The Murder of Twelve

by Jessica Fletcher

  So Heath Mulroy had supposedly plunged to his death off the Brooklyn Bridge and now his son, and coconspirator, might well have disappeared into the woods on the eve of a killer blizzard. That brought my thinking back to the murder of Loomis Winslow and finding on the backseat floor mat gravel that made for a perfect match with gravel from the parking lot of the Cabot Manufacturing Company. Something was bothering me again about that particular image, something I’d seen but hadn’t quite registered and couldn’t locate in my memory.

  “Daniel was the heir apparent,” Connie continued, “always the apple of his father’s eye far more than Mark. I didn’t want to believe he was complicit, wanted to believe he’d been duped by the scheme like everyone. But I was naive, wasn’t I? When I told you I feared my life was in danger . . .”

  She let the rest of the thought dangle, leaving me to pick it up. “Because you suspected your husband was still alive, because you were cooperating with the authorities against his interests and wanted to see whatever money he may have squirreled away returned to the investors that he’d swindled.”

  Connie nodded. “I felt I was being watched for some time. I know it was him, Jessica. I know it was Heath, waiting for the opportunity to escape for good with the money he must have stockpiled.”

  “That’s why you hired Loomis Winslow, isn’t it? To find whatever’s left of the money your husband stole from his clients.”

  Her face flashed surprise at my knowledge of that. “He told me he was onto something, that he needed to check a few more things out. He was supposed to call me this afternoon, but he never did.”

  “Because he was murdered this morning, just a few miles from here, where it appeared he was meeting someone.”

  “How awful!” Connie’s voice turned desperate, pleading. “It was Heath, don’t you see? It must’ve been! He killed Winslow and now he’s coming for me. Now he’s—” Her face paled, the slow realization of terror spreading over it. “And Mark—he must have killed Mark, too! It’s him, Jessica! He tried to poison me and then he murdered his own son!”

  “Mark wasn’t involved in your husband’s business, was he?” I asked, as the others in the room looked on in rapt fascination.

  “He tried,” Connie offered as an explanation. “It didn’t work out.” She left it there.

  “An inconsistency surfaced when I looked into the twins’ birth records,” I told her.

  “An incon—,” she started to repeat, but stopped.

  “There was no record of the infants ever being discharged. I was wondering if you might have some idea why.”

  She shook her head. “I have no idea, none at all, Jessica. If I did . . .”

  Her voice tailed off again, as if she was having trouble completing her thoughts. No surprise, under the circumstances, having just awakened from a brief coma.

  “Tell me about Owen, Connie.”

  “Owen?” she repeated, eyes widening at my mention of the name.

  “The triplet who was stillborn.”

  “I know who he was. You don’t need to remind me.”

  “So the report was true,” I advanced, not sure where I was going with this.

  “Of course. Why wouldn’t it be? It was the saddest moment of my life, Jessica—until tonight.”

  At that, Constance Mulroy broke down hysterically. I was beginning to fear she was going to lapse back into her coma, before Lois Mulroy-Dodge, the niece she had practically raised as her own daughter, rushed to her and swallowed Connie in a hug, the two of them sobbing horribly.

  I looked to the Sprague sisters, to Virginia Da Salle, Henley Lavarnay, and Harrison Bak, who was leaning on his crutches, before I settled on Tyler Castavette, whom I still found no reason to trust. But Tyler’s reaction was pained as well, along with something else he wore on his expression like a scarlet letter:

  Fear.

  He was just as scared as the rest of us and it showed. His cousin Mark was dead. His father, too, along with Faye and Ian. Four dead and another nearly so, leaving eight members of the wedding party.

  While Lois Mulroy-Dodge continued to comfort her aunt, Seamus and I wheeled Mort into the bedroom portion of the suite. I asked Seamus to go about the task of removing Mort’s wet clothes and getting him settled beneath my bedcovers; despite the circumstances, I couldn’t bring myself to violate his privacy by seeing him stripped down to his underwear, though I suppose it would make for quite a tale to tell at Mara’s later.

  If we both survived the rest of the night, and the storm, that is.

  I stood in the doorway between the bedroom and living room, surveying the potential victims, who were all still potential suspects as well. I was afraid to rule out even the Sprague sisters any longer, my thinking so jumbled and my mind struggling to recall what had struck me about the Lexus’s backseat.

  The attack on Mort lent a new wrinkle to our state. The gash on his head I intended to dress with the first-aid kit Seamus had brought along from the lobby could have been inflicted only outside the hotel. It certainly had the contours of a wound made by some kind of blunt instrument, but I supposed it could have also been inflicted in an accident that had separated him from his snowmobile. The former scenario meant someone I was looking at right now would have had to venture outside to do the deed, and then return without showing any signs of the storm on their clothes or person, much less a trail of melted snow. I supposed they could have used another entrance, but that wouldn’t have explained the lack of any indication of puddling or discoloration due to wetness on the lobby rug. The basement where the gym and hotel conference center were located, meanwhile, had a single emergency exit that would have set off a blaring alarm if opened.

  Or so I thought.

  Anything was possible at this point. Nothing could be ruled out.

  Once Mort was settled under the covers, I used the considerable contents of the first-aid kit to wash and dress the gash on the back of his head. It was deep enough to require stitches, so I kept the pressure tight and added layers of adhesive tape after clearing Mort’s sodden hair from the area.

  “He could do with another blanket, Mrs. Fletcher,” Seamus noted, after feeling Mort’s forehead and detecting a slight chill.

  “I have extras in the living room closet,” I told him, already moving in that direction.

  All eyes were upon me as I made my way across the room to the closet I used mostly for books and such, with no shelves in my suite. You’d be amazed at how much I’d accumulated during such a lengthy hotel stay necessitated by the ongoing reconstruction of my home.

  The people whose eyes followed me wanted reassurance that they’d be alive beyond the dawn, something I could in no way provide them. I turned away from the remainder of the wedding party to retrieve those extra blankets for Mort, drawing open the closet door as I had a thousand times.

  Only this time, a body tumbled out straight into me.

  Chapter Twenty

  The body knocked me to the floor and I narrowly missed striking my head on a leg of the dining table. I shoved it off me in a panic. I heard screaming and wondered it if was my own, though not the words that followed.

  “That’s Heath!” cried out Constance Mulroy. “That’s my husband!”

  It was Tyler Castavette, of all people, who helped lift me back to my feet, even as Seamus McGilray charged in from the bedroom.

  “Oh no . . . Oh no, oh no, oh no,” Constance Mulroy kept repeating on a constant loop.

  The shock of seeing dead for real the body of a husband she believed had faked his own death, coupled with just having learned of her son Mark’s death, was too awful to even consider. The body was stiff and cold, as if it had been pulled from a freezer or a car trunk in these frigid conditions. It was impossible to tell how long Heath Mulroy had been dead or determine the manner of his murder without the kind of thorough examination Seth Hazlitt would perform
if he were here. Or the simplified version he would talk me through if cell service hadn’t been down in the area. I tried my room phone, but no dial tone greeted me.

  Still shaken myself, I moved across the room and crouched before Connie. “You’re sure that’s your husband, Heath Mulroy?”

  She managed a single nod.

  Seamus skirted the man’s stiff corpse to fetch the blankets required to keep Mort warm. He also located some extra sheets, which he laid down alongside the body. I couldn’t imagine leaving Heath Mulroy in place, even covered by sheets, but I couldn’t focus on choosing a suitable alternative at present.

  “How long has it been since you’ve seen your husband, Connie?” I posed gently.

  “I don’t remember exactly. He supposedly jumped to his death three months ago now. It would have been the morning of that night.”

  “I have another question for you, Connie,” I said, holding her knees with my hands, “a difficult one. Could you answer it for me?”

  “If I know the answer,” she offered.

  “You came to Hill House with a great deal of cash stuffed in your tote bag. That’s true, isn’t it?”

  She nodded, and looked toward Virginia Da Salle. “You carried it up to my room for me after I checked in, Ms. Da Salle—remember?”

  Virginia Da Salle’s gaze met mine, the mystery of how her nail polish had ended up on a handle of the tote bag solved. “Yes, I do. You really had your hands full. I remember now. . . .”

  “And I appreciated the gesture.”

  “The money was for Doyle Castavette, wasn’t it?” I asked Constance Mulroy.

  She nodded again.

  “You gave it to him, didn’t you?”

  No nod this time. “Mark delivered it to Doyle’s suite on my behalf.”

  I couldn’t resist glancing toward Tyler to gauge his reaction to learning his father had a tote bag with a half million dollars stuffed inside. His mouth had indeed dropped, no doubt as he was pondering how he might have made off with it.

  “Was it a payoff, a bribe?”

  Another nod.

  “But your husband was already thought to be dead. It must’ve been your sons you were protecting.”

  “Only Daniel,” Constance Mulroy corrected. “He managed to escape prosecution, but Doyle had proof of his complicity. He’d lost a great deal of money in my husband’s supposed fund and I made up for that as much as I could to buy his silence and keep Daniel out of jail.”

  “Not Mark?”

  She sighed deeply and shivered, forced to recall his murder. “He was only peripherally involved with my husband’s business, like I just told you. Tried his hand at a bunch of things, but none of them clicked. But he figured out what was going on and told his father he’d report him to the authorities if my husband didn’t turn himself in.”

  “Mark was the whistle-blower,” I said.

  “Only internally. When my husband learned the authorities were preparing to arrest him, he concocted the ruse of his suicide.”

  “Mark told you about what he’d uncovered, didn’t he?”

  “Not exactly. It was me who told Mark. He went to the authorities because I instructed him to.”

  * * *

  * * *

  The pieces were falling into place and the puzzle taking shape, centered around the Mulroy family’s financial deceptions and general duplicity. I was starting to see the other victims, with the exception of Doyle Castavette, as collateral damage. That might not rule out that serial mass murderer who’d struck two other similarly isolated venues, but it certainly suggested a far more personal motivation behind the potential murder of the twelve guests originally gathered here.

  As that thought sifted through my mind, I was left considering what it indicated about the murderer’s identity, which got me thinking about Heath Mulroy’s corpse, specifically how it had found its way into my suite. Given that the wedding party was clustered on the second floor, the third had likely gone untraveled through the bulk of the night. There would have been ample opportunity for Heath Mulroy’s real murderer, and the killer of four others here tonight, to get the body up here. But how had he or she managed to access my suite?

  I looked toward Tyler Castavette again. “Tyler, do you have that key card with you? I believe you know the one I’m referring to.”

  He nodded, grateful I still hadn’t mentioned that the previous afternoon he’d accessed my door, which was later opened by whoever had hidden Heath Mulroy’s body in the closet. He felt through his pockets and wallet, his expression growing tense when he came up empty.

  “It’s gone, Mrs. Fletcher,” he reported finally. “I swear I don’t know what happened to it.”

  I had expected as much, although I was still far from ruling Tyler out as a suspect. Except that he wasn’t a Mulroy and the Mulroys were where all this kept coming back to. A family steeped in betrayal, graft, and malfeasance. Was all this about revenge, then, or something else?

  “You’ve gone uncharacteristically quiet, Mrs. Fletcher,” noted Harrison Bak, seated now to take the pressure off his legs. “It would seem all roads here lead to Castle Mulroy, that this financial scandal is at the root of the threat against all our lives.”

  “Then why the whole ruse trying to make us believe what’s happening here is just like how that killer struck in those two other places?” Henley Lavarnay challenged.

  “The murderer, I believe, was creating his own cover story, following the scenario exactly as it had been performed in those other cases. By the time help finally got here, they’d find all of us dead and come to the same conclusion we did: that we’d fallen into the clutches of a fiend who’d done it before and will do it again.”

  Tyler seized the floor. “But he—”

  “Or she,” I interrupted.

  “—couldn’t possibly have planned for a blizzard, never mind a storm of this magnitude, right?”

  “I suspect the killer altered his plans to take advantage of the storm, but he—or she—would have targeted you all anyway over this wedding weekend. The storm became a random stroke of luck for our killer.”

  “Someone—,” Beatrice Sprague started.

  “In this room,” her sister, Olivia, finished.

  “How absolutely—”

  “Horrible, and we can only hope that—”

  “You, Mrs. Fletcher, flush out the killer—”

  “Before he can strike again,” Olivia finished again.

  “Or she,” Beatrice corrected. “Maybe it was—”

  “You. I never did fully—”

  “Trust you. Not in—

  “These seventy years.”

  With that the Sprague sisters made it a point to put more distance between their chairs—in perfect unison, of course.

  Seamus returned from tucking the fresh blankets around Mort in the bedroom portion of my suite and set about covering Heath Mulroy’s corpse with bedsheets until we determined what to do with it. Heath was a good-sized man, and it would have taken at least moderate strength to maneuver him about. That certainly seemed to eliminate the Spragues, Virginia Da Salle, and Henley Lavarnay, as well as Lois Mulroy-Dodge in all probability, and certainly Harrison Bak, given that he couldn’t manage his own weight without use of his crutches. Beyond them, there were also the hotel staff, Janey Ryland and Eugene, to consider; or, I supposed, some number of those seated before me might have been working together.

  While covering Heath Mulroy’s body, Seamus noticed something near him on the floor and scooped it up.

  He glared at Tyler. “Might this be your missing key card?”

  I answered for him. “No, his is a different shade altogether—isn’t it, Tyler? Identical to the Hill House brand.”

  “I suppose,” the young man said, face squeezed taut in an expression that was hateful and uncertain at the same ti
me.

  I accepted the key card from Seamus and held it before me. “It’s not a Hill House key card at all, is it, Seamus?”

  “No, Mrs. Fletcher. Ours are printed in black and white and feature the hotel graphic.”

  I took the key card from Seamus and tucked it into my pocket for safekeeping while the Spragues chimed in, though I wasn’t paying enough attention to them to tell exactly who was finishing whose statements.

  “I never liked Heath anyway. Always found him—”

  “Too arrogant—”

  “With his nose always up in the air. Remember the time—”

  “We drove to the country and—”

  “He pushed his seat back—”

  “All the way so I couldn’t—”

  “Move my legs.”

  “No, they were my legs. I was the one—”

  “Sitting behind him. Cramped and—”

  “Uncomfortable,” the Sprague sisters finished together, never settling on which one of them had been seated behind Heath Mulroy that day.

  Something scratched at my mind, something that brought me back to the Lexus SUV that had been abandoned miles from here. I remembered what hadn’t quite registered initially about the vehicle’s backseat.

  “Lois,” I said, facing her again, “what do you know about your cousin who died at birth?”

  “Owen,” Connie muttered, before her niece had a chance to speak his name.

  “Why would I know anything about him?” Lois Mulroy-Dodge challenged. “He died.”

  “Mark never shared anything with you?”

  “I don’t know what he could have shared, because there was nothing. Owen was stillborn.”

  “Jessica,” Constance Mulroy interjected, “what are you suggesting? After all these years, what does it matter?”

  “I believe it matters plenty. Why did you keep the third crib in the nursery?”

  She looked befuddled that I knew that. “I’m sure I don’t know. If I ever did, the memory’s gone.”