Cliff and Whitney picked through the flower bed where Charlene’s body had been found that morning. The first thing they noticed was a path of crushed flowers around fifteen to twenty feet long leading up to where the body was discovered. The flowers within and immediately surrounding the path of smashed garden bed were covered in blood.
“What do you think it all means?” Whitney asked.
“Looks like she crawled,” Cliff said. “So she wasn’t killed instantly, I guess. And whatever injury she had, she was bleeding.”
Whitney nodded.
They started at the beginning of the path and looked through the crushed, bloody flowers even closer. At first they tried to do it by simply leaning over and physically looking from a closer proximity. But after a few minutes, Cliff finally dropped to his knees.
“Screw this,” he said. “There’s too much on the line to worry about getting dirty.”
Whitney followed suit a short time later. They worked their way toward the end of the path that Charlene had crawled with her last few minutes of life. Cliff was on the right side and Whitney the left. They both picked through the flowers, crushed stems, and dirt, looking for… well, they weren’t really even sure what they were looking for. Anything that might possibly help them piece together what had happened.
Being that close to the ground made it much easier to spot the pool of congealed orange-brown vomit at the end of the path.
“Eww, what is that?” Whitney asked.
“Smells like puke,” Cliff said. “Literally, I mean. Looks like Charlene might have barfed when she got to the end here.”
“Why?”
“Beats me,” Cliff said, even though Whitney hadn’t been expecting an actual answer from him. She’d mostly just been thinking aloud.
They let the question linger for a few seconds before continuing their search through the flowers around where the body was found.
A short time later, while Cliff was feeling his way through a thick bed of some bright tropical flowers he didn’t recognize, his hand hit something metal. He slowly lifted the object out of the dirt. It was a gardening spade. But not just any gardening spade; this one was covered in blood.
He opened his mouth and then caught himself and put the spade back where he found it. By not telling Whitney, he could get a leg up on her. It would almost guarantee his survival this round. Besides, the little religious zealot was kind of a bitch, if he were being honest. She hadn’t started out that way, but lately the stress of the murders had turned her into a quite negative and unpleasant person.
Cliff straightened up and glanced over at Whitney. She looked up at him and smiled faintly. It was one of the first times he thought he’d seen her smile since the murders started.
“I never thought I’d start to hate flowers so much,” she said.
“I know what you mean,” he said, though his words sounded hollow to himself. It just didn’t feel right.
“Find anything?” she asked hopefully.
He shook his head and then pretended to go back to work. He waited several seconds and then grabbed the spade again. This time he turned back toward her and held it up.
“Look at this,” he said.
When she first looked up and saw the spade, her expression was mostly blank. But then she gasped when she finally saw the blood.
“Looks like you might have found the murder weapon,” she said.
“It appears so,” he said, relieved that he’d decided to tell her after all. It just felt better that way.
He wanted to win, sure. And he definitely wanted to live, of course. But he didn’t think he’d be all that happy living with himself if he had to do it by cheating and lying. On this island, and in this game, simple lies and cheats were almost as bad as murder itself.