The Murder of Twelve

by Jessica Fletcher

  “Well, my shift’s the one immediately after his, so it’ll be like just starting a bit early. I’ll bet he fell asleep or something. It would be just like Mark.”

  “You’d be about the same age, wouldn’t you?”

  She nodded. “We’re practically brother and sister.”

  I recalled how she had been raised by her aunt and uncle following the death of her parents when she was a young girl. Given her closeness to the family, I thought about asking Lois Mulroy-Dodge about the odd thing, the anomaly, I’d spotted in Daniel and Mark’s nursery amid the slideshow, but it didn’t feel like the right place or time. Besides, Mark Mulroy himself would be far better positioned to answer my questions.

  “I was terribly sorry to hear about your husband,” I said instead, recalling that Constance had told me the young woman had lost her husband to an accident at sea.

  Her expression turned stoic. “He wasn’t nearly as good at piloting a sailboat as he thought, Mrs. Fletcher. We never should have gone out that day, even if that storm did spring up out of nowhere. The mast cracked and landed on him while he was trying to protect me. He died hours later while I was holding him.”

  “I’m so sorry, Lois.”

  “I wake up some nights in bed and can still feel him sleeping next to me. Is that unusual?”

  “Are you asking me as a writer?”

  “As an expert in such things, I suppose.” The young woman shrugged.

  I opted not to ask her what she meant by that, and for the simplest of responses. “No, Lois, it’s not unusual at all. In fact, it’s totally normal, what those far more expert than I would call the lingering effect of shock and grief.”

  It didn’t appear my words had worked much as a reassurance.

  “Thank you, Mrs. Fletcher,” she said anyway, as I stepped aside so she could enter the room. “I’ll be waiting up here when you find Mark.”

  * * *

  * * *

  Over my months residing at Hill House, I’d trodden a well-worn path to the hotel gym that was located in a newly renovated area of the basement level that also included a business center and a pair of conference-style rooms. The minor upgrades allowed the hotel to attract at least modest conference business of up to fifty attendees. That didn’t do that much for Hill House’s bottom line, but it did serve to boost revenue during the normally slower winter months.

  I retreated to the gym regularly during the colder months, when my bicycle was tucked away in storage. I preferred the elliptical machines and was also no stranger to the pair of treadmills with a television hanging between them. The two ellipticals, meanwhile, had television screens built in. For the record, I’d also gotten to know my way around some light weight-lifting exercises.

  I used my key card to enter the gym. One of the televisions was on, tuned of course to the Weather Channel, but there was no sign of Mark Mulroy anywhere about, until I spotted a figure lying supine on a bench positioned under an assisted weight assembly I think is called a Smith machine. The Smith machine operated on a cable-and-pulley system that maximized safety for whoever was using it.

  “Mark,” I called out. “Mark, it’s Jessica Fletcher. I was just wondering if—”

  I froze halfway across the floor, realizing Mark Mulroy’s arms had dropped to his sides, fingers nearly scraping the floor. He wasn’t moving, wasn’t breathing, and as my vision adjusted to the lighting and the mirrored far wall, I saw that the stationary barbell supporting the weight stack was pressed against his neck. I made myself move forward until I was close enough to confirm what I’d already suspected.

  Mark Mulroy was dead.

  Chapter Twelve

  My breathing settled again after a few seconds, at which point I called Seamus McGilray on my cell phone. I figured as part owner and manager of the hotel he had a right to know first.

  “Jessica?”

  “I’m in the gym, Seamus. You need to get down here.”

  “Problem?”

  “Putting it lightly, yes.”

  Through the gym’s glass walls I watched him coming down the basement hall inside of three minutes later. As soon as he stepped through the gym door I held open for him his eyes traced the same path mine had, and immediately fixed on Mark Mulroy’s still form.

  “Is he—”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Oh my, what an awful night this has become,” Seamus muttered, shaking his head.

  He approached the weight-lifting bench where Mark Mulroy lay dead. Drawing closer in his wake, I could see the blanching and purple bruising of the young man’s face, indicative more of death by asphyxiation than a broken neck from the force of two forty-five-pound weights on either side of the bar crashing down on him.

  Seamus seemed to read my mind. “The whole purpose of this piece of equipment is to minimize risk to the user. That’s why it’s here.”

  “So the weight didn’t fall and crush his neck?”

  He positioned himself behind the young man’s frame atop the weight bench, and looked as if he was prepared to lift the weighted bar upward. “The bar is resting on the neck, but given the design of the machine, it’s virtually inconceivable that it could have crushed it. Looks to me instead like somebody stood about where I am and pushed the weight downward, holding it until the young man suffocated to death.”

  “How terrible.”

  “Indeed.”

  I considered the scenario Seamus had proposed, recalling Mark Mulroy’s appearance and how he carried himself. “He was clearly in fine shape and quite muscular. If you’re right, we’re looking for someone at least as strong as him, and likely stronger.”

  “Not necessarily, Jessica,” Seamus told me. “Whoever held the bar down against his windpipe wouldn’t need to be all that strong, because he, or she, would’ve had the advantage of leverage.” He imitated the positioning and motion it would have taken. “The killer would only need to be standing where I’m standing and push down on the bar here and here, until the deed was done.”

  “Murder, then.”

  “I’d say most certainly, but I’m hardly an expert on such things,” Seamus said, the tone of his voice implying that I was.

  I let that part of his comment hang in the air and resolved to take some pictures on my phone, which I could then forward to Seth Hazlitt so the good doctor could confirm Seamus’s conclusions as to the means by which Mark Mulroy had been killed.

  “We need to seal this room, Seamus,” I said, hearing my own voice as if someone else was speaking. “Nobody else allowed in.”

  “I can take it off-line, so no one else’s key card will work in here.”

  That made me think of Tyler Castavette’s unwarranted entry into my room, something I’d yet to share with Seamus. “Something else,” I told him. “One of the guests upstairs has a master key card of some kind.”

  “For all of Hill House, you’re saying?”

  I nodded.

  Seamus’s expression bent into a scowl. “Please point him out to me. I need to have a word with this guest.”

  “I don’t think that’s a good idea at this point when we should be focusing all our energy on one successful murder and one attempted one. That starts with gathering the ten remaining guests in the lobby to tell them what’s transpired and continue our investigation.”

  “Our investigation, Mrs. Fletcher?”

  “Didn’t you mention to me once that you had some police experience in your native Ireland, Seamus?”

  “As a constable directing traffic—murder wasn’t exactly in my job description.”

  “It is now.”

  * * *

  * * *

  Before closing off the hotel gym, Seamus and I checked it carefully for Mark Mulroy’s personal items, which might be important to the investigation into his murder. If I’ve learned anything about cell phones, it’s tha
t their detailed call logs can be a godsend in determining a murder victim’s final words, plans, and intentions. But Mark Mulroy’s cell phone was nowhere to be found, either on his person or anywhere inside the small gym. Neither was his wallet or even the key card to access his room, and it was a safe bet that his murderer had made off with all of that.

  While Seamus retreated upstairs to begin the process of rounding up the rest of the wedding party, I remained outside the gym to call Mort. I have to admit that the prospect of being alone anywhere in the hotel right then was hardly pleasant. I made sure to ring Mort with my back pressed against a wall and with a clear view of the hall beyond, stretching past the hotel business center and conference rooms all the way to the elevator and stairwell.

  “Any updates, Mrs. F.?” he said, by way of greeting. “I was just about to call you with some news of my own.”

  “Yes, there is indeed, Mort, if you include murder.”

  I heard him sigh on the other end of the line. “The woman who was poisoned passed?”

  “No, it’s her son,” I said, and proceeded to fill him in on what I’d found inside the hotel gym, adding for good measure the conclusions Seamus had reached. “Mort?” I said after he’d stayed silent for too long once I’d completed my report.

  “You know the conditions when the crime rate was the lowest in New York City, Mrs. F.?”

  “Blizzards would be my guess,” I told him.

  “Any measurable snowstorm, actually. The crime rate literally fell in direct correlation with the amount of snow accumulated. Apparently, that unwritten rule doesn’t apply in Cabot Cove. No rules of crime apply in Cabot Cove.”

  “Not when it comes to murder,” I said, from outside the Hill House gym while Seamus went about the chore of rounding up the remaining ten guests to gather in the lobby.

  I filled Mort in on the details of Mark’s death, drawing a hefty “Ugh” from him when I suggested murder was the only rational explanation, though a weight-lifting accident was still a remote possibility.

  “If you’re right, Mrs. F.,” Mort pronounced grimly, “it means you’ve now got a murderer loose at the hotel. Good news is they’re not going anywhere.”

  “What’s the bad news, Mort?”

  “That they’re not going anywhere until their work is done.”

  “Could be it already is, if mother and son were the targets.”

  “So far, you mean. Who else is present from that side of the family, in terms of direct relatives?”

  “Just a niece,” I said, thinking of Mark’s cousin Lois Mulroy-Dodge, the young woman presently standing vigil over Constance Mulroy up in her room. “Oh,” I said as an afterthought, “a pair of elderly twin cousins: the Sprague sisters, Beatrice and Olivia.”

  “More twins?”

  “It seems to run in the family, along with tragedy.”

  “And murder.”

  “Unfortunately.”

  I could feel Mort thinking on the other end of the line. “Did I tell you that Cabot Cove maintains a small fleet of snowmobiles for just this sort of emergency?”

  “I remember it coming up in the emergency town meeting earlier today. Was that the news you said you had to share with me?”

  “No, that’s something else. Anyway, Dick Mann pulled them out of storage at the fire station and found them to be in fine working order once he gassed them up.”

  I gleaned his intentions immediately. “Have you ever driven a snowmobile, Mort?”

  “Have you ever driven to a crime scene through New York City rush hour traffic?”

  “I’ve never driven anywhere, period.”

  “Then take my word for it—after twenty years doing that, driving a snowmobile will be a piece of cake. If you can just hold down the fort long enough for me to get there, Mrs. F. . . .”

  “You’ve got an entire town to watch over during a record snowfall, Mort,” I reminded him.

  “And now I’ve got at least one murder to solve as well.”

  “I told you the initial victim is still resting comfortably.”

  “But she wasn’t really the initial victim at all, was she, Mrs. F.? There was that private eye this morning, and then the soon-to-be newlyweds who might well have fled that abandoned Lexus this afternoon.”

  “Except they’re apparently present and unaccounted for now, remember?” I said, thinking of the message the late Mark Mulroy had received from his twin brother, Daniel.

  “Well, it turns out they’re not, not at all. That’s the news I had to share with you,” Mort told me. “You see, I finally tracked down the owner of the Roadrunner Motel. Turns out, he closed the place down at noon today with no guests whatsoever on the premises.”

  * * *

  * * *

  That left me considering in an entirely new light what we were facing here tonight. I had wanted to get to the lobby before any of the wedding guests arrived, in order to study their reactions even as they emerged from the elevator. But I had to process what Mort’s news meant before proceeding upstairs.

  First off, obviously I needed to view the Lexus that had been abandoned on the road with its front doors still open in the context I’d originally feared. While Mort still hadn’t received confirmation that this particular Hertz vehicle had been rented at the Portland Jetport, it was difficult not to consider the obvious. And with the obvious came the connection, through that distinctive gravel left on the SUV’s backseat floor mat, with the murder of Loomis Winslow. That left me considering the worst-case, and now most likely, scenario.

  First, the private investigator had been murdered, though not by Bigfoot as our lone witness claimed.

  Then, the Lexus SUV had turned up, its driver and passenger having fled and the presence of that gravel in the backseat indicating the same killer might have been responsible.

  Next, Constance Mulroy had somehow been poisoned at dinner, and then her son Mark was murdered in the hotel gym.

  That, of course, raised the question of why exactly Mark had lied about his brother having contacted him. I wanted to believe it had been to assuage his mother’s fears, to give her and everyone else one less thing to worry about, given the promise of an already-frightful night. But what if his intentions had been more nefarious? And did those intentions explain why his cell phone was missing from the hotel gym? Surely he wouldn’t have ventured down there without it, under the circumstances. Without it, meanwhile, we’d be unable to ascertain whether he’d actually spoken to his brother Daniel at all or learn the identity of anyone else with whom he might have been in contact.

  I remembered in that moment that, while upstairs with Constance Mulroy, I’d texted Harry McGraw the names of all members of the wedding party, the late Mark Mulroy included. I still had no idea what he needed them for and resolved to call him for an update after the meeting upstairs in the lobby with the remainder of the wedding party was concluded. I now had Constable Seamus McGilray to serve as my deputy, and I fully expected to receive a call from Mort Metzger fairly soon that he was about to set off for Hill House via snowmobile.

  Just as I was finally heading for the elevator, my caller ID lit up with SETH at the top of the screen.

  “You didn’t call to tell me,” he snapped angrily.

  “Tell you what?”

  “That there’s been another murder there.”

  “The first victim’s still alive—remember?”

  “All the same, I have to learn such news from Mort?”

  “He called you?”

  “I called him. In case you’ve forgotten, I am chief emergency medical official of Cabot Cove. I just thought I should check in, and what do I learn? That Jessica Fletcher is stranded at Hill House alone with a killer.”

  “I’m hardly alone, Seth. There’s the rest of the wedding party, in addition to Seamus McGilray.”

  “Whatever that mean
s. Mort was slight on the details.”

  “I didn’t provide many.”

  “He said something about asphyxiation in what originally might have been deemed a weight-lifting accident. Broken neck as well?”

  “No. By all accounts,” I corrected, not going into all the details, “the young man’s killer pressed the barbell down against his throat and held it there until . . . Anyway, I was just about to e-mail you some pictures so you could confirm that diagnosis.”

  “So now you’re a medical examiner and a doctor? A more suspicious type might think you were out to replace me. Good thing Mort will soon be on his way to sort everything out.”

  “He’s really going to try to make his way here? He told you that, Seth?”

  “Indeed, he did, ayuh. Coming by snowmobile, he said, of all things. Says he’s gonna try to make it to the fire station in his SUV and ride over to Hill House from there. I was almost tempted to ride along with him.”

  “What stopped you?”

  “Survival instinct, I suppose, Jess. Have you ever known me to ride in any moving vehicle other than one of my trusty Volvos?”

  “As a matter of fact, no.”

  “Then why start now? But I find myself worried over my favorite pinochle partner and fellow Mara’s pie enthusiast.”

  “I’ll be fine, Seth. Like you said, Mort will be on his way shortly.”

  “Right, riding a snowmobile,” Seth repeated. “Might as well be coming from Boston. Don’t forget to send me those pictures so the real de facto medical examiner of Cabot Cove can have a look.”

  * * *

  * * *

  Upstairs in the lobby, I left my phone on in case a call came from either Mort or Harry McGraw, whom I was expecting to hear from. By the time I got there everyone had been assembled, having been shepherded accordingly by Seamus McGilray and placed in a makeshift sitting area that had called for a repositioning of much of the lobby furniture into a neat circle. Seamus had left one of the staff members riding the storm out on the premises to watch over Constance Mulroy upstairs, and the ten remaining wedding party members gathered here along with Seamus and me.