BY THE TIME night fell, Eddie and I had gone through all the rooms in the mansion. All the bedrooms on the second floor, except his. He’d balked at searching Cormac’s room, until, my heart beating at my boldness, I said, “Who can you trust, Eddie? Really trust?”
I felt like a snake of doubt, with my slithering, quiet question. But it worked. We searched Cormac’s room, too.
And mine. I stood aside, keeping a watchful eye as Eddie went through my few things. When he was done, I felt like they were all tainted, although he didn’t toss them around as he had Claire’s items.
“Shouldn’t we search Rosita’s suite?” I’d asked.
“Our suite. And we already did. She couldn’t take the note back from me after she was dead, now could she?” Eddie’d sneered as he said this. “And the murderer wouldn’t leave the weapon there.”
But searching for that note, and maybe even for the weapon, was pretense. He was really looking for whatever she had on him, and he’d already searched that room.
I was looking for that as well, plus my lockbox, the murder weapon, Rosita’s keys. If someone had forced her out the back, they’d have needed those keys to get back in the mansion without alerting anyone.
We didn’t find any of that.
At the end of our fruitless efforts, we parted without saying anything to one another.
I went directly to the kitchen and put together a simple meal of roasted chicken, mashed potatoes, and green beans, and for dessert, a bread pudding.
My workmates were quiet as they ate: Henry ashen, Maxine gazing at him with worry, Liam and Seamus exhausted. They’d come in several hours before from the outside and went right to work on Rosita’s coffin under Henry’s supervision in the storage and furnace room. I’d stepped in the room long enough to look at it while they cleaned up for dinner. It was simple, rough-hewn, but appeared airtight, and it was nearly done.
I carried trays of food up to the dining room for Eddie and the others. All of them were quiet as well, even Marco and Claire. The only conversation was at the beginning of dinner.
“It’s done?” Eddie asked.
“Yes, sir.” The exhaustion in Cormac’s voice matched his weary expression. “Covered over with tarp. Snow is coming down hard.”
Eddie gestured at an empty chair at the dining table, inviting Cormac to sit next to him for dinner. But I saw a wariness in Eddie’s gaze as he regarded Cormac. I’d planted a seed of doubt in Eddie about his right-hand man.
After that, no one spoke. Each clink of spoon on bowl that I made, serving up potatoes and gravy, or sound of chewing and swallowing, seemed amplified in the cold silence.
Sounds drifted up from the basement below us: the rhythmic banging of a hammer. The faint yet steady grind of a saw through wood. Liam and Seamus finishing Rosita’s coffin. Against the background of those sounds, the smacks and slurps of eating became grotesque. Cold and snowing though it was, I wished that I could be outside instead, hearing the whoosh of the wind, the occasional stirring of birds and animals, the constant thrum of the waves on the lake.
Eddie pulled out a cigar and lit it. I grabbed an ashtray and put it beside him. “Get me a whisky,” he ordered. Then he looked at Douglas. “And you—go play something!”
Douglas strode to the adjoining music room. Within moments, a jazzy tune drifted into the dining room. But his playing was flat, rote. The usually snappy music rendered lifeless seemed almost worse than the sounds of coffin-making that it was meant to cover.
AN HOUR LATER, I was alone in the kitchen, cleaning dishes and cooking pans. Eddie and his entourage were all still upstairs. As I dried the pieces of silver and put them on the tray, already laden with china plates and crystal, I suddenly realized that other than the sounds of my own movements, the clink of silver, the kitchen was utterly silent.
A chill came over me as the silence took on significance. The hammering and sawing had stopped. Rosita’s makeshift coffin, rough-hewn and unpolished though it was, was done.
I sat down, hard, on a kitchen chair. My body trembled. I wanted my workmates to come into the kitchen where we could comfort one another.
And yet … I didn’t want them to come into the kitchen at all. If I discovered that one, or more, of them was guilty of Rosita’s and Joey’s murders, could I bear it? Bring myself to expose them as killers, knowing the fate they’d meet? And some would say that my penance on Trouble Island was not sufficient for killing Pony. For my past sins. My own conscience told me so on many a troubled, sleepless night.
Since coming to Trouble Island, I thought I’d been alone, so all alone.
But I had not. I’d been with Henry and Maxine and Liam through all of it, and with Seamus in the past few months. They had all been my true companions on Trouble Island, and I’d been too caught up in my guilt over what I’d done, too sorrowful over what I’d lost, too eager for Rosita’s approval, to see it.
I’d been a fool. I’d betrayed them by working with Eddie to search their quarters earlier. I wanted to seek them out, beg their forgiveness, and be accepted again in their embrace.
For a wild moment, I wanted to run upstairs and confess to Eddie that yes, yes, I’d killed Rosita. Tied up her body, just out of cruelty. That I’d encountered Joey wandering through the mansion, that he began asking too many questions about why I was leaving and where I was going, and so I’d lured him outside, and then surprise attacked him with—what? A fishing knife I’d found in the cottage, the same one I’d used to kill Rosita?
I shook my head. Too many holes in that story, too many questions. And if I confessed, how would I know I was saving the Carmichaels, or Liam, or Seamus? Most likely, I’d be saving Eddie and Cormac or one of the others who’d come with them.
My ruminations were broken by the sounds of Marco and Eddie and Cormac coming down to the casino. Music started up on the record player—a different jaunty tune than Douglas had been playing. I waited until they sounded settled in, laughing at something, and then I picked up the heavy tray of china, crystal, and silver, and went upstairs.