Margot put her lips near the keyhole and whispered:
“Molly?”
No answer.
“Molly Badger?”
Some movement behind the door.
Then nothing.
“Molly! It’s Margot Gavin and Nina. Your friends. Molly, you have to open the door.”
Silence.
“Margot,” said Nina, quietly, “you have to unlock it.”
“All right.”
The key was rusty, as was the lock.
Both screeched as metal scraped against metal.
Then there was a click.
“Open it!”
“All right.”
Margot pulled.
The door came open painfully, hinges having not been oiled, obviously, for decades if not longer.
Before them they saw little more than a dark cell, no more than ten feet square. Along the far wall stretched a cot, upon which the blanket-enshrouded body of Molly Badger lay. On a shelf on the wall directly above the cot sat a glass vase, and in that vase a single red rose.
There was a reading table at the foot of the cot. A candle burned low in its tarnished gold holder, and, by the flickering light thrown by the small flame, Nina could see the book that Molly had been reading upon going to sleep.
The Diary of Anne Frank.
“Molly?”
Margot stepped into the room.
“Molly?”
No answer. No movement.
“Margot,” Nina whispered, suddenly quite frightened. “Is she––”
But Margot merely shook her head:
“No. She’s breathing.”
“Do you think she took some kind of drugs?”
“I don’t think so. There, look—she’s waking up.”
And in fact she was. She groaned a bit, stretched in the bed, finally opened her eyes, and managed a weak smile:
“Margot! Nina! You’ve come to see me!”
Margot nodded:
“Yes. Are you all right?”
“I’m all right. Just frightened.”
“Of what, child?”
“Of the others. I’m afraid of what they’ll do to me, if they find me here.”
“They won’t find you.”
“I don’t know. They hate me so much. They hate all of us. And why? Why could one otherwise civilized culture want so desperately to eliminate another, wipe them out completely?”
“I don’t know. It’s something I can’t understand.”
“Yes, so I’m a self-published author. But am I not still a human being? Does not a self-published author have eyes? If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us––”
“It’s all right,” said Nina, quietly but firmly. “We know the lines.”
“I’m sorry. It’s just that it seems so unfair. They think they’re this Master Race of Writers, just because they’re all in Kindle Select.”
“I know,” said Margot. “But Molly, I have to tell you––”
“I crept down into the kitchen early this morning, about 4 a.m., before anyone else was awake. I know I shouldn’t have, but I wanted to see the world, the real world again. I found all of the presents that the publishers had sent. And––oh, this is so hard for me––”
“Go on, my child.”
“I took something.”
“What? What did you take?”
“I know I shouldn’t have, but they all looked so lovely, lying there on the various tables. I took a sweatshirt. Look.”
She reached under the cot and took out the shirt, holding it up proudly before her.
“It’s blue. Pale blue. It has American Guild of Cozy Writers stitched across the front, in bold, black letters.”
“It’s beautiful, Molly,” said Nina.
“Do you think I shall be allowed to keep it?”
Margot, consolingly:
“Of course. Of course, you will.”
“Because––because whenever I wear it, no matter where I shall be. Even, if I shall b––I shall look down at these letters, and feel the blue sky above me, and the green grass spread below me––and I shall know that I too am a true Cozy Writer.”
Nina tried to respond to this, but she was about to cry.
They were in silence for a time.
Finally Molly Badger said, quietly:
“It’s the right size, too.”
Again, silence for a time.
Finally Margot said:
“Someone must have seen you, Molly.”
Molly Badger nodded:
“Yes. Someone did.”
“Who?”
“The beauty queen.”
Nina, who’d studied the list of cozy guests quite thoroughly, nodded and said:
“You mean Suzy Maples?”
“Yes, that’s the one.”
Nina looked at Margot:
“Suzy Maples writes the Chrissie Oakton Mysteries. Chrissie is young and beautiful, and takes part constantly in beauty pageants. All of the murders she solves take place at such pageants, and the victims are always beauty queens.”
“That’s good,” said Margot, thoughtfully.
“Her cat is a beautifully groomed Siamese named Skipples.”
“Her real-life cat?”
Nina shook her head:
“No. Her fictional cat. In real life her cat is a Siamese named Whiskers. I saw it earlier this morning having sex with that gray yard cat that the staff calls Sluggo.”
“Well, that’s not good.”
“No, she won’t be pleased.”
“What was Suzy doing downstairs so early, Molly?”
Molly Badger was sitting up now, and she had reached back to take into her small hands the red rose that sat above her cot. Smelling it, and smiling, she said.
“I love this rose. It gives me courage.”
“I know. But as for Suzy––”
“She was putting her makeup on.”
“At four in the morning?”
“She said it takes her a long time to do it. She has to start early.”
“I see.”
“Anyway, I’m sure she saw me. She asked who I was. I told her. I didn’t say I was self-published, but––they know. They always seem to know. Anyway, she said some vicious things to me, words I can’t repeat––and then she went back to doing her nails.”
Margot nodded:
“All right. She must have called Harriet Crossman.”
A look of fear came into Molly Badger’s face.
“So they know? They know I’m here?”
“I’m afraid they do.”
“Then they’ll be coming for me.”
“Not if we get you out quickly.”
“Those sirens! Waa daa! Waa daa! Oh, I hate the memory of them!”
“It won’t get that far. But you’ll have to leave, Molly. I’ve asked one of the boys to get a car ready. He should be up here any time now. You can go down the back stairs.”
“But where? Where can I go, Margot?”
“Why don’t you just stay in Abbeyport for a few days. I know the name of a motel there.”
“And they’ll accept me?”
“Yes. They’re good people, and brave.”
“Oh, thank you! Thank you! Oh my God!”
“What is it, dear?”
“The sirens! I hear the sirens!”
“That’s a fire truck, dear. Out on the road.”
“It’s so hard to tell the difference––”
“I know.”
Molly Badger was standing now, and she put the book she’d been reading in a small suitcase that she took from beneath the cot, saying:
“I want to thank you so much for letting me stay here even for this short amount of time.”
“I’m afraid it wasn’t much––”
But Molly shook her head, saying:
“It was enough. I accomplished what I wanted to accomplish. Just being here allowed me to do that. And now I can promise you—I will be published!”
“Certainly you will, Molly.”
“Not only that—but I’ll be the one who gets the HBO contract!”
How, thought Nina, in the hell are you going to do that?
But she didn’t say anything, and, if she had, she would not have included the ‘hell’ part.
(She was already thinking like a cozy writer.)
By the time Nina and Margot had reached the main meeting hall (secure in the knowledge that Molly Badger had been whisked down the back stairs and was now being taken safely into Abbeyport), the main morning’s meeting had begun. The room was full, the beaming face of Jessica Fletcher was blessing the proceeding, and Harriet Crossman had just begun an address that began innocuously enough, but was to lead to trouble.
Nina and Margot stood in one of the room’s corners while Harriet spoke, the microphone squawking a bit as she said her first words:
“Good morning!”
“GOOD MORNING!”
“I wish now to declare as open the first morning session of Year 2015’s annual Congress of the American Guild of Cozy Writers!”
“HUZZAH!”
Upon saying this, she struck the podium with a solid brown wooden gavel, shouting as she did so:
“THE SESSION IS NOW OPEN!”
“Hear, hear!”
“Our first order of business though, I must warn you, is to be a difficult one. It represents a difficult decision on my part, and one that I have labored over quite intensely.”
Silence in the room.
What is this all about? wondered Nina.
Harriet continued:
“As you all know, at ten thirty this morning a representative from HBO is going to arrive.”
They knew.
More:
“The HBO representative is named Sylvia Duncan. She is said to be quite powerful in the organization. She will interview at some length any of you who wish your cozy series to be considered to be the basis of a new, nationally televised, mystery series. In short, from the pages of one or more of your novels, is to come the nation’s next––”
She turned and pointed to the image glowing behind her, spread across the wall.
“––the next Jessica.”
A kind of awed silence ensued.
“And yet––”
The awed silence transformed itself into a suspicious silence.
“…and yet, serious concerns remain as to which works, and which authors, the Guild itself is to put forward to Ms. Duncan.”
Now there were a few shouts.
“What are you talking about?”
“What is this?”
Harriet, hands in the air:
“Please, please just let me speak. This is going to be difficult enough, without our interrupting one another.”
“What are you talking about?”
“What the-------- are you talking about?”
First obscene word of the meeting, noted Nina.
Not really a ‘cozy’ meeting, one had to say.
Harriet:
“As most of you know, we have in recent years given the coveted GACW seal—as well as membership in the Guild—to works which stretch the boundaries of what might truly qualify as cozy mysteries. Let us be honest with ourselves. There have been some very bloody murders committed within our pages. Also––”
She looked down at Rebecca Thornwhipple, who was seated, as usual, in the front row.
“––though I am no prude, I do take grave exception to the level of eroticism that we have allowed to creep into some of our narratives.”
“-------- you!” chirped Rebeccah.
The room gasped as one.
Harriet, though, continued:
“Now, now. I am not going to attempt to pare down our membership, nor do I intend to lead a movement to purify our writing, and bring it back to the pristine state with which Agatha and Jessica began it.”
Harsh voices now.
“See that you don’t!”
“Down with Crossman!”
Crossman, though, was not to be flustered:
“It is my contention, however, that this convention should vote as a group on a certain list of titles that it will recommend to HBO. And that these titles be those which embody our rules of true coziness: charming villages—on the New England coastline whenever possible—genuinely lovable and eccentric, perhaps cantankerous in that we-love-them-all-the-same kind of way, characters: town barbers, crusty lawyers, elderly gossips, and here and there an attractive young couple engaged to be married.”
“Boring!”
“Been done!”
“Also, that these chosen novels portray good, middle-class murders that even children can view and read about and talk about with their friends.”
“Children don’t read cozies!”
“To hell with children.”
And with that, another biscuit went flying across the room, striking one of Jessica Fletcher’s pearly white teeth before falling harmlessly to the floor.
Must have been left over from last night, mused Nina.
But, of course, there had been biscuits for breakfast, too.
“We want, in short, what we were raised on watching television and reading library books: good, straightforward knives and letter openers to the heart, and revolver shots—preferably one and perfectly placed—to the head. We do not want—and I’m not going to name authors’ names here, or mention novel titles—men being beaten to death by kickboxers, their throats mangled by karate chops and their eyes poked out by thumb jabs!”
“All right, that’s enough!”
A figure stood up in the middle of the audience.
Nina had not seen her before.
Though she wondered how it would have been possible to miss her.
The woman wore tight fitting black slacks and a tank top.
The latter was important because it showed off a chiseled and muscular upper body, biceps bulging, shoulders rippling.
The woman had short blond hair and ice blue eyes.
She spoke in an ice blue voice.
Everyone was instantly afraid of her.
Including Nina.
“We all know who you’re talking about. Okay let’s get it out on the table. I’m C.R. Wood and I’m a feminist cozy writer.”
A woman just to the left of Nina muttered:
“As though there could be such a thing. The very idea!”
But she said this very softly.
“I write The Patty Parity Mysteries. Yes, I will admit it, Patty is a fighter for equal rights for women. And she’s a body builder, as am I. And she’s a trained expert in martial arts. She can kill with her hands and she can kill with her feet. And she does so, quite regularly.”
C.R. Wood leaned forward and shouted:
“But she only kills when she’s confronted by examples of sexist behavior!”
Harriet Crossman, attempting to be conciliatory, herself leaned forward on the podium:
“But C.R., in the last novel, Patty castrates a man with one karate chop.”
“It’s possible! I’ve done it.”
An audible murmur ran through the crowd.
C.R. Wood glared at everyone in the room.
Then she sat down.
Harriet, shaking her head, continued:
“All right, clearly there are going to be some disagreements among us. But if we can just agree that what promotes best the well-being of the entire––”
She was interrupted by movement from the back of the room.
A door had opened, and in the doorway stood a radiant woman, beaming, dressed in white, and warming the entire room.
“I am,” she said, “Sylvia Duncan.”
No, you’re not, thought Nina. You’re Glenda the Good Witch.
Except you don’t have a little crown.
It must be in a suitcase somewhere.
Everyone in the audience gasped.
They stared at her for a time, as though, despite her perfectly pressed business suit an
d crimson scarf, she was actually standing in the doorway completely naked.
She had so much confidence, of course, Nina found herself thinking, that she could have been naked and not worried about it one bit.
She continued:
“I am sorry. I was supposed to arrive an hour and a half later. I only realized my mistake a few minutes ago. I thought it might be all right if I just sat in on your meeting, perhaps got a few ideas about how your organization functions––
My God, thought Nina, the last thing you want to know is how this organization functions.
Harriet Crossman obviously thought the same thing.
Because after flustered apologies on both sides, a great deal of hand shaking and milling and stewing and standing up and sitting down and applause and ‘My name is so and so and I write the such and such’ and ‘I’m so anxious to get to know you and to get to know you and OH WHAT AN ADORABLE CAT YOU HAVE THERE––”
For heaven’s sakes, thought Nina, at least keep the cats off one another for a while. Just a little while, anyway, until she gets used to the place.
––after a few minutes of this kind of thing, Sylvia Duncan, who of course was not about to be consigned to the back of the hall as though she were just anybody—
––was at the podium, addressing the entire group.
“Well, Cozy Writers of America, I, as you know by now, I am Sylvia Duncan. I have the honor to represent HBO. We’re always trying at our network to meet the ever changing demands of a diverse and highly intelligent viewing audience. Our attempts to recognize what’s truly wanted out there, and what’s being asked for, have led us again and again to the realization that cozy mysteries—wholesome mysteries with good well-crafted plots—are more in demand than they’ve ever been.”
“Yes!”
“Yes!”
Sylvia Duncan smiled at these comments.
“We wish that we could make on-going television productions of all your fine novels. And perhaps, with time and luck, we can. But for now we must choose one of you. One series of novels that we hope will begin a––
And on and on.
She gave a brief succinct speech in which she said just about what everybody in the room already knew.
She was going to make somebody a millionaire.
And now it was time to begin the interviews.
And so she said, finally, after her preliminary remarks were finished and the true business to begin:
Climate Change: A Nina Bannister Mystery (The Nina Bannister Mysteries Book 7) Page 13