Nine Man's Murder (19 page)

“The one has already gotten five of us,” Hatter pointed out. “Plus Damien.”

Jill glanced from person to person. “By not trusting one another, we’re more likely to kill one another, like Amanda did to Reeve, and save the murderer the trouble.”

“Maybe,” Hatter suggested, “that’s what he’s counting on.”

Jill stood up. “I’m sorry, but I feel safer looking after myself.”

“Jill …” Jonas began, but Jill was already out of the drawing room.

“I’m with Jill,” Hatter said.

Before Bryan and Jonas could speak, Hatter was as far beyond the threshold as he was beyond the reach of reason.

“So now what?” Jonas asked Bryan. “Do we stand guard in the corridors?”

“And guard whom? Jill? Hatter? Or split up and guard both?”

“What difference does it make? The murderer has the only guns. If Jill or Hatter comes out with a weapon, what are we going to do?”

“We’d be safer in our rooms,” Bryan agreed.

“It’s either all together, or everyone apart. And Hatter and Jill appear to have made that decision for us.”

“Still, I don’t like it,” Bryan said as he left his ex-partner alone in the drawing room.

Jonas removed from his pocket the slip of paper Bryan had dropped earlier that evening. Once again he read the words typed on it:

***Breaking into a director’s office and stealing files is a misdemeanor. If the State Licensing Board found out, what would happen to your investigator’s license? But how would they find out? Who would know about something that happened fifteen years ago?***

* * *

J
ill swallowed a
clonazepam
pill from the bottle on the end table beside her bed. She needed to relax, calm her nerves. One more night, and then everything would be behind her. She locked the door to her room. It was unfortunate, of course, the others dying. Especially Amanda. But her main concern now was her own safety.

She had to stay awake. She reached for the alarm clock. She would set it, to wake her in case she fell asleep. No, she was too worked up to fall asleep. No need to worry on that account.

She had to get Imogen back. Imogen needed her. Always had. Of course, taking in Imogen hadn’t been entirely altruistic. Perhaps, in its way, it had been an act of desperation. One that had opened the floodgates of emotion.

You take care of your family. You protect the ones you love. You don’t let anything stand in your way. Even when it means lying to the welfare office to protect Imogen. Or stealing pills from the nursing care facility, when Mom kept receiving the wrong medication. But even with all that, Mom’s heart eventually gave out, and Imogen was taken away. Somehow Jill had to make things right, even if Bryan had to—

Suddenly Jill’s limbs felt heavy. Her head began to feel fuzzy. No, stay awake. Only one day remained. One day to fix things.

* * *

T
hey were crossing
a suspension bridge over the ravine, Jill and he, escaping the deadly mountain peak to freedom. On the other side stood a dark, shadowy figure whose features Jonas could not discern. Beside the stranger sat an old-fashioned box-and-plunger detonator, the type used by caricature villains in the old westerns. The spectral figure depressed the plunger. An explosion snapped the ropes. The bridge unraveled at the far end and began to fall in slow motion …

Jonas awoke fitfully. He had dozed off, dreaming about that same bridge that had been haunting his thoughts for the last two days.

And not only his thoughts, apparently. Shortly before retiring for the evening, Bryan had stood before the fireplace mantle, staring at the detonator box they had found near the bridge. Yesterday the wooden box had intrigued Bryan; this evening it seemed to puzzle him. Yesterday Jonas had quipped about how well the dried-up piece of balsa would burn as firewood. Tonight he wondered what aspect of the detonator box could have accounted for Bryan’s sullen silence.

The life of a farm worker was as stifling as a stagnant pond; but Jonas had to be a river, going somewhere. What is wrong with where you are? Papa would ask. He meant well, but he was naive. If you’re unhappy with your job, tell your boss. And how would that have looked? Got to keep up appearances. Success and failure are incompatible. You can’t be good if someone is better. Only the best are good.

And up here, trapped on this mountaintop with no possibility of escape, the best would be the one who survived.

51

B
ryan’s eyelids resisted
the pull of gravity. There was too much that needed to be done. Too much that needed to be worked out. All of the signs had pointed in one direction; and then, suddenly, a dead end.

There were so many unanswered questions. Like the cigarette lighter they had found on Bennett when they had discovered his body. The lighter he had claimed to have lost. Had he been lying? How could having that lighter have possibly incriminated Bennett, who was clearly not the murderer, in any case?

Then why lie about it? Or had someone stolen it? Why then was it subsequently returned to Bennett’s pocket?

It was curious how Bennett had been so easily taken by surprise, out in the open in broad daylight. What had he been thinking, going out there with a murderer on the loose?

And where had Bennett gone Friday afternoon, leaving the inn so soon after their arrival? Not the second time, when he went outside to emit the scream that drew them all from the inn, but the first time.

Bryan shook his head sleepily. His groggy mind was leaping from thought to thought, like a frog between two hotplates.

How had Jill known about that actress? He thought he had been so discreet. Jonas, of course, had known. Bryan had made the mistake of confiding in him the fact—which Bryan had found cruelly amusing at the time—that his affair with the actress (what was her name?) had commenced on, of all days, Jill’s birthday. What had he been thinking? Had he really expected Jonas to respond with anything but icy disapproval? At least Bryan had had the sense to share the ironic fact with no one else.

He had been so impulsive in those days. How could he have been so young and naive, trying to steal the information the director had refused to share? He could lose his license if the State Board ever found out.

He had been reckless … young and reckless. He had allowed his passion for vengeance to take control. You try to untie a knot, and it becomes more tangled.

That was where it all began, on that movie set. Nine Man Morris … Nine Man’s Murder. What was the connection? What had that graduation assignment to do with their current predicament? That was the key. And only one of them knew the answer.

The stunt accidents. The sabotaged scaffolding. Julian Hayward’s unexpected substitution for Adam Burke on the deadly stunt when Burke twisted his ankle at the last moment. Julian’s fatal fall. William Hayward’s subsequent nervous breakdown and commitment to a mental institution. William and Amanda in the director’s office on the morning of the accident, when one of the three construction workers completing work on the scaffolding called in sick.

We were all partly responsible for Julian Hayward’s death, Bryan reflected. Each of us contributed in his own way. Bunglers.

Eight against one, and the eight were being picked off one by one. Bryan wouldn’t be surprised if there was indeed only one left by morning.

* * *

H
atter’s reflection was
laughing at him. The public knew only Hatter Cates, the author—not Lawrence Cates, the person. It was the image who was famous. The person was still anonymous. So had he really fulfilled his destiny?

The muffled echo of commotion startled Hatter to his senses. Despite his efforts to stay awake, he had nodded off.

Drowsily Hatter consulted his wristwatch. Just past two o’clock. Who had set their alarm for two o’clock in the morning? And why did they not shut it off? Someone was a much sounder sleeper than Hatter.

Draping a warm robe over his clothes, he drifted downstairs.

Bryan was racing from his room to join Jonas before the closed door of Jill’s bedroom. “I fell asleep,” he said. “What’s going on?”

As Hatter approached, the alarm grew quite loud, clanging behind Jill’s door. Jonas knocked even louder.

“Jill, are you all right?”

No response.

“Jill, answer me.”

He tried turning the doorknob. Locked. Bryan had no greater success.

“Something’s wrong. We’ve got to get in there.”

“How?”

Jonas was the first to come up with an idea. He disappeared down the hallway.

Hatter followed Jonas, leaving Bryan alone in the hallway outside Jill’s bedroom door.

Hatter found Jonas in the service porch searching the storage closet. At length Jonas withdrew the object he sought: a large ax for cutting firewood.

The two men hurried back to Jill’s bedroom, where Jonas, after one last futile attempt to turn the doorknob, hacked a hole in the door. Reaching inside, he found the lock on the doorknob that secured the bedroom door from within. Twisting it, he unfroze the doorknob. With a turn of the knob, he opened the door.

The clock alarm was still screaming for attention when the men entered the room. Jill was lying face down on the bed, in rumpled clothing on top of the blankets, hair sprawled like snakes in a fumigated vipers’ nest.

They knew that the alarm could sound forever, but it would never wake the girl.

52

O
n the pillow
beside Jill’s head lay a small slip of paper. Jonas picked it up. On it were typed four words:

NOTHING CAN STOP ME.

As Jonas turned off the alarm, Bryan passed what he hoped was a cold, clinical eye over Jill’s body. Jonas and Hatter confirmed her death. There was no sign of struggle, yet her crumpled clothing showed signs of unnecessary violence. All three men noticed the deep red indentation on her neck. Apparently she had been strangled with a rope or cord—

“Or bathrobe sash, perhaps.”

“Could it have been suicide?” Hatter asked hastily.

Jonas sneered. “You can’t strangle yourself to death. You’d pass out before you could finish the job. Besides, even if you could, Jill was strangled with a sash or cord. If she died at her own hands, how did she get rid of the cord after she died?”

For there was none in the room to be seen.

The three men looked over every inch of Jill’s room that might conceal some clue. But the mockingly silent milk chocolate walls, broken only by the darker sepia of the closed closet door, presented a monotony of solid brown, unrelieved by even one window. Bryan and Jonas examined the lock on the inside knob of Jill’s bedroom door. On the night table beside the bed was Jill’s room key, next to a bottle of pills and a water bottle. They tested the key: It locked and unlocked Jill’s door.

“No sign of a struggle,” Bryan observed. “Jill was on her guard, like the rest of us. Yet the murderer appears to have taken her by surprise, strangling her without a fight.”

Jonas approached the night table, scooped up the pill bottle, and read the label. “Unless she couldn’t offer one. Clonazepam. A tranquilizer. Probably prescribed by some doctor at Lakeview.” He set the bottle down. “If she took one or more pills tonight, she may have sedated herself to the point where she could offer no resistance.”

Bryan joined Jonas at the night table. “But Jill wanted to stay awake and alert. If her pills normally made her sleepy, she wouldn’t have taken any.” Bryan picked up and opened the bottle. “However, if the murderer somehow replaced Jill’s medication with sleeping pills, Jill might have taken a pill she thought would not put her to sleep.”

“But what about the alarm clock?” Hatter asked.

“She might have set it to wake her up in case she did fall asleep,” suggested Jonas.

“Or,” Bryan said, “it was the murderer who set it, because he wanted us to find the body now. But how did he get in?” Bryan looked around the windowless bedroom. “There’s only one way into this room: the door. And it was locked from within when we arrived.”

“How do we know that it was locked earlier?” Hatter asked. “The killer could have come in through the unlocked door, strangled Jill—”

“And how did he lock the door when he left? If you turn the lock on the inside doorknob while the door is open, the knob freezes and you can’t close the door. If you turn it with the door closed, you can’t open the door to get out.”

“But you can lock it from the outside with a key.”

“We found the key on the night table, inside the room.”

“And we know these keys weren’t duplicated.”

“Maybe,” Hatter suggested, “the murderer killed Jill, took the key, used it to lock the door from the outside, and returned the key to the night table when we entered the room.”

But all agreed that they had seen the key on the table upon entering the room, before anyone got within arm’s reach of it. And no one had had an opportunity to swap it with a look-alike, even when they were testing it in her lock.

Bryan had that stubborn look that scorned surrender. “Then there must be some other way out of the room.”