Sea Change (The Nina Bannister Mysteries Book 1) (9 page)

Front row now:

“Does she own all the Robinson property?”

“I don’t know.”

Now questions popping like popcorn balls, here, there, wherever:

“What about the money?”

“I don’t know.”

“What’s going to happen to us?”

“I don’t know.”

“What’s going to happen to the town?”

“I don’t know.”

“Is she going to come and live here?”

“I don’t know.”

“Could she sell all this property?
 
Does she have a right to do that?”

“I don’t know.”

“What about the Robinson mansion?”

“I don’t know.”

Finally the entire crowd, muttering, stunned and disgusted––all left.

Nina turned and said to the small ring of people seated behind her:

“Well. I think I handled that pretty well, don’t you?”

None of them said anything.

“Good,” she continued. “Now I’m going out to dinner.”

CHAPTER SIX:
 
AN EVENING WITH FRIENDS

“Bad news isn’t wine.
 
It doesn’t improve with age.”

Colin Powell

She and Margot Gavin had developed the habit of meeting together for cocktails and dinner at Sergios By the Sea, at seven o’clock precisely, every Thursday evening.

She saw no reason to change the routine now, because things, which so far had gone as badly as they possibly could have, would have hardly been made worse by her sitting around at home.

So she went to Sergios.

The restaurant was slightly ill-named, there being no ‘Sergio’ connected with it (It was in fact owned by a man named Leonard Katz, who lived in Jackson), and the distance between it and the sea being somewhat more than two miles.
 
Still, she always told herself, it was by the sea, to the degree that all places in the world are by the sea, given a bit of poetic license—and direct ownership of the restaurant by Sergio was not implied by the sign outside it, which contained no apostrophe.

She found Margot standing under the entrance canopy.

“Hello there, traveler! I wasn’t sure you’d make it tonight.”

“Why wouldn’t I make it?”

“No reason.
 
No reason at all.
 
So.
 
You’re back from New Orleans!”

“Yes, I am.”

“Shall we go in?”

They entered.

The concierge greeted them, took them two steps toward their normal table by the window, noticed the simultaneous turning of all heads in the restaurant, as well as the baleful stares, and asked:

“Would you like a private room?”

And then, not waiting for an answer, he took them to one.

In a matter of seconds they were seated.

“Something to drink for the ladies?”

“Dry martini,” said Margot.

“Strychnine,” said Nina.

“I’m afraid––”

“She’s joking.”

“No I’m not.”

“Bring her a dry martini.
 
Gin.
 
Olives.
 
More gin.”

“Certainly.”

They waited until he had disappeared.

“I bet,” said Margot, “you had a great trip.”

“Absolutely.”

“Beignets?”

“Wonderful beignets.”

“Preservation Hall?”

“Of course.”

“And then, I heard you had a great meeting this afternoon.
 
At the gym.”

“Certainly did.”

“Also, I heard you had a fantastic time last night with your friend Tom Broussard.”

“Once again, you’re right on the money.”

“How nicely life is turning out for you these days.”

“Yep.
 
Oh. Here are the martinis.
 
Right on time.”

“Here you are, ladies.
 
For you––”

“Thank you.”

“And for you.”

“Thank you.”

“Now may I bring you something else?”

“Another martini.”

“Another martini.”

“Ah.
 
Bien.”

And he left.

Nina sipped her martini, listening as Margot began:

“So, about this ‘Eve Ivory’ person:
 
is she––”

“Stop it!
 
I don’t want to talk about it!”

Silence for a time.

Only the sipping of the martinis.

“Sorry.”

“It’s all right.”

Silence for another second or so.

Margot began to hum:

“Do you know what it means, to miss New Orleans…”

“I hate you.”

“Don’t take it so seriously. But, we have to talk about something, Nina. So do you want to talk about Tom walking out on the writers’ group last night and all of them hating you for it; or do you want to talk about your meeting Eve Ivory today and finding out the town will maybe cease to exist now; or do you want to talk about talking to all the people this afternoon, so that they all hate you now too, like the ones last night did?”

Nina sipped her martini.

“I think I want to talk about World War II.”

The waiter reappeared:

“If I may take your order, Mesdames?”

“Are you,” Margot asked him, “French?”

“No,” he answered.
 
“I’m from Philadelphia.”

“Oh how nice.
 
Well, in that case I’ll have the shrimp étouffée.”

“Exquisite choice.
 
And for your friend?”

“No strychnine?”

“No, Madame.”

“Not in season,” said Margot. “And besides, that would be an appetizer.”

“Then I’ll take the soft shell crab.”

“Excellent.”

He left again.

“So,” Nina said, beginning to feel the effects of the martini, “how was your day in the shop?”

Margot shrugged:

“Okay.
 
I mean, before one o’clock it was ok.
 
Then it changed quite a bit.”

“It’s all going to come back to that, isn’t it?”

“Maybe for a while. A few weeks, months.
 
Forever.”

“How did people take the news?”

“Some of them were crying.
 
I personally don’t think that’s a very good way to deal with grief.
 
I had more sympathy for the ones who were hurling pottery against the wall.
 
Aren’t these martinis good?”

“Yes they are.”

“I wonder where the second one is.”

“Don’t know.”

“It just seems that––”

They were interrupted by the waiter, who carried no second martinis but rather a question:

Damn,
thought Nina.
 
Ready for that martini.

“If I may be so bold––”

“Be so bold,” said Margot.

“A lady and a gentleman are here to see you.”

“Are they,” Margot asked, “from the police?”

“I do not believe so.”

“Are they armed?”

“No, Madame.”

“Then to hell with them.”

“Margot––”

“All right, all right.
 
Show them in.”

“Ahhh, oui!”

“It would be fascinating,” Margot continued, “to live in Philadelphia some time. Just to be engulfed by language.
 
Perhaps the South of Philadelphia.
 
Arles.
 
Maybe Rocky’s neighborhood––”

The door opened.

“Nina, Margot—sorry to bother you.”
    

Jackson Bennett and Edie Towler entered.

“May we join you?”

“Of course,” said Nina. “Jackson, have you heard anything since the meeting this afternoon?”

He nodded.

“I’ve heard a lot.
 
Faxes have been coming in since the meeting this afternoon.
 
And by the way, I’m sorry about that.”

“Me too. Why is everybody in Bay St. Lucy mad at me now?”

“You brought them,” Edie said, “bad news.”

“I’m a schoolteacher; I’ve been doing that all my life.”

“But no one ever listened.”

“I suppose that’s true.”

“I’m beginning to piece it together now pretty well, Nina,” said Jackson. “ There was a lot we didn’t know.”

“Apparently.”

He leaned forward.

“The shooting happened in December of 1982.
 
No one knows who did it.
 
There are implications that it was organized crime, but further than that, we still don’t know.”

“All right.
 
Nothing new there.”

“Homer Baron Robinson and his wife—I think his wife was Felicia—were gunned down in their own home. The child, Arthur, remained unhurt. He was taken away to New Orleans to be raised by familial connections.
 
It was all very secretive.
 
No one spoke of it. No one talked about exactly where in the city he was, or what these ‘connections’ might have been.”

“So he grew up as a weird kid.”

“Is that surprising?” Edie asked.

“No.
 
Not given the circumstances.”

Jackson continued:

“You know, he must have seen––well, we don’t know what he must have seen.”

“True.
 
But go on.”

“Well––”

He paused.
 
When the waiter came, Edie ordered a rum and coke.
 
Jackson ordered a scotch on the rocks, before continuing. “Yes. Well, we knew all of the information I’ve just repeated, about the young Robinson boy.
 
But the girl––”

“The girl?”

“Yes.
 
There was a daughter.
 
Her name was Emily, and she was a couple of years older than Arthur.”

“I didn’t know a daughter was in the house when it happened.”

“She wasn’t in the house apparently. She had left home a year or so before. Some say she ran away; others say she was sent. All we do think is that she died quite young, of a drug overdose.
 
She was in New York at the time, or so the story goes.”

“The Robinson curse.”

“You could call it that.
 
Arthur growing up a recluse in an insane family and then forced to watch two ghastly murders; finally taken away to live—if that’s the word for what his life must have been like––taken away to live with God knows who in some New Orleans mansion just as old and musty as the Robinson place is now.”

“A Rose for Arthur,” Nina whispered.

“What?” asked Jackson.
   

“Faulkner story.
 
Doesn’t matter.”

“She does that a lot,” interjected Margot.

“At any rate,” Jackson continued, “we were all aware of the death of the daughter. What we didn’t know was, she herself had a child before dying.”

“Uh, oh,” said Nina, beginning to understand.

“Right. The circumstances behind this girl’s youth are completely shrouded in mystery. She simply disappears from the radar for a time.
 
We don’t know who she is, or where she grows up.”

“But I think,” said Nina, “that I know where she was at one o’clock this afternoon.”

“I’m sure you do.
 
Somehow this young girl grew up––not particularly wealthy, but fabulously beautiful.”

“And wise in the ways of the world.”

“Yes, Nina, I think we can all agree to that. Her grandfather a gangster, her mother a drug addict—we can all agree that she must have known something of the world.”

He was interrupted by the arrival of food.

“The étouffée for Madame, the crab for you, my lady.
 
May I bring a menu for the two new guests?”

Edie and Jackson declined.

Nina had always loved soft shell crab, and she tore into this one eagerly, washing it down with gin and stories of human misery.

“So what,” she said, crunching a spindly leg in her mouth and feeling like a cannibal, “do we know about her?”

“She married very well.”

“I’m sure she did.”

“A man named St. Jacques Ivory.”

“There are people named St. Jacques Ivory?”

“There was one.
 
From Jamaica.
 
How she met him, God only knows.”

“‘Was’ one?
 
‘Had’ money?”

“He died a few years ago.
 
He was elderly when he met her.”

“That figures,” said Margot. “By the way, this shrimp étouffée is to die for.”

“You probably,” said Nina, “shouldn’t put it that way.”

“It’s very good,” she said.

“Thank you.”

“My bad.”

“It’s all right.
 
So, Jackson, the will––”

“Had originally left everything to Arthur. But Arthur, as we know, had been adjudged insane at age sixteen, when he could have inherited.
 
But the will spoke of Arthur, his sister––”

“—who was dead, God knows how––”

“Yes.
 
Arthur, and Emily––AND THEIR HEIRS.”

“Which nobody knew there was one of,” said Nina.

“That is the worst sentence,” interrupted Margot, “I’ve ever heard an English teacher make.”

“Well, I’m retired.”

“So the thinking had always been,” Jackson proceeded, seemingly oblivious to dangling prepositions and mangled context, “that young Arthur was mentally incompetent to draw a new will, and that, upon his death, the family’s holdings would revert to the city, since they consisted mainly of land.”

“But that’s not true now.”

‘No.
 
Somehow word of Arthur’s death reached our Ms. Ivory.
 
And she now owns a great deal of land here, plus most of the ocean front property.
 
She owns––”

“Don’t say it, “said Nina.

“Don’t say what?”

Nina took a deep breathe, not wanting to say for the first time what she knew would be said often in the days and weeks thereafter.

“She now owns The Ivory Coast.”

“Well,” said Jackson, smiling in spite of everything, “I guess that’s one way to put it.”
 

Edie Towler leaned forward:

“Nina, I do want to assure you of one thing.”

“What’s that?”

“You need to put this afternoon’s meeting out of your mind.”

“That’s a little hard to do.”

“No one in Bay St. Lucy blames you for any of this.”

“I’m not sure that’s true.
 
Those people in the gym––”

“They were just shocked and confused.
 
We all are.
 
But you’re still probably the most respected person in this town.
 
Your husband handled the legal affairs for half our citizenry, and you taught grammar and literature to the other half.
 
People love you here, they always have. Nobody would ever hold any of this against you or do a thing to harm you.”

“Thank you, Edie.
 
That’s very kind of you.
 
I just––”

The door to the private room opened again.

A young, black-haired, slender woman entered.

She was wearing a tan police uniform.

She spoke directly to Nina.

“Are you Ms. Bannister?”

“Yes.”