“You’re an alcoholic.” It was a statement, not a question, but he answered anyway.
“I suppose you could say that. I’ve never thought of myself as such, but look at me now. Who else, other than an alcoholic, would come to an escape room, just to find a safe place to drink?”
“You came here to drink?”
He laughed at the disbelief in my voice. “It wasn’t my intent at first, but as soon as J. asked me to come along with him, I figured, why not? I did my research, learned we’d start in little rooms by ourselves, and thought I could take a couple minutes to myself and have a few quiet sips without anyone nagging me. Barely had time to take the first pull before you were asking me to scour the room for trees.”
“That’s why you sounded breathless,” I said. If he was tipping the flask back, knowing he only had a few minutes before he’d be forced to join the main group, he’d have rushed, would have drunk faster than he rightfully should.
“I barely had time to enjoy it,” Bob said. He wiped his nose again, before he reached into his jacket. His hand paused, halfway to grabbing the flask again, before he removed it, empty. “Maybe it’s a sign. Maybe if I’d been more concerned about escaping my room, rather than seeing how much I could drink before time ran out, I could have saved that guy.”
“You can’t blame yourself,” I said. “I’m not sure any of us could have stopped what happened.” And that’s not to mention the fact that if he’d gotten out of his room earlier, he might have been the one with the pricked finger.
Bob shrugged one shoulder. “Guess we’ll never know.”
“You said Jerry asked you to come to this?” I asked, not wanting to dwell on the “could have” possibilities.
“He did.”
“Was that normal?”
Bob glanced up at me. “I didn’t think much about it at the time.” His eyes hardened. “But now, I’m starting to wonder if he asked me to come here with him so he could kill me.” Both his fists clenched, and with the flush on his cheeks, I was afraid he’d had a little too much to drink, despite his claims that he’d barely gotten started. Drunk people did stupid things all the time.
Even if Jerry was guilty of Lewis’s murder, I couldn’t let Bob enact drunken justice on him. It would only make matters worse, and likely get him into trouble with the police afterward.
“How did you find out that you’d have time to yourself here?” I asked him. I’d looked the escape room up, but hadn’t found much online about it. Lewis had a website, but there were no pictures of any of the rooms he’d run, let alone descriptions of what to expect.
“One of J.’s friends did this last week. It’s how J. knew about it. The guy works with us, so I took the guy aside and asked him about it. He was all too eager to tell me exactly how this thing was supposed to go. I think he was hoping it would score him a few extra points with me, like it would somehow speed his advancement at the firm.” He glanced around the room and frowned. “Though there are some pretty significant changes from what he’d told me, so his info didn’t help me all that much.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“I don’t know.” He touched the ceramic Christmas tree, fingers barely brushing it as if he was afraid it might break. “The items are different. The number of them. I guess he changes things up between sessions.”
Which was understandable. If you kept everything static, it wouldn’t be long before everyone would know exactly what to do. I imagined it wasn’t only the numbers that changed, but the method of obtaining them as well.
“Do you think the guy who killed that Lewis guy knew what to do?” Bob asked. “Like, he’d learned the codes ahead of time?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “It’s possible.”
Bob nodded, then scrubbed his hands over his face. “We should probably get back before the others start to wonder what we’re up to. I don’t need those kinds of rumors floating about, especially since J. wouldn’t hesitate to spread them around the office. Wife wouldn’t think twice about kicking me out of the house if she learned about this.” He patted his pocket. “She’d be happier if I was cheating.”
“I won’t tell,” I promised him.
Bob and I left the room and found the others standing almost exactly where we’d left them. Troy was by the door, attempting to crack the code once again. He typed in a few numbers, tried the door, and then punched it when his latest attempt failed.
“We should talk.” Jerry approached Bob with a somber look on his face. “Alone.”
Bob heaved a sigh, but nodded. They both looked at me expectantly.
I was able to take a hint. With a slight nod to Bob, I left them to it, choosing to join Rita where she stood with Carol.
“Discover anything that will help us get out of this mess?” Rita asked.
“Not really,” I said. “I don’t think Bob was involved, however. How about you? Did you learn anything new?”
“There’s nothing to learn,” Carol said. “Everyone’s keeping to themselves, won’t talk to anyone they don’t know.”
“Almost everyone,” Rita amended. “That Yuri fellow tried to mess with Lewis’s body while you were gone. We stopped him.”
“Didn’t think it was right to be messing about like that,” Carol said. “Let the dead lie in peace, I say.”
Yuri was leaning against the wall in the far corner. He was watching everyone with a suspicious gleam in his eye. When his gaze passed over me, those eyes further narrowed, before moving on to watch Troy try yet another code.
“Why do you think he was wanting to look at the body?” I asked.
“Well, how would I know that?” Rita said. “He didn’t exactly tell us what he was doing. Just scowled and walked away when we stopped him.”
“I think Yuri knew Mr. Coates pretty well,” Carol said. “Didn’t the two of them talk before we got started?”
I thought back and realized that, yes, Lewis and Yuri had acted like they’d known one another. Yuri had called Lewis his “friend,” but by the scowl on Lewis’s face at the time, I don’t think it was an entirely accurate statement.
“I’ll be right back,” I said, before walking over to join Yuri.
“What do you want?” he asked, crossing his arms. His glare intensified, as if he thought he could scare me away just by looking mean.
“You knew Lewis Coates,” I said. “Before all of this.”
“And?”
No denial. Just the one word. I hesitated, not quite sure how to continue. It wasn’t like Yuri had hidden his relationship with Lewis. He’d admitted to knowing the guy from the start. Would someone do that if they planned on killing a guy later?
“Did you get along with him?” I asked.
Yuri’s shoulders eased and he dropped his arms. “Look, I knew him. We weren’t friends, if that’s what you were thinking. The guy didn’t much care for me, and I felt the same about him. But that doesn’t mean I killed him.”
“When you first saw him today, you called him ‘my friend,’ ” I reminded him.
“I liked to tweak his nose,” Yuri said. “Give him a hard time. It wasn’t like we were mortal enemies or anything.”
“Have you done any of his escape rooms before? Or know someone who had?” I asked, thinking back to what Bob had said. If someone knew the codes ahead of time, it would make it easy for them to slip out, swap the mugs, and get back before anyone was the wiser.
“One or two. Never this one.” He nodded toward the big gift in the center of the room. “I’m not usually into Christmas stuff like this. It’s too . . . cheerful.” He made a disgusted face.
“So, you’ve done a few? Is that how you met Lewis?”
Yuri crossed his arms again. “I said I’ve done escape rooms. Didn’t say I did one of his. The first was in Vegas a few years back. Another at a wedding, if you can believe it.”
“So, then, how do you and Lewis know one another?” If it wasn’t through the escape rooms, but something else that
connected them more intimately, it would go a long way in proving a motive.
“Our paths crossed a time or two,” Yuri said. “He works security, uses computers. I use them too, just in a different capacity. But we were never competitors, never had cause to fight. He was uptight, rude, and always acted as if he was better than everyone else. I felt the need to knock him down a few pegs over the years. Gives me a laugh.”
“He didn’t seem very happy to see you,” I said. “Were you two arguing?”
“That’s none of your business,” Yuri said.
“Come on, Yuri. The man’s dead. Secrets aren’t exactly your friend right now.”
He sneered, but answered. “We didn’t get along. What do you think he said? He told me I should leave him alone. I made a joke about him slipping in his job or some such. He hardly heard me, though. He was distracted, kept missing what I said. Felt like he was angry at something else.”
“Like?” I prodded.
“How should I know? The guy wouldn’t meet my eye. Kept looking past me and scowling. Then that woman over there came out of the room, which set him off further.” Yuri leaned forward, lowered his voice. “Honestly, if Lewis was the intended victim, I think he knew who the killer was from the start.”
“You think he knew someone was trying to kill him?”
“That, or intended him some ill will. He was more fidgety than normal, quicker to anger. Can’t say who it was, though. I don’t know the lot of you, and don’t plan to.” He leaned against the wall, turned his head away from me.
Apparently, our conversation was over.
Bob and Jerry shook hands and parted at the same time I turned away from Yuri. Neither looked thrilled about whatever they’d discussed, but at least they weren’t at one another’s throats.
“This is getting us nowhere,” Troy said, stepping away from the lock. “We need to get out of here.”
“And how do you propose we do that?” Yuri asked. “Break the door down?”
“Why don’t we do what we all came here to do in the first place?” Bob asked.
All eyes drifted to the table and the waiting gifts.
“What if they’re booby-trapped like the mug?” June asked, hugging herself. “Can we take that risk?”
“Do we have any choice?” Carol said. “I don’t want to die any more than you do, but if we don’t do something, we aren’t getting out of here any time soon.”
“I would rather not starve to death,” Yuri said, shooting a glance at Lewis’s body.
I doubted we’d be trapped here for that long, but I understood the point.
“Bob’s right,” I said, taking a step toward the table. “We need to get out of here.” I eyed the gifts, the mugs of now-cold hot cocoa. “And from the look of things, there’s only one way we’re going to do that.”
“Okay, then,” June said. “Who’s going to go first?”
Everyone looked to everyone else. No one volunteered, which wasn’t exactly surprising. One man was dead already. None of us wanted to join him.
But someone had to take that first step, or else we’d be waiting until police officer Paul Dalton or someone else decided to come looking for us. That could still be hours from now.
I couldn’t handle hours more of waiting, especially with a killer in the room.
I took a deep breath and walked around the table until I found my name. “I’ll do it,” I said. And then, with everyone else watching with bated breath, I reached for the Christmas gift with my name on it.
Chapter Eight
The package was one of those prewrapped gifts, the kind where the lid was wrapped separately and could be lifted from the rest without unwrapping anything. I did just that.
Nothing exploded. No needles shot into my finger. And, thankfully, nothing leapt out at me like a demented jackin-the-box.
I let out the pent-up breath, which I didn’t realize I’d been holding, and peered over the edge.
“What’s inside it?” Rita asked.
I checked every corner to make sure nothing was hidden in the packaging and then I removed a small Rudolph with a tag hanging from it. I twice turned the reindeer over in my hand, before checking the tag. I read aloud: “ ‘My nose is bright. I light the way. But the glow does not make me what I am today.’ ”
“What does that mean?” Yuri asked.
“I’m not sure,” I said. I fiddled with Rudolph’s nose, turned him over twice more, but I saw nothing that told me how the clue worked with the figure.
“Maybe we need to look at the other gifts before we can make sense of it,” Carol said.
No one made a move for the table.
“We need to do this if we want to get out of here,” I reminded them. “If you’re careful when you open your presents, you should be fine.”
“Unless it’s rigged to blow,” Yuri said.
“I don’t think that’s going to happen,” I said. “The mug was poisoned. That’s a very specific, very direct way to kill someone. I don’t think the killer wanted to hurt anyone else.”
I looked from face to face, hoping that Lewis’s killer would show some sign that they agreed with me, but no one reacted in any way I found suspicious.
“Oh, I’ll do it,” Rita said. She marched up to the package with her name on it and gave everyone a stern look. “You’re all acting like a bunch of cowards, you know that?”
As she reached for her lid, June stepped forward, toward her own gift. Both Troy and Jerry quickly followed suit. They were then joined by a more tentative Carol and Yuri.
Bob, however, remained standing where he was.
“Not happening,” he said. “If my mug was booby-trapped, there’s a chance my gift will be as well. I’m not going to risk dying over some stupid game.”
“It looks the same as the others,” Carol said. “I don’t think it was swapped out like the mug.”
“I don’t care.” He crossed his arms. “Someone else can open it if they want. I’m not touching the thing.”
Lids popped off and trinkets were removed. Rita had a Christmas tree, Yuri a snow globe featuring a gingerbread house. Every item was Christmas themed, and each and every one had a short poem written on their tags.
“‘Beneath a star, a globe burns bright’?” Rita said. “What is that supposed to mean?”
“Mine isn’t much clearer,” Carol said. She held out her tag to Rita, who read it and shook her head.
I met Bob’s eye, daring him to open his gift. He stared right back without blinking. So, with a frustrated sigh, I walked over to stand next to Lewis’s body, making sure not to step in the spilled hot cocoa. My hand hovered just over the box, but a stab of fear shot through me, keeping me from touching it.
What if it is booby-trapped? The killer could have set traps on both items, just in case one of them missed the mark. It wouldn’t be hard to slip a needle into the lid, or on whatever item was inside. One wrong move and I wouldn’t care one way or another if we ever got out of here; I wouldn’t be caring about much of anything anymore.
But everyone was watching me. I knew if I didn’t open the gift, we wouldn’t know what to do to obtain the code to the door. Of course we could probably guess the final digit once we had the rest figured out. But what if this step merely allowed us to retrieve Santa’s gift, and we would need to do something else in order to open the final door? We couldn’t do that without Bob’s clue.
My hand hit the top of the box. I grabbed the lid, wincing only slightly. When nothing poked my finger, I jerked upward, fully expecting something to fly out at me.
Nothing did.
The tension released from my shoulders, and then I leaned over the table to look inside the box.
“It’s a snowman,” I said. I picked it up to show everyone.
“Is it safe?” June asked.
I turned it over in my hand, carefully inspecting it. “No needles,” I said. Then, before reading what the tag said, I tossed it to Bob.
His eyes widened, a
nd his body tensed as if he might leap out of the way like I’d thrown a grenade at him. Instead, he caught the snowman, wincing like he expected it to hurt; then, with a relieved grin, he checked the tag.
“Something about button eyes and coats,” he said, his grin melting into a frown. “I can’t make heads or tails of it.”
I glanced around the room. “There’s a tree,” I said, indicating the Christmas tree across the room. “And there’s a reindeer with a red nose.”
“Do you think that’s what we need to do?” Jerry asked. “Check the decorations around the room?”
“I doubt we need to return to our starting rooms, so yeah,” I said. “Find the object that matches your figure and examine it.”
“I can’t wait to get out of here,” Troy muttered as he made for the string of Christmas lights hanging around the room. He had a small string of them in his hands, and I noted the color pattern wasn’t alternating, but had two red bulbs next to one another, followed by a green, then a single red. I was sure he’d noticed the same, so I let him get to work.
While the others checked their own items, I headed for the Rudolph in the corner, but my mind wasn’t on the riddle. I kept thinking that once the door was open, the killer would walk right out of our lives. Once that happened, the chances of them getting caught would plummet.
I had no doubt the mug that killed Lewis would be clean of prints. Why go to the trouble of murdering someone that way, and then leave evidence that could easily be traced? Gloves would solve that. And while the suspect list was rather short, we weren’t even sure Lewis was the intended victim.
I ran my hand over Rudolph’s back. Brown felt covered the reindeer in place of fur. His nose was a simple red lightbulb, much like the ones decorating the rest of the room. I unscrewed it, but there was nothing inside the hole left in his face, nor was there anything on the light itself.
I returned the bulb, and then read the riddle again.
“ ‘But the glow does not make me what I am today,’ ” I said aloud. So it was not the nose, then.
I stepped back and looked Rudolph over. I doubted it was the felt covering him. There were no seams, no way to remove it to get to his insides. His tail didn’t move, and his hooves were a part of the whole, and didn’t come off.
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