The Murder of Twelve

by Jessica Fletcher

“I think you do know, or at least suspect the truth.”

  “What truth are you talking about? What on earth are you saying?”

  I looked at Constance Mulroy as if she were the only person in the room. “I don’t think your son Owen, the third triplet, was stillborn at all. I think he’s still alive today.”

  * * *

  * * *

  “And I believe he may finally be getting his revenge,” I continued, as a heavy wave of shock descended upon the room. “He tried to kill his mother and succeeded with his brother and father.”

  I went into no further detail than that, avoiding the conclusions that were still crystalizing in my mind. I felt it all coming together, but I still didn’t have a tight grasp of what had transpired in the hospital delivery room that night almost thirty years ago and explained why there was no record of the surviving twins ever being discharged.

  I turned again toward Lois Mulroy-Dodge. “I’m going to ask you again, what do you know of this?”

  Her gaze had already been rooted on me. “Mark didn’t like talking about it. He didn’t learn about what happened that night until years later.”

  Constance Mulroy’s mouth dropped.

  “And what happened that night?” I persisted.

  Lois Mulroy-Dodge sought at all costs to avoid looking toward her aunt. “Owen wasn’t stillborn, but . . .”

  Her voice tailed off, and I coaxed the young woman on with my gaze.

  “. . . there were problems. Owen Mulroy was the last of the three my aunt gave birth to. And according to Mark, who only learned about this years later, he was deformed, disfigured—not someone worthy to bear the Mulroy name in his father’s mind.”

  “No,” I heard Connie mutter, her face having paled to an almost milk white tone. “No . . .”

  “My aunt was sedated at the time, so she never was to learn what happened next. Heath Mulroy swore all the doctors and nurses to secrecy, with ample payoffs to follow later. He arranged to have Owen listed as a stillborn and placed in the nursery as an orphaned John Doe.”

  “Explains why there’s no record of any of the brothers being discharged from the hospital,” I noted, wondering whether this was the hunch Seth Hazlitt said he’d need to check out before sharing it with me. “To cover up the fact that he’d fabricated Owen’s death, Heath Mulroy arranged for the discharges of all babies born that day to disappear from the system. Maybe he had to do it that way because their birth names were all included on a single document that would have otherwise revealed that Owen was actually alive.”

  Alive . . .

  It was all coming together now, everything. I thought back to what I’d discovered upon searching Doyle Castavette’s bedroom. I thought back to the breaking-glass distraction Mark had set just before his mother was poisoned.

  “Owen would never have been a candidate for adoption, because of his deformity,” Lois picked up, as if reading my mind. “According to Mark, he bounced around from facility to facility, never remaining in any one for very long. Behavioral issues,” she added, by way of explanation.

  “He was prone to violence, wasn’t he?”

  She nodded. “Extremely. What he lacked in size, he made up for in attitude and rage. Never backed down, never allowed himself to be made fun of. The stories Mark told me of what he did to the people who made that mistake . . .”

  “Lacked in size,” I repeated.

  “Owen was a dwarf,” Lois Mulroy-Dodge told me.

  Chapter Twenty-one

  And in that moment everything fell together, starting with the crime scene out at the Cabot Manufacturing Company where Loomis Winslow had been murdered. I now understood exactly what Hank Weathers had meant about witnessing a giant he called Bigfoot murder the private detective. I pictured him peeking out from that thick post he’d taken cover behind, spotting Owen Mulroy perched on the ladder Seth Hazlitt had bumped into, and mistaking him for someone seven, even eight feet tall. Owen must have lured Winslow to that very spot and jumped down to take him by surprise, by which time Hank Weathers was cowering in fear. I understood now why there hadn’t been a second set of footprints, dragging the body having erased any trace of them.

  Owen Mulroy was the triplet who’d never gotten to occupy that third crib in the nursery, which explained why it had remained forever empty. . . . But all that would’ve been different if he hadn’t been born a dwarf. Renounced by his own father, who convinced his wife, Constance, that he had been stillborn, not so much to save her pain as to save himself the embarrassment of having a disabled child, whom a man like Heath Mulroy would have seen as beneath his station in life and not worth the bother. Indeed, the real villain in this tragedy was the late Heath Mulroy, since he’d renounced the youngest of his three triplets entirely and left him to the whims of the social services system, before destroying the lives of those who’d trusted him with their life savings.

  “‘Why, I, in this weak piping time of peace, have no delight to pass away the time,’” I found myself reciting, “‘unless to spy my shadow in the sun and descant on mine own deformity.’”

  “What’s that?” Tyler Castavette wondered aloud.

  “Shakespeare,” Seamus answered, before I had a chance to. “Richard the Third, and a splendid rendition at that.”

  “And now Owen is taking revenge on his entire family, and all the rest of us because of our connections to the family. But he hasn’t done it alone. Ultimately, he reconnected with his brothers, didn’t he?” I asked Lois Mulroy-Dodge.

  She nodded. “Mark never told me the precise circumstances, which of them approached which, though I always believed it was Owen who sought his brothers out, likely for money.”

  More pieces of the puzzle were falling into place, all the empty spaces of tonight’s murders and attempted murder filling in. Yet I found myself pondering what might have led Owen to target his two brothers. Why chase Daniel and his fiancée into the deep woods rimming the freeway, where they might well have frozen to death by now? Why murder Mark in the Hill House gymnasium after he had lied about Daniel being holed up at the Roadrunner Motel?

  It must have been Mark who’d helped Owen place the body of their murdered father in my closet, my assumption being that the stray key card we’d found minutes before on the floor must have accessed some hotel room where Heath Mulroy had been hiding out after his fake suicide. By all accounts, his sons must have set him up, intent on using for themselves the illicit funds he’d stashed away someplace. All but the cash their mother had come up with to pay off the late Doyle Castavette to keep Daniel from going to jail. That clearly explained why Doyle had been killed early on in the night. I hadn’t yet figured out the need to kill Ian and Faye, but I suspected their murders might be no more than a distraction to draw me away from the truth, while further establishing the ruse that the wedding party had been targeted by a killer who’d done this before, this very week both two and four years ago.

  So why not again? Why not here?

  “Anything else, Mrs. Fletcher?” I heard Lois Mulroy-Dodge ask me.

  I didn’t answer her, not wanting to disrupt the conclusions that were starting to dawn on me. I thought of the gravel at the scene of the Winslow murder, a perfect match for what I’d spotted on the rear floor mat of the abandoned Lexus. In the likely scenario, Owen Mulroy had killed Winslow before dispatching his brother Daniel and Daniel’s fiancée, Allison Castavette. The latter act made perfect sense with what had transpired here at Hill House tonight. But why would Owen care about Loomis Winslow? How would he even have known of the private detective’s involvement?

  And then everything hit me like a hammer blow, the whole scenario—the timeline, motive, and everything else—falling together.

  A moment before the lights in my suite went out, plunging us all into darkness.

  * * *

  * * *

  The only illumination came fro
m the dull glow off my laptop screen. I’d forgotten I’d left it on and I had no memory of the last time I’d checked it. And that dull haze that extended little beyond my desk was enough to illuminate the realizations that had just dawned on me.

  I nearly tripped over the body of Heath Mulroy on my way to the closet to fetch a flashlight. I assumed it must have been Owen who’d killed him. Something had lured him to Maine, where the son he’d abandoned at birth finally got his long-sought revenge.

  I snatched the flashlight off the closet shelf, tensing a bit in the fear that there might be something else waiting for me upon the shelf, another surprise. I switched the beam on and swept it about, my room otherwise lit only sporadically by Hill House’s outdoor floodlights struggling to pierce the snow and darkness beyond. Shining the light across the room made me think of how I hadn’t quite gleaned what a different kind of light had revealed for me almost from the beginning about this near murder of twelve. Not one clue so much as a series of them, all pointing in a direction I hadn’t followed:

  To Owen Mulroy.

  “Let’s all try to stay calm,” I said to the group gathered before me. “I have an ample supply of candles, so we’ll have plenty of light in no time.”

  “We’ve got another problem, Mrs. Fletcher,” Seamus said after poking his head into the hallway. “First, the emergency lighting hasn’t kicked on, meaning the hotel’s backup generator hasn’t activated automatically as it should have.”

  “Well, that’s not good. What about the second thing?”

  “Eugene is gone from his post.”

  * * *

  * * *

  I peeked out through the same crack in the door Seamus had peered through and I confirmed the big man was indeed nowhere in sight. Where might he have gone without alerting us? There were no signs of a struggle, and surely someone the size of Owen Mulroy, no matter how monstrous he was, wouldn’t be able to contend with an opponent of Eugene’s bulk.

  “What do you think happened to Eugene, Constable?” I said, closing and locking the door behind me.

  I couldn’t make out all of Seamus’s face in the flickering, naked light, making him appear more shadow than substance. “I’m sure I have no idea, ma’am.”

  “I think I do,” said Virginia Da Salle. “I believe him to be our killer, in spite of all this talk of a missing triplet. I believe he’s the killer from those other two locales and everything he’s done has left us pointing fingers at each other. That bear of a man checks all the boxes, and all this madness about a third triplet abandoned by his parents at birth sounds like nothing more than a clever sideshow. A distraction.”

  “Posed by a writer,” Henley Lavarnay added, the ex-wife of one of our victims seeming to be in lockstep with the woman that victim had been dating. “Surely, you can’t expect us to value your imagination above our own good sense.”

  “I’m not here to argue the point,” I told her, and everyone in the room for that matter. “Finding the killer pales in comparison to staying alive until help can arrive. And we should be safe so long as we remain here, together.”

  In making that statement I didn’t pay enough attention to the fear I felt that had never accompanied any of the other investigations I’ve found myself pursuing. In fact, I scared myself far more in the writing of especially tense scenes conjured for my books. Reality was usually not a prime consideration for the villains I could build in my mind.

  Not so the case here tonight, though, thanks to the realization that Owen Mulroy was likely still somewhere among us, close by, which struck me with the force of a baseball bat. I thought of the crawl space Seamus had directed me to in Doyle Castavette’s bedroom, how I’d noted that no one of average size could have ever negotiated it.

  Which, of course, didn’t include Owen Mulroy. That explained how he’d managed to move among the rooms to commit his dastardly deeds without ever being noticed. I could now explain virtually all the anomalies that had been plaguing me through the day and the night, though I didn’t voice my revelations to the assembled group because they clearly had other concerns in mind, and rightfully so.

  “What’s the plan?” Henley Lavarnay, Doyle’s ex-wife, asked me.

  “I thought this was the plan,” her date for the weekend, Harrison Bak, interjected. “You heard what Mrs. Fletcher just said: Stay alive until help arrives.”

  “A mystery writer,” someone said derisively, under their breath.

  “We’ve got another problem, Mrs. Fletcher,” Seamus chimed in. “That is, if we don’t all want to freeze to death. It’s not just the power we’ve lost, but also the heat. And we’re looking at a steep drop in temperature before dawn.”

  Dawn . . . I’d forgotten what sunlight even looked like. And while I didn’t expect it to do much in terms of speeding up the help we were depending upon, the world brightening beyond was the best recipe to assuage a person’s fears, no matter how extreme or trivial.

  “How do we get the emergency generator on, Seamus?”

  “That’s the rub, isn’t it? See, the unit’s outside. There’s a breaker on the propane-fueled generator’s housing, and a breaker in the basement responsible for constantly replenishing its power supply.”

  “A two-person job, in other words,” I concluded.

  “I’d be happy to handle the exterior duties,” Seamus offered, “except for the fact that throwing the interior breaker requires a whole sequence of steps while the outside generator breaker is a simple switch.”

  “I should be able to manage that,” I offered.

  Tyler Castavette rose from his chair. “Let me. It’s my father that’s dead at this killer’s hand. Let me go,” he said, addressing both me and Seamus.

  I gave Tyler an approving nod. “A noble gesture, but one I can’t accept. You may be able to throw a switch as easily as I can, but the generator is buried in snow now. No easy task to locate it if you don’t have at least a general idea of where to find it.” I looked toward Seamus. “I’ll handle the duties outside while Constable McGilray does the same in the basement. And we’ll have the light, and heat, restored in no time.”

  Back to Tyler now.

  “You can make yourself just as useful by keeping these folks safe while we’re gone.”

  “In that case,” said Tyler, “how about I offer some tried-and-true advice from something I once read, Mrs. Fletcher: Don’t get dead.”

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Which was easier said than done, of course, I thought as I bundled myself up in extra layers, topped with my parka, the outer shell of which was still moist from my initial foray into the storm in the company of the currently unconscious Sheriff Mort Metzger.

  How I wish I were working alongside him, as was our custom. I might not miss his calling me “Mrs. F.,” but with Mort by my side I’ve always felt more like an opening act than the headliner. As if reading my mind, Seamus eased Mort’s nine-millimeter from beneath his jacket and extended it toward me.

  “Familiar with the use of one of these, Mrs. Fletcher?”

  “Operation, yes, from shooting at ranges just to learn what I need to for my books. That doesn’t mean I can hit a target. You keep it, Constable,” I said before he could interrupt me. “Whether the power and heat come back on or not, your first responsibility is the safety of your guests.”

  He nodded grudgingly. “We’ll need to get you a walkie-talkie so we can coordinate our efforts. You’ll also need a shovel to dig out enough of the snow around the generator to locate the breaker switch. It’s contained in a steel box you need to lift up and hold while you flip the breaker.”

  I looked out the window, into that blinding world of swirling white that gave up nothing of the night.

  “I think I can handle that,” I told Seamus.

  * * *

  * * *

  “How concerned should we be about Eugene’s disappearance?�
� he asked me, as we took the stairs down to the lobby.

  I had a small penlight in my bag and it was now serving as our sole source of illumination. We’d left the larger, lantern-style flashlight with the others in my suite, along with lit candles placed at various intervals, before we’d headed out. Once in his office, Seamus would be able to retrieve additional flashlights, along with the shovel I’d need to take with me to the propane generator located around the back of the property. But I actually preferred my small, powerful Maglite for its focused beam and simple heft.

  “On the one hand, there were no signs of a struggle. We heard nothing, and he gave no warning to us that something concerned him.”

  “That doesn’t answer my question, Mrs. Fletcher.”

  “Then let me ask you one, Seamus. How much did you look into his background?”

  “Speaking frankly, because he was only a temp and a kitchen worker not likely to come into contact with any guests, not at all—at least not beyond what the temp agency sent over.”

  “This the same Boston agency that fills spots for Cabot Cove Catering?”

  “Yes. Why?”

  “Because they’re very good at what they do and have never let our own local catering company down. Could be that Eugene is off hiding somewhere. Could be that this wasn’t what he signed up for and he decided to let us handle the heavy lifting ourselves.”

  “In other words, Mrs. Fletcher, he was scared off.”

  “As good a way of putting it as any, I suppose,” I said, not informing Seamus of what I’d noticed about Eugene when he’d opened the door to my suite for Mort’s wheelchair.

  As we entered the lobby, both sets of eyes went to the grandfather clock and we noticed the same thing: the roman numeral six was now crossed out as well.

  For Heath Mulroy.

  * * *