Game Change: A Nina Bannister Mystery (The Nina Bannister Mysteries Book 3) (15 page)

“I’m very sorry, April, if my living situation embarrasses the school.”

“Oh, that’s putting it much too strongly. You are, as I told you earlier, clearly one of the most respected people in Bay St. Lucy. But it’s for precisely that reason that, if I or Bill or any of a number of contacts that I’ve been able to make recently—well, if we can help you out a bit—we’d all be happy to do so.”

“That’s very good to hear.”

“So you’ll consider it?”

“I certainly will.”

“Good! Well, if there’s nothing more…perhaps you’ll allow me to walk you out?”

“It’s fine, April. I can make it by myself.”

“You’ll be going back to school now?”

“Yes. Have to eat lunch with the kids. Fish sticks today.”

“It’s such a shame. I’d ask you to have lunch with me at Gambrelli’s but some of the senator’s staff are flying in from Jackson…”

“I understand.”

“In the meantime, do you want to take these mock tests over to the school and distribute them to the various teachers?”

“Sure.”

“I had meant to have a courier bring them over later in the afternoon, but…”

“…but as long as I’m here. We can’t get started too soon!”

“That’s the spirit, Nina!”

“Well, then. Bye bye, April.”

So saying, she took the cumbersome manila envelopes in her arms and walked from the building.

“A condo,” she whispered to herself as she made her way through the parking lot.

“I could have a whole new set of friends. I wouldn’t have to live like bum anymore.”

She opened the door of the school van and put the MOCK MACEs carefully into the back seat.

“Furl’s life would change too. I could get him a collar. Maybe even a diamond collar. And a little red vest that he could wear while we were out walking.”

She went round to the front of the van, pulled the sliding door open, and got in.

“I wouldn’t be an embarrassment to the school any more. And I could entertain.”

She started the engine and backed out of the parking lot.

Have to be careful. Not on your Vespa any more.

She threaded her way along Avenue E and turned onto Breakers Boulevard.

“And, then, there are these tests. Probably should give them out this afternoon. April will be over in a day or so to be sure we’re practicing with them. She’ll probably want to actually
see
the students practicing with them.”

A mile on Breakers Boulevard, then left onto Pelican Drive.

Finally, she had arrived at the wharf area.

First along the main quay, where nicer craft were kept.

Then farther down, where more modest craft were kept.

Then to the end, where Penelope Royal’s flat bottom fishing boat lay gently rocking in the waves.

“Penn!”

She got out of the car and waved to Penelope, who was stashing canned goods of some kind in the bow of the boat.

“Hey, Penn!”

Penelope saw her and waved back, then shouted a convivial and amiable curse.

“Nina! Y---! How ---?”

“I’m fine, Penn! I’m fine!”

She walked around the van, slid back the door, and gathered the manila folders up in her arms.

Then she walked to the side of the wharf, high fiving Penn, who scowled and said:

“The other ---night, that ---Max Lirpa and that---of a---Moon Rivard, if I ever---!”

“I know, Penn. How is Tom?”

“He’s fine, poor guy, but those two-----almost-----and if I hadn’t-----it would have been their-----!”

“Well, I’m glad he’s okay.”

“-------.”

“Look, I’ve got a favor to ask.”

“------.”

“Do you have a charter this afternoon?”

“Yeah, I’ve got-----and-----.”

“How far are you going out?”

“Oh, at least about-----if we don’t-----.”

“Good. Do you have a sack of some kind and a weight that you could put in it?”

“---!”

“Wonderful. Would you mind to take these manila envelopes, put them in the sack, put the weights in the sack, tie up the sack, and dump it in the ocean?”

Penelope stared at her:

“Course I -----wouldn’t-----mind.”

Then:

“What’s in the envelopes?”

“A bunch of -----,” answered Nina.

“Who gave them to you?”

“A -----!”

Penn, amazed, shook her head and said:

“I’ve never heard you use that kind of language.”

“Well,” said Nina, handing over the mock tests, “Maybe I’m -----learning.”

“Maybe you-----are.”

The two women high fived, and Nina walked back to the van.

Once back at the high school, she parked the van, entered the building, and opened her cell phone.

She dialed city hall.

“Dr. van Osdale, please.”

Pause.

“This is April van Osdale.”

“April, it’s Nina.”

“Nina? You barely caught me; I was just going out to my luncheon.”

“Something’s happened.”

“Happened? What is it?”

“We had a theft.”

“Oh, my God. At the school?”

“Well. In the parking lot.”

“A car was stolen?”

“No. But someone apparently got into my van. I have to tell you, April. I may have forgotten to lock it.”

“So what actually
was
taken?”

“The mock tests.”

“Oh no.”

“I’m so sorry, April. I know they were valuable.”

“Extremely valuable. And it’s going to take some time to get replacements here.”

“That’s the worst of it, isn’t it?”

“Yes, it is. We were all ready to start Mocking by—tomorrow actually. Now it’s going to take at least another week.”

“Everyone here will be devastated.”

“Of course the question is, Nina, where are those tests now? Where will they be by, say, this afternoon?”

“That’s anybody’s guess, isn’t it?”

“It certainly is; but I can promise you, by five o’clock today someone will be pouring over those mocks.”

“Flounder,” Nina whispered, despite herself.

“What?”

“Found her. School cat went missing and we—we found her.”

“Oh. Well, that’s something, I suppose.”

“Yes, it is. Yes, it is. Once again, April, I’m so sorry for my negligence. And you have a good lunch at Gambrelli’s.”

“I’ll try to. You enjoy your meal also.”

“I will. Good bye.”

She flipped shut the phone.

“And an entire school of fish,” she said, quietly, “will soon be moving from ‘good’ to ‘exemplary.’”

She smiled to herself, left the office, walked to the lunch room, and chowed down on fish sticks.

CHAPTER 10: A FEW MOMENTS WITH TIMOTHIES

“The sun, an hour above the horizon, is poised like a bloody egg upon a crest of thunderheads; the light has turned copper: in the eye portentous, in the nose sulphurous, smelling of lightning.”

––
William Faulkner
,
As I Lay Dying

On Saturday morning, Aurora, Goddess of the Dawn, came sweeping across the cove and into Bay St. Lucy.

She appeared first as a slight lightening in an octopus-ink black sky that had blanketed the town. Then she slipped an aquamarine-clad arm through the crack of the doorway that leads from earth to heaven. Then, opening the door, she stepped through it.

The eastern sky exploded into all the colors—saffron, red, gold, purple—that were her robes, and Nina, who had been sitting on her deck watching since five AM, felt the urge to fall on her knees and worship.

She thought of Timothies, the mortal who had loved the goddess of the dawn so deeply that he’d been granted a wish by her.

Any wish.

“Eternal life, so that I might rise each morning throughout eternity and sing your praises.”

Wrong wish, of course.

Should have included eternal
youth
, Timothies.

What were you thinking?

Things had gone all right, of course, for fifty years or so.

Then age began to have its effect.

And Timothies had begun to shrink, and shrivel, and harden, and blacken.

“Let me die! Let me die!”

But the gods cannot take back the wishes they have granted.

And so Timothies remains until this day, haunting the basements and the curbsides and the wet cold grasslands, his tiny blackened body screeching out in piteous miniature cries:

“Let me die! Let me die!”

Incomprehensible to all that are not aware of his presence, of his story.

Audible only as:

“Creeech! Creech!”

The chirp of the cricket.

Which is what Timothies had become.

A dangerous thing, making deals with the gods.

But one could always watch them!

She continued to do so, beginning to sip another cup of coffee as the sun itself, a flaming orange peel appearing as if by magic—which is, of course, what the whole spectacle was—over the perfectly flat line that was the sea.

Then she spotted the porpoises.

They greeted her every morning, of course, and why should this morning be unlike any other? Black, glistening, and perfectly synchronized, they came bounding into her field of vision as far to the left as she could see—then they made their way before her, continuing to leap and submerge, leap and submerge, first one and then the other, one and then the other, until they finally faded from sight and let sea air and distance extinguish them.

Now the sun was all the way up.

It was absolutely perfectly exquisitely circular. It was globular and fruitlike. It was—was—

Oh, just look at the damn sun, Nina, and stop trying to be a poet.

Or look at––look at that, look at that! Two, now three pelicans sweeping low over the surf, one dives, another dives, whap into the water then out again and look at the fish, look at the fish just squirming half in and half out of the beak and now jerk with the pelican head and SLURP down goes the fish!

But there are more fish! Look at the fish!

The waves are full of them!

Whitefish, their foot-long bodies glistening in the arch of the green waves.

Fish jumping, now twisting and turning their black glistening backs over and over, white black, white black.

Here come the gulls!

“Hey everybody! It’s what all of us gulls have been waiting for! A billion fish! Let’s fly low and circle and screech and caw like crows and bark like dogs and drop excrement all over the beachcombers and get ourselves some SEAFOOD!

Which they were now doing.

This was not a chance, Nina decided, to miss.

She set her coffee cup aside on the small deck table.

She looked reassuringly at Furl, who, not moving at all in his corner of the deck, saw no reason why she should do so.

Then she made her way into the kitchen, opened the refrigerator, and took from a carefully taped white package four shrimp that she had bought two days earlier from one of the bait shops in town. She crossed the living room, shuffled out to the stairs, and made her way down to the dew-wet concrete slab that spread out fifteen feet below the shack’s floor.

Leaning against one of the fifteen-foot tall support poles was her rod and reel.

She baited the hook with one of the fat curved shrimp, then walked down to the ocean.

The morning air bathed her.

Sixty five degrees, she would have seen the circular thermometer on the wall behind her deck indicating, had she been standing on the deck looking not out at the sea but back toward her shack.

But she was not standing there. She was walking across the hard-packed sand, enjoying the sixty five degrees rather than reading about it…

…and now she was slipping out of her sandals, letting them lie dormant and secure behind her like two black sea anemone, while the tan beach sucked and squiggled beneath the soles of her feet.

The surf pounded in front of her.

Tide coming in.

Waves, waves…

BRASH! CRABBLE! ROOOOAAAAR!

An air full of fish, a wave full of fish, fish everywhere!

She was in the ocean now, exquisitely cold water washing around her ankles, almost reaching up to the cuffs of her cutoff jeans.

“Okay, you whitefish! Come and get it!”

She flipped the reel’s bale, held her finger on the line, arched, leaned back, took one breath, now two…

Then HURLED with all her might, letting her finger up at just the right moment and sending the shrimphooksinker apparatus flying out over the sea.

PLOP

Which it all now fell into.

There it was: the miniature half red, half white two inch buoy-bobber bobbering before her, waiting to be pulled down into the drink.

One second, two seconds.

The bobber disappeared.

There then followed an instant of nothing at all.

Then came the tenth most sensual and exciting, at least according to Nina, physical feeling in the world.

The first nine had to do with the act of reproduction and did not need to be dwelt upon.

The tenth though was..

…NOW! NOW THIS FEELING!

FISH ON THE LINE FISH ON THE LINE!

The reel whirred and buzzed in her hand; she saw the tiny spot where the fishing line entered the water as it circled and darted away from her.

Flip.

She closed the bale, fixed her legs firmly in the twisting water beneath her, and closed her fingers hard on the reel crank.

Then she began to pull the fish toward her.

One revolution. Two revolutions.

CREECH CREECH CREECH!

Gulls circling above her, diving all around her, flapping and honking and diving and screaming.

CRASH CRASH CRASH AND

ROOOOOOAAAR!

The waves broke around her, drenching her sweatshirt and jeans, filming and obscuring the lenses of her glasses.

Pull again.

Pull hard again.

The fish fighting back.

BIG FISH!

STRONG FISH!

This went on for perhaps a minute.

But finally she won, and, with a last tug, pulled the whitefish up out of the water, so that it now hung wriggling and lurching before her.

It was a foot out of the water, scales silver and flashing in the sunlight.

She addressed the fish.

“Hello, dinner.”

It replied by flapping, jerking, inflating and deflating its gills.

She turned and waded out of the surf.

Frank had taught her how to clean a fish, and she felt that, during the last years, she had become even more adept at the process than he had ever been.

The area beneath her shack was her treasure trove. A charcoal grill ready to use in one corner; a freezer buzzed quietly in another; and, in a third, the one closest to the surf, there stood her work table, its thick wooden surface pockmarked, knife scarred, and redolent of oozings and slime from past cleaning.

The knife stood ready for her, and beside it the whetstone.

“Never try to do this,” she could remember Frank saying, “with a dull knife.”

Whish whish whish.

Then plop, fish on the cutting board.

One careful slit, no more than an inch deep, under the fish, from the pectoral fin to the tail.

Now, turn the fish…

…trickiest of all, cut off the head, but don’t go too deep.

Pull.

The head comes off, and all the digestive apparatus out with it.

Bread bag ready for purpose, all entrails dumped inside.

Bag into the garbage can.

Now filet the fish, quick cut, another quick cut.

Two filets.

Wash the board.

Stand the rod and reel up, leaning on its pole.

And upstairs.

Two filets into the refrigerator.

Dinner dinner dinner.

A little lemon sprinkled on the fish.

Charcoal grill it down below, or just let it simmer in the frying pan up here in the kitchen?

She would decide later on.

After her afternoon nap.

But that was dinner.

…this was breakfast, which she had decidedly earned.

She carefully made herself one egg, over easy, and toasted a slice of garlic bread.

Another cup of coffee…

…outside, at the foot of the stairs, the rolled-up copy of
The Bay St. Lucy Gazette
.