Game Change: A Nina Bannister Mystery (The Nina Bannister Mysteries Book 3) (36 page)

“He teaches for me. At the high school.”

“Did Officer Rivard fill you in on what’s happened here?”

“Yes.”

“You know we have reason to believe he may have some involvement in the disappearance of Dr. April van Osdale?”

She spoke quietly as she walked, always keeping an eye on the gaunt, ancient mariner figure that was Max Lirpa.

“He has more involvement than you know.”

“Ma’am?”

“Sorry.”

Why was no one getting her jokes these days?

Perhaps because nothing seemed very funny these days.

“He seems to want to talk to you.”

“So I understand.”

“Do you know why that would be?”

“Well. We work together. I suppose I’ve been supportive of his teaching methods.”

“Has he seemed…well, erratic in the past days?”

“He’s seemed erratic ever since I met him.”

“Do you think he’s capable of committing an act of violence? Of killing someone?”

She paused, then said:

“I don’t think he’s capable of committing an act of violence; I do think he’s capable of killing someone.”

Silence for an instant.

Then:

“Ma’am?”

“I know. It’s confusing.”

“I’m not sure I understand.”

“That’s all right. I’m just beginning to myself.”

They were at the edge of the gangplank now.

Max Lirpa shouted at her:

“Mistress Mine, with Eyes a Shining!”

She answered:

“Max! You need to come away from the boat!”

He shook his head”

“Oh, but I can’t, dear lady! You see I must go down to the sea in ships! I told you, you remember, how very Masefield like it all was! Very much like Cornwell!”

“Yes. I remember.”

“So you understand why I can’t give it up.”

“You wouldn’t have to give it up.”

“Oh, but I must disagree with you there! You see they want to pen me up!”

“No one wants to pen you up.”

“You’re wrong, Headmistress. They pen up people who do murder. Or they guillotine them. Or they hang them. I think I’d sooner drown. More poetic, don’t you think?”

“You didn’t do murder, Max.”

“Really? Then what would you call it?”

“I don’t know. But I just know you’re…”

“Sick? That’s the very word, isn’t it?”

“No. That’s not the word.”

He was silent for a time. Then he said:

“You understand what’s happened? What’s been happening, all along?”

She nodded:

“I think I understand.”

“When? When did you know?”

“Not until a few minutes ago.”

“And what, as the students are so fond of saying now, was your first clue?”

She paused, then said:

“Your name. I never really looked at it before. Then when I remember the things that April said. The things that you said…”

“I might have known. I suspected that, if anyone would figure it out, it would be the indomitable Ms. Bannister. The lady pitched from the pitch. And so, by the way, how did the match go tonight?”

“We won.”

“Capital!”

“Max, I want to come aboard,” she heard herself saying, “and talk with you.”

Now why would she say a thing like that?

Fifty-three voices buzzed around her:

“You can’t do that, ma’am!”

“We don’t even know if he’s got a weapon!”

“We would have no way of protecting you!”

“There’s no way we can authorize that!”

And that was only four, leaving forty-nine, all stating persuasive reasons why she could not go on board and talk with Max Lirpa.

Then she turned to Moon:

“He’s going to jump if I don’t go out to that yacht.”

“Yes, ma’am, but…”

“I know what’s happened. I know what happened to April van Osdale.”

“All right then, Ms. Nina…what did happen to her? Where is she?”

“Nowhere. She isn’t anywhere at all.”

“You mean she’s dead?”

“In a way. Just…in a way.”

“You’re not making any sense.”

“A lot of things in life don’t make sense. There are things that can’t be measured. Things that aren’t on the test.”

“Ms. Bannister, I don’t know what test…”

“Skip it. Please, Moon, I have to go out there. I think I can talk with him. He just needs to know that someone understands what is happening.”

“I’m just not certain…”

“He’s not dangerous.”

“But if he’s killed somebody…”

“It’s not what you’re thinking.”

And after pleading her case, and pleading her case, she was finally allowed to say:

“Max!”

“Yes, my dear?”

“I want to come aboard. The patrolmen, and Moon Rivard, have told me that I can do that. They insist on coming too.”

“Oh, it will be a splendid party!”

“You’re not armed, are you?”

“Definitely not! I’m as disarming as one can be!”

“You won’t kill me?”

“No, no, not a chance of it! I’ve done all the killing I care to for a time!”

“You realize these people don’t understand your humor.”

“But you do, don’t you?”

“I understand a lot, Max.”

He began climbing down from the mast.

“I’m sure you do, fair lady. I’m sure you do.”

And with that it was decided.

Moon Rivard, two patrolmen, and Nina, headed up the gangplank and onto
The Sea Beagle
.

“It takes two people to make you, and one people to die. That’s how the world is going to end.”
                       
––
William Faulkner
,
As I Lay Dying

“Sometimes I ain’t sho who’s got ere a right to say when a man is crazy and when he ain’t.”

                  
––
William Faulkner
,
As I Lay Dying

The scene in the small stateroom of the yacht was far cozier than one could have expected, given the presence of three armed police officers in the room, standing against the walls staring outward, their hands resting upon glistening revolvers.

Max Lirpa, still bare-chested, appeared not to notice them.

He’d found a bottle of port.

She wondered how he could have been so familiar with
The Sea Beagle
.

But, of course, she knew, once she thought of it.

He was familiar with
The Sea Beagle
because he’d been on it.

Had probably, in fact, been given a key to it.

Because he’d been a friend of the senator’s.

Even though the senator had not known it.

She forced herself to take a sip of the glass of port Lirpa had given her and said, quietly:

“I can’t claim that I’ve figured it out, Max. Not all of it. Not the inner workings of it.”

“Ah, but who
could
make such a claim? The inner workings of the human mind…no, who
could
make such a claim?”

The wind was freshening; they could hear it begin to sing around the corners of the yacht.

“I was in the police car. Moon showed me the report. It had the name LIRPA typed in large letters on top of it. I just kept staring at it. Finally things began to make sense.”

“I’m glad they did. It would have been difficult to explain. Difficult to put into words. At least, the words we commonly use.”

“
April
backwards is
Lirpa
. That was the only name you could have given yourself; you were her mirror opposite.”

“Yes. No choice about the name. Max Lirpa. Maximum InsideoutApril!”

“And that day when you told me you were ‘conceived in Oxford,’ I didn’t really understand.”

“Nor would I have expected you to.”

“When April said she had ‘come to know you during university days,’ she meant The University of Mississippi. Oxford, Mississippi.”

“Yes, I…I came into being there.”

“April’s alter-ego.”

“I suppose the doctors might call it that. ‘But that was in another country; and besides, the wench is dead.’”

“You killed her.”

He shook his head.

“No. I willed her out of being. Two entities in one body. It could not have lasted forever. And I proved the stronger.”

Silence for a time.

“Like
Psycho
,” said Nina.

He frowned.

“I hate that film. Completely unbelievable. And so much blood. So much violence.”

Then he said quietly:

“The most difficult battles are not fought with knives.”

Nina knew nothing to say to that. She thought for a time and finally whispered, more to herself than to the figure sitting opposite her:

“I was so crazy. I was worrying about what would happen when April van Osdale might come into the building and run into this wild Max Lirpa. But that was never going to happen, was it?”

“No. At least not in the way that you had imagined. In another way, of course, it was happening all the time. Right under your nose.”

“Right under all our noses. And the reason I could never seem to call April in her Hattiesburg office was not that she was in high-level meetings; it was simply that she—being you—was in Room 102. Everybody around southwest Mississippi thought that she was somewhere else. Which I guess was true.”