Many of the guests were surprised to find themselves waking to a bright and sunny morning. Most of them had expected to be awakened in the middle of the night by a flaming, screaming person running wildly toward the pool, or maybe an explosion, or perhaps a blood-curdling shriek again. But this time there had been no interruptions in the night or early morning. Most of the guests slept rather peacefully, all things considered.
But that still didn’t mean that nothing sinister had happened on the resort that night or early morning. It most certainly did not mean that one of the two Scared individuals had not been murdered after all in the early-morning hours.
Giles had told them all the night before that breakfast would be at 9:30 that morning. By 9:00 A.M. most of the guests had showered and were throwing on some clothes. Which is why it didn’t take long for them to make their way down to the resort garden when Giles’s voice crackled over the mansion intercom system asking them all to do so “posthaste.”
“As you can see, the head gardener made a quite morbid and horrific discovery this morning,” Giles said once all the remaining six guests were present.
Technically, the seventh guest was also present. She just happened to by lying dead, facedown, in one of the flower beds. The other guests were shocked at the sight of Charlene’s dead body. They’d all assumed that Jessica would be the one to die next, having been on the bottom for all three previous murder cases. More than a few of the guests found it rather suspicious that she’d been Scared each time, yet had managed to live.
Even Giles was surprised that the old lady had been the next victim.
But perhaps that was part of the killer’s game. Maybe the killer enjoyed leaving the alcoholic in the mix. Certainly she’d helped to bring down Charlene, even if unintentionally, during the last investigation. Giles surely wouldn’t put it past the killer to want to mess with all of their heads as much as possible.
Or maybe she hadn’t been truly drunk at all that week. Maybe Jessica was actually the killer and all the drunken stumbling was merely deceptive posturing.
But there was work to be done now, so it didn’t matter either way. Giles knew that. Just like the past two times this had happened, the why simply didn’t matter. Knowing why the killer made certain decisions regarding who died and who lived wouldn’t actually change anything that was happening.