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

by T'Gracie Reese

“I’m as sure as I can get, Moon. It’s the only thing that makes any sense.”

  “All right. Then you do what you have to do.”

  And Nina did.

  In the far corner of the upper floor of the Bay St. Lucy Airport, a small press conference was being held. The conference involved three reporters, who were quietly asking questions, and the woman who was the subject of their interview.

  The woman, an elegant fur boa around her neck despite the heat outside, a diamond tiara glistening in the harsh airport lighting…

  …the woman dressed like a Christmas tree, just as she had been the first night Nina had ever seen her at Hope’s garden party, and as she had been the night Margot had slapped Barrett…

  …the woman whom everyone had forgotten about.

  The woman whose name Nina had not even bothered to learn…just as she had not learned the name of the actor who played Polonius, or Laertes, or Fortinbras…

  …this woman, who, channeling Queen Gertrude, had said only two nights ago, “Oh, Hamlet, thou hast cleft my heart in twain!”

  …this woman, Constance Briarworth, looked up as Nina approached the group.

  And she smiled, the kind of a smile only a Christmas tree can emit.

  “Can I,” she asked huskily, “help you?”

  “I’d like,” Nina said, quietly as the three reporters stepped back, “an autograph.”

  “Certainly. Do you have something for me to sign?”

  Nina nodded and pulled from the back pocket of her blue jeans a small notebook, not much larger than a deck of cards.

  She flipped it open, took a ball point pen from the pocket of her blouse, and wrote on it:

  WE KNOW YOU DID IT.

  Then she handed it to Constance Briarworth.

  There was no change of expression at all.

  Finally the woman lifted her head and stared hard at Nina, who merely gestured subtly toward Moon.

  Moon had now been joined by another young officer.

  They stood at a respectful distance, just beside the escalators.

  Then Constance Briarworth wrote something on the small tablet, which she handing back to Nina.

  On it were the words:

  THE REST IS SILENCE.

  Then, after more smiles all around, to the young reporters:

  “Well. If that will be all, I believe I have another small meeting to attend before the flight leaves.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  And they left, disappearing into the milling flow of passengers coming and going.

  “So…”

  Queen Gertrude stood waiting.

  “Over there,” said Nina.

  “All right, dear. Let’s go.”

  She strode off.

  And Nina followed.

  CHAPTER 22: ANSWERS

  At 8:30 p.m. Nina arrived on her Vespa at the entranceway to the Reddington home.

  The entire area was deserted.

  Lights glowed in the living room of the house, but there were no police cars, no news vans, and no panhandlers selling posters of Clifton Barrett.

  “Everything,” she whispered as she dismounted and toed the kickstand, “is going on downtown.”

  And that was the case. Constance Briarworth having confessed in a tearful but brief interview…to which Nina had been privy…that she’d given Clifton Barrett an overdose of Percodan, pouring it into several glasses of Scotch—the world had begun to follow her, to the exclusion of everyone else.

  No one knew where she was at this time, but word somehow leaked out that the nine o’clock press conference would feature a ‘new development to the case.’

  Nothing so baited, so tantalized, the wild dogs of journalism as the words ‘new development.’

  And so it came to pass that the placid, moss-overgrown and gas-lamped yard of Hope Reddington had returned to its former times, its summer night card party innocence, when merely the sound of crickets mixed with the quiet burble of Plaquemine Bayou flowing by in the back.

  John Giusti stepped out of the house just as she approached it.

  “John!”

  “Come on through, Nina. They’re out in the back, sitting on the pier.”

  “Have you heard, John?”

  He opened the door for her, and asked quietly as she entered the house:

  “Heard what?”

  “No one has called you?”

  He shook his head:

  “The phone’s been ringing, but we haven’t answered. A couple of hours earlier Jackson Bennett came by. He tried to talk to both Hope and Helen again, but they won’t say anything. Then he left, kind of put out, and said not to answer the phone. So we haven’t.”

  “The police haven’t been here?”

  “According to Jackson, they’re probably going to show up in a few minutes. There’s going to be press conference, I guess. But both Hope and Helen are ready to…well, to be taken away.”

  “And no one has told you what’s happened?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Let’s go out to the pier.”

  He led the way, Nina all the while wondering why had no one come to inform the Reddingtons that they were free now, and would have to go nowhere.

  Of course, she asked herself, who would this informer have been?

  Certainly no one from the police force, which, in the first place, had its hands busy with events happening downtown; and not Jackson, who had not been informed himself.

  Who would have informed him?

  He was not Constance Briarworth’s attorney.

  So that was the case as she followed John through the kitchen and out onto the pier.

  Helen Reddington sat at a metal table, situated on the rocking pier almost directly beneath her window.

  Some six feet away sat her grandmother, staring out across the bayou.

  Helen was smoking a cigarette, which smoldered in the ashtray before her.

  Hope, hearing the kitchen door close, turned, looked at Nina, and then at her granddaughter.

  “She’s taken up,” she said, icily, “smoking.”

  Helen said nothing, but merely drew hard on the cigarette and set it in the ashtray, causing Hope to say:

  “Filthy habit.”

  “Grandmamma…”

  John placed himself between the two women, looked down first at one, then at the other, and said, softly:

  “Both of you. You’ve got to give this up.”

  Neither woman spoke.

  “The police will be coming soon. There’s going to be a press conference. If one of you did this thing, then that’s all right. The whole community is on your side. The man was a monster. There will be money to defend whoever did it. We’ve just got to know.”

  “As far as I’m concerned,” said Hope, her head swiveling like that of a bird so that she found herself peering again across the water, “we know now. I gave the man an overdose. He was, like Polonius, a rash intruding fool. And he got what he deserved. I murdered him.”

  “Grandmamma,” said Helen, darkly, “you did no such thing.”

  “I did!”

  “You didn’t! I did!”

  “You did not! And I’m so disappointed in you for lying in this way. Your parents brought you up to know better.”

  Hope looked at Nina then and said:

  “Nina. You tell me. What has happened to values in this country?”

  “Hope, I…”

  “What are we teaching our children, anyway? If I had gone to my mother, or my grandmother, and told either of them that I was a murderess, I’d have been believed. But now…perhaps it’s the drugs. Or television.”

  “Grandmamma, I just will not…”

  “Neither of you did it.”

  A turtle, close by on the bank, plopped into the water.

  Fireflies were swarming on one of the bushes that had covered the far pier post.

  A meteor lined its way directly overhead, som
ewhere between Antares and Vega, and Nina thought she could hear its soft hissing as it made its way toward the Milky Way.

  Because of these great noises there could not have been said to be silence; but what there was was close enough, so that John Giusti’s words rang across the bayou like shots from a small rifle when he said:

  “What did you say?”

  “Neither of them did it.”

  Both women were looking at her now.

  “What?” asked one of them, the specific identity unimportant since they were, genetically, except for the matter of a few decades, the same woman.

  “What?”

  Same thing, same unimportant identity.

  Helen picked up her cigarette, hurled it into the bayou, and took two steps closer.

  Hope watched the cigarette disappear into the dark water, chastised the dying cigarette, its smoker, and its manufacturer—and also took two steps closer.

  They were all standing now.

  “What?”

  The word had become like an opera chorus now, repeated with increasing degrees of intensity, first given by the soprano—Hope, the alto—Helen, and the base—John.

  “What. What? WHAT?”

  Nina to the two women singers:

  “Neither of you did it.”

  Nina to John:

  “Neither of them did it.”

  A nameless creature came up out of the bayou, stuck its head over the planking of the pier, and asked:

  “Then who did do it?”

  To which Nina answered:

  “Constance Briarworth.”

  Silence.

  John stepped forward and asked:

  “Who the hell is Constance Briarworth?”

  And then the police arrived.

  If the previous moment had featured a small chorus involving three voices, the next half hour turned into The Pirates of Penzance, with everybody arriving at once: Moon Rivard, Jackson Bennett, representatives from Edie Towler’s office, and a number of people carrying around cell phones, some of which were actually cameras, some of which were miniature television sets, some of which were computers, and some of which were just little video games.

  The long and short of this was that Nina, at precisely 9 p.m., had the choice of watching Edie Towler on at least three screens, one huge one that had been set up in the now-magical-again backyard, one medium-sized which had been set up on one of the pier tables, and one secretive and tiny, which radiated like a silver dollar or a tumor in the palm of the man standing beside her.

  “I can now tell you that we’ve identified a person of interest connected with the death of Mr. Clifton Barrett.”

  “Can you tell us…”

  “That is all I can tell you at this time. This ends the press conference.”

  Then all of the screens in the garden showed cans of dog food.

  Then they went blank.

  After which there followed a period of mass confusion, with Helen hugging John, and John hugging Nina, and Hope hugging Nina, and all of the cats in the neighborhood going out on the pier and pooping.

  Finally Nina found herself in a good place, which was within the encirclement of Jackson Bennett’s arms, being led into the house.

  It took some minutes but the reporters were ejected, and the Reddingtons seated, Nina in the middle, Jackson looking cautiously out of all windows at once.

  “All right,” he said. “This is a much better meeting than I thought we would be having. As I think Nina must have told you by now, Constance Briarworth has been arrested for giving Clifton Barrett a fatal overdose of Percodan.”

  John stated what had now become his theme:

  “Who the hell is Constance Briarworth?”

  But Helen interrupted.

  “Constance? Constance was Clifton’s Gertrude. She was his first Gertrude, actually. In fact, she discovered him.”

  “Yes,” Jackson countered. “But, as I learned on the police tape I just got from Moon Rivard—the tape of the confession, made out at the airport—that was the problem. She did discover him when he was quite young. Actually she did more than that. She married him.”

  “Married him?” gasped Helen.

  “Yes. But that did not turn out too well for Miss Briarworth.”

  “She didn’t know,” Helen whispered, “who she was getting involved with.”

  “No,” Jackson continued. “He exploited her. He used her contacts to further his career. And then his interests became obvious.”

  “Younger women,” hissed Helen.

  “And so he divorced Constance Briarworth, much in the same way he was planning to divorce you, Helen. He ruined her career and took her money.”

  “So why did she agree to come here?” asked John.

  Jackson nodded:

  “We got all of this from her confession. It turns out that she never actually revealed to Clifton Barrett the depth of her bitterness. She continued to call him from time to time, and act as though she was still an ‘old friend.’ But she kept up with his exploits, keeping a mental list of the younger women.”

  “And biding,” said Helen, quietly, “her time.”

  “Yes. Until now. She learned there was to be a Hamlet; she approached him in some manner, I’m not quite sure how; and she volunteered to do Gertrude one last time, “for old times.”

  “For old times,” Nina found herself echoing.

  “Of course,” Jackson continued, “she knew what drugs he took. And then..well, we should let Nina take it from there.”

  Nina did.

  “I’m not that knowledgeable about drugs. But one thing didn’t make sense, Hope, in either your story or Helen’s. In both of your accounts Clifton Barrett drank the medication, immediately felt dizzy, and passed out in bed. But that couldn’t have happened. It would have taken some time—at least a half an hour according to my encyclopedia of dangerous drugs (She smiled inwardly, wondering how Margot would react to this new title) for the overdose to make him feel anything at all, other than amorous. That he was certainly feeling while he gave his farewell speech. Everybody was aware of it.”

  “Yes,” said Helen, demurely, “his hands were quite—active.”

  “The cad,” muttered Hope.

  John muttered something else.

  “And that’s what we were all watching. But we didn’t see the mouse trap that he was reaching back into, and from which he was taking his Scotch. First one glass, then another, then another.”

  “I didn’t notice it myself,” said Helen.

  “No, because you were dealing with his hands. But only one hand at a time. Behind him, almost but not quite out of the sight of the video cameras, someone—Constance—was pouring ‘juice of cursed hebenon into the porches of his ears.’ Except not ears in this case but mouth. And the cursed hebenon was Percodan. She put a huge dose in every glass of Scotch. Thank heaven nobody bothered to clean the kitchen today, and Alana has promised me to lock it That glass is surely there, with the Percodan traces left in it. Even if Constance Briarworth recants her story—which I doubt she will do—the proof is there. At any rate, Barrett was feeling the drug when he got home. He did in fact take his normal amount of Pitocin…not a spiked amount, because neither you, Helen, nor you, Hope, ever spiked the medication at all…but when that amount of Pitocin reacted with the giant amount of Percodan he had already ingested…well, the end was near. He had only an hour or so to live.”

  Jackson Bennett interrupted at this point. He looked at Helen, then at Hope and asked:

  “So let me get this straight, you two: Hope, you actually thought your daughter had given Barrett the overdose?”

  Hope shrugged:

  “I didn’t see any other possibility. Helen had told me the truth about her husband, and what he was about to do to both of us. I’d seen him strike her—something I shall never forget. I’m, as I have said, a pharmacist’s wife. I’ve seen many users of drugs. Barrett did not seem to me the kind of man who would accidently overdose. Once I learned th
at he was dead, I had no choice but to believe that Helen had done it…and that she would be arrested for it. I could not let that happen.”

  “But Helen…you knew your grandmother hadn’t done it.”

  “Of course I did. She never came into the room, and I was certain of that. Once I realized that morning that Clifton was dead, I honestly assumed that he’d overdosed, and that the autopsy would prove that. But when Grandmamma stepped in and made her confession…such a strikingly detailed confession—I simply had no choice. I had to make up the story that I had done it.”

  “Would both of you have gone to jail?”

  There was silence for a time.

  Finally Hope began to form the thing that was, after several hours of reintensification, to become her smile.

  “I’m a very stubborn lady.”

  “Yes, you are,” said Helen.

  “And I still resent your implication that I could not have killed the man. I was just as capable of doing so as you.”

  “Neither one of you could kill anybody,” said Nina. “And you know it.”

  “Well…”

  “Well…”

  “Jackson,” asked Nina, “where is Constance Briarworth now?”

  “On a plane to New York.”

  “New York? Why?”

  “Because that’s where everybody involved wants this trial to take place. We’ve already granted extradition. That’s also why Edie said so little at the press conference.”

  “I don’t understand, Jackson.”

  He shook his head:

  “Let me put it this way. Let’s say a married couple from Bay St. Lucy took a trip to New York City, and stayed in a hotel room. One got mad at the other and committed murder.”

  “We would want the trial to take place here.”

  “Of course. They’re Bay St. Lucy people. It would be our affair, not the city of New York’s. And that’s the way it is here. If there’s going to be a media circus, it belongs in New York. Clifton Barrett brought his own evil here, and it devoured him. But it was an evil that had been building up for a long time. Now it’s gone back to where it originated.”

  “So the press conference announcing the real murder, and revealing the murderess…”

  “Will be tomorrow morning. In New York. Where it belongs.”

  Another period of silence, after which John said: