Read Sex Change: A Nina Bannister Mystery (The Nina Bannister Mysteries Book 6) for Free Online Page A

happens, I do. Not for too long, I don’t think. But for several months. I’m not sure you know too much about my personal life, Nina…”
    “Not as much as I should, given your stature.”
    “Oh, pish about that. But the fact is, I am a widow, as, I believe, are you.”
    “Yes.”
    “I’ve been sharing a very nice apartment, just off Massachusetts Avenue, with an old and dear friend. She works in international banking, though, and has just been offered a handsome promotion. They want her to go and manage their branch in Paris.”
    “Oh, my.”
    “Yes, it’s impossible to turn down. Also, my daughter will be graduating from Georgetown at the end of this coming summer semester. She will probably move in with me for a time, while she thinks about future plans. But from now through early fall…well, I followed your race with such interest, and came to feel as though you were someone I admired so much…I thought perhaps…”
    “I would love it!”
    “Really?”
    “Absolutely! It would be a great honor for me!”
    “And for me, too, Nina. For me, too. The apartment is just east of the corner of 3 rd and E Streets. It’s quite close to the Capital, and to the Rayburn House Office Building, where your office is. It’s on the third floor of a stately old Victorian mansion. From the big window in our living room we can see down onto Massachusetts Avenue, and, beyond that, the Thurgood Marshall Federal Judiciary Building.”
    “It sounds perfect.”
    “I think you’ll be comfortable there. There is, however, just one thing that may be an issue…”
    “What?”
    “I have a cat.”
          
    That evening, she went to the Lincoln Memorial.
    It was around sundown.
    The cherry trees were beginning to blossom.
    She overheard a guide talking to a group of visitors about Lincoln’s hands. They looked, he said, especially lifelike because they were based on castings done while he was president. The guide said people who knew sign language might recognize that the left hand was shaped like an A and the right hand like an L . No one knew whether that was done intentionally, but the sculptor, Daniel Chester French, did have a deaf son.
    Then, of course, after the group left, Nina went over and read one of the two full speeches in the Memorial.
    The Gettysburg Address was one, of course.
    The other one…
    …ah, yes, the other one.
    The Second Inaugural Address.
    Those last lines…
          
    “If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said ‘the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.’
    With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”

    With malice toward none, with charity for all…
    To bind up the nation’s wounds…
    “They always were you’ve favorite lines, weren’t they?”
    Silence for a time, then:
    “I think you would be so proud of me.”
    More silence. Then:
    “I used to think,