“Well, yes, you could, by altering his brain waves, drive him almost crazy. Still, I don’t think that he or any other dog would be able to––”
“No, they wouldn’t. But the Furies would.”
“My dear Ms. Bannister, I don’t understand how––”
Her musings were interrupted by Margot, who burst into the library.
“Nina!”
She looked around:
“What? What is it?”
“Chief Thompson!”
“What about him?”
“He just called me on my cell phone. Actually, it wasn’t him. It was a woman from police dispatch in Abbeyport.”
“Fine, so I’ll ask it again—what does Thompson want?”
“He wants us to drive out to the main road and meet him.”
“Why, for God’s sakes?”
“He says it’s urgent! He’s found something that might answer the whole puzzle!”
“Has he shot the animal?”
“The woman didn’t say. But she did say that we need to go as fast as possible. Now come on: we can take the Volkswagen. I’ve got two heavy rain slickers in the entryway. Maybe we can make it to the car without drowning.”
“All right.”
And so saying, Nina followed into the small entryway/ reception area.
Turmoil, turmoil.
The storm, terrible in its intensity.
Sylvia’s voice in the dining room, trying to placate a sea of anger.
Chaos everywhere and yet––
––something about her was calmer than it had been.
Something was looking.
At––
At what?
A pile of boxes lying in a corner.
“Come on, Nina! Put this on! We’ve got to hurry! I don’t know why, but the woman in the dispatcher’s office said get there as fast as possible!”
The boxes.
Cardboard boxes.
What was wrong with the boxes?
They were the boxes that the gifts had come in.
Gifts from publishers.
Bribes.
All of the boxes lying there before her, with professionally-written return addresses on them.
O’Donnel Press.
Black Cat Press.
Leinart Press.
Except for one.
HBO.
Except that box, the one from HBO, had no address on it.
“Margot?”
“What are you waiting for? Come on!”
The return address was there all right: HBO, Los Angeles, Street Address, etc.
But no address.
“Margot, that box––”
“Come on!”
“That box has no address on it.”
“Who cares?”
“But how did it get here?”
“I don’t know!”
“And what was in it? Margot, what came in that box from HBO?”
“Some of the gifts, I suppose, maybe sweatshirts. But it doesn’t matter now.”
“Yes it does. I don’t know why. But it’s odd.”
“Of all the odd things going on around here, an empty box is the one you choose to worry about?”
“I’m just––”
“Come on!”
And, so saying, Margot pulled Nina toward the door, somehow shucked her into a huge ill-fitting yellow slicker, and forced her to don massive overshoes.
“You ready?”
“Yes, but it’s just so strange that––”
“Forget it and come on!”
Margot kicked open the door, and the two women lurched out into the midst of the storm.
The porch, the trees, the roofs, the outbuildings––everything was night-black over, obscured, rendered invisible by the rampaging winds, sheets of rain, and low-scudding clouds.
“This is awful!” screamed Nina, who was almost being blown backwards.
“Come on! It’s not far to the car!”
She could hear rumbling thunder, and, from time to time, the world was illuminated by lightning flashes.
“There’s the car! Come on! Just a little farther!”
“Margot, what could he have found that we need to see?”
“I don’t know. But when the police call me and tell me to do something, I do it. I’m not like I was in the sixties!”
“It just doesn’t make any sense. Like the boxes don’t make any sense!”
“Will you forget about those damned boxes?”
“But how could that one box have gotten here without––”
“Forget it! Here—go around to the other side of the car, while I unlock the door!”
Nina did so, her feet overrun by a flood that was running through the driveway.
Margot pushed open the door from the inside and Nina stumbled in, wondering how the two of them were going to manage to navigate through sheet after sheet of driving downpour in the blackest of nights.
“All right, here we go!”
She turned the key; the engine sputtered, then started.
She gunned the accelerator, threw the gearshift into reverse, and, tires spinning in the mud puddle that had been solid gravel a day ago, jammed the car backward, turning it as she did so.
“Can you see, Margot?” screamed Nina.
“What did you say?”
“Can you see?”
“No, but I think I know where the road used to be.”
“Maybe we should go back in the house!”
“With the writers?”
“Okay you’ve made your point. It can’t get much worse.”
“Hold on.”
The Volkswagen lurched onto the driveway, then spun and careened its way into the surrounding forest, headlights boring a narrow tunnel of light through the pines and brambles that were now closing in on them, and the deluge that was pouring down around them.
“I don’t know,” shouted Margot, trying desperately to keep the car in some kind of path, “what kind of a panther they’re going to be able to shoot in this storm.”
“It’s a goose,” replied Nina.
“A what?”
“It’s not a panther. It’s a goose. A wild one.”
“What are you talking about?”
“They’re on a wild goose chase.”
“How do you know that?”
“Because my mind was lively and at ease. All of our minds have been lively and at ease. Especially Officer Thompson’s.”
“You’re not making any sense.”
“No. For the first time, I am making sense. Oh my God, look!”
In front of them was the bridge, now overtopped by fast flowing water, but still barely visible.
“Can you get over that?”
“I’m sure I can. We had it worked on, remember?”
“Sure, I remember that’s what you said, but––I can barely see where the bridge stops and the creek starts!”
“I know. When the rain gets hard enough, the river floods, and then everything else floods.”
Nina could see that they were ten yards from the creek, which was roaring louder than the storm and the thunder.
Then five yards.
Then the bridge washed out.
It did so with a sucking sound, and then there was nothing but planks breaking apart, their jagged edges biting at the air above them and the water below as though they were sharks’ teeth flashing in the Volkswagen’s headlights.
“Oh my God!” shouted someone in the car.
It could have been either Nina or Margot.
No matter.
They were both thinking it.
“Back up, Margot! Back up!”
“I’m trying!”
But it was no use; the tires merely spun in water that was obviously deepening as the swollen creek reached out for them.
Then it was Margot’s turn to scream:
“We’re floating!”
“Get out of the car!”
Nina pushed the handle down and lurched
against the car door, wishing she was heavier. The door opened with a sucking sound, and cold, swirling brackish water flooded into the passengers’ side, covering her yellow galoshes, which peered back up at her as though they were faint yellow carp.
“Come on!” she heard Margot yelling from the other side of the car.
Then she was out of the car, shocked by the water that was now tearing at her, and soaking her jeans up to the knees.
“Get away from the car, Nina! Get away from the car!”
She was barely able to do so, grasping at the slender pine branches that, in turn, tore at her face.
She turned and watched, as the Volkswagen began to move, slowly at first, then faster, becoming after several seconds no more than a part of the rubbish and driftwood that was eddying fast toward a sharp bend in the creek.
“Come on! We’ve got to get away from here!”
“I’m trying, Margot!”
But it was almost impossible, for the water was getting deeper from second to second, and the downpour was so thick that it felt as though she were swimming. Rain and flood and creek water all became one, and would have swept her away along with the car had the trees not formed a kind of rescue net that she could pull herself along with.
Five yards back toward the house.
Ten yards.
Finally she could tell that the water was well below her knees now, and that the tall straight object she lurched toward, and finally grabbed, was not a tree trunk but Margot.
The two women held each other for a while, gasping, trying to get their breath.
“Your car, Margot!”
Margot, she could see, was shaking her head:
“To hell with the car! A couple of seconds more and we could have been in it!”
“Well, they say Volkswagens float!”
Another shake of Margot’s head:
“I don’t think ‘they’ know much about the Mississippi River when it floods. Look!”
Nina did so, just in time to see the roof of the car, now almost fifty yards downstream, disappear beneath the swirling waters.
There’s very little to say, Nina realized, when watching a car one has just gotten out of, as it disappears beneath the swirling waters.
“Wow!” was all she could manage.
Margot was more practical:
“We’ve got to get back to Candles! Can you walk now?”
“I think so! We’re farther away from the creek, and it’s only ankle deep here!”
Each woman now had her arm around the other’s waist, and, having no idea where any sign of a road was, they simply forced their way through the flooded forest, ignoring pine needles that tore at their faces and various scraps of flotsam and jetsam that pricked their ankles.
Finally there was a break in the undergrowth.
“There! There’s one of the old barns! We’re coming out of the woods and into the west pasture. The house is not more than a couple of hundred yards to the left! The worst is behind us!”
“Are you sure about that?” cried Nina.
“Yes, why wouldn’t I be?”
“Look up! Look up at the sky just in front of us!”
“Oh my God!”
There was a lot of that being said these days, mused Nina.
For directly in front of them, out of the gray scudding clouds and frothing sky, a vertical black tube was dropping, as though it were a snake falling out of the sky.
Watching it created the same kind of effect as watching the car drown.
Very bad, but somehow fascinating.
The Nature Channel.
She had come to The Candles for a few days of rest and relaxation.
And she’d found herself slap dab in the middle of the Nature Channel.
Watching cats fornicate with intense passion.
And watching them fight, which was even worse.
Strange, she found herself thinking, that standing here in this tempest, seeing a tornado about to strike the ground only a few hundred yards away—she was thinking about the vicious intensity with which cats fought each other.
But those thoughts left her mind quickly, driven out by Margot’s screams:
“It’s a twister! Get down behind this tree trunk!”
And Margot, clearly not worrying about cats or cars, pulled her to the left, so that she was soon cowering behind the thickest pine available, and watching as the tornado sucked up the barn.
It did so with astonishing ease, just as the bloated creek had sucked down the Volkswagen, up down, up down, elemental forces running amok now, the barn swirling and twisting and rising, its shape nearly perfectly intact, as it simply disappeared into the sky.
And then the tornado was gone, having receded into the clouds as though they were its lair.
“Where is it?” asked Margot.
“It’s gone! It’s just gone!”
“So is the barn!”
“Da dum da dum da daah daah!”
“What are you humming!”
“The music from The Wizard of Oz.”
“What?”
“This whole weekend. The handyman, Mildred the cook, Harriet, Sylvia, Dunbury––have turned into the scarecrow, the tin man, Professor Miracle, the Wicked Witch of the West, Glenda the Good Witch, The Wizard himself, and now the tornado. Margot, when that barn finally comes down, there’s going to be a witch under it.”
“You’re crazy!”
Nina nodded:
“Or I’m dreaming. But there’s no place like home. It’s just that I’m not sure I’ll ever get back there.”
“You will. But come on; we’ve got to get back to Candles.”
They rose and began to slog their way to the spot where the old barn had stood.
And then it came to her.
Jane Austen might have been standing there in the flood, smiling at her and nodding.
That was how it had happened!
“Margot, I think I know now!”
“What are you talking about? What do you know?”
“It’s not the ruby slippers! It’s golden instead!”
“Nina, what are you talking about?”
“The boxes! And an image I just thought about! From The Nature Channel! It was happening all around us. Nature, doing its thing—and we didn’t realize it!”
“I hate it when you get like this! It’s as though you were in another world!”
“No! Everybody else is in another world, a fake world. I’m in the real one. I’m the only one in the real one. Well. I and one other person.”
“Will you tell me what you’re talking about?”
But Nina merely shook her head:
“I’ve got to show you. But I think I can. Come on!”
And she strode off, Margot one step behind her, toward The Candles.
And to The Solution—
The Perfect Murder!
CHAPTER SIXTEEN: THE VOICE OF GOD
The situation back at Candles was much as it had been an hour earlier. Everybody seemed to be angry, and everybody seemed to be shouting.
It was hard to tell which of the two villains––Nina or Sylvia––was most hated.
Several of the writers had formed small groups and were discussing the possibilities of lawsuits against HBO. Or, of course, there was also the possibility of boycotts.
That was it! All mystery writers of the nation—or of the world—boycotting the new Nina Bannister series.
Even the sound of it––the Nina Bannister series—was ludicrous and insulting.
Of course, at the moment the Nina Bannister series was being completely ripped apart as a concept, the subject of that series was back in the entrance hall, talking with a member of Margot’s staff about the mysterious box that had arrived with a return address but no address.
“Was this box delivered by the mail in just the same way the others were?”
“I don’t know, ma’am.”
“You didn’t bring it in?”
“No, Ms. Bannister.
It was one of the other girls.”
“Which one?”
A shake of the head:
“I’m not sure about that, either. The boxes were arriving all morning, some of them by FedEx. I didn’t sign for any of them, but other people in the staff did.”
“And this box: do you remember what came in it?”
“No, ma’am.”
“Okay, this is very important. Can you ask around and find out all you can about this box? I want to know who brought it in and how it came here with no address on it. Can you do that?”
“I’ll try.”
“Good girl. Whenever you find out, wherever I am, come and tell me.”
“All right.”
And, so saying, the girl disappeared.
Nina threw herself into the dining room, ignoring the hateful stares that were directed at her.
It was early evening, dark outside now because of the storm and the twilight, and the chandeliers were glowing.
Dinner had not been served: no thought of eating, given the rancor in the room.
Margot had disappeared somewhere, but that did not matter to Nina.
She had to find Sylvia.
Where was Sylvia?
Ah, there, in the middle, of course, of a group of angry people.
Hard to pry her loose, but necessary.
So Nina began to make her way through the crowd, trying to remind herself that the stares directed against her came from the fact that she was not even self-published.
She was non-published.
Of course, people here hated her!
Crossing the room was like walking out of the forest had been, except that, rather than making her way through floodwaters and pine needles, she was making her way through bitter hatred and resentful jealousy.
But making her way she was, and Sylvia was now only ten feet away.
Now only five feet.
When suddenly the lights went out.
Someone shouted:
“The storm!”
The entire room was black, illuminated only by flashes of lightning that shone through the massive picture windows.
Even the screen which had glowed with the picture of Jessica Fletcher was now dark.
There were small cries and orders and bits of advice everywhere:
“Somebody get a candle!”
“We need some light!”
“It must have been a lightning bolt!”
“Where are candles?”
“Doesn’t The Candles have candles?”
One candle did appear though, just at that moment, in the doorway which led to the kitchen.
Climate Change: A Nina Bannister Mystery (The Nina Bannister Mysteries Book 7) Page 22
