behind those deserted lots on the south side of town?”

  “I do.”

  “I’m there. Down in the water, there’s…”

  The voice at the other end interrupted her.

  “I’ll be there in two minutes.”

  And he was.

  Other things were too, of course. Two ambulances. Three patrol cars. After a short time, she simply lost count, and lost all focus. She could only think about finding a place to sit down, but, of course, there was no place to sit down, and so she simply wandered about, watching the flashing lights, listening to the sirens, and reflecting on the fact that certain events made other events impossible. She was going to go to Bagatelli’s, then home, then to Elementals. She was going to eat pastry, then drink coffee or tea. She was going to unlock the shop, get some receipts in order, open several packages that had arrived the other day from potters and clay makers whose work she and Margot sold on consignment.

  Now it made no sense to do any of those things.

  Somehow a surrealistic mental picture formed itself in her mind. She was walking into Bagatelli’s, smiling at Helen Giusti, who had just arrived there from running—and she was saying, ‘I’d like two cinnamon croissants, I’ve just discovered a corpse, floating face down in the old coulee on the other side of town and maybe you could throw in a prune Danish and three scones.’

  No. That was impossible.

  So was motoring home, climbing the stairs, unlocking the front door, taking off her sweatshirt, and starting the coffee maker. So was sliding open the glass door and making her way out onto the deck to peer at the morning sun-sparkle on the incoming waves. So was waving good morning to the porpoises, and planning her day.

  She couldn’t do those things.

  It wouldn’t be fair to whatever was down there below her, the thing that had been wrapped in yellow plastic and was being cantilevered up the slippery concrete banks—slippery-brown from a small shower that had hit Bay St. Lucy an hour before dawn—by several paramedics, or policemen, or whatever other uniformed people seemed to be used to doing this kind of thing.

  “Ms. Bannister?”

  Well, here was something to do, anyway.

  Perhaps the only thing to do
.

  “Yes, Moon.”

  She could talk to Moon Rivard.

  Which she did, after he, a tree branch-thick forearm wrapped consolingly behind her back, had led her to his squad car and seated her in the front seat.

  People kept coming and going.

  The radio on the dashboard kept squawking and rattling with a static that sounded like gravel was being poured on the car’s hood.

  “Are you all right, Ma’am?”

  Strange. It seemed that she was always being asked that.

  Yes, I’m just very good.

  No, I’m not at my best right now.

  ‘For the essentials,’ Sherwood Anderson had written, ‘of what use is language?’

  And this—aha, the corpse was coming up out of the coulee now and the gurney was being trundled over to an ambulance—this, yes, was one of the essentials.

  She could still remember the look of the thing, its long hair matted and floating like fair Ophelia in her stream.

  The bright red jacket bloated and quivering in soft, filmy current, while carp nibbled the neck.

  “I’m all right.”

  This was not an outright lie. It was just a useless and irrelevant thing that circumstances were forcing her to say.

  “Can you tell me about what happened?”

  She shook her head:

  “Nothing. Nothing happened, Moon. I can’t tell you anything.”

  “You didn’t see anyone?”

  “No.”

  “Not even anybody coming out of or going into the apartments back there?”

  “No.”

  “What were you doing out here?”

  “I had come to run.”

  “Where?”

  “Over in Gerard Park.”

  “When did you get there?”

  “About forty five minutes ago.”

  “Anybody else in the park?”

  “Helen and John Giusti.”

  “Do you know if they’re there now?”

  “I don’t think so. Both of them had to be somewhere else. They were just finishing their run.”

  “I see. And you came through here…”

  “It’s the closest path to get back to my bungalow. Moon––”

  “Yes, Ms. Bannister?”

  “What can you—I mean…”

  He took off his sunglasses.

  His eyes, she noticed, were blue, too.

  Everything was blue today; the sky, the phone, Moon’s eyes.

  Everything blue.

  What a luscious day it was supposed to have become.

  She thought of Faulkner’s Benji, the idiot boy, after his sister had been deflowered.

  ‘Caddie didn’t smell like leaves anymore.’

  The day didn’t smell like cream the way it had.

  “Did he drown?”

  “We don’t know yet. My men are going through the pockets now to see if there’s ID or money. Maybe it’s somebody that lives in one of these apartments. He could have been drunk, walking out here by the coulee. Maybe he fell in, hit his head on the concrete. There aren’t many cars that drive by here, but there was a pretty hard shower an hour or so before sunup. A car could have hit him, then driven off. Or of course…”

  Moon did not say, “He could have been murdered.”

  But that’s what he was thinking, of course.

  As was she.

  The most dependable thing about Bay St. Lucy was its stone jetty.

  The half mile wood pier—for that is what it had become informally named—was a new feature, wonderful for tourists and lovers, but still redolent of Robinson gangland money, and likely, at least in the minds of oldsters, to collapse like matchsticks under the fury of the first hurricane.

  The jetty, on the other hand, was an immovable thing. It extended out into the gulf just as far as its wooden Johnny-come-lately counterpart, but it did not shake or tremble when the big swells slammed into it. It did not move. There was some question, if fact, whether it was buttressed by the giant, marble pink boulders that lined its sides with impossible angles and crags and crevices—or whether it buttressed them, with its six-foot wide core of slippery concrete and its ever present pools and puddles of spray-water that slurped when one padded across them.

  Nina found herself very thankful for it.

  After Moon had followed her home in the squad car and had seen her safely up the stairs, after he had watched her unlock and open her front door, after he had nodded appreciatively to Furl, who stared hatefully at him…

  …and after Moon had left…

  …she would have had nothing at all to do, except for the jetty.

  But it seemed right and fitting that, after having discovered a corpse, she should walk on a jetty.

  There was a poetic rhythm about it.

  Besides, better still, a squall was approaching.

  It would reach the outer end of the jetty at about the same time as she would.

  She did, taking three things with her: a cardboard box of chicken livers, the ponderous dark green slicker she wore in rain storms, and a battered book of poems, the cover of which had long ceased to exist.

  She put the book into a pocket of the slicker.

  Then, with the latter over her arm and the box of chicken litters held tightly in her fist, she descended her stairs.

  The beach was fine to walk on, of course. She did not have it to herself, for summer families had begun to arrive in Bay St. Lucy. The parents of these families stood in ankle-deep water, waving and shouting at their swimming children, while pointing at the storm and shouting words which drowned in the crashing surf some meters before reaching their targets, who, to their delight, found for the first time in their lives that their mothers and fathers had become mute.

  She walked on.

  The jetty was two hundred yards in front of her, the storm a mile and a half out to her right.

  Neither spoke.

  Neither was silent either, since the waves crashing on the jetty had been churned up and hurled toward land by thirty to forty mile an hour squall winds, and since thunder was beginning to rumble up onto the beach and announce in murmurings and rumblings that the show was about to begin.

  She stopped and put on the slicker. It smelled of grease and motor oil and old, black and white movies.

  It weighted her down literally but buoyed her spiritually, so that she could actually feel herself ascending to the masthead under the baleful glare of Captain Bligh.

  It was also comforting to be walking along in a plastic wrapper that creaked and scratched and formed itself anew with each passing step, as though she had become a crustacean and it had agreed to be her protective shell.

  She glanced again to her right.

  The ocean was green now.

  Come to think of it, the sky was green, a dreadful lemon yellow/green that presaged hurricanes and looked down upon the land like an oyster shell off-white deity, awesome in its calmness.

  There were no birds to be seen.

  It took her two minutes to reach the jetty.

  For some reason she had begun to walk faster. The only reason for this that she could imagine was that she wanted to meet the storm on its own ground and would have felt remiss had it found her on shore.

  She clambered up onto the jetty, her sneakers slipping comfortingly as they always did, and her eyes falling on translucent shrimp shells and cast-off fishing bobbers.

  It was a fine place to be.

  The spray of the big waves, the fresh breeze that was getting stronger and wetter as she bent to walk into it, the straight road of fixed rock and concrete that extended unthinkingly before her, the lines of lightning that traced marquee lights in the ink behind them, the hulk of a great ponderous tanker that inched its way along some half mile from shore and thus now found itself just being rendered invisible by clouds and rain…

  …all of these things were just impressions.

  They kept her senses completely glutted.

  She could smel
l and hear and taste and shudder at and celebrate them.

  There was no room in her brain for anything else.

  Nothing else at all.

  Seeing was not remembering.

  Tasting—and, yes, she could taste salt in the air and wind—was not remembering.

  There was in her mind no place for a corp—

  BOOM!

  Yes, good thunder! Keep at it thunder!

  BOOM! BOOM!

  The rain began spattering on her now; she could see its pellets dotting the water on either side of her and creating a filmy spray on the jetty in front of her.

  BRRRRRROOOOOOM!

  Better thunder, with a kind of consonant quality to it, a deep ‘rrrrr’ that added drama and discipline to what had been rather a perfunctory vowel performance that nature could easily have beaten, if it had tried.

  It was trying now.

  BROOOOOOOOM! BRRRRRRRROOOOOOM DAMN YOU!”

  Yes. This was perfectly satisfactory thunder, playoff thunder, going all out on defense as well as offense, executing, seeing the whole field, raising its intensity level.

  Then the rain hit for real.

  It poured down on her from buckets. It drenched her.

  There was no sound that she could think of that in any way imitated fierce rain, rain that came from some celestial fireman’s hose pointed directly down at the earth.

  The closest thing she could come up with was a cross between a roar and a hiss; but since everything else was roaring and hissing—the huge breakers, the tanker’s claxon horn, the surging swells out in the channel, the relentless thunder—she gave up all attempts to subdivide whatever was going on around her, and decided it was time to go crabbing.

  She was not really going crabbing, for she had with her only bait and not the apparatus: string, meat-piercer, etc.

  But she had no desire to catch crabs, only to watch them—and so the rest was not necessary.

  She could hardly see now, the world having transformed itself into a filmy gray scrim though which all objects appeared as either moving or fixed zombies—but she knew enough about where she was to remember a small niche in the boulders, a place where she could stand on flat surface, lean against a forty-five degree angled wall of rock, peer down into a natural pool, which emptied slightly and flooded and then emptied again with coming and going surges in the swells.