Free Climate Change: A Nina Bannister Mystery (The Nina Bannister Mysteries Book 7) by T'Gracie Reese, Joe Reese Page B

continued to stare for a time, finally asking, quietly:
    “What kind of a cat have you got?”
    She shook her head:
    “It’s difficult to explain.”
    Another man approached from the back of the store and stood beside the first.
    This man was a bit shorter, a bit ruddier, and wore no glasses.
    But the aprons were the same.
    “What’s the trouble?” he asked.
    The first man looked at Nina, then at his associate, and said:
    “Fred—Fred’s my brother, ma’am––this lady wants four hundred and fifty pounds of cat litter.”
    “She wants how much?”
    “Four hundred and fifty pounds.”
    Fred stared at her for a time, then asked:
    “What kind of a cat have you got?”
    She shook her head again:
    “It’s difficult to explain.”
    The first man was speaking now, but, as the conversation wore on, it became a first-one-and-then-the-other kind of thing.
    “This is not for one cat?”
    Nina.
    “No. Thirty.”
    Second man.
    “You have thirty cats?”
    “Not exactly. It’s just that my friend Margot was not expecting––”
    Both men leaned upon the counter, four eyes widening simultaneously:
    Both said:
    “You mean Ms. Gavin out at Candles?”
    “Yes. She had a last minute booking by––”
    The first of the two men shook his head:
    “Doesn’t matter. If it’s Ms. Gavin and those artist people she brings in there—no, we’ve learned not to ask. There are seven places here in Abbeyport that sell cat litter. Fred here will take the truck. Give us half an hour and you’ll have your four hundred and fifty pounds. Just promise me:   you can’t use cat litter to make methadone, can you?”
    “I don’t think so.”
    “No, I don’t either, or the kids would have found out by now. Wouldn’t be an ounce of the stuff to be had on the shelves. So then:   give Fred and me half an hour, we’ll have you fixed up.
    She did.
    And they did.

CHAPTER SIX:   MARGOT AND NINA MEET THE COZY WRITERS

    Her return to the plantation house was an occasion of great joy, even exultation, and, as she pulled the truck into the driveway, the cab was swarmed by people who seemed as though they might have been shipwrecked sailors clambering aboard a Red Cross relief vessel.
    “Here! Give me that sack!”
    “No, I need it for room fourteen, and I need it now!”
    “I need two sacks! Two sacks!”
    In little more than two minutes, the truck’s back end was emptied of cat litter, and a dozen or so staff people had disappeared into Candles.
    She got out of the cab, looked around, saw no one wandering the grounds, and assumed that the house itself had subsumed the writers who were to inhabit it for the next few days.
    She wandered inside, looking here and there for Margot, and realizing that her search was likely to be fruitless.
    There were a thousand places that Margot might be, and another thousand errands that her friend might be occupied with.
    And so she simply wandered, turning down a corridor here and a passageway there, sighting now and then a cluster of writers who were wrestling luggage up flights of stairs and into half-opened doorways.
    Finally, she turned a corner and entered a room at random, drawn at first by the strange and yet pleasant half- light emanating from it, and only aware some seconds later that it was a library.
    Not a large room but an elegant one, with a reading desk sitting patiently at one windowed wall, orange glow of sunset filtered through the beveled glass.
    She had taken two steps into library before she realized she was not alone.
    A figure stood to her right. A man. Not a tall man, but still imposing somehow, with long black hair that swung in a kind of horse’s tail back and forth over his forehead as he rocked back and forth. His attire matched his hair:   black, leathery, and not to be trusted.
    He had not, apparently, noticed Nina’s entrance, for his attention was riveted to the books, which he was fingering, one volume at a time, while whispering:
    “Crap.”
    The book back in its