One by One

by Ruth Ware

  She looks up, as if startled at the sound of my voice.

  “What? What did you say?”

  “We’ve got a problem,” I repeat. “The water isn’t working. I think the pipes have frozen.”

  “Fuck.” She closes her eyes and rubs her face as if she is trying to wake herself from a nightmare, which I suppose in a way she is. “Well, there’s nothing we can do except sit tight. Danny and the others must be there by now. We just have to make it until morning. If we can manage that without freezing to death.”

  Her words are unsettling, the more so because I realize that even with my snowsuit on, the chalet is almost unbearably cold now. My breath in the kitchen was a cloud of white. Upstairs must be subzero.

  “Maybe… should we sleep down here?” I ask.

  “I—I guess. Yes. I suppose it makes sense.”

  “I’ll go and get my bedding,” I say, making up my mind. Erin nods.

  “I’ll make the sofas up into beds. They fold out.”

  I’m almost out of the room when she says, “Liz?”

  And I look back, expectantly, wondering what she’s about to say.

  “Yes?”

  “Liz, I just wanted to say—thanks. Thanks for staying here with me. And I’m sorry it turned out like this.”

  “It’s okay,” I say, but somehow the words are hard to say. There is something in my throat—an unexpected kind of lump. “It’s okay. It’s not your fault.”

  And then I turn and hobble into the lobby and up the spiral stairs, before she can see the tears in my eyes.

  ERIN

  Snoop ID: LITTLEMY

  Listening to: Offline

  Snoopers: 5

  Snoopscribers: 10

  When Liz’s footsteps disappear along the corridor, I slump back in my seat with a sigh and run my hand over my face. I’m sorry. I don’t know what possessed me to say that, except that out of everyone here, it’s Liz I feel most sorry for. I’m not even sure why exactly—maybe because it was so plain, right from the start, that she never wanted to be here. Topher, Eva, however awful this weekend has turned out to be for both of them, they brought it on themselves in a way—choosing to come here, brandishing their money, pushing people around like little chess pieces in their battle for control of Snoop.

  But Liz—Liz is just a pawn, like me, caught up in something she never asked for, never wanted.

  And yet not once has she complained. Where Topher has grumbled about the crap food, and Carl has stamped and roared and threatened legal action, and Rik has blustered about health and safety and corporate responsibility, and Miranda has made accusations—Liz has just trudged on, putting up with it all, even though under her self-effacing manner I’m sure she was as scared as anyone.

  My ankle throbs as I force myself to standing, and I begin to move aside the sofa cushions, ready to pull out the mattress hidden inside the frame. But as I pick up the last cushion, I see something lying underneath it, right where Liz and I were sitting. It glitters in the firelight, and for a second I think it’s a brooch or a piece of jewelry—but when I pick it up, I realize it’s a key. A very familiar one.

  It’s a staff key.

  Automatically I feel in my pocket, assuming it must have slid out of my jeans when I sat down, but mine is still there, hard and reassuring against my backside.

  Only… it’s not reassuring at all.

  Because if my key is in my pocket it means… oh God, it means… this is Danny’s key.

  Danny’s key that was stolen.

  The key that was taken by the killer.

  I stand there for a very long time, completely frozen, just looking down at the key in the palm of my hand and trying to cudgel my brain into figuring this out. Somehow, someone got hold of this key—probably during the kerfuffle over getting entry to Tiger’s room, after Inigo’s disappearance. It’s not hard to imagine someone slipping it surreptitiously out of the lock while we were all preoccupied with checking if Tiger was okay. Whoever took it used it to gain entry to that same room in the middle of the night, and kill Ani. And then at some point after that, presumably this morning while we were all distracted by talking about the plan to ski down to the village, it slipped out of their pocket and fell between the sofa cushions.

  The only question is: Who took it? Who was sitting on that space on the sofa this morning? Because I cannot for the life of me remember.

  I shut my eyes, trying to picture the scene—Tiger lying on the sofa, sobbing, Miranda trying to comfort her, Rik handing out whiskeys… I need to place all the characters in the room, one by one, figure this out.

  Danny and I were standing. I remember that clearly. Topher… Topher was leaning up against the mantelpiece. Miranda was kneeling on the floor by the coffee table. Liz was in one of the armchairs by the fire. Rik and Carl… they were on a sofa, but which one? I squeeze my eyes shut harder, and have a sudden vision of Rik leaning forward, filling up the whiskey glass at the far end of the table. It was the other sofa, the one beneath the window. Which means… I open my eyes.

  It means Tiger was lying on the sofa where I found the key, her hip right on the point where the cushions join. It would make complete sense—the key could so easily have slid out of her pocket while she was lying there crying. Except… it makes no sense at all. Tiger is the only person who didn’t need a key to kill Ani. She was already in the room. And if she wanted an alibi, she could have simply said she forgot to lock the door.

  But no one else occupied that seat after the key went missing, apart from me…

  And Liz.

  As if hypnotized, my gaze drifts upwards, to the ceiling, where on the floor above Liz is moving around her room, gathering up duvets and pillows. I can hear the faint creak of the floor joists, and then the sound of her door shutting.

  I hear the shush, shush as she drags the duvet along the corridor.

  Then I hear the halting noise of her feet on the spiral stairs, going carefully this time; she does not want to slip again.

  Then she appears in the doorway of the living room, her hands full of bedcovers, her face unreadable in the dim light, the firelight flickering off her big, owl-like glasses, and with a funny little pang I remember that very first day, the way she reminded me of an owl, paralyzed by the lights of an oncoming car.

  She still looks like an owl, but suddenly the resemblance seems very different, and quite another kind of chill comes over me as I realize I was right all along—but so very, very wrong.

  Because here is the thing. We think we know owls. They are the soft, friendly, blinking creatures of children’s rhymes and stories. They may be wise, but they are also slow, and easily confused.

  The problem is, none of that is true. Owls are not slow. They are fast—lightning fast. And they are not confused. In their own element—the dark—they are swift and merciless hunters.

  Owls are raptors. Predators.

  That was what I saw in Liz, right back on that very first day. I was just too blinded by my own preconceptions to recognize it.

  In the dark, owls are not the hunted, but the hunter. And right now, it is dark.

  “Hi,” Liz says, and she smiles, an unreadable smile behind those blank, flickering lenses. “Are you all right?”

  LIZ

  Snoop ID: ANON101

  Listening to: Offline

  Snoopers: 0

  Snoopscribers: 1

  When I come back down, my arms full of duvets and pillows, Erin is standing stock-still in the middle of the room, one hand on the sofa-bed frame, as if a thought has just occurred to her.

  “Hi,” I say. I throw the bedding into the armchair. Then, when she still doesn’t move, I add, “Are you all right?” I don’t know why I say that, except that she looks really odd. “Is the sofa bed stuck?”

  “What?” She seems to shake herself. Then she gives a smile and a short laugh. “No, sorry. Just thinking. I was—I was thinking about Danny. They must be there by now. I was wondering if we’d hear from them tonig
ht.”

  I glance up at the clock on the mantelpiece. It is so dark now that the hands are almost unreadable, but I think I can make out that it’s nearly eight o’clock.

  “I guess you’re right. How long did you say it would take to get there?”

  “I thought about three hours. But given Miranda and Carl have never snowshoed before, it might take longer. Still, they left just after one. Even allowing for rests and stuff, they ought to be at Haut Montagne easily by now. Maybe even on their way back, though I don’t know if they’ll snowshoe in the dark.”

  She gives the metal frame a tug. The sofa bed unfurls with a screech.

  “I hope you’re right.” I move my pillows onto the mattress and then help Erin take the cushions off the other sofa and unfold the bed. “Losing the water feels like the last straw.”

  “We’ll have to melt snow,” Erin says. Her face looks white and strained in the dim light, but it’s not surprising really. “I can’t believe it’s only been two days since the avalanche. It feels like forever.”

  “Two days?” For a second I don’t believe her, and then I count up in my head, and I realize she’s right. Two days and four hours. It feels like a lifetime ago. It does feel like we’ve been trapped here forever. And now it is almost over. The strange thing is, I am not sure I’m ready to face reality again. It is just dawning on me that what felt like captivity might actually be a kind of idyllic tranquility. Perce-Neige is a crime scene. And we are suspects. When we get back to the real world, we are going to have to face the full glare of publicity. There will be a police investigation, reporters, news stories. Interviews. I can see the headlines now: CHALET OF DEATH.

  All sorts of things are going to come out of the woodwork.

  Now it is my turn to stand, stock-still, staring into the darkness, thinking.

  “I’ll go and get my bedding,” Erin says, into the silence. “Can you put another log in the stove?”

  “Sure,” I say, shaking myself back to the here and now. I watch her as she picks up a torch and passes through into the lobby, the thin beam spiraling around as she makes her way up the stairs, her hand going click, click, click on the banister as something hard, a ring perhaps, strikes against the metal.

  Click. Click. Click.

  I hear again my mother’s breathless, nervous Oh, Liz, you know Daddy doesn’t like that…

  Tick. Tick. Tick. Disappearing into the darkness.

  Perhaps it is the thought of the police, and everything that is going to come crashing down, but suddenly, I don’t know why, it sounds like a clock, ticking down to zero.

  ERIN

  Snoop ID: LITTLEMY

  Listening to: Offline

  Snoopers: 5

  Snoopscribers: 10

  My heart is hammering as I walk along the corridor to the staff section, and let myself into my bedroom. The room is totally dark, lit only by the narrow beam of the torch, but I don’t want to risk the batteries giving way so I switch it off, and in the darkness I sink down onto my bed. I need to think.

  My fist is clenched around the key, hard against my palm, like a physical reminder of the craziness of this situation, and now as I sit there, trying desperately to make myself understand this conundrum, I find that I’m holding it so hard that it’s biting into my fingers, leaving dents I can still feel when I force my hand open.

  What does it mean? What does it mean?

  If Liz took that key… is she the killer? But how?

  I cast my mind back, reliving the scrum in the corridor when Danny broke into Tiger’s room. Liz was there, I’m certain. But I remember that while everyone else surged forward into the room, she hung back. I thought at the time it was because of her natural reserve—it seemed so in character, compared to the way everyone else thrust themselves forward, pushing to see what was going on. But now I wonder. Was she hanging back so that she could pocket the key, unobserved?

  But why, that’s what I can’t understand. Liz cannot have killed Eva. Motive aside, she’s one of the few people, along with Ani and Carl, who had no opportunity at all. She was stuck on the bubble lift going back down to the bottom of Blanche-Neige when Eva was seen skiing La Sorcière.

  But the key. The key that is hard and jagged and incontrovertible in my hand, as if refusing to allow me to forget its evidence.

  What about the key?

  I rub my hand over my face, feeling the shiny scar tissue, the ever-present reminder of what I did, the price I paid for being too sure of myself, and I’m suddenly aware that I have been sitting here for—I’m not sure how long, but a long time. Too long. Suspiciously long. I have to get back downstairs, or Liz will know something is wrong.

  I switch the torch back on and gather up an armful of duvets, and then, holding the torch in my teeth, balanced on top of the stack of pillows, I open the door with my free hand.

  Liz is standing right outside, almost nose to nose with me, the torchlight reflecting off her glasses.

  I scream, and the torch bounces off the pillows and falls to the floor with a thump, where it goes out.

  My heart is hammering in my chest like a pneumatic drill.

  “Jesus,” I manage, my voice shaking. “Liz, you scared me.”

  I set the duvets down with trembling hands, and grope for the torch.

  “Sorry,” she says. It sounds like she’s smiling, but I can’t be sure in the darkness. There is something so flat about her voice, so hard to read. “You took so long. I got worried.”

  “I—” Oh fuck, what can I say? What excuse can I give? “I was just changing my top.”

  What. Why on earth did I say this? She’ll be able to see I’m wearing the same clothes I was before. What a stupid lie.

  I feel sick with nerves. I am a terrible liar. Even at school I could never do the two-faced “Oh, you look so lovely! I look like trash!” thing that the other girls did. The only time I can dissemble is when I’m in staff mode. Then I’m polite and cheerful to everyone, no matter how I really feel—not because I like them, but because they are guests, and I’m staff, and that’s my job.

  The thought calms me.

  It’s my job. I can do this. Liz is a guest, and it’s my job to be sympathetic to her. I just have to channel that thought.

  I switch on the torch, and I make myself smile.

  “Shall we head down? It’s really cold up here.”

  And Liz nods, and turns for the stairs.

  LIZ

  Snoop ID: ANON101

  Listening to: Offline

  Snoopers: 0

  Snoopscribers: 1

  There is something wrong with Erin. I am not sure what. She said she was worried about Danny, but if that’s the case, I don’t know why her fears came on so suddenly. She was quite cheerful until about two hours ago. Then she got nervous and edgy.

  We have been lying in the darkness for perhaps an hour or more, but she is not asleep. It’s not just that she’s not snoring—out of the corner of my gaze I can see her eyes are still open, reflecting the light from the fire’s embers as she blinks. She is lying there in the darkness, silently watching me. She is thinking about something. But I do not know what.

  What is she thinking?

  I squeeze my eyes shut, trying to look as normal as possible.

  A few minutes later I hear the creak of the mattress springs. Erin is cautiously swinging her legs out of bed.

  “Where are you going?” I ask.

  She jumps like a criminal caught in the middle of something, and puts her hand to her heart.

  “God! Liz, you scared me.”

  “Sorry.” I don’t say anything else. From my experience, if you keep quiet, people get nervous. They talk. They fill the silence with their own conversation. You can find out a lot that way. Sure enough, after a pause, Erin answers my question without me having to restate it.

  “I didn’t mean to wake you. I couldn’t sleep. I’m going to the t-toilet.” She is shivering. I can hear her teeth beginning to chatter. It is very, v
ery cold in the room now. The fire has died down to glowing ash.

  “Okay.” I roll over, pulling the covers up to my chin. “Don’t forget the pipes are frozen.”

  “I kn-now.” She opens the stove to put in another log. “I’ll use one of the upstairs bathrooms. I think we’ve flushed both the d-downstairs loos already.”

  I don’t say anything. I just watch her as she wraps her coat more tightly around her, and then pads up the stairs. Then I turn over and feel in my pocket for the key.

  It is gone.

  ERIN

  Snoop ID: LITTLEMY

  Listening to: Offline

  Snoopers: 5

  Snoopscribers: 10

  Bloody hell. My heart is pounding as I tiptoe up the staircase. I don’t know where that lie about the toilets came from, but I’ve never been so thankful for frozen pipes. They have given me exactly what I needed—an excuse to go upstairs.

  I have no idea what the truth is about the key. Did Liz take it? I don’t dare to ask. Maybe someone else sat on that sofa when I wasn’t around. Or maybe Liz found the key and picked it up but has been too scared to tell anyone in case they suspected her. There could be a dozen innocent explanations. Or there could be one, very damning one.

  Either way, I could not lie there in the darkness listening to her soft, regular breathing a second more. I had to do something. And at last my subconscious overrode my racing thoughts to prod me about something I had totally forgotten.

  Elliot’s charging block. The giant external battery he was using to power his laptop, before he died and his computer was destroyed. If I can get to that battery and plug my dead phone in, maybe I can get a sliver of connection. It’s worth a try. It’s also not something Liz could possibly object to. And yet, for reasons I can’t face examining, I don’t want to tell her.

  Why not? my brain whispers as I tiptoe along the corridor, in time with my steps. Why not?

  Because I don’t trust her.

  Why not?

  Because… I swallow, hearing the dry click of my jaw in the eerie silence. Because in my heart of hearts, I do think she could have killed Eva. I don’t know how, but my fear over these last two hours has shown me something I would not have believed before tonight: I do think Liz has it in her to kill. It’s not just the key—though that is concerning enough. The panic I felt when I opened the door of my room and saw her standing there, smiling blankly at me, her face hidden behind those silvery lenses—there was something deep and true and real about that panic. It told me something I had not admitted to myself before: I am afraid of Liz. She may be meek and quiet and almost painfully reserved, but behind that meekness, I believe there is steel, and yes, I think she could kill someone. I believe that in a way that I never believed it of Inigo, or even Topher, despite all the evidence piled up against him.