Thus it was with Bay St. Lucy and the fabled Nina Bannister.
There was, true, a continued flurry that lasted several days.
But it died down.
If anything, after forty eight hours or so, remained that was legendary concerning the whole matter, it was not Nina Bannister herself nor the obscure oceanside shack in which she resided—but the fabled soliloquy of Penelope Royale, so thoroughly laced with exquisite obscenities that the very fish in the sea (those within one hundred yards or so of land, at any rate, or so went the story) were said to have flipped over on their dorsal fins and floated to land, dazed and dead by the hundreds.
Even the flowers in their boxes were withered by the rant.
No fishermen of Bay St. Lucy or sailors living in the town heard it, because none of them cared very much about the ‘save our continent’ movement, nor could they afford marijuana, nor did they prefer living in tents to living on ships.
But the counter-culture folk, the bearded and stoned and mosh pit crowd that actually did hear, it became like the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki—they lived on, but they were never the same, and they kept their eyes warily on the skies from that horrible moment on, lest a second Penelope might appear on their horizon and sear the very sky under which they had so blissfully wiled away their previous lives.
So terrible was it.
But it was not bad at all for Nina, since it gave her back her privacy and her shack and her beachfront routine…
…and her cat.
Jackson Bennett brought Furl home the following day—Wednesday—and his two girls came along to bid the animal farewell.
They had obviously brushed and petted him, and given him much love.
But he was still quite angry with Nina and showed the fact by walking straight into the bedroom as soon as he was set down upon the floor, and secreting himself beneath a pasteboard box in which he occasionally liked to live. He came out of this box only twice the first day back, both times to leave small, hard, round turds in the middle of the shack’s two major rooms.
After the second excretion, Nina went herself to the bedroom where she squatted down, lifted up the top flap of the cardboard box, peered down at the brooding creature beneath her, and said, quietly but sternly:
“Factum fiere, Furl, infectum non posttest.”
Furl, who spoke Latin (as most cats do and would respond if addressed in that alas dead language, but never get the chance, being never spoken to in it)—and who thus understood the words ‘It is impossible for a deed to be undone’—replied:
“Falsus in uno, falsus in omnimus.”
(False in one, false in all.)
And he glared.
She was not about to let the matter stand as thus, and replied:
“Fac fortia, Furl, et patere.”
(Do brave things, Furl, and endure.)”
But he hissed, contracted into an even tighter fur ball and said:
“Facium et mei memineries.”
(I’ll make you remember me.)”
Upon saying which he went straight into the living room and left another turd on the throw rug.
Other than this, though, things went remarkably well.
The world at large, at least the most sensation-seeking part of it, forgot about Aquatica and thought of it, if at all, in the same way it thought about satellites circling the earth. We can call Japan on our cell phones because they are out there, but we don’t spend a great deal of our time worrying about them.
The New York Times did not cease to exist, although many right wing columnists and radio talk show hosts went on suggesting that it should.
Louisiana Petroleum did not sue Nina. Nor did they make any further effort to contact her.
The second morning after her return to the shack she rose early—it was a splendid morning, the wave foam red in first sunlight—put on her bathing suit, took her cell phone from the desk, walked down to the surf, walked out into the surf, reached waist deep water, bent back, and hurled the phone as far as she could, hoping that it would hit Germany.
It did not, keeping the Germans safe by plopping into the water some sixty feet away from her and disappearing.
Later that morning, she took a screwdriver from the tool kit that she kept under her shack, and unscrewed her small mail box.
She did not throw it into the ocean, because it was shiny and metallic and black and old (it had been her and Frank’s mailbox when they lived downtown) and it looked like what it was supposed to be, a mailbox.
So she put it away in a drawer.
But, content to be unreachable by phone or mail, she felt ready to assume her old life, as well as could be expected.
True, she thought some about Sandy Cousins; about the mythic and larger than life, the cartoonish and from another era-ish Brewster Dale, about the two Narangs––one of which did not exist, but as each day passed, they faded a little deeper into her memory.
The disk was gone, but, at least in the minds of everyone but her and Hector, it had never existed in the first place.
Aquatica, for this reason, she supposed, made no effort to acquire it.
Nor did The New York Times, which wanted nothing more to do with the entire story.
A part of her—the amateur sleuth part—felt that some investigation should be undertaken to expose the people who had deceived her. Some Cajun red-haired woman had met her at the Lafayette airport. Some small middle Eastern man had received her in the lecture hall at the University. He had also written an article which the paper had run. He had called her to ask her permission to run it.
These things had happened.
She was not insane.
Aging a bit perhaps, but not insane.
But whose place was it to investigate these beings?
The city of Lafayette’s?
The University’s?
It was not really even a police matter, when one thought about it.
She had taken a trip, that much could be proven.
But after that?
Yes, perhaps Pierre could be found, and made to testify that she had been in The Blue Gator. Yes, a red-haired woman—if he could remember, having played host to so many women—had been there too, and danced.
So what?
Otherwise no one had seen these beings.
They had taken nothing, done no wrong.
And so, from time to time, as she was walking on the beach, both the unreal Narang and the ethereal Annette, would appear to her, smile, and say, hovering out over the water:
“If we shadows have offended, think but this, and all is mended. That you have but slumbered here, while these visions did appear. And this weak and idle theme, no more yielding than a dream.”
And then they disappeared.
So it went for several days.
She walked on the beach each morning, went to Bagatelli’s for croissants and beignets and bagels, made herself coffee, sat on the deck and drank it, and waved happily at the tourists who meandered along the beach, going from left to right in the early hours and from right to left as the sun crested, returning to their beds and breakfasts tired and dangerously sunburned.
Then one o’clock to four o’clock was spent at Elementals, where she puttered about, opening this new acquisition or that, cleaning up a bit here or there, selling something, paying a bill or so, and otherwise sitting in a quiet nook near the cash register and allowing herself to get engrossed in Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo’s The Laughing Policeman.
A major change in these proceedings occurred one week later when, in the late afternoon, just before she was wondering what dinner would be, dinner knocked on the door.
Or rather an invitation to dinner.
It was a beaming John Giusti, his plaid shirt bisected by two wide dark blue galoshes, and his feet clad in the combat boots he always wore in the Pelican Skeleton, his animal hospital.
“Nina! Good afternoon!”
“Good afternoon to you, John!”
“N
ina, it’s been more than two weeks since we…”
She cut him off:
“Yes, John. We ran together that morning in the park. You and I and Helen. And only half an hour later…”
He nodded, then said:
“You’ve been through a lot since then.”
“Yes. It’s been difficult.”
“We’ve been keeping up with it.”
“I guess everyone has.”
“And we’re proud of you, Nina. Whatever the real story is—well, everyone in town is on your side.”
“That’s good to know.”
“But it just came to us: we invited you out to dinner. And we never followed up.”
“Well, a lot was happening.”
“Things seem to be going better now, though.”
“Yes, John, they are going better.”
“So why don’t you come out?”
“When?”
“Now. Come with me in the rover. You haven’t eaten yet, have you?”
“No.”
“Then come on. Helen’s doing spaghetti. We’re going to have some Italian bread, and we’re going to drink red wine…and we’re going to sit out over the ocean and tell ghost stories. Helen loves storytelling.”
“Don’t worry about the short notice; I’m there.”
And she was.
She could not sit in the front seat because, for various veterinarial reasons, the Labrador could not be moved. (It had something to do with his relationship to the two weasels.). She did not want to sit in the middle of the middle seat, because she did have or expect to have a good relationship with the weasels either.
So she scrunched against the door, used both hands to move aside an automobile part of some kind that sat, oozing oil onto the plastic covered seat––and gingerly placed it on a pancake-thin metal box that sat on the floorboard.
Then she simply listened to the animals chatter, trying once or twice to try to make small talk with John as they made their way out of Bay St. Lucy.
This did not work because of the animals: His questions and her replies, her questions and his replies, all wound up sounding something like, “RRRRaaaarghhhh arrrrghhhe rrrgggh!”
And so they gave up.
So she simply rode along and enjoyed the ride—she usually made it once or twice a month now, to visit the Reddingtons––over what must have been ten miles, along coastal and not-so coastal roads that she had never explored before John had bought his place. She thought of nothing at all––except the spaghetti to come––while the yellow-pine forest wrapped itself around her.
It was getting darker. Craning her neck, she could see the stars up through the roof of pine needles. The Mississippi sky was ferocious and black, stars glittering in mute and yellow explosions.
It all remained like this for a period out of time, all changes elemental and thus of great and no importance, until they reached John Giusti’s house.
“So here we are!”
“I love your place, John. It’s my favorite house in the world!”
They could not yet see the great sea-straddling monstrosity that was John and Helen’s house yet, of course. They first had to park in a driveway that looked like a deer blind, get out of the van, get the dog and ferret out of the van, and brush their way through a narrow path that led through shrubs and scrub oak, gradually descending on its way down to the sea.
But the walk was worth it, of course.
Finally, she could hear the ocean, rumbling and grating not more than a few yards over the top of the encircling trees.
But she still could not see the house.
“How did you find this?”
“A client of mine. He was a crazy architect.”
“Where is he now?”
“I think he’s been institutionalized.”
“That’s comforting.”
“Here. Let’s push through these last bushes and…”
“Wow!” she could not help exclaiming. As she always did when she visited John and Helen.
For there, laid out before her, was a wide, long, pier at the end of which glowed what would have been a magnificent beach house, had it been on the beach.
It was not.
It was an ocean house, perched as high above the surging waves—twenty feet or so, she judged—as her own shack was perched above the beach.
Helen stood in the doorway, beckoning.
The house, all vast glass windows, seemed to reflect a thousand images of her, the various animals around her, and the sea beneath her.
Nina started forward, feeling the pier wobble a bit, the boards swaying ever so slightly as she walked upon it.
“Nina! So good that you could come out!”
“I wouldn’t have missed it!”
“Hope you like Italian!”
“Love it!”
She turned for a second. The beach was behind her now, narrow but perfectly white, dark pine forests impinging upon it, as though the trees were trying to drive the sand into the water.
Then she walked on until, John following close behind with the Labrador on the leash, she was at the door.
“Come in! Come in!”
She stepped inside.
And in so doing, she stepped outside.
For there was, strictly speaking, no inside.
There was furniture. Heavy, mahogany, leather couches, tables, chairs, rugs and things a man would have to sit on and lie on and put things on and have some woman come in from time to time and clean.
But she was still more outside than inside, the vast glass walls magnifying everything on the coast, from birds that skimmed low over the ocean to lights twinkling miles to the south in Cape Hatteras, to slowly moving freighters that made their way like moving oil splotches hurled upon the clean azure evening sky and now oozing horizontally along it—to the waves, always the waves, swelling, throbbing, falling, and rising again, having vowed never to allow stillness to anything in the universe.
“We hadn’t seen you since..”
“I know.”
Helen was radiant, as usual, her dark eyes glittering like specks of coal which, when illumined, would have burned the color of her crimson gown.
“What a terrible day, Nina. How you’ve gotten through all of this…”
“Well, Helen, it isn’t much more terrible than something we all had to go through earlier. And we made that. The community can make this, too. And the Ramirez family will survive. Senora Ramirez still has Hector and Sonia.”
They were in the kitchen now, with soft white light coming from a fluorescent tube above the oven, and a vast glass wall to their left showing an epic film version of The Ocean by Moonlight.
The meal followed soon thereafter, marvelous, as she knew it would be.
A glass of red wine; another glass.
Desert: chocolate mousse.
And then, with the ocean spread out silver beneath them and the wind making its soft moan through the yellow pines that encircled the house, they told ghost stories.
John told “Oh Whistle and I’ll Come to you my Lad,” and “Who’s Got My Golden Arm.” Nina told “Thus I refute Beelzy.” Helen told “The Monkey’s Paw” and then went in to get the coffee ready.
She had been gone five minutes or so when she reappeared, a concerned expression on her face:
“Nina, I don’t know if I should mention this..”
“What?”
“Well?”
John stepped forward and asked:
“What is it, Helen?”
“Television.”
“What about it, honey?”
“There’s a broadcast on. The eight o’clock news. I’ve been glancing at the little portable tv just while I finished making the coffee.”
“And?”
Helen took the obligatory deep breath that proceeds distasteful news.
“It’s a big press conference.”
“So?”
“The governor of Louisiana and the governor of Mississippi are holdin
g a joint press conference.”
“I can’t think of anything more boring than…”
But Nina interrupted:
“It’s Aquatica, isn’t it? Has something happened out there?”
Helen was quick to cut her off:
“No! No, it’s nothing like that! They’re just announcing something.”
“I’d like to see,” said Nina, almost beside herself. “I feel close to some of those people out there, in spite of the fact that I made a fool of myself.”
“You did no such thing,” said John. “You were just trying to help everybody. Anyway let’s go in the den. The big wall tv is in there.”
Then came the marvel of walking through John and Helen’s house. The walls were doors, the roofs were walls, and air seeped in from everywhere, delightfully cool, whispering out of hidden crevasses that served as ventilation ports. There were animals all around, of course, most of them dogs, but cats here or there, and slinking little reptiles that peered around crags in the wall structure or out from gurgling fissures.
Finally, they entered a smaller interior room, from which, incredibly, The Gulf of Mexico could not be seen.
They sat down in darkness and leather; John turned the lights even lower, and Helen operated the remote control stick that caused most of one wall to become life-sized images of smiling politicians.
The worst kind, thought Nina, settling in and somehow wishing for popcorn.
Another switch of the remote, and sound enveloped them.
It would have been better, Nina found herself speculating, if they had simply stayed in the kitchen and watched the small tv.
But here they were.
And here was a man, identified with text scrolling across the bottom of the screen, as the press secretary to the governor of Mississippi.
“All right, so much for introductions and preliminaries! And, John, down there in the front row, from The Chicago Sun Times, I want to say how much I like that hat you were wearing today on the golf course!”
General laughter.
Camera on John from The Chicago Sun Times, who was also laughing.
“I’m just kidding you, John.”
More laughter.
Oil Change: A Nina Bannister Mystery (The Nina Bannister Mysteries Book 4) Page 18
