Endgame (20 page)

P
ete
and Sandra carried Crispin upstairs. Verna was filled with trepidation as she unlocked the room beside hers and they brought him in, laying him out as though on a funeral bier like all the others.

“I suppose he should be in here and not somewhere else,” Verna said, mostly to herself. She shivered. “I just wish we could put him in someone else's room.”

“This was his room,” Sami Lee said coldly. “He's staying here.”

They left the room and locked it behind them.

“The dead don't walk,” Sami Lee said to Verna. “You won't have to worry that he'll come into your room and murder you next.”

“So what do we do now?” Pete asked. “Sit around all day watching one another as we go crazy, or do we just lock ourselves in our rooms and stay there till help comes?”

“I suggest we try to make a fire and send up a smoke signal,” Sami Lee said. “I for one don't intend to sit here and wait to be killed.”

Without Max to look after her, she'd become a more dominant personality. Somehow, she seemed to have found an inner resolve.

In the end, it was agreed they would light a fire on the cliff facing the mainland. The results were dismal at best. There was little hope anyone would even be looking for smoke signals on a small island in the middle of a rainstorm. After half an hour, they gave up and returned to the house.

“How long can this fucking rain go on?” Sami Lee said, shaking her fist at the sky.

At noon, they convened in the dining room and had another meal of canned tuna. The bread had run out and no one wanted to cook. The kettle was filled under everyone's watchful eye. When the whistle blew, each of the four chose a tea bag and inserted it into a cup as the water was poured. The fridge had remained unplugged so no one bothered with milk.

The scene was repeated again at six o'clock for supper. In the middle of the meal the power went off, plunging them in darkness.

“Fucking power corporation,” Sami Lee said.

“We better check the fuses,” Sandra told them. “But we'll do it together.”

It was agreed they would all go down to the electrical room, one after another, holding a single flashlight. Pete stumbled on the stairs and broke the chain. There was a moment of panic before the line was resumed as, hand in hand, they moved forward and found the switch breakers. Just as they opened the panel, the power suddenly came on again. They stumbled back upstairs, nervous and edgy.

It was then Pete realized he hadn't checked the chess board after Crispin's death. True to form, he found the black bishop tipped over on its side.
Eight poisoned needles
, mocked the Voice. Pete shivered and shut the door to the drawing room without telling the others.

Supper was soon over and the dishes washed jointly. They retired to their rooms by eight. It was agreed that no one needed to emerge before morning, so no secret knock was prearranged.

S
andra lay in bed envisioning over and over again the scene in which she asked Crispin if he wanted to trust the insulin. She saw him nod, knowing there really was no choice. If she didn't give it to him, he would die. But he died anyway. The look of agony on his face, the twisted lips and bulging eyes were forever burned into her memory. No matter how long she lived, she would never forget that sight.

She'd seen many troubling things, but nothing quite as awful as that. Before, when she'd concocted the compounds to put people out of their misery, they had simply and peacefully gone off to sleep, never to awaken. But this was different. This was a man who still wanted very much to live. As far as she was concerned, there was no reason anyone should want to see him die that way.

Pete, too, lay in bed. He was waiting for the Voice to make itself known, but nothing came in the hours he lay there. Eventually, he drifted off into an uneasy sleep where he found himself examining an urn in a garden. The urn lay on its side. With a great effort, he managed to set it upright, but as he did he saw it was no longer an urn but a giant chess piece. A black knight. As he stood and brushed off his hands, he heard an unearthly buzzing. He watched as a swarm of wasps emerged from the knight's mouth. Hundreds of them.

He held his breath and kept very still as they began to zoom around, lighting on his clothes and in his hair. Then, sensing he wasn't what they were looking for, the wasps turned as one and flew off in another direction.

Sami Lee lay awake trying to piece together the strange chain of events that brought them to Shark Island. First had been Harvey's letter turning up suddenly and Max shouting for joy upon reading the news. Then Pete called asking to join them. How could they have known the terrible things that awaited them? On the other hand, it was fitting for a star to go out in a blaze of glory rather than fade away. It wasn't right for a legend like Max to end up old and destitute. Stars had to die young in order to stay immortal, otherwise what was the point of being a star? Stars didn't fade. They crashed and burned and exploded. Their legends demanded it. So Max had fulfilled his destiny by dying here on Shark Island.

Verna, too, lay awake, thinking of that awful night of the party twenty years ago. She could still see herself as Werner, how he seemed to speak those words as if he'd been prompted: “Don't call 911. Don't get the police involved or we're all screwed!”

Until then, no one had paid much attention to Werner, but suddenly it was as if he were in command. Amazingly, no one contested him when he took the phone from Spike's hand.

“What do we do then?”
Spike asked.

“Send her in a taxi,”
Sami Lee had said.

Werner argued, “But then they'll know where she was picked up and they'll come looking for us.”
He felt very much in control, as if he had thought this all out beforehand.

“We'll take her outside and meet the taxi on the corner,” Max said.

And so Zerin Ames's fate had been decided for the conven­ience of everyone else.

Later the story was concocted that she'd been taken to the taxi by two unknown men, friends of Zerin's who left the party with her and were never seen again. At the trial, Newt Merton pleaded no contest on the advice of Noni Embrem and went to jail. And, but for fifty thousand dollars in cash, he might have told the truth about everyone else's involvement. But he didn't.

End of story.

It was while she was reliving these terrible memories that Verna heard a scratching sound coming from the roof. She sat up in bed and looked around, but saw nothing in the darkness. She listened carefully. The scratching stopped. Now there was another sound in the room. A faint buzzing. And suddenly, Verna knew how she would die.

N
one of the others could remember when they eventually drifted off to a sleep disturbed by dark happenings, but they all recalled clearly what woke them: a scream in the night. In the confusion that followed, no one was willing to emerge from his or her room without the secret knock, but eventually Sami Lee came out, followed by Pete and Sandra. They convened in front of Verna's door where they could hear her whimpering inside, but nothing more.

“Open it,” Sami Lee commanded.

“We can't. Verna's got the other key to the cupboard,” Sandra said. “Mine opens the case the master key ring is in. Without Verna's key, I can't open the cupboard.”

“Then break the fucking lock on the cupboard,” Sami Lee told them.

Pete ran downstairs where they heard him bashing away at the cupboard. Eventually, he returned bearing the key ring. They opened Verna's room, but by then all sound had ceased.

“Careful,” Sandra said. “Someone could be hiding in here.”

She flicked the light on. There was no one else in the room.

Verna lay spread-eagled on the bed, naked. In her effort to escape, she'd shed her cotton nightie. Her body was covered in red welts, as though she'd been kissed all over. Her bee-stung lips were still proudly full and red. A few of the wasps were still buzzing around. Others lay dying or dead on the bedspread. On the floor beneath the window lay a large papery wasps' nest.

They spent a few minutes knocking down the rest of the flying insects before stamping on them and beating them to death.

Sami Lee looked around. “How did they get in here?”

Indeed, there was no obvious way in which the wasps might have entered the room. The curtains were pulled back, but the window was bolted from inside.

“It's impossible,” Sandra said.

Check!
said the Voice.

“Stop it,” Pete screamed, clutching his head. “Stop playing this game!”

Sami Lee and Sandra stared at him.

“What's going on?” Sandra said.

“It won't stop,” Pete said, with a deranged look on his face. “It's the Voice. It keeps telling me to look at the chessboard, but I won't go down there anymore. Why won't it leave me alone?”

“Calm down, Pete,” Sami Lee commanded.

The Voice did not speak again. Pete quieted himself after a few minutes while Sami Lee and Sandra checked to make sure Verna was no longer alive.

“I was sure it was her,” he said, clutching his head as though he feared the wasps might swarm him next.

“Well, clearly it wasn't,” Sami Lee said.

“What now?” Sandra asked, looking fearfully around.

Sami Lee gazed at her coldly. “I suggest we all go back to bed and lock our doors and stay there until morning.”

“But how will we know we're safe?” Sandra demanded. “Verna was locked in her room and the killer still got to her.”

Sami Lee nodded. “We will each go downstairs to the kitchen and bring a knife into our room with us. It's the only way to be sure. Agreed?”

The other two nodded.

Together, they tromped down to the kitchen and waited while each selected a weapon, then went warily back up the stairs, trying not to think about the fact that they were all now armed. One by one, they went into their rooms and locked their doors behind them.

It's Pete
, thought Sami Lee.
It's this crazy Voice he keeps hearing that tells him to kill us. Maybe he doesn't even know he's doing it, like some sort of sadistic psycho who turns into a killing machine when his alter ego takes over.

It's Sami Lee
, Sandra thought.
I know Pete sounds crazy, but he's not really capable of doing anyone any harm. Not when you come down to it. He's just a neurotic. Or maybe I'm deluding myself.

Fucking women
, Pete thought.
It could be either of them. I've always had to watch myself around women. First they steal your money, then they stab you in the back and walk out on you.

It could be both of them
, the Voice said.

Pete was startled.
Yes
, he thought.
They're probably in it together
. He clutched the handle of his knife and held it tightly.
If they try to get in here, they'll get what they deserve
.