Game Change: A Nina Bannister Mystery (The Nina Bannister Mysteries Book 3) (9 page)

“What yacht?”

“
The Sea Beagle
.”

“
The Sea Beagle
.”

“Yes, Ma’am.”

“Well, I hate to tell you, young man, but I––”

At which point, Pearl Johnson, not the main administrative assistant (secretary), but the associate administrative assistant (secretary), stepped out into the middle of the anteroom, slapped both of her palms against her cheeks, so that her face began to resemble Edward Munch’s great and frightening painting “The Scream,” and uttered the scream:

“Oh, my God.”

Silence.

The rain had become harder; it now sounded as though a stream of gravel was being poured upon the roof of the building.

“Oh, my God. I’m sorry.”

The conversation did not seem, Nina thought, to be giving her many options.

“For what?” she said, which, like ‘what yacht’ a minute ago, was obviously the only thing she could say.

“I forgot to tell you.”

Nina nodded:

“You forgot to tell me something about a yacht?”

“Yes, Ma’am.”

“Well, that begins to clarify things a little bit.”

“You’re supposed to go to a yacht after school today.”

“I see.”

“Now, actually.”

“And the reason?”

“The press conference.”

“What press conference?”

“A Doctor van Tinsdale or van Mothdale or…”

‘Van Osdale? April van Osdale?”

“I forgot the name exactly. It sounded something like that. They called early this morning to invite you but you were in with Ms. Ramirez and we were trying to find a substitute for Mr. Thompson and somebody found a condom in––”

Nina interrupted, not wishing to hear more details concerning the condom, or its location, or its owner, or its destination.

“It’s all right. I’d heard there was going to be a press conference, but I thought it was going to be after Christmas.”

“No, ma’am. It’s today.”

“I also assumed it was going to take place downtown somewhere.”

“No, ma’am. It’s on the yacht.”

“And I really didn’t know I was invited.”

“Yes, ma’am. You are.”

“Well, then––”

Nina looked back at the young man who had initially brought this news, and who was, she now realized, a chauffeur.

Whose chauffeur?

Probably the chauffeur of the man whose yacht it was.

And so, every day has its little surprises.

She walked around her desk, assembled her rain gear, smiled at the man standing in the doorway, and said:

“Let’s go to the yacht.”

And that (her going to a yacht) became the fourth thing to happen on Friday afternoon.

“And when I say women I don't mean you.”
                       
––
William Faulkner
,
Soldiers’ Pay

The limousine was the color of the rain, which was the color of the mud running in dark rivulets across the school parking lot, which was the color of the sky, which was the color of the ocean.

All of these elements ran together, so that all she really remembered was being tugged or pushed gently from one place to another—the school road, the beach drive, the wharf, the motor launch, the boat ramp—until, someone’s sensitive hands peeling her rain gear off her, she was ushered below decks into a stateroom the size and splendor of the Robinson Mansion.

She looked around her.

It did remind her of the Robinson Mansion!

And if that opulent palace as rebuilt by old mob money and Eve Ivory’s taste had resembled the sunken Titanic inverted and put right, this yacht’s interior—had she ever been in a yacht before? Maybe, but not this kind of yacht—reversed the process, taking a mansion, and making it a seagoing thing.

All glass and brass, all shining mahogany hand rails and thick colorless carpeting, hutches smiling with dishware and cutlery, paintings of ships and enlarged group pictures with various United States presidents grinning and shaking hands.

A waiter, his shirt starched and white, skin starched and white, approached her and smiled:

“Welcome to
The Sea Beagle
, ma’am.”

“Thank you.”

“Can I get you something to drink?”

“Cup of coffee?”

“Of course. Would you care for a pastry?”

“Just the coffee will be fine.”

She looked around her at the milling crowd. There was a familiar face here or there, but for the most part, these were people she did not know well, because they were the truly wealthy set of Bay St. Lucy.

Among them were people in BIG OIL.

The owner of
The Sea Beagle
, she remembered having heard, was a highly placed executive in Mississippi Oil and Petroleum, the corporation that ran one of the huge drilling platforms forty miles or more offshore.

These were people who played golf in foursomes. They wore suits to work and were proud of their ties.

She filtered through the crowd, and several people, a few men, a few women, felt sorry for her and introduced themselves.

“Tom Harkness. I’m in digital sales.”

“Hi, I’m Jill. My husband and I do financial analysis.”

“I’m Morgan Carpenter. I’m a systems engineer.”

Her mind went back to Sonia Ramirez, who was struggling to learn how to conjugate the verb “the.”

“Good luck, Sonia,” she whispered to herself.

And then there were lights flashing in the front of the room—

––or ‘fore,’ she probably should have said—

––and there, scurrying around like mice attempting to flee the ship, were two reporters she recognized from
The Bay St. Lucy Gazette
.

They were not alone.

More reporters now.

And TV cameras.

Which produced, conjured up as though from celestial education dust—

April van Osdale.

There she was.

After at least fifteen years.

April van Osdale. Who must now have been in her late thirties, but who seemed ageless.

April van Osdale was a cake. With a long, tangled, glowing, blonde wig.

She looked like something that had been baked and decorated.

She also wore not make-up, but frosting.

Everything about her was artificial—including the massive, curled, flowing, upswept blonde, blonde, blonde wig––and always had been, dating back to that afternoon years earlier when she had walked into the study room and extended a vanilla greeting and a marzipan hand, saying:

“I’m April. You must be Nina.”

No one had ever said anything more damning to her.

The study sessions—there had been three of them during the semester—had turned into nightmares. Each had involved four women: Nina, April, and two others. The task had been to prepare oral reports on Thomas Dewey or some educator or theoretician or another. April had never been satisfied with the work of her co-reporters.

“We don’t want an ‘A’ on this project, ladies. We want an ‘A+’ Or at least I do.”

It was during the second session that she had stood and screamed:

“I WILL NOT BE ASSOCIATED WITH—WITH SECOND RATE PEOPLE!”

The second rate people, Nina remembered, had sat in stunned silence.

April had gone to the teacher, requesting not a new group, but the chance to be her own group.

To do the report by herself.

The teacher had refused, of course, citing some gibberish about it being a good thing to learn to work with other people—gibberish, because April herself, though certainly ‘other,’ was hardly a person and April had returned for a third attempt, during which Nina had sprung to her feet and would have leveled at her a stream of obscenities had she known any obscenities other than “Shame on you!”

They received a “B-” on the report.

April never spoke to any of them again.

And now she was
 
at the speaker’s stand, waiting for the hubbub surrounding her to diminish.

Her suit was perfectly pressed, perfectly white, and expertly trimmed in cherry-flavored ice cream.

Nina was perhaps thirty feet away from her, and could not stop staring at her face, upon which there were neither age lines nor wrinkles. Had they been removed by medical procedures or had they never come into existence in the first place? Did April van Osdale have finger prints?

No, the woman had sprung fully-formed from a seed pod, like the creatures from some science fiction movie that had postulated the overthrow of earth by spores floating through space.

Perhaps that was it: perhaps she was not a cake at all but a flower, or a greenhouse orchid.

What had it been about her that had so disturbed, so frightened Nina, even from the first moments?

Not her unbridled, stupendous, unceasing, and measureless ambition, for many people had been ambitious.

No, it was simply the fact that she was not real.

What seemed to be there was not really there.

And what was there in place of what should have been?

“Thank you! Thank you all! I want you all to know how grateful I and the senator—and all of the senator’s supporters at the capitol—are for your support. You make us feel very special!”

Applause.

“As you all know, I’ve recently been appointed to work with school officials here in this part of our state. I see my job as extremely important, blah de blah de blah…

More
applause.

Nodding of heads.

Mutter mutter mutter…

“Our children, as you know, are our most important blah de blah de blah…”

And after what seemed another fourteen or fifteen hours of ‘the test scores must rise,’ and such not, but was really only two minutes of real time…

…the speech was over.

April van Osdale stepped down from the podium.

There was a mild hubbub surrounding the podium for a time, and Nina, almost against her will, found herself drifting forward, magnetized toward the polar ice cap that was this woman.