“What do you mean, ‘oh?’”
“I mean I’m not certain that’s the truth.”
“Nina––”
He bent low over the handlebars and began to speak to her as though she were a child.
“Nina, we all have every bit of respect for you in the world. But you’re a retired schoolteacher. This is not your—well, not your area.”
“I see.”
“Please. Try to keep encouraging Macy. But let the rest of us do our job.”
“All right,” she lied.
And watched him pull away.
Two minutes later, she was entering Margot’s shop, her mind in a state of intense almost feverish activity.
Ringgg went the little bell.
Margot, puttering about.
A customer here and there.
People crossing the street in front of the shop.
Mr. Perry setting up his carriage.
Mr. Fontenot starting up his pickup truck.
Margot, coming out of the garden:
“Well, are you still talking to us?”
No answer.
No answer possible.
Think, Nina.
Something is wrong.
Start with the truth, then work your way back.
Macy did not kill that woman.
There is something you’re not seeing, Nina.
Something no one is seeing.
What?
WHAT?
“Are you even talking to me, Nina? What’s wrong with you?”
See it all. Remember it all.
See the whole board, the whole chessboard.
What doesn’t fit? What is wrong?
A mind lively and at ease can do with seeing nothing, and can see nothing that does not answer.
Nina, your mind is lively.
It’s always been lively.
BUT IT CANNOT BE AT EASE.
NOT NOW!
MACY’S LIFE IS ON THE LINE!
ALL OF YOUR LIVES ARE ON THE LINE!
THE COMMUNITY IS ON THE LINE!
THINK! LISTEN! LISTEN TO THE BATES SISTERS CHATTERING AWAY!
SOMETHING DOESN’T FIT!
WHAT DOESN’T FIT, NINA?
Margot shrugging.
“All right. I can see you’re still mad. Tell me when you want to talk, and I’ll make us some tea.”
And Margot walked away, humming.
Humming.
Humming.
Follow her.
“What’s that?”
“What?”
“What’s that, that you were humming?”
“I don’t know.”
“Hum it again.”
“What?”
“Hum it again.”
“What is this, Casablanca?”
“Hum it again, Margot!”
“Well it was—oh I remember, I was humming it to you that night after you got back from New Orleans. I was mocking you, actually.”
“Hum it, dammit!”
“What’s the matter with you?”
“Hum it!”
“All right, it was, let’s see—da da da da da daaaa, da da da da da!”
“Do you know what it means,” Nina whispered, “to miss New Orleans?”
“Yes, that’s it. Old song. Why?”
“She doesn’t know.”
“What?”
“She doesn’t know what it means to miss New Orleans.”
Nina threw herself into Margot’s arms.
“SHE DOESN’T KNOW WHAT IT MEANS TO MISS NEW ORLEANS!”
After a time, getting ever more excited, she said:
“Where’s your calendar?”
“My what?”
“The calendar you always keep; you know, the ins and outs.”
“Over there by the cash register. But what does that––”
“Show it to me, Margot.”
Margot did.
She read the appropriate entry and said:
“We haven’t missed it. Christmas. We haven’t missed it!”
“You sound like Ebenezer Scrooge now.”
“She doesn’t know what it means. She doesn’t know what it means, Margot. To miss New Orleans.”
“I think you’ve gone crazy.”
“Let me hug you one more time. Then you need to call the police. I need to talk to Moon Rivard.
The two women did hug.
And she stayed there for a while, sobbing against Margot’s chest, and thanking Jane Austen.
It took ten minutes for Moon Rivard to arrive at the shop.
He was skeptical.
“Miss Nina? What is this about an emergency?”
“I can’t tell you everything now, Moon. But things are starting to make sense.”
“What things, ma cher?”
“Important things. Things about how Eve Ivory really did die.”
“Aww, ma’am. That’s not your department, you know.”
“So I keep hearing.”
“I just talked with that lawyer. Bennett. He’s awful mad at you. He says you trying to do his job.”
“Only because he’s not.”
“Miss Edie, the town prosecutor, is not too happy, either. They tryin’ to get some kind of plea bargain to get Macy Peterson off with a lighter sentence.”
“I know that.”
“Miss, I don’t mean to tell you your business—but if you keep on talking with Macy Peterson, they gonna get some kind of court order.”
“Let them.”
“You don’t want that, Miss Nina.”
“Moon, I need you to help me out.”
“I ain’t sure I ought to be doing that right now.”
“I need you to take me over to Tom Broussard’s.”
“Can’t you ride over there yourself?”
“I need to go fast. We’re running out of time.”
“Who is?”
“Bay St. Lucy.”
“What are you talking about?”
“We might have a few hours. And then, if I’m right. We’re done.”
“You ain’t making no sense.”
“No. I am making sense. Just for the first time. Please, Moon—we’ve got to find Tom. And then we’ve got to go somewhere else.”
“Where else?”
“Down in the ground. And back in time?”
“What?”
“It wasn’t big crime, Moon; it was little crime. But all the worse because of it.”
“What?”
“The children.”
“What children?”
“The children would know. The children saw. And heard. And the children would know. Now come on. Let’s go.”
He agreed.
And they pulled off toward Tom Broussard’s.
They found him where she knew he would be, slumped over the typewriter.
Moon, frightened for his safety, waiting in the patrol car, ready to call for backup.
Nina climbed the steps, knocked on the door, then opened it and went in anyway.
Tom looked up from his manuscript.
“Well. Surprised to see you here.”
“Tom, I need you to do something for me.”
“I thought you hated me. I thought you hated all of us.”
“I’m sorry about that.”
“What were we doing last night anyway, that made you so mad?”
“Being happy.”
“What’s wrong with that?”
“It wasn’t the time. There may not be a time, if you can’t help me out here.”
“What do you want me to do?”
“Fly to New Orleans.”
“What?”
“Fly to New Orleans in Bay St. Lucy’s jet.”
“Why?”
“I’ll tell you that in a minute. But didn’t you tell me once that you’d spent a year in law school in New Orleans?”
“Well. Kind of.”
“What do you mean, kind of?”
“I mean it was a kind of law school. You learn a lot of law there. An
d you meet a lot of lawyers.”
“What was the name of this law school?
“City jail.”
“Ok, that makes sense. But Tom, did you make—well, contacts there?”
“Of course I did. Everything I know about crime, I learned in jail.”
“If I gave you a name, and asked you to find out everything you could about it—could you do that for me? And for the town?”
“Why are you asking me to do this?”
“Because, Tom, I need somebody who can dig down beneath the surface. And do it quick. And do it right. There’s a big, dirty secret Tom. And I need a big dirty man to go find out what it is.”
He nodded.
“I’m your man.”
The battle to get Tom Broussard on the city’s private jet was only won by calling in every favor that every city council member owed Nina.
But it was won, so that, at 4 P.M., the most disreputable—and capable—man she knew was flying off to find out things heretofore unimagined.
While she and Moon Rivard were parking behind the Robinson mansion.
“I can’t take you in here. It’s a crime scene!”
“I don’t want to go into the mansion. I want to go down under it.”
“You want to what?”
“I want to see that tunnel. The one that Macy went through.”
“Why?”
“Because we have to go down where all the ladders start; in the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.”
“But that don’t make no sense!”
“Yes it does. It makes all the sense.”
“But that’s a dirty place down there. I had to go look at it this morning, with all them security policemen. I don’t want to go back down there.”
“Come on.”
“I could order you not to do this, you know. Jackson Bennett and Miss Towler don’t––”
“They don’t have to go down there, do they?”
“But we don’t either!”
“Yes we do. I want to see what she saw.”
“Who?”
“I don’t know for now. I think I know. But I’m not sure. We have to wait for Tom. I just know, Moon, that somebody was in that tunnel two nights ago. And whoever it was killed Eve Ivory.”
“But how, ma’am? That letter opener––”
“She got the letter opener, Moon, because she didn’t know what it means to miss New Orleans.”
“What?”
“Our minds were lively. But they were at ease.”
“You not making any sense.”
“We were satisfied with seeing nothing. Even though the whole thing, all the while, was right there under our noses.”
“Miz Nina––”
“We could do with seeing nothing; and we could see nothing that didn’t seem to our stupid little minds just what we wanted it to seem. It’s going to be a very close thing. Now come on, Moon. Take me down into the Robinson tunnel.”
“Man. I always hated schoolteachers.”
But he got out of the car anyway, led her through the police banner, opened a rusty gate, and pulled up a clapboard trap door.
“Be careful.”
“I will.”
And the darkness closed upon them.
For a time, the smell of musk, rotting roots and dank soil overwhelmed her.
The first concrete steps led down, and she could hear droplets of water oozing around her.
Moon’s broad back swayed before her, and, in front of that, the ray of the flashlight, illuminating cobwebs.
“Be careful where you stop there!”
“I will, Moon.”
“Man, it’s spooky down here.”
“I know.”
“Smell that—what is that smell?”
“I don’t know. Just—well, just buried things.”
“I don’t like to smell that. Watch out for them cobwebs!”
“I will.”
“Hell, that web there is ten feet across. Like to see the spider spun that thing.”
“He’s as scared of us as we are of him.”
“You sure? That spider, be the size of a rat!”
“Well. Maybe we can eat him.”
“What are you looking for down here?”
“I’ll know it when I see it.”
“Here. Now it levels off. We under the main floor now. In a minute there’s a turning place. And then it starts up.”
“How long is the tunnel?”
“We measured it. Little more than a hundred feet.”
“And you’ve never been down here before?”
“No, ma’am.”
“Moon, you’ve got to think back. When this-this thing happened at the mansion, you’d just started with the town police.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“And what do you remember about it?”
“Well—I and my partner was called over there about four o’clock in the morning. We was told that a shooting had taken place. That two big black cars had been spotted in the driveway. All that happened, they told us, around two P.M. Mr. Homer Baron Robinson and his wife had been shot to death. Shot several times, all shot up. A little boy was safe but had been taken away.”
“Why was it all so hush hush?”
“Ma’am, that was big crime, that done that. Maybe out of New Orleans. Maybe out of Chicago. But the word came down, bury the dead. Close up the mansion. And don’t ask no questions. So that’s what we did.”
“I still don’t see—wait. Wait. There. Shine the light there!”
He trained the flashlight on a small pile of something rusting not rotting.
Something that did not belong.
And yet did.
Nina knelt beside it.
“Look, Moon.”
“Aw, man. Why you have to show me that?”
“Because it’s probably a witness. It may be the only witness.”
It was a rag doll, with button eyes, and a candy stripe dress.
On one of the white strips, visible in the beam of the flashlight, stenciled in black, were the letters:
E.R.
“Do you want to take that doll with us?”
She shook her head and put the doll back where she had found it.
“No. No, Moon, let’s let it stay buried here.”
“But what do we do now?”
She straightened up.
“We go back. And hope Margot’s calendar is right and that we haven’t missed Christmas. And then we wait for Tom Broussard.
She turned, began making her way back toward the entrance to the tunnel, and said softly:
“It’s time for the town to meet its past.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN: DO YOU KNOW WHAT IT MEANS, TO MISS NEW ORLEANS?
“If I didn’t know the ending of a story I wouldn’t begin. I always write my last line, my last page, my last paragraph, first.”
Katherine Anne Porter
She arrived back at her house at five P.M.
There was nothing to do but wait.
This was easier than she had expected it to be.
It was not like the morning, when the thing had struggled to be born, had fought to come out of her.
It was out now.
She knew precisely what had happened.
She knew what had happened two nights ago.
She knew what had happened thirty years ago.
And here she was, Tiresias.
The blind prophet.
“Mine is a terrifying gift. For what use is knowledge, if it only breeds misery?”
Still, this did not bother her as she made her customary salad, poured the glass of white wine, and turned on The Metropolitan Opera Broadcast.
Turandot.
She checked the clock.
Five forty.
There was no way Tom could be back before ten.
Someone did come, though, around six, or just at the beginning of Act Two.
Two ponderous sedans this time.
So many cars, she found h
erself musing, all wanting to come see poor little Nina Bannister.
Normally she would have risen, run over to the landing, and opened the door, happy to receive visitors.
That was not the case now.
She did not dread their coming, either.
There was just a kind of numbness about the whole thing.
Edie Towler entered first, Jackson Bennett behind her.
In short order they were all seated around her living room table.
Like the group last night, that she had thrown out.
She could not throw these people out, though.
She did not, on the other hand, have to offer them coffee.
Strictly speaking, Edie ranked higher on the municipal scale than Jackson did.
Jackson, strictly speaking, was not on the municipal scale at all.
So it was only right that Edie spoke first.
“Nina, what in God’s name have you been doing?”
Nina actually knew nothing to say to that, and so she simply shrugged, and sipped from what was, she realized, her second glass of wine.
Edie continued.
“I mean this, Nina. We need to know what’s is going on.”
“Yes,” she answered. “We do.”
Silence.
Then Jackson:
“Tom Broussard showed up at the airport in Biloxi a few hours ago, with orders, signed by five city councilmen and women, that he was to be taken to New Orleans and escorted, with all due speed, to The Quarter.”
“Yes.”
“Nina, were you behind this?”
“I was.”
“Who is going to pay for that trip?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t––”
Edie now:
“Nina, are you all right?”
“No. Yes. I’m not sure.”
“Do you need a doctor?”
Again, no answer forthcoming.
They were asking such hard questions!
“You know, Nina––”
Which one of them was talking now?
Or did it really matter?
“—we were attempting to have the psychological examination of Macy Peterson this afternoon at three o’clock.”
“So I had heard.”
“Macy refused.”
“Really.”
“She said she wasn’t crazy. She said she was quite rational. That she remembered everything that happened that night. And that she would so testify, when the time came.”
“Good for her.”
“Good for––”
Edie now leaned forward:
“What do you think you’re doing? You are in no position to advise this woman!”
Sea Change (The Nina Bannister Mysteries Book 1) Page 22
