Climate Change: A Nina Bannister Mystery (The Nina Bannister Mysteries Book 7) (20 page)

A woman just to the left of Nina muttered:

“As though there could be such a thing. The very idea!”

But she said this very softly.

“I write The Patty Parity Mysteries. Yes, I will admit it, Patty is a fighter for equal rights for women. And she’s a body builder, as am I. And she’s a trained expert in martial arts. She can kill with her hands and she can kill with her feet. And she does so, quite regularly.”

C.R. Wood leaned forward and shouted:

“But she only kills when she’s confronted by examples of sexist behavior!”

Harriet Crossman, attempting to be conciliatory, herself leaned forward on the podium:

“But C.R., in the last novel, Patty castrates a man with one karate chop.”

“It’s possible! I’ve done it.”

An audible murmur ran through the crowd.

C.R. Wood glared at everyone in the room.

Then she sat down.

Harriet, shaking her head, continued:

“All right, clearly there are going to be some disagreements among us. But if we can just agree that what promotes best the well-being of the entire––”

She was interrupted by movement from the back of the room.

A door had opened, and in the doorway stood a radiant woman, beaming, dressed in white, and warming the entire room.

“I am,” she said, “Sylvia Duncan.”

No, you’re not
, thought Nina.
You’re Glenda the Good Witch.

Except you don’t have a little crown.

It must be in a suitcase somewhere.

Everyone in the audience gasped.

They stared at her for a time, as though, despite her perfectly pressed business suit and crimson scarf, she was actually standing in the doorway completely naked.

She had so much confidence, of course, Nina found herself thinking, that she could have
been
naked and not worried about it one bit.

She continued:

“I am sorry. I was supposed to arrive an hour and a half later. I only realized my mistake a few minutes ago. I thought it might be all right if I just sat in on your meeting, perhaps got a few ideas about how your organization functions––

My God
, thought Nina
, the last thing you want to know is how this organization functions.

Harriet Crossman obviously thought the same thing.

Because after flustered apologies on both sides, a great deal of hand shaking and milling and stewing and standing up and sitting down and applause and ‘My name is so and so and I write the such and such’ and ‘I’m so anxious to get to know you and to get to know you and OH WHAT AN ADORABLE CAT YOU HAVE THERE––”

For heaven’s sakes
, thought Nina,
at least keep the cats off one another for a while. Just a little while, anyway, until she gets used to the place.

––after a few minutes of this kind of thing, Sylvia Duncan, who of course was not about to be consigned to the back of the hall as though she were just anybody—

––was at the podium, addressing the entire group.

“Well, Cozy Writers of America, I, as you know by now, I am Sylvia Duncan. I have the honor to represent HBO. We’re always trying at our network to meet the ever changing demands of a diverse and highly intelligent viewing audience. Our attempts to recognize what’s truly wanted out there, and what’s being asked for, have led us again and again to the realization that cozy mysteries—wholesome mysteries with good well-crafted plots—are more in demand than they’ve ever been.”

“Yes!”

“Yes!”

Sylvia Duncan smiled at these comments.

“We wish that we could make on-going television productions of all your fine novels. And perhaps, with time and luck, we can. But for now we must choose one of you. One series of novels that we hope will begin a––

And on and on.

She gave a brief succinct speech in which she said just about what everybody in the room already knew.

She was going to make somebody a millionaire.

And now it was time to begin the interviews.

And so she said, finally, after her preliminary remarks were finished and the true business to begin:

“Well, then. We’re a bit ahead of schedule, but I see no reason why I should not begin the interview process. I’m to begin, I think, with a Mr.––”

She did not finish.

The screams prevented her.

Screams from a young woman—Nina recognized her as one of the cleaning staff—who was standing on the stairwell and pointing upstairs.

She was, that is, pointing with her right hand. Her left hand was pressed tightly over her mouth.

It came away, almost involuntarily, to let out more screams.

Heart-wrenching screams.

She continued to point, her arm swaying like a tree branch in the wind.

“Marjorie!”

Margot was walking toward the young woman now.

“Marjorie, what is it?”

Marjorie’s reply:

“It’s—it’s up there! It’s awful!”

“What is?”

“In the room! The blood! The blood everywhere!”

Margot spun, looked at Nina, and said:

“Come on!”

Then she walk-ran to the stairwell, Nina close behind.

It took them no more than a few seconds to reach the second floor.

Silence in the hallway.

They looked at each other.

“Any idea––” began Margot.

Nina merely shook her head.

The corridor loomed before them, rooms on either side.

“Which room was she talking about?” Nina asked.

“Obviously we should have asked her.”

“Yes. Except for the fact that she’s too terrified to speak.”

“We may have to look in all the rooms,” said Margot, quietly.

“We could do that,” said Nina, quietly. “Or we could do it the easier way.”

“What is that?”

“Check the room halfway down the hall, where the pool of blood is running out onto the carpet.”

They both looked.

They saw the pool expanding, seeping under the door jamb, soaking the thin gray carpet.

“Oh my God,” whispered Nina. “Maybe we should get the police.”

“The police,” answered Margot, “are in Abbeyport. Whoever’s in there could be still alive.”

The blood had formed a lake now, and had extended to the far side of the corridor.

“Come on,” said Margot.

The world was silent.

Mid-morning. Early September.

Nothing moving in the deserted fields and outbuildings.

They stopped before the doorway.

The bottoms of their shoes were now soaked in blood.

“All right,” said Margot. “Whatever it is, let’s see.”

She pushed open the door.

And they did.

“Oh my God.”

“Oh my God.”

It hardly mattered which of them had spoken first.

CHAPTER TEN:
 
END OF A PRODIGY

When they re-entered the hall below them, the audience appeared as nothing more than a carefully detailed painting.

No one seemed to have moved.

No one was speaking.

Palms were still securely clapped over mouths.

Harriet Crossman remained seated in the first row.

Sylvia Duncan remained standing at the podium.

She moved aside just enough to let Margot take her place, and speak into the slightly braying microphone.

Margot’s usually firm voice was breaking.

“I have—I have horrible news.”

No sound, no movement.

Not even breathing.

“One of your colleagues, Mr. Garth Amboise, has been murdered.”

Gasps from everyone.

“Ms. Bannister and I have just come from his room.”

A few people began moving slightly now, leaning slightly forward on the tables in front of them, as though the news itself were magnetized.

“I know that I could spare you this, but I think you all have the right to know. The scene inside, I must tell you, is simply ghastly. There is blood everywhere. The sheets of Mr. Amboise’ bed are drenched with it. The carpet of the room, the furniture. And his body––”

More leaning forward.

Everyone in the room breathing as one.

And finally Margot:

“His body is nude upon the bed. It has literally been ripped apart, his skin shredded.”

She paused to let this seep in.

Then she continued:

“I was able to call the police a few seconds ago. I know James Thompson the Chief. He’s a good man. He says help will be here in approximately fifteen minutes. He has asked me to advise you, all of you, simply for now to remain where––”

But it was too late.

The entire crowd of cozy writers had leapt to their feet simultaneously and were pouring into the aisles of the meeting room, stampeding toward the stairwell.

“Wait!” Margot screamed. “Stay here! You can’t go up there! We don’t know who did this! He might still be––”

But it was no use.

They were clawing at each other, tugging at each other, and forcing their way forward as fast as possible. Many of them were rummaging in large purses for their smart phones, ready to snap pictures to put on Facebook walls.

Some of them, Nina noted, had already begun to text.

“What is wrong with these people?” whispered Margot.

Nina could only shake her head:

“I don’t know.”

The stairway was now packed, and the clattering of feet could be heard upon the second floor corridor above.

One of the women who’d been forced to the back of the line bellowed to the crowd on the stairway:

“DON’T TOUCH ANYTHING!”

This same woman, coming abreast of Nina, asked:

“Did you see a knife?”

Numb, Nina could only shake her head.

But the woman continued her interrogation:

“Exactly what color would you say the blood was?”

Automatically, Nina found herself replying:

“Kind of––dark. Purplish on the sheet. But brighter red on the body.”

The woman nodded.

“Good. That’s very good. Was the corpse twitching around a little bit or was it still?”

Margot intervened at this point, shouting:

“What are you doing?”

But the woman merely replied:

“You can’t get this kind of stuff from a library!”

Margot shouted even louder:

“A man has been murdered!”

“I know!”

Then, suspiciously:

“You aren’t just staging this, are you?”

“I’m not what?” asked Margot.

“Just staging it. I know last year at The Love is Murder Conference in Chicago––”

“Of course, we’re not just staging it! He’s dead! He’s in his bed and dead!”

“With his skin ripped off him you say?”

“Yes, yes, he’s torn to pieces!”

“Was the skin ripped off in big, inch-long strips or was it––”

“Stop it stop it stop it!”

And so screaming, she pulled Nina away, to the back of the room.

The last of the cozy writers had made their way into the stairwell now.

The faint sounds of sirens could be heard coming out of Abbeyport.

“These women,” said Nina, “are ghouls.”

But then she was aware of the presence of two other women standing beside them.

The Smathers sisters, Ruby and Lacy.

One short, one tall.

Still looking around, sniffing the air, suspicious of the floor and the ceiling, steering well clear of the walls.

Ruby, from on high:

“We told you.”

Lacy, from down low:

“You didn’t believe us, did you?”

Ruby:

“We told you about the demons.”

Lacy:

“But you did nothing! Now all this is on your heads. On both of your heads!”

Then the two sisters made their way toward the opposite door, saying, over their shoulders simultaneously:

“We don’t need to go up there. We know exactly what it looks like.”

And then they disappeared.

“They’re insane,” said Margot.

“Absolutely crazy,” concurred Nina.

They were silent for a time.

Some of the cozy writers, having viewed the crime scene, had now descended back into the main hall and were walking up and down the aisles between tables, notebooks or apps in their hands, either writing dialogue to themselves or trying to tap descriptions into smart phones.

They wandered here and there, heads upturned or bent toward the floor, muttering:

“The room was in shambles. Peter lay upon the blood-soaked sheets, his skin quivering. Macy Maplethorp’s mind raced:
 
how had he come to be here? What was the mysterious phone call that he’d gotten?”

Or:

“Blood was everywhere, and, even in the half light of dawn, Starling Canterbury knew that the man’s death had been almost instantaneous. And brutal. But who could have done it? Certainly Roger Saintsford was hated around the village, and certainly any number of his spurned lovers might have––”

“I cannot believe,” Nina said, “that I’m hearing this.”

“They’re writing books about it.”

“Margot, we have to get them out of that room! It’s a crime scene!”

“And how are we going to do that? There are thirty of them!”

Margot shook her head:

“Besides, the police will be here soon. Come on, let’s sit down.”

They did so, at one of the tables in the center of the room.

“I can’t believe the insanity of all this,” Margot muttered. “I don’t know who’s worse:
 
the insane Smathers sisters or the insane rest of the crowd.”

“And yet, and yet––” Nina muttered.

“And yet what?”

“Margot, this just doesn’t make sense.”

“So what does make sense? A demon?”

“I don’t know, I just—it’s crazy! I took him his breakfast not more than two hours ago. He was fine then. I know he was fine because I remember so distinctly wanting to kill him.”

“But you didn’t.”

“No, I’m fairly certain I would have remembered. My God, Margot, it’s like we’re in a cozy mystery ourselves.”

Margot stared at her, incredulously, saying finally:

“Now
you
are sounding crazy! Just what about any of this is ‘cozy?’ We have musclebound women castrating male chauvinists with karate chops, cats humping each other all over the place, weird sisters smelling the devil, ninety-year-old women fornicating in artificial breathing devices––”

“Okay, okay, you’re right.”

“Where’s the little village? Where are all the cute and eccentric characters?”

“All right, you’ve made your point already.”

“This whole fiasco is as close to a ‘cozy’ as World War II was!”

They sat for a time.

More writers ambled past them, and they heard more dialogue, more description:

“Although Cecilia Phillips had seen almost everything in her seventy years as a Seaside Cove nurse, she’d never quite…”

“Word spread like wildfire through the streets of the charming New England village of Port Mariner. Eton Bransworthy, heir to the huge fortune built by his enigmatic—and often hated—grandfather had been butchered. Ms. Eleanora Stapleworth could not wipe from her mind the image of the blood, purplish on the body, brighter red on the sheet––”

“It was,” Nina interrupted the writer who was passing by, “the other way around.”

A woman looked down at her.

“Oh, you mean purplish on––”

“––the sheet, brighter red on the body.”

“Well. Thank you.”

“Don’t mention it.”

Finally the police arrived.

At least a dozen people entered the room, all dressed in various uniforms.

An older officer with white sideburns and a somewhat corpulent build, dressed in the light khaki and dark brown of a forest ranger, approached the table where Margot and Nina were seated.

“Ms. Gavin?”

“Yes, Officer Thompson. Thank you for coming. I’ve not seen you for a while.”

“Not since the writers were here. You’ve got another bunch of them out here I see.”

“Yes. We thought these would be different. But they’re worse.”

“We just got your call. Is the body––”

“Upstairs. Room 284.”

“And the victim?”

“His name is––was––Garth Amboise.”

“And how was he killed, Ms. Gavin?”