Climate Change: A Nina Bannister Mystery (The Nina Bannister Mysteries Book 7) (34 page)

But Molly Badger merely shook her head and said, quietly:

“I am a demon.”

And then, again to Harriet:

“I’ll give you fifteen minutes. Then it will be midnight. If you are indeed true mystery writers, you should appreciate the scene, the timing. You will hear the clock strike twelve times. And that will be the last thing you hear.”

Professor Brighton Dunbury took a step toward the screen and said, supplicating:

“Surely, my dear lady, there is something we can do––”

Molly Badger merely nodded:

“Yes. You can die.”

And then the screen went black.

Leaving them all there.

Trapped in a huge house.

Escape impossible.

Police nowhere near.

All power gone.

Nina thought of Macbeth, and the witches’ lines, the ones that had been quoted only that morning at the pond by Dunbury himself:

‘By the pricking of my thumbs,

Something wicked this way comes.’

Something wicked was coming.

Coming to get all of them.

For a time no one said anything.

They were merely looking at each other.

Finally, Harriet said to the man still standing beside her:

“Thank you, Brighton.”

“Why, for what, my dear?”

“For standing by me. For holding my hand like you did.”

“I’ve always stood by you; and you by me.”

“No. I let you down. I fell for that megalomaniac Amboise. You probably hate me now.”

“Of course I don’t hate you.”

“I’m so thankful for that. And, Brighton?”

“Yes, my dear Harriet?”

“If we both have to die, I’d like it to be together.”

“And it will be. Whatever furies this strange goddess sends to torment and ultimately devour us—they can never devour our love.”

But, upon hearing this, it was Nina who stepped forward.

“That’s very touching. I’m sorry to tell you, though, that you don’t have to die. None of us do.”

Everyone looked at her.

“I think,” she said, “I’ve got it figured out!”

A voice asked:

“What are you talking about?”

“I know how she did it!”

Silence for a time.

Finally, Harriet Crossman stepped forward and said:

“But Ms. Bannister, how
could
you know?”
 

“The boxes.”

“What boxes?”

“The ones that came from the publishers. The ones that were lying there in the entranceway, the reception office. One of them didn’t have an address. It had a return address, but not a mailing address.”

“What does that have to do with anything?”

“Just listen:
 
the question is, how could the box have been delivered if there was no address? And the answer is, someone must have brought it in by hand and set it down among the morning’s mail.”

Silence for a time

Then Nina:

“I think I know who delivered that one strange box, and, more importantly, what was in the box. The murderer wanted us to think that the box came from HBO—but Sylvia, to the best of your knowledge, did HBO send a box of shirts or anything else out here as a gesture of good will?”

Sylvia Duncan shook her head:

“Not that I know of.”

“No, of course you don’t know of it—because it didn’t happen!”

Harriet Crossman:

“Nina, are you saying that Molly Badger actually committed these two murders, by using what was in a box that she brought in herself?”

“Yes. Except, she didn’t commit the murders herself. She had them done for her.”

“Murder for hire? She paid someone to do it for her?”

Nina shook her head:

“No. It wasn’t done because of money. It was done because of insanity.”

“A lunatic?”

“Not one lunatic. That wouldn’t have been enough.”

“These people were killed, mutilated, mauled, by a group of lunatics?”

“Exactly.”

“But that’s impossible!”

“It’s not impossible. It’s simply all that remains when we’ve eliminated all the things that
are
impossible.”

“Janet Evanovich.”

“P. D. James.”

“Josephine Tey.”

“Tony Hillerman.”

“Sherlock Holmes,” Nina said. “But remember what Molly said:
 
There are beasts almost everywhere. Some of them are in us. Some we carry around with us.”

Then she looked at the entire group and said, quietly:

“You’ve all brought your own beasts here. Now you have to tame them. And I think I know how you can do that.”

Margot stepped toward her and asked:

“Nina, I never seem to know what you’re talking about when you’re solving murders. But this time I have to tell you:
 
you’re not making any sense at all.”

“It will all come clear in a very few minutes, Margot. Once I deduced WHAT WAS IN THE BOXES AND WHO BROUGHT THEM—and once I really thought about what the professor said down by the pond––and once I realized that the way Molly would get her revenge—and prove her genius and GET PUBLISHED was to go after everyone’s pride, the very emblem of what must have seemed to her to be their arrogance—then I knew the answer. I knew how we will tame the beasts within us––and then we will wait for Molly Badger’s call.”

And she did.

And they did.

It was not a ‘call,’ precisely, but a reappearance, and it happened just as the standing clock in the corner of the dining room struck the first of twelve chimes.

The screen lit up, and there was Molly Badger’s image once again.

Her face had no expression on it, as she stared across the room below.

She waited until the twelfth chime had sounded.

There was a scarcely audible rasp of static, and then came the voice:

“It’s midnight. I hope you have all prepared yourselves.”

Harriet Crossman:

“Yes, Molly, we have prepared ourselves. With Nina’s help that is.”

“How unfortunate that Nina should have to perish with you. She and Ms. Gavin are the only ones who’ve always accepted me despite—despite what I am.”

Nina stepped forward:

“What you are, Molly, is a human being.”

“But a self-published one.”

“Self-published writers are still human beings.”

“Not to Amazon.”

“There is more to life, Molly, than Amazon.”

“Yes, there’s Barnes and Noble. But it doesn’t matter now, dear Nina.
 
None of it matters now. What will happen, what was fated to happen—will happen. And the time for that has come. I’m only regretful that you and your friend will have to suffer.”

“No one is going to suffer. It’s like Harriet said:
 
we have prepared ourselves. We know of the furies you’re planning to let loose upon us.”

At this time, Brighton Dunbury stood up in the center of the room, and said firmly to the image:

“We know of these furies, my dear Ms. Badger. We had our own Athena here to tame them, just as the goddess tamed them in the myth.”

A shake of the head on the screen.

“That’s where you’re wrong, professor. I’m simply too ingenious. I’ve proven it twice already; now I plan to do so again. In a kind of Grande Finale. When they find your bodies—and they will find them, sometime tomorrow, when I call both the police and the news media and the storm subsides enough for the cameras to get in—I will be recognized as having committed not only THE PERFECT MURDERS, but THE PERFECT MASS MURDERS!”

Nina:

“And then what will happen to you, after you admit all of this?”

A smile:

“I’ll be taken away, probably. But I’ll be written about. And I’ll be famous.”

“But you’ll be in jail!”

“Iron walls do not a prison make, nor iron bars a cage.”

Several voices in the room exploded as one:

“Tony Hillerman!”

“Simenon!”

“It’s Richard Lovelace!” shouted Nina, losing her patience for an instant while someone from across the room shouted:

“Yes, it’s Richard Lovelace! I met him once at a conference in Boston! He writes the Becky Althorpe mysteries! Becky is a retired female auto mechanic who lives in little seacoast village of––”

“Richard Lovelace is one of the seventeenth century Cavalier poets, you idiots! And he died fighting against the Puritan armies of Oliver Cromwell!”

Silence for a time. Then another voice:

“Who is Oliver Cromwell’s detective?”

Nina shouted:

“He doesn’t
have
a detective!”

The she regained her composure and said to the flickering black and white image:

“There won’t be any mass murder, Molly.”

To which Molly smiled, saying:

“Yes, there will. And it will start soon. No. Why wait? It’s time!”

The camera panned backward, so that a small table appeared behind her, and on it a computer screen.

She turned and typed in some kind of command, then turned back, smiled, and said:

“Prepare to die!”

Upon hearing which, Nina merely said quietly:

“All right, Cozy Writers. Blow out your candles.”

Everyone did so.

The room was in darkness, save for the glowing image of Molly Badger’s face.

It continued to stare, without changing emotion.

Finally the image spoke:

“It should begin now. The first should be arriving.”

Nina merely shook her head: