Frame Change: A Nina Bannister Mystery (The Nina Bannister Mysteries Book 5)

by T'Gracie Reese

  The muscles in her upper arms, or those left visible through tears in the sail she was wearing, twisted and corded themselves like thick ropes.

  Tom, Nina could see, was watching those muscles too.

  And the black, oily, seemingly weightless (at least to Penelope) crowbar.

  My God, Nina found herself thinking. What has he done?

  Then someone, insanely, took two steps toward the building (and thus also toward Penelope) and said:

  “Penn! Penn, let us come in!”

  Who had said this?

  Whoever it was had now incurred the same stare that had been fixed on Tom.

  It was Nina.

  Damn, she told herself.

  What was she thinking of?

  (Of course, what was she thinking of, even being here in the first place?)

  It was growing dark. It would have grown dark all on its own, even without the storm and the low scudding clouds to help it. It would have grown all cuddly and dark even without Penelope’s foul and tempest like fog of thick obscenities to intensify it impenetrability.

  But now, aided by all these things, it was dark indeed.

  So why was Nina Bannister not home in bed?

  “Penn, let us come in!”

  Penelope stared at her.

  “Nina, --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------!!”

  Well, there was not much to be said to that.

  So she simply stood there and listened to the wind blow.

  The wind did that very well.

  And after it had dispersed over the docks the last fifteen or twenty words of the torrent that had been unleashed, it slackened enough so that Nina could hear this second person (the lunatic) who seemed to be impersonating her, say:

  “Just let us come inside!”

  The crowbar arose now, and found itself being pulled back, as though Penn having become taken over by the spirit and form of Captain Ahab, it could have been launched at Moby-Tom Broussard.

  “Nina, why did you let this------------------------------------------------------------------------------------!!”

  “I don’t know, Penn!”

  “He’s ruined me! He’s--------------------------------------------------------. Nina, how could you----------------------------------------------------------------------?”

  “I don’t know, Penn!”

  “But why did you even---------------------------------------------------------------------------?”

  “I don’t know!”

  “How-------------?”

  “Don’t know!”

  “Why -----------------?”

  “Don’t know!”

  “Then how---------?”

  “Don’t know!”

  And with that answer, the crowbar fell clattering on rain-spattered concrete, and Penelope buried her face in her hands, her body wracked with seemingly inconsolable sobs.

  Within a minute, Nina was hugging her.

  And within two more minutes, the three of them were inside the building, in what passed for both living and bedroom, Penn sitting, sobbing, on the bed itself, Tom and Nina in massive sponge cloth objects that at first glance seemed creatures of the deeper reefs, but upon closer analysis must surely have been once manufactured as chairs.

  “Now,” Nina found herself saying, somewhat calmly, “will one of you two tell me what’s happened?”

  Both of them shook their heads.

  “Penn, please. Whatever Tom has done…”

  More head shaking, and low, quiet, murmuring:

  “That………….! How could he……………….?”

  “All right, then. Tom, you tell me.”

  “I’m sorry, Penn,” he said, more to his wife than to Nina.

  It did not seem to help.

  She merely went on murmuring:

  “How could you let this happen? How could you do such a thing? What did I ever do to you? Why did I deserve this?”

  He could only shake his head.

  “I don’t know, honey.”

  “DON’T CALL ME THAT! YOU…..!!! DON’T EVER CALL ME THAT! NOW HOW DID THIS HAPPEN?”

  “I don’t know. I just don’t know.”

  Silence for a time.

  The beating of the rain.

  The buzz of a dim electric light bulb hanging from a single, precarious wire in the center of the room.

  Nina:

  “All right. I’m going to ask you both one more time. Whatever this is, it can be dealt with. Whatever Tom has done, Penn, there will be a way around it. You both will find a way of dealing with this thing. Now, Tom, I’m going to ask you again. We have to put it into words. We have to get it out there. Tell me: what is it?”

  He looked at her.

  He took a deep breath.

  Then he said:

  “Nina—Penn’s pregnant.”

  CHAPTER NINE: BREAKTHROUGH!

  It has been noted earlier in this series, that certain towns and villages prepare for communal events such as weddings, births, and deaths by giving showers. Or, if they do not give showers (there being no such things as funeral showers), they at least bring food and say gracious things to and about each other.

  This was not the case in Bay St. Lucy.

  Bay St. Lucy, filled with shops and gifts and curios and fruit baskets and cute hats and non-abstract art and absolutely nothing of any practical use—did not give showers.

  Bay St. Lucy was a shower.

  It never stopped unwrapping and opening itself, and every turn around every corner in every one of its establishments elicited the breathless and wonder-filled statement/question:

  “Ohhhhhh! Isn’t that darling?!”

  Penelope’s pregnancy was the purest sort of just the kind of fuel the town ran on.

  Word of it took some time to spread itself around Bay St. Lucy, of course, and by four o’clock the following afternoon there were still a few inhabitants-shut ins, gunshot victims and the sort—who had not heard of it.

  But in the case of normal Bay St. Lucyans, it was pretty much standard fare and grist for the gossip mills that never ceased churning and generating life-giving information to THE PEOPLE!

  A baby!

  Penelope Royale and Tom Broussard were going to have a baby!

  There were perhaps a few problems that had to be glossed over.

  First, the source of the information, Nina Bannister, had been judicious in her reporting of it, leaving out Penelope’s immediate attitude, which was not so much matricidal as homicidal.

  This would pass, Nina knew.

  Second, there were obviously going to be some things that this particular couple still needed, as opposed to more conventional couples.

  A house.

  Those kinds of things.

  But that could all come later.

  The thing that had to be dealt with now was:

  The shower.

  THE BABY SHOWER!

  WHAT FUN!

  So, of course, Nina found herself in the late afternoon, sitting in Elementals, and listening to the rain (which had not stopped, and which showed no sign of stopping).

  She’d been hard at work for an hour, and sheets of paper lay beside her on the writing desk beside the cash register.

  The sheets all bore the heading Elementals: Treasures from the Earth and Sea, written in Algerian script with small pictures of Neptune and The Earth in the upper right and left had corners respectively. They were filled with names, dates, gift ideas, and suggestions concerning shower themes.

  It was late October.

  The baby would arrive, probably, around late August of the following year.

  No time to waste in planning.

  Nina had wrestled for a time with the date choices. August 27 was a Friday night. But that was a little late in the month. If the baby came on the fifteenth, which was a possibility, then Penn and Tom would have to go for two weeks with no clothing to put on the child, no toys for the child
to play with, no crib accessories for the baby to goo goo at.

  No diapers.

  Not a good risk to take.

  So the decision was made: either the twentieth or the twenty-first, depending on whether the town preferred a Friday or a Saturday.

  Of course, what if Penn were late?

  Why then…

  “Excuse me?”

  What was that?

  Someone was actually in the store.

  What a terrible distraction!

  Was there no respect for simple privacy anymore?

  There was a SHOWER to be planned here!

  Oh, for heaven’s sake.

  Oh, well…

  “Yes, how may I help you?”

  “I’d like to buy a painting, if it would be possible. I do hope it’s for sale. I just found it, over on the far wall. It’s quite lovely you know.”

  The person making these comments was a young slender woman dressed in zebra striped pants (the pants were black and the diagonal stripes white), with close-cut raven hair covering one eye (the left), and an English accent.

  She might have been in her late twenties, early thirties.

  But she was English.

  What was she doing in Bay St. Lucy?

  Didn’t the English have their own beaches?

  “Of course, of course—let’s go and take a look. We just got some seascapes in yesterday, painted by Ramoula Peters. She does terrific work. And we sell a lot of paintings done by her. Or you might have been looking at the abstract that Paul Donovan brought in last week. Usually his stuff doesn’t stay around very long—he’s in great demand.”

  Nina rose and followed the woman across the room, making a note as she walked that two of the ferns needed watering.

  “I’m sorry, but I failed to note the name of the painter.”

  “That’s all right. I’ll know who it is.”

  Also, there was a sterling silver set that someone had apparently looked over and not put back in the proper place.

  Work work work all the time.

  “Is this your first time in Bay St. Lucy?”

  “Yes, yes, it is.”

  “Well, I hope you’re enjoying yourself.”

  “I am, immensely! What a lovely little village you have! It reminds me of Cornwall.”

  “You’re English?”

  “Yes, from Sheffield originally.”

  “What do you do?”

  “I’m actually in the import/ export business.”

  “Based in…”

  The woman smiled:

  “Quite a few places, actually. I tend to move around a great deal, or be moved, I suppose, if one were to put it accurately. Mostly larger cities, though—which is why I love occasionally to visit the smaller towns. Ah, here we are: this is the one.”

  “Which? I can’t quite…”

  “This one.”

  She pointed.

  Nina looked, then looked again.

  It was her painting.

  Her painting!

  “Yes, this is the one: I believe the note here beside it says, ‘Old Red Lighthouse #6.’ And the artist’s name is ‘N. Bannister’.”

  This could not be happening.

  She was going to sell a painting!

  She felt faint, unable to speak.

  “This note says the price is $350. Is that accurate?”

  “I––I...”

  “That is quite a reasonable price, I must say. Can you tell me something about the artist?

  “You’re sure you want this painting?”

  “Oh, yes, definitely! All of the works hanging in your shop are quite charming, really they are. But this one has…”

  Nina waited.

  What did this one have?

  “It masquerades as a primitive, but I think it has a modularity that is paradigmatic of something more—how shall I say it? More vascularity than the primitives are able to conjure with. Don’t you agree?”

  “I…maybe.”

  “The interchange of color and structure envisages something Doyanesque. And although there’s a truly scintillating aura of abstract clarity—no, no, ‘clarity’ is not the right word, maybe ‘perfunctoriness’—there’s this scintillating viscera, there’s also something that eviscerates its own rubric even as it overshadows it.”

  “You don’t think the dog is too big?”

  “Oh, no, no, that seeming disparity is quite purposeful, and allows the force of the painting to, as it were, circle its own centers of gravity, becoming a kind of double star enhancing its own gravitational field, for want of a better phrase. Yes, it is, in short, quite wonderful. Do you know the artist?”

  “Yes.”

  “Does he or she live here in Bay St. Lucy?”

  “It’s a ‘she’.”

  “I’m not surprised. There’s something definitely feminine about the entire conceptual framework. Men are more celestially tuned, women more ‘of the earth.’ And that quality emanates quite clearly from this.”

  “It’s me, actually.”

  The woman stared at her.

  This was, Nina found herself thinking, the happiest moment of her life.

  She was celestially tuned.

  She viscerated.

  AND SHE WAS GOING TO MAKE THREE HUNDRED AND FIFTY DOLLARS!

  TAKE THAT MARGOT!

  And who really cared about the stupid old Chicago Art Museum anyway?

  Did the paintings hanging there enhance their own gravitational field?

  Did they possess perfunctoriness? Real, true honest perfunctoriness?

  You’re damned right they didn’t!

  “You painted this?”

  Yes. You see, I took this class, and I…”

  “Oh, my God. I’m so excited!”

  “I’m not sure it’s really…”

  “It’s wonderful! Please tell me: whom have you studied with?”

  “Well, the class was taught by Emily Peterson…”

  “Peterson. Peterson. Out of London?”

  “Ruston, Louisiana, I think. Originally. Her husband owns a hardware store.”

  “Do you have other works?”

  “Yes. They’re out on my deck. There were five other paintings of this barn, but the colors weren’t right.”

  “Will you be offering them to the public?”

  Not if Margot Gavin has anything to do with it.

  But to hell with Margot!

  Down with Margot, up with Carol!

  “Yes. Yes. I’ll probably be replacing this one with, oh, I don’t know: maybe “Old Red Fishing Boat #2.”

  “And when will it be hung?”

  “Probably…”

  As soon as I can get home, get it, and bring it back here.

  But why appear too eager?

  If the paining was actually a double star creating its own gravity, and that kind of stuff—maybe I could price it higher?

  “Probably a little later in the week.”

  “Wonderful! I may not be here by then…have to leave early tomorrow, busy schedule and all…but could you send me a picture of the work? I would definitely be interested in bidding on it.”

  Bidding on it.

  BIDDING ON IT!

  “I’ll be happy to. If you’ll just give me an address…”

  “Of course, of course! Also my email address and my cell phone number. Now, you must tell me: where are your other works to be seen?”

  My deck.

  “They’re not really available now.”

  “No museums at all?”

  “No,” Nina said, meekly.

  “Then perhaps I shall be able to act as your purchasing agent. I do know a number of people with excellent taste. There’s nothing more exciting than discovering new talent. You may expect more buyers to be dropping around. Now, I’m a bit rushed, so if I may pay for this with a credit card…”

  “Of course, of course.”

  The paying process was taken care of.

  Old Red Lighthouse #6 was carefully taken
down and wrapped.

  Goodbyes were said and congratulations were given (Nina being congratulated for transcending primitivism, the woman congratulated for finding out that Nina was transcending primitivism.)

  The woman left, ringing the little tinkling bell above the door as she did so.

  And Nina, left alone, raised both her arms straight in the air, shouting:

  “YES!”

  She was a painter, after all!

  Within ten minutes, she’d locked Elementals for the rest of the day, unchained and started up her Vespa, and backed out of her parking place.

  She did not really need the vehicle, of course.

  She could have floated over the city.

  She headed out onto Breakers Boulevard and navigated not toward home—although she looked forward to getting there—but to the most disreputable side of Bay St. Lucy.

  She watched as the pets grew scruffier, the buildings more disreputable, the old cars in weed-grown lots more rusted and undriveable, and the air heavier with the scent of stale tobacco and unpaid bills.

  Finally she came to the hovel of Tom Broussard.

  Be here, Tom. Be here, Tom.

  She knew he spent evenings with Penelope and afternoons here, drinking beer and writing his latest novel, whatever that happened to be.

  She looked up, saw the empty porch, heard several dogs howling from an indeterminate distance away, and hoped that they were not unleashed.

  But no, what was she thinking? Of course, they were unleashed.

  What could she hope for, then?

  That they were not rabid was about the best she could think of.

  “Tom?”

  Noise from within the house.

  And then Tom Broussard himself, clad in a sweat-through undershirt, his chest arms cheeks legs feet and furniture all sprouting black hair that had never been combed, a can of beer in his hand, stumbled out onto the porch.

  “Nina! Nice to see you! Come on up!”

  She did so, wondering if the stairs leading up to Tom’s porch were any ricketier than her own.

  It was, she thought, holding onto the bannister in the silly hope that it might not fall to pieces before the stairs, a dead draw.

  “Tom, how’s Penn?”

  He raised high the can of beer and let a smile whiten the otherwise totally black mass that was his head.

  “She’s great! All she needed was to talk to you.”

  “Well, I’m glad I could help.”

  “She’s knitting booties.”