Set Change: A Nina Bannister Mystery (The Nina Bannister Mysteries)

by T'Gracie Reese

  “Why should it be any different from any other night?”

  The tinkly little bell that separated garden from curiosity shop—for what better name was there for the thing that Margot had put together in the fifteen months following her move from Chicago?—this bell tinkled, the door opened, and the dark haired young girl asked:

  “Ms. Gavin?”

  “Yes, dear?”

  “How much is the seascape by Ramoula Peters?”

  “The larger one or the smaller?”

  “I believe the lady is interested in the larger.”

  “That’s one hundred and fifty, Sandra.”

  “All right. Thanks.”

  Door closing.

  Girl disappearing.

  More smoke blown into the cloud hovering like the remains of an erupting volcano just inside the greenhouse roof.

  “Margot, this is your big night.”

  “It’s no different from any other night.”

  “But it is: it’s opening night!”

  “Well. That’s so, I suppose. But all plays have opening nights.”

  “But––”

  She hesitated. There was, as she thought about it, not a great deal for her to say.

  If Margot was implacable, then she was implacable.

  But Nina herself was as nervous as Furl in the vicinity of a big dog on the beach.

  And, perhaps as a result of this nervousness, she found herself regressing in time, the lemonade carrying her back three months—was that all it had been, three months?—to a similar afternoon on March 1. What had she done that morning?

  Oh—right—she had slept in.

  Have to watch that in the future.

  Oh well.

  How grand retirement was! No more high school English classes to teach!

  But at any rate, she had possessed, on that March 1 morning, even more reason to sleep in than she had possessed today.

  A shivery, cold wind had been blowing in from Cape Hatteras. The beach, she could remember, was a zone of desolation and the sullen clouds were the same color as the water.

  She and Margot had been drinking coffee then; lemonade would have been unthinkable.

  The conversation had probably begun with some retelling of the bizarre and still at that time—nor at this time, when one thought about it—not quite completely understood events concerning the Robinson mansion. But then it had lulled, allowing Margot to light a cigar—she had just begun to smoke cigars at that time, and Nina was trying to decide if such a thing might be cause to dissolve their friendship—light the cigar, put it carefully in an onyx ashtray that Nina could quite clearly remember sitting on the table as though made by nicotine loving Mayans for just such an occasion, just such a gift shop, just such a howling wind outside—and say:

  “I’m going to be in a play.”

  There was, Nina could remember, absolutely nothing intelligent to say to that. And so she had replied:

  “What?”

  “I’m going to be in a play.”

  Then the conversation had rolled along going downhill with the same necessity as a stone rolling downhill and the same pointless, though vaguely disturbing, outcome possibilities.

  “You’re going to what?”

  “The community theater. I’m going to be in their next play. The summer production. It will open in June.”

  “But why?”

  “Alana Delafosse asked me.”

  “But why?”

  “How should I know? Perhaps she took pity on me.”

  “I take pity on you! Why would you want to do this?”

  “Oh, why does one ever want to do anything?”

  “Money, sex––”

  “Well, I have money and as for the other––”

  “All right all right—so we’ll just leave it that there is no comprehensible reason that you would want to be in a play that the community theater is doing. That’s a lost cause. But at least tell me what the play is.”

  The Sound of Music.

  The Sound of Music?

  “Is it becoming hard to hear in this garden. Is the fountain too loud? The wind too gusty outside?”

  “No, but—I’m just so confused.”

  “Why shouldn’t I be in The Sound of Music?”

  “Oh Margot there are so many reasons––”

  “Name one.”

  “One? That limits me too much.”

  “You’re being silly.”

  “But –can you act?”

  “Of course I can act.”

  “When have you ever acted?”

  “What do you think a Chicago Art Museum Director does? What do you think all such people do? If it weren’t for acting there would be no management positions at all. And look at me now: I’m here in Bay St. Lucy, population two thousand. If I weren’t acting every second, if I ever allowed my real ‘self’ to appear in public—why they’d put me in jail. And with good reason.”

  “All right, we’ll leave that.”

  “And so we should.”

  “But, singing?”

  “What about singing?”

  “You have to do it. If you’re going to be in The Sound of Music, you have to make the sound of music. You have to sing.”

  “So?”

  “Can you?”

  “Can I what?”

  “Now you’re just being difficult. Can you sing?”

  “Oh I don’t know!”

  “You don’t know?”

  “How should I know?”

  “Well, wouldn’t you want to know before you agreed to be in a musical?”

  “I think that would take the fun away.”

  “What part does Alana want you to play?”

  “Mother Superior.”

  “What?”

  “Mother Superior. She’s the head of the convent. She’s the one—“

  “I know who she is.”

  “Then why do you seem so astonished?”

  Nina, even now, could remember the feeling, often associated with bad comedies or good tragedies, of not knowing whether to laugh or cry.

  She could remember looking across the table and seeing a woman six feet tall, shrouded in cigar smoke, her cragged face a testament to decades spent in a life that must have been a mixture between political activism, bohemian ecstasy, drug induced stupor, and desperate hand to hand conflict—seeing this woman and saying softly:

  “We’re all going to be excommunicated. I’m Methodist—and I’m going to be excommunicated.”

  “Why ever?”

  “For allowing this.”

  “Allowing what?”

  “Margot—you’re the least Mother Superior-like human being I’ve ever seen!”

  “Nonsense. I may be a bit short on the mother part but I’m long on superior; the two qualities will balance themselves out.”

  “But the song––”

  “Alana did mention there was a song. Only one song though.”

  “Yes, it’s only one song. But Margot, it’s a big song! It’s a really, really big song!”

  “Something, I believe she said, about climbing a mountain.”

  “A mountain? Margot, you’re going to have to sing…”

  And then a customer had come, and Margot had gone away, leaving Nina to ponder the sorry state of a Catholic Church that would allow Margot Gavin to don a nun’s habit, even in a theatrical production, and not issue a Papal Interdict.

  But the three months had gone by, and no words of outrage or chastisement had come from Rome, and rehearsals had, apparently, chugged along their merry way—and tonight Margot Gavin was to present herself to the community of Bay St. Lucy as a singing nun.

  “My God,” Nina found herself whispering, to no one in particular, especially not Margot.

  “What did you just say?”

  “I said, ‘How did the dress rehearsal go?’”

  “I was splendid.”

  “How about the rest of the cast?”

  “Oh I never notice them.”
>
  “Never notice what anybody else is doing. Is that one of your principles of acting?”

  “It’s one of my principles of life. But no. I will admit, I do notice them from time to time. And they’re exceptionally good; they really are.”

  “How’s Macy Peterson as Maria?”

  “Macy? Oh, dear; she’s a godsend. A true godsend. Those marvelous blue eyes, and that look of complete and unabashed innocence. Why the woman makes Julie Andrews look like a French whore.”

  “So she’s doing well.”

  “Of course, she’s doing well. And John Giusti is a superb Captain von Trapp…”

  “He would have to be,” Nina said, nodding. “If he could manage to achieve the status of Furl’s permanent veterinarian…and anyway, John has always been one of my favorite people in Bay St. Lucy.”

  “He was your student once, I suppose.”

  “They all were. But none were as good as John. Solid as a rock. Popular, great athlete, wonderful mind. I’m sure he’s great in the play.”

  “He is.”

  “All right, and I’m sure you are too, Margot. But just the same, I’ll be keeping my fingers crossed for you.”

  “You’ll be there tonight?”

  “Of course. Front row. Got my ticket a month ago when they went on sale. I did wonder why you’re opening on Saturday night and not Friday night.”

  “Mrs. Throckmorton, I believe, had a Friday engagement that she could not break. And since she’s our pianist—and thus our entire orchestra—well––”

  “I understand. Ok, then, Margot, I’m glad you’re not nervous. But I have to tell you, I am.”

  “Clearly you’re not a trooper, darling.”

  “No. No trooper.”

  Margot stubbed out her cigar, shook her head, and said:

  “No, Nina, you’re not a trooper at all. ‘No Guts Nina,’ that’s what the town calls you now. Of course, last Christmas, you did unmask a cold blooded murderer and save poor Macy’s life. The truth is she’d be locked away in a mental institution for murdering Eve Ivory last Christmas if you hadn’t showed yourself to be a bit of a trooper. Enough of a trooper, by the way, to save the town.”

  “Well––”

  “By the way, did you know someone in town is writing a book about the whole thing?”

  Nina looked the way she felt: astonished.

  “Who would do that?”

  Margot shrugged:

  “A writer, who, like all writers, is desperate and poor.”

  “But who would publish it?”

  “Some company that publishes books about cats, I heard.”

  “But there are no cats involved in the Robinson affair!”

  “I know, but people always want to buy books about cats. At any rate the book—I believe it is to be called Sea Change––will be out soon and will be stocked in every gift shop and curiosity nook in town; you’ll be even more a heroine than you have been for the last five months.”

  “Just what I need. Why in heaven’s name is it being called Sea Change? The sea doesn’t have anything to do with what happened in the Robinson mansion.”

  “How should I know?”

  “The lunatic, the lover, and the poet,” Nina sighed, “are of imagination all compact.”

  “You are, you know, going to have to give up the habit of quoting like that. You’re not in a classroom, you know.”

  “I tolerate your cigars, you tolerate my Shakespeare. Looking back on the whole mess, though, and what they all thought Macy had done—and what everybody wanted to do to Eve Ivory—when I think of all that—there were times when it seemed pretty hopeless.”

  “Hope is here, Nina.”

  “It is now. We have the money; Alana Delafosse has made the Auberge des Arts a reality. What was the Robinson mansion has become an art gallery, new theater space, cultural center—and the school will be ready for the fall. Yes, hope might be here now, but––”

  “No, Nina. I mean, really: Hope is here. In the shop.”

  “What?”

  Nina became aware that Margot was rising, gesturing, and smiling at a diminutive figure entering the garden.

  “Hello, Hope!”

  “Hello, ladies!”

  Nina turned in the chair, then smiled and greeted the new arrival: Hope Reddington.

  This lady had been often referred to around Bay St. Lucy as The Hope Diamond. It was a comparison not precisely accurate, for although Hope the human was slightly smaller than the jewel of the same name, she was much brighter, and she possessed many more facets from which a startling kind of radiance seemed always to be emanating. She was harder, too, or at least she would have had to be, given certain things that had happened in her past. They were not disreputable things, not Homer Baron Robinson murderings or Supermarket Weekly gossipings. No, Hope Reddington’s griefs had been entirely of the mundane kind that make them less interesting to talk about and far more difficult to endure. Her husband, Marshall Reddington, owner of the town’s leading—and for a time only—pharmacy, stricken with a cruel form of cancer and forced to wither in their stately home until mercifully delivered to the grave. Her daughter and son-in law, quite happily married, killed in a freak automobile accident. And her granddaughter Helen, not of Troy but of Bay St. Lucy, stricken by three insidious diseases: the first, beauty, the second, talent, and the third (the only one of the three to prove invariably incurable and unfalteringly fatal), success.

  But if Hope did not quite spring eternal then she at least bubbled forth in a dogged mortality, coming as near to timeless as humanity, in its white-tight-ringlet haired, stooped, caned, hearing aided, ninety-genarian but who cares and damn the next century anyway form—could manage.

  “Hello, Ladies!”

  To which both Nina and Margot replied in chorus:

  “Hello, Hope!”

  It seemed an entirely appropriate thing to say.

  “How delightful to see you! Is that lemonade?”

  “It is,” answered Margot.

  “May I have some?”

  “No, Hope. I don’t think we’re going to let you have any lemonade today.”

  “Oh, dear. I was so looking forward to it––”

  “Well perhaps another time, when we’re in a better mood.”

  “Perhaps if I come over and beg?”

  “You could try.”

  “I believe I shall; it looks so inviting. Just wait for me: I don’t move too quickly.”

  Hope began making her way across the garden. She was, Nina remembered while watching her approach, always looking up and out from under something. This was not hard in Margot’s shop, because there was always something or other—a painting, a vase, an ashtray, a pot, a bouquet, a spray, an engraving—to be looking up and out from.

  But Hope simply lived life looking up and out from under something, even if nothing was there.

  It was, Nina speculated, the end result of being eleven inches tall, or, if not quite that short, at least a height diminutive enough to make her the only Bay St. Lucyan (over the age of seven) to be shorter than Nina herself.

  “Now that I’m here, it looks even better!”

  “Well, since you’ve come all this way, we may relent.”

  “Oh goody!”

  She looked up and out from under nothing at Nina (beaming as she did so) and then looked up and out from under nothing at Margot.

  Then she folded her bat-like hands in front of her, knelt at Margot’s feet, looked up in supplication and asked:

  “Will you bless me, Holy Mother?”

  Margot, missing not a beat, placed her own hand on Hope’s superbly tailored white white WHITE! jacket, and intoned:

  “Go and sin no more, my child.”

  I am, Nina found herself thinking, going to be sick.

  But Hope, not moving, shaking her head and staring down at the floor, merely whispered:

  “I am too old to sin, Mother Superior.”

  “One is never too old to sin. Sin is one
of the gifts that God always offers us.”

  Then Hope twisted her neck so that she was, once again, in the position of looking up and out from under something—the burden of sin, Nina surmised––and said quietly but with intense glee:

  “Thank you! Thank you! And bless you for that!”

  “It was nothing, my dear.”

  “Both of you,” said Nina, as Hope began the painful and lengthy process of rising, “are going to be struck by a bolt of lightning. And I will be too although none of this is my fault and it isn’t fair.”

  “Oh don’t be silly,” said Margot, helping Hope as much as she could without breaking off one of the woman’s arms. “She’s just trying to help me get into character.”

  “Of course I am,” said Hope, who had now arrived at half-erectness and was pausing to catch her breath before continuing the ascension. “And I think Margot is going to make a wonderful Mother Superior. I’m so excited about tonight! Aren’t you, Nina?”

  “Nina,” Margot interrupted, “is skeptical.”

  “Why are you skeptical, Nina?”

  “Well, the truth is, I’ve never really thought of Margot as a nun.”

  “Then I assure you, she’s going to prove you wrong tonight.”

  “Ms. Reddington?”

  The girl appeared again in the doorway.

  “Ms. Reddington?”

  “Yes?”

  “Would you like me to wrap your painting?”

  Hope beamed at her:

  “No it isn’t necessary, darling. But would you bring it out here, please? Let us look at it in the better light!”

  There was no better light, Nina thought to herself, because of the volcanic cigar haze blocking the skylight; but still Ramoula Peters’ seascape radiated a light of its own—how could great painters do that, she wondered; how could they create light with paint?—and the water in the picture seemed to move and glow and respond in perfect keeping with the full moon, which now was shining in the middle of Margot’s garden.

  “So you were the one who bought this!” said Margot.

  Hope took it in her hands, held it up for a second, worshipped it quietly, and then set it against one of the chairs.

  “I fell in love with it when I first saw it in your shop a week or so ago. But I had no occasion to buy it. Now I do.”

  “An occasion?” asked Margot.

  “Oh yes. One always needs an occasion. Look. Look at the lines that I’ve written here!”