Endgame

by Jeffrey Round

  Before she could leave the room, however, Crispin returned and stood in the doorway. He looked as though he were unable to speak.

  “What’s up?” Pete asked him. “I thought you said you weren’t coming back.”

  “Are you okay?” Sandra asked.

  Crispin shook his head and swallowed. “I think someone has just been in my room.”

  “What?” Sami Lee cried.

  “My laptop is missing,” he said. “It’s possible I may have misplaced it in all the confusion, but I don’t think so.”

  “But that’s impossible,” Verna said. “We’ve all been here the entire time. Haven’t we?” She looked around for confirmation.

  “That’s right,” said Sandra. “None of us left the room since we found Spike. The three of you arrived downstairs together.”

  “I know that …” Crispin began.

  “How would someone get in your room?” Sandra interrupted.

  “I may have left the room unlocked when we came downstairs. In fact, I’m sure I did.”

  “There has to be someone else in the house,” Verna said. “There has to be!”

  “How could there be?” said Pete.

  “I suggest we look again, one room at a time,” Crispin said. “I can’t think of any other way to be sure.”

  Verna and Sandra each retrieved their respective keys, unlocking the cupboard over the fridge. The master key ring lay where they had left it. They next went together up to Crispin’s room and looked for his laptop. A thorough search revealed nothing.

  “Why would someone want your laptop? What’s on it?” Sandra asked him.

  Crispin’s voice was hesitant. “The tapes,” he said. “I’ve been transcribing them night after night when everyone else has gone to bed. Perhaps someone said something they don’t want confirmed about their actions the night of Zerin Ames’s death.”

  “That could be just about anybody,” Sami Lee said scornfully.

  “In any case,” Crispin continued, “at least they don’t have the original recordings. I’ve kept those with me at all times.”

  “Then you better hope they don’t come back and kill you for them,” Sami Lee said.

  One by one, they searched the rooms. It was difficult not to look at the bodies laid out on their beds. Noni’s and Janice’s rooms had already begun to be tainted by a slight thickening of the air. They discussed leaving the windows open, but agreed that would only make it easier for anyone outside trying to get into the house.

  “Even up here on the third floor?” Verna asked skeptically.

  Crispin nodded. “Even here. Whoever is behind this is a diabolical killer who will probably stop at nothing. We’d just be leaving ourselves open to attack.”

  In the end, it was agreed the doors and windows would remain locked. After searching upstairs, the group continued downstairs. There was no sign of the laptop or anything suggestive of a forced entry.

  At one point, Crispin pulled Sandra aside. “I didn’t want to say anything to the others, but my entire insulin supply is in that laptop bag. Do you have any in your medical kit, in case I absolutely need it?”

  “Yes, but …” She left the sentence unfinished.

  “But do I really want to chance it? Is that what you’re thinking?”

  “Yes,” she said softly. “That’s it.”

  “We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.”

  When the search was over, the master key ring was returned to its hiding place.

  That night, once again, all doors were locked as the five remaining guests slept an unquiet sleep. No one stirred; no sounds were heard in the corridors. No secret knocks were enacted during what seemed like an endless night.

  Chapter 24

  There was no lessening of the rain overnight, but by morning the wind had died down a little. It held a promise for calmer seas on the morrow. Breakfast itself was a quiet affair, with surreptitious glances passed back and forth among the five remaining guests.

  Sandra thought Crispin appeared wan and listless when he came down the stairs, but he made no complaints. The others were simply too preoccupied to notice.

  “Coffee?” she asked him.

  “No, thank you,” he replied. He cocked his head to the room, as though to ascertain how many people were in his company. “I know it’s difficult to say these things, but it all points to one conclusion: the killer is one of us. It might help if we talk about probabilities here. Who is likeliest to have done this? Who has the strongest motive? Revenge? Hatred? Betrayal?”

  His blind eyes turned toward them one by one.

  “Yes, all of the above, but for what purpose?” Verna said. “A young woman died. It’s sad, but why go to all this effort for revenge?”

  “Yes,” Crispin said. “That’s just it. Who is most likely to get upset about it to such a degree that they would seek revenge? A boyfriend? A lover? Family member?”

  There was no answer.

  “Again, you would think it could be all of the above, yes?” he continued. “So who knew the girl personally? Any of us?”

  Everyone seemed to be avoiding his blind, questioning stare.

  Verna sighed. “I never met her before the night of the party. You don’t have to believe me, but it’s true.”

  Crispin nodded. “If we accept that this is the truth, then you clearly had no motive for wanting to see her dead. Yet you made the suggestion not to allow the emergency call to be made.”

  Verna stifled a gasp. She shook her head. “I told you. I didn’t want the police to get involved so I … I …”

  They waited while she struggled to speak.

  “Someone picked up the phone to dial emergency,” Verna continued. “I just advised them not to make the call.”

  “You pulled the phone out of Spike’s hands,” Sami Lee corrected her. “That’s what I remember.”

  Verna turned her head away. “Yes,” she said in a whispery voice. “I stopped the call.”

  “Then you’re in the clear,” Crispin said. “If you contributed to her death, you can’t want revenge on anybody else for what happened,” he concluded. “What about a nurse? Someone sworn to saving human life? Could a nurse take exception to the awful things that went on and want revenge for what she saw as the senseless destruction of one of her patients?”

  They all looked to Sandra, who shook her head. “After a while, you don’t think that way. It’s sad, but it happens. Especially with drug abuse. You can’t save everyone. But that’s not the reason I’m here. I think the killer knows this.”

  The others waited for her to continue.

  Sandra looked down. “Newt — David Merton — and I used to know one another back then. I supplied him with the medication he used to make his drug cocktails. I stole from the hospital pharmacy,” she said, her voice reduced almost to a whisper. “‘Party martinis,’ he called them. Whatever I could get my hands on that might not be missed, I passed along. Free samples. Anything past the expiry date. I guess he made a mistake with his combinations and it turned lethal. At least, it was lethal for Zerin Ames. If she’d got help in time we could have done something, but it was a tragic chain of events that went from bad to worse.”

  Crispin’s hand dropped to the table with a thud. They turned to look at him. His head hung back. His eyelids fluttered, revealing those eerie blue portals. His breath came in gasps.

  Sandra ran to him.

  “It’s my insulin,” he said.

  “I’ll get the medicine kit,” she said calmly. She looked at the others. “Keep him comfortable. I won’t be a minute.”

  She rushed to her room and quickly returned with the kit. They all watched anxiously as she stabbed the tiny bottle with a needle tip and drew a dropper of liquid into the cavity.

  She looked intently at Crispin. “Do you really want me to do this?�
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  “I haven’t any choice,” he gasped.

  “We could risk waiting to see if anyone shows up this morning.”

  “I might be in a coma by then. Come on, let’s do it.”

  She rolled Crispin’s sleeve back and jabbed the needle deep into a vein, injecting the entire dosage. Crispin sighed and relaxed. At first, nothing happened. The others breathed with relief. Suddenly, a spasm shook Crispin’s body. His face registered extreme agony. A cry that sounded like the howl of a wounded animal came from the depths of his being. He shook and convulsed as the others tried to hold him down. Then, almost as quickly as it began, it was over. He lay still.

  “You’ve killed him,” Verna said in horror, looking down at his unmoving body.

  Sandra stared at the syringe in her shaking hand. “I can’t have,” she said. “It was just insulin.”

  “How do you know?” Pete asked. “It could have been anything in that bottle.”

  Sandra dropped the needle onto the floor where it rolled to one side. Tears fell from her eyes.

  “My god…!”

  “It’s not your fault,” Sami Lee said. “We were set up from the beginning. Whoever did this is a sick, sadistic bastard. If I find out which one of you it is …”

  She left the threat unfinished. Three faces stared at her in bewilderment.

  “It’s not me,” cried Verna. “It’s not!”

  “Nor me,” Sandra said, weeping softly.

  “I wouldn’t harm a fly,” Pete said, his head hanging down. “Or a human being.”

  “Well, then, that makes four of us. But someone here is lying,” Sami Lee told them. “And I know it isn’t me.”

  Sandra looked at Crispin’s tape recorder where he’d left it on the table. “He thought someone wanted the information he had on this,” she said, fingering the device.

  “You mean our confessions,” Sami Lee reminded them, staring at it. “Yes, maybe.”

  She reached across the table and pulled it toward her. “I’m in charge of this from now on. If anything else happens before help comes, I’m going to record it. So be warned that anything you say from now on will end up on this machine.”

  She stood and left the room, taking the recorder with her.

  “Who does she think she is?” Verna asked, looking at Sandra and Pete.

  “I’ve been wondering that myself for the past twenty years,” Pete said.

  Chapter 25

  Pete and Sandra carried Crispin upstairs. Verna was filled with trepidation as she unlocked the room beside hers and they brought him in, laying him out as though on a funeral bier like all the others.

  “I suppose he should be in here and not somewhere else,” Verna said, mostly to herself. She shivered. “I just wish we could put him in someone else’s room.”

  “This was his room,” Sami Lee said coldly. “He’s staying here.”

  They left the room and locked it behind them.

  “The dead don’t walk,” Sami Lee said to Verna. “You won’t have to worry that he’ll come into your room and murder you next.”

  “So what do we do now?” Pete asked. “Sit around all day watching one another as we go crazy, or do we just lock ourselves in our rooms and stay there till help comes?”

  “I suggest we try to make a fire and send up a smoke signal,” Sami Lee said. “I for one don’t intend to sit here and wait to be killed.”

  Without Max to look after her, she’d become a more dominant personality. Somehow, she seemed to have found an inner resolve.

  In the end, it was agreed they would light a fire on the cliff facing the mainland. The results were dismal at best. There was little hope anyone would even be looking for smoke signals on a small island in the middle of a rainstorm. After half an hour, they gave up and returned to the house.

  “How long can this fucking rain go on?” Sami Lee said, shaking her fist at the sky.

  At noon, they convened in the dining room and had another meal of canned tuna. The bread had run out and no one wanted to cook. The kettle was filled under everyone’s watchful eye. When the whistle blew, each of the four chose a tea bag and inserted it into a cup as the water was poured. The fridge had remained unplugged so no one bothered with milk.

  The scene was repeated again at six o’clock for supper. In the middle of the meal the power went off, plunging them in darkness.

  “Fucking power corporation,” Sami Lee said.

  “We better check the fuses,” Sandra told them. “But we’ll do it together.”

  It was agreed they would all go down to the electrical room, one after another, holding a single flashlight. Pete stumbled on the stairs and broke the chain. There was a moment of panic before the line was resumed as, hand in hand, they moved forward and found the switch breakers. Just as they opened the panel, the power suddenly came on again. They stumbled back upstairs, nervous and edgy.

  It was then Pete realized he hadn’t checked the chess board after Crispin’s death. True to form, he found the black bishop tipped over on its side. Eight poisoned needles, mocked the Voice. Pete shivered and shut the door to the drawing room without telling the others.

  Supper was soon over and the dishes washed jointly. They retired to their rooms by eight. It was agreed that no one needed to emerge before morning, so no secret knock was prearranged.

  Sandra lay in bed envisioning over and over again the scene in which she asked Crispin if he wanted to trust the insulin. She saw him nod, knowing there really was no choice. If she didn’t give it to him, he would die. But he died anyway. The look of agony on his face, the twisted lips and bulging eyes were forever burned into her memory. No matter how long she lived, she would never forget that sight.

  She’d seen many troubling things, but nothing quite as awful as that. Before, when she’d concocted the compounds to put people out of their misery, they had simply and peacefully gone off to sleep, never to awaken. But this was different. This was a man who still wanted very much to live. As far as she was concerned, there was no reason anyone should want to see him die that way.

  Pete, too, lay in bed. He was waiting for the Voice to make itself known, but nothing came in the hours he lay there. Eventually, he drifted off into an uneasy sleep where he found himself examining an urn in a garden. The urn lay on its side. With a great effort, he managed to set it upright, but as he did he saw it was no longer an urn but a giant chess piece. A black knight. As he stood and brushed off his hands, he heard an unearthly buzzing. He watched as a swarm of wasps emerged from the knight’s mouth. Hundreds of them.

  He held his breath and kept very still as they began to zoom around, lighting on his clothes and in his hair. Then, sensing he wasn’t what they were looking for, the wasps turned as one and flew off in another direction.

  Sami Lee lay awake trying to piece together the strange chain of events that brought them to Shark Island. First had been Harvey’s letter turning up suddenly and Max shouting for joy upon reading the news. Then Pete called asking to join them. How could they have known the terrible things that awaited them? On the other hand, it was fitting for a star to go out in a blaze of glory rather than fade away. It wasn’t right for a legend like Max to end up old and destitute. Stars had to die young in order to stay immortal, otherwise what was the point of being a star? Stars didn’t fade. They crashed and burned and exploded. Their legends demanded it. So Max had fulfilled his destiny by dying here on Shark Island.

  Verna, too, lay awake, thinking of that awful night of the party twenty years ago. She could still see herself as Werner, how he seemed to speak those words as if he’d been prompted: “Don’t call 911. Don’t get the police involved or we’re all screwed!”

  Until then, no one had paid much attention to Werner, but suddenly it was as if he were in command. Amazingly, no one contested him when he took the phone from Spike’s hand.

&nb
sp; “What do we do then?” Spike asked.

  “Send her in a taxi,” Sami Lee had said.

  Werner argued, “But then they’ll know where she was picked up and they’ll come looking for us.” He felt very much in control, as if he had thought this all out beforehand.

  “We’ll take her outside and meet the taxi on the corner,” Max said.

  And so Zerin Ames’s fate had been decided for the conven­ience of everyone else.

  Later the story was concocted that she’d been taken to the taxi by two unknown men, friends of Zerin’s who left the party with her and were never seen again. At the trial, Newt Merton pleaded no contest on the advice of Noni Embrem and went to jail. And, but for fifty thousand dollars in cash, he might have told the truth about everyone else’s involvement. But he didn’t.

  End of story.

  It was while she was reliving these terrible memories that Verna heard a scratching sound coming from the roof. She sat up in bed and looked around, but saw nothing in the darkness. She listened carefully. The scratching stopped. Now there was another sound in the room. A faint buzzing. And suddenly, Verna knew how she would die.

  None of the others could remember when they eventually drifted off to a sleep disturbed by dark happenings, but they all recalled clearly what woke them: a scream in the night. In the confusion that followed, no one was willing to emerge from his or her room without the secret knock, but eventually Sami Lee came out, followed by Pete and Sandra. They convened in front of Verna’s door where they could hear her whimpering inside, but nothing more.

  “Open it,” Sami Lee commanded.

  “We can’t. Verna’s got the other key to the cupboard,” Sandra said. “Mine opens the case the master key ring is in. Without Verna’s key, I can’t open the cupboard.”

  “Then break the fucking lock on the cupboard,” Sami Lee told them.

  Pete ran downstairs where they heard him bashing away at the cupboard. Eventually, he returned bearing the key ring. They opened Verna’s room, but by then all sound had ceased.