Climate Change: A Nina Bannister Mystery (The Nina Bannister Mysteries Book 7) Read Online Free PDF

down on something, even if they had been built at ground level so that nothing could, at least physically, be beneath them.
    It did not matter; everything was beneath them anyway.
    Wherever one was in or around the Robinson Mansion, a part of it was frowning.
    This building smiled. Every part of it. The color of its exterior walls—a soft and mellow off-peach which was the precise color of slanted sunlight on a late Friday afternoon—this color smiled. The broad porch smiled at the white and motionless rocking chairs which sat upon it, while they smiled, in turn, at the dilapidated outbuildings, which smiled at the rusted farm machinery and antiquated carriages that sat within them. And from the well in the middle of the back yard, its wooden frame apparently on the point of disintegrating with age and dropping into water far beneath ground level, the bucket which hung gleaming in the mid afternoon sun—from the very moss-covered stones rising above this well, there emanated a kind of benevolence, as though coming out of the deep earth itself, seeping over the lawns and fall gardens, and settling quietly at dusk into the not very recently mown grass.
    Margot and Nina got out of the car.
    There was no movement anywhere, no sound, except for birds chirping in the trees.
    Then, finally, something came around the house and began approaching .
    Nina turned quickly.
    She saw a white form lumbering toward them, its tongue, like an obscenely red garden hose, hanging halfway to the ground and spraying saliva as though it were an extremely slow flying crop dusting plane with long white hair.
    The animal looked occasionally from side to side but kept its attention riveted for the most part on a particular patch of ground that happened to be beneath it at the time, and that needed both watering and stepping on.
    The dog sidled up to Margot, who laid one of her broad hands upon its much broader back, the effect being something like a cargo plane landing on an aircraft carrier.
    “Borg,” she said. “I don’t know how old he is, or why he was named that. He just came with the place.”
    “Ms. Gavin!”
    Nina realized, upon hearing this exclamation, that the house had been strangely inverted on its grounds, or that, more precisely, the grounds had been inverted around the house. Because the driveway she and Margot had approached the building on had led them to the back of the plantation and not the front entrance.
    So that the creature now making its way toward them—woman, not dog—was coming out of the back door and clattering over the back porch.
    Clattering was exactly the correct word.
    For if Ben Danielson––handyman, plumber, etc.—was the scarecrow, this woman was the Tin Man.
    Her body was composed of two metallic cylinders, each covered over with a thin film of skin-colored paint, the entire assemblage bouncing along a series of interlocking cans that functioned as legs.
    “Mildred? Mildred, what’s happened?”
    Mildred kept coming, rattling off the porch now and onto the grass, which, had it not already been browned by the late August heat, would certainly have been crushed to death by the half-ton weight of each of her feet.
    “We couldn’t get hold of you!”
    Margot, who had already heard this statement now from two or three hundred other people, tried to hide her exasperation by taking a few futile steps toward the building.
    “I’ve been down in Bay St. Lucy! You knew that, didn’t you?”
    “Yes, but we tried to call you there, and you never answered.”
    “I forgot to charge my cell phone! What’s going on?”
    “We tried to get hold of you, but nobody answered!”
    “I forgot to charge my cell phone!”
    “You see, we called you. But we couldn’t get no answer!”
    “I forgot to charge my cell phone!”
    “We kept trying to call you, but…”
    “What,” asked Nina, realizing that she would be driven insane by even one more repetition of the same lines, “is the