The Murder of Twelve

by Jessica Fletcher

  “I could have just been listening to music on the beach, couldn’t I?”

  “Not when the impression’s only on one side, Agent . . .”

  “Finnegan,” the man I’d known as Eugene said through the howling winds.

  I should have been utterly freezing right now, but a combination of adrenaline and exertion was keeping me warm for the time being.

  “It was a private investigator named Loomis Winslow who alerted the Department of Justice to what he’d uncovered about the Mulroy family’s financial shenanigans, wasn’t it?”

  My question clearly threw Agent Finnegan for a loop. “How’d you know that?”

  “Did you know Winslow was murdered this morning?” I asked him, instead of answering his question.

  It was clear he didn’t. “Winslow?”

  I nodded. “Right here in Cabot Cove.”

  “An investigation was already underway before he fanned the flames,” Agent Finnegan told me. “As one of the lead agents, I came up here to keep an eye on the family, the mother and two sons, thought the wedding might be an opportune time for them to let their guard down, maybe make a mistake. Was it Owen who killed Winslow?”

  “Yes, but he wasn’t alone,” I said, thinking of the abandoned Lexus SUV and realizing something I probably should have earlier.

  * * *

  * * *

  We found Seamus McGilray in Hill House’s mechanical room, unconscious with a nasty lump on the back of his head. He was dazed but otherwise fine, and we—well, Agent Finnegan, mostly—dragged him up the stairs to my suite.

  “Mrs. F.?” I heard as soon as I entered, visible from the bedroom where Mort Metzger lay beneath the covers.

  I rushed to his bedside. “Mort!” I said happily, taking one of his hands in both of mine.

  “Easy there, Mrs. F.” He smiled. “Don’t want Adele to get the wrong idea about our relationship. Bad enough I woke up in your bed.”

  “I won’t tell if you won’t.”

  He rubbed the spot that I’d bandaged on his head, still clearly disoriented and starting to assemble into a picture what he was seeing before him.

  “Why do I get the feeling I missed something?” he asked me.

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Mort also missed what came next, as he was in no condition to do anything but rest for a few days anyway, according to Seth Hazlitt.

  Seth took enough time off to drive me to Boston and the Encore Boston Harbor, the new casino that had recently opened on the city’s waterfront. I met Agent Finnegan in the lobby and accompanied his team to a blackjack table in the middle of the lavish casino floor.

  “Hit me.”

  I can’t say how I picked out that voice, but I turned to find a face I recognized for its likeness to another man’s: Mark Mulroy’s, because I was looking straight at his fraternal twin brother, Daniel, the groom-to-be I’d originally believed had fled into the woods from that abandoned Lexus and almost surely met his death—because that’s what whoever found the rented vehicle was supposed to think, thus absolving Daniel of suspicion. His disappearance would be quickly judged a murder, freeing him and Allison Castavette to live off his father’s pilfered fortune in this country or that.

  Daniel Mulroy met my gaze without a spark of recognition flashing in his eyes. But Agent Finnegan and his team of five FBI agents were something else again. Daniel’s gaze trailed them all the way to the table, where he was handcuffed and placed under arrest by one agent while the others formed a ring around him to ward off onlookers. He stood there arrogantly, not ready yet to accept defeat.

  “How’d you find me?” he asked finally, surprisingly composed.

  Finnegan looked toward me for a response, and I waited for Daniel Mulroy’s gaze to follow his before answering his question.

  “The key card we found in my suite underneath your father’s body, the one we couldn’t identify. I let myself believe the obvious: that it had been your brother Mark who’d tucked your father’s body away in my closet. But he was already dead, wasn’t he, killed not by your brother Owen but by you?”

  * * *

  * * *

  Daniel Mulroy’s mouth dropped at that. I thought I saw him swallow hard, or at least try to.

  “Because the bench press was perched too high for your brother to hold it down with enough pressure to suffocate Mark. I realized that as soon as I learned of your brother’s deformity. That’s when all this fell into place. It was the three of you all along, the Mulroy triplets together for the first time. That is, until you murdered Mark.”

  “He was weak, would have eventually talked if we’d given him the chance. He didn’t have the stomach for it.”

  “‘We,’” I repeated, “you and Owen. Did he find you or did you find him?”

  “I found him, years ago, the only person who hated my father more than I did. Reason enough for us to join forces.”

  “Your brother exposing the financial misdeeds—that was part of the plan, wasn’t it? Force your father on the lam with a hidden fortune you’d then be in a position to steal.”

  “It was ours. You can’t steal what belongs to you. That man never gave us anything, least of all Owen. You want to know the truth? Killing my father was a pleasure. I only wish I could have done it twice.”

  “Murder done right normally works the first time,” I told him.

  Daniel’s eyes narrowed on me as he stopped, Finnegan letting him hold his ground for the time being.

  “You planned all this,” I couldn’t help but continue, “your wedding included, to coincide with the anniversary of those mass murders on the plane and at the wilderness retreat, Hill House serving as a similarly isolated setting that would have turned the investigation in just the direction you wanted it to go. Even absent the blizzard, you could have used Cabot Cove in winter to your best advantage.”

  “Who are you, exactly?” he asked me.

  “Jessica Fletcher.”

  “Who?”

  “Doesn’t matter. What matters was the key card that must have slipped from your pocket when you were tucking your father away. We matched it to the Bayside Motel, where you and Allison must have gone in the backup vehicle one of you must’ve been driving while the other set up the whole ruse with the abandoned Lexus. You could’ve had your pick of any empty room in Hill House to wait the storm out, thanks to Tyler Castavette’s master key card, which your brother Mark must have taken before you murdered him. Oh, did I forget to mention that Allison Castavette was arrested upstairs in your room ahead of our coming for you? After setting up the whole ruse with the Lexus, did she drop you and Owen close to Hill House before the storm reached its peak? In any event, you used the weather to your best advantage, accelerating the timetable with the full knowledge that no one was coming to our rescue.”

  Daniel Mulroy didn’t bother denying any of it. He stood there amid the other gamblers mingling about and was transfixed by the neat summary of what I’d managed to compile in the forty-eight hours since his brother Owen had plunged to his icy death.

  “Anyway,” I continued, “a security camera caught that second car you must have rented leaving the Bayside Motel parking lot. We matched the license plate to one captured on a security camera for this place’s parking garage.”

  Daniel stared at me. “And here you are.”

  “Yes, here we are. But where’s your father’s money, Daniel? You might find your path forward a bit easier if you were to turn it over.”

  He was silent, finally at a loss for words.

  “Loomis Winslow had to die because he’d found wherever your father had stashed his money,” I resumed. “I’m guessing you learned he was coming to Hill House to meet with your mother, so you lured him to the Cabot Manufacturing Company with a text message from your mother’s phone, the one she thought she’d misplaced because Mark must have stolen
it. You lured him there so Owen could kill him. And your mother feared for her own life after Winslow failed to show for their meeting at Hill House. When I got back, she was still waiting for him in the lobby, not for you and your fiancée, like she told me,” I finished, not bothering to add that she hadn’t been waiting for my return to Hill House either.

  Daniel Mulroy’s expression was utterly blank. “Who did you say you were, again?” he asked, as Agent Finnegan started to lead him through the casino, the other agents forming a protective shield around them.

  “A mystery writer.”

  “Sorry I’ve never read any of your books.”

  “You’ll have plenty of time to catch up on your reading now, Daniel.”

  * * *

  * * *

  A week later, his first day back to work, Mort Metzger was finally well enough to meet Seth and me for breakfast at Mara’s Luncheonette. It turned out he hadn’t been attacked by Owen Mulroy after all, the gash on his head having come from a spill he’d taken when his snowmobile overturned. I couldn’t wait to chide him for not wearing a helmet. Based on where the snowmobile was found, Mort must have walked nearly a half-mile through the storm, a miraculous feat in itself.

  Meanwhile, it had taken much of that week for the big town plows and Ethan Cragg’s armada of private contractors to get the roads completely clear and for Cabot Cove to be up and running again. The final snowfall measurement, according to none other than Jim Cantore, was somewhere between fifty-eight and sixty-two inches, monumental and unprecedented by anyone’s standards.

  “Well, Mrs. F.,” Mort greeted, taking his eyes from the wall-mounted television still tuned to the Weather Channel, “records were meant to be broken.”

  “We’ll never see another storm like it in our lifetime—that’s for sure.”

  “I was talking about the record for murder,” Mort corrected.

  “That, too, I suppose.”

  “I’ve been looking into the life of this Owen Mulroy, Mrs. F. You sure can pick them. As a boy, he was suspected of burning down the only foster home that would ever have him and spent as much time in jail as group homes after that. He even spent some time playing a circus clown, if you can believe that.”

  “I’m guessing that didn’t come to a good end either, Mort.”

  “Depends what you call breaking the finger of a little girl who tried to squeeze his red nose. The only thing I haven’t been able to figure out is when he and his brothers got together to hatch this plan.”

  “Go back to Heath Mulroy’s arrest and subsequent ‘suicide.’ Since Mark’s turning him in was part of the plan, it must have all started right around then.”

  Seth Hazlitt looked up from his pancakes, which were swimming in maple syrup. “Leads me to wonder how things might have been different if those people had raised that poor boy as their own.”

  “‘And thus I clothe my naked villainy with old odd ends stolen out of holy writ, and seem a saint, when most I play the devil,’” I said, quoting Shakespeare again.

  “You’d make a fine Richard the Third, Jess.”

  “I actually played Queen Elizabeth in a version of the play once.”

  “This whole thing has the feel of a Shakespearean tragedy, doesn’t it?” said Seth.

  “You had a hunch you said you needed to check out before you could say more,” I recalled. “You already had a notion that the hospital discharge records had been tampered with to hide the fact that Owen Mulroy wasn’t stillborn after all.”

  “And I turned out to be right, didn’t I?” Seth beamed. “Guess I proved myself to be a pretty good detective, while you proved yourself a pretty good doctor, Jess, ayuh,” he added, gesturing toward Mort, who’d been my patient.

  “I’ll tell you what I can’t get out of my mind,” Mort said, sifting a spoon through the coffee our server had set down without waiting for him to ask for it. “How the three of them pulled all this off, even with a storm they couldn’t possibly have built into their plan.”

  “The storm gave them the opportunity to make it seem like the guests had perished at the hands of the same mass murderer from that airplane and wilderness lodge,” I told him. “The perfect alibi, you might say. Misdirection to get the authorities looking in the wrong direction.”

  Seth looked up from his pancakes. “And what about the elaborate setup for the bride and groom appearing to have fled into the woods, Jess?”

  “Their bodies would never have been recovered and they would’ve been listed as missing and presumed dead. With everyone else dead, nobody would be any the wiser, leading investigators to settle on the most obvious conclusion.”

  “Here’s my conclusion,” Mort said as our server set a bagel and cream cheese down before him, again without his having ordered. “Never mind solving the crime; you saved eight lives that night. Makes you a candidate for Cabot Cove Citizen of the Year.”

  “I never put much stock in such things. More a popularity contest than anything else.”

  “Then how’d I win last year?” Seth asked me.

  “You’re as popular as it gets. Anyway, maybe I’ll nominate Hank Weathers,” I told him.

  Mort frowned at that.

  “He identified Loomis Winslow’s killer,” I reminded them. “We should have listened to him.”

  “He identified Bigfoot.”

  “I should’ve given more thought to that ladder, why it was there. Maybe I’m slipping a bit.”

  “Maybe you just need my help more than you’d like to admit.” Mort’s eyebrows twitched as he smeared cream cheese on his bagel, his eyes darting to an old campaign flyer for Sam Booth, our “Do-Nothing Mayor,” still taped to a bulletin board near the cash register. “Speaking of politics, maybe you should think about running for mayor, Mrs. F. I’m sure you could come up with a better slogan than ‘Vote for me and I’ll do nothing.’”

  “How about ‘A chicken in every pot’?” I posed, aping Herbert Hoover.

  “I was thinking more like ‘A body in every cupboard,’” Seth suggested.

  “That works, too.”

  “More accurate, at least,” Mort said, “now that you’ve broken your own record.”

  “Seems like the year for that, doesn’t it?” I noted. “By the way, did the weather people ever name the storm?”

  Mort and Seth looked at each other.

  “You never heard?” Seth asked me.

  “I’ve been kind of busy.”

  “Weather people called it Jessica,” Mort told me. “Winter Storm Jessica.”

  “Really?”

  He shrugged. “Hey, blame the alphabet, Mrs. F.”

  “Uh-oh,” Seth muttered, his gaze angled out Mara’s plate glass front window.

  Outside it had started to snow, the first flakes since the great storm had ended.

  “Here we go again,” said Mort.

  About the Authors

  Jessica Fletcher is a bestselling mystery writer who has a knack for stumbling upon real-life mysteries in her various travels. Jon Land, author of more than fifty books, coauthors this bestselling series.

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