Read Online Sea Change (The Nina Bannister Mysteries Book 1) by T'Gracie Reese, Joe Reese - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: T'Gracie Reese, Joe Reese
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being my Best Woman.”
“That’s a good thing to call it, isn’t it?”
“Yes!”
“Come on then. We’ll go back to my place and dry off. Then we’ll have the last of bottle of wine I opened. Then we’ll start planning the wedding.”
They hugged, and struck out toward the shore.
The next sodden hour disappeared, immersed in non-stop chatter and cold rain.
It was ten o’clock when they reached Nina’s shack.
The wine was broken out.
Some minutes thereafter, various sheets of paper, pictures, and wedding plans covered the kitchen table.
Sometime before midnight, they both went to bed, Nina in her own room, Macy on the couch.
And Nina, snug beneath the covers, realized how excited she was for Macy, and how proud she would be to be in the wedding, and how much she loved her little Bay St. Lucy.
Which was a perfect little seaside town.
And which—Nina had no way of knowing this as she closed her eyes and drifted into pre-sleep reveries—would never be the same again.
CHAPTER FIVE: CORPSES, CASES, AND CAPONS
“Alas poor Yorick! How surprised to see how his counterpart of today is whisked off to a funeral parlor and is in short order sprayed, sliced, pierced, pickled, trussed, trimmed, creamed, waxed, painted, rouged, and neatly drressed––transformed from a common corpse into a Beautiful Memory Picture.”
Jessica Mitford
St. Charles Avenue, Nina mused, looking up and down the great palmed and street car-bisected thoroughfare, was the only street in the world where mansions, mortuaries, legal offices, and restaurants all looked precisely the same.
There were other edifices stuck in here or there, of course, and she’d always wondered what drunken pirate crew had thrown together New Orleans’ zoning laws.
But that did not matter. The fact that somehow a MacCheezit existed between the Senator Robicheax Family Estate and what had been the old Pontchartrain Hotel—or that the uptown branch of the New Orleans Public Library sat beneath the same stately live oaks and Mesozoic ferns as Commander’s Palace and somebody’s two room shack—
––none of this mattered. St. Charles was St. Charles, and as good a reason as she could have wanted for a morning’s walk.
The second best thing in the entire world, when one actually thought about it, to walking on the beach.
And so she had flashed the city’s credit card to the cab driver, left the vehicle at Audubon Park, given her respects to the backs of buildings at Tulane––or rather, TU lane––and the fronts of buildings at Loyola, and sauntered for half an hour, lungs filling with the scent of hot beignets, eyes formulating what one of the painters whose work hung in Margot’s shop would have done with the brown bored and completely anachronistic street cars meeting on the median, and yawning to each other as they sauntered on.
She tried to avoid actual thinking, and to engage only in light reveries, but to do so in an organized manner.
A time for every daydream, all of the not-quite-thoughts laid out in precise geographical and urbanized units.
Poydras Street to D’Urberville. Three hundred yards. Memories of the Robinson Mansion, and comparisons with the one over there on the left.
No.
The Robinson Manor was bigger.
Deeper balconies.
Could Margot Gavin actually buy the structure?
After all those years would anything in it be—what was the word? Restorable?
How rich was Margot, anyway?
And would she––Nina Bannister––actually consider going into the hotel business?
No. Of course not.
But the Bed and Breakfast business?
Well, that was something else again.
She imagined a couple not at all like tourists one saw in the Quarter on Big Football Game Days or Mardi Gras week.
What could they do, anyway? A bit of fishing, a little beachcombing, much sitting around the edge of the garden, listening idly to the chatter and gossip of Bay St. Lucy—which went on, of course, in the middle of the
“That’s a good thing to call it, isn’t it?”
“Yes!”
“Come on then. We’ll go back to my place and dry off. Then we’ll have the last of bottle of wine I opened. Then we’ll start planning the wedding.”
They hugged, and struck out toward the shore.
The next sodden hour disappeared, immersed in non-stop chatter and cold rain.
It was ten o’clock when they reached Nina’s shack.
The wine was broken out.
Some minutes thereafter, various sheets of paper, pictures, and wedding plans covered the kitchen table.
Sometime before midnight, they both went to bed, Nina in her own room, Macy on the couch.
And Nina, snug beneath the covers, realized how excited she was for Macy, and how proud she would be to be in the wedding, and how much she loved her little Bay St. Lucy.
Which was a perfect little seaside town.
And which—Nina had no way of knowing this as she closed her eyes and drifted into pre-sleep reveries—would never be the same again.
CHAPTER FIVE: CORPSES, CASES, AND CAPONS
“Alas poor Yorick! How surprised to see how his counterpart of today is whisked off to a funeral parlor and is in short order sprayed, sliced, pierced, pickled, trussed, trimmed, creamed, waxed, painted, rouged, and neatly drressed––transformed from a common corpse into a Beautiful Memory Picture.”
Jessica Mitford
St. Charles Avenue, Nina mused, looking up and down the great palmed and street car-bisected thoroughfare, was the only street in the world where mansions, mortuaries, legal offices, and restaurants all looked precisely the same.
There were other edifices stuck in here or there, of course, and she’d always wondered what drunken pirate crew had thrown together New Orleans’ zoning laws.
But that did not matter. The fact that somehow a MacCheezit existed between the Senator Robicheax Family Estate and what had been the old Pontchartrain Hotel—or that the uptown branch of the New Orleans Public Library sat beneath the same stately live oaks and Mesozoic ferns as Commander’s Palace and somebody’s two room shack—
––none of this mattered. St. Charles was St. Charles, and as good a reason as she could have wanted for a morning’s walk.
The second best thing in the entire world, when one actually thought about it, to walking on the beach.
And so she had flashed the city’s credit card to the cab driver, left the vehicle at Audubon Park, given her respects to the backs of buildings at Tulane––or rather, TU lane––and the fronts of buildings at Loyola, and sauntered for half an hour, lungs filling with the scent of hot beignets, eyes formulating what one of the painters whose work hung in Margot’s shop would have done with the brown bored and completely anachronistic street cars meeting on the median, and yawning to each other as they sauntered on.
She tried to avoid actual thinking, and to engage only in light reveries, but to do so in an organized manner.
A time for every daydream, all of the not-quite-thoughts laid out in precise geographical and urbanized units.
Poydras Street to D’Urberville. Three hundred yards. Memories of the Robinson Mansion, and comparisons with the one over there on the left.
No.
The Robinson Manor was bigger.
Deeper balconies.
Could Margot Gavin actually buy the structure?
After all those years would anything in it be—what was the word? Restorable?
How rich was Margot, anyway?
And would she––Nina Bannister––actually consider going into the hotel business?
No. Of course not.
But the Bed and Breakfast business?
Well, that was something else again.
She imagined a couple not at all like tourists one saw in the Quarter on Big Football Game Days or Mardi Gras week.
What could they do, anyway? A bit of fishing, a little beachcombing, much sitting around the edge of the garden, listening idly to the chatter and gossip of Bay St. Lucy—which went on, of course, in the middle of the
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