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

by T'Gracie Reese

  He did not think there would be much rust.

  He was still as active a man as ever.

  Swissssh.

  Swissssh.

  Yes, by God, he was active.

  He’d proven that last night with the opera singer.

  She’d been impressed, both by the paintings—she had especially loved the three Correggios—and by his own performance.

  Of course, this was the kind of life that international beauties deserved. They deserved to be supported by royalty. That was the way great European art had come into existence in the first place. The patronage system. Great books, great paintings—these were done at the behest of The Duke of Something or Other, or the Baron of Buxtehude, or…

  …or the Graf von Beckmeier.

  Damn the modern world.

  Damn the bourgeoisie.

  There, just to the right, twenty feet away, almost hidden in the dark pine boughs—a deer, probably a buck, its horns magnificent, its eyes shining like little points of starlight. The animal stood perfectly still, looked at him for an instant…

  …just long enough to get a shot away, if that was his intent on this snowy evening…

  ….but it wasn’t.

  Perhaps tomorrow.

  God, there was so much to do.

  So many pleasures to resume.

  And, as he thought these things, the buck disappeared, simply dissolving in a haze of snow and pine brush.

  And he began his homeward trek again.

  Swisssh.

  Swisssh.

  Yes, it certainly was quite cold.

  He could see the faint haze of what would have been the full moon straight above him, would have been, had the clouds dissipated, would have been and almost certainly would be tomorrow night, for snow storms seldom lasted long in the southern Fischbachers in December.

  January was another matter.

  By January, the entire castle would be snowed in.

  Narrow mountain roads almost impassable.

  Trips to Graz or even Moorbach on the lake difficult at best.

  So for the next week they would carry in stores of supplies and become a fortress.

  As in the old days, when they were a fortress permanently.

  He glimpsed an opening in the woods before him and knew that the trek was done. Good. He was tired. Not exhausted but tired. Tired enough so that he was perfectly prepared for the dinner that awaited him. First a glass of champagne in the library, with its massive windows letting him watch snow fall on the front lawn, letting him enjoy the statuary––the Diana and Achteon done in bronze by Klaus of Innsbruck.

  Then the table itself, his dinner table, graced last night by one of the great Violettas of the modern stage, but quite empty tonight, save for himself and bottle of St. Emilion and a pheasant, shot this morning.

  Swisssh.

  Swissssh.

  He swept out of the forest and glided effortlessly across the opening, drawn as if by a second source of gravity to the black RV that sat waiting, patiently as a hunting dog, as he skied up to it.

  “Whew! Mein Gott!” he whispered to himself as he reached the vehicle. “Mein Gott ist es kalt!”

  He stopped, put a hand against the fender of the vehicle, propped his ski poles securely, and caught his breath.

  Even as he did so, he could feel his fingers begin to grow numb.

  He needed to get inside the RV, get the engine going, get some warmth circulating.

  He’d almost finished the job of taking off the skis and securing both them and the poles to the rack on the vehicle’s roof when he heard the sound.

  Rrrrrrrrr.

  An engine.

  There, in the distance, between him and the lake.

  He opened the door, climbed inside, turned the key, and enjoyed the comfortable soft roaring of his own motor.

  Then he turned on the heater, took off his gloves, and waited.

  The sound grew louder.

  Now he could see the vehicle’s lights, hazed beneath a floating cloud of snow, moving slowing toward him.

  It was another Landover, a vehicle from Eggenburg.

  One of his own men.

  He sat and watched it approach, sat and warmed himself as it stopped, sat and savored the meal to come and the champagne and the wine and the music he would play afterward on the sound system in the music room and Amontillado he would have on his night stand while drifting off to sleep even as this snow was drifting over his forest…

  The door of the second vehicle opened and one of his men got out.

  A hatchet-faced man, eyes barely visible behind the black toboggan that covered most of his face and neck.

  The figure approached.

  He pushed a button; the window opened.

  “Mein Herr.”

  “Ja?”

  “Es ist wohl Zeit.”

  It is time.

  He felt his heartbeat quicken.

  “Wie meinst du?”

  What do you mean?

  Although, deep within, he knew quite well what the man meant.

  “Red Claw. His people are close by.”

  “Schon gut.”

  There was nothing else to say.

  Eight o’clock at night in Austria meant one o’clock in the afternoon in Bay St. Lucy, where chaos reigned.

  Sirens were going off everywhere as police cars raced toward and away from the city hospital as though they were taking part in a re-filming of The Keystone Cops.

  Everyone was yelling at everyone else.

  The primary care physician of Carol Walker was yelling at the nurse at the reception desk, who was yelling at the nurse in charge of the third floor, who was yelling at an orderly, who was also being yelled at—for some reason—by two other nurses, who were listening while Jackson Bennett, having just arrived, was yelling at Moon Rivard, who did not have time to respond, because he was yelling at the young officer he’d assigned to guard the hospital, who was simply repeating the words:

  “Yes, sir.”

  And:

  “No, sir.”

  And:

  “I don’t know, sir.”

  …over and over and over, so that he did not have time to yell at any body at all.

  Nina was simply running in circles, her hands alternatively covering her face and balling themselves into fists that went up and down beside her like little pistons while she yelled at anybody who’d come close to her:

  “What were you thinking about? Is this a hospital or a lunatic asylum? You can’t simply lose people here, can you? What is this, a supermarket? Do you think somebody shoplifted her out of here like she was can of asparagus?”

  “Ms. Bannister…”

  A good many people—Moon, the doctor, the head nurse, the assistant head nurse, Jackson—were calling her this, trying to calm her down, but it did no good, of course.

  She was near tears.

  This could not be happening.

  And it all swept over her: the explosion, the tale of what had happened to Carol, the vision of what had almost happened to Carol…

  After a while, she found herself simply sitting on a chair in the main hospital waiting room, a copy of People magazine sitting opened on the gray chair beside her.

  She cried like a baby, tears falling on the bare abdomen of Celine Dionne.

  This went on for a time.

  Finally, through a window that opened out onto the hospital parking lot, she spied Jackson Bennett and Moon Rivard standing beside a squad car shouting at each other.

  The only way she had to stop crying, she realized, was to start shouting herself, and so she rose, tore the picture of Celine Dionne out of the magazine, crumpled it up, hurled it viciously into a wastebasket, and left the building.

  Moon, when she reached his squad car, had stopped yelling at Jackson Bennett for a moment, and was yelling into the two-way radio:

  “I don’t care. No, I don’t care; I want you to find that girl! No, put everybody on it. Get hold of Hattiesburg! Yes it’
s a Code Four; that’s what I’m trying to tell you! No. No! We don’t know anything, don’t you understand that? Of course, she could be in a car! She could be in a damned pick-up truck for all we know! The only thing we do know is that she’s not in the damned hospital.”

  Jackson, spying Nina, hugged her—it seemed like she was being hugged frequently by Jackson these days—and whispered:

  “I’m so sorry! I’m so sorry!”

  She shook her head:

  “How could this have happened?”

  “I don’t know. Nobody knows.”

  “It’s not like she was getting her tonsils out, Jackson!”

  “I know.”

  “Somebody’s trying to kill her! We put her in the hospital so she could be observed. Observed. Doesn’t anybody know what that means?”

  “Nina, I can’t tell you how…”

  “It means watched! Watched! And so what does Moon do? He puts Dobie Gillis at the door of the hospital and then goes fishing!”

  “He wasn’t fishing, Nina.”

  “Well, he just as well could have been fishing!”

  “I know. I know. I’m as furious as you are…”

  “No, you’re not! If you were, somebody would be dead! Damn! Why do I have to be so little? I can’t break anybody’s head; I can’t beat anybody up—I can’t even break anything! But look at you! You’re huge, you’re tough! Why aren’t you hitting somebody!”

  “Nina, if I…”

  “What did football teach you, anyway, if not how to hit people!”

  “All I know is, Moon and his people are doing everything they…”

  “I want to go home.”

  Jackson stared at her for a moment, then said:

  “I don’t know if you should do that.”

  “Well, I’m going to damn well do it! Try and stop me!”

  “Your home is a crime scene, Nina. The people from the lab are there, and it can’t be cleaned until they finish their job.”

  “Then get them the hell away. It’s my home! I live there, and I want to go home!”

  Moon Rivard had gotten off the intercom. He stepped forward and asked:

  “What did you say, Ms. Bannister?”

  “I said I want to go home!”

  “I’m not sure we can let you do that.”

  “So who are you, dad?”

  “No, ma’am, but…”

  Jackson intervened:

  “Moon, are the lab people still there?”

  He shook his head.

  “No. They finished up about six this morning. But we don’t know if it’s safe for…”

  Nina, furious now, shouted:

  “Safe! Safe! Yeah, that’s right isn’t it! The Moon Rivard safety team! If anybody knows about safety, it’s you guys!”

  He blushed.

  She calmed down a bit.

  When she was able, she said, quietly:

  “I’m sorry I said that.”

  Both men had their heads hung.

  “I had no right to say that. It’s just…well, listen:”

  She took a deep breath.

  “I’ve been thinking about this. We all heard Carol last night. She was confused, delusional.”

  “Yes, Ms. Bannister. That’s why…”

  “Just give me a minute, Moon.”

  Silence

  She continued:

  “She was saying all this insane ‘international smuggler’ nonsense. As though Carol could ever be an international smuggler. She’s a farm girl from Georgia, for God’s sakes. She was completely off her head. Now it’s just possible that after Dobie—who was probably trying to find Maynard––let her walk out under his very nose, she went, I don’t know, down to the beach or something. She could just be wandering around.”

  “We’ll keep looking for her,” said Moon, “but in the meantime, Alanna has offered you a room at the Auberge until your place is cleaned up.”

  Nina thought for a moment. “What about Furl?”

  “I’ll instruct my officers to keep an eye out for him. If they find him, we’ll bring him to you at the Auberge.”

  And with that assurance, Nina agreed to be a temporary guest at the Auberge des Arts guest residence.

  While at precisely the same time, two Land rovers were making their way slowly, single file, over the narrow snow-covered road that led to Eggenburg Palace.

  The great pale yellow building, floodlit and shimmering through a haze of slow-falling snow, seemed to encircle them as they made their way around the gravel driveway.

  The main façade was two-hundred feet long.

  At intervals of every twenty feet, stood an armed guard.

  These men all seemed the same height.

  They seemed, in fact, identical in every way.

  They were Franz Beckmeier’s private army.

  Just as there were urban gangs in cities such as Chicago and New York, so were there private armies in parts of Europe.

  This, its members outfitted in black uniforms and carrying automatic machine guns, was such an army.

  Beckmeier surveyed it as he stood down from his vehicle.

  The hawk-nosed man from the second vehicle walked to his side.

  Beckmeier turned and looked at him, then asked:

  “So, where is this army of the Red Claw now, at this moment?”

  No answer.

  The snow could be heard hissing through pine boughs in the surrounding forests.

  Beckmeier reached into the vehicle, picked up a bullhorn that lay on the floor in front of the passenger seat, turned it on, put it to his lips, and spoke into it:

  “Na, Manner…”

  All right, men.

  “Jetzt ist so weit.”

  Untranslatable.

  The closest thing?

  The time is at hand.

  “Kommt denn nah.”

  Come close.

  “Ich will euch ganz klar sagen, welcher Kamp vor uns liegt.”

  I want to tell you as clearly as possible, about the battle that lies before us.

  As though he knew.

  But he did know.

  He knew his men were well trained.

  And he knew they were experienced fighters.

  They would prevail.

  “So,” he repeated, “kommt euch her!”

  Come here.

  He watched them.

  They remained precisely where they were.

  His heart began to pound erratically.

  Then he looked at the hawk-nosed man next to him.

  The man was holding a machine gun trained upon him.

  And suddenly, he knew where the Red Claw’s army was.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN: SEE THE REAL PAINTING

  Nina was relieved to leave the hospital, and sank thankfully into an overstuffed armchair in the Auberge study. She heard a crinkle and remembered about the note she’d crammed into her pocket.

  She took it out, glanced at it, and read:

  “Dear Nina…”

  My God.

  This was from Carol.

  She read:

  “I’m so sorry for what has happened. It’s all my fault. I just want you to know that I love you very much, and I love Bay St. Lucy, and I’m sorry for the violence I’ve brought to your little town.”

  “It’s over now, though. I’ve gone somewhere else. Please don’t try to find me for a while. I’m sorry, but that’s all I can say now. The police may want to ask me more questions. I’ll try to help as much as possible.”

  “The main thing is, and I want you to believe this: you are all safe.”

  “There will be no more bombs.”

  “There will be no more guns.”

  “Again, I love you all,”

  “Carol”

  She was crying by the time she finished the letter.

  She was still crying as she walked out of the study and into the garden.

  She thought about the letter. None of this made any sense.

  That Carol had been able to leav
e the hospital unseen was insane enough—but this letter?

  How was any of this conceivably the fault of Carol Walker?

  Carol was a college teacher and a museum docent.

  How had Carol been responsible for that?

  And where was Carol now?

  She could not have gone far.

  Georgia. Clearly she was going home.

  So, what was she––Nina––to do?

  Take the letter to Moon Rivard, and to Jackson Bennett.

  There must be a way to find Carol’s parents. East of Atlanta, north of Athens. In a small town. A farm family named Walker.

  There had to be some record.

  So thinking, she walked back into the study, resolving to call either Moon or Jackson––she was not entirely sure whom.

  She glanced out beyond the sliding glass door.

  There, sitting on a bench in the garden, where she’d just walked, was a man.

  She caught her breath.

  For a time, he simply stared at her.

  She was frozen, her hand paralyzed on the phone.

  He rose, took a step toward the closed glass door….

  …and smiled.

  Then she recognized who he was.

  Five minutes later, the two of them were sitting at the table in the Auberge parlor.

  “I hope you don’t mind the intrusion. You were easy to find; I just asked at the hospital.”

  “This is not making any sense to me,” she was saying.

  He was the same man who’d come to Elementals a few weeks earlier.

  Michael.

  The man who’d been close once to Carol.

  Who’d even wanted to marry her.

  Who had come to Bay St. Lucy in order to attempt to persuade her to go back with him to Chicago.

  “I’m genuinely sorry,” he was saying. “I’ve caused you both a great deal of pain.”

  “That’s just what Carol said in her letter.”

  “What letter?”

  Nina took it out of her pocket and handed it to him.

  He read it and smiled.

  “Yes. This sounds like her.”

  “Michael, has she gone back home?

  “I think I should say ‘yes’ to that. Then you will not worry.”

  “What you should do is tell me the damned truth. I think we’ve all earned that. We may be small town rubes…”