Game Change: A Nina Bannister Mystery (The Nina Bannister Mysteries Book 3) (12 page)

“When will you be back?”

“Around dinner. But I’m buying dinner for the team at Dee Tee’s.”

“Can I meet you there?”

“Sure, if you want to. Be warned though; they get a little rowdy.”

“Rowdy? You should have been here this morning.”

“What’s going on?”

“April van Osdale is going on.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah, oh. Jackson, can she…”

He cut her off:

“Let’s talk about it tonight.”

Then he hung up.

Every real town—even an artistic community such as Bay St. Lucy––has a restaurant like Dee Tee’s. It was not a trendy restaurant. It did not serve gourmet food or trendy food or healthy food or food that was to be eaten while sitting on a veranda and looking out over the sea.

It served hamburgers for lunch and breaded veal cutlets for dinner.

These things were lugged to tables by big strong waitresses dressed in sky white uniforms, who called the men ‘honey’ or ‘sugar,’ and who carried six platters of breaded fish on one upturned palm and a continual, always full, pot of coffee, in the other.

Nina arrived at five thirty, a few minutes before the team did.

There were two big tables at the back of the restaurant that sat, empty, waiting for them.

“What are you going to have tonight, honey?”

Damn. She must look like a man. The waitress called her honey.”

“Just a salad.”

The waitress looked as though Nina had stuck a fork into her stomach. Crestfallen to the point of tears, she said, in a tone reminiscent of a minister whose congregation was refusing en masse to take communion:

“No meat?”

Nina shook her head.

“I’m sorry.”

“None at all?”

“No.”

“Just a salad?”

She answered as though she were answering the question, “Is your sister really dead?”

She said:

“Yes.”

The waitress, heartbroken, turned and left.

A short time afterward, the huge yellow cockroach that was the school bus crawled to a stop outside the south window, and the team poured out.

One second. Two seconds.

Then they all came hurtling into the restaurant.

Meg was not with them.

For Meg, immediately following the game, had headed out to New Mexico.

By this time two days from now, she and Jennifer would be married.

The girls had been chaperoned home by Jackson Bennett, who drove just behind them.

They did not act like one expected giggling girls to act. They were athletes and they comported themselves as such. They brayed, horse played, shoved, pushed, broke into delirious laughter (the team had obviously won) and threw each other into tables, some of which were empty, others were occupied by smiling people who recognized their status as jocks and, being people from The South, forgave them.

Once having seated themselves at the tables reserved for them, they engaged in the time-honored ritual of unscrewing the tops of the sugar bottles and the salt shakers, then pouring one of the ingredients into the other’s bottle, and vice versa.

No one at Dee Tee’s seemed to mind.

Dee Tee’s was the kind of restaurant that had seen much worse, and sucked this kind of behavior into its cream gravy bowls much as a midway swallows rubes and yokels.

It was ready for whatever the girls could throw at them.

Two of the players spotted Nina.

“Hey, Ms. Bannister!”

“Hello, Ms. Bannister!”

She nodded primly and answered:

“Hello, girls. How did it go?”

“We won! Fifty to thirty five!”

“Congratulations!”

“Now bring on Logansport and Hattiesburg!”

Upon hearing the hated name, the remainder of the team slammed down onto their tables the bottles of sugar and salt—the contents of which had now been thoroughly switched––and made animal noises.

Nina was so proud of them.

A few minutes later food began to arrive.

The young women did not order salads.

They did not order as though thinking first and foremost of their slender figures.

They ordered MEAT! MEAT! MEAT! as though they were Odysseus’ men slaughtering the cattle of the sun, and soon their tables were covered with steaming bowls of mashed potatoes, grease-filled platters of French fries, rolls, biscuits, tureens of thick cream gravy, and great thick slabs of steak, chicken, ham, fish, pork, mullet, hen, squab, and, perhaps if one researched too thoroughly, horse and dog.

GO YOU, MARINERS! GO YOU, MARINERS!
 
GO YOU, MARINERS!”

Nina was forced to rethink her literary analogy.

Odysseus’ men could not have been this loud.

They had finished their second chant and begun asking for seconds (But were there any animals left alive in the city?) when Jackson Bennett walked through the door.

“YAAAAY, MR. BENNETT!”

“YAAAAY, MR. BENNETT!”

He beamed, and opened his arms to embrace Alyssha, who’d hurtled across the room and thrown herself against him, shattering as she did so two chairs which seemed to have been made of balsa wood.

“Good game!” he crowed, looking down at her as she beamed up at him.

She accepted the praise and nodded, her face glowing only slightly more intensely than the fluorescent lights in the ceiling above.

Then she returned to her teammates while Jackson shouted:

“Good game, ladies!”

“YAAAAY, Mr. Bennett!”

“YAAAAY, Mr. Bennett!”

All of the standing girls sat down again and renewed their carnage. The people brave enough to still be in the restaurant nodded approval, whispering to themselves things like:

“Aren’t they cute?”

…and not:

“Let’s get the hell out here.”

…like non-Mississippians might have said.

“Nina! May I join you?”

“Sure. Sit down, Jackson.”

He did so, the table rocking as he leaned forward on it, the chair creaking as his weight began the process of intimidating it.

“What are you having?”

“Salad.”

He shook his head, perusing the menu:

“You’ve got to do better than that. This meal is my treat, you know.”

“You’re buying dinner for the whole team?”

He looked at the girls, who, having finished off fifty pounds or so of main course, were now contemplating desert.

“The law firm did pretty well last year. We can use the profits to put down a deposit.
 
So, come on, chow down.”

“No, a salad’s fine.”

“Wimp,” he growled, peering at the wall behind the players.

It was covered with a gigantic rebel flag and pictures of Jeb Stuart, Robert E Lee, and Stonewall Jackson.

“Great restaurant,” he said quietly, “for a Black man to be frequenting.”

“So why do you come here? Why did you bring the team here?”

“I like,” he said, gesturing to the waitress, “the breaded veal cutlet.”

“Well. So much for principles.”

“The only principal I’m really concerned about is you. How’s the job going?”

She said nothing while Jackson ordered, his two-minute litany of desires obviously pleasing the woman who stood beside him, scribbling earnestly, her weekly salary apparently depending on the poundage of meat and potatoes she was able to dole out and see consumed.

She left.

The confederate heroes on the far wall continued to stare out over the room, stern-faced, wishing apparently to have no more truck with Jackson Bennett that he wanted with them.

“We’re all a little concerned, Jackson.”

He took a deep breath and nodded.

“Van Osdale?”

“Yes. She spent the morning at school.”

“How did that go?”

“How did the Civil War go?”

“Pretty good for my side.”

“But for the other side?”

He smiled.

“I heard they had some difficulties.”

“Yes, they did.”

“And you feel like…”

“Atlanta. And she’s Sherman.”

“Is it that bad, Nina?”

“I’m not sure how bad it is. That’s why we need to talk.”

“All right. Talk.”

“Jackson, how much power does this woman really have?”

‘I’m not sure.”

“How can you not be sure? You’re one of the best attorneys in town. You know people in the state capital.
 
You’ve got contacts. You’re also head of the school board.”

“Sherman, from what I’ve been able to read, didn’t talk to those folks either.”

“So, you don’t know how much power she really has? This woman basically threatened every teacher in the building this morning. The test scores must go up, or people will be fired.”

“Which people?”

“All people. Any people. How can she do that? Isn’t it the school board’s place to hire and fire people?”

“Technically, yes.”

“I hate that word ‘technically.’ What it really means is, ‘the thing that I just said is true isn’t true at all.”

He took a deep breath and began to do what Nina had learned years before, in watching Frank deal with clients, lawyers always did when they either had bad news or had to admit they didn’t know something:

…he whispered.

This just gets worse and worse
, she found herself thinking.

“Years ago, Nina, it was probably true that the school board of a little town like Bay St. Lucy could decide pretty much everything that was going to happen. Curriculum, textbooks, hiring, firing—the school superintendent or the principal, depending on the size of the district, made recommendations, and the board rubber-stamped them. Hell, what did the local feed store owner or grocer care about what math book the kids had to buy?”