So Then There Were None

by Annie Adams

  “I got the same feeling. Hey, look at your arms.” They were covered in goose bumps.

  “It just feels spooky in here.”

  He rubbed his hands up and down my arms. “And here I thought you were so into me that I gave you chills.”

  “Oh, that’s definitely true. But, there’s something about being here—I can’t put my finger on it—maybe it’s because this is Eva’s room.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “This is a bedroom—used by your ex-girlfriend—it would be weird if I didn’t feel weird in here. Right?”

  “Sure. I can see that.”

  “But…”

  “But, what?”

  “You don’t sound too convinced,” I said.

  “It just seems like there’s more to it.” He glanced at different parts of the room, searching. “I’m a guy. I don’t have the same kind of emotional attachments to things as you. To me, this is just another room in the lodge. Yeah, maybe it feels like we’re breaking and entering, but it’s for the sake of helping Eva.” He walked over to the bathroom, switched on the light and took a look around. “I felt like we were being watched at the same time as you.”

  “Maybe it was just a guilty feeling we had for being in someone else’s room while we made out. Maybe we both knew at the same time what that might lead to…”

  He came back and stood facing me. “I have no idea what you’re talking about. Just what are you saying it might lead to? Tell me.” He flashed a smile that made me forget anything about the official occupant of the room. It took a few seconds before common sense kicked in.

  “How’s about we find a key in here, and then I’ll show you what I was talking about, in our room?” I said.

  “Let’s find that key.” He made a show of running to the dresser and frantically opening drawers.

  It felt completely wrong to go searching through someone else’s drawers. But, if that someone had given me the correct key this morning, or better yet, given me my key the night before, we wouldn’t be in this predicament. And the state of Eva’s room was just as tidy and kept together as she seemed to be. Her cosmetics and hair supplies were placed in an orderly fashion on top of the dresser, there were no clothes draped on the chair or shoes left around the room. Everything was put away, including her empty luggage, which was tucked away in the closet.

  “Couldn’t she just have left the extra keys out in the open?”

  “That’s not her style. That—I do remember,” Alex said.

  “You make it sound like that’s a bad thing,” I said. “Does that mean you prefer my messy room?” I wouldn’t call Alex a neat freak, but we’ll just say he’s thoroughly comfortable with the minimalist style in his house.

  He stepped back from the drawer he had just opened. “I—think you should be the one to look through this drawer.” I looked inside and found that it was full of lingerie. And boy, did she have some fancy stuff in there. She had enough money invested in the contents of that drawer, she could have used the same amount to buy the island we were visiting. I fingered through things very carefully so as not to disrupt her careful and precise folding.

  “Aha!” I felt the hard outline of something the same size as a credit card swaddled inside of a very pretty, silky black fabric. I pulled out the whole thing, planning to fold it back the way I had found it.

  “Sure seems like a lot of underwear for one weekend,” Alex said.

  “I thought you weren’t looking. Besides, I think I found what we should be looking for,” I said as I closed the drawer.

  I unfurled the rather detailed and extravagant piece of fancy underwear. Black lace and silk. I have no idea what it was called. All I knew is that it was very sexy, and I couldn’t help but wonder if she had my fiancé in mind when she decided to bring it. I managed to turn off that flow of negative thought and concentrated on what I was doing. There were three key cards tucked inside.

  “How do we know which one is which?” I said.

  “They’ve got different numbers printed on them, but they don’t correspond to our room number. We’ll just take them all and hope at least one of them works.”

  “Let’s get out of here, then,” I said. I decided to leave the fancy piece of lingerie unfolded and draped on Eva’s bed just to mess with her.

  Alex made sure to hang on to Eva’s key as well as the others as we exited her room.

  “I still can’t shake the feeling that we’re being watched,” I said as we stood in front of the door to our room.

  “I know. I feel it too,” Alex said. “Here goes,” he said as he tried the first key taken from Eva’s drawer.

  It didn’t work.

  “Please—no—” I said in desperation.

  “Don’t worry, one of these will work.” He tried the second key, which also didn’t work. He looked up at me. “It’s okay, babe, don’t look so worried. You know, I’ve been thinking about that feeling of being watched.”

  “Yeah?” I realized he was trying to distract me to make me feel better. I loved him so much for it.

  “You remember when the lights flickered and K.C. yelled at the ceiling?”

  I felt a smile spreading on my face. I knew what he was going to say despite the fact he didn’t believe in ghosts. “Uh-huh.”

  “Well, maybe she’s been right about them.”

  “Them who?”

  “The ghosts,” he said as he put the third card in the reader on the door. The indicator light turned green and I felt my heart swell with happiness and relief. “They’ve been watching us all along. I don’t think they like us making out. Maybe they just don’t like us at all,” he said on a laugh. Right then, the lights flickered as they had before and the card reader made a strange noise. The lights went out completely, all the way down the hall.

  “No, this isn’t happening!” I said. I tried the door handle and it wouldn’t open.

  “That was weird timing,” Alex said. It was all still amusing to him.

  “I can’t take any more. I already did this last night in that closet, except there’s not even a vacuum light out here.”

  “Quincy, what are you talking about? Calm down.” He hugged me, but that wasn’t the comfort I needed. I needed my own clothes, and my own things. I needed sleep and I needed light.

  I did the only thing I could think to do. I tilted my head up and yelled at the ceiling. “We’re sorry! He didn’t mean it!”

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  “Feeling better?” Alex asked as I came out of the bathroom in our room.

  “Much.” I had changed into my own clothes and brushed my teeth. I felt like a shiny new human.

  He rolled onto his back on the bed, sprawled out and closed his eyes. “It was a total coincidence, Q.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “The flickering lights, the power bump and you talking to ghosts that don’t—”

  I sat down next to him on the bed with a bounce. “Don’t say it!” I said.

  “What? About the—” His eyes were still closed but his grin let me know he was teasing.

  I lay down and cuddled in, next to him. “Tease if you must, but the power came back on.”

  He muttered something about me talking to ghosts, but then pulled me tighter against him.

  “We have to go look for Eva—don’t we?” I was hoping he would say no, that we had to take a nap instead.

  “I suppose we do.”

  “I think I could just fall asleep right now.”

  “I know what you mean,” he said.

  “So you didn’t get much sleep wherever…you were?”

  “Hardly any,” he said.

  “So…you don’t have to tell me, but if you were inclined to…”

  He lay there, eyes closed, but he did his eyebrow lift thing, so I knew he was paying close attention.

  “You’d like to know where I was last night.”

  I shrugged, trying to portray my very casual interest, even though I w
as dying to know. “If you wanted to share—but if you didn’t—I wouldn’t pry.”

  He chuckled quietly. “How about instead of telling you, I show you.”

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Alex took me to the kitchen first. He was still hungry and so was I. “I bet there’s some more wedding cake in the fridge,” he said.

  “I don’t know if I would eat that,” I told him.

  “Why not?”

  I pointed to one of the leftover plates of food on the island. “I’m pretty sure that’s what Eva had for breakfast.”

  “So?”

  “So, Pam insists that Eva is off feeling sick somewhere. If it’s from the cake, you don’t want to get sick too.”

  “I’ve got an iron stomach. Besides, if it was anything, it was probably that glass of milk that got to her.” He lifted the glass and sniffed it, then made a face. “That doesn’t smell right.” He went over to the fridge and took out a carton of milk. “I’m guessing it’s from this one.” He gave it a quick sniff, a little more reluctant than the last time, then shook his head and put it back. “It smells okay.”

  “Do you think…?” I looked at Alex and decided better of what I was going to say.

  “Tell me, what were you going to say?”

  “This is awful of me, but, Pam was so sure that Eva was sick. She argued with every single suggestion any of us had about Eva’s whereabouts, and told us how sure she was that nausea was the problem. I’m wondering if Pam put something in Eva’s food to make her sick.”

  “That would be pretty messed up,” he said, then looked at me and we both nodded in agreement simultaneously. Unfortunately, it didn’t seem too far-fetched for Pam to do something like that. She had shown us some pretty messed up behavior so far.

  “What is it that Pam does for a living? I’ve been meaning to ask if you knew for sure.”

  “Oh, I’m well acquainted with her life story. She’s cornered me a few times telling me we need to get caught up.”

  “So did you catch up with each other?” I teased.

  “More like she told me everything I should know about her. I didn’t give her much input about me. She never gave me much of a chance, even if I had wanted to.”

  “So what does she do?”

  “She rescues cats,” he said.

  “I don’t think she could make a living doing that. Doesn’t she just volunteer with a shelter, or something?” I said.

  “She mentioned a few thousand times that she’s a freelance computer geek,” Alex said wearily. “She loved emphasizing the geek part.”

  “So she’s not a chemist, or someone that would know about food poisoning or something like that,” I asked.

  “I don’t think so. I’m sure she would have told me if she was.”

  “Yeah, I think we’d better try to help find Eva.”

  We exited the kitchen through what I called the false alarmed security door. The one that said an alarm would go off, but never did when I opened it. I told Alex the full story of what had happened the night before, starting right after I’d left him at the beach.

  He took us down the path we’d gone when we saw Kourtnee sitting on the rocks the night before, only we kept going down toward the water. This was where they found Sydnee, the second victim, and her crashed golf cart. We walked around the end of the boulder-lined path to an outbuilding I had never noticed before.

  “What is this?” I asked him.

  “It’s the boathouse. This is where I was for most of last night and this morning.”

  “What were you doing here?”

  “You remember Eva mentioning a boat?”

  I thunked the heel of my hand on my forehead. “Oh yeah.” I’d been so anxious to ask about the boat she had mentioned earlier, and somehow I’d forgotten about it.

  “There’s a boat in here that wasn’t running right. I was wandering around out on the beach last night after I talked to Eva, and I saw Johnny. He told me about the boat and wondered if I wanted to take a crack at it. We started on it, then Chad came in a little later. We ended up working on it for most of the night. There are some cots they’ve set up in there and that’s where I slept for an hour or two when we called it a night—or day.”

  “Where are the boys now?” I asked.

  “I’m not sure. You said you saw them this morning when they were fixing the closet you stayed the night in?”

  “Yeah, K.C. found them somewhere. Probably the kitchen getting food—wait a minute. Are you telling me there’s a boat in there? One of those floaty things that carries people across water?”

  “Yeah,” he said on a laugh.

  “A boat.”

  “Yes.”

  “That doesn’t have any holes in it?”

  He smiled at me. “No holes.”

  “Then what are we doing here? Let’s go get K.C. and leave.”

  “What about the others?” he asked me.

  “We’ll send for help once we’re off the island.”

  “I hate to ruin your plans, but I couldn’t get the motor to work. It kept conking out.”

  I grabbed fistfuls of the front of his shirt. “I don’t care if we half to make oars with our hands. This means we can get out of here.”

  Just then, I heard a loud crack from above and a blinding light zig-zagged across the sky. The deluge began instantly with no ramping up from a drizzle to heavy rain. Those stages were skipped and it went straight to summer storm.

  Alex grabbed my hand and we ran toward the building.

  We stood under the overhang of the roof, waiting for the rain to subside before going around the building to the door.

  “Did you get all wet?” I asked him.

  “No, not too bad. We ran just in time.”

  I had caught enough rain drops to feel a chill as we stood there. I reflexively rubbed my arms to warm up.

  “Here, let me.” Alex gathered me into him. “Put your hands under my shirt.”

  I looked up at him. “Here? Now?”

  “I meant so that you could warm up faster. I am offended at what you’ve implied, madam.”

  I decided to play his game. I leaned away from him. “I wouldn’t want to offend.”

  “Come back here,” he said, pulling me in close. He held me to him much tighter this time and he kissed the top of my head. “I missed this. I missed you.”

  I gently pushed away from him, so that I could look at him. “I’m right here.”

  “I felt horrible last night.”

  “I know, me too. But we’re okay now, right?”

  “Yeah, I guess being back here just…reminded me of last night and everything.”

  “Believe me, I won’t be spending time in any closets for the rest of my life. From now on, I’m going to put everything in trunks like in the old days. No more closets for me.”

  He laughed quietly and ran his finger down my cheek. “Let’s not ever do that again.”

  “I agree. Let’s never talk about closets—”

  The last thing I saw before he kissed me was the flicker in his dark brown eyes. It was almost like I could see a flame blazing there. He backed me against the wall, and I was in no hurry to go anywhere else.

  “You know what I think?” I said, between kisses.

  “That there’s a cot inside this boathouse,” he nearly growled next to my ear.

  That’s not exactly what I had been thinking, but it worked for me. Eva? Eva who?

  We rushed to the other side of the building. The rain still poured, crashing noisily as it hit the metal roof.

  Alex retrieved a hidden key from somewhere around the corner and rushed back. He kissed me again before unlocking the door. As the lock unlatched, we rushed through the opening. I ran into the back of Alex, not expecting him to stop short the way he did.

  “What’s wrong?”

  His voice came out hollow and cold. He stared straight ahead, not turning to speak to me. “It’s gone.”

  His tone scared me. We could make do wi
thout a cot. The weight of the problem didn’t match the seriousness in his voice.

  “What’s gone?” I asked.

  “The boat. It’s gone.”

  Chapter Forty

  "I can't believe they just took off on us," Alex said as he stared at the empty space where the boat was supposed to be. I couldn't help but feel bad for him. He'd told me how he had developed a bond with Chad. Or at least, he thought he had. And now Chad had probably taken off with Johnny and the boat and they were long gone.

  I stood behind him, so I leaned in and hugged him from the back. "Maybe they figured out how to fix the boat after you left, and—took it for a test drive?" He seemed so deflated and I wanted so much to help him feel better. He turned in my arms to face me and forced a smile as he looked down at me. "Maybe you're right."

  He didn't sound convinced. I gave him a quick kiss and hugged him once more.

  "You know what we need?" I said.

  "Besides a boat?" He was downright surly this time. Verification of how much we needed what I was about to suggest.

  "We need a nap. Why don't we go back to the lodge and see what the others are up to? Maybe they'll feel the same way."

  "You want us all to take a nap together?" he asked.

  "Uh—no. I could think of a million things I’d rather do. I'd rather try to swim back to the parking lot from here than do that.”

  “You’d hate it that much? You, the non-swimmer would rather swim for miles in cold water, than force yourself to sleep in the same room with the others?” The smile lines returned around the corners of his eyes, giving me motivation to continue. I knew Alex had wanted nothing more than to make me happy by having us come to this island. The least I could do would be to help him feel happy too.

  “It’s not them, personally, but oh, yeah. I would find a way—somehow.”

  His mouth hitched to the side again. “I’ve no doubt that you would.”

  “In fact, once I made my swim, I’d jump in my van and drive–oh, wait. She’s broken down.” I sighed, completely taken out of my happy imaginings and plopped right back into reality. “I never thought I’d see the day. I mean, her name is Zombie Sue for a reason. Or—it was."