A Party to Murder

by John Inman

  “If we do keep seeing each other,” Derek said, all laughter gone from his eyes, “I’ll probably fall in love with you. Is that what you want?”

  Jamie could only stare back at the open expression of trust that radiated from Derek’s eyes. They had quickly gone off script here. This wasn’t the usual repartee they engaged in. This wasn’t one of their little conversational gambits they so often played with each other. Swapping insults. Teasing. Trying to get a rise. Trying to get a laugh. Jamie understood immediately that Derek had changed the rules. What he asked now, he asked from the heart. And the intensity of his words, along with his melted chocolate gaze, caused goose bumps to explode on Jamie’s arms.

  Jamie sat there, entranced, as the tip of Derek’s tongue came out to brush his lips, which still sparkled with the moisture from their kiss. Those were his own juices moistening Derek’s mouth, and with that gentle swipe of his tongue, he realized, Derek had retasted him.

  Jamie knew if he said what he wanted to say, it would change things even more than things had changed already. He and Derek would never be the same again. Not with each other. Not with their friendship.

  Jamie also knew he didn’t care about that. Not really. He only cared about how he felt.

  “I think it’s what I’ve always wanted,” he said in a whispered hush, unsure how it would sound until he actually heard the words coming from his own lips. When he did hear them, he knew they were true.

  “Since we were kids?” Derek asked, his eyes wide and searching now. Studying Jamie’s face. Humorless. Sincere.

  And somehow it was that sincerity in Derek’s eyes that made Jamie really understand. Derek was right. They had been leading up to this moment from day one of their lifelong friendship. For years, even when they were children, that friendship had camouflaged what was actually happening between the two of them. Now the camouflage had been swept away. And it had happened the very first time they stumbled into bed together.

  Jamie imagined a little cartoon light bulb blinking on over his head. My God, how could he have been so blind for so long? Without hesitation, he echoed Derek’s words right back at him. “Yes,” he said with his heart hammering in his ears. “I’ve wanted to be with you since we were kids.”

  Derek smiled then. Just a tiny one. At the same time, the fire in his chocolate-brown eyes flared to glorious flame. Sparks of gold bubbled in their depths. They blazed to life, burning like the flames on the grate in the other room. Only brighter, hotter. Derek’s hand came out and covered Jamie’s cheek. Jamie all but melted beneath the touch.

  “It took us long enough to figure it out.” Derek smiled.

  Jamie tried to swallow the lump of emotion swelling in his throat. He succeeded, but the emotion found another escape route. A tear spilled from his eye. He felt the heat of it as it slid down his cheek to the corner of his mouth, where he licked it away.

  “Are you saying what I think you’re saying?” he asked with a tremor in his voice.

  At that, Derek gave a tiny shake of his head. “If I have to translate, maybe I didn’t say it very well. Or maybe you’re just not ready to hear it.”

  “You’re wrong,” Jamie said, his fingers tightening on Derek’s hand. “I’m ready.” He twisted his head into Derek’s other hand, the hand caressing his cheek. He pressed a kiss into Derek’s warm palm. Derek’s thumb stroked his cheek when he did.

  Oddly enough, at that moment Derek turned away, directing his gaze back to the square of pristine paneling on the wall where one of the pictures had been removed. As if on a cue from the prop master tucked away in the wings, a crash of thunder shook the house around them, startling them both. A blinding flash of lightning seared the window panes that bordered the front door, strobing through the foyer, throwing everything into stark relief.

  “I think we should search the house,” Derek said out of the blue.

  Jamie frowned. “What? Now? I think I’d rather finish this conversation. You were saying something about… us. Remember? I think it was kind of important.”

  But Derek pulled him to his feet. He didn’t even try to be gentle. “Something’s wrong,” Derek said. “Don’t you feel it? Listen.”

  Jamie glanced around and tipped his head to the side, concentrating on all the noises inside the house. The hushed murmur of voices in the parlor. The tinkle of cutlery. The roar of the storm battering the forest outside the foyer windows. A branch, thrashing in the wind, scraping against the porch roof somewhere. The rattle of window blinds in some far-off room, perhaps where the wind from the storm had crept through an unsealed window. The pop of an ember exploding in the fireplace in the other room. The thump of an outside shutter, loosened from its moorings and banging against the side of the house.

  Jamie heard it all but didn’t care.

  “Sorry,” he said. “I only hear my hormones begging me to take you to bed.”

  He reached out to pull Derek up the stairs, and at that precise moment, a woman’s scream tore through the house.

  The scream was sharp, piercing. It sliced through the night like the point of a knife penetrating the tender flesh of an eardrum. Cruel, invasive. Jamie shrank from the sound, it was so awful, so operatic. A chill crept up his spine. Terror erupted inside his head like a frightened heartbeat. Without thinking, he moved closer to Derek, where he felt protected. Where he felt safe.

  As the echoes of the scream diminished, a strange quiet engulfed the house. It was as if the walls had suddenly ceased to breathe, waiting to see what would happen next. Jamie imagined the entire structure crashing down upon itself, crumbling to the earth under that eerie barrage of deafening silence.

  Jamie reached out again for Derek, and Derek snaked an arm around his waist to hold him close. They stood frozen for a moment, listening. Waiting. Trembling in expectation.

  Then the scream came again.

  RUNNING FOOTSTEPS thundered across the hardwood floor in the parlor. Oliver Banyon burst through the parlor door with Tommy Stevens hot on his tail. They skidded to a stop when they spotted Jamie and Derek on the stairs. Both men were still clutching their drinks. Banyon’s hand was dripping where most of his cocktail had sloshed out as he ran. He looked stunned, while Tommy wore a strange grin on his face that didn’t seem to fit the circumstances at all. It was a fun-house grin. Like Tommy thought maybe it was all a game. A trick.

  The kid’s in shock, Derek thought.

  A moment later, Cleeta-Gayle Jones appeared at the top of the stairs. Her eyes were as big as silver dollars, her face pale. One trembling hand clutched the bodice of her dress, the other embraced her throat.

  Derek quickly altered his opinion. Tommy Stevens wasn’t in shock. She was.

  “Who was that?” she wailed. “Who screamed?”

  The answer was obvious.

  “It had to be Mrs. Jupp,” Derek said. “She’s the only other woman here.”

  “Where is she?” Jamie asked, not caring what anyone thought about him standing there in Derek’s arms. If they had a problem with it, fuck ’em. “Where’s her husband? Where’s Mr. Jupp?” Banyon stepped forward. He was clutching Tommy’s hand. Tommy wasn’t grinning anymore. He seemed to have finally caught on to the fact that something was wrong. Whiz kid.

  Clearly rattled, Banyon spoke louder than necessary. A professor trying to reach the students in the back. “He told me they were going to check the basement for a generator in case the storm took out the electricity. That must be where the scream came from.”

  “I guess we should find them,” Jamie said, his eyes centering on Derek as if Derek’s opinion was the only one he cared about. Derek had to admit he liked that. He ignored the sudden urge to kiss Jamie’s trembling lip in front of everybody in the hall.

  Instead, he tugged him down the stairs. They were only a few steps into their search to find the quickest route to the basement when a door slammed deep inside the house. Footsteps approached. They seemed to be rising up toward them, coming from beneath the staircase.

/>   A triangular door under the arch of the stairs, one that Derek had not noticed before, squeaked open. Mrs. Jupp stepped through it into the hall. She looked even more terrified than Cleeta-Gayle. Her hair had escaped the bun at the back of her head and hung in long gray tendrils across her shoulder, swinging under the weight of a couple of fat bobby pins that were hanging on for dear life. Her pale cheeks were wet with tears, and the tears had not yet stopped falling. Her eyes were brimming with them. She spotted everyone watching her and pulled herself up short.

  Mrs. Jupp opened her mouth to speak, but only a sob came out. A noise behind her made her jump, then turn. Her husband stepped into the hall from beneath the stairs. One side of his trousers was covered in blood.

  Cleeta-Gayle finally released the scream she had been holding in for so long. Even Derek had to admit it was a pretty good time to let it go. Immediately she tried to swallow a second scream, succeeding to some extent. “What’s happened?” she cried. “Why is he bleeding?”

  Mr. Jupp looked down at himself, then back up into the gaping faces. Derek couldn’t tear his gaze away from the old man’s eyes. Magnified, as always, behind his thick glasses, they radiated shock and fear. His jowls were slack with terror. His mouth sliced a thin scar above his chin. Somehow he looked twenty years older.

  “It’s not my blood,” he said on an intake of breath, as if the very act of speaking had pulled the air from his lungs. “There was—so much. I—I slipped in it and fell.”

  “If it isn’t yours, whose blood is it?” Derek asked, taking a step forward.

  Mr. Jupp opened his mouth to explain, but a movement to his left caused his eyes to skitter sideways. For a large man, he moved quickly and gracefully, catching his wife before she hit the floor.

  He knelt with a groan on aged knees and, carefully cradling Mrs. Jupp in his arms, lowered her frail body gently to the floor. He laid a skillet-sized hand over his wife’s meager bosom as if feeling for a heartbeat. Apparently satisfied she had only fainted, he lifted his gaze to the people watching. In the end, his old, weak eyes settled again on Derek, just as Derek somehow knew they would.

  “Whoever they are, or were,” Mr. Jupp said, straining to calm his voice, “they’re both dead now. I think they were murdered.”

  THE TWO bodies lay side by side in a dirty back corner of the old house’s basement, in a small enclosure about ten feet square that used to be a coal bin. There was a hinged door, closed to the elements now and no bigger than a window, inserted in the wall above the bodies where the coal was once shoveled in from outside.

  The corpses were older. Probably in their seventies. A man and a woman. Their lives had clearly been snuffed out by cruel blows to the head. First one, and then the other. Their bodies had been neatly laid out on the filthy, blackened floor, the old woman’s skirt modestly folded over her legs, the man’s shirt and tie neatly smoothed out across his still chest. Neither corpse could have weighed much in life, for in death, they appeared almost skeletal. Jamie suspected it would have taken very little effort to end their lives.

  On both corpses, the eyes were closed, as if in spite of all the blood and violence, they had merely dozed off in the coal bin, of all unearthly places. Jamie wondered if the murderer might not have closed their eyes for them. But why in the world would he—or she—do that?

  A small hand shovel lay on the floor beside the woman’s head. Its blade was covered in blood.

  The murder weapon.

  Jamie stood stunned by what he was seeing. After a startled intake of breath, he quickly placed a hand over his nose and mouth, for he suddenly smelled the bodies. They must have been dead a while.

  “Oh my God,” Banyon exclaimed, as if he had suddenly found his voice. He stood with Tommy, next to Jamie and Derek, as they all stared down at the two corpses on the floor. Cleeta-Gayle hung far back, over by the ancient furnace in the corner, refusing to come any closer.

  The basement was a mess, as basements usually are. Cobwebs trailed from the rafters overhead. A lifetime of discarded items were piled here and there. The only light came from a bare bulb hanging from the end of a cord in the middle of the ceiling. The light bulb swayed, causing shadows to roll back and forth, bringing everything in the basement to imaginary life but for the two bodies in the corner. No amount of imagination could have resuscitated them.

  As Jamie watched, a spider crawled out of the dead woman’s hair and skittered across her face, disappearing into her hairline on the other side.

  Jamie almost barfed.

  A pool of blood had spilled from the coal bin and meandered out onto the basement floor. At a spot six feet or so from the bodies, the blood was smeared in a wide swath. Directly beneath the bare light bulb, footsteps could be seen in the shimmering liquid. That was where Mr. Jupp had fallen. Jamie didn’t need Hercule Poirot to tell him that.

  The fetid basement air had been moistened by the storm, which was probably why the blood on the floor had not completely congealed. It took Jamie a few seconds to realize that what he originally thought was the smell of decomposed bodies, was really not that at all. Perhaps the two victims had not been dead long enough for that. What he smelled was the effluvium of loosened bowels where the victims’ waste had spilled from their bodies at the moment of death.

  Jamie really wished he hadn’t figured that out.

  The pressure of Derek’s hand at his back eased the shudder welling up inside him.

  “These two must be the owners of the house,” Derek said.

  “You mean our host and hostess?” Jamie asked, still trying not to gag at the stench and the memory of that goddamn spider.

  “I don’t think so,” Derek answered. “I don’t know them. I’ve never seen them before. And unless you’re keeping it a secret, I don’t think you know them either, or you’d have mentioned it by now.”

  “No, I don’t know them,” Jamie muttered through the hand still clapped over his mouth and nose. If Derek had been trying to make a joke, Jamie hadn’t found it amusing. Derek turned to the others. Banyon and Cleeta-Gayle were carefully watching him, as if they didn’t need another glimpse of the two dead people, thank you very much. Only Tommy Stevens still stared at the bodies, his eyes bright with wonder, his expression oddly blank, as if he couldn’t quite interpret what it was he was seeing.

  “Do any of you recognize these people?” Derek asked.

  He was answered by a couple of muttered no’s and then silence. Just as Jamie expected.

  “I have to get out of here,” Jamie said, and Derek quickly agreed.

  He steered Jamie back toward the basement steps. “Come on, babe,” he said. “I think we need another drink.” Cleeta-Gayle was no longer in the basement. She had already left. Back upstairs. Back to the light. Back where no head-bashed old people had been left to bleed to death on a filthy basement floor.

  DEREK SUCKED in a breath of clean air as he led Jamie back into the foyer through the strange little Harry Potter door under the stairs. He studied Jamie’s eyes and realized he had never seen such sadness in them before, but it wasn’t surprising. What they had witnessed in the basement was truly the saddest thing either one of them had ever seen.

  Jamie brushed his hair out of his eyes with a trembling hand. His gaze found Derek’s face. “I don’t think we should have left them alone down there. Shouldn’t we at least cover them up?”

  Derek sighed. “I don’t think we should disturb the evidence.”

  Jamie nodded. “I guess you’re right.”

  “Are you okay?” Derek gently prodded.

  Jamie nodded again. As if shaking off the fetid cold of the basement, he headed straight for the fire in the parlor. He stood in front of the flames, washing his hands in the heat, while Derek took it upon himself to pour them each a drink. God knew they needed it.

  Banyon, Tommy, and Cleeta-Gayle had positioned themselves around a settee in the corner of the room, where Mr. Jupp was tending to his wife, who had woken up. He held a hand towel filled
with ice cubes to her forehead, as if he thought that would make her feel better. Derek thought she looked more annoyed than appeased by his attentions, but she didn’t say anything. She simply let her husband do what he felt he needed to do. Derek supposed that was the result of spending a lifetime together. Letting the other do what they thought needed to be done, whether it pissed you off or not.

  Drinks poured, Derek nudged close to Jamie in front of the fire and handed one to him.

  Jamie took it but didn’t bring it to his lips. Instead, he simply stared into the flames. A moment later, he said, “We have to get out of here. We have to notify the police.”

  In the background, Derek noticed for the first time, the soft sounds of Cleeta-Gayle sobbing into her hands. Banyon was awkwardly patting her shoulder, trying to get her to stop, while Tommy stood over by the sideboard, chewing on a sliver of tuna sandwich. His eyes weren’t on Banyon or Miss Jones; they were on Jamie and Derek across the room. Mr. and Mrs. Jupp looked at no one but each other.

  Unintentionally, Derek overheard Mrs. Jupp fussing about the state of her husband’s trousers. “I need to soak those, or we’ll never get the blood out.”

  “Maybe we should wait until the police come?” Mr. Jupp replied, his voice low, as if he didn’t want the others to hear. He used almost the same words Derek had used only moments before. “One isn’t supposed to mess with evidence at a crime scene, you know.”

  Mrs. Jupp bristled at that. “You watch too much TV. Just when do you think the police will come? After the bridge rebuilds itself? After the phones miraculously start working again on their own? When Batman swoops down in his Batcopter and carries us all away to Gotham City?”

  For all her griping about her husband watching too much TV, she herself was clearly a movie fan. Derek bit back a giggle.

  Mr. Jupp, on the other hand, sounded like every henpecked husband Derek had ever known. “Sorry,” he said, “I wasn’t thinking.”