* * *
According to the grandfather clock, it was closing in on four thirty a.m. when I finally opened the front door and felt a stiff wind buckle me in my tracks. I had sampled the storm’s fury upon opening the door to drag Mort Metzger in, but entering it in full was like nothing I had ever experienced before. The notion of needing a rope line to traverse even five feet outside had never made much sense to me until I was battered by a combination of wind and snow that struck the parts of my face I couldn’t cover with a scarf like shattered windshield glass thrown inward by a crash.
I had read once that it was actually possible to die of asphyxiation in such conditions, something else that had made no sense to me until now. It literally hurt my chest to breathe in this snow-laced air that made it feel as if I’d swallowed mouthfuls of icicles. I suppose that wasn’t far from the truth, given the coagulation of the blowing snow into pellets that my lungs sucked down.
I hadn’t been outside for more than thirty seconds when I became utterly disoriented, able to see nothing before me and hearing only the relentless howl of the wind as it swirled around me. I felt like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, about to be swept up and away by a vortex of energy I was utterly powerless to resist. Trying to trudge in any direction was like battling a riptide even though in shallow currents close to the shore. There might be pockets of smooth motion, but otherwise you could go only where the motion took you.
I’d mused to people that I’d been living at Hill House for so long, I could find my way about its grounds blindfolded. Now that boast was being put to the test, though I realized a blindfold would have been far less handicapping than these raging snows and winds. Indeed, at least with only a blindfold I’d be able to feel my way about, whereas at this point my gloved hands could find within easy reach no purchase on anything to guide me. I couldn’t tell which of the snow was falling and which of it was blowing. And in my determined effort to follow a well-charted, simple course to the generator I’d glimpsed on hundreds of occasions, I grew confused and couldn’t even have told you where Hill House itself was.
I fought against the grip of panic beginning to tighten around me everywhere I could feel, but mostly in my chest and stomach. It felt like a vise slowly closing, to be loosened only by some indication I was at least headed in the right direction—an impossible notion at this point, given that I’d already lost my bearings. The walkie-talkie crackled in a side pocket of my parka, Seamus McGilray’s voice reaching me only as a muffled sound. And I didn’t dare extract it for the further distraction and disorientation that mere effort might cause.
Instead, I collected my bearings and looked for some landmark that might reassure me and guide my way. And I found such a landmark in the shiny silver weather vane that sat atop the hotel roof. I heard the creak it made when spinning through a few gaps in the storm’s wind gusts and I focused my gaze upward in at least its general direction.
Sure enough, I caught a reassuring glimpse of it, making my position no more than twenty feet to the right of Hill House’s entrance, on the side of the building where the generator was located in the far corner. That meant if I steered myself in that direction, I’d arrive where I needed to be after covering the hundred yards between the front of the building and the generator’s location. The problem, of course, was that in these conditions distance was no easier to judge than direction. And I couldn’t feel my way there with the building as my guide because far too much snow had accumulated against it.
The total snow accumulation had likely passed the four-foot mark by now, and that was without taking the wind into account. On the one hand, its northerly direction pushed the snow hard past me to buttress the building’s exterior, where it continued to mount in horrific proportions. On the other hand, that left a more modest path of snow—maybe eighteen inches to two feet in depth—to negotiate. Not easy to trudge through in any respect, but passable at least.
I found I did better when I eased the shovel before me with both gloves clinging tight to the handle and used the tool in much the same way as Harrison Bak used his crutches. I realized my thoughts were running away from me, the creeping panic from the storm’s onslaught beginning to edge into my brain. I resolved to focus on the task at hand, which was no more than to locate the generator and flip the switch. I began thinking only of the next foot before me, the next step, the next place to plant my shovel and draw up to it before I would repeat the same process again. And I fell into a strange rhythm, by which the slight progress I was making in the right direction cushioned me from the terror raised by the storm and the threat of losing all orientation and freezing to death fifteen feet from Hill House.
The process continued and I stopped counting steps or measuring distance. I could make out the shape of the hotel structure on my right and would thus know when it came to an end in the general location of the generator I needed to switch on. Only the fact that I kept myself in reasonably fine shape through biking my way around town in the good months, and through using the Hill House gym treadmill or elliptical in the not-so-good ones, allowed me to keep my breath, though barely.
As I continued to push ahead with the shovel through the snow that climbed past my waist, I marveled at Mort Metzger’s having made his way to Hill House from wherever he’d lost his snowmobile. Thinking of the gym, though, brought me back more resolutely to the matter at hand, since my mind filled with a vision of the murdered Mark Mulroy, along with the fact that eight more victims would likely be there for the taking if my efforts out here didn’t succeed.
My uneasy rhythm through the windswept mounds continued, the handle of the shovel now barely protruding from the snow I repeatedly sank it into. The effort reminded me of winters when I was a little girl, and visions of storms like this burying me up to my neck. I was experiencing the very real thing now, and it didn’t make me feel like a little girl again in the slightest. Indeed, there was now the question of whether the storm would kill me before Owen Mulroy ever got the chance.
I finally spotted an utterly black void and took that to mean I was nearing the back end of the Hill House footprint, right around where I’d spotted the emergency generator a thousand times. It was right in line with the shed where I’d been storing my bicycle since taking up residence here, but that storage shed was utterly hidden by the storm’s relentless fury and mostly buried by the snow at this point anyway.
I held fast to the shovel with one hand and extracted the penlight from my pocket with the other. The beam struggled to make a dent in the snow-riddled darkness, hardly penetrating it at all. Only when a gust of wind temporarily cleared the air before me did it reveal a mound I took to be the generator I sought. The plan was for me to call Seamus on the walkie-talkie now to make sure we activated the backup power system in the proper sequence.
Angling for what I believed to be the generator, I felt an incredible rush of excitement for managing to triumph over the deadly conditions that could swallow a person whole who strayed too far. The penlight finally illuminated clumps of snow collected atop the generator’s casing. I drew closer, tamping down that strange sense of elation, which vanished in the next moment anyway.
Because what I could see of the generator had been smashed beyond recognition, destroyed by the determined efforts of someone wielding a sledgehammer like the one stored among the other tools in the same storage shed that contained my bike. I planted the shovel in the ground and leaned against it, sweeping the penlight about as I freed the walkie-talkie from my pocket and squeezed it inside my parka’s hood, which was fastened tightly around my head.
“Seamus, do you read me?”
Static greeted me for a reply.
“Seamus, come in. Seamus, please come in.”
Nothing but more static.
“Are you there, Seamus? Seamus, are you—”
Through the screams of the wind I heard the crunch of snow, felt the presence creeping up on me an instant before something
swept my legs out from under me. I went down hard but landed soft in the cushion of the freshly fallen snow that receded to accept my weight. And there, standing before me, little bigger than the snow pile itself, was the murderer.
Owen Mulroy.
Chapter Twenty-three
He laughed hideously, the wide grin stretched across his pearl white face, which made a fitting match for the snow. One eye drooped. The arm on that same side hung limp, and his opposite leg seemed canted inward. I realized he was standing atop the remains of the generator, which explained why all of him was in view, and I imagined he’d used the same sledgehammer—now deposited at his feet—with which he’d destroyed the generator to slash through the snow pile and rob me of my balance.
“Owen Mulroy,” was all I could think of saying.
“Jessica Fletcher. A pleasure to make your acquaintance,” he said, bowing slightly and still grinning as if he were enjoying every moment of this. “Though you’ve proved a royal pain this long night, haven’t you?” He took a deep breath and coughed out a thin mist into the air. “‘Is there a murderer here? No. Yes, I am. Then fly! What, from myself? Great reason why: lest I revenge.’”
“Richard the Third,” I said, recognizing the quotation. “You must have heard me quote another section.”
“I’ve heard much from you tonight. As I said, you’ve proved a royal pain, haven’t you?”
There was an almost Elizabethan cadence to his words, born of a tortured soul condemned to spend the bulk of his life an outcast; alone, isolated, and unwanted by the world. Hence, I thought, the revenge.
“This is about the missing money, isn’t it? The family fortune made by your criminal father at the expense of others.”
“Didn’t serve him well tonight, did it? Got him back for his indiscretions, didn’t I?” Owen said, his voice carving through the wind that howled between us.
I tried to push myself up from the snow to mount some form of response, but I couldn’t manage it from the angle at which I’d fallen.
“For his indiscretions,” I posed to Owen Mulroy, “or abandoning you as his son at birth?”
“A man is the sum of his deeds, Mrs. Fletcher.”
“Or the sum of his murders, Owen.”
“The night’s not done with them yet.”
I saw a dull glint captured in the meager spray from one of the outdoor floodlights and realized Owen was holding a small-caliber, but nonetheless deadly, pistol.
“And you’re to be the next victim, Mrs. Fletcher.”
* * *
* * *
“Of course,” I said, stalling for as much time as I could, “because if everyone’s found dead, suspicions will fall on the serial mass murderer from that plane and hunting lodge.”
“The perfect alibi, you might call it.”
“But you didn’t act alone, did you? You had your brother Mark’s help, until you murdered him, too.”
I’d hoped my remark might get a rise from him, but it didn’t.
“He’d outlived his usefulness,” Owen said in a voice colder than the air.
“I should have known earlier,” I said, finally pushing myself up to a seated position and trying to find his eyes through the snow tumbling from the sky. “As soon as I saw that open suitcase in Doyle Castavette’s room. That’s where you hid after you killed him, isn’t it? After the chair broke in the struggle you had no way to climb back into the crawl space.”
“I expected you to find me in that moment. The great Jessica Fletcher, proving herself to be a most able adversary.”
“You didn’t know I was living here, did you? You didn’t know until tonight.”
I thought the shrunken figure looming over me shrugged, but I couldn’t be sure. “How could I?”
“How could you know about this storm in advance?”
“Simple,” Owen Mulroy said, a fresh grin stretched across his anvil-shaped face. “It was predicted in the Farmers’ Almanac.” He extended the gun farther down at me. “Now get on your feet.”
* * *
* * *
Poking the tiny pistol in my back, he forced me into the woods that rimmed the back of Hill House, where the thick umbrella of tree cover had notably mitigated the snowfall, leaving the ground beneath comparatively passable. I might surprise him if I twisted suddenly enough, might even manage to separate Owen from the weapon. But there was still enough snow cover here to deny me firm purchase on the ground, and such an effort would as likely lead to a fatal slip as not. I needed to buy time until a low-hanging branch or some other weapon of convenience made itself known.
But there was nothing available. It was as if we’d strayed into a patch of woods flattened by the storm. The snows had thickened again, stealing my sight beyond just a few feet and rendering any move to thwart my attacker impossible, as the snow would certainly deny fast-enough movement.
Where was I? My disorientation was palpable, like something out of a nightmare from which I couldn’t rouse myself.
“You were hiding under the dinner table, weren’t you?” I said to Owen Mulroy. “That’s how you were able to poison your mother’s wine when everyone was distracted by Mark’s glass breaking at the bar.”
“Another clue you missed, Mrs. Fletcher. Perhaps you’re slipping.”
“Or perhaps I’ve met my match.”
“Keep walking,” he said, the gloating evident in his voice. “You’re going to appreciate what I have planned for you. People might even advance the proposition that you went mad and created your own mystery. Until your body turns up, of course.”
And then I realized where I was. Owen Mulroy had led me out to the center of Booker’s Pond, a small body of water that had swelled through the especially wet fall months but struggled to freeze, as always when winter set in. I recalled all the DANGER! NO SKATING signs posted around it and felt the snow-covered ice bowing beneath my weight.
Owen gave me a hearty shove, uttering that hideous, throaty laugh once more. I turned awkwardly to find him backpedaling toward the shore, small-caliber pistol still trained on me.
“They say freezing is a good way to die, if there’s any such thing to be had.”
“You killed Loomis Winslow because he was closing in on the money your father had hidden away, the money you intended to claim for yourself.”
“Clever girl, aren’t you?”
“But not clever enough to figure out how you learned about his involvement. Not clever enough either to figure out why you killed your brother Daniel and his fiancée.”
He continued backing up, then stopped, still within easy shooting range. “Not all mysteries are meant to be solved, Mrs. Fletcher.”
“Did you lure them somehow to the old Cabot Manufacturing Company? Take them captive in the Lexus SUV they’d rented at the jetport?”
“Figured that out too, I see. Perhaps I didn’t give you enough credit.”
“I don’t deserve it. The front passenger seat was pushed all the way back, no room for a regular-sized person behind to tuck his legs,” I told him, explaining what I’d finally realized had been bothering me. “I should have made the connection then and there.”
“That’s quite enough, Mrs. Fletcher.”
With that, I watched the tiny, shriveled form of Owen Mulroy angle the barrel of his pistol downward and fire a series of shots into the ice at my feet, coughing snow up into the air from the depressions left by the bullets. Almost immediately, I felt the ice weaken beneath me, starting to crack and give, the murderer before me intent on sending me to a frigid grave.
“Goodbye, Mrs. Fletcher. I wish we’d gotten to know each other better. You seem like a hoot.”
The ice continued to crack, audibly now, the sound like that of paper crunching. Then, suddenly, I heard the pounding of footsteps back a ways along the path we’d taken, then grinding to a sliding
halt just short of the pond’s edge.
“FBI!” a voice bellowed through the night and the storm. “Hands in the air! Do it now!”
I felt the ice about to give in the same moment I spotted a familiar figure standing a hundred feet away, a pistol aimed straight for the small shape of Owen Mulroy.
“Drop the gun, and hands in the air!” a familiar, hulking figure ordered.
Eugene.
* * *
* * *
But Owen lunged for me instead, drawing too close for Agent Eugene, or whatever his name was, to chance a shot in such awful conditions. Owen tried to angle himself behind me, but he slipped at the last moment, providing an opportunity for me to manage a leap onto a still-whole portion of ice. It held under my weight, though a terrible crunching sound from where I’d just been standing pierced my ears. I was looking straight at Owen Mulroy when he plunged downward, disappearing into the black hole that had appeared when the ice finally gave way.
I saw his one good hand flailing desperately for something to latch onto, but every bit of jagged ice he clutched broke off in his grasp. I dived forward and slid across the ice, scattering the snow pile like one of the plows in Ethan Cragg’s failed armada, and I groped for Owen’s gloved hand with mine.
My grip fastened briefly on his wrist, but I couldn’t find clean purchase through the sodden woolen material. Then something was yanking me away by the feet from the cracking ice, the shape of Owen Mulroy’s gloved hand disappearing from sight before it disappeared altogether into the icy waters below.
* * *
* * *
“Took you long enough,” I said to Eugene, once we’d finally reached the safety of the shore, no trace of Owen Mulroy anywhere to be seen.
“When did you figure out I was FBI, Mrs. Fletcher?”
I pointed a gloved finger toward his left ear, at what I’d spotted there before being distracted by Constance Mulroy’s calling my name from inside my suite somewhere around an hour ago. “The pale impression around your ear is in the shape of one of those law-enforcement earbuds you people use. You must’ve been wearing it while standing in the sun someplace, because the rest of the skin around it is tan. I noticed when you opened the door to my suite for me.”
The Murder of Twelve Page 22