Oil Change: A Nina Bannister Mystery (The Nina Bannister Mysteries Book 4)

Oil Change
:

(A Nina Bannister Mystery)

T’Gracie and Joe Reese

To University of Louisiana-Lafayette friends and colleagues. Thanks for the memories: Geaux Cajuns!

PROLOGUE:
 
UNDERNEATH

Water had gotten into the cement tank, and some of the cement had solidified. The cement tank looks like a farm silo and sits in one of the rig’s legs. It was his job to be lowered down into the tank and chip away the hardened cement.

Cement irritates sensitive skin, nostrils, and lungs.

He worked with a small hammer and chisel. The fragments of cement went into a wicker basket, which was pulled to the top, then dumped overboard.

Chip.
 
Chip.

He tried not to think that the platform was ten miles from shore;
 
that today was his last day, that he was getting out of it; or that the leg of the platform extended down more than a mile into the water, and that he was now an extra sixty-three feet beneath the ocean’s surface.

Chip.
 
Chip.

Fragments into the basket, swinging there beside him held to the rung of the ladder.

Absurdly the basket reminded him of Easter egg hunts.

There was no technology involved here, no high speed compressor pumps, no state of the art machinery.

Water had gotten into the cement. Fragments of cement had hardened and had to be removed.

Sounds surrounded him. Dull roaring of engines, circulating vents of air, creaking of the aluminum joints that held the ladder together.

What if the ladder collapsed?

He tried not to think of that.

Better to think of the money he was going to be paid.

That he was going to take, and escape with.

And he
was
going to escape. There were warnings that one could not do that.

But he had figured out a way to do it. And with money.

A great deal of money indeed.

There were stories, of course, about The Tool Master, and about what he would do if he learned…

But he would not learn.

Tomorrow: the helicopter, shore, and then somewhere else.
 

First New Orleans, then London.

He would not be found in London.

There he could disappear.

And drink. Drink a great deal, because out here there was no drinking.

Chip. Chip.

Basket almost full now, no eggs, no green and red and banded and speckled and children all around, shrieking and running through the cool wet lawn.

How long ago since he had been a child?

He was not a child now.

He was, indeed, very far from being a child now.

The cement was chipped away now, revealing bare patches on the side of the well.

He took two five-inch square packets from the pocket of his orange jump suit.

Very carefully he taped them to the well wall.

Five minutes later, he was climbing out into the sunlight.

And he was squinting through sweat-filmed eyes at the thunderheads, out there, farther at sea, vast pink and purple popcorn balls, with tracings of lightning illuminating the guts of them, dark inky guts of them, the lightning writing its name inside them and then evaporating, disappearing, forgetting where it had been or what it had written.

He was outside.

And a mile under water, sixty three feet under the mud that was the bottom of the ocean…

CHAPTER ONE: WHAT SHE FOUND IN THE DRAINAGE CANAL

The thunderstorm that appeared huge, menacing, inspirational, colorful, fantastically colored, and deadly as the sea itself to workers on the offshore oil rig Aquatica—owned and operated by Louisiana Petroleum Ltd—was hardly visible at daybreak to the citizens of Bay St. Lucy. Those of them who were awake at five thirty AM saw nothing monstrous at all, but simply a twin of the rising sun, a sliver dome-topped peach curve that could have been old sol reflected in morning haze, just as well as it could have been what Keats called a ‘huge, cloudy symbol,’ and what Nina Bannister, ex English teacher of thirty years, would have recognized as the inspiration for what seemed ninety percent of all romantic poetry.

“Oh my God,” she wheezed.

Then she stopped running.

Or rather she stopped doing whatever it was that she had been doing, because ‘running’ would have been putting it a bit dramatically, overstating to a ludicrous degree what it actually was.

What she had been doing did not even properly arrive at the status of ‘jogging,’ and was actually no more than advanced walking with one’s weight distributed in such a way as to make falling forward and scraping one’s face across three feet of red clay track a distinct and frightening possibility.

“Oh my God.”

She was bending double now, hands pressing in hard on whatever part of the body that was just above the hip bones, and bits of dizziness alternating through her brain with equally disturbing bits of ‘lightness of the head,’ while she cursed herself for having taken no real exercise at all for the previous five months.

Five months?

Well, ten months actually.

Ten months?

Oh the hell with it. Who knew how long had it been since she had taken any real exercise?

The job of high school principal had taken its toll, both on her free time (she had none) and on her willingness to do anything other than deal with myriads of school problems, eat (too much) and sleep (too little).

But that was done now.

Now she was the proprietor of Elementals: Treasures from the Earth and Sea, responsible only to Margot Gavin, who would be a far easier boss to work for than the school board had been.

Breaths were coming a bit easier now, so she could straighten up and begin to enjoy both the morning and Gerard Park.

Neither was hard to do.

The morning was like a jewel, and, yes, what was indeed so rare as a day in June? And not just any morning in June: June first, the first exquisite real day of summer, with acacias all in bloom and sea birds floating like shards of whole cloth above evergreens and magnolias that dotted the town’s landscape; and smells of Flowering Judas bushes mixing gleefully with all the aromas of coffee and pastry and kilns and sea air and ocean spray…

…and then there was the park.

Bay St. Lucy was a village of parks.

Its white sand beach was a park in and of itself, of course, and its little doll house downtown could have been considered a park—bright blue clapboard houses set off under palm trees and crumbling sidewalks bordering red brick streets—but there were other parks, each of them possessed of a certain kind of charm.

McKenzie Park had a duck pond. Stonewall Jackson Park had the bandstand where, in only a few days, the Bay St. Lucy Brass Band would begin its Summer and Sousa series. Kimmel Park had perhaps the region’s most complete jungle gym/ seesaw/ swing set/ giantplasticbrightyellowtubething.

And here, surrounding her as she began walking as a warm up to one more attempt at near-jogging, was Gerard Park, which had a bit of everything.

It had the running track, which outlined the boundaries of a giant amoeba, if amoeba-boundaries were comprised of red clay bitlets that sounded scratchy when one’s not new but not very often used either Nikes scraped across them. It had copses of willows that bent soothingly over the gazebos that were circular white porches without houses attached to them. It had a creek running through it to no purpose, with no particular destination, and only the rumor of a current that bubbled along over flat rocks and small frogs, luring very young children and picnicking lovers and wild-eyed poets and Nina to sit upon its banks and submerge their bare feet.

And it had that quality of timelessness that all real parks possess, the soft breath emanating from all its elements, all its minnows and palm fronds and shadows and arches and groves and brickwork—emanating from all these rags and bones of the universe, whispering:

“We were and will be, just like you weren’t and won’t be. So just enjoy, and the hell with it.”

Or something like that.

She was beside the giant maple tree now. Two cardinals, the bright red male and his much more modestly dressed spouse—one would assume they were married, but these days, these days, these younger birds, these younger birds, where did they get their values?—were chasing each other through the branches, upon which a black squirrel sat and yammered at them, probably realizing that they were up to no good and were on drugs.

“Hey Nina!”

“Nina!”

These voices came from two other cardinals, who differed from the first two only in that the female was dressed more brightly than the male, that they were flying on the track and not in the trees, that they were oblivious to the squirrel, and that they were humans.

“Hey you two!”

They were moving with such effortless grace and such deceptive speed that her greeting, which had begun with every intention of being a shout, had whimpered down to little more than an everyday utterance by the time it had reached its exclamation point, which really, given the fact that they were now no more than a few feet away from her, did not deserve to be much more than a period.

“John and Helen Giusti! My favorite runners!”

There were those exclamation points again. But they were probably all right, and even justified, given the exclamationness of these two perfect people, these late-in-their twenties still newly marrieds, these ex stars of the Broadway stage and Mississippi gridiron, these earths, these realms, these Englands, these Giustis.

Who were standing still now, and smiling at Nina just as broadly as she was beaming back at them.

This was possibly because they were by nature happy people, in the first glorious months of their marriage.

Or it might have been because they were just enjoying the morning.

Or it might have been because Nina was one of those people that all humans in Bay St. Lucy seemed to like, and they were humans in Bay St. Lucy.

Or it might have been because they were out here on the running track in Gerard Park, not in the laundry room of the state prison, where Helen might well have been had Nina not solved the murder of her ex-husband.

“We haven’t seen you out here!”

“I know,” she nodded, still a bit out of breath. “My first time in more months than I want to think about. Do you guys come out and run every morning?”

And, of course, the answer was bound to be ‘yes we do,’ which was absurd, because—well, there it was, wasn’t it? Absurd because those people who did not need to run did so constantly and those who desperately needed to run did so with the frequency of Christmas, Valentine’s Day, or Halloween, that is, once a year.

“We try to,” said Helen, smiling as she said the words, her dark eyes sparkling, her lilting actress’s voice spreading like honey over the park and causing all the small animals to swoon like Disney characters.

“John has to open ‘The Pelican Skeleton’ at six thirty; vets have tough hours. I’ve been helping out at Bagatelli’s bakery—you know I’ve always loved that place—but bakers’ hours aren’t the easiest things to deal with either. Nina, have you heard from Margot?”

Nina nodded, trying not to be openly envious of Helen’s superbly sculpted abs, or the fact that she could run in a two piece red bikini-like thing—as opposed to Nina’s floppy sweater—or the fact that she could run at all.

She failed at not being openly envious of all these things but answered anyway.

“Got a call from her yesterday. She and Goldmann are back at The Candles. First guests are arriving next week. The week long honeymoon in Chicago is over.”

John shook his head. He was not as magnificent or radiant or red or sculpted or hauntingly beautiful or darkly mysterious as his wife but as men went he wasn’t bad, and he looked like he still could start at fullback for the Bay St. Lucy Mariners.

“Who would want to honeymoon in Chicago?” he asked.

There was silence in the park.

No one knew.

Nina gave, finally, the best answer she could come up with.

“Well. They’re Chicagoans.”

“That,” said John, seemingly trying but not succeeding in making his head stop shaking, “should be reason enough.”

“I know. I know. I told Margot the two of them ought to go to Bimini or Tahini or one of those ‘ini’ places with umbrella drinks. But they were having none of it. Anyway, she said she was already missing Bay St. Lucy.”

“Serves her right,” said John, “for leaving. By the way, when are you bringing Furl by for his vaccinations?”

She paused.

This was an area of some disagreement between her and her cat.

“We talked about it last night. I told him I felt it would be in his own best interests. I described, with some graphic detail, some of the diseases a cat his age could get if he neglected preventive health care. I emphasized that going in the cat carrier wasn’t as bad as he seemed to want to believe, and told him that it was really pretty silly—demeaning actually—to have to use a plumber’s helper to force him down into it, especially since last time he chewed a big gap out of the plumber’s helper and now it’s lost its vacuum seal thing so it isn’t really much of a helper. To the plumber, I mean.”

“How did Furl react?”

“He jumped up on the kitchen table and left a little turd there.”

“So he was against the idea?”

“That’s the way I interpreted it.”

“Still…”

“I know, I know. We’ll be there.”

There was silence for a time, and Nina regretted, almost immediately, having mentioned the turd on her kitchen table.

Still, John had asked, and if he as a veterinarian could not handle such matters…

“You have to come out for dinner!” he said, brightly, proving that he could indeed handle such matters.

Nina reacted exactly the same way she always did when invited out for dinner:

“When?”

John and Helen looked at each other, communicated symbiotically, and chimed in harmony:

“This Friday!”

Nina answered, also in harmony:

“Good.”

John nodded:

“We’ll be leaving town at about five thirty to drive home. Why don’t we just pick you up at your place?”

“Excellent!” answered Nina, who was not certain which she most looked forward to: the ten mile drive, most of which skirted the beach and the rest of which wound through dark and hauntingly beautiful pine forests; or the house itself, set on poles far out into the ocean and glimmering like a jewel on moonlit nights; or whatever feast the Giustis would make for her; or just being with John and Helen for an evening, listening to Helen reminisce about life on the stage in New York, or to John talk about the strange and wondrous sea creatures one could spy from the deck.

“That’s done then,” she said, adding: “But only on the condition that I can have you two out the following weekend.”

Their HAPPYCOUPLESYMBIOTISM remained in force, and they both nodded and agreed simultaneously.

So that was it then.

There were a few more words of near-perfunctory pre-parting, a few words of actual parting, mutual shouts over the shoulder after having parted, and then Nina was by herself again, panting, wheezing, and sighing as her mental speedometer approached two MPH.

The creek was on her left now, and there, ten feet ahead, was the small Ichabod Crane bridge that crossed it and behind which the Headless Horseman could not have hidden because it was too small.

Eight feet ahead.

Pant pant…