Sea Change (The Nina Bannister Mysteries Book 1)
Page 14
“Oh, I would guess––”
And these people, in turn, were supplanted by the Head of the Chicago Art Museum, who bent over the piece, straightened, and said:
“Twenty five point three carats. Cosquez Mine. Columbia.”
The words simply hung in front of her.
Finally, Nina asked, quietly.
“How do you know that, Margot?”
Margot Gavin shrugged.
“We tried to buy one like it once. We couldn’t afford it.”
Then she turned away, and seemed to go about other business.
After the arrival of an emerald that Tom Broussard and Penelope Royale could buy and the Chicago Museum of Art could not, a great deal more was not to be expected from a bridal shower.
There was only the business of picking up, saying thank you, and just being happy in general.
Nina followed Macy Peterson around the garden and shop, watching the young woman smile, chatter, laugh, gush, and act in a thousand more completely appropriate and utterly joyful ways.
She followed behind, picking up here, discarding there, offering a few thank you’s herself on Macy’s part.
Finally, after everything was done, she followed Macy outside, hugged her, congratulated her, and watched her get into a van which, driven by friends, was to take her home.
Nina followed the van on her Vespa.
It was a bit of a melancholy drive through the ‘Saint” Streets—St. Ambrose St., St. Gerome St., St. Euclid St.—melancholy because it was in one of these small, tree-lined streets, that she and Frank had their first small cottage.
She visualized it for a time, then forced herself to speed up slightly, even though she knew quite well where Macy lived, and would hardly get lost in this part of town.
She parked some fifty yards away while the van disgorged Macy and whatever presents could be carried inside by the three friends surrounding her—the rest having remained at Margot’s, while a separate museum could be built to house them.
The four women laughed uproariously on the porch.
The door opened, and they disappeared inside.
After a minute or so the door opened again, and they made their way slowly out to the van, laughing uproariously as they did so.
Then Macy watched the van drive away, waving spiritedly and jumping up and down.
Then she went inside, closing the door behind her.
Nina waited two minutes so that Macy would have time to change into a robe or underwear or whatever, then drove the Vespa into her driveway, parked it, took off her helmet and goggles, went to the door and knocked.
Macy opened the door and threw her arms around Nina, sobbing uncontrollably.
They stood in the door way for a while, and then made their way as a human knot across the small living room floor, like two immensely miserable and stunningly inebriated dancers.
Finally they were seated on the couch, each one’s face pressed hard into some kind of fabric on the other one’s chest, neither able to talk.
They cried for a time, tried to breathe, could not, gasped, hiccupped, succeeded in breathing, used the air to cry still more, and finally became an inert mass, only capable of panting and squeezing.
Something like words came out of Macy, those being:
“What is he doing?”
“I don’t know, Macy.”
“What can he be thinking?”
“He’s not thinking.”
“What does she want?”
“Him.”
“She wants Paul?”
“Yes, she does.”
“Why?”
“Because he’s the best we’ve got. And she wants it all.”
“Nina, who is this woman?”
“I don’t know, Macy.”
“Is she the devil?”
“Yes.”
“But the devil is just a story!”
“Ay, think so. ‘Til experience prove thee otherwise.”
And the other lines came to her, the ones from Othello:
There is no such creature; it is impossible.
Unfortunately, it was possible.
“He should have been there tonight, Nina!”
“Yes. He should have.”
“Can you talk to him?”
“Yes.”
“Can you talk to him soon?”
“Yes.”
“How soon?”
“Now.”
“How?”
“Don’t worry about it. I just can.”
“Will you tell him for me, please, that I hate him?”
“No.”
“I don’t, you know.”
“I know.”
“But what is he doing?”
“He’s being seduced.”
“Oh, God!”
“God doesn’t have much to do with it right now.”
“What can I do, Nina?”
“Go to sleep.”
“How?”
She could have said, ‘Sleep, sweet sleep, that knits up the raveled sleeve of care,’ but it wouldn’t have done much good, and it had never made complete sense to her, anyway.
“Just lie down. Get yourself some warm milk or something.”
“And you’ll talk to Paul?”
“Yes.”
“How?”
“However.”
“Will you say bad things to him?”
“Yes.”
“Very bad things?”
“Yes.”
“Will you tell him he’s an idiot?”
“Yes.”
“I hate him! I hate him! Oh God, Nina, I love him so!”
“I know. Now try to get some sleep. Good night.”
She left, drove to Paul Cox’s home, found him just walking up the driveway, pulled up beside him, and said:
“Paul!”
“Nina! What are you––”
“Follow me to my place. Now.”
“But what––”
“Now.”
She drove to her place, parked, walked up her stairs, and opened the door for him as he arrived.
“Come in,” she said.
“Nina, I––”
“Come inside.”
She turned on the light, walked to the deck, unFurled, and then went back into the kitchen.
“I know everybody’s wondering about––”
“Go in the living room and sit down.”
She heard him doing so, and also heard a faint click, as the light came on.
She herself was busy in the kitchen, reaching high on a shelf and finding an almost forgotten bottle of whiskey.
She took two large glasses into the living room with her, set them on the glass-topped table between her and Paul Cox, and filled them.
“I’m not sure I should––”
“Drink.”
She drank; he did also.
The whiskey made perfect sense, and was the first thing in quite some time that had done so.
“I should have been there,” he said, “tonight.”
“Ya think?”
“Does she hate me?”
“She hates you; for that matter, even I hate you.”
“But, I’m just trying to––”
“Listen, you idiot: there are two female figures in all of literature. There are a few more of us in real life but we haven’t gotten into print yet. We’re still trying, and, who knows, with e-books and self-publishing––”
“It’s just that––”
“Shut up. These two figures are the ‘Eve’ figure and the ‘Mary’ figure. Mary is wholesome, young, blue-eyed, virginal. She represents everything good in the world. Eve is tempting, evil, gorgeous, wily, evil, and destructive. All she wants is to ruin whatever man she happens to be with. Now—drink up! Drink up! Drink up!”
He did so. She poured more for him.
Finally she said:
“Now, it’s test time, Paul. Are there two women like that in your life?”
“But it’s more––�
�
“Yes, there are, aren’t they? There is one who wants to help you and love you and marry you and have your children and do everything, until the day she dies, to make you happy; and there is another who wants to seduce you, and make a fool of you, and throw you off like a piece of garbage.”
He was quiet, staring down into his drink.
“And now the really big question on the test. The only question, when you think about it, that really matters at all on the test: which of these women did you choose to spend the evening with tonight, Paul?”
He shrugged again.
Nina took a big drink of whiskey.
“She just seems really encouraging,” he said.
She spit the whiskey out.
It came out as part of a huge ‘guffaw’ and splattered on the table between them, a field of Jim Beam rivulets glittering amber on the glass.
She went into the kitchen, fighting the urge to draw her sleeve across her mouth and chin.
She found paper towels, wiped her face, took them back, cleaned the table, and tried to look at him with a straight face.
This failing, she looked at Furl, who, taking the raining whiskey to be possible food, was now standing beside her chair:
“She seems really encouraging?”
“Yes.”
“I bet she does. I just bet she does.”
“But––she approached me first.”
“Good for her.”
“I told her about the school.”
“Bet you did.”
“She seemed impressed by the plans.”
“Bet she did.”
“She wanted to talk more.”
“Bet she did.”
“Will you stop saying that?”
“No.”
“Well—she told me I was integral to her plans.”
“Bet she did.”
“Nina––”
“Go on.”
“We might have the school. We might have a new fire department headquarters. We might have Allana’s Auberge des Arts. But they would have to be part of a major comprehensive city-wide development. Several bidders were offering visions of this development. But she needed someone from Bay St. Lucy to help her—well, make sense of it all. She needed a right hand man.”
“A right hand man.”
He took a note pad from the inner pocked of his navy sports jacket, and wrote a figure on it.
“She proposed a salary.”
“It’s not enough.”
“It’s more money than I’ve ever––”
“It’s not enough.”
“Would you just look at it?”
“Give it to me.”
She took the slip of paper.
“With that much money,” he continued, “Macy and I could––”
She tore it up, threw the pieces at him, got up, and went to the kitchen.
“Go home,” she said, opening one of the cupboard door and then slamming it shut, simply for the pleasure of hearing it go ‘bang.’
She listened as he walked out.
For five minutes or so she simply got herself together.
Then she walked downstairs and out toward the beach.
She could hear the cathedral bells of St. Mary’s chime the hour.
Eleven P.M.
She listened to the waves for a time, and then walked back to her parking lot.
There did seem to be other bells, from other directions.
It felt like Christmas night.
The world glowed blue in the street light.
But there, outlined against the light—
––was something falling from the sky?
No, it couldn’t be—
But, but look up, Nina.
Look up!
There is one, and there—
––fluttering down.
Fluttering down from the sky!
What are—
Then she heard the screech of the low wheeling band of gulls, and she realized what the objects were.
“Damn,” she whispered.
She climbed the stairs and went to bed.
CHAPTER TEN: A SURPRISE FOR BAY ST. LUCY
“Everyone needs an editor.”
Tom Foote, commenting in Time magazine about the fact that Hitler’s original title for Mein Kampf was Four and a Half Years of Struggle Against Lies, Stupidity, and Cowardice
“A man’s face is his autobiography. A woman’s face is her work of fiction.”
Oscar Wilde
Eve Ivory’s security forces arrived on the morning of December 22, a few hours before the gala at which she was to announce her plans for the development of the village.
They came in several vans: black, hearse like vehicles that parked bumper to bumper around the mansion’s circular driveway, their lustrous finish gleaming like black, elongated stars, and their grillwork sharpened, smiling, and ready to cut.
They spread first through the gardens, then through the house itself, then through the perimeter of the village, then through the center of the village, then through the very air of the village.
There they stayed.
They hovered like a virus.
They patrolled corners.
They moved in pairs, like twin stars, one the shadow of another.
They were identical. Some were black and some were white, some were male and some were female, some were Asian and some were Indian, some were younger and some were older—but taken all in all they reflected a perfect cross-section of American society, ensuring the awed and gaping community which watched them go about their business that any killing they did would be both diverse and sensitive.
The people of Bay St. Lucy accepted their presence as they would have accepted news of a residual hurricane, one that, if it could not be fled, at least promised not to destroy mobile homes. These newly arrived, black suited, white shirted, red tied people were doing no harm, and, on the plus side, were the only truly well-dressed people the villagers had ever seen who were not Jehovah’s Witnesses.
They created, if nothing else, one subject worth talking about.
The other subject worth talking about was the relationship between Paul and Macy.
They were two adult individuals and their privacy was to be respected, of course, so little was talked about after the evening of the shower, beyond the fact that he had not shown up for the shower, and had, in fact, been seen entering Eve Ivory’s mansion, with Eve Ivory, at ten o’clock in the evening.
Beyond that, Macy and Paul’s affairs remained shrouded in the mists of privacy, as they are generally allowed to do in a small community.
All that was known for certain was that Paul had called Macy at 6:45 the following morning and that she had refused to answer; that he had continued to call, reaching her finally at 7:03. She had, or so the rumor went, expressed her anger, even disgust, at his behavior the previous evening, but the matter of whether she’d actually used the word ‘jackass’ was conjecture only, and could not be certified one way or another.
It was certain that she had allowed him to come over for coffee, and that he’d stayed for forty five minutes, both of them leaving for school shortly after eight, meaning both of them had arrived somewhat late, but arm in arm, and smiling.
All of the people in the village were careful neither to form, or offer, any personal opinions concerning what might have happened in Marcy’s house during the forty five minute period between his arrival and their mutual departure.
“She made him breakfast,” said Margot Gavin, standing in the doorway of her shop, glancing at her watch, and observing the darkening streets and blue-glowing lanterns dotting the park opposite.
“Sure she did,” said Nina.
“Where is this car?”
“I don’t know. Eve Ivory said she’d send a car for us.”
“She still likes you.”
“Yes.”
“And you don’t know why.”
“No idea. I do have a suggestion, though: when th
e thing arrives—and I suppose it will be some kind of limousine—I’ll get the driver’s attention, and you sneak around and slash a couple of the tires. Or—no, maybe not such a good idea.”
“Why? I would have been game.”
“Two security people. Standing there, just behind the gazebo, at the edge of the park.”
“Yes. I see them. Gives one a sense of security, doesn’t it?”
“Nobody’s going to mess with that gazebo,” said Nina.
And then:
“There’s the car.”
“Where?”
“There. Coming around the corner.”
“My God.”
“What?”
“It’s still coming around the corner. Still coming; still coming—Nina, is this a car or a train?”
“Well. Only the best for us. Everything locked up in the shop?”
“Yes.”
“Anything of inordinate value?”
“A few things that are especially nice. But I’ve placed them well out of view; I don’t think we’ll have to worry.”
“Especially with these new security specialists watching out for things,” Nina said. “Look how tall those two are!”
“I know. Why isn’t Nazism more appreciated, Nina?”
“People just don’t learn history anymore. Oh, there’s Allana!”
And, in fact, beaming at them from the front seat of the limousine, which was now parking in front of the shop, Allana Delafosse, identifiable by her Which Color of the Zodiac Am I Going to Wear Today? outfit (orange today), and her full throated “Laaaayyydeeeez” warble, which always came out not so much as a greeting as a theme song.
“How ahhhhhhhhrrrrryou this maaaahhhhhvelous eeeeeeeeeevening?”
Hearing a simple greeting from Allana Delafosse was like listening to The Star Spangled Banner; one felt the need to stand.
“Fine,” said Nina, inadequately as always, approaching the car as the Na—the Security Official–– got out and came around opposite, preparing to open the back door for her.
“Good evening, ma’am.”
“Good evening,” she answered, regretting the fact that she did not know German, while wondering if her shoes were properly shined.
“Well! Are both of you properly excited? It’s going to be an historic evening for Bay St. Lucy!”
It’s an historic evening anywhere, Nina found herself thinking, when anybody puts the words ‘an’ and ‘historic’ together properly.