Game Change: A Nina Bannister Mystery (The Nina Bannister Mysteries Book 3)
Page 8
Some time April van Osdale would have to find out about Max.
But not today. Not today.
“And Nina, this is somewhat embarrassing, but––”
“Yes?”
“I do feel as though, thinking about it, we may have met somewhere.”
“Strange. I have that feeling too.”
“Were you at the state conference on Innovative Teaching Strategies last March?”
“No. No, didn’t make that one.”
“Well, that’s not it, then. Sometime though, and somewhere, our paths have crossed. It will come to me.”
Not from me, thought Nina.
If you don’t remember, then to hell with you.
She did not say this.
“I’ll try to figure it out too,” is what she did say.
And they were at the door of the meeting room.
Most faculty meetings were held in the library, which could seat seventy people comfortably. The room they were now entering was known simply as a conference room. It held a round table, several chairs, and audio visual equipment that allowed Power Point presentations to be flashed on a screen in the front of the space.
“Good morning, Ladies!” said Nina, in a voice that was much cheerier than her mood.
Group response:
“GOOD MORNING!”
Everyone standing.
“Take a seat,” she said, “Take a seat.”
Everyone did so.
Now she and the vegetative growth beside her stood before the group.
“I want to introduce to you Dr. April van Osdale. Dr. van Osdale, as I’m sure you know by now, has been named Educational Liaison Officer by the office of our state senator and will, in the following months, be helping us to improve the performance of our students. And so, I give you Dr. van Osdale!”
Some faint applause.
Then April van Osdale:
“I want to begin by telling you how much I look forward to working with you, and how much I appreciate the toil and effort you put in, each and every day. I’ve spent more than my share of years in the classroom, and I realize just how arduous the job can be.”
Pause.
“Still….”
Uh oh, Nina found herself thinking.
Something ominous about that ‘still.’
“Still, ladies, we’ve got a lot of work to do. Bay St. Lucy’s combined scores for the November tests are extremely low in comparison to similar institutions elsewhere in the state. This is not satisfactory to anyone. Not to the people who represent us in Jackson; not to the parents of our children, who represent, as I’m certain you all know, our most precious asset; and not to me. In short, it’s going to change.”
No answering that.
The five ‘ladies’ addressed; Eunice, Cyntha Barnhart, Candice Wilkins, Terry Starr, and Ronda Wilkinson, all sat quietly and continued to nod.
A bell went off, uselessly.
Two coaches sauntered down the hall, uselessly.
“First, Ms. Duncan, I must ask you: how often are you MOCK MACEING?”
The Mock Mace was an approximation of the actual MACE. It was a practice test.
“We try to do one MOCK MACE per month.”
“That’s all?”
“Well, there are other activities that…”
“What activities?”
Silence.
“Do you not understand that this test takes precedence over everything else?”
“Yes, we know that, Dr. van Osdale. It’s just that…”
“Just that what?”
No answer.
“Ms. Bannister?”
“Yes, Dr. van Osdale?”
“Do you have an explanation for this?”
“I’m not sure what you’re referring to.”
“I’m referring to the fact that not nearly enough MOCK MACEs are being administrated. Do you know if this is true in other departments as well?”
“I have to say, I’m not sure.”
“Nina,” piped up Eunice, bravely, “has only been with us a few weeks.”
“I see. That does explain a few things.”
“And Paul––”
April van Osdale cut her off.
“—that doesn’t matter now. What Mr. Cox’s policies—or lack of policies—might have been, is irrelevant..”
She glared at everyone evenly and said:
“Our policy is now going to be weekly MOCK MACEing. Let me be very clear: if the test scores go up, good things will happen to this faculty. If not…”
Silence in the room.
A few drops of dust filtered down from air ducts in the ceiling and could be heard making a crashing noise on the carpet.
Otherwise, there was complete, utter, unbroken, endless, interminable, and unendurable, silence.
“Are there questions?”
There were no questions.
“Good. Well. So far as I’m concerned, the meeting is over.”
And it was.
Of course, everything else was only beginning. The history meeting took place, and the math meeting took place, and each went like the other, and the women teachers sat with smiles frozen on their faces and the men teachers who were not coaches (there were five of them in the school) sat with no expressions at all, and the coaches found excuses to be absent.
April van Osdale, not wanting to be subjected to fish sticks and tater tots, left shortly before lunch.
During lunch, and for most of the afternoon, Nina sat in her office and tried to console various teachers or groups of teachers who entered in panic mode:
“Who is she, anyway?”
“Does she really have the power to do all of these things?”
“We can’t prepare for a MOCK MACE every week!”
“We won’t have time to do anything else!”
“Can she fire me?”
“I’ve been here twenty years: can she fire me?”
Nina, knowing the answers to none of these questions, decided it would be boring simply to answer “I don’t know” to every query, and so she decided to spice up her life a bit by choosing three answers out of an answer hat and alternating them.
“Yes.”
“No.”
“I don’t know.”
“No.”
“Yes.”
“I don’t know.”
“I don’t know.”
“No.”
“Yes.”
And so on and so on.
Finally, there was a lull in the storm, and she had time to call Jackson Bennett.
“Jackson?”
“Nina? What’s going on? Oh, by the way, I heard about Lirpa and the fight. I think we’re going to be able to keep it quiet.”
“Good. But I’ve got to see you.”
“Can’t. Got to be at the court.”
“You have a case?”
Silence for a time. Then:
“Not in court, Nina. At court.”
“What are you talking about?”
“The girls have an afternoon game at Hatteras. Aren’t you keeping up with the schedule?”
“You’re going to a basketball game?”
“The Hattiesburg game won’t mean anything if we don’t win this one. I’m leaving the office to drive over now.”
“When will you be back?”
“Around dinner. But I’m buying dinner for the team at Dee Tee’s.”
“Can I meet you there?”
“Sure, if you want to. Be warned though; they get a little rowdy.”
“Rowdy? You should have been here this morning.”
“What’s going on?”
“April van Osdale is going on.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah, oh. Jackson, can she…”
He cut her off:
“Let’s talk about it tonight.”
Then he hung up.
Every real town—even an artistic community such as Bay St. Lucy––has a restaurant like Dee Tee’s. It was not a trendy rest
aurant. It did not serve gourmet food or trendy food or healthy food or food that was to be eaten while sitting on a veranda and looking out over the sea.
It served hamburgers for lunch and breaded veal cutlets for dinner.
These things were lugged to tables by big strong waitresses dressed in sky white uniforms, who called the men ‘honey’ or ‘sugar,’ and who carried six platters of breaded fish on one upturned palm and a continual, always full, pot of coffee, in the other.
Nina arrived at five thirty, a few minutes before the team did.
There were two big tables at the back of the restaurant that sat, empty, waiting for them.
“What are you going to have tonight, honey?”
Damn. She must look like a man. The waitress called her honey.”
“Just a salad.”
The waitress looked as though Nina had stuck a fork into her stomach. Crestfallen to the point of tears, she said, in a tone reminiscent of a minister whose congregation was refusing en masse to take communion:
“No meat?”
Nina shook her head.
“I’m sorry.”
“None at all?”
“No.”
“Just a salad?”
She answered as though she were answering the question, “Is your sister really dead?”
She said:
“Yes.”
The waitress, heartbroken, turned and left.
A short time afterward, the huge yellow cockroach that was the school bus crawled to a stop outside the south window, and the team poured out.
One second. Two seconds.
Then they all came hurtling into the restaurant.
Meg was not with them.
For Meg, immediately following the game, had headed out to New Mexico.
By this time two days from now, she and Jennifer would be married.
The girls had been chaperoned home by Jackson Bennett, who drove just behind them.
They did not act like one expected giggling girls to act. They were athletes and they comported themselves as such. They brayed, horse played, shoved, pushed, broke into delirious laughter (the team had obviously won) and threw each other into tables, some of which were empty, others were occupied by smiling people who recognized their status as jocks and, being people from The South, forgave them.
Once having seated themselves at the tables reserved for them, they engaged in the time-honored ritual of unscrewing the tops of the sugar bottles and the salt shakers, then pouring one of the ingredients into the other’s bottle, and vice versa.
No one at Dee Tee’s seemed to mind.
Dee Tee’s was the kind of restaurant that had seen much worse, and sucked this kind of behavior into its cream gravy bowls much as a midway swallows rubes and yokels.
It was ready for whatever the girls could throw at them.
Two of the players spotted Nina.
“Hey, Ms. Bannister!”
“Hello, Ms. Bannister!”
She nodded primly and answered:
“Hello, girls. How did it go?”
“We won! Fifty to thirty five!”
“Congratulations!”
“Now bring on Logansport and Hattiesburg!”
Upon hearing the hated name, the remainder of the team slammed down onto their tables the bottles of sugar and salt—the contents of which had now been thoroughly switched––and made animal noises.
Nina was so proud of them.
A few minutes later food began to arrive.
The young women did not order salads.
They did not order as though thinking first and foremost of their slender figures.
They ordered MEAT! MEAT! MEAT! as though they were Odysseus’ men slaughtering the cattle of the sun, and soon their tables were covered with steaming bowls of mashed potatoes, grease-filled platters of French fries, rolls, biscuits, tureens of thick cream gravy, and great thick slabs of steak, chicken, ham, fish, pork, mullet, hen, squab, and, perhaps if one researched too thoroughly, horse and dog.
GO YOU, MARINERS! GO YOU, MARINERS! GO YOU, MARINERS!”
Nina was forced to rethink her literary analogy.
Odysseus’ men could not have been this loud.
They had finished their second chant and begun asking for seconds (But were there any animals left alive in the city?) when Jackson Bennett walked through the door.
“YAAAAY, MR. BENNETT!”
“YAAAAY, MR. BENNETT!”
He beamed, and opened his arms to embrace Alyssha, who’d hurtled across the room and thrown herself against him, shattering as she did so two chairs which seemed to have been made of balsa wood.
“Good game!” he crowed, looking down at her as she beamed up at him.
She accepted the praise and nodded, her face glowing only slightly more intensely than the fluorescent lights in the ceiling above.
Then she returned to her teammates while Jackson shouted:
“Good game, ladies!”
“YAAAAY, Mr. Bennett!”
“YAAAAY, Mr. Bennett!”
All of the standing girls sat down again and renewed their carnage. The people brave enough to still be in the restaurant nodded approval, whispering to themselves things like:
“Aren’t they cute?”
…and not:
“Let’s get the hell out here.”
…like non-Mississippians might have said.
“Nina! May I join you?”
“Sure. Sit down, Jackson.”
He did so, the table rocking as he leaned forward on it, the chair creaking as his weight began the process of intimidating it.
“What are you having?”
“Salad.”
He shook his head, perusing the menu:
“You’ve got to do better than that. This meal is my treat, you know.”
“You’re buying dinner for the whole team?”
He looked at the girls, who, having finished off fifty pounds or so of main course, were now contemplating desert.
“The law firm did pretty well last year. We can use the profits to put down a deposit. So, come on, chow down.”
“No, a salad’s fine.”
“Wimp,” he growled, peering at the wall behind the players.
It was covered with a gigantic rebel flag and pictures of Jeb Stuart, Robert E Lee, and Stonewall Jackson.
“Great restaurant,” he said quietly, “for a Black man to be frequenting.”
“So why do you come here? Why did you bring the team here?”
“I like,” he said, gesturing to the waitress, “the breaded veal cutlet.”
“Well. So much for principles.”
“The only principal I’m really concerned about is you. How’s the job going?”
She said nothing while Jackson ordered, his two-minute litany of desires obviously pleasing the woman who stood beside him, scribbling earnestly, her weekly salary apparently depending on the poundage of meat and potatoes she was able to dole out and see consumed.
She left.
The confederate heroes on the far wall continued to stare out over the room, stern-faced, wishing apparently to have no more truck with Jackson Bennett that he wanted with them.
“We’re all a little concerned, Jackson.”
He took a deep breath and nodded.
“Van Osdale?”
“Yes. She spent the morning at school.”
“How did that go?”
“How did the Civil War go?”
“Pretty good for my side.”
“But for the other side?”
He smiled.
“I heard they had some difficulties.”
“Yes, they did.”
“And you feel like…”
“Atlanta. And she’s Sherman.”
“Is it that bad, Nina?”
“I’m not sure how bad it is. That’s why we need to talk.”
“All right. Talk.”
“Jackson, how much power does this woman really have?”
‘
I’m not sure.”
“How can you not be sure? You’re one of the best attorneys in town. You know people in the state capital. You’ve got contacts. You’re also head of the school board.”
“Sherman, from what I’ve been able to read, didn’t talk to those folks either.”
“So, you don’t know how much power she really has? This woman basically threatened every teacher in the building this morning. The test scores must go up, or people will be fired.”
“Which people?”
“All people. Any people. How can she do that? Isn’t it the school board’s place to hire and fire people?”
“Technically, yes.”
“I hate that word ‘technically.’ What it really means is, ‘the thing that I just said is true isn’t true at all.”
He took a deep breath and began to do what Nina had learned years before, in watching Frank deal with clients, lawyers always did when they either had bad news or had to admit they didn’t know something:
…he whispered.
This just gets worse and worse, she found herself thinking.
“Years ago, Nina, it was probably true that the school board of a little town like Bay St. Lucy could decide pretty much everything that was going to happen. Curriculum, textbooks, hiring, firing—the school superintendent or the principal, depending on the size of the district, made recommendations, and the board rubber-stamped them. Hell, what did the local feed store owner or grocer care about what math book the kids had to buy?”
“That’s changed, I guess.”
A dozen or so people brought Jackson’s order. It surrounded Nina’s minute and pitiful little salad much as the confederate gunboats and infantry batteries must have surrounded Vicksburg.
It was time to stop, she told herself, these Civil War analogies
They were making her uneasy.
“Yes.”
A smooth sea of white cream gravy lay shimmering before him, the hypothetical veal cutlet, like the Loch Ness Monster, lying hidden below it.
His whisper, coming up from the East, caused a gravy tsunami to begin making its way to the West, where, in some seconds, it would threaten to overwhelm a village of turnip greens.
“Yes, it’s changed. Public education has become completely political.”
“Somehow, I seem to have missed all of that in the last ten years.”
“I know. And I was hoping you could come back for a few months and just be a good principal, without having to be in the center of a hurricane.”
“Didn’t work out that way, I guess.”
“No. No, I guess it didn’t.”