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

by T'Gracie Reese

  Within five minutes, they were turning into the lush-groved driveway of Auberge des Arts, formerly known as the Robinson mansion.

  “You’re bringing me here?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “But Alanna…”

  “It was Alanna Delafosse’s idea. She’s a very perceptive woman, Nina. As soon as the story broke this morning, she was on the phone to me. She asked how you were, figuring, I guess, that if anybody knew your whereabouts, it would be me.”

  “Which was true.”

  “A lot of what Alanna thinks is true. So anyway, by that time the town had already begun to fill up. Craziness was already happening, both here and in Lafayette. As well, by the way, in everywhere else from LA to DC to the Amazon Rain Forest. We both decided you couldn’t go back to your place. But we also realized that the mansion was perfect. It was built to keep the Robinsons safe from Chicago and New Orleans gangsters. Surely it can keep out Willie Nelson fans.”

  “And Alanna is ok with this?”

  “She was really the one who suggested it. After she did, I called Moon Rivard’s office and asked him if he could spare some additional security people.”

  “I see a couple of them now, in one of those police cars parked beside the gazebo.”

  “Yeah. We don’t want to make it too obvious. But this place is an absolute fortress. If whale lovers break in, you can hide in one of the getaway tunnels.”

  They pulled to the main entrance, where Jackson stopped the car and got out.

  Nina did likewise, watching as she did so, the front door of the mansion swing open and Alanna Delafosse swing outward, ripping across the wide porch floor with hurricane like winds and enveloping Nina in a storm surge of python embraces, kisses and tears.

  “My darling! My darling, Nina! How are you, my dear girl? How are you?”

  “Well, I can’t breathe.”

  “I know. I know. It must be overwhelming. Whatever can I do to help?”

  “Put me down.”

  “I know. I’m overly affectionate.”

  “No, you’re just really strong.”

  “There. Is that better?”

  “Well, my feet are on the ground anyway. Now if we can just free up my ribcage..”

  “Of course, dear. Come inside. Come in quickly, before you’re seen. Jackson, did you have any trouble getting her here?”

  He slammed the back door of the car after grabbing Nina’s overnight bag, and he made his way up and onto the porch.

  “I think we’re all right.”

  “You weren’t followed?”

  “No.”

  “Would you know it, if you had been?”

  “Well, I’ve seen a lot of movies. There’s usually a chase scene, and we didn’t have one.”

  “That’s a good sign.”

  “I hope.”

  “Here, both of you, right through here.”

  They entered the main hall, where Nina could still imagine images of Eve Ivory standing proudly on an interior balcony, looking down at the assembled township gathered like peasants awaiting the pronouncement of their doom.

  The great hall clock ticked, its pendulum rocking somberly left and right, as though wagging a long finger toward them in a continual admonishment that they were allowing time to pass.

  Tempus fugit.

  Tick tock tick tock.

  “Jackson,” asked Alanna, who was dressed in a long garment that might have been a robe or the map of a children’s playground, “are you still receiving calls?”

  He nodded as they walked through the hall.

  “Everyone’s calling everyone.”

  “And everyone, of course, wants to see Nina.”

  “Seems that way.”

  “Oh, my poor darling…”

  Alanna stopped halfway across the hall and turned abruptly, taking a step toward Nina, who shouted:

  “Don’t grab me again!”

  “My poor child…”

  “I know karate.”

  Alanna smiled.

  “Of course you don’t know karate.”

  “No, but I’ve read books about it. Anyway, you need to find a way to comfort me without squeezing me.”

  “Of course. But come now, both of you. We’ll go into the study. There are no outside windows there, so no one can peek in and spy on us.

  “My God,” said Nina, following dutifully along, “I feel like I’m public enemy Number One.”

  “You are public enemy Number One,” said Jackson, “to big oil. Especially to Louisiana Petroleum. To what seems to be everybody else in town, you’re a symbol. You’re one small person—no reference to your size, sorry..”

  “It’s all right, I’m used to it.”

  “...but let’s say one average person who has taken it upon herself to fight a huge corporation. Going out there on your own, getting that disk somehow, smuggling it to Narang…”

  “I didn’t ‘smuggle’ it. I got on a plane and carried it to him.”

  “Yeah, I know, but ‘smuggle’ sounds a lot better.”

  “Jackson, where the hell is Professor Narang?”

  He shook his head.

  “No one seems to know, and everyone in the country is trying to find him.”

  “He’s got to stand by the claims he made in his article. Otherwise, I look like, well…”

  “A dumb shit.”

  She paused, then said:

  “That wasn’t exactly the way I was going to put it.”

  “I know.”

  “I was thinking more in terms of ‘a person not so highly informed as she had once thought herself to be, given a particular set of circumstances’.”

  “Yeah. A dumb shit.”

  “Well then, if you insist.”

  “Here,” interrupted Alanna. “I’ve made the study my business center for the morning. Jackson, you may put Nina’s travelling bag over there on the couch. Nina, once Jackson has left, you can help me take the calls and make the engagements.”

  She found herself in front of a huge mahogany desk and pulled by furniture-gravity down into the bowels of the biggest green leather chair she had ever seen. It enveloped her with its cushions much as had Alanna enveloped her with her arms, but it was more stern, and it offered less possibility of escape.

  She was to be here, in this chair, for the rest of her life.

  “What arrangements?”

  Her voice, after leaving her lips, was confused and depressed for a time, being caught in a gravitational vortex spinning like a charybdis whirlpool between the sun that was the desk and the earth that was the chair. Finally though, if found a black hole through which it could flee, and it wafted across the room to the other people listening for it.

  “What arrangements?”

  Alanna looked at her in bewilderment.

  “Child, do you not understand what has been happening?”

  She shook her head.

  “Everyone seems to be asking me that this morning. And the answer is always, ‘no.’”

  “Nina, because of you, Bay St Lucy has become the epicenter for worldwide environmental awareness. You are now to Big Oil as Anne Frank was to Hitler.”

  “I’m Anne Frank?”

  “Yes. Of course, you’re hiding in a somewhat larger space, but…”

  “This is surreal.”

  “Yes, isn’t it wonderful?”

  “’Surreal’ and ‘wonderful’ aren’t necessarily the same things, Alanna.”

  Alanna Delafosse reacted to this statement with shock and dismay, and it was with a funereal voice that she asked:

  “They aren’t?”

  Nina shook her head.

  “Don’t worry about it. Anyway, so I’ve become the Anne Frank of Bay St. Lucy. What does that have to do with these engagements that you’re talking about?”

  “Why, it has everything to do with them! We already have a sparkling summer series planned!”

  “A what series?”

  “A summer series, darling. Artists
have been calling me since six AM this morning. So many New York contacts were made last summer, you remember, due to the unfortunate Reddington matter…”

  “The murder, you mean.”

  “Well, I said it was unfortunate. I try to avoid being overly dramatic.”

  This was the most precisely and thoroughly incorrect statement Nina had ever heard, and she would have spit out the food she was chewing, except that she was not chewing any. So she simply said:

  “All right, go on. So we know a lot of artists from New York.”

  “Well, they’ve all been calling.”

  She thought for a time, then said:

  “Okay, I saw the sign about Willie Nelson coming.”

  Alanna shook her head in disgust.

  “Darling I do not deal with people who have names like that.”

  “Like ‘Willie?’”

  “No, like ‘Nelson.’ It sounds so...so plebian.”

  “I’m sure the man has always struggled against that. So who do you deal with?”

  “Sergie Eisentein.”

  “You’re right. That’s a long way from Willie Nelson.”

  “And artists from around the country. Chamber musicians. We’ve just scheduled an oboe concerto for August the eleventh.”

  “That’s going to be fun.”

  “Oh, it shall be, it shall be! Nina, it’s such a remarkable thing: we tried so hard to make our town a cultural mecca last summer, and it failed. But—well, you saved Bay St. Lucy when it was threatened by Eve Ivory and Big Tourism. Now you’re going to make it a center for environmental awareness. And that awareness is going to draw the entire art world to us! You should be so proud—our own Anne Frank!”

  “Couldn’t I be somebody else? Like Davy Crockett?

  “Davy Crockett,” Jackson growled, “got killed too.”

  “Well,” Nina fumed, “that’s just a bad thing about doing people favors, isn’t it?”

  No answer.

  Finally she said, to Jackson:

  “So what is next for me, really? Besides getting to go to Auschwitz, I mean?”

  He shook his head:

  “I still don’t know, exactly. But you need to stay here under wraps this afternoon. I think we can trust Alanna to help us out there.”

  Alanna beamed:

  “We shall take these calls for a time, my dear. Then we shall have a light lunch. Perhaps cucumber sandwiches. Then you need to take a nap. For heaven’s sakes, you’ve earned one…”

  “That all sounds good, Alanna. It really does.”

  And then, later on in the afternoon…how about working in the garden?”

  “The auberge has a garden?”

  “Of course we do. My great pride. In fact, we have several: a flower garden, an herb garden, and a vegetable garden. Tomatoes, squash, bell peppers—and all in need of watering, weeding….”

  “Alana, that would be wonderful.”

  “I even have gardening clothes for you to wear. Overalls, a sweatshirt…”

  “Great. Just let me hide under some plants for a time.”

  “It shall be done. And then, I’ve ordered white wine and oysters for dinner, and I shall reserve a film for us to watch in the movie room.”

  “What film?”

  “I thought perhaps ‘Norma Rae’”

  “Alanna!”

  “Or something else. Whatever.”

  “That all sounds fine, Alanna,” said Jackson. “But Nina…”

  She perked up.

  “Yes?”

  “At some point, we’ve got to make you available.”

  “Available to whom, Jackson?”

  He shook his head:

  “That’s the question, of course. And I’m going to spend this afternoon trying to find an answer. My best guess is this, though. There will need to be a meeting some time tomorrow. They’re maybe going to want that meeting to be in Lafayette, or New Orleans. Maybe Jackson.”

  “Who will be there?”

  “Attorneys for LP.”

  “That sounds like fun. Are they going to charge me with anything?”

  “They would, but, like you we said earlier, you don’t have anything they want. Except…”

  “Except what?”

  “Nina, they’re going to want you to apologize.”

  Alanna interrupted:

  “Why should she apologize? She’s done a courageous thing; the whole nation is applauding her.”

  “Yes,” Jackson continued, “and that’s what LP hates. The more they love Nina, the more they hate big oil. They are continuing to insist that none of these claims are true. Now they’re going to want you to substantiate that fact.”

  “How can I substantiate it, Jackson? I don’t know what all that data means!”

  “I know.”

  “If they have a problem, it should be with Narang. And I’m sorry; I just don’t think he’s going to back down.”

  Jackson shook his head again, and rose.

  “Like I said, I just work here.”

  “Oh, and by the way: I’m not going to be able to pay your bill.”

  “You’ve never paid any of my bills. As far as I remember, you still owe me fifty thousand dollars or so for the Reddington Case.”

  “I can give you five at the end of the month.”

  “Or maybe you could just come over and do the windows.”

  “In addition to the five?”

  “Let’s not worry about it now. You get some sleep. Then do a little gardening. Then get some sleep again. I’ll send the kid for you tomorrow morning. But I will say this: if I find out anything this afternoon, I’ll be sure and give Alanna here a call. Whatever happens tomorrow morning…”

  “It would be nice if I had the night to worry about it.”

  “Well, now that you put it that way…”

  “No, Jackson, please do call. I want to know what’s coming.”

  “All right then. So have a nice rest of the day, Nina.”

  And, so saying, he left.

  The rest of the day was indeed nice. She was taken to a small but exquisite bedroom where she buried herself under thick but exquisite comforters and listened to the soft chiming of a wrong (at least as far as time goes, given the questionable truth of the assertion that any clock can be wrong about its own specialty, that being chronology) but exquisite Dresden alarm clock, and dreamed an exquisitely incomprehensible dream which she did not, alas, remember any of upon waking.

  Which she did around four PM.

  Then Alanna outfitted her in rags, took her out to the garden, and abandoned her there.

  Bliss.

  The afternoon sun dropping lower and lower in the summer sky, the clouds becoming golden-tinged, the dirt porous, cool, and sticky in her fingers, the green tomatoes ranging from bb size to huge, pale green, and globular—she forgot everything but a drizzling hose and a six inch trowel.

  By dinner time, she was covered in dirt and sweat, and her legs were beginning to cramp from bending low and crawling on the ground.

  The dinner was wonderful, of course, as she knew it would be. Alanna had turned the Auberge des Arts into a kind of fine restaurant/bed and breakfast, with the sole difference that, instead of random tourists, the clientele tended to be writers, musicians, painters, and storytellers, who stayed for some days and lived sumptuously, in return for the community service of doing school readings or private workshops.

  These people paid nothing for their meals, the fare being bought with money left in coffers from the sale of the vast Robinson estate.

  And so: fresh oysters, asparagus, pate de foie gras, and lobster.

  Plus cold, dry Chardonnay.

  Nina had showered and changed, and was able to watch the sky darken through vast picture windows in the dining room as she chatted with Alanna about this or that completely irrelevant subject, munched the food that was set in front of her, and tried to keep from her mind the fact that vast forces were preparing either to vault her to the top of the universe or che
w her up and discard her like so much garbage.

  It was only over cheesecake and coffee that Alanna added:

  “By the way, dear, I did not tell you: we shall be having one other guest over tonight.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes. I’m sure a great many of your friends would have liked to dine with us, if for no other reason than to offer you their support. But Jackson and I felt that, given the particular circumstances, confidentiality was the best policy.”

  “I agree.”

  “There will be one exception, though. Ah. Here it comes now!”

  The same prim, white-jacketed young girl who had served the dinner now served a laptop computer, which she placed carefully in the center of the table.

  “Our guest is a computer?”

  “Our guest will be arriving through means of the computer.”

  The screen lit up. Alanna’s fingers played on the keyboard for a time.

  And there, indeed, was the guest.

  Nina exulted when she saw the familiar image:

  “Margot!”

  For there before her, courtesy of Skype, was Margot Gavin.

  It was a remarkable thing: the chiseled face, the gray outlandish hair, and equally outlandish baggy sweater—the two of them might as well have been sitting back in the vine-entangled garden of Elementals, having a first of the morning cup of coffee.

  “Margot Gavin! I can’t believe it!”

  “Nina! Oh my God, it’s so good to see you!”

  “And you too, Margot! It seems like forever since we’ve talked!”

  “Well, it has been!”

  “Do you like being married?”

  “Oh it was a bit of an adjustment for a while until Goldmann suggested we imitate the two leads in a Congreve play that he happened to be reading. ‘Good Mirabell, says wonderful Millamant––don’t let us be familiar or fond…let us be as strange as if we had been married a great while, and as well-bred, as if we were not married at all.’ And that is the lifestyle we’ve been attempting to achieve.”

  “And Candles?”

  “The plantation is most certainly haunted. We hear strange noises every night.”

  “Have you seen ghosts?”

  “Oh my heavens, no. There are always artists here from Chicago. The ghosts are too frightened to come out, and so they remain hidden within the woodwork. But enough of that. You, I hear, have succeeded in keeping busy.”

  “I’ve been puttering around.”