Nine Man's Murder (7 page)

“It’ll be dark soon,” Hatter observed. “Let’s get this over with.”

Reeve, Bryan, Jonas, and Hatter carried the body outside. Aaron found a shovel in the indoor service porch off the kitchen. A makeshift funeral delivered Damien to his frozen grave.

Back inside the inn, the stealthy burglar Death robbed everyone of their appetites.

“We need to figure out why,” Jill was saying. “Why would someone come all the way up here to murder Damien?”

“Maybe this was the revenge of some criminal he had helped put behind bars,” Gideon suggested.

“It would certainly be the ideal place for a murder,” Reeve added. “No witnesses.”

“Aren’t we just assuming it was murder?” Hatter’s tone was almost patronizing. “How do we know it wasn’t suicide?”

“A gruesome way to commit suicide. Stabbing oneself in the gut.”

“But possible.”

Bryan turned to Amanda. “How did you find the body?”

“I was searching for the man who took the guns, like everyone else, when I noticed the upstairs hall closet. I opened the door, and out fell … the body.”

“So that rules out suicide,” Bryan said. “Amanda found the closet door closed. If you go upstairs and check, you’ll notice that the door has no inside handle. Which means that there’s no way to close it from the inside. If Damien stabbed himself to death in the closet, how—after stepping inside—could he have closed the closet door?”

“He couldn’t have,” Reeve agreed. “Someone had to have closed the door after him.”

“And whoever killed Damien was someone who knew he would find him up here.”

“But why hide his body in the closet? If he didn’t want it discovered, why not just bury it or take it with him? No one would ever have found it.”

“Maybe the murderer wanted it found.”

“Then why hide it in the first place?”

“Perhaps,” Jonas suggested, “he did not want the body to be found right away.”

“More important right now,” Carter added, “is there some connection between this murder and the theft of our guns?”

At that moment a blast shook the inn like a cradle rocked to the beat of some demonic lullaby.

“What in God’s name was that?”

Jonas and Bryan were the first ones out the front door, followed closely by the others.

A few vagabond flakes of snow fell upon them, as if nature were abandoning her attempt to bury them alive. From the chasm that separated the promontory from the rest of the mountain range, billows of black smoke rose as from a funeral pyre. The guests raced toward the smoldering abyss over the layer of newly fallen snow, to be stunned upon arrival by the sight they no longer saw.

“The bridge!” Jill cried. “It’s gone!”

23

W
ithout a word,
Jonas and Bryan began searching the rim of the ravine.

“What are you looking for?” Carter asked.

“The detonator.”

“What will that tell you?” Hatter snapped.

“Maybe nothing.”

But that did not stop them from searching, nor Reeve and Carter from joining in. It was the latter who made the discovery.

“What’s this?” From behind a large rock, uncovered and completely exposed, Carter produced a wooden box, powdered lightly with fresh snow. Jonas knelt beside Carter to inspect the box. Inside was an electric mechanism.

“A detonation device,” Jonas mumbled. “Set in a wooden frame.” He studied it with a trained eye. “The frame is balsa wood, cheap and porous. The device itself is simple—crude, actually.”

“If it’s a detonator,” Hatter challenged, “then why was it placed here, on the mountain, instead of secured to the bridge itself?”

“My guess is that whoever did this was taking no chances. He knew that vibrations could cause the device to malfunction. Remember how shaky the bridge was when we crossed it? That made it too unstable a support on which to mount the detonator.”

“Whoever murdered Damien must also have set the charge,” Amanda suggested. “He must have rigged the explosive after killing Damien.”

“It’s not hard to see a pattern,” Jonas muttered. “The stolen guns. The murder of Damien. And now this.”

Hatter twitched nervously. “We don’t even have a working telephone to call for help.”

Carter closed his eyes to think. “Wait. I seem to recall Damien keeping a short-wave radio up here, in case of emergencies. If we can find it, we may be able to call for help.”

Jonas rose to leave, the detonator device still dangling from his hand.

“You’re bringing that thing?” Reeve asked.

“I want to look at it more closely.” Examining the wooden frame, Jonas quipped, “If nothing else, we can always use it for firewood. The frame is bone dry, so at least it will burn.”

The party returned to the inn, across the fleecy blanket of snow, past rain-soaked trees. Gideon, waiting restlessly at the front door, was told about the bridge. He joined the others in a search for the short-wave radio.

Bryan and Jonas searched the downstairs bedrooms and library, but it was Carter who discovered the radio in an upstairs closet. Yet the light from an overhead lamp offered a dismal diagnosis: The front of the radio had been smashed in, rendering it inoperable.

Back in the parlor room, Jonas was the first to speak.

“It’s beginning to make sense. All of this—the missing guns, Damien’s murder, the blowing up of the bridge—is the work of one person. The one who sent those invitations.”

“So Damien didn’t send them, after all,” Jill said.

“That would explain a great deal,” Gideon agreed. “We all noted that it’s not like Damien, who comes here for solitude, to undermine it by inviting company. Because—apparently—he didn’t.”

Jonas looked at his ex-partner. “Back at the train station, you had mentioned something about the envelope your invitation came in. Something about the postmark.”

“Yes, I had noticed an L.A. postmark on the envelope my invitation arrived in. We received the invitations about a week after Damien came up here. Which means that he had to have sent them from here—from Owen’s Reef—as you yourself pointed out, Carter. That would have given the envelopes a northern California postmark.” Bryan’s eyes narrowed. “But Los Angeles is in southern California.”

“Perhaps Damien came up here a few days later this year,” Amanda suggested, “and sent the invitations before leaving L.A.?”

Carter shook his head. “No. He left the same time as always.”

“I had thought of that, too,” Bryan said. “Which is why I telephoned Damien’s agency to ask about it. They confirmed that Damien had left several days before the invitations had been sent. Invitations—I should add—they knew nothing about.”

So that’s who called the agency several days ago, asking when Damien had left on his vacation, Carter thought.

“Two months ago our secretary fielded a call from someone asking questions about the detectives who had graduated in our class fifteen years ago.” Carter kept his eyes on Bryan. “Was that you, also?”

“No.”

Hatter interrupted. “So you’re saying that whoever sent those invitations waited until Damien was up here—”

“And cut the telephone line, knowing that Damien—who never uses his phone or computer, anyway—would never notice.”

“Ensuring that Damien could not be reached.”

“And could therefore not deny having sent the invitations.”

Amanda regarded Bryan with narrowed eyes. “If you knew Damien hadn’t sent the invitations, why did you show up?”

“For one thing, I didn’t know Damien hadn’t sent them. Which is precisely why I did show up. I knew something was going on. And I wanted to find out what.”

No point, Bryan thought, in bringing up the note. No one needed to know his other reason for coming up here.

Reeve settled heavily into a plush settee, preparing to puzzle out the mystery himself. At his right elbow he noticed something lying inconspicuously on the end table beneath an oriental lamp.

He had just discovered the First Note.

24

R
eeve read the
note aloud:

“The cast is now assembled and the scene is set. You are all about to partake in a game of Nine Man’s Murder.

“You all fancy yourselves great detectives. Well, we’ll soon see just how good you really are. I have devised a little challenge for you, a small test of your deductive abilities. It’s very simple. All you have to do is catch a murderer.

“Who is the victim, you may ask? Why, ladies and gentlemen, you are the victims. The scenario: One by one you will all be murdered. Your only chance of survival is to identify the murderer and stop him, or her, before you are added to the list of casualties. Consider it a battle of wits, the skills of a few would-be detectives against the cunning of a master killer. Your talents against mine.

“The winner will be the one who survives.

“It’s unsigned,” Reeve said dryly.

Each guest in turn dredged the note to bring up clues, but only one was found. The message had been typed on ordinary blank white stationery. Its author had not wished to provide a sample of his or her handwriting. Which implied that it might be recognized by the others.

“So one of us wants to kill the rest?” Jill asked.

“Or,” Amanda suggested, “a third party has a grudge against all of us.”

“Who?” Hatter asked. “We all have different professions. We live in different areas. Who would even know us all, let alone have a reason to kill each of us? What’s the common denominator?”

“Damien,” Gideon said. “We all apprenticed with him fifteen years ago.”

“Gideon’s right,” Carter agreed. “We used to help Damien on his cases, as part of our training. Investigating, doing research, writing up reports. Maybe we helped convict someone he proved guilty of a crime.”

“And the convict blames us,” Reeve added, “as well as Damien.”

Jill nodded. “It makes sense. He killed Damien. Now he’s after us.”

Gideon swept an eye over the others. “We all trained as detectives. Perhaps there’s something more we can infer from the note.”

“Tone?” Jonas asked.

“Angry,” replied Carter.

“Hostile.”

“Taunting.”

“Damien made no secret of his winter retreats,” Jill said. “Everyone who knew Damien knows about them. So anyone could have used that knowledge to forge those invitations and lure us up here.”

“Whoever did type this note,” Jonas added, “had this whole thing planned out well in advance. Every stage seems to be under perfect control.”

Amanda pondered. “All we really need to know is who put that note on the table, and then we’ll know who wrote it.”

“What if it was placed there before we arrived?”

Jonas shot down the notion with a shake of his head. “I was in the parlor room earlier this afternoon. That note was definitely not on the table at that time. Someone planted it there between then and now.”

“Perhaps you put it there yourself,” Hatter suggested, “when you were alone.”

“All of us have had ample opportunity to plant it during the last two hours,” Bryan said.

“Not to mention an outsider,” Reeve added. “There were times when anyone could have come inside undetected.”

“The mysterious outsider,” Hatter muttered with his sandpaper chuckle. “The one who took the guns.”

“The one we’re trapped up here with,” Jill pointed out soberly.

25

T
hey divided into
two groups. Bryan, Carter, Reeve, and Amanda scoured the promontory to sweep out the intruder, if there was one, with what little daylight remained. A large broom was not needed, for the mountaintop was no more than a half-mile square, bordered by a sheer drop of cliff on all four sides, with no shelter other than the narrow trunks of trees dappling the mountain peak. If someone was hiding anywhere on the summit, he would not be difficult to find.

Jonas, Jill, Gideon, Hatter, and Aaron searched the inn. Jonas and Jill ransacked the work shed and empty garage, finding no one. Circling Moon’s End, the pair was stopped behind the inn by Jonas catching sight of something to the left of Bryan’s window.

“What is it?” Jill asked.

“You see that trellis?” Jonas replied.

Stretching between Bryan’s first-floor window and Amanda’s second-floor window was a white wooden ivy-twined square latticework, like others affixed to the walls of Moon’s End—the one outside the kitchen and Reeve’s room, for example.

“What about it?” Jill asked.

“Look at those two slats near the bottom. They’re broken. I didn’t notice that when we were searching for the source of that scream.”

They completed the circuit of Moon’s End, finding no footprints in the snow. Thus no one had evaded discovery simply by staying one step ahead of them.

A search of the inn yielded similar results. Not one inch of Moon’s End was granted modesty or went untouched by human eyes, not even the cellar Hatter and Jonas had discovered earlier that day. The walls, ceiling, and floors of the inn concealed no secret compartments or passages in which a fugitive could hide. The only guests at Moon’s End were those who had been invited. Nor did the search of Moon’s End uncover any of the missing handguns. The only treasure the inn would yield was an old cassette tape recorder, still functional despite its years, with a tape of Damien’s old dictation.