“Hello?”
“Carol?”
“Yes?”
“This is Margot Gavin.”
“Oh, Margot!”
“Carol, we have a lot of money here in Bay St. Lucy, which is a town on the gulf shore in Mississippi. We’d like for you to come down and give one of your incredible presentations. Just name your price. And let us know what kind of equipment you need. I know you’re busy, but––do you think you could squeeze us in?”
It took her fully two minutes to stop crying, so that she could say ‘yes.’
CHAPTER THREE: TRANSITIONS
It took the better part of a week for Nina to get over Margot’s and Alanna’s response to her entry into the world of art.
At every trip to Bagatelli’s, the word ‘insipid’ came into her mind.
At every step she took along the shore line, she heard the phrase ‘take it down now!’
Every sight of the frothing waves on the incoming tide reminded her of her own masterful use of white in the seascape that she and twelve others had painted with such care.
It wasn’t that bad, she continually told herself.
Or maybe it was.
Margot had been, after all, for many years, the managing director of The Chicago Art Museum.
She probably knew something about these matters, or so one would think.
Gradually these thoughts dissipated into the mild sea air, and were replaced by visions of the great spectacle which was to happen in only a few days at the Auberge des Arts. For the apparently quite talented Carol Walker had replied to Margot’s telephone invitation to say that, yes, there was an opening in her schedule; she could come quite soon to Bay St. Lucy, and, yes, she would be delighted to give a presentation.
On Monet’s Water lillies, as it happened.
As for the equipment necessary, it was quite easy to obtain, from any good store that specialized in computers and electronic devices.
Of which there was one in Bay St. Lucy and an even larger one in nearby Hattiesburg.
And so the date was set: September 16.
Three days away.
There was nothing to do, then, except look forward to it.
Well, almost nothing.
There was worrying to be done.
For something was definitely wrong with Penelope Royale.
Nina had heard rumblings for some days.
“Somehow she just doesn’t seem the same.”
“I know––it’s—something’s bothering her.”
But she’d given little credence to such mutterings.
True, Penelope and Tom Broussard, married a little less than a year now, were the unlikeliest of couples. He’d been a rebellious student in Bay St. Lucy’s high school, managing to get himself expelled and then sent to jail before taking a turn for the worse and becoming a writer. For her part, she’d also been expelled from the high school (on numerous occasions, actually), but, as opposed to Tom, who usually did no more than get into fights or insult various classmates or teachers, she’d actually managed to do severe and costly damage to the physical plant.
Now, she’d become the town’s Tugboat Annie.
If Tom was Marlon Brando she was Marie Dressler.
Their marriage, though, had seemed to work out, for the simple reason that neither of them acted married.
Neither of them changed lifestyle in even the smallest degree.
Penelope continued to live at the far end of the wharf, in a corrugated iron shed beside her square, flat bottomed boat, The Sea Urchin.
Tom continued to live in a square, flat-bottomed shack in the most disreputable part of town.
She continued to live for only two things: fishing and obscenity.
He continued to live for only pornographic writing.
So it was hard for Nina to believe either could be dissatisfied with the arrangement.
But such was clearly the case, no doubt.
She realized it early on Wednesday morning as she approached the shed and boat, walking gingerly along a quay moistened by a small predawn shower and still slightly slippery.
“Hey, Penn!”
This was her standard greeting; it almost always called for Penelope to emerge from the shed, clad in dungarees, hip boots, and a plaid shirt, beaming, and saying something like:
“Hey you------------! Ready to-----------------------some----------------------------- and get some---------------------- fishing done?”
The dirty words varied, of course, but they were always fiercely imaginative and even quite poetic in a Dantean sense, if Dante had only been a bit more daring in his wanderings through Hades, and a bit less concerned about being excommunicated.
It was just Penn saying, ‘Hi, let’s go fishing!’
Because they did go fishing every week.
It had become a part of each woman’s routine.
It gave Penelope a chance to keep up with the comings and goings of her favorite ex-teacher (the only teacher, actually, who had not attempted to have her removed, not only from the high school, but from the city, and even the state).
And it gave Nina a chance to be sure that Penn was still living comfortably in the far west end of the wharf, and thus would not be a danger to any of the town’s infrastructure.
It also supplied Nina with four or five nice, foot-long whitefish (They sometimes caught other things, of course, but whitefish was their prey of choice), which Nina would put into her freezer and thaw for various evening meals.
So it worked out nicely for everyone concerned.
Except, of course, the whitefish, but that was matter for a different time and place.
It was thus highly surprising this particular morning when, as a reply to Nina’s cheerful greeting, Penelope could only stare somberly at her across several buckets of bait and other aquatic refuse and say, quietly:
“Good morning, Nina.”
Uh oh.
Something definitely not right.
“You ready to go fishing, Penn?”
“Sure. Bait’s all ready. I’ve got your lines rigged. Come on and we’ll get started.”
Nina nodded and continued to approach the boat, but she was already genuinely concerned.
“How’s Tom?”
“Oh, he’s fine.”
“And your business?”
“Going well. Had three parties last week and two more scheduled for the next few days. It’s not summer business, you know, but it’s holding steady.”
“Glad to hear it. So. Where are we going today?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Maybe over in the Bay. Maybe out toward the oil rig. There seems to be some action out that way. Several of the other captains have taken sea bass. Just whatever you want to do, wherever you want to go.”
“Sure.”
Well, that settled it. Penn was sick.
No obscenities at all.
What could be wrong with her?
Her color was fine.
She moved around in a sprightly enough fashion, juggling thirty or forty pound barrels of this and that as though they were weightless.
But she was not swearing.
Nor did she swear during the entire ceremony of starting the boat, easing it through the various slips and other docks—usually one or two of the other fishing boat pilots would have left a line adrift or moored unevenly, breaking an unspoken captain’s code and eliciting from Penn some such outburst as:
“Flynn, you ---------------------! If you ever ---------------------------------- that again I’ll------------------------- and you won’t have enough------------------------------ to -------------------------------------------your------------------------for a -------------------------------!”
Or something similar.
But this morning, the boat just chugged its way out to sea.
What was going on?
The wind freshened; there was a slight chop in the surf. Nina basked in the morning sun as she sat in the prow and turned occasionally to watch Penn steer.
She probed.
“How’s Tom’s newest novel?”
“It’s coming along all right.”
“He hasn’t gotten arrested any more, has he?”
“Just once, last month. But the other guy in the fight didn’t press charges.”
“That’s good.”
“Yeah. I guess.”
What was wrong with her?
Maybe nothing.
Maybe she was just feeling blue, or moody.
Sometimes that happens to everyone.
But no—this was something completely different.
And the reason Nina knew it was completely different was as follows:
After fishing for little more than an hour, they came within half a mile from the offshore oil rig that could be easily seen from Bay St. Lucy.
This was not Aquatica, the huge drilling station that Nina had, incredibly, saved from utter destruction some bare months before, and which was still going about its mammoth pumping business more than ten miles out.
No, this was a much smaller installation; but still, it had its own business to do, and it employed drillers and riggers, and it fed them, and it threw overboard as garbage both the food they did not eat and the remains of the food that they did.
Fish came to eat these things.
One of those fish struck Nina’s line just as she was musing about what could possibly be wrong with Penn, and whether she should possibly ask something like: ‘Penelope, are you all right? Have you been getting enough beer to drink? Somehow you just don’t seem to be…”
WHAM!
Huge strike!
The rod bent double in Nina’s hands; the reel buzzed, and the prow of the boat was pulled in a tight circle by the submerged aircraft carrier that was now pulling them:
She heard the voice from astern:
“You’ve got a ------------------------! Don’t---------------------------! Just --------------------- the ------------------------, and then ----------------------------------------.”
It was then Nina knew that real trouble was at hand, and that something was terribly wrong with her friend.
For things had become exactly reversed.
It was as though Penelope Royale had been turned inside out, her entrails outside of her and her skin hidden within.
Penelope—the real Penelope, the normal Penelope—could never engage in casual conversation, which she had been doing for the past hour with Nina, without swearing.
But she had not sworn.
Not one bad word had she uttered.
On the other hand, she could not talk about fishing when a fish was actually on the line in any other than stolid, serious, prose.
“Hold the rod tip higher. Give him a little more line.”
Now all of that had been reversed.
Penn was swearing while giving actual fishing advice.
This was tantamount to an otherwise normal person drinking heavily in the morning.
It presaged evil.
What was wrong with Penn?
Whatever it was, its symptoms were to worsen.
For after five minutes of battle with the fish—it seemed like half an hour, and Nina’s forearms had begun to ache—the struggle began to go her way, and the tiny spot in the churning green ocean where line entered water was now no more than twenty feet from the side of the boat.
“Watch----------------! The --------------------------- is going to-----------------”
Jump.
And the fish did jump, leaping and writhing and spraying and flashing in the sun, its t-shape now a full two feet out of the water.
Hammerhead shark.
HAMMERHEAD SHARK!
Nina’s first impulse was simply to throw the rod away and tell Penn to take them both home.
Then she thought about Jaws.
“You’re gonna need a bigger boat.”
The shark whapped flat back into the water then, but the fight in him was doubled, and the boat began to skull even faster in the direction of the Christmas Tree-lighted rig.
Was he intending to take them under it?
And then it happened.
The thing Nina was probably never to forget.
The thing that showed her, clearly, just how ill Penn really was.
For ‘ill’ was the only way to describe it.
Penn rose from her pilot’s seat in the stern of the boat, made her way to a storage compartment, which she opened, and pulled out a forty-five automatic.
This was, Nina remembered, the same weapon that had been used during a tense confrontation at the Aquatica.
It had saved their lives then.
Was it to do so again?
No, it wasn’t.
Because Penelope, who in any other circumstances, in any other normal life, would have sighted the gun carefully, waited until the next leap, and––BAM––blown the two-foot shark completely apart so that nothing remained save a circular mass of chum and red writhing intestines, purpling up the water—
––simply watched that next leap.
And did nothing.
Nothing at all.
Until, with her face frozen on the horizon, her eyes seemingly peering out beyond the shark, and even beyond the oil rig, she carefully lifted the lid of the storage compartment, and gingerly placed the weapon back where it had come from.
Then she produced a hunter’s knife from the broad leather belt she was wearing. She leaned over the side, and, with a deft movement, severed the fishing line.
“To hell with him,” she said, quietly.
What was wrong with Penelope Royale?
For Carol Walker, the day following her firing began in depressing darkness. By the time she left for Pilsen, a scudding layer of gray clouds washed over the city, turning umbrellas inside out and soaking the sidewalks, which glistened in the glare of headlights. Rain––especially unseasonably cold September rain––made everything harder. Crossing Michigan Avenue, bumping into people who had their heads bent into scarves and their eyes fixed on the pavement…now crossing the sidewalk, remembering it was four forty-five and people would be sprinting desperately from the seventy-eight bus up Wabash toward Union Station, up toward Ogilvie––avoiding bicyclists, who seemingly did not care who crossed their paths…watching fearfully, furtively, all of the people in the world, who were running, peddling, hurrying, mumbling...just panicked by the fact that it was Friday afternoon and THEY MIGHT NOT BE ABLE TO GET TO THE SUBURBS ON TIME!
Of course, in these same stations––Union, Ogilvie––equal numbers of people just as harried, were pushing each other off the platforms, out of the trains, through the revolving doors, down the escalators…just as panicked that it was four forty-five and THEY MIGHT NOT BE ABLE TO GET INTO THE GREAT CITY OF CHICAGO ON TIME!
She made her way up the stairs to the Pink Line Wabash stop. There, seated on benches, huddled beneath warmers, clustered shelterless and peering down at the tracks below them, or the city stretching westward—people were miserable. No one smiled. A few read newspapers, but most seemed close to despair, blankness, complete lack of touch or contact. Here and there, up and down the platform, a group of teenagers ran into each other and giggled, or pushed each other precariously near the chasm over the electric tracks. Everyone else in the station hated them intensely.
Finally, the train came; she squeezed her way onto it, wondering vaguely if someone would try to pick the pocket of her trench coat, wondering vaguely if she would care.
Twenty dollars were folded carefully in the shirt pocket of her blouse.
She was to meet a man named Michael in Pilsen.
She’d gotten an enigmatic, typed note late the previous afternoon, in an envelope containing a twenty dollar bill.
HEARD ABOUT YOUR FIRING. BAD LUCK. HAVE A NEW EMPLOYMENT OPPORTUNITY TO PUT FORTH TO YOU. MEET ME AT 216 BLUE ISLAND ROAD IN PILSEN. USE THE MONEY TO BUY FOOD. KEY IS UNDER THE MAT WHEN YOU ENTER FROM THE STREET. (THERE WILL BE BEER IN THE REFRIGERATOR.) MICHAEL
<
br /> What a strange thing for her to be doing!
She thought she could remember this ‘Michael’ person.
He’d been at one of her presentations, and had introduced himself.
The last name was German, she thought, but she could not remember it.
What she did remember was that he was slight of build—not too much taller than she herself—and that he had a nice smile.
Had she been attracted to him?
Surely not.
After all, she’d seen him no more than two minutes.
Certainly she had not been attracted to him!
Would he ask her to go to bed with him?
Or would he have too much old world gallantry, Germanic reserve––simple courtesy?
Going to bed with Michael…and in Pilsen, for God’s sake.
Who went to bed with anybody in Pilsen?
She would not do it, of course. It showed too little respect for herself, for her values, for her upbringing.
Besides, he was not the German of her reveries. That German was tall. That fantasy German had the unruly lock of hair that all young German men seemed to have, as well as the habit of constantly throwing it back upon his head, constantly rearing his neck and shoulders violently upward so as to get rid of the stupid cowlick, get it far back from his face, making her ask herself as she saw the activity taking place over and over again, thousands of times each morning, millions of times by the end of each day…
“Why don’t you just cut the damned thing off?”
But this Michael did not have such an unruly lock of hair; he had a neatly trimmed goatee.
There was, in short, practically nothing at all sexy about Michael.
She did not find him particularly attractive.
And she would not go to bed with him.
She descended the stairs from the Pink Line station and began walking toward Pilsen. She was going through the hospital district now, and felt the same curiosity as she always did when visiting Pilsen (which she did with some regularity on festival days or holidays). She liked Pilsen. The trip into it always amused her, though, and disturbed her: the complete trip was divided, as Gaul had been, into four parts: in the northern neighborhoods, where she lived, people walked aimlessly, having been told that doing so would keep them healthy; in the Loop, everyone walked desperately, attempting to get into or out of the Loop as fast as possible; in the hospital district (through which she was now walking), no one walked at all, except for some rats, either dead or dying in the gutters.
Frame Change: A Nina Bannister Mystery (The Nina Bannister Mysteries Book 5) Page 3