So Then There Were None

by Annie Adams

  “Maybe there’s some kind of machine or something hooked to the phone lines somewhere. Whoever is running this game forgot to turn it off,” I said.

  “Well, ladies, we’ve got the whole evening ahead of us. What should we do to kill some time?” Alex knew when and how to diffuse the tension in a lot of situations.

  “We could all go to the pool,” I said. I only suggested this because I knew it’s what Alex wanted to do. His plan included us being alone, I was pretty sure, but K.C. is good company, and we would have plenty of time to be alone at home. Once my mother recovered from her trauma and finally decided she didn’t hate Alex for trying to steal me away to a haunted place in the woods. Of course, I wouldn’t be telling her about the possibilities of ghosts or hauntings on this trip, but there was no stopping K.C. from telling a tall-tale.

  “You know what, kids? I think I’ll be mighty content if I just go upstairs and take my time packing up my things, reading my book, and sipping a little bit of wine. You two should have a chance to be alone anyway.”

  “Now don’t worry about us, K.C.,” Alex said.

  “Truly, I want to take it easy tonight. You go on and have a fun last evening here at this spectacular place. Last chance, you know.”

  “Okay. Maybe we’ll just take you up on that offer,” Alex said.

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  We left K.C. at her room on the way to our own.

  “Did you bring your key?” Alex asked me.

  “So not funny.”

  “What do you mean? I don’t have mi—” His mouth lost the battle and broke into a crooked grin. “Alright, I guess it wasn’t the right time for that joke.”

  “I think for the rest of our lives it will never be the time for that joke,” I said.

  “I like the sound of that,” he said while pulling me in close to him.

  “The sound of you not ever teasing me about losing the keys?”

  He laughed quietly and then grew silent and serious. He stared into my eyes. The brown chocolate drops looking warmer than ever. “The sound of you and me together for the rest of our lives.”

  I gulped in a breath and tried not to cry. The only thing I could do was to bury my head against his neck and squeeze him as tight as I could.

  As I started packing my bag so that I wouldn’t have to do it after we got back from the pool, I thought through the events of the past couple of days, which had seemed like months. Something about the story of being stranded on an island, with no contact with the outside world and people being eliminated one by one kept nagging at me. I already knew this story somehow.

  I’d changed into my swimsuit and cover up and was finished with any amount of packing I was going to do for the time being. Alex was still busy going through his stuff so I decided to go ahead of him and grab some snacks from the kitchen to take outside with us.

  “I’m going downstairs. I’ll take a towel for you.”

  He didn’t look up from his suitcase and I wasn’t sure if he’d heard me.

  “Alex?”

  This time he did look up, but his attention wasn’t fully on me. He seemed focused on the contents of his suitcase.

  “Is something wrong?”

  He paused for a nanosecond then seemed to snap out of it. “No, nothing’s wrong.” He gave me a quick smile. “I’ll be right there. I just misplaced my watch.”

  “You’re wearing it.”

  He looked down at his wrist and then tapped the side of his head with his palm. “Geez, don’t I feel stupid. I’m too distracted by your beauty.”

  I felt my eyebrows scrunching together. “Okay…” I didn’t believe him for a second and I paused with my hand on the doorknob.

  “Everything’s fine.” He came over and cradled my face in his hands then kissed me. “I’m five minutes behind you. Here,” he reached behind me and unlatched the door, “allow me.”

  I couldn’t help giving him the suspicious squinty-eye as I slowly rolled my body around the door and into the hallway. It was similar to his one-eyebrow-lifted suspicious gaze, but I couldn’t pull that one off. After I was about five feet away he called out, “I get to see you naked in ten minutes!”

  My skin’s auto-blush kicked in and the ensuing heat, incinerating my body in its entirety. He laughed fiendishly and ducked inside the room before I had the chance to reply.

  I couldn’t get my mind off the way the murder mystery had gone. I knew it hadn’t worked out as originally planned by Mike and Christie’s friends. It seemed that more people were supposed to have participated during the weekend, since there was enough food to feed all of them. I supposed that the “murders” could have originally been planned for the bridesmaids, but then anyone here at the lodge could have figured out the mystery.

  And then there was that story line seeming so familiar to me. It kept popping up, just on the edge of memory. I tried to clear my head and let the answer come to me in its own time. What I needed was a shower. It always seems that answers come to me when I’m in the middle of a shower. Maybe it would come to me in the shower at the pool deck, I thought to myself as I descended the stairs in the main foyer.

  “That’s it!” I said to no one, but I couldn’t contain my excitement for having remembered. It was the book that moved the bookcase to reveal the secret passage. And Then There Were None, by Agatha Christie. If this mystery had been patterned after events in that book, all I had to do was look inside the book to refresh my memory of who committed the murders. Maybe it would serve nothing more than to relieve my mind with the solution to the puzzle. Or maybe, since the game went off the rails, I could figure out who the murderer was supposed to be, and maybe I could still collect the prize money.

  I made a sharp right turn at the bottom of the staircase, shifted our towels under my other arm and headed for the game room.

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  I grasped the handle of the game room door and immediately an ice cold energy shot through my body and my skin prickled with shivers from head to toe. I clutched the towels I’d been holding to my chest and squeezed as hard as I could, trying to feel like I was keeping myself together. I waited for the ghostly whisper that usually came next, but it never came.

  I leaned back against the door frame until the chills, which were followed by some profuse sweating all subsided. This wasn’t normal. And there were no ghosts. Something was wrong with me.

  I stayed where I was for a moment and thought about all the instances where I’d experienced the chills and heard the voices. It could quite possibly all add up to being stressed out. The flower business is tough, and there’s always a heap of things to worry about on a daily basis. Then there was Alex’s occupation. He wasn’t happy at a desk but I worried so much when he was away. When he wasn’t away, we tried to spend time together, and that often led to certain adult activities. Maybe the Pill was doing things to my hormones. Things other than what I wanted it to be doing to them, making me feel and hear strange things.

  I took a deep breath, got a hold of myself and vowed to call my doctor when I got home. Now for that book.

  Apparently, we had left the hurricane lamps on when we exited the room earlier. I turned on the overhead light and then went to the bookcase. I wasn’t sure if I’d be able to lift the book out of the bookcase, since it was the part of the latch mechanism. I tugged lightly on the spine, heard the latch click and the bookcase eased toward me. Upon closer inspection, I found that the book was held by a sort of sleeve attached to the lever that worked the latch. I was able to slide the book out of the sleeve and open the pages.

  I hurriedly skimmed, not wanting Alex to be wondering where I was. I read the poem in the book, and then flipped to the last chapters—something I usually considered a cardinal sin if I haven’t previously read the entire book!

  Based on the order of the characters’ murders in the book, the “murderer” in our game should have been…Eva?

  I just knew that couldn’t be right. I couldn’t imagine a professio
nal mystery game company having the person who helped plan the entire wedding and weekend at the lodge be the person at the center of the game. Not when there was money involved. The things that came out of her mouth suggested that she wouldn’t be the one.

  Our theory about plans gone wrong and someone else trying to take up the game must have been right. I remembered how Chad and Johnny left early—maybe they were fulfilling the required tasks for the game—probably getting paid for it, and when they left, someone had to take over. As soon as I thought of that theory, the flaws came to mind just as fast.

  I replaced the book and swung the bookcase back into place until it latched. Dang it, I thought to myself, I’d left the hurricane lamps on again. I walked over to the table, to see if there was a manual switch on the lamp sitting there. Something on the table flashed a reflection of the light.

  Charms.

  Not one, but two. A cat and a dollar bill. The cat was definitely Pam’s and the dollar bill had to be Audra’s. Kind of lazy leaving them both here on the table, I thought. And then I had a thought that caused a sickening pain in my chest. These were put here after Alex and I discovered the bookcase. I knew I had looked at the table when we were searching for Pam.

  I tore out of that room and down the hall. I realized we hadn’t left the lamps on when we left, they’d been lit to get someone to come back to the room. I saw that the door to the garden room was open as I approached. Alex must have already arrived. I stopped, leaned against the wall, and took a deep breath. If those charms were laid out after us, it meant that someone besides me, Alex, or K.C. was still here. So what? That was part of the game before? Why should it be so scary now? But who could have done it?

  It wasn’t Alex, I’d left him at our room and gone straight to the game room. And I’d heard K.C. singing a warbling soprano solo to herself—even though she’s got a definite alto voice—as I passed the door to her room on the way to the staircase.

  So maybe it was like the ending in the book. The police didn’t find out what really happened until months later. Perhaps since no one solved the mystery, no one would find out what happened until later. Maybe the answer would come with the thank-you notes?

  Feeling relieved and annoyed at the way the game had petered out, I went straight to the pool.

  “Remind me never to suggest having a murder mystery at our wedding, okay?” I said as I walked through the French doors and onto the patio deck. Alex wasn’t out on the deck. And he wasn’t in the pool, the water was deathly still.

  “Alex?” I called out.

  Nothing. Realizing he must have gone to the kitchen to grab something to drink, I laid the towels out on two patio chairs then headed toward the kitchen. I had to tell him about the charms.

  He wasn’t in the kitchen either. I came back down the hall, checking the restrooms off the main ballroom and inside the ballroom itself, for good measure.

  He must have been delayed in the room. I went to the grand staircase and as I put my hand on the newel post and stepped onto the first step, I felt the now-familiar icy chills pass through me, and a loud, yet distant, whispery voice in my head said, Get out!

  Okay, so maybe it wasn’t all in my head. Maybe there was a ghost who wanted me out of here. Thing is, we both wanted the same thing. But before that, I wanted Alex.

  I ran upstairs, my heart still pounding from my ghostly encounter. I thought I might be close to hyperventilating when I got to the top. After some very controlled breathing, I managed to bring myself back from feeling like I was going to faint. I walked as slowly as I could manage to my room, and of course, I didn’t have a key.

  “Alex?” I called out, as I knocked on our door. “Alex, I don’t have a key, let me in,” I said toward the door, a little louder than the first time I called him.

  There was no reply or response of any kind. I grabbed the door handle, and more out of frustration than logical thought, tried it just in case. In case of the lock malfunctioning at precisely the moment I needed it to? Something like that.

  As my fingers curled around the handle, I felt something different than the smooth, polished metal I expected. I looked down and saw a tiny gold chain. I pulled it off the handle and found a very familiar golden charm. It was a heart, my heart to be exact, only it had been broken in half.

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  Tears found their way to the corners of my eyes, blurring the detail on the tiny charm. I knew something was very wrong.

  I ran down the hall, stopping to pound on K.C.’s door. Of course, she didn’t answer.

  After a last try at the pool and the garden room, I confirmed that I was alone. The only thing I could think to do was return to the game room. Someone had wanted me, or us there, maybe that’s where I was supposed to go to finish this game-mystery-thing once and for all.

  For the smallest moment, I considered the possibility that Alex and K.C. were in on the plan to trick me, but I discarded the notion. It was unimaginable that they could be involved in something that created this sinister feeling. I wondered then if the ghostly warning really was inside my head, my subconscious trying to tell me to pay attention to my gut. Just like my Aunt Rosie had always told me to do.

  Halfway down the hall, I could see the flickering light of the hurricane lamps escaping through the sliver of a gap created by the open game room door. With dread, I took the final steps required to confront whatever it was that I was meant to confront. I pushed the door hard, so as to fling it open and reciprocate the shock I had just been given with my charm. So I hadn’t figured out the murderer in time, but how did they get my charm bracelet, and why did they have to break it in half like that? What a stupid game. What a stupid weekend. Now I looked forward to seeing who the idiot was who had royally messed this all up.

  I walked in and saw the table. Empty.

  “Hello, Quincy.”

  “Kourtnee?” I yelled after I shrieked into the rafters. “Where did you come from?”

  “From behind the door,” she said as she rubbed her nose. I felt a great sense of pleasure from having caused that bump on the nose.

  “Why?” I couldn’t help yelling.

  “Why what?” she said, with her usual clueless nonchalance.

  “Why behind the door? Why alone here in this room? Why are we still here?”

  All I got in reply was a no-effort shrug.

  I tried a different tack. “So you’re the murderer? This all seems kind of elaborate if I’m just the next victim. And it doesn’t follow the book at all.”

  “What book?” she asked me.

  I pointed to the Agatha Christie book. “The one that opens the bookcase, the one that this whole weekend has been based on.” I got another vapid shrug for an answer.

  “I don’t know about any book,” she said, removing her hood as she came toward me a couple of steps. I moved back the same distance.

  “I’ve got to sit down,” she said.

  Underneath her hood was somewhat of a rat’s nest of hair. I followed her to the table, where she sat down with a burdened thud. Despite the low lighting, it was obvious she was looking haggard.

  “So what do we do now?” It was time to get this over with. “Am I the last victim, or how does it work?”

  She looked at me as if I was taxing the very last reserves of mental energy she had left. “I have to get you to the boat.”

  “Wait a minute. There’s a boat here?”

  That elicited a heavy sigh. Just then it struck me. “So, you’re not the murderer, are you?”

  She confirmed with a tired shake of the head.

  She was just the henchman, so to speak.

  “How does it work? No one solved the mystery, so the prize money goes to the murderer?”

  “Yeah, something like that.”

  “And I assume you’re splitting the money with them, since you seem to be doing—this? You hid behind the bookcase and then took Pam, didn’t you?”

  “You got me.”

  “So then, who is th
e murderer?”

  Kourtnee glanced in a couple of different directions through slit eyes. She leaned forward and I did the same. “It was supposed to be Eva, but things didn’t work out like they were supposed to.”

  Despite how that news didn’t fit in to what I had hypothesized, I somehow had always known that Eva was the culprit. It still didn’t make any sense, but we were so far past things making sense in this game.

  “I have to ask you something,” I said. “Do you know who pushed you off the roof?”

  “Nobody pushed me off the roof.” She said so in a way that made it sound like I had said something completely insane.

  “So, when K.C. and I found you in the bushes—you had climbed in there?”

  “Look, I take sleeping pills. And I know what you’re thinking, but they’re a prescription. Sometimes I sleepwalk when I’m on them, especially when I’m stressed out.”

  I supposed that was possible. But the way she’d been positioned in those bushes looked like she had to have fallen into them from above. I would have to take her word for it. Not that it mattered. I was never going to see these people again if I had anything to say about it. Alex could forget inviting any of these bridesmaids to our wedding. I was this close to excluding Mike and Christie despite knowing how Alex would protest.

  That thought brought on a strong pang of guilt. None of the others had planned this mystery, and something had gone wrong in the planning, I was almost sure.

  “Kourtnee, what did you mean that Eva was supposed to be the murderer? If she isn’t then who is?”

  “I can’t tell you that, we’re still playing.”

  “We are? Who’s left? Where are Alex and K.C.?”

  Kourtnee glanced at the same spot in the room that she had before. “They’re getting on the boat. We have to hurry.”