Free Set Change: A Nina Bannister Mystery (The Nina Bannister Mysteries) by T'Gracie Reese, Joe Reese Page B

DEPARTURES

    CHAPTER 6:   WHAT IS SO RARE AS A DAY IN…

    One of Nina’s favorite lines in literature had always been Tolstoy’s opening to Anna Karenina .
    “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”   Except Nina applied these lines to months. Every miserable month had its own story, or stories.   Happy months, though, just rocked along as they chose, day to day, one pleasurable sensation following another, all equally luscious, all completely forgettable.
    Such was her June in Bay St. Lucy, following the announcement of The Great Hamlet, which was to act as forerunner to The Great Summer Festival.
    Every day she rose, breakfasted, Furled, Unfurled, went to run on the beach and ultimately walked on the beach, worked for two or three hours in Margot’s shop which meant she chatted for two or three hours with Margot, came home, Furled, Unfurled, lunched, napped, fished with Penelope Royal, dinnered with any one of a number of friends, came home after dark, Furled, Unfurled, had a glass of wine, went to bed resolved to read something truly great (there was a volume of Schopenhauer on the nightstand, where it had lain for several months), read instead a mystery, and then dozed off to sleep.
    She remembered each one of these things vividly—how Margot’s shop looked, how it felt to catch a fish with Penelope, the lovely shiver of finding out who the murderer was—but she remembered each scene only once, which would have meant that, at month’s end, she would have missed something like 29/30ths of her life.
    It bothered her.
    What had happened to all those moments?
    No matter, because this was no longer June.
    This was July.
    Different story entirely.
    Hellzapoppin.
    July 4 came and went, big tourist days, much business in the town, all the sea craft booked, fishing as good as it might be expected to be in midsummer when it was at its worst, and the town filled with weaponry. There were fireworks going off everywhere––from offshore oil platforms to high school and middle school stadia to beach condos with fancy rooftop launching pads—and there were battle re-enactments, soldiers on parade, military marches coming from every bandstand in town—everything, in short, to remind the citizens of Bay St. Lucy of how good a thing war was and how lucky we were to have it.
    Nina spent most of the day inside.
    Furl was too frightened to go out on the deck.
    But the day passed, and gave way to July 5, the day for cleaning up used rocket flares and bottle blasters and roman candles and squealies and Whirling Dervishes, all in the hope that they were spent and not live, and that they would disappear into ponderous garbage trucks and not explode into the hands and faces of curious, five year old, would-be infantrymen.
    Then came July 6.
    At 8 p.m. Helen Reddington was coming home, flown in from New York City, via Memphis, and accompanied by her husband, Clifton Barrett.
    The Great Clifton Barrett.
    A crowd had begun to gather at Bay St. Lucy’s airport around 7:30.   It was not a huge crowd.   It was not the crowd that a head SEC coach would have drawn, nor the crowd that a star running back would have drawn.
    For this was an actor, after all, and an actor’s wife.
    It was the crowd that a good starting linebacker would have drawn.   
    But Nina, having been driven to the airport in Margot’s Volkswagen, still felt a tingle of excitement as the lights of the small plane––and then the plane itself—appeared, flying in from the East, the sky in the middle stages of twilight, a full moon almost directly overhead.
    “Look at Hope, Nina!”
    “Yes.   She’s so excited.”
    Hope was barely taller than the barrier rope that had been strung to show the crowd its limits.
    And it was a crowd that appreciated the effort.
    The mayor; Alana Delafosse; several of the people who had been arriving from New Orleans during the previous days to help with the production.
    Perhaps twenty five