Set Change: A Nina Bannister Mystery (The Nina Bannister Mysteries) (6 page)

“Everybody in the church is talking about it.”

“Actually, dear, everybody in church is eating.”

“That too. But between bites, they’re talking about Helen.
 
That’s the ‘occasion’ you were talking about in Margot’s shop yesterday.”

“Yes. That was my secret. I felt I should keep it to myself until church.
 
But, John, you were wonderful last night.”

“Thank you, Hope.”

“Nothing to thank me about. I’m just telling the truth.
 
And Nina––”

She put her hands on Nina’s shoulders and bent closer.

“One ‘thank you’ is necessary. I do have to say ‘thank you’ to you.”

“Well––”

“None of this would have happened, of course, without you.”

“I’m just glad I could help, Hope.”

“I knew sometime, somehow, that Helen would come back.
 
And now you’ve made it possible.”

“It was my pleasure.”

“If there was anyone in Bay St. Lucy who could have done this, who could have made it possible for Helen to return, I should have known it would be you.”

“You’re too kind, Hope.
 
I only did what little I could.”

“Thank you, Nina. Thank you for bringing my granddaughter back to me.”

So saying, she turned and disappeared into a puff of casseroles.

“Wow,” said John, still looking for Helen, who’d disappeared into the past. “She’s very grateful to you, Nina.”

“Yes.
 
She is.”

“You brought her granddaughter back to her.”

“Yes.
 
I guess I did.”

“How?
 
hat did you do, that had anything to do with Helen Reddington coming back home?”

Nina shook her head:

“I have no idea.”

John, startled, bent forward:

“What?”

“I haven’t the slightest idea what the woman is talking about.”

She continued to look around the dining hall.

But all Hope was gone.

CHAPTER 5:
 
NEWS

Nina had not been back to the Robinson Mansion—which, despite the fact that its official name was “Auberge des Arts,” would always be the Old Robinson Mansion to her—since the events of Christmas. Nor could she walk through the grounds without shivering a bit, despite the heat of the day.

Eve Ivory. Standing up there, above the assembled group, making that shocking announcement.

Her “security forces” standing grimly at her side.

The town envisioning its future as a gambling mecca.

And then, days later, she and Moon Rivard making their way through the escape tunnel. Emily Robinson’s doll, down there buried for years and years, rotting, its button eyes having seen nothing for decades but toads and spiders, its clump of cloth nose smelling must and decay.

So why wouldn’t there be chill about the place?

“Champagne, ma’am?”

She had, much as rubes in Chicago attract scam artists wanting money to send to their families stranded in Indiana, attracted a waiter.

She could not drink champagne in the early afternoon.

But it seemed rude simply to say no, for this young man, white jacketed and bow tied just as everyone else seemed to be white jacketed and bow tied, was beaming at her so eagerly, as though his entire future depended on completing this small transaction.

An excuse.

She needed an excuse.

“I’m sorry,” she said, “but I don’t have any money with me.”

Great excuse!

Not only that, but it was true!

“It’s free,” he responded.

Darn.

The only other excuse she could think of (also true) was “It makes me throw up,” but she did not want to say that, and so she was left with:

“Sure.”

He gave her the champagne.

So now she had a glass of champagne.

Too bad it was in this glass. If it were in a paper cup with a top on it she could carry it back to Furl, whose personality was more in keeping with champagne than her own.

“Nina!”

“Nina!”

Who was that?

Oh!

Macy and Paul Cox.

“Hello you two!”

“Nina,” shouted Macy, making her way past a strolling accordion player, “I saw you in the audience last night!”

“Of course I was in the audience.
 
I wouldn’t have missed it!”

“What did you think?”

“You were all superb!”

“Weren’t they great?” chimed in Paul.

“They certainly were!”

The conversation addled its way on for a few more sentences about the play and then it went into how excited everyone was at Alana’s announcement and then into the progress of the new high school, with Nina beginning every question with, “So how is….” and the MacyPaul tandem answering only:

“WE’REHAPPYWE’REHAPPYWE’REHAPPYWE’REHAPPY!”

no matter what words they actually chose to say or how they arranged them.

This went on for a few minutes and then Nina, like a bit of refuse after a disaster at sea, found herself floating along with the prevailing currents, looking first this way and then that, trying to avoid anything particularly destructive.

Finally, she felt drawn toward the mansion itself, as though somewhere just inside the main entrance was Niagara Falls and both she and everyone around her were going over them.

“Who are all these people?” she found herself asking.

Because, although she knew a good many of them (the usual gang of town dignitaries), there were others thrown in as well. People who genuinely did look comfortable in white jackets and bow ties, and who had silver hair that stayed in place. People who wore dark glasses because it was fashionable and not because they were out on the ocean all day; people who wore perfume and women who wore perfume, too.

Not like the strange folk who populated her little seaside village and loved their mangy existence,
 
most of which was carried out sipping coffee in bed and breakfasts or painting seascapes in refuse-filled attics or helping tourists catch redfish or just lying around drunk.

Some of these people, she found herself noticing, wore socks.

The whole mass of them did not go over the falls but rather oozed out into the small swamp of folding chairs that had been set in precisely the same manner Nina remembered from the night of Eve Ivory’s announcement.
 
Perhaps, she found herself thinking as she set the still full champagne glass beneath the chair and on the stone floor, perhaps Alana had planned it that way simply to infuriate Eve Ivory’s ghost.

Things were to be different now.

How different?

Well, soon to know.

For Alana herself had risen, come forward on the dais elevated above the entrance hall, and now addressed the group spread out below.

It was, Nina discovered almost immediately, a very different Alana.

More conservatively dressed now, in a dark blue suit which, though still capable of rendering a mild electric shock, had nothing like the Fusion-Reactor voltage usually emanating from Alana’s wardrobe.

“My Dear Friends…”

The voice was somewhat quieter now, and there was even a slight promise that all vowels would be treated equally and not whipped and stretched out to the point of exhaustion.

“My Dear Friends. The occasion that brings us here today is very different from the one that brought us here months ago.
 
This is a time––”

She looked down at the podium, shook her head, smiled at the audience, and said quietly:

“I have written eleven speeches to try to convey the wonderful news I have to impart.
 
None of them do it justice.
 
So I’m simply going to say it.”

Then say it,
thought Nina.
 

What’s happening?

“The first production to done in Theatre des Arts, our major stage here—will be William Shakespeare’s
Hamlet
, premiering August first.”

Wow,
thought Nina.

So who’s going to play Hamlet?

It’s a little harder part than Stanley Kowalski.

And you better get Ophelia’s name right and not start calling her Ellen.

An appreciative murmur was still rolling around in the crowd.

Nice idea, Alana.

Start with something ambitious.

Bay St. Lucy might not be able to produce the best
Hamlet
in the world, but we can sure as heck give it a try.

“The production will be mounted by The New York Shakespeare Company.”

Silence.

What?

Now it was not silence anymore; it had moved forward to a kind of Advanced Stupor.

“The entire production will be filmed by the Public Broadcasting Company. The role of Hamlet will be played by the incomparable Clifton Barrett, who will also direct. The role of Gertrude the Queen will be played by Constance Briarworth, who, as many of you I’m sure know, is given credit for discovering Mr. Barrett over a decade ago, and was Gertrude in his breakthrough performance at The New Globe Theatre in London. And the role of Ophelia, will be played by the town’s own daughter, and of course the wife of Mr. Barrett, Helen Reddington.”

It took a while of course for this all to sink in.

And it was not made any easier by the fact that everyone was still standing and buzzing around and laughing and saying “How did you do this?” and so on and so on.

While Nina was still seated.

Thinking.

But now it began to make sense.

The new people up there in the real clothes were producers, and film makers. And publicists, and—well, those kind of people.

They had been drawn here by a world class facility.
 
By a world class ocean.

Well the Gulf of Mexico wasn’t exactly the North Sea, but it could be cooled down a few degrees by an enterprising director.

And by money.

A lot of money.

Robinson money.

Which the town now had access to because of…well, because of what Nina had done.

This was the reason for Hope saying what she did.

Nina had, in a way, drawn Helen Reddington home.

The first thing to do was—no she could do that later—the very first thing to do was go and congratulate—no, she couldn’t because of the crowd, no, the first thing of all she had to do was—no that could come later, too…so what was the first thing she had to do?

Stand up?

No, sitting here was ok because everybody else was standing up and why do just what everybody else was doing?

Then she realized what the first thing to do was.

She reached under the chair, grabbed the glass, and, in three good swallows, drank the champagne.

Then she stood up, made her way through the crowd, then through the greenhouse, then past a radio reporter who was interviewing somebody who had to be a producer or an agent or a writer or a director or The President of France—and out into the gardens.

Where was—

There!
 
There he was!

“Waiter!”

“Yes, ma’am?”

“I need another glass of champagne!”

It was still exactly the same price as the other one had been—free—but it tasted much better.

Sip slowly, make it last.

Or just gulp it down and get another one.

What the heck.

She began to wander through the azaleas.

There was that waiter.

“I’ll have another glass, please.”

“Here you are, ma’am.”

“Still the same price?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Ha ha ha!

She was much funnier when she was drinking champagne.

She took the first sip, realized that she was moving from the azaleas to the roses, and then remembered teaching
Hamlet
all those years. Bobby Jacobs that time standing in front of the class to recite one of twelve or fourteen famous lines she’d asked them to memorize.

Not all of the lines, of course.

Just—just choose one of the lines, come up in front of the class and recite it.