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Morrie stretched his quads on the table. “Excellent. I do enjoy vigorous exercise, as Heathcliff and Mina can attest—”
“We’re leaving now.” Heathcliff grabbed him by the scruff of the neck and dragged him to the door. Charlie followed, with Quoth at the rear.
Jonathan slammed the door behind them. “I hope I’m not making a big mistake.”
Me too. I hope I didn’t just send my boyfriends off with a murderer.
I glanced around the table at the shadowed faces of my fellow writers. Real life really was stranger than fiction when six crime writers would have to solve a murder to clear their name, with the murderer sitting at the table with us!
CHAPTERNINETEEN
“I’ve drawn this map of the room,” Quoth said as he handed around sheets of paper upon their return exactly eighteen minutes later. “It’s a little rough, as I wasn’t allowed to go to the art suite for my supplies and I didn’t exactly have a lot of time, but it will give you an idea.”
I might’ve been imagining it, but Charlie seemed quieter than when they left the room, and I noticed he raced for a seat on the opposite side of the table, as far from Heathcliff as it was possible to get.
Quoth handed me a thick piece of card, and I was touched to find a tactile diagram of the room on it. Quoth had glued matchsticks and string and pieces of fabric to the paper to create a map of the room, the furniture layout, etc. I pulled out my Braille labeler and typed up labels for each of the writers and tacked them next to where each was sitting.
“We’ve done a thorough inspection of the room, and we can conclude that there were no other entrances or exits,” Morrie said. “The main door was locked, as Mina, Donna, and Jonathan attest. There are two windows along this side of the room—”
“Directly behind where Charlie and Killian were sitting,” Vivianne pointed out primly.
“Just because I sat near the window doesn’t mean I’m a murderer,” Killian shot back.
“No, but the fact that the murder victim was sleeping with your girlfriend rather suggests—”
“Oh, so you want to get into a discussion of who was sleeping with whose partner, because I’ve heard your husband’s list of conquests is as long as your forked tongue—”
“I was pointing out the windows to show a possible entry point for an outside murderer,” Morrie explained. “However, the catches are old and stuck and the windows could not be opened without the storm blowing through the room and alerting you all that they were open. Did anyone feel a breeze?”
No one said anything, but the writers must have been shaking their heads, because Morrie moved on.
“The only other point of entry is a small heating vent above the bookshelf, but this is not large enough for a human to pass through.”
“So the murderer was definitely someone in the room,” Christina’s voice trembled.
“And we’ve established that Christina, Killian, and Charlie all have strong motives for wanting Hugh dead,” said Donna. “But I don’t.”
“Hmmmm,” I remembered something Donna had told me earlier. “You do, though.”
“I do?”
“Yes. You inherited this estate from your parents, and the mountain of debt that came with it. You would have gone into more debt to build the spa and do all the expensive advertising. You’re stretched thin financially, and you told me yourself that having a murder at Meddleworth would bring in more guests. Maybe you decided to engineer that murder yourself.”
“That’s absurd,” Donna said. “I’m not so desperate for money that I would stoop so low.”
“I wouldn’t be so sure about that,” Jonathan said from the doorway.
“Don’t you mind Jonathan,” Donna snapped, losing a little of her carefully crafted calm. “He’s bitter because I’ve come into Meddleworth and started making changes. Well, if this place didn’t change it would be bankrupt, and then where would we be? Hugh was giving me a boatload of money for my book on the mysteries of Meddleworth, on the condition it painted him and his literary events in a positive light. If I was going to kill someone, why him?”
“Because you specifically told me that the person who should be murdered would be ‘high-profile’,” I finished.
“I wasn’t speaking literally!”
“Maybe not, but it’s a motive enough for you to remain in this room.” Morrie made some notes next to Donna’s name on his map. “Now, who’s next?”
“How about the woman who has said multiple times that her specific purpose in coming to the retreat is to get revenge on Hugh?” Charlie said in that self-satisfied voice of his, as if he’d already cracked the case.
“Please,” Vivianne said. “You should stop contributing to this project. You’re embarrassing yourself.”
