Sex Change: A Nina Bannister Mystery (The Nina Bannister Mysteries Book 6) (20 page)

CHAPTER FIFTEEN: THE MAN WHO LOVED DICKEN

The office into which Nina Bannister had been moved was everything Mississippi. It was FOOTBALL FOOTBALL FOOTBALL with balls, jerseys, helmets, overview pictures, newspapers headlines, shoes, face guards—and it was COTTON COTTON COTTON, with an actual bale stuffed somehow not quite into a corner, and photos of cotton gins with their yards filled with wagons.

It was FAULKNER FAULKNER FAULKNER with an entire portion of the west wall built as a shrine to the Nobel laureate who had created a mythical Yawknawpatawka county and a world of Snopses (Flem Snopes, Montgomery Ward Snopes, etc) to populate it.

It was trinkets and Civil War memorabilia and Robert E. Lee and marlin caught off Bay St. Lucy and deer shot near Meridian and––

––well, it just went on and on and on.

Except that it had been gradually collected over the decades by Jarrod Thornbloom for his seventeen acres of office space.

Then it had been crammed down here into the basement of the Rayburn Building and compacted into Nina’s cubic foot and a half of office space.

So there really wasn’t much a place to sit. Or walk. Or work.

Or breathe standing straight.

It was hard with eight aides and Dicken Proctor.

It was easier, though, when one was alone.

As Nina now found herself.

After “The Proctorlamation” as it had quickly become known (
Proctor Proclamation
, with a bit of language stretching thrown in) had reached the Secret Service (five minutes) all Hell had broken loose.

Of course, at least in Nina’s mind all Hell had broken loose from the time of her viralization, and she was having a hard time remembering which part of loose Hell she was dealing with any one time.

But that really didn’t take too much concentration.

She wasn’t dealing with an enigmatic, shadowy figure in the Georgetown Library.

She wasn’t dealing with an assassination attempt and a floor covered by shattered window glass.

Those would have been hard enough.

She was dealing with—they all were dealing with––a ghost.

A man whose private jet had crashed into the Atlantic Ocean a thousand miles from the shore of the United States of America and three thousand miles from the shore of France…

…and had still turned up here, in this office, seven hours ago.

For it was now 2 PM.

She had been here all alone all that time.

They had told her to stay here, and that was that.

Several agents had explained it all in the following way:

She could not be sent home, to the apartment she shared with Laurencia, because, after the shooting at George Washington, a sea of media personnel had spread slowly around the place, and all efforts to remove them––these were, after all, public streets—had proved useless.

A quiet, boutique hotel?

Impossible.

She was too closely watched now.

Business as usual?

No, business was not as usual. Her staff had been sent home. They needed to stay home, at least for the day.

And so she had been told to stay here, where she could be very tightly guarded.

Outside, in the corridors, business did go on pretty much as usual.

So a thousand or so security people were engaged to float up and down the hallways of the Rayburn Building, but they managed to look like they were doing what everybody else was doing—fundraising or glad-handing—and so no one much minded them.

Nina simply drank one cup of coffee after another, sat at her big desk, and read.

What did she read?

Faulkner, of course.

She did this for several hours.

A Rose for Emily
was actually pretty believable when one compared it to what her chief of staff had just reported.

Emily Grierson had slept with a dead man for ten years or so, but at least he had shown the courtesy of staying dead and rotting.

This Jarrod Thornbloom on the other hand..

…well, that was a different story.

Finally, at just after two o’clock in the afternoon, the door was opened (by a real person and not a deceased one), just as she had been apprised that it would be.

Sylvia Morales entered.

The two women hugged, sobbed, hugged again, laughed a little, and sat down.

They asked each other whether they were doing all right and, yes, they were, in fact, doing all right and the weather was good and etc. etc.

Finally, Nina asked:

“So what’s been going on?”

Sylvia took a deep breath.

This was going to take a while.

“All right. As soon as word got over to Stockmeyer, three agents came and got Proctor. They took him immediately to the Service headquarters. He hasn’t seen anybody but Service people since he saw this…”

“…this ghost.”

“Well, yeah, whatever it is he saw. The main thing is, the press can’t be told about this. That’s why you’ve been kept here…”

“Like a prisoner.”

“You’re not a prisoner. Stockmeyer wanted me to stress that with you.”

“I’m not a prisoner?”

“No, you’re just a person who has to stay in one place and isn’t allowed to go anywhere else.”

“Oh. Thanks for clearing that up for me.”

“There are just too many people out there who want to talk to you, Nina. And you’re too honest.”

“I can lie if I want to.”

“Have you ever lied?”

“Well, maybe not, but I’ve been wrong.”

“See, that isn’t the same thing.”

“Same result.”

“The problem is, you wouldn’t have been wrong on this. If somebody had asked you, did your Chief of Staff see Jarrod Thornbloom a few hours ago, you would have said
yes.
And then everything would have been chaos.”

“As opposed to now, when everything is…”

“Just impossible.”

“Ok, tell me more.”

“Well, Proctor got sent into the interrogation room with Stockmeyer and two other agents.”

‘You being one of them?”

“Yes. A word from the President makes a lot of difference. I’m hot stuff now.”

“Glad to hear it.”

“Question after question: what was he wearing? What did he say to you? Have you been drinking? Do you take drugs? Do you realize that what you claim you
saw
is impossible?”

“And Proctor?”

“Poor guy. Probably never been interrogated like that. By pros, I mean. I thought he was going to break into tears. But he just sat there, and kept on nodding, and keeping control of himself, and repeating the same thing: ‘I tell you I saw Jarrod Thornbloom.’”

“So what happened?”

Sylvia shrugged:

“What happened was, the whole crash investigation got re-opened. Calls went flying to Dulles Airport. By ten o’clock, where Proctor had been sitting, Stockmeyer had the guys who had testified after the initial crash. Two controllers who had been in the tower, and the mechanic who had serviced Thornbloom’s plane. And it was the same story that they had told earlier, I guess.”

“You weren’t around for their original testimony?”

“No, I was working another case. But apparently, Nina, the whole thing was pretty cut and dried. Pretty routine. The plane was a Beechcraft 550. That’s a dependable private jet with very few problems in its history. It had taken off at eight AM as scheduled. Two mechanics had prepped it, two veterans––guys who had never made a mistake, apparently. They testified then, and they still do, that it checked out perfectly.”

“This just doesn’t make any sense.”

“Actually, it makes less and less. There are all kinds of cameras around. Homeland Security, you understand.”

“I see.”

“There’s a film, taken from the control tower, scanning the tarmac and the runway. You can see Thornbloom and his pilot walking toward the plane and getting into it. They’re laughing and patting each other on the back. Apparently this has been Thornbloom’s regular pilot for years. He’s perfect. Never had a complaint, never a problem of any kind. Anyway, each of these guys was carrying a little suitcase and a thermos of coffee. This stuff they took onto the plane with them. The mechanics watched them board the plane. And the mechanics swear, Nina, that nothing else was on the plane. No strange packages, no bombs. Nothing that
could
have been
 
a bomb.

“And yet…”

“Yeah.
And yet
. The plane took off perfectly, the weather stayed perfect, Thornbloom
was on the plane
and two hours later the plane disappeared from radar. Not one word of a problem, just…gone. The Coast Guard found a bit of wreckage three hours later…but the ocean is two miles deep at that point. No bodies, no black box.”

“How far out were they?”

“One thousand, two hundred and twenty miles.”

“How high were they flying?”

“Forty-thousand feet.”

“And Thornbloom came in here this morning and left me another dirty letter.”

“Well, I wouldn’t exactly call it
dirty
.”

“Let’s not quibble.”

“All right. Yes, according to Proctor, he came in here.”

“Well, then, we just have to resort to literature.”

“That’s what we have to do?”

“Yes, that’s all that’s left. Sherlock Holmes tells us we only have to eliminate the impossible, and believe what’s left.”

“And when we do that in this case?”

Nina shrugged:

“Thornbloom survived the forty thousand foot crash, got out of the airplane, and swam back to shore.”

“Nina, he’s seventy-eight years old.”

“And I have to say, it’s a remarkable achievement for a man of that age.”

Sylvia stared at her for a time.

Before she could reply, the door to the office opened.

It was Dicken Proctor.

He still had the same shocked look on his face that Nina had seen the morning before.

There was nothing to be said to him, so the two women simply watched as he sat down in the chair closest to the door.

As though drawn to him by some kind of magnetism, they pulled chairs close by and they themselves sat.

A ring of three people sitting silently in an office that looked like a sideshow booth advertising the Old South.