Nine Man's Murder (22 page)

But Bryan pressed on. “You won’t shoot me, Jonas.”

Jonas disputed the point with a thrust of the gun.

“You don’t have the nerve,” Bryan taunted.

“What choice do I have?”

“You’re bluffing,” Bryan said.

Jonas did not understand. Was Bryan purposely antagonizing him, goading him to shoot?

“That’s close enough,” Jonas warned. “You slipped up, Bryan, and I have no intention of giving you a second chance.”

“Then you’re going to have to kill me.”

Like a panther Bryan leaped for the gun. Jonas pulled the trigger.

57

J
onas stared down
at the motionless body, asking himself what he had to do to wake up. He had killed his partner, his friend.

With the gun still dangling from his hand, Jonas staggered into the parlor room. He would have liked to have heard Bryan’s explanation for Jill’s murder, as well as Hatter’s death. Two seemingly impossible murders: in each, a dead body found in a room with the door locked from within and no window that could be opened. No way in, and certainly no way to have left the rooms sealed up so tight.

Jonas placed the gun on an end table near the entrance to the library corridor. Nothing seemed real; the inn seemed suffused with an eldritch light, as if the last three days had dawned and dimmed inside the head of some cosmic lunatic. But now it was finished. The game was over, and he had won.

“Thank God,” he muttered aloud, drifting from the end table. “It’s over.”

He had heard no footsteps. But suddenly, from the corridor entrance behind him, echoed the sound of unearthly laughter.

“Is it?” a voice asked.

58

I
t was impossible.
Should he have checked to make sure Bryan—?

No. The laugh, the voice was not Bryan’s.

This couldn’t be. Jonas was the only one left. Yet there on the threshold between the parlor room and corridor that led to the downstairs bedrooms and library Jonas caught, out of the corner of his eye, the silhouette of a man brandishing a gun and laughing eerily. It was the deranged laugh of a demon god looking gleefully on the end of the world. Torn between an urge and a fear to see the intruder’s face, Jonas slowly turned.

It wasn’t possible. He couldn’t be seeing what he was seeing.

It was Bennett.

“You’re dead,” Jonas gasped. “I examined your body myself.”

“No,” said the man, with a bodiless laugh suggesting that Hatter had been right all along. “It was Bennett whose body you examined.” His hand seemed to float toward his face. “Not mine.”

Bennett’s fingers seized his nose and, as if in a madman’s nightmare, ripped it from his face. No blood. Wait … Another, smaller nose lay beneath the first. From his eyes Bennett removed a pair of colored contacts, then he stripped the bushy eyebrows from his forehead. The sideburns followed, then the moustache and beard. From his overalls he removed a handkerchief, with which he began to wipe away the covering makeup.

This face was one Jonas had seen before, not long ago, at Owen’s Reef. Beneath the wig that he yanked from his skull sat a head of short black hair belonging to a man to whom Jonas had paid little heed at the time.

“Bill?” Jonas asked, already knowing the answer.

Bill—the driver of the van who had met them at the train station. The man who, with Max, had delivered them to Moon’s End. Bill …

“William,” the man corrected.

The taunting notes. The wording of the invitation. The reference to the movie, Nine Man Morris …

“William Hayward,” Jonas concluded. “You don’t look anything like you did fifteen years ago.”

“Time—particularly the time I spent starving myself in the asylum—has changed me. Along with some cosmetic help.” The impostor continued to wipe the makeup from his face.

“Then you were behind the whole thing. But why?”

“Why? Isn’t it obvious? You ‘great detectives’ killed my brother.”

“Then it wasn’t Bryan …”

“He thought it was you. That was the beauty of my plan.”

“So you planted the gun in his room …”

“It was no matter to me who shot whom. Although, frankly, I had figured on him killing you.”

The gun. He had forgotten all about it. But now Jonas realized, to his horror, that he had left the weapon lying on the end table beside which Hayward at this very moment stood; while he himself was barely within wishing range. He had to reach that gun without telegraphing his intent to Hayward.

A show of bewilderment would play to Hayward’s ego. “Once the bridge blew up, there was no way for you to have crossed the ravine. So you had to have crossed before then. Yet after the explosion, we searched the entire mountaintop—and there were only nine of us. You couldn’t have remained hidden from us, yet that’s exactly what you appear to have done. How?”

“Yes, you would have to ask. My first step was to determine which of you was closest to me in height and weight. That turned out to be Bennett. The perfect choice, really, because he hated all of you, and I knew I could persuade him to cooperate. In addition, he had changed so much in fifteen years, I knew none of you would recognize him. Which was essential to my plan.

“I paid a visit to Bennett Nash, in the guise of ‘Bill,’ of course. I planted the idea that each of his former classmates was in a position to learn about his theft of Capaldi’s ledger and expose it to the police. I led him to the idea of coming up here to discover what each of you knew. I made him think it was his own idea.

“The ‘reunion’ had the added advantage of providing a place for Bennett to hide. And, as a final enticement, I proposed the masquerade as Aaron the caretaker. Bennett was hesitant at first, but I sold the plan as the perfect opportunity to pay you all back for the way you had treated him fifteen years ago: I used to watch you all mock him. Bennett was understandably dubious about playing a mute, but I told him it was to ensure that no one would recognize his voice. Of course, that was not the real reason.”

“No, of course not. If Bennett had spoken, then after you took his place, we would have been able to tell the difference between your voice and his. It would have given you away.”

“I can imitate faces,” Hayward said, “but I can’t do voices.”

“Jill had mentioned that.”

Hayward glossed over his limitations. “I provided Bennett with the outfit to wear to the reunion, so I was able to exactly duplicate his attire when I replaced him later. As I spoke to Bennett, I studied his features. When I got home, I was able to draw sketches from memory and make an exact replica of his face, using prosthetics, makeup, and hair.”

“But two weeks ago,” Jonas protested, “Gideon helped Bennett—the real Bennett—steal Capaldi’s ledger from the police. He heard Bennett’s voice—and you can’t imitate voices. So Gideon must have known that the ‘Bennett’ at the reunion was an impostor.”

Hayward laughed. “I had been following Bennett for weeks, so I knew about the botched theft. After meeting with Bennett, I disguised myself as him and bailed Gideon out of jail. As ‘Bennett,’ I visited Gideon and told him I had bailed him out. I said that I had reason to believe one of you was responsible for his accident. I offered to join him up here to help him discover the culprit’s identity, in exchange for not betraying ‘me’ to the police. Obviously, I couldn’t have him taking Bennett out of the picture, when Bennett was so vital to my plan.”

“But Gideon must have known you weren’t really Bennett, from your voice.”

“He did ask me why I was talking differently. I told him my plan was to pretend to be Aaron the mute caretaker. I laid out the same plan I had laid out for Bennett—with the addition of Aaron later talking—convincing Gideon that we could use the plan to flush out the one responsible for sabotaging that trap door. He wanted so badly to believe it would work, he was willing to try anything.

“But it was essential, I told him, that no one identify me as Bennett, so I needed to disguise my voice. To ensure I didn’t accidently slip into my ‘real’ voice, I had to get into the habit of talking the new way. Gideon was puzzled, but his mind was overwhelmed by the shower of misfortunes that had recently rained upon him.”

“But once everyone up here knew you were ‘Bennett’—”

“I would no longer need to ‘disguise’ my voice? By then the murders had begun, and Gideon had already gotten used to me talking this way. Fear and confusion distracted his mind from considering the matter further. It occurred to him once on Friday night, and he started to ask about it when you came along and interrupted.

“Anyway, that was phase one of my plan,” Hayward continued. “I had learned all about Damien’s trips to Moon’s End each winter. Before he came up here, I drove up and cut the phone lines. When I had contacted Anderson’s about getting in touch with Damien at Moon’s End, they told me he communicates with no one while up here. So I knew he would never notice the phone line had been cut. After Damien left for the inn, I sent out invitations to the reunion, knowing that Damien could not be reached to deny having sent them.

“Early Friday morning, I came up here, killed Damien, and pushed his car over the cliff, so that you would have no transportation out, should any of you decide to leave before the bridge blew up. I also found and destroyed the short-wave radio. I knew your cell phones would do you no good up here. I met you all later that day at Owen’s Reef, as Bill, the truck driver.”

“And what about Max?”

“You’re getting ahead,” Hayward snapped. “As Bill, I pretended to have a cold, talking in a hoarse voice—”

“So we wouldn’t recognize it later, when ‘Bennett’ started talking.”

“Not bad, for a detective.” Hayward was so self-absorbed, he failed to notice the shrinking distance between himself and Jonas. “Everything went exactly as planned. Bennett showed up dressed in the clothes I had provided. I brought everyone here and left with Max. Once the truck was out of sight, I stopped and got out. I changed into the same clothes Bennett was wearing and made myself up to look like him. Max took off, with instructions to return in three days.”

“So that was why it took two people to drive us up here,” Jonas muttered. “Someone had to return with the truck later, and it couldn’t be you—since you were to be stranded up here with us.” Don’t break eye contact, Jonas reminded himself. Anchoring Hayward’s eyes will keep them from floating toward the gun.

“I crossed back over the bridge and set the explosive. Then I went to a place where I had arranged to meet with Bennett, to ‘give him his next instruction.’”

“I saw him check his watch and leave the inn.”

“He was right on schedule. The unsuspecting fool was taken completely by surprise. I killed him before he even knew what was happening.”

“We wondered how Bennett could have been caught so completely off guard by the killer, despite the other murders. But when Bennett was killed, there had been no other murders.”

Hayward nodded. “I buried him twenty paces east of a tree I had marked, right there in the snow—”

“Making it impossible to determine how long he had been dead. We thought Bennett had been killed on Saturday morning, when ‘he’ had disappeared. But he had actually been dead since the day before. Without the snow preserving him, we’d have known that Bennett had been dead since Friday afternoon, and would have realized that the Bennett who had been alive on Friday night and Saturday was an impostor. And still at large.”

“You had to believe he’d been dead for only six or seven hours, when in fact he’d been dead for over twenty-four.” Hayward indulged in a triumphant pause. “After killing Bennett, I went to the inn, dressed as Bennett had been dressed, and took his place. That was why—though there were ten of us on the mountaintop—you never found a tenth person. I took the place of the ninth person. The real ninth person was buried in the snow. The perfect hiding place.

“As a mute, Bennett had not spoken up to that point. So, when ‘he’ later began talking, I did not have to worry about imitating his voice. All I had to do was make sure I never got too close to any of you, so that no one would notice any wig lines, seams, or other evidence of makeup.”

“That’s why you kept your distance from everyone. But why actually go ahead with the theft of the guns? I thought that had simply been a pretext for Bennett’s benefit, to lure him to the reunion. Why actually go through with it, once he was dead?”

“I knew I might not be able to keep up the charade of being mute. In fact, I wanted to talk, to control everything that went on, if necessary. So I needed an explanation for why Bennett had been pretending to be mute.”

“And that explanation was to create a mystery none of us could solve: a scream no one could have made and guns that had disappeared equally impossibly.”

“With the added benefit of rendering you all defenseless.”

That was when Hayward noticed the gun.

Jonas’ wildcat leap was no match for Hayward’s tactical advantage. Left hand clutching the gun like a cattle prod, Hayward forced his victim deeper into the parlor room, as he tucked his own weapon into his waistband, undoubtedly amused with the irony of shooting Jonas with his own gun.

“That was a mistake,” Hayward said.