Murder in Mystery Manor

by Anthony E. Zuiker

  She was holding up the end of a loose piano wire from the wreckage.

  “So, what does that mean?” Thomas asked, likely sounding more annoyed than he’d intended.

  “Well, it’s the only one that’s loose and I don’t think it happened when the piano hit the ground,” she said. “If it had, more wires would be loose just like this one.”

  “Okay, makes sense to me,” Bryce said. “Then again, I don’t know anything about pianos.”

  “It’s something,” Thomas finally agreed. “Maybe. But it’s all we have for now, either way.”

  They then moved on to the clock. The investigation went about the same. They found nothing overly significant. The only thing each of them agreed could mean anything at all was the clockface itself.

  It was stopped at 9:30 P.M. Which was more or less around the time the whole thing had started when the lights had gone out. They knew it wasn’t much, but it was all they had. For now.

  As the estate bell chimed indicating it was time to move to the morgue, they all hoped that there was more to come. Because at that moment, none of it made any sense yet.

  Once in the morgue, Jacqueline took the lead as Bryce and Thomas observed.

  The bodies of the two maids sat on side-by-side metal tables. They started with the maid who had been crushed by the clock. After a thorough examination, the only thing they noticed other than the obvious signs of trauma caused by being crushed under a clock was some froth and vomit in her mouth, similar to what they’d found in Frank’s mouth after he’d been murdered.

  “She was poisoned just like Frank,” Jacqueline said. “Or so it appears. There’s no way to know for sure, of course.”

  “Remember, right before he disappeared, Giles said that this last game would involve fragments of all the other murders,” Bryce said.

  Thomas studied them both intently. Then he nodded slowly in agreement without saying anything.

  The next thing they noticed about the maid’s body, after they flipped it over, was that she’d also been shot. There was a bullet entrance wound in the middle of her back. There was no exit wound.

  “So the killer, one of us, poisoned her, shot her, and then dropped a clock on her body? That seems like overkill to me, sorry for the crappy pun and all. But, seriously, I mean, screw that!” Bryce said, his eyes wide as he looked from Jacqueline to Thomas and back again.

  “How do we know it’s not you?” Thomas said.

  “Because I’m not a creepy psycho like you,” he said.

  “Boys, stop it!” Jacqueline said in that way only a mother can. “We have work to do. We can accuse each other all we want later.”

  “Okay, fine, what about this one?” Thomas nodded at the other maid’s body.

  “I’m getting there, keep your pants on!” Jacqueline said.

  She examined the second maid’s body. Again there was the obvious damage caused from being crushed by a grand piano. But aside from that, they all noticed ligature bruising around her neck, wounds obviously not caused by a falling piano.

  “Strangled, just like Emily’s helicopter murder!” Bryce said, growing angry as he remembered her death.

  The estate bell chimed at the end of his sentence, as if to punctuate in perfect agreement.

  The three of them had never been to the estate’s servants’ quarters. But as soon as they entered the smaller structure behind the mansion, a male servant guided them to a massive room with eight beds, a small kitchenette, several desks, and a dinner table with eight chairs. It connected to two small, shared bathrooms.

  “This is the maids’ quarters,” he said, and then stepped outside, leaving them alone to investigate.

  The room looked as if it had been left in a hurry. There were still remnants of an unfinished dinner on the table next to the kitchenette in the corner of the room. Dirty maid uniforms and other clothes were spilling out of an overflowing hamper by one of the bathrooms. A blow dryer, towels, makeup containers, and other assorted toiletries littered the counters of the bathroom itself.

  Bryce found the first clue rather quickly.

  “Look!” he said.

  He pointed at a half-eaten plate of sushi. Across from it, the other maid had been eating a salad. Apparently, they’d been in the middle of dinner when beckoned back over to the mansion for the final challenge.

  “The one eating sushi must be the one we suspect was poisoned,” Jacqueline said.

  Neither Thomas nor Bryce responded. But they didn’t have to; that had been an easy enough conclusion to arrive at. So instead they merely continued searching.

  Near the end of their investigation period, Thomas had resorted to digging through a purse slung over the shoulder of one of the dining table chairs. The chair in front of the plate of salad. He pulled out a set of keys. Jacqueline and Bryce turned toward the noise.

  “Keys?” Bryce said.

  “Let me see those,” Jacqueline said.

  Thomas handed them to her. She examined them closely, then handed them back.

  “Well?” Thomas said.

  “Well, I don’t know!” Jacqueline snapped in an unusually sharp tone. “I mean, they’re definitely for an older car, but I have no idea what they would mean. They’re probably related to the car crash murder that killed Sophia and Parker.”

  “Then again, they might not even be evidence at all,” Bryce said.

  “Yeah,” Thomas said, but his expression betrayed him. He looked as if he thought they were quite significant.

  Bryce noticed as much but said nothing.

  It didn’t matter, because just then the estate bell rang, ending their discussion. One of the remaining maids entered and handed Jacqueline a small note card.

  “More instructions,” she said, and then turned and left.

  Jacqueline looked at the card and then read it aloud.

  “ ‘Let us play a little game of hot and cold. Find your inner child, if you’re to be so bold. Maybe try looking at things another way. Perhaps the way you saw them earlier today.’ ”

  CHAPTER 50

  CRIME SCENE

  Jacqueline finished reading and the three of them looked at one another, unsure as to what exactly to do next.

  “There’s more on the back,” Bryce said, pointing at the card in her hand.

  She flipped it over and read.

  “ ‘You may now move about the entire estate as you see fit. Either alone or together, the choice is yours, so use your wit.’ ”

  It didn’t take long after she’d read the last sentence for the three of them to split up.

  Thomas rushed back to the crime scene almost immediately. It was still somewhat disorienting to enter an upside-down room. Especially one as grandiose as the mansion’s formal living room. Or as grand as it had been before all of its contents were smashed across the ceiling floor, anyway.

  He moved to the clock first and held up the smashed face. He considered the riddle, “looking at things another way. Perhaps the way you saw them earlier today,” and then flipped it so it was upside down. The 9:30 P.M. suddenly became 3:00 A.M. It was interesting but perhaps not overtly significant just yet. At least not until it made a connection with something else, some other clue Thomas hoped to find.

  He set down the clockface and moved to the grand piano. He grabbed the loose piano wire and twisted it around so it was upside down. It still just looked like loose piano wire to him. Thomas stood there and stared at it for a few more moments before finally giving up and rushing out the door toward the morgue.

  A few minutes after Thomas left, Bryce also returned to the crime scene. He, like Thomas, started with the clockface. He turned it upside down as well but considered it differently. When he switched it upside down, the 9:30 P.M., to him, became 6:90 as he considered the numbers mobile as well. Of course, if he weren’t in the middle of a game where the loser dies, he might have giggled at the clue like the immature college dropout he was. But instead, he merely threw aside the clockface, clearly frustrated: 6:90
made no sense—he was obviously missing something.

  But he knew he needed to stay calm. So he moved over to the piano. He held up the loose piano wire and examined it. Bryce twisted it around and then had a realization that seemed so obvious to him that he’d have been shocked to discover that Thomas had missed it.

  When turned just the right way, the piano wire looked like a noose. The action of moving it simulated strangling someone. Like Emily. And also like the maid crushed underneath this thing had been.

  Satisfied that he discovered something at the very least, Bryce left the crime scene, passing Jacqueline on the way out.

  “Good luck,” he said to her with a warm smile.

  She smiled back. When she’d first met him, she, like most other guests, had him pegged as somewhat of a loser. A lazy, entitled product of a changing world. Kids these days didn’t work hard like they’d had to when she’d grown up. But he’d surprised her that week. Not just with his unanticipated intellect when he applied himself, but his displays of empathy that many of the other guests had shockingly lacked in key moments. Even though Bryce at first had sometimes tried to hide the empathy behind a wall of jokes and apathy, she’d seen it the whole time.

  Jacqueline started with a clock just as the other two had. It took her a little longer, but she, too, noticed that when held upside down, the time on the clock became 3:00 A.M. But unlike Thomas, she also made the same connection as Bryce had with the piano wire. When held up and twisted, it made a noose. It seemed an even easier conclusion to reach given that the maid crushed beneath the piano showed obvious signs of being strangled by a thin cord. Jacqueline also would have been surprised to learn that Thomas had not figured that out.

  But, as it were, after revisiting two of the three locations now, and reexamining the clues under new light, she was confident, as she made her way toward the morgue, that she would indeed make it through the night alive.

  CHAPTER 51

  MORGUE

  Bryce had been the first to revisit the morgue before leaving to check out the crime scene again. But his second trip to the morgue had been a short one. He looked at the bodies of the two maids again and again, replaying the newest riddle in his head. “Try looking at things another way. Perhaps the way you saw them earlier today.” It didn’t make any sense to him in relation to the two bodies.

  He tried looking at the maids’ dead bodies from every angle, but nothing clicked. Bryce even tried rolling them over, but found nothing. He eventually sighed, gave up, and then bolted for the living room.

  Hopefully he would have more luck there.

  Thomas showed up at the morgue a short time later. He started with the first maid and her gunshot wound. He did the same thing as Bryce, starting by looking at it from an upside-down angle. Except the main difference was, unlike Bryce, he definitely noticed something unusual.

  The blood from the wound had stained the maid’s uniform, as one might assume it would after getting shot. However, the blood hadn’t run down her back toward her feet like one might also assume. Instead, the blood streaking away from the wound did so toward her head and neck. Which meant what? Considering the laws of gravitational pull, it had to mean that she’d been shot while hanging upside down.

  It was certainly possible considering they’d been inside a room that had turned itself upside down around the time she’d been murdered. But how had she stayed standing or hanging long enough for the killer to shoot her if she wasn’t on that same panel the guests had been on? It had been the only portion of the room to remain right side up.

  Thomas mentally banked the question for now and moved on to the second body. He examined the ligature marks closely and then opened her eyelids and looked into her lifeless, bloodshot eyes. The blood vessels had burst, but just like the first victim the blood had pooled more so at the tops of the whites of her eyes. She’d also been hanging upside down when she was murdered.

  But how was that possible?

  How could the killer have kept them from falling once the floor became the ceiling? How had the killer stayed up there him- or herself? And how had the killer managed to kill both of them at the same time?

  It didn’t make any sense.

  Frustrated that the morgue had brought more questions than answers, Thomas slammed his fist onto the metal table and ran for the stairs. He could only hope that his second trip to the maids’ quarters would somehow answer those questions.

  Jacqueline was the last one to visit the morgue for a second time. Feeling confident, perhaps overconfident, she moved meticulously around the two bodies. Being a former nurse, and having carried many of the other guests through morgue investigations, she had a feeling she would find exactly what she needed to, so there was no need to rush.

  And she did indeed figure out that the blood directionality of the first maid was all wrong. In fact, it looked so abnormal now on a second viewing, the blood trailing up her shoulders toward her head, that she was somewhat shocked that they all hadn’t noticed it the first time.

  But she hit a roadblock on the second maid’s body. There were no external bleeding wounds from the strangulation to be able to draw as easy a conclusion. So she kept searching, having no idea that one of the guests was getting dangerously close to solving the entire puzzle.

  CHAPTER 52

  LAST KNOWN WHEREABOUTS

  Right after the newest riddle had been read aloud in the maids’ quarters, Thomas had bolted from the room, heading for the crime scene. Bryce had lingered for a moment, just looking at Jacqueline. Then, after asking her to read the riddle again, he said he would take the morgue first and left.

  So Jacqueline stayed there in the maids’ quarters and reexamined all the clues with the new perspective of the riddle. It hadn’t taken her very long to make what she thought were two important discoveries. She left the servants’ house with a grin on her face as she moved along the garden path back toward the mansion and the crime scene. In her mind, this game was basically already over.

  Thomas, knowing he was getting close, practically sprinted back to the maids’ quarters after his trips to the crime scene and morgue. He’d been moving much faster than Jacqueline and Bryce the whole time and thus managed to get there while Bryce was still at the crime scene trying to uselessly figure out what 6:90 on a clockface could possibly mean.

  Once back inside the maids’ quarters, Thomas moved right toward the unfinished dinners on the table. He twisted and turned the plastic containers of sushi and salad, but nothing jumped out at him right away. So he stood there and stared at the two disposable to-go containers.

  The maids’ names had been written across the top of each one in black marker. The salad container belonged to Courtney. Not much to work with there, no matter how the letters were rearranged. But then, when Thomas glanced at the sushi box, looking at the name written on the open lid, which from his perspective was currently upside down, it suddenly clicked.

  “Crap,” he said aloud. “Map.”

  The name “Pam,” when flipped upside down in word form, which was to simply reverse the order of the letters, spelled “map.” He feverishly dug through her lunch bag, tossing aside the extra napkin and packets of wasabi and soy sauce. Nothing. He scanned the table again, stopping on the pile of napkins.

  He looked closer. One of them had a small map drawn on it. It was crude and basic, but he was certain it was a map of the estate mansion. Below it, the same pen had scribbled:

  U – weakerthan P – desaparecidos.

  Of course the words made no sense to him in the moment, but that didn’t matter. What mattered was that he had a map. A map that would likely lead him to victory. A map that he had found first and was going to take with him so the other two would never find it. This game was more or less over, as far as Thomas was concerned.

  CHAPTER 53

  THE TREASURE HUNT

  Thomas reentered the mansion from the servants’ house with much less haste than he’d shown leaving it. He didn’t want to b
e spotted looking like he had a real lead. He was following a map left by the killer and likely on his way to victory, so it was difficult to move slowly, to pretend he was as lost as the other two likely still were.

  He entered the mansion through the east door by the patio, which was where the map indicated to start as best he could tell. After that, it actually became surprisingly easy to follow. It eventually led him back to the study where both Darrel and Emily were last seen before their murders.

  Once there, Thomas paused.

  Now what?

  He looked down at the map one last time. His gaze again passed over the scribbles below the map:

  U – weakerthan P – desaparecidos

  It had to be a clue as to what was next. But what exactly did it mean?

  Thomas looked around the study, searching for some kind of connection. He thought perhaps the words appeared on one of the paintings or items hanging from the walls. Next he tried looking at items on each of the four desks. When he saw the first closed laptop computer, it suddenly made sense.

  Or at least he hoped it did.

  Thomas sat down at the nearest desk and opened the laptop on top of it. He typed “weakerthan” into the user name field, and “desaparecidos” as the password. He clicked the log-in button.

  The desktop loaded. It had worked!

  A message popped up almost right away:

  Would you like to restore

  your last browser session?

  Thomas clicked yes.

  A web browser opened up and brought him to a social network site. He typed in the same user name and password he’d used to get into the computer. Again, it worked. The profile loading was Pam’s. The default picture was definitely the maid who had just been murdered in front of him.

  But it wasn’t her real page. It was just another clue—he could see that right away. For one thing, her page contained no content or posts of any kind. Also, she had just one friend on the site, someone named David Bazan.