One by One

by Ruth Ware

  As if echoing my unease, Liz flexes her fingers nervously—crack, crack, crack. The noise is like gunshots in the silence, and it puts my teeth on edge.

  “How did you get involved with Snoop anyway?” I ask. I pitch my voice slightly too loud, trying to cover up the sound. Liz shifts in her chair. I can’t tell if her knee is hurting her, or if it’s the question that’s made her uncomfortable.

  “I just applied for a job. They were a start-up at the time—just Topher, Eva, Elliot, and Rik. I was their first… secretary, I suppose you’d call it. PA, maybe. They didn’t have the weird job titles in those days.”

  She falls silent again, as if the uncharacteristically long speech has exhausted her. I’m about to ask another question when, to my surprise, she speaks again.

  “I miss it. I miss them. It was fun… for a while.”

  “What made you leave?” I ask, but that’s when the shutters come down again. Her face turns blank and unreadable.

  “No reason,” she says, looking down at her cards. “I just wanted a change.”

  In the silence I pick up a card, and put down a king. Liz picks it up, frowning. I have put my foot in it, but I’m not quite sure how. I think of Danny’s remark about the incestuous nature of Snoop’s workforce, Eva sleeping with Inigo, Topher with Ani. Haven’t they heard of Me Too? Did something happen between Liz and Topher? Something she is running from? But no, I don’t think it’s that. Of all the people in the company, Liz actually seems to get on best with Topher. And Topher, for all his faults, doesn’t seem like the kind of man to pressure an employee into something sexual. Whatever was between him and Ani, I got the impression it was consensual.

  But Ani ended up dead…

  The words are a whisper in my ear, an uncomfortable reminder of the fact that Liz and I are not alone in this chalet—there are two bodies upstairs. And somewhere out there in the frozen peaks there is a third, Eva, and maybe a fourth, because who knows what happened to Inigo after he stumbled away into the snow. It feels like death is closing around us. It feels like Liz and I could be next.

  But no. I shake myself. This is morbid—ridiculously so.

  “Your turn,” Liz says, and I look down and realize I have no idea when she made her move. I pick up a card from the draw pile at random and discard without really thinking about strategy.

  “Rummy,” Liz says, and she lays out a run of four spades and three kings. I force a smile.

  “Well done.”

  Liz picks up the cards and deals again. I pick up my hand. It’s a good one—three of a kind straight off. But I can’t keep my mind on the cards.

  “Eva’s death…,” I say cautiously, and Liz looks up.

  She’s still wearing her oversize blue jumpsuit and I can’t really blame her. Even with the woodstove, the chalet is now painfully cold, and I can see my breath when I speak.

  “That… It must have been quite a shock. I suppose the buyout won’t go through now? How did it feel—having all that money and then having it snatched away?”

  I’m half expecting Liz to tell me that it’s none of my business—and it’s true, it’s not. But we’ve gone long past the point of guest and chalet girl, and we both know it.

  “It felt… strange…,” Liz says, slowly. The firelight is reflecting off her glasses, making her expression even harder to read than usual, but I can see her forehead crinkle as she frowns.

  “Did you resent Topher?” I ask. “For quashing the sale? I think I would have.”

  But Liz is shaking her head.

  “I never really wanted the money, to be honest. It never felt like mine. It was such a stupid sum, and for what?”

  “Being in the right place at the right time, I guess?” I say with a laugh, but Liz doesn’t smile back. She shakes her head again, although I’m not sure what she’s denying. I can’t blame her though. Whatever place we have ended up in, all of us, it’s definitely not the right one.

  Silence falls again. I look at my watch. Ten minutes to four. God, could this day pass any slower? Suddenly I can’t sit any longer, and I stand, putting my weight carefully on my swollen ankle, and make my way over to the long window overlooking the valley.

  It is almost completely dark outside now, but the chalet is dark too, and so I don’t need to cup my hands to my eyes as I look out across the snow, wondering where Danny and the others are. Have they made it to Haut Montagne yet? And what about Topher and his party? I wish, harder than I’ve ever wished for anything before, that I had a phone with just a single bar of reception. Or a two-way radio. Or anything—some way of communicating with the outside world.

  “Four aces,” says Liz, over my shoulder, and I sigh, and turn back to the darkening room.

  LIZ

  Snoop ID: ANON101

  Listening to: Offline

  Snoopers: 0

  Snoopscribers: 1

  It is 3:58. We are on our—I don’t know. Twentieth game of rummy, perhaps. I have not been counting. Thoughts are chasing around my brain like rats. Questions like: What is going to happen? When will they come? What will happen when the police get here?

  Erin glances up at the clock on the mantelpiece above the stove. I can tell that she is feeling the same way I am.

  “One more round,” she says, “and then I’ll figure out something for supper. They should be there by now.”

  If they made it.

  The words hang, unspoken, in the air, as Erin begins to deal.

  It is more to drive the unsaid doubts away than because I really want to know that I say it.

  “Topher said you were in an avalanche. What was it like?”

  Erin looks up. I have caught her by surprise, and for a second her face is unguarded, horribly vulnerable. She looks like I have punched her. For a moment, I regret asking her. Then she composes herself. She deals out the last few cards before she speaks.

  “I was. Three years ago. It was—” She stops, looks down at the remainder of the deck in her hand. “It was the worst thing that’s ever happened to me.”

  “I’m sorry,” I say. Then something occurs to me. “Even counting this weekend?”

  She gives a laugh at that, a shaky mirthless one, and nods.

  “Yes, unbelievably. Even counting this weekend. I can’t explain how awful it was. The noise, the shock, the sense of powerlessness—” She falters, as if she is struggling to find the words. “I thought… I thought that it would have made it worse, you know? Being caught up in the same horror all over again. But in a strange way I… I think I’ve been expecting it to happen. Like I escaped the mountain once, so it would come back for me.”

  She stares into the darkness. She is facing me, so it should feel like she is staring at me, but I have the odd feeling that she is not, that she is looking through me, as if I am not there. It gives me a strange sensation. As if I am already gone.

  “Is that when you—when you got your—” I can’t say it. I just touch my face with my fingers, and she nods.

  “Yes. I cut my face on something in the fall, probably my own ski.”

  “And is that why you left uni?” I ask, and she nods, very slowly.

  “Yes. I can’t really explain why, even now. I just—I felt like I’d become a different person, do you know what I mean?”

  I nod too. I know exactly what she means. I have the impression that she is talking about this perhaps for the very first time.

  “I had to dig him out.”

  Her voice is barely above a whisper. I have to strain to hear it.

  “I wasn’t carrying a GPS locator. I had to dig out my boyfriend to activate his beacon, knowing he was already dead.”

  She looks down, cuts the pack, deals the first card into the pickup pile, moving mechanically all the while.

  Suddenly I do not want to talk about this anymore. I wish I had never asked the question. After all, I have my own secrets, my own subjects I do not want to discuss. What if Erin asks me about my past in return? What if she brings up Snoop again? Ab
out why I left? What if she asks about the friends I don’t have, the schoolmates who bullied me for fourteen years, about the family I have cut myself off from?

  I hear again my father’s slurring voice, my mother’s sobs… I taste blood. I am chewing my cuticles again. I stick my hands in the pockets of my jumpsuit.

  But Erin does not ask about any of these things. She seems to be somewhere else completely, somewhere very far away. When she speaks, her voice has a strange quality to it. It is like a confession.

  “It was my fault, you see,” she says. She picks up her cards. Her hands are trembling a little. “I suggested we go. Off-piste skiing. I was the one who wanted to do it. I killed them.” She swallows. “That changes a person.”

  She looks up at me, as if expecting me to understand. I have the most peculiar urge to take her hand and tell her that I know how she feels.

  But that would be crazy. So I don’t. Instead, I look down at my own cards. I pick up a three of hearts and discard a jack.

  “Your move,” I say.

  ERIN

  Snoop ID: LITTLEMY

  Listening to: Offline

  Snoopers: 0

  Snoopscribers: 10

  I don’t know what made me spill my past to Liz like that. It was the strangest thing. I’ve never talked to anyone about that time—not my parents, not Will’s parents; even the coroner and the search and rescue team only wanted the bare facts, not to hear about my bewilderment and grief.

  It’s not that I didn’t have the chance—my mother urged me to see a therapist, and I lost count of the number of friends who called me up, saying, If you need to talk, I’m only a phone call away. But I didn’t want to talk. I didn’t want to be that person. An object of pity. A victim.

  Because I know how Topher and the others must feel, in a way. For I felt it too. And that’s the thing I have never told anyone—that in the minutes and hours I spent searching for Will and Alex after the avalanche, it wasn’t terror or fear that was uppermost in my mind but a kind of shocked disbelief, that this had happened to me, to us. I was not this person. I was not the person terrible things happened to. That was other people, other families. I was golden, slipping through life on a charm, insulated by the security of my family, my own good looks, and the luck of having found Will’s love.

  Because yes, that was luck. All of it. And I knew it. But it was also how it was supposed to be, because I was supposed to be lucky.

  And now suddenly that luck had turned.

  And after it did, I found that I couldn’t stand to be there with the people still walking in that perpetual golden sun while I lived in a place that was black with guilt and grief. I couldn’t stand to see the pity in their eyes.

  It’s almost completely dark in the living room now, and when I walk across to the clock over the mantelpiece, I see that it’s getting on for 6:00 p.m. Danny and the others should have been at Haut Montagne about two hours ago. It’s possible they could be starting back. It’s possible they have managed to contact the police and a chopper is on its way.

  Possible. Not certain. Possible.

  It’s equally possible the road is trashed and they are still trudging across icy rubble, or Haut Montagne was empty and shut up.

  God, the possibilities are going to send me mad.

  I don’t know why, but with Danny and the others gone, it feels like the atmosphere of the chalet is closing around me and Liz. I can feel the weight of the snow pressing against the roof and the walls, feel the tonnes and tonnes still resting on the mountain side, waiting for another trigger. I can feel the darkness seeping through the rooms and corridors.

  I know what the edge of endurance feels like, because I passed it once before—sitting frozen on a cold mountainside with the dead body of my lover, not knowing whether help was going to come. I passed it, and I survived. I came back. Back to safety. Back to normality.

  But there are times when I feel myself being dragged back across that line into a place where nothing matters anymore, where every heart beat drags you closer to the edge, and I think I am going to fall into the abyss again, and this time I won’t be able to claw my way out.

  When I shut my eyes I can see his face, Will’s face, cold and white as marble, and peaceful, so terribly peaceful.

  “Erin.” The voice comes from very far away.

  I shake my head.

  “Erin.”

  I open my eyes. Liz is standing in front of me, looking anxious.

  “Erin, are you okay? Should we get something to eat?”

  I force myself to smile.

  “Yes. Sure. Come through to the kitchen, and we’ll see what we can find.”

  I lead the way, limping, and Liz follows me into the chilly darkened cavern of the kitchen, looking around her wonderingly as we enter, as if it’s Aladdin’s cave rather than a very ordinary professional kitchen.

  “There’s a t-tin of cassoulet here,” I say, trying to read the label in the dim light. It’s extremely cold away from the fire, and my teeth are trying to chatter. “At least I think it’s c-cassoulet, it could be confit du canard. It’s hard to tell. Will that do?”

  “Sure,” Liz says. She’s still looking at me like she’s concerned. “Are you all right, Erin?”

  “I’m fine, I just—I’m just worried about D-Danny. I keep hoping we’ll hear something.”

  Liz nods, and I realize she must be as worried as me, she’s just hiding it better, under that calm, stolid exterior. I find myself wondering what she’s thinking, and when the tin (it was cassoulet) is decanted into a pan and warming on top of the woodburning stove in the living room, I pluck up my courage to ask her the question I’ve been pondering but not quite daring to ask.

  “Liz, what do you think happened? To Eva, I mean.”

  Her face crumples and I realize she is holding back the unthinkable just as hard as I am.

  “I don’t know. I’ve been thinking and thinking—I just—I can’t believe any of it is true. It doesn’t seem real. I keep wondering if Eva was just in an accident, but then what about Elliot and Ani?”

  What indeed.

  “What do you think Ani meant?” I say, stirring the beans slowly, feeling the heat of the fire at my face and the chill cold of the room at my back. “When she said, She wasn’t there.” Or was it I didn’t see her? I can’t remember now, and that fact bothers me. I hear the rustle of waterproof fabric as Liz shrugs.

  “I don’t know. I keep going over and over it in my head. I thought at first she must have been talking about Eva, but it makes no sense. She was there, on the slope, I saw her too.”

  “Could it have been someone at the top?” I’m struggling to remember the exact wording now. Fuck. This could be important and I can’t remember. “I’m wondering… when she got to the top of the bubble lift. Was someone already missing, someone other than Eva? Someone who had already skied after her?”

  “But who?” Liz says. “There weren’t that many women left at the top. I’d already gone down in the bubble. The two women left at the top were Tiger”—she ticks them off on her fingers—“in which case it seems very odd that she would report what Ani said. And Miranda—but she had no opportunity to go after Eva. She went down in the bubble with Ani.”

  “Maybe she didn’t.” My heart is suddenly thumping. “Maybe that’s what Ani remembered. That Miranda wasn’t in the lift. It’s easy to get confused after all—there’s a shuffle of bodies at the top, people heading for one telecabine, it’s full, they go for another. Maybe that’s what Ani realized, that Miranda never got on the lift?”

  “What are you saying?” Liz looks uneasy. Her brows, behind the thick glasses, are knitted together and in the darkness I hear the crack, crack, crack of her knuckles as she nervously flexes her fingers.

  “Maybe she’s a better skier than she’s letting on. It’s quite easy to pretend to be worse than you are. Maybe she peeled off when everyone else was getting on the lift, and instead of going down in the bubble, she followed Eva down
La Sorcière.”

  “I… I guess…,” Liz says slowly. She looks troubled.

  I’m ladling the cassoulet out into two bowls when I realize something. If it’s true, if what I’m guessing is correct, then I’ve sent Danny off with a killer. And my heart clutches like someone has put it in a vice.

  Because yes, it’s true, there are two of them and one of her. But the path to Haut Montagne passes along some pretty treacherous stretches. How hard would it be to wait until someone was close to the edge, and then give a little shove.

  I have no proof of any of this, I remind myself, desperately. It’s just a theory. It’s just a theory.

  But my throat is constricted, and my stomach is closed and sick, and suddenly I can’t face eating the fast-cooling mess of beans and meat in front of me. I feel ill with the force of what I may have done.

  Because I told him to go. With my instinct to organize, my certainty that I know what’s best for others, I told Danny to go out into the snow alone with Miranda and Carl.

  Is it true?

  Have I sent another friend to his death?

  LIZ

  Snoop ID: ANON101

  Listening to: Offline

  Snoopers: 0

  Snoopscribers: 1

  Erin hardly touches her supper. She has gone from being professional and friendly to something quite different in the space of about half an hour. I am at a loss to understand it. When I ask her about it she just mutters something about being worried about Danny, but I am not sure if that is completely true.

  I eat most of her portion as well as my own. Then I get up and grope my way through to the kitchen to rinse the bowls under the cold tap. There is no point in trying to wash up. We are past things like that. This is starting to feel like survival. But when I turn the tap, nothing happens. I try the other. Still nothing.

  When I get back into the living room, Erin is hunched over, staring into the fire. I sit beside her, gingerly flexing my knee, though it’s feeling a lot better than it was.

  “We’ve got a problem,” I say.