Sea Change (The Nina Bannister Mysteries Book 1) (8 page)

“Well.
 
How far is it to your place, Nina?”

“It’s nothing.
 
A mile or so.”

“I’m so sorry.”

“Don’t worry. What’s a little water? Besides, we have planning to do.”

“Yes!
 
There’s so much in my mind now. Thank you for being my Best Woman.”

“That’s a good thing to call it, isn’t it?”

“Yes!”

“Come on then. We’ll go back to my place and dry off.
 
Then we’ll have the last of bottle of wine I opened.
 
Then we’ll start planning the wedding.”

They hugged, and struck out toward the shore.

The next sodden hour disappeared, immersed in non-stop chatter and cold rain.

It was ten o’clock when they reached Nina’s shack.

The wine was broken out.
 

Some minutes thereafter, various sheets of paper, pictures, and wedding plans covered the kitchen table.

Sometime before midnight, they both went to bed, Nina in her own room, Macy on the couch.

And Nina, snug beneath the covers, realized how excited she was for Macy, and how proud she would be to be in the wedding, and how much she loved her little Bay St. Lucy.

Which was a perfect little seaside town.

And which—Nina had no way of knowing this as she closed her eyes and drifted into pre-sleep reveries—would never be the same again.

CHAPTER FIVE:
 
CORPSES, CASES, AND CAPONS

“Alas poor Yorick! How surprised to see how his counterpart of today is whisked off to a funeral parlor and is in short order sprayed, sliced, pierced, pickled, trussed, trimmed, creamed, waxed, painted, rouged, and neatly drressed––transformed from a common corpse into a Beautiful Memory Picture.”

Jessica Mitford

St. Charles Avenue, Nina mused, looking up and down the great palmed and street car-bisected thoroughfare, was the only street in the world where mansions, mortuaries, legal offices, and restaurants all looked precisely the same.

There were other edifices stuck in here or there, of course, and she’d always wondered what drunken pirate crew had thrown together New Orleans’ zoning laws.

But that did not matter. The fact that somehow a MacCheezit existed between the Senator Robicheax Family Estate and what had been the old Pontchartrain Hotel—or that the uptown branch of the New Orleans Public Library sat beneath the same stately live oaks and Mesozoic ferns as Commander’s Palace and somebody’s two room shack—

––none of this mattered. St. Charles was St. Charles, and as good a reason as she could have wanted for a morning’s walk.

The second best thing in the entire world, when one actually thought about it, to walking on the beach.

And so she had flashed the city’s credit card to the cab driver, left the vehicle at Audubon Park, given her respects to the backs of buildings at Tulane––or rather,
TU
lane––and the fronts of buildings at Loyola, and sauntered for half an hour, lungs filling with the scent of hot beignets, eyes formulating what one of the painters whose work hung in Margot’s shop would have done with the brown bored and completely anachronistic street cars meeting on the median, and yawning
 
to each other as they sauntered on.

She tried to avoid actual thinking, and to engage only in light reveries, but to do so in an organized manner.

A time for every daydream, all of the not-quite-thoughts laid out in precise geographical and urbanized units.

Poydras Street to D’Urberville. Three hundred yards.
 
Memories of the Robinson Mansion, and comparisons with the one over there on the left.

No.

The Robinson Manor was bigger.

Deeper balconies.

Could Margot Gavin actually buy the structure?

After all those years would anything in it be—what was the word?
 
Restorable?

How rich was Margot, anyway?

And would she––Nina Bannister––actually consider going into the hotel business?

No.
 
Of course not.

But the Bed and Breakfast business?

Well, that was something else again.

She imagined a couple not at all like tourists one saw in the Quarter on Big Football Game Days or Mardi Gras week.

What could they do, anyway? A bit of fishing, a little beachcombing, much sitting around the edge of the garden, listening idly to the chatter and gossip of Bay St. Lucy—which went on, of course, in the middle of the garden, presided over by ironically the town’s newest true denizen—Margot—

––now how much trouble could it be to look after the two of them?––but more of those reveries later.

For here, canopied, red carpeted, was either a new, beautiful, expensive, and truly sumptuous restaurant—

––Check the small scrunched up note page with the address on it—

What does it say?
 
228 Toulouse?

Or a Funeral Home.

And it was, indeed, the latter.

McWilliams Funeral Home.

She began to make her way up the steps, and had climbed three of them when the door opened and the corpse emerged.
 
He was certainly just that, was he not?
 
Helping her out with the viewing by coming out to meet her in person.

“Good morning!”

“Good morning,” she answered, wondering about the etiquette of greeting the dead.

“It’s going to be a lovely day, isn’t it?” inquired the cadaver.

“It certainly is,” she answered, not adding, ‘for those of us who are alive.’

“You must be Ms. Bannister, from Bay St. Lucy?”

“Yes.”

“Welcome.”

Oh my God he’s extending his hand.

She took it.

It was not warm, exactly, but then, the hand being dead, it lacked the strength to lock onto her and carry her to a charnel house.

And then, now that she was closer to the man, she could discern definite non-necromantic tendencies.
 
He was, to begin with, better dressed than most corpses.
 
He was thinner and seemed in worse health.

“I’m Charles McWilliams.
 
Please come in.”

She did so, subconsciously wishing for a table beneath the window, and wishing that the soft, monochromatic organ music which seemed to seep from the walls could be played, at least between certain stipulated hours, at Wal-Mart.

“Have there been many people in to—to view?” she asked.

He shook his head.

“You are the first.”

He led her through several rooms, making her feel as though she was touring an automobile showroom.
 
Elegant, gray and velvet vehicles reflected quiet lighting and––their lids open and their handles shining––promised the most comfortable ride imaginable.

As well as, she could not help musing, superb mileage.

Stop that, Nina, she told herself.

Arthur Robinson had a small room to himself.

She walked to the casket, having noticed that the funeral director, once beside her, had now dropped off, and now, hands folded appropriately, was standing just inside the door of the room.

There were several large sprays of flowers.
 
Purple flowers, gold flower, and, of course, white lilies.

She leaned over.

The thing that had been ‘he’ was dressed appropriately for the occasion, charcoal gray suit with red tie.
 
He had not been a small man.
 
She could imagine the gaunt face as having once been young-looking, before being ravaged by whatever had attacked it, as well as the rest of Arthur Robinson.

“Was he ill long?” she found herself asking.

“Yes, Ma’am.
 
For quite some time, I believe.”

“Well,” she said, looking down at the figure beneath her, “it’s over now.”

“Yes,” came the answer, from behind her (somewhat to her relief) and not below her.

There was nothing else to do.

She could have prayed, but she found herself doing that less frequently now than earlier in her life—she did not know why.

She could have done something appropriate, but there seemed nothing appropriate to do; she was merely reading the day’s obituaries, but doing so in 3-D.

And so, having “paid her respects,” and wondering how many other phrases the culture stored and used frequently that also had no meaning whatsoever, she turned and left.

There were nods.
 
Quiet condolences.
 
A glance or two at families huddled together in other rooms.
 
The sound of sobbing.

And, finally, she was on the street again.

She took a deep breath.

That was done.

It had needed doing, at least by someone from Bay St Lucy.
 
And she was that person, and she had done the right thing.

Now—a check on time.

Eleven fifteen A.M.

She walked several feet in the direction of Canal Street, thought about the mile or so between her and the law offices she must be in at one o’clock, and decided to take the street car.

There—just in front of her—that was a stop, was it not?

The ponderous clanging of the apparatus behind her told her she was right.

And so she climbed aboard, having, fortunately, the right change, and, giving her coins to Charon she allowed him to pole her over the River Styx, into the Garden District, and further into the Land of the Dead in the holy-seeming day of Viewings and Wills.

Damn Shakespeare
, she thought, the man’s infernal writings invading her mind again. He was as bad as Tom Broussard; she could not shake him. “Let’s talk of graves,” came the words, as automatically as they always came now, as though her brain were a twenty four hour movie theater showing ENGLISH LITERATURE constantly rather than Japanese horror films.

There were times she would have preferred the latter.

Let’s talk of graves, of worms, and epitaphs;

Make dust our paper, and, with rainy eyes,

Write sorrow on the bosom of the earth.

The streetcar clattered and sparked along, descending St. Charles.

She tried to think of nothing at all.

It didn’t work.

At one o’clock precisely, she entered the offices of Raymer, Peabody, and Fontenot, Attorneys at Law.

Another mansion, of course, rooms here and there, gray men and women making their way about, approximately the same way figures had moved in the mortuary but with less purpose.

She was met courteously and led to the appropriate room, where several men sat around a large burnished table.

She and Frank had always laughed about the measure of a firm’s success:

“You can tell how spiffy they are,” he insisted, by the length of the secretaries’ skirts.
 
The length of their legs, too!”

By that measure, this firm was Fortune 500. A superb woman, absolutely in her prime, was moving around the table, whispering with each of the dark- suited figures who sat sipping cups of coffee.

She was dressed in black, which contrasted starkly and unforgettably with her expensively-tanned skin and radiant golden hair.

This was not,
Nina thought, watching her elementally simple but insultingly—to the rest of the human race—graceful movements.
This was not a woman but a constellation.
 
If the corpse an hour and a half ago had been the obituaries three dimensionalized, this was the Art and Beauty Section animated.

My God, she asked herself, how tall was this woman?

Six feet at least.

Another attorney—for she knew, somehow, that the other men around the table were attorneys—entered the room.

They all nodded to each other, as well as to her.

The vision of beauty that had been serving them, whispering to them, laughing softly with them, and making them simultaneously ashamed of their age and completely oblivious to it—went back to a corner of the room and sat down, as inconspicuous as Helen of Troy in an episode of Perry Mason.

“Thank you all for coming.
 
We’re here as you know to discuss the estate of the late Mr. Homer Baron Robinson.
 
There has been some confusion concerning––”

Blah blah blah.

Papers shuffled around.

Legalese.

She had heard so much of it in her life.

It never seemed to change.

Preliminaries.

More preliminaries.

Getting to the heart of it now; briefcase opened, everyone leaning forward just a bit.

“And so.
 
The will reads as follows:
 
I, Homer Baron Robinson, being of sound mind and in possession of my faculties––

What will? she found herself thinking.

There wasn’t supposed to be any will.

“Do leave my entire estate to Ms. Eve Ivory.”

All eyes turned to the secretary who was sitting in the back of the room.

Except it was no secretary.

Within two minutes proceedings had closed, and Nina found herself sitting alone at the table.

With the woman now bending over her, breath as warm as her smile.

“I can promise you,” she said, “that I will try to help Bay St. Lucy in every way I can.
 
I wish only the best for Bay St. Lucy.”

And she left.

Nina allowed herself to be stunned for one minute.
 
Perhaps more.

Then she took out her cell phone and dialed a number.

“Jackson Bennett,” came the answer.

“Jackson?”

“Yes!
 
Nina!
 
Is it over?”

She shook her head.

“I think, Jackson, it’s just beginning.”

And she hung up the phone.

By five o’clock that evening she was back in Bay St. Lucy, sitting in the middle of the high school gymnasium, a crowd pouring in, several people seated in a tight circle around her.

Between the reading of the will and this particular moment, several things had happened:

1) She had taken a cab immediately to the New Orleans Airport and boarded the small plane that was to take her home.

2) She had talked frequently by cell phone to Jackson Bennett, learning that he knew nothing, except that all relevant papers would be hand delivered to his office later in the evening.

3)
 
All of Bay St. Lucy had learned that there was in fact a will, and that it left all of the money and property in the Robinson estate to someone named Eve Ivory, and not to them.

4) A press conference/town meeting had been announced for five P.M. in the city gymnasium.

5)
 
She had been whisked directly from her flight to said gymnasium, in the middle of which she now stood, microphone before her, Jackson Bennett,
 
Edie Towler, and four city council members seated around her.

6)
 
Jason Boudreaux, reporter for the Bay St. Lucy newspaper, had raised his hand.

These were the things that had happened between the reading of the will and the posing of Jason Boudreaux’s question, which was:

“Nina, what happened in New Orleans today?”

“I don’t know.”

“Where did this will come from?”

“I don’t know.”

Someone else in the audience, far in the back, standing on a riser, directly beneath the Visitors basket, shouting:

“Who is Eve Ivory?”

“I don’t know.”