Read Online Game Change: A Nina Bannister Mystery (The Nina Bannister Mysteries Book 3) by T'Gracie Reese, Joe Reese - Free Book Online Page B

upswept blonde, blonde, blonde wig––and always had been, dating back to that afternoon years earlier when she had walked into the study room and extended a vanilla greeting and a marzipan hand, saying:
    “I’m April. You must be Nina.”
    No one had ever said anything more damning to her.
    The study sessions—there had been three of them during the semester—had turned into nightmares. Each had involved four women: Nina, April, and two others. The task had been to prepare oral reports on Thomas Dewey or some educator or theoretician or another. April had never been satisfied with the work of her co-reporters.
    “We don’t want an ‘A’ on this project, ladies. We want an ‘A+’ Or at least I do.”
    It was during the second session that she had stood and screamed:
    “I WILL NOT BE ASSOCIATED WITH—WITH SECOND RATE PEOPLE!”
    The second rate people, Nina remembered, had sat in stunned silence.
    April had gone to the teacher, requesting not a new group, but the chance to be her own group.
    To do the report by herself.
    The teacher had refused, of course, citing some gibberish about it being a good thing to learn to work with other people—gibberish, because April herself, though certainly ‘other,’ was hardly a person and April had returned for a third attempt, during which Nina had sprung to her feet and would have leveled at her a stream of obscenities had she known any obscenities other than “Shame on you!”
    They received a “B-” on the report.
    April never spoke to any of them again.
    And now she was   at the speaker’s stand, waiting for the hubbub surrounding her to diminish.
    Her suit was perfectly pressed, perfectly white, and expertly trimmed in cherry-flavored ice cream.
    Nina was perhaps thirty feet away from her, and could not stop staring at her face, upon which there were neither age lines nor wrinkles. Had they been removed by medical procedures or had they never come into existence in the first place? Did April van Osdale have finger prints?
    No, the woman had sprung fully-formed from a seed pod, like the creatures from some science fiction movie that had postulated the overthrow of earth by spores floating through space.
    Perhaps that was it: perhaps she was not a cake at all but a flower, or a greenhouse orchid.
    What had it been about her that had so disturbed, so frightened Nina, even from the first moments?
    Not her unbridled, stupendous, unceasing, and measureless ambition, for many people had been ambitious.
    No, it was simply the fact that she was not real.
    What seemed to be there was not really there.
    And what was there in place of what should have been?
    “Thank you! Thank you all! I want you all to know how grateful I and the senator—and all of the senator’s supporters at the capitol—are for your support. You make us feel very special!”
    Applause.
    “As you all know, I’ve recently been appointed to work with school officials here in this part of our state. I see my job as extremely important, blah de blah de blah…
    Moreapplause.
    Nodding of heads.
    Mutter mutter mutter…
    “Our children, as you know, are our most important blah de blah de blah…”
    And after what seemed another fourteen or fifteen hours of ‘the test scores must rise,’ and such not, but was really only two minutes of real time…
    …the speech was over.
    April van Osdale stepped down from the podium.
    There was a mild hubbub surrounding the podium for a time, and Nina, almost against her will, found herself drifting forward, magnetized toward the polar ice cap that was this woman.
    She was going to have to greet her.
    And how would that go?
    If she had never in her life met and tried to work with a woman she so completely despised, did the same not hold true for April? Did she not continue to despise Nina?
    Probably.
    Of course, it would be masked.
    Nina was a principal now and April was surrounded by the press. There would be a frothy and sugar-laden show of surprise and