Sea Change (The Nina Bannister Mysteries Book 1) Read online

  ––into the three-vehicle parking lot that fronted Elementals: From the Sea and the Earth––

  ––Margot Gavin’s shop, beneath her bed and breakfast.

  Taking off her helmet and hanging it by the chin strap to the handlebars as she propped down the kickstand, she looked up and noted Margot Gavin, puttering about in the vases section, and waving to her.

  “You’re just in time, Nina. I was about to actually do some work. Now you’ve saved me. We can go back in the garden, and I can smoke another cigarette.”

  Margot took two long strides toward the garden which, because she was almost six feet tall, meant that she had already halved the distance. Nina followed, still marveling at the kind of clothes Margot could wear, and wear successfully. At the present she had on a baggy sweater which, with its vertical red strips and horizontal white gashes and stars, looked less like a garment and more like a vast tent that some sultan had disassembled and was carrying over the shoulder.

  “Look at the clay pots there by the door. Nice, aren’t they?”

  Nina looked, nodded, agreed, said so, and inquired about the potter.

  “Sarah Fielding.”

  “I don’t think I know her.”

  “New. Moved down last month from Vermont. I met her two weeks ago at some social or charity sale or bake sale or something. When I found out what she did, I asked her to throw some pots for me. And she has.”

  “They’re very nice.”

  Of course everything in Margot’s vine-enshrouded shop––all of the landscapes, seascapes, portraits, pots, knick knacks, local art, exotic art—was very nice. That was not surprising, Nina mused, given the woman’s background; but how the most hideous possibilities could result in the most magical realities—the monstrosity of a sweater was only the latest such miracle—never ceased to amaze her.

  They walked to the center of the fifteen-foot square, palm-fronded fountain-splashing garden, and sat themselves, each feeling quite civilized, in black, wrought iron chairs, the table rocking slightly on paving stones still glistening from the early morning dew.

  It was all perfectly delightful and would have been Eden itself had not the scents pouring in from nearby bakeries, sea air, candy shops, and lush undergrowth, been invaded by the odor of Margot’s cigarette.

  “Have you had coffee this morning, Nina?”

  “Two cups.”

  “Then you’re only beginning. Sit for a few minutes; I’ll make us a fresh pot.”

  “You really feel no need to be inside your store?”

  “None at all. Actually, I shouldn’t have opened the store at all this morning.”

  “Why not?”

  “A perfectly ghastly night. I’m trying to get it out of my mind.”

  “What happened?”

  Margot threw back her head, scrunched her face aground the cigarette, which she seemed on the point of inhaling, and blew out a cloud of gray, swirling smoke toward the colorless sky the way a fire truck belches a stream of water at a blaze.

  The smoke, Nina could not help noticing, was the exact color of Margot’s steel gray, short cut hair.

  “I took one of my new boarders out for dinner.”

  Nina was silent for a time.

  Finally she said, quietly:

  “I warned you about that. You know you find your boarders extremely boring.”

  Margot nodded, her face as deeply and exquisitely wrinkled as a Kandinsky painting or a Stravinsky symphony, or, for that matter, any work of art whose creator’s name ended in “insky.”

  Margot’s face was, in short—and Nina had noted this from the moment she first saw the woman over a year ago—a work of modern art itself. As equally impossible to comprehend as to forget, and probably not even conceivable to a century that had not experienced two devastating wars.

  “Why did I not listen to you?”

  “I don’t know. You’re so intelligent otherwise. Do you want to talk about it?”

  “No. Yes. I don’t know. It’s all so wretched.”

  “This wasn’t a man that you took out, was it?”

  “Oh heavens no. I’m not that stupid. No, it was a woman who moved in yesterday. She’ll be staying two weeks. Her name is ‘Wilson.’ A widow from Wisconsin or Vermont or Arizona. One of those places, you know.”

  “States. Yes, I know. There are lots of them. Now, why don’t you get us some coffee? It will make you feel better.”

  “No, it won’t. Some gin though…”

  “Too early.”

  “Why do people always say that? It has such a dampening effect on the day, when one hears it.”

  “Coffee.”

  “All right.”

  Margot rose, disappeared into the shop, and fidgeted around in the small kitchen area by the back wall, which had somehow been magically hidden away between a display of cookbooks and a table covered with children’s games.

  When she returned, she carried on one upward turned palm, as though the entire apparatus was weightless, a shining chrome platter––cups, sugar bowl filled with sweetener packets, creamer, and spoons all laid out upon it.

  “This will do us both good,” said Nina, savoring the steam scent rising as her cup filled.

  “I doubt that.”

  “All right. It will do me good. You may be a little beyond help right now. So where did you take her?”

  “Out to eat.”

  “Where?”

  “A restaurant.”

  “One surprise after another. And what was so bad about it?”

  Margot thought for a while, stubbed out her cigarette, took a sip of coffee—and then seemed to become aware of something on her skin. She began frantically, with one overly large palm, trying to brush from her sweater sleeves a substance which seemed to be burning her, but which Nina could not see.

  “What is it?” cried Nina, alarmed.

  “Get it…get it off me! Get it off me!”

  “Margot, what is it?”

  “It’s all over me! It’s on my skin! Nina, it’s all over me! Get it off! Get it off!”

  “Margot what is it?”

  “It’s boredom! There’s boredom all over me! Get it off! Get it off!”

  Nina sat back, wondering whether it was a good thing or a very bad thing that, somehow, gradually and against all odds, that this woman had become—should she say it?

  Yes, no denying it.

  Her best friend.

  She waited.

  Finally, the paroxysm or spasm over, Margot sank back into her chair, which tottered metallically as she did so.

  “That bad, huh?” asked Nina.

  Margot whispered, seemingly to herself.

  “I’ll never get it off. Never. It’s all over me. Like the blood on Lady Macbeth’s hands.”

  She leaned forward, stared intently at Nina, and hissed:

  “I’m covered in boredom; and I’ll never get it off me”

  “Yes you will.”

  “No. She’s poisoned me.”

  “It couldn’t have been that bad.”

  “It was worse. She had to tell me about her late husband and what he had done for a living––”

  “Which was?”

  “I didn’t listen.”

  “See, that may be a reason, Margot, why conversations tend to bore you.”

  “Do you think so?”

  “I’m just throwing it out as a suggestion.”

  “Perhaps you have a point. At any rate, though, the person has children, who had to be talked about. And pets at home that someone is caring for––”

  “Back in Arizona or Vermont?”

  “Rhode Island, perhaps. Is there a Rhode Island?”

  “I don’t know, Margot. I taught English, not geography.”

  “Oh. I thought you might know.”

  “No. But anyway, Margot. You did a nice thing. The woman—what’s her name?”

  “Wilson. She’s staying two weeks, as I said. Then she’s going to New Orleans. She kept telling me, ‘
I’ve never been to New Orleans! I’ve never been to New Orleans!’ As though I cared.”

  “But you did care, Margot. Good for you! This poor Mrs. Wilson is completely on her own, and you took her out and listened to her. She’s never been to New Orleans. All right. She needed to tell somebody that, and you were there for her. Now you won’t have to hear it again, nor will you ever have to try to socialize with any more of your boarders for a while, or at least until you’re feeling sociable.”

  “Thank God. Good, then. This has been quite therapeutic. Thank you, Nina.”

  “Not at all.

  She paused to listen to the cathedral bells chime the hour, then play the first notes of a hymn whose melody she knew, but could not place. Music sifted down through the garden just as the aroma from Margot’s herb garden rose up from the leaves and out over the town. Bay St. Lucy, she thought: don’t ever change.

  “There is this one thing, Margot, that I’m going to have to beg of you.”

  “What, Nina?”

  “Promise me that you’ll realize you are no longer the Managing Director of the Chicago Art Institute. You came here because that job was killing you, and you were developing ulcers.”

  “But ulcers can be dealt with. Boredom on the other hand….”

  “Margot, boredom is what we grow here. It’s our principle product. It isn’t just the woman you were nice enough to take to dinner last night; it’s all of us. We may pride ourselves on being a little artists’ community, but that’s all we are. We’re little artists, emphasis on little. Renoir does not live here. We’re not even the South of France. Margot, Bay St. Lucy is not Chicago.”

  “All right,” Margot answered. “You’re right. I’m sorry to complain. The ulcers are much better. And Nina, I do appreciate Bay St. Lucy. I’m very happy here, for all my complaining. If I were insane enough to go out socially with people in Chicago, I’d find them just as wretchedly boring. It’s only that I had so much to do in connection with the museum that I never thought about such things. Here…”

  “Here you’re bored.”

  “Well, perhaps. But that leads me to another thing. Something I’ve been meaning to ask you for some time.”

  “No, I won’t be your lover.”

  “I know. Although it would be a delicious little scrap of gossip, wouldn’t it?”

  “People would rank it just below the hundred pound tuna caught off the concrete jetty the other day.”

  “You think? No, I think it would positively thrill everyone. Still, that isn’t what I want to talk with you about.”

  “All right, then we’ll put potential lesbianism on the back burner at least for now. What then?”

  “Do you have any money?”

  “What, you mean on me? I think I have three dollars.”

  “No. I mean actual money. Money in the bank. Money in savings. Money to invest.”

  “I think I have three dollars.”

  “Be serious.”

  “Ok, it’s actually closer to two ninety four, but there’s usually some change lying around…”

  “Be serious.”

  “OK. No.”

  “Not any.”

  “A little. Not much. Teacher retirement. You know.”

  “All right. No matter. The thing is, I have money.”

  “You do?”

  “Yes. The Managing Director of The Chicago Art Institute makes an obscene amount of money. I had so much of it I was beginning to feel myself becoming a Republican. That’s why I came here.”

  “No Republicans here.”

  “I should hope not. But I wondered if you would be interested in going into a project with me.”

  “What kind of project?”

  “An investment.”

  “What investment?”

  “I’ve been thinking about it for some time. Nina, do you know the Robinson mansion?”

  “Of course I know the Robinson mansion. Everybody does.”

  “It’s in disrepair.”

  “Yes.”

  “I’d like to buy it. I think we could…well, fix it up?”

  “The Robinson mansion?”

  “Yes. It’s a wonderful location.”

  “Fix it up for what?”

  “A hotel. Or, if you will, a truly sumptuous bed and breakfast. It looks out on the beach; it’s got those wonderful Doric columns, the magnificent balconies…and we could run it together. It would be great fun.”

  “You would actually like to run a larger hotel? Deal with the guests, make meals, clean rooms, hear their complaints, all that sort of thing?”

  “No, silly, that would be your job.”

  “Oh, wonderful.”

  “I would simply invest the money.”

  “Margot, it’s a wonderful idea, except…”

  “Except what?”

  “I just…I keep forgetting what a short time you’ve been here.”

  “It’s a little over a year now; so how long does one have to live in a city before one is allowed to buy property?”

  “It’s not that; it’s just a question of what property.”

  “I don’t follow you.”

  “You don’t know about the Robinson mansion?”

  “What is there to know?”

  “No one has told you?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Margot, you can’t buy the Robinson mansion.”

  “And why not?”

  Incredulous that there would be an actual inhabitant of Bay St. Lucy who did not know, and who could actually ask ‘and why not?’…Nina sat and stared until she realized that she was being rude.

  Then, gaining as much composure as she could, she said:

  “You can’t buy the Robinson mansion, Margot, because it’s haunted.”

  This pronouncement produced the effect of shock and awe that Nina expected, but the expression of complete disbelief on Margot Gavin’s face seemed to have been caused by something more than the realization that supernatural forces might render impossible a business deal that she, only a few seconds before, had thought feasible.

  And in fact, such was the case.

  For Margot, her mouth open and her eyes wide and glazed, was looking not at Nina at all but through the small window in the door that led into the shop.

  “Margot, are you all right?”

  “No.”

  “What’s the matter? Is it the Robinson place?”

  “What?”

  “The Robinson place.”

  “What about it?”

  “It’s haunted.”

  “I don’t care. That’s the least of our problems.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Allana Delafosse has just arrived.”

  Nina turned, peered through the same window Margot was gazing at, and confirmed the fact.

  Allana Delafosse was in fact making her way regally through the pottery section, the spectacle of her appearance extinguishing the possible existence of supernatural beings in the Robinson mansion just as completely as the sun’s brilliance extinguishes minor constellations.

  Margot’s garden had become, in the last months, a kind of gathering place for the town’s culturally elite.

  Nina would never have described herself in just that way.

  But Allana certainly would have.

  And it was true—and becoming known throughout the village:

  If you wanted to know everything, you came and sat for a while at Margot’s place.

  “Ok,” said Nina, turning back, “so it’s Allana Delafosse. Maybe she wants to buy something. Offer her coffee.”

  “Are you mad?”

  “Why would I be mad?”

  “Nina, Allana Delafosse doesn’t drink coffee; she drinks tea. And I always seem to offer her the wrong kind. I try to have the best teas in the world here. But when I offer most of them to her, it’s as though I’ve kicked her dog.”

  “Well, Allana Delafosse is the de facto leader of the city, at least as far as cul
ture is concerned.

  “But that doesn’t give her the right to…”

  At that moment, the door exploded open and Allana herself, dressed entirely in red, save for black leather gloves, a shining and equally black four-inch wide belt, and a white, twenty six-foot radius hat tilted slightly and perfectly askew, as though precisely in tune with the gravitational laws prescribed by the zodiac at just this time of the morning, just this spot in the universe—entered, and pronounced:

  “My dear ladies!”

  This in and of itself––this three word utterance––was an event worth celebrating and remembering, as was every gesture and sound connected with Madame Delafosse. It was not the “my dear” so much that needed celebrating and adoration; it was the word “ladies,” which had never been said quite the same way on earth, and never would be again. Precisely what she said could not have been written, nor would any professional writer have tried. “Laaaaaydeeez,” was perhaps the closest orthographic fit, but those inky marks on white pulp paper would have failed completely to recreate even part of the total effect of the thing itself or the “Ding an sich” that was Allana. It would not have the tilt of her head, the radioactive smile flashing out from her dark-coffee Creole skin like a thermide bomb detonated in the mouth of a cave.

  “My dear laaaaaydeez—how aaahhhhhhrrrr yew this maaaawwwrrrrning?”

  Margot, who, despite years in the great city of Chicago, and a decade or so before that in the great city of Los Angeles, and some years before that in various radical communes around The University of California at Berkley––had never encountered a creature more bizarre than she herself, was momentarily stunned, outgunned, and out-outrageoused. So it was left to Nina to reply to the verbal Daryl F. Zanuck cinemascopic presentation that was “Laaayyydeeeeeze, how aaaahhhhhrrrr yew?” by saying simply:

  “We’re good! How are you?”

  How humiliating.

  “I’m wunnnnnnderful! It’s such a deviiiiiiiine maaaaaawwwwwrning, is it not? I do hope I’m not disturbing you?”

  Margot had refitted herself by now, and found composure enough to rise and gesture to one of the chairs:

  “We’re fine, Allana. Please sit down. I was just going to get some tea.”