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

matter?”
    Everyone—Mildred, Margot, Borg, and several other younger people who had appeared on the eight-foot wide blue-painted board porch that surrounded the house—stared at her.
    The world stopped.
    “This,” said Margot, starting it again, “is my friend Nina.”
    Thousand one thousand two––
    “You see we tried to––”
    “Let’s go inside, Mildred,” said Margot.
    And they did.

    So that a few minutes later they were, at least three of them were, sitting around a small breakfast table in the kitchen, adjacent to the entrance hallway. This house seemed topsy-turvy to Nina, with the front door really opening to the back of the place.
    It was a homey room though , she thought.
    All the stuff for baking. Pans hung neatly on the walls. A stove tucked into the corner. A big open-faced clock smiling down on them from the west wall.
    And Margot, taking a deep breath, then exhaling calm words with the same demeanor she would have used to exhale tobacco fumes, when she still smoked.
    “I know, and Nina now knows too, that you have all tried to contact me. I’m sorry that I did not have my cell phone on. It’s clear that something has happened. It’s also clear that the plantation has not burned down, because we are sitting in it right now, as we speak. It’s also somewhat clear that no one has died, since there are no police cars, no ambulances, and no yellow tapes marking a crime scene. So what, Mildred, the heck is going on?”
    The holes that were ’face’ in the upper can of Mildred that was ‘head’ dilated slightly and flashed, leading Nina to wonder where her power source was.
    “You said it wouldn’t happen again, Ms. Gavin! You promised us. You promised all of us. You did!”
    There were at least four other people, all teenagers, three girls and one boy, who were flitting about just outside the kitchen, ascending and descending the stairways, carrying pasteboard boxes, frowning, almost running into each other, running into each other, cursing softly, and looking over their shoulders as if expecting the nearest door to them to open and disgorge trouble.
    “What wouldn’t happen? What did I say wouldn’t happen?”
    “Those people!”
    “What people?”
    “We tried to call you but––”
    “Mildred––”
    Air hissed into the larger can that was Mildred’s thorax.
    She let it do its work inside her machinery, then allowed some of it to escape through a ventral screen, and went on repeating herself:
    “You said you wouldn’t let them come again!”
    “Who?”
    “You promised all of us that––”
    “Who?”
    “Because after the last time, when they––”
    “Who?”
    “And we begged you. We was all gonna quit, right then and there, but––”
    “Who?”
    Somebody tripped on the stairs, fell down a few of them, cursed as a box of dishes shattered, cursed again as she or he—it was pretty much indistinguishable at this point—got up and kept doing whatever was being done, and then tripped again.
    “It was yesterday. About six in the evening.”
    “All right. Now we’re getting somewhere. What happened yesterday about six in the evening?”
    “We had everything all cleaned up and locked away. Lights was off. All the doors and windows locked up good.”
    “Right.”
    “We were all getting ready to head into town. Two cars was here to take us.”
    I wonder , Nina found herself musing, if we will ever come to the end of this story? If we will ever find out what really happened? Or if we will simply sit here almost finding out, hearing a bit more and a bit more of the build up to it, until we die. People die. We ourselves are dying. What if the Lord has not given us sufficient time to get to the heart of this, the substance of it? What if we are taken before we are enlightened?
    Will God tell us when we get to Heaven?
    Here is who killed Kennedy, and here is what really happened at Candles in that late afternoon in August.
    These things Nina found herself