And Then They Were Doomed

by Elizabeth Kane Buzzelli

  She was sure someone had pushed her or hit her with something. She’d felt something against her back. From someplace in the woods.

  As she looked around the room, watching the groups talk, some laughing, she knew she’d made a mistake about this place. It had been hardheaded of her to come. She’d vowed to find out why they’d tortured Evelyn and why they were after her. But how did she do that in five days? When would it start, or had it started already—with that blow against her back? Maybe trying to disable her so she couldn’t leave. A warning shot?

  Or, this could be exactly as advertised. An academic triumph for a group of Christie fans in Northern Michigan’s backwoods. It wasn’t so far off the usual. Always at least one drunk to be seen to and one lech chasing the youngest attendee. There would be one know-it-all and then a has-been writer with a terrible book, asking others to read it and comment—offering a great favor. There could be one panel where the leader stopped the discussion cold to pull a number from a bowl, run out into the audience, and award a copy of his book to a surprised person, taking the time to autograph the book before finally returning to the stage, with a little laugh.

  But maybe not at a webinar where the hour would be controlled.

  There should be the poet who carried his booze in a paper sack, but not here: no poets. And she remembered the woman who’d come wrapped in nothing but a dozen scarves at a New York conference. The woman had announced the removal of one scarf a day until, on the eighth day, she was ushered off the campus. There might even be two feuding writers amid a group of their friends, crying and declaring they were leaving this awful place, until properly assured of equal importance.

  And one terrible panel—this from a conference in Wisconsin—where the first panelist spoke for fifty-five minutes of the allotted hour while the leader sat fidgeting, her face red, but without the firmness to stop the oblivious woman.

  Zoe sighed. She’d promised herself—no more of these events, but here she was, her hatred and curiosity having gotten the best of her. And now she was meeting more people who might or might not be who they said they were; who might or might not be in on some ridiculous joke; or might or might not want to hurt her or, at least, teach her a final lesson she had no need to learn.

  She hesitated on the bottom step, looking over the reception room. If she could only get on the internet, she’d look them all up, investigate much more than she had. Maybe she would figure out who they were exactly and why she’d been invited—even fooled—into attending by an invitation that looked like an announcement of a death. Or a warning to stay away, from someone who had taken the invitation to the post office. There could be someone on her side.

  Maybe someone trying to help her. But with a push to her back? With a painful ankle that would more than likely keep her there?

  Agatha Christie was how they’d gotten her. But how did they know she was working on Christie? And then to call Christopher Morley?

  And the remote setting? Of course, that would intrigue her—Upper Peninsula of Michigan.

  And then the rain—that couldn’t have been part of the plan. But there was the water-covered bridge. The lack of phone or internet. The characters in Christie’s novel were all strangers. Strangers with secrets—like her secret for coming here. Those strangers began to die. One by one. Terrible deaths.

  She shivered as Louise Joiner and Any Tow, over near the shelves of books with that man she hadn’t met yet, began to laugh.

  Anthony Gliese must have been drinking for a while. His voice was loud. He stuck his glass high in the air when he spotted Zoe, saluting her. Beside him, a young blonde girl hung on his every word as he leaned forward and bent his head to hers, then laughed again, softly this time.

  The girl had to be in her late-twenties, very pretty, if a little plump and pink and dewy. Not the type Zoe was drawn to: the little-wide-eyed-blonde sort of girl. Or more likely—the dewy-eyed hopeful writer being drawn into the good-looking male editor’s hopes of a bedmate for the duration of a dull literary event. Sometimes it only took the promise of a glance at her manuscript or a word to an agent she hoped to sign with, and she was hooked. After all, what was a little virginity, or self-respect, when her name could be lifted up among those of the best writers in the world?

  To Zoe, having sex with someone or not having sex with someone really didn’t matter. Only the pain that was caused by using other people. Or by being used. She’d seen all of this enough to be cynical about good-looking editors and pretty women trading something for nothing.

  Between Louise and Anna, the tall, craggy-looking man, maybe in his middle fifties, leaned back from time to time, turning from one woman to the other to make loud, disparaging remarks in the kind of nasal, autocratic voice that made Zoe’s skin crawl with little bumps.

  The pretty girl with Gliese looked over at Zoe and got up to come toward her, a soft hand extended. She was not much taller than Zoe, but not a dwarf. Still, having someone close to her size let her feel normal.

  “Gewel Sharp. I’m such a fan,” the young blonde gushed, taking Zoe’s hand in both of hers and shaking it again and again. “I love what you’re doing with writers. At first I didn’t get what one of my professors at U of M was talking about—he loves your work, by the way—until I read your book on Emily Dickinson. What insight! And after all the critics have written books on her and all her friends have told their stories, it took your work to capture a mind bent toward the future. All that wisdom in her poetry. If only we knew the code.”

  She held Zoe’s hand, shaking it again. “I have a feeling you might know that code. Am I right?”

  Zoe didn’t answer, too busy thinking different thoughts: Someone close to my size. Well—almost. At least my neck won’t hurt trying to talk to her.

  “Christie’s a writer apart, don’t you think? I mean her stories seem so simple, but they aren’t. Can’t wait to hear your summary of the webinars,” Gewel went on. “We might come up with such new things. I want to write mysteries myself, you see.”

  Zoe smiled at the excited young woman. “I hope you’re writing.”

  “Oh, I know. I am. I’m in the middle of my first novel. But then I read someone like the writer Louise Penny, and I know I’ll never make it. I’ll never write the way she does.”

  “Don’t try to write the way Penny does. Write the way Gewel Sharp writes.”

  “I know, I know. Be myself.” The girl’s eyes filled with emotion. “But writers like Penny and James, Rendell and Christie stand alone, don’t they?” Gewel dipped her head as she spoke. “And still with us, in a way. That’s what I’ve found. Always a new Christie book to read or come back to. Or a short story I haven’t seen before. She is constantly different.”

  Zoe found herself warming to this girl: Gewel. Maybe ten years younger but very different, filled with what Zoe must have been filled with once—that zeal to be successful, to prove herself to all of ‘them.’ And most of all, to be accepted. It made her hurt, just a little, to have lost some of that.

  Zoe smiled at the excited girl. “We’ll have some interesting times this week. Can’t wait to hear what you have to say about Agatha.”

  “Me too. Oh, me too. I don’t mean me.” Gewel laughed, then blushed. “I mean listening to you and the others.”

  At a wave from Anthony Gliese, Gewel took Zoe’s hand and pulled her to where Anthony sat beside the man Anna Tow and Louise Joiner had been with earlier.

  He introduced the tall, almost ugly man as Professor Aaron Kennedy. “From USC.”

  Aaron Kennedy made a move to stand, then collapsed back into his seat, too overcome for good manners. He put out a limp hand to take Zoe’s, shook it as if she were asking a lot of him, then curled his lips into something of a smile. “And you are?”

  “Why, this is the famous Zoe Zola, Aaron. She’s playing cleanup on the last day. We’ll be put into good order, I imagine. Shown the rights and wrongs of Christie study. I’m sure we’ll be told what we really meant to say. In
other words, we’ll be cleaned up, put in our places, and sent away to sin no more. Am I right, Zoe?” Anthony laughed as he pointed to a seat across from Aaron Kennedy. She shook her head and stood where she was.

  “I hope no one will be changing a word I say.” Kennedy’s oddly colored eyebrows—shot through with white—went up into inverted V’s. “My work has been years in the making. I don’t think it fair to leave myself in the hands of …” He leaned back and looked Zoe over. “I wasn’t told there would be …”

  “Ah, but Aaron. Surely you’ve heard of Zoe Zola! Her books delve to the interior of the artist, discovering the seeds of the work. Very new form of biography.”

  Aaron Kennedy made a face that involved his nose wrinkling, his thin lips pursing, and those funny eyebrows gathering over his nose. “I see. But I still say I don’t want my words changed. I have invested many years into my work on Christie. I would say I’m the preeminent scholar, even though I find Christie isn’t aging as well as people think.”

  “Have you checked her sales?” Zoe felt her back bristling. There was always one who had to be the contrarian to get attention. She wasn’t going to like this Aaron Kennedy and, despite trying to control herself, would end by taking him on—head to head. It always turned out that way.

  Kennedy waved a flaccid hand at her. “So many tics in her work—repeated again and again. A shame. Many arcane references to her life. People won’t stand for it for long.”

  He turned to Anthony. “I teach a genre fiction course at USC. I’ve included Agatha Christie, but sadly, I find it’s time to move on to the more famous mystery writers of our time. Take Stephen King, for instance. I could create tremendous resemblances between his work and the more famous of the Russian writers. The women writers—well, I’m finding they quickly date themselves or devolve into silly love stories like Christie did under the pseudonym Mary Westmacott.”

  He turned to Zoe and smiled a superior smile. “But why do we even discuss these women in the same breath with male writers? The trouble with women writers is genetic, you understand. Nothing at all to do with female servitude, as some have put it. Not at all. Women will never make great writers. And please don’t give me any of that ‘Poor souls, held back by male critics’ baloney. It is nothing but a matter of talent—or lack of it.”

  Zoe bit her tongue as long as she could. “Dear, sir,” she said with caustic bite, “unless men write with their penises, I doubt there is anything different between the work of the two sexes except that women bring more of the senses to the page—other than shooting big guns and blowing up everything around them—which I always find suspect in the mysteries of men. Women know about childbirth and loving another more than oneself. They have a reverence for life no male writer can hope to achieve.”

  “Now, little lady, you don’t know who you’re talking to and I hope …”

  Behind them, the front door opened, and a middle-aged woman walked in and stopped to look over the gathering before closing the door behind her. She wore a plain brown raincoat. Her hair was brown—sticking out from under a brown rain hat. She waited, suitcase at her feet, as face after face turned her way.

  The room was almost silent.

  She stammered, “I’m … I’m Mary Reid. I think I know most of you. I should have been here earlier. I’m actually a member of our Christie Society and one of your hostesses.”

  Zoe hurried over to the poor woman, happy for the interruption, and for the enraged look she left behind on Aaron Kennedy’s face.

  “Mary Reid. I own Ulysses Bookstore in Houghton.” The woman bent toward Zoe, putting out a hand and vigorously shaking Zoe’s. She asked her name and threw a hand to her mouth when she heard.

  “Oh, Zoe Zola. Just the person I want to meet. I hope you’ll come to Houghton, to my bookstore, one day. You have so many fans up here. The whole English and creative writing faculty at Northern Michigan University. I swear, Miss Zola, you would be a hit.”

  Zoe smiled the bright smile she gave when meeting especially perceptive people like this Mary Reid.

  Chapter 22

  The Copper Room was large and austere, the paneled walls decorated with copper works. One, at the head of the room, was shaped into Michigan’s two sections: Upper and Lower Peninsulas. One, on another wall, was a large work of various-sized pine trees. Another was a copper rendering of a mine shaft, complete with a silhouetted man, a pick axe on his shoulder. The room was both formal and earthy, maybe Zoe’s favorite room so far.

  The oak table, set in the middle of the room, was large. The chairs around it were plain, yet the table was set with a long, ornate tablecloth. There were translucent white dishes at every place, glassware etched with “NL,” and heavy silverware set atop brilliant white napkins.

  At the center of the table, a large copper platter held a bowl of blue wildflowers—at least Zoe guessed they were wildflowers since she didn’t recognize them as any cultured flower she’d seen before. Under the draping wildflowers were figures of children: playing, skipping, sitting, falling. One with a hand clutching his throat. Ten figures. Not soldiers, as in And Then There Were None. She felt a tightening in her chest and told herself children couldn’t disappear as the soldiers had in Christie’s book. Children wouldn’t mark a guest disappearing and presumed dead.

  Ten little soldier boys went out to dine

  One choked his little self and then there were nine.

  Nine little soldier boys … She tried but couldn’t remember the rest of the poem. But whatever the last little soldier boy’s way of death was, that would be hers. She was the tenth guest and the last of the presenters.

  She looked around the table at the others. Anthony Gliese and Gewel Sharp were there, taking seats next to each other. Professor Leon Armstrong lurched into the room and bent to read place cards, squinting hard as he searched for his name. The professor’s red hair was still uncombed, his eyes blurrier than before. When he found his place next to Aaron Kennedy, he smiled at the man, waggled his head as a greeting, and sat. Kennedy made a disagreeable face, moving as far as he could get from Armstrong.

  Leon noticed nothing, only asked Aaron to please pass the wine.

  She knew enough about all of them now to make judgments. There was no one who looked like her, no one who seemed to hate her—except Aaron Kennedy, and she was proud to claim that woman-hater as an enemy. And no one who seemed particularly murderous, though someone had tried to hurt her out on the path, no matter what the others said.

  Zoe settled back in her chair, alone at one end of the long table, and wondered whether to point out the figurines, and make a joke of them.

  Mary Reid, tilted head, flushed face, and wide-open eyes, sat beside her. She quietly touched Zoe’s arm, then pointed to the figurines. Zoe nodded and smiled.

  “Décor,” she whispered behind her hand. “Imaginative.”

  Mary signaled that she got it and settled back to look over her schedules before the food came.

  Nigel Pileser sat in the chair around the table corner from Zoe.

  Louise Joiner, with Anna Tow right behind her, was next into the room, nodding at everyone. She was followed by Emily Brent, who took the second to last chair as a thin, ungainly woman hurried in behind her, looking left to right around the table and bursting out with apologies as she searched for her place.

  “So sorry.” The woman looked up and nodded in all directions. “So sorry. Got held up. From Canada, you know. Betty Bertram?” She gave her name as if asking a question, then glanced from face to face around the table, nodding at each name given to her. Her own face turned a bright red, her head soon lowered as she pulled out the chair near Anthony Gliese.

  Emily Brent, seated now, leaned forward. “I was wondering what happened to you.”

  “I know.” Betty blushed again. “The plane was delayed and then canceled. Rain. Everywhere. Nothing but rain the whole way here. Finally came by way of Flint. Took a bus to Houghton and then hitched a ride from there to Calumet. Th
ose people lived in Calumet and they never heard of this place.”

  Words spilled out until she cut them off abruptly, mouth hanging open as she looked at each face turned her way. She took a breath and began talking again.

  “Luckily, I found that car in town, waiting to bring me here. Never for a minute did I imagine this place would be out so far. I suppose I’ve missed quite a bit. Well, first of all, I’m Betty Bertram, as I said.”

  The woman was thin to the point of emaciation and had the undecorated, plain face of a country girl. She nodded again and again to the people around the table, repeating her name. “Betty Bertram. Graduate student. McGill. Canada, ya know.”

  She sat very straight and robotically introduced herself to each person at the table. “Betty Bertram. Graduate student. McGill.”

  Her thin brown hair was pulled back into a ponytail, with wisps sticking out along the sides of her head. The white blouse and denim skirt she wore hung on her thin body like old clothes in a secondhand shop—the shoulders of her blouse drooped halfway down her arms. Her very long-fingered hands jumped from the table top to her lap and back as she spoke.

  Zoe, a master of knowing people at first sight, felt a twinge of pity for this new woman. With the academic hyenas she’d identified among them—Professor Pileser, for sure; maybe Anna Tow; Anthony Gliese, no more than a playboy; Aaron Kennedy—she could be in for a mauling.

  Zoe sighed and gave her name as the woman’s eyes fell on her. Poor thing. There was almost a begging quality to the woman’s narrow smile.

  “Oh, I know who you are,” she said quickly. “Oh, not because you’re a—no, I mean I’ve heard of you. I was so happy to hear you’d be here. I’ve been looking forward to this since they first asked me to come, and I said yes when they told me that Zoe Zola would be here. A whole new way of writing a literary biography. What a coup. What a—”

  “Mary Reid. I own the Ulysses Bookstore in Houghton,” Mary interrupted. “A long-time devotee of Agatha Christie and all the writers of her ilk.”