Game Change: A Nina Bannister Mystery (The Nina Bannister Mysteries Book 3) (13 page)

“That’s changed, I guess.”

A dozen or so people brought Jackson’s order. It surrounded Nina’s minute and pitiful little salad much as the confederate gunboats and infantry batteries must have surrounded Vicksburg.

It was time to stop
, she told herself,
these Civil War analogies

They were making her uneasy.

“Yes.”

A smooth sea of white cream gravy lay shimmering before him, the hypothetical veal cutlet, like the Loch Ness Monster, lying hidden below it.

His whisper, coming up from the East, caused a gravy tsunami to begin making its way to the West, where, in some seconds, it would threaten to overwhelm a village of turnip greens.

“Yes, it’s changed. Public education has become completely political.”

“Somehow, I seem to have missed all of that in the last ten years.”

“I know. And I was hoping you could come back for a few months and just be a good principal, without having to be in the center of a hurricane.”

“Didn’t work out that way, I guess.”

“No. No, I guess it didn’t.”

“But, Jackson, these tests…”

He shook his head disgustedly.

“There’s nothing we can do about them. I can’t tell you how much I’d love, as president of the school board, to make an edict saying, ‘For two months, no tests at all. Let’s let our teachers teach. Let creative people
be
creative. Maybe then we could lure back into the classroom a few more Nina Bannisters.”

He found the cutlet, impaled it, watched it die on the fork in front of him, and swallowed it whole while the rest of the food on the table, knowing now what lay before it, shuddered in sauces of despair.

“Nina,” he then said quietly (any utterance at all an amazing feat since his throat was filled with fifty ounces of chicken pretending to be veal), “the tests are a fact of life. If we don’t administer them––just the way the state mandates that we administer them—we lose our funding. And then, talk about people getting fired–”

“I understand. So we’re prisoners.”

“I’m not sure that’s the term I’d use.”

“What term would you use?”

He thought for a time and finally said:

“Prisoners.”

“Oh. Well, you put it a little better.”

“It’s my legal training.”

“What else can she do, Jackson?”

He shook his head.

“She is one major faction of an entire state government; Paul is in Jackson representing the other faction. But…”

“She came here because of Paul, didn’t she?”

“It’s very possible. Nobody put it into writing, but…”

“We send our champion into battle, they send a champion back into his home town to…well, to make an example of us.”

“I wish I could tell you that you’re wrong.”

“So Bay St. Lucy High School—and Middle School and Elementary School—are going to be “what if” schools. April van Osdale is here to show the state what can be done if everybody just does exactly what the powers that be say must be done.”

“That’s about it.”

There was silence for a time.

Then it became clear that the girls at the far two tables, having finished off their peach cobbler or chocolate cake or cheese cake or vanilla sundaes or cherries melba—were getting hungry again and thinking about breakfast.

“Ma’am?” said Jackson, lifting an arm and gesturing to the waitress. “Bring the check to me, please.”

The players cheered. The waitress appeared with the check, Jackson put four fifty dollar bills on the table to cover it, and then said:

“All that I can advise you to do, Nina, is what you always do. Use your common sense.”

“If I used my common sense, “she said, “I’d leave Atlanta and go back to Tara.”

He shook his head:

“If I remember right, that burned too.”

Then he set about finishing his turnip greens.

“. . . in August in Mississippi there’s a few days somewhere about the middle of the month when suddenly there’s a foretaste of fall, it’s cool, there’s an lambence, a soft, a luminous quality to the light, as though it came not from just today but from back in the old classic times. It might have fauns and satyrs and the gods and––from Greece, from Olympus in it somewhere. It lasts just for a day or two, then it’s gone. . . the title reminded me of that time, of a luminosity older than our Christian civilization.”

                       
––
William Faulkner
,
Light in August

It was eight PM when Nina got home.

A beautiful evening. The snow was gone, the rain had not returned in some days, and the South was showing its inhabitants how lucky they were to be a part of it. Ice storms in the Northeast, snow in North Dakota, blizzards in Denver—

––but here in Bay St. Lucy there were only a few puffy gulf clouds out over the off shore oil rigs, while the three-star belt and sword of Orion shone in readiness for its eternally-upcoming battle with Taurus the Bull, a battle which probably would not happen tonight, since Taurus was still grazing peacefully in the sky of the southern hemisphere.

Nina gazed down the beach before making her way up the rickety stairs that led to her shack.

Some fifty yards distant, a family had found enough driftwood in the nearby dunes to make a fire. They were sitting beside it, roasting marshmallows, while the waves combed in before them leaving white tracery a foot or so from their beach blanket.

“April van Osdale,” she found herself whispering.

“Tests, tests, tests.”

She began climbing the stairs.

A shooting star began writing a piece of cursive overhead, then forgot what it was going to say, gave up, and disappeared

The ponderous ocean ignored it.

Nina reached into her purse for her key, then noticed that, a foot or so above the door handle, a note had been stuck between the screen and the door facing.

This
, she thought to herself,
could be good news
.

She could have won something.

A lottery or something.

Or it could be an invitation to a party frequented by several friends, all of whom had a sense of humor and drank a lot.

Or it could be a notice announcing, with deep regret, the untimely passing of one Dr. April van Osdale, who had, been captured by a sea monster, torn to pieces, and eaten.

She pulled the note out and began unfolding it

“It’s going to be good news,” she whispered down at the fine quality caramel-color paper. “Yeah, right.”

A dust-covered bulb burned over the door. There was just enough light to read in the small sphere of illumination where the three of them—Nina, the note, and her sense of reality—found themselves.

NINA DARLING:

SOMETHING VERY TROUBLING HAS HAPPENED, AND I AM DEEPLY UPSET. I DO HATE TO BOTHER YOU, BUT I WONDER IF YOU COULD COME OVER TO THE AUBERGE AS SOON AS POSSIBLE.

THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR YOUR TROUBLE.

ADMIRINGLY, AS EVER,

ALANNA DELAFOSSE.

“I would say that music is the easiest means in which to express, but since words are my talent, I must try to express clumsily in words what the pure music would have done better.”

                              
––
William Faulkner

The Auberge des Arts was the Robinson Mansion and always would be to Nina. It emanated darkness, even despite the numerous yard lights that had been installed in its extensive, magnolia-dotted lawns, and its Gothic windows would always hide secrets behind the curtains that hung, silent and diaphanous, as though held by invisible hands.

She approached it carefully, revving down the Vespa’s little motor even more than normal. The paths seemed to encircle her. There were lights in some of the windows. She began to ask herself the question she’d always asked while approaching this vast and bat-filled building, even as a girl, even before its restoration and artistic transformation:

Was she more frightened of people who might be inhabiting these rooms, or of the rooms themselves, silent and empty, growing dark, growing light, day after day after day?

It was a question she did not want answered.

She parked the Vespa, hearing as she did so, the sounds of several guitars which seemed to be playing in one of the front rooms.

She climbed two steps that led up to the wide wooden porch, and she could see now that, through a window to her left, several people were sitting in a tight circle, guitars before them, their hands active as spiders weaving nests among the strings.

She rang the bell. A soft and sonorous moan seemed to grow beneath the arabesques of the Malaguena, then soften and finally disappear.

The door opened. Alanna Delafosse stood before her.

That was about like saying ‘The Grandeur of the East,’ ‘The Mystery of the Orient,’ and ‘The Splendor of the Old South’ stood before her.

Or perhaps that was an exaggeration.

It was not much of an exaggeration though, for Alanna never tired of attempting to portray humanity as it was depicted in museums, and not how it was lived in school buildings and feed stores.

She was a Creole woman, not as dark as the sky had become in the last ten minutes, but somewhat deeper in texture and a good deal more mysterious.
She was wearing a brightly-colored tent with the signs of the zodiac burned celestially upon it; a garment which could, Nina found herself thinking, have come straight from the closet of Margot Gavin

“Nina! Thank you so much for coming!”

“No problem. I just got home and found your note, Alanna. What’s happening?”

“I’m grief stricken. You cannot imagine.”

“Tell me.”

“It’s a letter I received today. It must have been written several days ago. I’m still in shock. It concerns our ‘Arts in the Schools’ program. We have, as you know, been bringing groups of high school students weekly to the Auberge, so that they could meet writers, painters, actors, from various towns and cities throughout the state. We pay these artists a stipend, of course, with part of the funds coming from the school’s budget. It was Paul who suggested it, after all. But now, this letter…”

“Can you show it to me?”
   

“Of course. I have it inside. Come, come. The guitar ensemble is practicing in what used to be a front parlor, and which we now use as a practice room for any groups of musicians that care to come.”

Nina walked in and Alanna closed the door behind her. The ponderous chandelier that hung in the entrance hallway examined her and, showing a sign of its good will, did not come crashing to the floor.