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

by T'Gracie Reese

  She produced a card, on which she had written several lines of poetry in the superb handwriting of people who went to school sometime around the turn of the century and learned Latin, and true mathematics—and handwriting.

  Margot read the line aloud:

  “I love the soft collision here of harbor and shore, the subtle haunting briny quality that all small towns have when they are situated by the sea.” William Styron.

  “That’s beautiful,” said Nina.

  “Isn’t it?”

  “What is the occasion, Hope?”

  Hope Reddington looked at her, then stepped back toward the splattering fountain—then put both palms before her mouth.

  Then she let the palms drop, and, as though she was a puppet whose hands were attached by invisible strings to the corners of her mouth—which of course raised as the hands now dropped––said:

  “Oh I can’t tell you that!”

  She then placed herself squarely between Margot and Nina, encircled each of their waists with a birdlike arm, gazed upward first at one and then at the other, and kindled a smile that radiated like a small fire, burning purely white and emitting its own heat, as though a star precisely one foot in diameter—the size of Hope’s face—had gleefully exploded.

  Then she whispered:

  “It’s a secret!”

  Then she swept the painting up and held it against her.

  She kissed the card—

  ––and she turned and tottered out of the shop.

  CHAPTER 3: PERFORMANCE!

  There is a magic about community theaters.

  There is a force which breeds, even in the smallest of settlements, one person who is absolutely perfect for the part.

  A village in central Texas, population eight hundred.

  Somehow God will provide a hardware store owner, or a mail delivery man, or an attorney or a dog catcher or a whatever––because behind the footlights it matters not in the least—one person who is more like The King of Siam than Yul Brynner.

  A ‘ville’ of some kind. Smithville or Jonesville or Johnsonville or Oilville or Cowville or whatever.

  A ‘ville’ hidden away in the foothills of the Ozarks, two hours drive away from Little Rock

  The Forces of Theatricality will combine to throw up, emit, disgorge, make happen some way—a huge South Seas Woman to sing “Happy Talk” from South Pacific and bring down the house.

  One of Nina’s favorite sayings—she was never sure what culture it had come from, but suffice to say one of those groupings of people less civilized than we and thus infinitely more wise—was the proverb that “A child remains a boy until a man is needed.”

  In the world of community theater that proverb read:

  “An insurance agent remains an insurance agent until Stanley Kowalski is needed.”

  And in truth, only three years ago––no one could forget it––Marvin Harper, State Farm Insurance agent for little Bay St. Lucy, prim, church-going, father of four, model husband, a bit bookish, somewhat timid except in matters of fender repairs and deductibles—

  ––this man had transformed much as a werewolf does in the spell of the full moon, into Marlon Brando, had hurled himself upon the stage floor, held his hands open to the floodlights above him, noticed that there was nobody up there except a stage hand or two, ignored that fact, and bellowed:

  “Ellen! Ellen! Ellen!”

  The audience had been transfixed.

  Nor did it detract even in the least from that unforgettable moment when someone was gauche enough to mention, in the anteroom after the performance, over coffee and cheesecake, that the name may have been wrong.

  What, the reply had been, is in a name?

  Even Shakespeare knew that much!

  And if Marvin Harper saw in those floodlights a woman named Ellen and not a woman named Stella, that was his own business.

  (He must have seen her there quite clearly, since he shouted out to her in precisely the same manner in the Saturday night performance, the Sunday matinee performance, and the Monday night finale).

  Then it was all over, of course.

  And, the werewolf-moon having gone down, he returned to being an insurance agent.

  Six months later the equally nondescript manager of The Piggly Wiggly became Curly, and Ida Sue Miller morphed herself into Ado Annie.

  It was incredible.

  And it kept happening.

  The only problem with the whole thing was that it kept happening in such an obscure way. Millions might have been enthralled by seeing the citizens of one small community such as Bay St. Lucy outdo the combined efforts of Broadway and Hollywood, except that millions could not fit into the Bay St. Lucy Community Theater Playhouse.

  Fifty three could.

  The problem was not helped by the fact that certain seats were taken in advance, and could not be offered up for public consumption.

  The Mayor, for example, had to be there.

  The town council had, if not to be there in their entirety, at least to be represented.

  Same with the school board.

  “Wouldn’t miss it for the world!”

  “Couldn’t keep me away!”

  And whether these sentiments were entirely honest and heart felt, they at least had to be expressed, and they had to be expressed by people who were in fact there tonight, right now, sitting in seat five, row nine, knees held tight and almost up against chest, program held just as tight up to face, cell phones off please, all preliminary chatting and coffee drinking in the anteroom, done, because the time approached precisely seven o’clock, and…

  …Mrs. Gertrude Throckmorton arrived.

  Mrs. Throckmorton, oblivious to a trickle of applause, made her way through the teenagers standing in the back of the theater, the parents in the middle of the theater, and the town elders in the front of the theater. She adjusted her glasses, patted the bun behind her hair, put her meager body through a few light calisthenics, then turned and faced the piano.

  She glared at it as though she hated it.

  Nina, no more than eight feet away from her and feeling dangerously exposed in her first row seat, held her breath while the woman threw herself onto the piano bench, threw open the music, threw her shoulders back, and threw her head forward so that her eyes were no more than six inches from the sheet music, which began to glow yellow in a small sphere of light emitted by the piano light.

  Then she attacked the music.

  BOMBOMBOMBOMBOMBOMBOM—

  And there they all came, realized a delighted Nina, closing her eyes and settling back into the three or four inch space that was all she had room to settle back into.

  There they all came, cascading and serenading and melting one into another and climaxing and softening and loudening and harmonizing and soloing and intertwining like Rogers and Hammerstein ropes being twirled into Austria and Alpine Mountain Air!

  There they all were, taking Nina back years into the day her father and mother—how old had she been then, ten?–– had taken her to Jackson, to the old and huge and red velveted Majestic Theater.

  Where she, sitting in the second balcony, had seen Maria gambol out into her mountain meadow.

  There they all were again, brought forth into the tiny rarified space of Theater Bay St. Lucy by the fingers of Mrs. Throckmorton, out of a frightened piano that seemed to shiver to the point of collapsing as she drove it like an engineer drives a freight train.

  There they all were, the great melodies of The Sound of Music.

  And then, after a breathless pause during which the audience was too shocked and awed even to applaud the fact that Mrs. Throckmorton had in three minutes and twenty seconds played what seemed a hundred and fifty songs—Macy Peterson was on the stage.

  Except she was not on the stage.

  She was in that mountain meadow.

  And Margot had been exactly right.

  She was Maria von Trapp.

  She inhaled…

  …complete silenc
e for only a moment…

  …and it all came flooding back into Nina’s mind:

  Macy’s statement.

  The letter opener.

  Eve Ivory, dead in the bedroom.

  And Macy the Perfect, Macy the Sweet Young Teacher, crying to Nina, who’d been the only one to believe her:

  “I didn’t kill her! I’m not insane!”

  Another moment; another pause, and then Macy pouring out her heart in another way, and carrying the town away:

  Singing about hills being alive.

  It was absolutely enchanting of course.

  And it just got better.

  It got better when Margot Gavin stepped onto the stage and proved, of course, that Alana, who for years had directed The Bay St. Lucy Community Theater just as she directed all things artistic in the town—that Alana’s eye had been perfect and that, improbable as it seemed, the little town that had produced the for all time definitive Stanley Kowalski had now produced the for all time definitive Mother Superior.

  Nina sensed this from the time Margot, ramrod straight, stern, crag-faced and habit-enshrouded, called Macy toward her, and put her palms on Macy’s shoulders.

  She knew it though when, upon hearing Margot say that Maria was going to have to leave the abbey…

  …an entire crowd of fifty four people sighed as one:

  “Ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.”

  My God she’s good, Nina said to herself.

  They were all good, of course. Good were Alicia Matthews, age six, Thomas Peterson, age eight, Susan Thompson, age nine, Nancy Espinoza, age eleven, Robert Dowd, age thirteen, Dan Slocum, age fifteen, and Ramona Howe, age sixteen but “Going on Seventeen” and “On the Brink”—every one of whom Nina knew, because, although through with teaching forever, she still had the career educator’s habit of seeing every human being in the town at age four and saying mentally, “I’d love to have that one in my classroom,” or “Uh, oh.”

  Good also was Alana Delafosse as a director who, working with a fifteen foot square stage and a one foot high platform, had told Macy to sit with her legs crossed, fake strumming a guitar which she had no idea how to play, while Mrs. Throckmorton, eyes glued into the corresponding eyes of every child on stage, softly ever so softly insinuated the chords as they were the comings and goings of the sea itself:

  Bum Bum Bum Bum

  Bum Bum Bum Bum

  And Marcy, who actually was going to teach these children in the classroom and was already teaching two of them, quietly, encouragingly:

  …singing about deer…

  …female deer…

  …sewing, running…

  First the children were hesitant, and then they were whispering, then louder, louder still, and finally standing while belting it out at the audience.

  Then they were marching in circles and then they were bisecting the circles and marching rearwards and forwards again and over and under one another and sitting and standing and doing both at the same time and all the while smiling broader and broader and more and more joyously while the audience, hypnotized, began to clap, and stomp, and sing along, which of course no one could stop doing while the ever-moving line of total and absolute cuteness which was the sailor-suited Von Trapp children aka Children of Bay St. Lucy Our Children Will You Look at Them UP THERE?—

  ––until this model of absolute rightness stopped stock still; the children gazed in wonder at their new Mother Macy who slapped a palm down on the top of her head, sang a superb R over Q minor, the highest and clearest note ever allowed in the universe…

  …gasped for air, bowed…

  And the house dissolved in delirious applause.

  The children stood, as though electrified.

  Macy was RADIOACTIVEGIRL, her grin alone powering the cities of the Mississippi Coast.

  Quiet was restored five minutes later.

  But that was the way the play went, one triumph after another, culminating in the great scene at The Salzburg Festival, which even the real Salzburg Festival had never done quite so well.

  At final curtain the applause lasted unabated for a full five minutes.

  It was only stopped by the entrance of the play’s director, Alana Delafosse.

  “My dearest Laaaaydeeez and Gennnntlmen, thank you thank you thank you sssooooo much for coming!”

  It would have been worth the price of admission—ten dollars for a front row seat, except nothing at all for Nina, who of course received her ticket free, as she received just about everything free these days, as a small show of gratitude from the town for saving it and making its continued existence possible—worth the price of admission, free or ten dollars or whatever it might have been, simply to see the theatrical spectacle that was Alana Delafosse, just being herself.

  Applause applause applause.

  Large spray of roses now being handed to Alana by the mayor, Alana kissing the mayor first on one cheek then on the other, the roses being handed to one of the stagehands, Alana, her splendid caramel creole skin shining in the footlights and her Cruella de Ville outfit glowing a red so bright that it seemed ready to burst into flame—Alana, preparing to make an announcement.

  Alana, so the stories went, had been born on The Upper West Side in New York City, to a Creole mother and a Senegalese father, who happened to be the United Nations ambassador for his country. She had been educated at the finest private schools until, while still a teenager, she had run off to Paris with her lover, a Russian émigré. This man had been killed in a duel—allegedly fought over her—and she had been whisked away by forces unknown to Moscow, where she’d learned fluent Russian and been trained as a Soviet Special Forces Agent, or, more simply, spy. She had disappeared from sight for a while, but rumor had it that she herself had become an assassin, killing several high ranking generals while working to support revolutionary forces in Chile.

  The fact that none of these stories were true held no importance. When juxtaposed to actual reality (Alana had been born and raised in a small trailer home four miles from New Iberia, Louisiana, and had never been west of St. Charles, or north of Lafayette, or south of New Orleans, or east of—well, where she was right now)—when juxtaposed against this abysmally boring and completely incomprehensible (because how could anyone raised in such circumstances have become ALANA?)—reality, the Tolstoy novel that passed as her past simply had to be preferred.

  And so that was the background everyone envisioned and savored every time Alana held forth.

  Which she was preparing to do now.

  “It both deliiights meee––”

  (Alana had great fun with, and a deep love of, long vowels, which she seemed never to want to let go of. They became her children from the moment they entered her mouth, and she did not want to allow them out into the world, where who knows what would become of them.)

  “––and it greeeeeeeves meeee, to remiiiiiind uuuuuuuuuu, that this will be the last performance, in the hallowed spaaaaaaace, that is the Bay St. Lucy Community Theater Auditorium.”

  General sigh.

  “But as you all knoooooooo, better things are in store for us! The Auberge des Arts is a Reee-ality!”

  Applause.

  “What had beeeen for so many years the Robinson Mansion…”

  (Alana did not much respect words that contained only short vowel sounds, and so she got through them as quickly as possible).

  “––has become, as we had dreeeeeeeeeeemed––)

  Finally! A word (dream) whose ethereal meaning was commensurate with its vowel potentiality!

  “––the cultural center of our community!”

  More applause.

  “The mansion has afforded us space for two theaters, a black box, and a larger venue, seating one hundred and fifty spectators.”

  Ooooohs and aaaaahs.

  (There might have been a problem getting one hundred and fifty Bay St. Lucyans to go to the theater on any Friday night, especially given the fact that, that hurdle having been jumped, th
ere would have been no one left to go on Saturday or Sunday—

  ––but that was something for down the road.

  Now it was time to celebrate.)

  “And so, as you know, the Arts Council of Bay St. Lucy has sent invitations to all of you, to attend a Special Champagne Lunch to be held tomorrow at one p.m. on the grounds of The Auberge. At that time I will have a special announcement to make concerning the inaugural performance of our new space.”

  Cheers.

  Clapping.

  Alana making a show of modesty, which was about like a Bengal tiger blending into a set of army-green curtains.

  It took a few more shows of flamboyancy to get Alana off the stage, and in these moments, Nina did in fact remember receiving her invitation—which came special delivery, and had contained a handwritten supplication on the bottom of the elegant card the words: “Please come, Nina! You will be our guest of honor!”

  She also remembered a dull sense of dread.

  Champagne in the afternoon.

  Who drank champagne in the afternoon?

  And why should she want to be in their company, whoever they were?

  Oh well—she could go home at two and sleep the rest of the afternoon.

  And so she left the theater, happy in the hope that neither she nor Bay St. Lucy had more to fear in the coming months than a surfeit of champagne.

  It would take several weeks for her to learn how wrong she was.

  CHAPTER 4: JOYS AND CONCERNS

  On Sunday mornings Nina attended worship services at The Second United Methodist Church at the corner of Jackson and Parry streets. There was not a First United Methodist Church. There probably had been one, but something had happened to it, and no one much cared to talk about the matter now.

  There was a newer Methodist church on the outskirts of Bay St Lucy, but she had never been tempted to attend, probably for that very reason: namely, that it was newer. Newer was not good in terms of religion. Newer did not promise the same dark burnished oaken pews that she and Frank had sat in for so many years—so many in fact that although Sandra McCallister sat regularly on her right hand now, the spot to her left was, as a matter of courtesy, always left open.