They All Fall Down

by Rachel Howzell Hall

  “Taste it and find out.”

  “No, you first.” He shook the bottle, then read the label again. “Contains … oh, dear. Potassium cyanide.” His eyebrows lifted in surprise. “Angel of Mercy Nurse Pemstein dropped some of this on your fugu last night, didn’t she?”

  I nodded. “While Javier was pouring wine, remember how she went to the kitchen for juice and then she screamed about the snake and we all rushed into the kitchen? We came back to the dining room and Javier served the fugu.” My plate … she knew it was my plate because it had a whopping big M engraved across it—and if she’d missed that, my first name in smaller print sat beneath it. “That’s why Evelyn wasn’t scared to eat the fish on her plate. Javier … he’d cut the fish right. That’s why she didn’t die.”

  “And that…” Wallace pointed at Eddie’s peashooter.

  “I left it on the carpet—”

  “But I didn’t notice it,” Wallace said, “since I went back to the kitchen and Evelyn must’ve … If Edward had asked you for it and you didn’t have it…”

  “He would’ve killed me.” Those footprints in my carpet—she’d probably left those behind every time she’d look for something to steal from my room. And each time she’d entered and left, the room had felt warm and heavy, and smelled … eggs and sweat … Had she left that noose? No. She couldn’t have known about that. Only Wallace knew, because Phillip had probably told him everything as he lay dying.

  The old man rubbed his forehead. “For some reason, she’s planning for every one of us to die. But if she thinks I’m dying by her hand, she’s dumber than she looks, and I will tell her so. Where the hell is she?”

  I glanced out the bedroom window and saw Evelyn sitting at a patio table on the lawn. She was eating from a bag of potato chips, tra la la, as though nothing dramatic had just happened in a bathroom on the second floor, as though she hadn’t broken down in a pitiful mess, wishing to be run over by a swift-moving yacht.

  Wallace stood beside me. “That’s what psychopaths look like on a Sunday afternoon.”

  “We need to get off this island,” I said, “and maybe, if Eddie can get the radio or the satellite phone to work—”

  Wallace winced and stepped away from the window.

  “What’s wrong?”

  He was tugging at his side. “I’m sore, and I’m tired from pulling what’s-his-face out of that tub. Really: I can feel the cancer cells multiplying and the tumors gnawing and crunching away at the little bit of healthy tissue I have left.” He took deep breaths in, then out, and shook his head. “But that doesn’t matter right now. At this rate, with this woman roaming the house…”

  I whispered, “The Bosch table.”

  “What about it?”

  “Back on Friday night, you said that we were the embodiment of the Seven Deadly Sins. What if you’re right? What if we’re being punished, and once we’re gone, our figurine…?”

  “Disappears.” He nodded. “Maybe Evelyn is seeing to that.”

  I blinked at him. “But that’s silly. Seven deadly…? If Evelyn is killing us because … No. She doesn’t know me. She doesn’t know…” What I’ve done.

  And anyway: Who would I be?

  Lust? I’d been faithful to Billy during our marriage. Although I wasn’t a virgin on our wedding night, I could still count the number of lovers I’d had on one hand.

  But Desi. Larry and Danny and Hoyt and Frank and who knows who else … She had been strangled, left tied and naked in bed.

  Gluttony? I liked food, but I never stuffed myself. I hated germy buffets and never took advantage of all-you-can-eat anything.

  Javier had cooked and eaten and snorted and drunk.… He had died eating poisonous fish.

  Greed? I didn’t want thirty of anything, nor had I married Billy for his money. In fact, Billy had no money during our newlywed days.

  Forging signatures, stealing, robbing, putting out hits … Frank had been boiled in his golden bathtub filled with oil.

  Laziness? I’d only stayed at home with Morgan for three years, and then I went back to work. Even then, I never slept in and I kept a tidy house. I cooked. I did our taxes.

  Pride? Okay. A little. But that wasn’t a problem—I needed a very healthy amount of self-esteem to be black and female in America.

  Envy? Anger? Well, yeah—again, it can be a bitch to simply exist, to aspire, but I wasn’t angry about it. Nor did I begrudge people the fruits of their hustle. At least, not enough to kill someone.

  More or less.

  “Evelyn,” I said. “She’s stealing the figurines.”

  Wallace narrowed his eyes but didn’t comment otherwise.

  My face warmed. “It has to be her. Who else could it be?”

  He held my gaze for a moment, then said, “I’ve been thinking about that since we discovered Desi this morning. And now with Frank … I just don’t know.”

  “It’s Evelyn,” I blurted.

  Wallace said, “Hmm.”

  “She screwed with the heating and made it so hot that Frank boiled. He tried to get out, but the tub was slippery from bath oil.”

  “And then, she ran down here on those stubby legs of hers and stole the dollar sign figurine.”

  “Is it gone?”

  He tilted his head. “Is it?”

  I narrowed my eyes—I didn’t like his tone. “Yes.”

  He said, “Hmm,” again, then shrugged his thin shoulders. “Say that Evelyn, for some reason, is doing all of this. Has someone directed her to kill us? Or is she doing it because she wants to?”

  “Don’t know,” I said, “but I do know—”

  “That we need to get off the island,” we said together.

  He leaned closer to me. His breath smelled sweet, but it was the sweet found in dark alleys and dank sewers. The sweet that told me something inside of him was dying. “Any ideas,” he said, “on how we do that without using a phone? Without hopping on a boat?”

  I shook my head. “No idea.”

  “Maybe we should ask our friend Evelyn about…” He pointed to the dresser filled with other people’s things.

  A grin cut across my face, and I snatched Eddie’s gun from its spot. “Let’s go.”

  Together, we shuffled past the foyer. I glanced at the Bosch table—the dollar sign had disappeared.

  Outside, the air was a solid wall of moist heat. The sun cast everything in a sickly yellow light, and the leaves on the jungle trees swayed without sound. The pistol was sticking to the skin near the small of my back, and I hoped that my sweat and body heat wouldn’t melt the glue that held the weapon together.

  “Wallace,” I said, “we can’t let her know right off the bat that we know that she had something to do with Desi and Frank. She’ll run into the woods if it’s obvious that we’re coming to kick her ass.”

  “Agreed,” he said. “Just follow my lead.”

  We snuck to the house’s north end, then peeked around the corner.

  Evelyn was still sitting at the small patio table on the edge of the lawn. Still shoving her hand into an open bag of Ruffles. Still stuffing her mouth with potato chips.

  The green lawn lay like a carpet, and I stooped to touch the blades … which didn’t give between my fingers. The grass was fake. Fake. All of it had been created in a lab somewhere in Taiwan. Were the only real things on this island the three dead people scattered around the house and the four who remained?

  “There you are,” Wallace said to Evelyn as he stepped around the corner. “Hate to interrupt your snack break, my dear, but it’s time that we all have a serious conversation.”

  Evelyn stared at us. Her pitted face and raggedy sweater were grubby with potato chips, and her bloated fingers shone with grease and salt, bright pink and tender looking. “Conversation about what?”

  “Believe it or not,” he said, “I think you may actually have something worthwhile to contribute to finding a solution to this horrible situation. Shocked? I’m shocked, too. Tell me—”
r />   “God is doing this to us,” she said.

  “Why?” Wallace asked. “For what reason?”

  “As payment for what you’ve both done,” she said.

  “And what have I done?” I asked.

  “The killing.”

  Wallace peered at me. “Miriam, did you kill Frank?”

  I shook my head. “Of course not.”

  “Did you kill Javier or Desireé?”

  “No.”

  “And I actually believe Edward,” Wallace said. “He’s a hateful person, but he wouldn’t boil a man. He’s a gun nut—his penis demands the use of blue steel.” He turned his gaze back to Evelyn. “See, dear? Neither of us are sure what you mean by God punishing us for killing.”

  “Are there other people on the island?” I asked. “Maybe they did it.”

  “No,” Wallace said. “This is Phillip’s private island, and Artemis is its only residence. There are no other souls living on this abhorrent piece of land. But let’s talk about Frank—how did he boil to death like that?”

  Evelyn shifted her gaze to the bag of potato chips.

  An overwhelming sadness settled over me—I would have to kill this woman. The sad part? I didn’t mind. Not at all.

  “Evelyn,” Wallace asked, “do you have any thoughts on how Frank boiled to death?”

  She bit her lip. “Maybe … maybe … the oil caught…”

  “On fire?” I asked.

  She nodded. “Or maybe … maybe … the water was too hot.”

  “But how did it get too hot?” Wallace asked.

  Evelyn shrugged. “The thermostat?”

  “Hmm…” Wallace rubbed his lips and pretended to be lost in thought. “Or … maybe we should start considering the possibility that something supernatural is happening here.”

  “Like ghosts?” I asked.

  He nodded. “Really nasty ones, too.”

  I said, “Hunh,” then wandered to the edge of the property as though lost in thought. Out there, the waves gleamed with sunlight, and the dark mass that was Mexico seemed as close to us as Saturn. I filled my lungs with moist, salty air, then turned back to Wallace and Evelyn. “Say that it is God doing this to us, as Evelyn suggested. Then…?”

  Wallace spread his arms, feigning hopelessness. “Then, we are meant to die here … unless either of you knows something that I don’t know.”

  I smiled at the old nurse. “Like why you had Eddie’s gun in your dresser drawer? Like why your hands look like you’ve scalded them in hot water, and why—”

  “What’s going on?”

  I swiveled toward the man’s voice but froze once my eyes landed on Wallace.

  A red dot the size of an Indian bindi beamed on the old man’s jaundiced forehead.

  And Eddie said, “You move, you die.”

  27

  My hands shot up and my pulse shot into the stratosphere.

  “Hanging out without me? How rude.” Eddie slipped from around the house with his TEC-9 aimed at Wallace’s forehead. His eyes were hard and flat, shards of topaz.

  “Edward,” Wallace said, smiling. “Just in time.”

  Evelyn eeped as she toppled out of her chair. The Ruffles bag fell to the ground and its ridged chips scattered across the pristine synthetic turf. She left them behind as she trotted toward the tree line.

  Because it was so humid, the air now weighed thirty tons, and I had trouble keeping my hands up in the air. Beads of sweat trickled down my face, down my neck, across my body, making my damp shirt stick to damp skin. Eddie’s gun, the wack one held together by spit, tape, and God’s grace, still lived in the small of my back.

  If I could reach for the gun and shoot Eddie before he shot us … But I didn’t know for sure that the gun actually worked, that bullets would fly out of the muzzle instead of a red flag that said BANG. So I didn’t dare move.

  Wallace’s chest had inflated with surprise—and it hadn’t dipped yet to show that he had exhaled. He had stopped breathing, stopped moving, had frozen in place. All except for his hands. He had shaky jazz hands—probably because that red bead now glowing on his forehead had yet to move. “Edward, we were just trying to figure out—”

  “Shut up,” Eddie barked. “Where are they, old man?”

  Wallace blinked. “Where are … what?”

  Eddie inched closer to us. “My guns. They’re missing. Where are they? What did you do with ’em? Who did you give ’em to?” He was one minute away from squeezing that trigger, shooting and shooting and shooting until no one remained standing.

  Beep … beep … Sounded like a battery was dying. The high-pitched beep was coming from the satellite phone shoved into Eddie’s back pocket. A green light—a signal?—flickered near the phone’s antenna.

  “Eddie,” I said, “why would Wallace take your guns? To do what with?”

  “You’re right, Miriam.” Eddie slowly moved the TEC-9 from Wallace to me. “Then you must’ve taken them.”

  “No. No. No … I’ve been with you most of the…” Fear had dried up all the spit in my mouth but I still tried to swallow. “The only…” Gun you gave me is now hiding in my pants.

  “The only what?” Eddie shouted.

  I flinched, and now I was the one suffering from jazz hands.

  And the satellite phone kept beeping … beeping …

  “The only thing we should be focusing on right now,” I said, “is getting off this island.”

  He sneered at me. “Good luck with that, homegirl. We’re not going anywhere anytime soon.” He aimed the weapon back at Wallace, then said, “Right? You’d know this. Cuz you’re a part of them.”

  Wallace hesitated before he said, “A part of whom? Of what?”

  Eddie took deliberate steps toward Wallace until the muzzle rested against the old man’s forehead. “You’re a part of the Escorpion Cartel. You’re his lawyer, his number two.”

  “What?” Wallace and I both screeched.

  “You directed all of it,” Eddie continued. “The gun trafficking, the dope, the kidnappings. I know it. I know you. Seen you on TV, in the papers.”

  “Me?” Wallace asked. “Never.”

  The green light on the satellite phone flickered … flickered … and then it popped off. No more beeps. No more light. The signal was gone.

  Standing this close to Eddie, I could see white powder dusting the tip of his nose. Had he snorted some of Javier’s cocaine?

  “Say something,” the cop demanded with a twisted grin. “Explain yourself, asshole. Where’s your witty comeback? You gonna tell us some random story about San Francisco in the seventies or about your little dog named Mr. Bigglesworth or some shit like that? Or are you gonna show the real you? Why don’t you tell us how many eses are in your clique and how much cocaine you hombres brought into the U.S. last year? Which Wallace are you about to be right now, huh?”

  Wallace’s eyes bulged. His mouth opened, but then closed again. He shook his head, speechless for the first time all weekend.

  I could feel the old man’s heart pounding wildly in his weak chest. Mine almost matched its rhythm but couldn’t—a TEC-9 wasn’t mere inches away from my brain.

  “So are you gonna come clean,” Eddie asked, “or do I shoot you and spill it that way?”

  “Edward,” Wallace said, “I have no idea what you’re going on about. Drugs? I don’t even smoke cigarettes anymore. I’m just an old, washed-up cabana boy who married—”

  “Answer. The. Question.” Spit gathered at the corners of Eddie’s mouth.

  Wallace’s eyes fluttered and any color he still had drained from his face. “I am not a part of the Escorpion Cartel—”

  “Then who’s running operations while Escorpion is rotting in a jail cell in Fort Worth? You, right?” Eddie’s hand hardened around the gun’s grip. “Answer me.”

  Wallace gulped. “Escorpion hates me. I kicked him off this island. We—”

  “Who’s running the cartel?”

  Oh my god, I’m gonna die.
He’s gonna kill us.

  Eddie’s head jerked to the right. “What was that? You see that?” The muscles in his face jumped and twitched as he stared at the tree line, in the direction Evelyn had run.

  Wallace and I also stared at the forest. Butterflies flitted above sycamores now swaying in a breeze that I couldn’t feel.

  Eddie grabbed Wallace by the arm. “Let’s go. They’re here.”

  My hands were skittish birds, fluttering from my hips to my arms, to my face, to my hips again, and to my arms again. “Who’s here?”

  “His friends.” Eddie’s eyes skittered from tree to rock to bird to butterfly. “They’ve been tracking us all this time.” He tossed a glare at Wallace. “Just like you did when you killed the original number two. Surveillance cameras, tracking devices in cars … You stole the second satellite phone, didn’t—?” His head jerked and his eyes hit the jungle again, harder this time.

  I scanned the wilds but saw only the trees, those butterflies, the dirt trail that led back to the docks. There were rocks and ferns and tangled vines. But there were no bars, there were no satellites, there was no help and no chance. Past the woods, there was a sea connected to the biggest ocean on the planet. There was a boathouse that housed no boats. There was nothing. Except us. And Eddie. And he was paranoid and high and seeing things.

  Somewhere in the tangle, a tree branch cracked, sending birds screaming to the sky. It echoed above the sounds of the jungle and the pounding of my heart.

  They’re here.

  “What was that?” Wallace rasped.

  We listened. No more cracking. Regular sounds again. Birds. Ocean. Wind.

  Wait. Stole the second satellite phone. There’s a second phone?

  “Hear that?” Eddie’s face was red and sweaty, and the vein in the middle of his forehead bulged, moments away from bursting. Would it burst? Could it burst? Please let it burst. He waited a moment, then nodded. “Yeah. Hear it?”

  I didn’t know whether to nod and agree, or to shake my head and say, “No.” Because other than that snap, there were no sounds that weren’t supposed to be. So I squeezed my eyes shut, wanting to hear; I opened my eyes, wanting to see, closed them again, wanting his paranoia to be real and not imagined, and wanting to fear something other than this man with a gun. This was my prayer: Please let the danger be somewhere else, somewhere deep in the jungle and not here, standing a foot away from me.