“Is this some kind of joke?” Gary asked, looking at the framed eight-by-ten photograph Giles had just handed him. “Because it’s too late for jokes like this.”
“Well, Mr. Froehlich, I’m actually not privy to the seriousness of this item. I am merely following the killer’s instructions as always,” Giles explained patiently.
All the guests were making strange faces at the framed pictures Giles had just distributed among them. They had all gotten the same photograph, but none of them could really tell if that made the content of the picture more or less confusing. It definitely made it seem all the more ridiculous for some reason.
“How is this possibly going to help us during this challenge?” Cliff asked.
Giles was growing increasingly agitated at their questions. What part of “he was just following instructions” did they not understand? Yes, of course he found the photograph just as disturbing and strange and useless as they all did. But at the same time, what about any of this had not been ridiculous in some way?
Of course, he couldn’t say these things aloud. He was a professional. And professional butlers do not talk back—no matter what.
“That is for you all to figure out, I’m afraid,” Giles said.
They all stood in the formal living room staring at the framed pictures of a turkey standing inside of a fireplace. The turkey in the picture was real and alive and staring straight into the camera with a complete and utter lack of comprehension as to where it stood and what was likely in its future.
It did seem an especially odd challenge clue, but then again, so had a lot of them over the course of the nearly thirty murders Giles had hosted.
“At least there is once again a riddle to help you find your way,” Giles said. “A copy of the riddle is written out on the back of your picture frames.
“ ‘To solve this crime, you must try to find me. To unlock the extras, I am the key. My duties include destruction of imported nature. But sometimes I’m also used to commit grisly murder. To find me, go to the place where I’m usually seated; that is if this were another setting, and I was actually needed.’ ”
With only four guests remaining, it was going to be interesting to see if any of them paired up. During the information-sharing portion of this murder, very little conversation had taken place as far as Giles could tell. Then again, this time around there was no specific event; the guests had been given an hour and free rein of the mansion for the most part, so he hadn’t been able to monitor them all during that time.
At least to start with, none of the four guests paired up. They each clutched at their framed pictures and then wandered off in separate directions. Whitney headed to the kitchen, feeling that perhaps the turkey was some indicator of food-related items. Additionally, many tools that could be used on imported goods and to kill someone could be found in a kitchen.
Cathy and Gary both started searching the mansion’s various fireplaces for any type of clue, ignoring the short and rather simple riddle for the time being.
Cliff sat on a couch right there in the living room and really studied the picture and riddle itself. At first he was as stumped as the rest of them. But after several minutes he felt he had a good tie between the picture and riddle: firewood.
Or, more specifically, an axe.
Destruction of imported nature could easily mean chopping firewood. And an axe would certainly create a very grisly murder—one that would and could cause the kind of damage he’d seen in Todd’s suite. And in this setting an axe for firewood was definitely not needed.
Next, he referred back to the hints in the riddle about where to find the narrating object. An axe was usually seated in a tree stump, at least in iconic fictional images. And, on an inhabited tropical island, there will always be some tree stumps.
But then he remembered there being a shed near the garden. They’d all seen it. If the mansion were going to have an axe on file for emergencies, Cliff figured that’s where he would have kept it were he the caretaker or owner here.
He headed outside, around back toward the gardening shed. The moon was large and nearly full and provided enough illumination to see when coupled with the pool and patio lights, which were on timers and stayed on all night. Behind the shed, there was a lone stump from some palm tree cut down long ago.
An axe was buried in the stump, its handle sticking up into the air like a trophy.
Cliff referred back to the riddle. His interpretation was that the axe was a key to unlock something. The most obvious place to check first seemed to be the shed. The front door was locked shut by a large wooden beam. It was perfect. In Cliff’s opinion, a huge wooden beam would be one of the few door lock mechanisms that an axe would be needed to pick.
He pulled the axe free from the stump and started hacking away at the wooden beam. He thought it might take some time, but the axe had been sharpened very well, and he chopped through the shed’s beam in a matter of minutes.
Inside the shed, on a small workman’s table along the far end, was an uncooked twenty-pound turkey, plucked and gutted. Cliff tentatively reached his hand inside the turkey, unsure of what exactly he’d find.
There was something hard and small, like a key, and also a piece of paper. He took them out. The key was, in fact, a key, but not a normal door key. It was more like a brass key for a windup toy. In a vacuum, he might not have had any idea what it was, but the fact that he had a gas fireplace in his room meant that he’d seen a key just like this in his suite. It was a key for the natural gas line valve to a fireplace.
He put the key in his pocket and then looked at the piece of paper. There was a simple message scrawled on it in messy handwriting, made even sloppier by turkey slime, but still barely legible:
Turkeys can’t fly, but this one will.
Cliff knew almost immediately what he needed to do next. It was just a matter of finding the right fireplace. The mansion had dozens of them.
He tucked the turkey under one arm and crept back into the mansion through the back door. He tried the living room, then the study, but both of the fireplaces had the gas valve keys already in place. He tried to picture what room might be directly underneath Todd’s suite. If things went down the way he now suspected, then the right fireplace would likely be in the same chimney line as Todd’s.
The library.
It had to be it. He rushed into the library and instantly saw the gas valve key missing from the fireplace. He stuck the turkey inside the fireplace like in the picture and then slid the key into the notched slot and turned it one revolution clockwise. Instead of the hiss of gas like from a stove, a glass encasement rose up from the floor and sealed off the fireplace, creating an airtight chamber.
Cliff gave the key one more turn.
Boom!
There was a blast, not dissimilar to the one that had rocked the mansion earlier that night. The turkey exploded upward into the chimney and out of sight. Cliff ran to the nearby window and peered out, cupping his hands around his eyes.
He saw the turkey flying in the night sky in front of the moon. Then it began its descent. He tracked it all the way down. Several seconds after he’d first spotted it, it finally landed with a splat on the mansion’s front path, twenty yards behind the fountain.
Cliff couldn’t help but to grin. When this whole game of murder had started a few days ago, he certainly never expected that it would lead to him getting see a turkey fly. Or so to speak.