Book Six, Chapter 37: Cold Cuts

“What could Antoine have been doing here?” Kimberly asked. “Why would he come down here at all?”

We were in the basement.

The walls were weeping with floodwater. There were no cracks, no holes; it looked as though the stone itself was crying as if we were in some sort of cave.

“I’m not getting a dial tone,” Bobby said as he ran down the stairs. “No telephone, no radio. The storm has wiped it all out. We cannot contact emergency services.”

“All right, back away, people,” Jules said. “Let the doctor do his work.”

Kimberly, Andrew, Daphne, Logan, Ramona, and I were the only other ones there, plus the maid who had found the body.

Andrew held a flashlight because the lights in the basement were terribly inadequate and flickered constantly.

There was a thin layer of water over the entire floor. Andrew knelt over Antoine’s body with a keen eye.

“Broken neck,” he said.

“How?” was all I could ask. Antoine didn’t have a completely devoted combat build, but to snap his neck, this killer must’ve gotten the drop on him.

“It would seem they bashed his head against the wall there,” Andrew said, shining a light on a bloody impression on the wall. “No puncture wounds to the torso or head. I don’t smell any gunpowder, nor do I see any evidence of a bullet.”

Antoine looked terrible. Someone had beaten his face raw.

Andrew continued to examine his body.

“Here we go,” he said. He lifted up one of Antoine’s legs. “It appears his Achilles tendon was severed completely.”

“So we’re sure he didn’t just fall down the stairs?” Bobby asked.

“That would be some fall, wouldn’t it?” Andrew said as he stared at the wound.

I couldn’t believe that Antoine had been First Blood. He was almost always around for the Finale.

The floodwaters continued to seep in through the tiny pores in the rock.

“We need to move the body,” Andrew said. “Do you have a walk-in refrigerator?”

“You have to be joking,” Jules said.

“I am not,” Andrew said. “We have to preserve him as best we can for a proper autopsy. And even if we didn’t need to do that, we can’t leave him here. This basement will be flooded very soon.”

He shined the light around the room. It was an endless void of blackness with the sparkles of the water reflecting the light. All we could hear were drips as the water dropped in from the foundation itself.

Andrew continued to investigate the area, gathering any data he could.

He paused as he moved his pen around Antoine’s clothing, investigating his shirt pocket and his suit jacket. He seemed to focus on a blood-stained white rose that was still pinned to Antoine’s clothing.

Daphne looked at me. I didn’t know if she was angry, but maybe she was disappointed. The killer had not taken the flower as a souvenir. That made us wonder what they had taken. After all, they had to take something because of Logan’s trope.

I suspected that they took the money, the twenty thousand dollars that Antoine had withdrawn, but I would save that theory for a different scene.

As the basement continued to flood, Bobby found a 2×6 board that we could move Antoine’s body onto to carry him to the kitchen.

“Go ahead of us and clear a path,” Andrew said. “We don’t need looky-loos.”

I didn’t know who he was talking to, but he and Logan lifted the board and Antoine’s body, so I went ahead. I had explored enough to know the way to the kitchen.

We didn’t encounter any trouble or non-player characters.

As we carried him into the kitchen, the two cooks who remained started screaming.

“Calm down, Lucia,” Bobby said to the loudest one. “A guest has passed away; we have a procedure for this.”

“This is not our procedure,” Jules said. “Our procedure is to call the police. Storing the body is something else.”

We moved him into the walk-in fridge and set him on top of two five-gallon buckets so that he didn’t have to rest on the ground.

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Kimberly was crying, appropriately for the situation.

I was more like Andrew, trying to analyze it, trying my best to make it so his death would not be in vain.

The informal autopsy continued.

Andrew was methodical, moving over every square inch of Antoine’s body, undressing and redressing him as needed.

It turned out that both of his Achilles’ tendons had been cut. No wonder they had been able to beat him in a fight; they didn’t fight fair.

As Andrew continued to examine the body, the rest of us moved out into the kitchen and began discussing the situation.

“I’m sorry that this terrible thing has ruined your nuptials,” Jules said. “We will, of course, refund you for the event.”

“No,” Daphne said. “We can’t cancel the wedding.”

“You can’t cancel it?” Jules said. “Do you want to get married on the day that your maid of honor’s boyfriend was just brutally murdered?”

“Maybe having his ankles cut is what caused him to fall down the stairs,” Bobby said, still playing the naive manager as a counterpoint to Jules’s forwardness. “It could have been an accident. We should look for something sharp on the stairs.”

He was in denial. He wasn’t actually arguing those things.

“My mother, she’s on the edge of death. That’s why we came to Carousel. So that we would be close to them, so they could see their daughter get married and have their one perfect happy day,” Daphne said forcefully. “It will take fifteen minutes, and it will be the best fifteen minutes of their lives. We can fake it for that long. We can keep this a secret until then.”

Now the bridezilla came out.