The Murder of Twelve

by Jessica Fletcher

  Make that eight, I realized, quickly ascertaining that Ian and Faye, best man and maid of honor respectively, were missing.

  “Couldn’t rouse them from their room, Mrs. Fletcher,” Seamus whispered to me. “They said they’d be down in good time.”

  I could tell by the teary reaction of Mark’s cousin Lois Mulroy-Dodge that Seamus had already shared the news that Mark Mulroy had been found dead, most likely murdered, in the hotel gymnasium. The young woman’s tearful reaction was consistent with what I would have expected given the circumstances of her upbringing, Mark much more like a brother to her.

  Now, though, I needed to bring the remaining guests up to speed on the second tragedy that had struck here. I would certainly inform them of Mark Mulroy’s likely murder, but I saw no reason at present to tell them of my suspicions about what may have befallen the future bride and groom.

  All of their eyes were rooted on me as I approached, while my gaze fixed on the incredible scene continuing to rage in the world beyond the walls. I’d kept thinking this whole evening that the storm couldn’t get any worse, but it had ideas of its own. If this wasn’t its zenith, it must be close, because nothing was visible outside the windows besides a blinding curtain of white that gave up nothing through the spray of the hotel’s outdoor floodlights. The windblown drifts made getting a fair estimate of how much snow had fallen difficult, but it was thirty inches easily, with hours more of snowfall to come, according to the latest forecasts. I even found myself fearing for Jim Cantore, who had weathered any number of major storms across much of the country, but never anything like this. He would certainly rue the day he’d opted for a live remote in the storm’s very worst track. Then I thought of Mort Metzger foolishly trying to cover almost three miles through this treacherous weather to reach us, and I would have called to warn him off if I’d believed there was any chance he’d listen to me.

  Just as I was about to begin addressing those assembled around me, my phone signaled an incoming text. I took a long-enough glance to see it was from Harry McGraw and read simply, Have News. Call Me!

  But Harry’s news would have to wait, at least for a few minutes.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Even though two members of the wedding party are currently missing,” I started, “I see no reason for their absence to inconvenience everyone else further. First off, thank you for your cooperation in coming down here. I can see from your reactions,” I continued, looking at the still-sniffling Lois Mulroy-Dodge, “that you’ve already learned of Mark Mulroy’s tragic passing.”

  “Oh,” interjected Doyle Castavette, as he loaded tobacco into his pipe, “is that what you’re calling murder these days?”

  “Sir,” said Seamus McGilray, “need I remind you that Hill House is a smoke-free establishment?”

  Castavette ignored him and lit up his pipe. “I should expect it to be a murder-free establishment as well.” He took several deep puffs, which turned the pipe’s tobacco packings fiery orange. “What are you going to do, kill me?”

  Seamus, to his credit, let it go.

  Beatrice Sprague was shaking her head. “That poor—”

  “Boy,” her sister, Olivia, completed for her. “So young and—”

  “Charming,” Beatrice picked up. “We watched him grow up, the family being so—”

  “Close for a time.”

  Finished with their joint remarks, the sisters looked at each other and nodded sadly.

  “Well, then,” said Doyle Castavette between puffs on his pipe, “perhaps the non-Mulroys have nothing to fear. Perhaps whatever’s going on here is aimed strictly at the Mulroys.”

  “I sincerely doubt that, Mr. Castavette,” I told him. “Murder is more often than not a crime of opportunity, and Mark’s trip alone to the hotel gym was likely to blame for his being the latest target.”

  “What about his mother?” Lois Mulroy-Dodge challenged in a whiny, nasal voice. “She wasn’t alone. Whoever poisoned her drink could only have done it in potential view of a dozen witnesses, more if you include the waitstaff.”

  “True enough,” I conceded.

  “May I, Mrs. Fletcher?” started Doyle Castavette, making his son, Tyler—seated nearby, next to his mother, Henley Lavarnay—roll his eyes.

  “May you what, Mr. Castavette?”

  “May I speak?”

  “Of course,” I said politely, resisting all of the other terse responses that popped into my head.

  “Would you mind explaining to me how it is that you’ve seized authority here, ordering us all about?” Castavette challenged.

  His companion for the wedding, the actress Virginia Da Salle, nodded in support but the gesture looked forced and hardly convincing.

  “It’s a fair question,” I acknowledged. “First off, you should all know that Cabot Cove’s sheriff, Mort Metzger, is making his way here via snowmobile right now. In the meantime, Constable McGilray and I have taken charge because of our experience in such matters.”

  And with that, I met Seamus’s gaze and came up just short of a wink.

  “‘Such matters’ meaning murder?” Tyler Castavette said, looking sheepish, as if fearing I might ultimately report to the authorities his unwarranted entry into my suite.

  “Regrettably,” I told him, “yes.”

  “The ones you’ve made up or those you’ve actually solved?” posed Harrison Bak.

  One of his crutches had tumbled over to the floor, and I retrieved it to save him the bother of straining to do so. “It’s often difficult to tell them apart. But I didn’t gather you all together to assume command. I gathered you all together so we could discuss how to survive the night without losing any more of your party.”

  Just then, Faye and Ian emerged from the elevator dressed as if they were headed for the ski slopes, except with backpacks slung from their shoulders.

  “Hey, folks,” said Ian. “I hope you don’t mind us taking our leave of this circus.”

  “Are you mad?” Henley Lavarnay said caustically. “This storm’s a killer.”

  “And there’s one loose inside this hotel, too,” Ian argued. “I think we’ll take our chances.”

  “Is this why Daniel chose you as his best man instead of his own brother?” Tyler Castavette snapped. “So you could run out on everyone?”

  “You’ll have to ask him when he shows.”

  “To find you gone . . .”

  “You really think the wedding will go forward with his mother in a coma and his brother dead? Show’s over, dude. Live with it.”

  Tyler shook his head. “Daniel never was much of a judge of character.”

  “You know what they say,” Ian snapped back at him. “You can choose your friends, but you can’t choose your in-laws. Speaking of which, do your fellow guests know to keep track of their valuables with you in their company?”

  The younger Castavette started to come out of his chair, only to be restrained with a firm hand and harsh look by his mother, Henley Lavarnay.

  “I hope you freeze to death out there,” Tyler shot at Ian instead.

  “Better than dying in here.” Ian swung toward me, Faye’s head pivoting like a spindle in mirror fashion. “Two down, ten more to go, right, Mrs. Fletcher? But once we’re gone, it’ll only be eight.”

  “Look out the window,” I warned him. “You won’t get a hundred feet without losing your way in this.”

  “We’ll take our chances—won’t we, Faye?”

  Still mute, Faye merely nodded.

  “Good riddance,” Lois Mulroy-Dodge hissed at them.

  “Hey, Mrs. Fletcher, you should keep your eye on this one as a potential suspect. If she doesn’t become the next victim, that is, given how much money she’ll stand to inherit if Daniel turns up dead, too.”

  “How dare you?” the young woman, practically a daughter to Constance Mulroy, blur
ted out.

  “This whole messed-up lot were no strangers to crime long before the bodies started dropping here tonight. No wonder the bride and groom are both no-shows. Come to think of it, Mrs. Fletcher, they just might be the prime suspects.”

  If only he knew, I thought, eager to change the subject.

  “If you don’t mind, Ms. Dodge, before Ian here departs, I was wondering if I might ask you a question I’d hoped to ask Mark Mulroy?”

  “Of course, Mrs. Fletcher.”

  “In that slideshow that was on display over dinner, I noticed an unusual shadow in a shot of Daniel and Mark’s nursery. On closer inspection, that shadow turned out to be a third crib,” I said, finally getting to the point I’d been holding back. “My question is, why three cribs if there were only twins, and not triplets?”

  Lois Mulroy-Dodge nodded slowly. “It’s a sad story, Mrs. Fletcher, because there were triplets, but one of them died at birth. My aunt and uncle named him Owen and buried his remains in the family tomb.”

  The Sprague sisters were nodding in perfect synchronicity, obviously familiar with the story as well.

  “You’re right,” I said to Lois, “a very sad story.”

  “Both these families seem consumed by them,” noted Ian. “Now, if you don’t mind . . .”

  Before he and Faye could take another step for the door, eleven cell phones all buzzed practically in unison, including mine but not Seamus’s. Like everyone else in the lobby but Seamus, I jerked mine from my pocket and found a trio of sour-faced emojis above a pair of Web links. I clicked on the first one, along with everyone else, all of us reading the same headline of a news report at almost the same time:

  PRIVATE JET LANDS WITH ALL PASSENGERS DEAD FOUL PLAY SUSPECTED

  I stopped reading there and went back to the original text message to click on the second link instead of continuing. I could see others in the lobby doing the same thing, while some stuck with the first news story.

  TEN GUESTS FOUND MURDERED IN PRIVATE WILDERNESS RETREAT

  Seamus had approached to read the content over my shoulder, everyone else perusing the articles at their own pace, with various utterances of shock and surprise.

  Because the message from whoever had sent the text was clear: The killer wanted all of us to know that he or she had done this before and was doing it again.

  Here, tonight.

  * * *

  * * *

  “Madness!” exclaimed Doyle Castavette, laying his pipe down on the sill of an ashtray he must have carried with him.

  “What are we going to do?” moaned Virginia Da Salle. “What are we going to do?”

  I turned my gaze toward Seamus. We needed to read these articles more closely, but they changed everything by suggesting we were dealing with a serial mass murderer.

  “It must be a game to him,” noted Harrison Bak, “and now he’s got us playing along.”

  “Well, we don’t have to play, do we, Faye?” Ian asked the young woman by his side.

  “No,” Faye said, speaking finally. “Let’s take our chances in the storm.”

  “Have you ever known such a thing, Mrs. Fletcher?” Bak asked me. “Someone who kills for sport, for the mere delight of it.”

  “Never directly,” I told him. “But I think we’re getting sidetracked. How, for instance, could such a killer have known we’d all be isolated here by a blizzard? That killer would have had a captive audience on that plane as well as at that wilderness retreat. Neither of those settings would be dependent on the weather for him to be assured his victims couldn’t evacuate or flee.”

  “I think I read about this happening on one of those private yachts you can charter that was found floundering at sea,” noted Henley Lavarnay. “A ghost ship, as they say, but quite literally, since no one was found on board and the remains of both the passengers and crew were deemed lost at sea.”

  “That would be in keeping with the pattern,” her companion for the weekend, Harrison Bak, said, nodding. “But we’re forgetting something, aren’t we? This plot of his would require him to somehow round up all our cell phone numbers.”

  “Hardly a difficult task,” noted Doyle Castavette, his voice ringing with derision.

  “In most cases, I’d agree with you. But this,” Bak explained, holding up his oversized smartphone, “is my work phone, not my personal one. I see no way the killer could have obtained it, no way at all.”

  “That’s his game, is all,” noted Tyler Castavette, with a knowledge best explained by his own experience. “Tonight is just the icing on the cake for him. The real fun came with getting to know us intimately, everything about us, so he could tease and taunt us prior to knocking us off one at a time.”

  “I’d listen to my son if I were you,” his father told us all. “Tyler is, after all, well acquainted with the dark side of things. Isn’t that right, son, given all your brushes with the law? When we get home, I suggest you begin looking for work that doesn’t come from any of our various holdings. You’ve already burned all those bridges.”

  “If we get home,” Tyler corrected. “Which is no sure thing, under the circumstances.”

  “You don’t mean that, Doyle,” said a stunned and embarrassed Virginia Da Salle from the other side of Tyler. “It’s just the stress of the evening talking.”

  “When it comes to boorish behavior, it’s not hard to figure who our son takes after, is it?” Henley Lavarnay challenged her ex-husband, as she looked toward Tyler. “I’ll help you find something suitable with my contacts. Your father’s not wrong, just misguided and heartless. You don’t need him any more than I did.”

  “That’s fitting,” spat Doyle Castavette, “since if you hadn’t spoiled him as much as you did, he wouldn’t have made such a mess of his life.”

  “I think we’re missing the point here,” Henley Lavarnay said, turning away from her ex-husband in disgust and fixing her gaze on me. “Why bother with all these recriminations when we now have reason to believe we’re the targets of a fiend who kills for sport?”

  “We have reason to believe that because he wanted us to know,” I reminded them.

  “I’m not sure I understand your point.”

  “Well, Ms. Lavarnay,” I said, taking a few steps closer to her, “in my experience it isn’t a killer’s habit to announce themselves. And when they do, it’s normally more for distraction than for anything else.”

  “That’s one heck of a distraction,” noted Tyler Castavette.

  “At last, intelligent words from my deadbeat offspring,” said his father, the lament palpable in his voice. “They say if you leave a chimpanzee at a keyboard long enough, eventually he’ll type the complete works of Shakespeare. Son, I do believe you’ve just proved that theory.”

  Tyler Castavette, for all his bravado and charisma, swallowed hard and leaned back in silence, not daring to cross his father, whom he must have relied on for funds to supplement the income gained from breaking into people’s hotel rooms.

  “None of this matters,” I told them all, “none of it. All that does is that we survive the night. With any luck, the sheriff will be here soon, at which point he’ll take charge and restore order. In the meantime, Constable McGilray and I will escort all of you back to your rooms on the second floor. We will see you safely inside one at a time after a careful check of the premises and wait until you lock the door behind you before we move on to the next. Once everyone is secured in their rooms, I’ll return downstairs to await the sheriff’s arrival, while the constable keeps watch of the hall.”

  Doyle Castavette lurched from his chair, a portrait of impatience. “Anything else, Mrs. Fletcher?”

  “Just one thing. During my shift watching over Constance Mulroy,” I said, addressing everyone, “I noticed a gap in her closet that seemed to indicate a matching piece of luggage the size of a tote bag was missing. I trust
no one here would mind if Constable McGilray searches their room for it.”

  No one voiced objection, until Ian spoke up with his customary flair.

  “Except us. We’re blowing this joint. Hope all of you make it through the night.”

  “Not before we search both of your backpacks,” Seamus said, sounding very much like the real policeman I had suggested he was.

  Ian tossed his to the floor, Faye following suit immediately. “Fine. Have at it. Just hurry it up so we can be on our way. Take our chances in the storm instead of with you bozos.”

  Seamus collected the backpacks in either hand. “In that case, we’ll search yours last. You can make yourselves comfortable back upstairs in your room in the meantime.”

  He gave Ian a stare that left the young man’s knees weak. I was starting to wonder whether there was more to Seamus McGilray’s career as a constable than he was letting on. Either way, Ian forced a smile and mocked a salute.

  “Whatever you say, Officer. Just get it done before the next victim drops.”

  Just then Hill House’s ancient grandfather clock chimed midnight, giving us all a start and turning our gazes in its direction. I heard a gasp. Then something rattled to the floor, shaken loose from someone’s grasp.

  “Oh my—,” Olivia Sprague started.

  “Stars,” her sister, Beatrice, finished.

  Because the roman numerals for one and two on the grandfather clock’s face had been crossed out.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Took you long enough, Jess,” said Harry McGraw, when I finally called as requested in his text.

  “I’ve been busy, Harry,” I said, having just managed to recover my senses after the others had all left the lobby to return to their rooms.

  I had turned away from the grandfather clock before placing the call, as I had no desire to keep staring at what was the strongest indication yet that a murderer was indeed among us, a murderer who clearly had no intention of stopping until all twelve roman numerals were crossed off.