Book Six, Chapter 44: Runaway Bride

“I just can’t believe they’re dead,” Daphne said, staring over her parents’ bodies. I had guided her to a nearby chair, and she was crumpled down with her face in her hands, weeping openly.

Andrew, ever the pragmatist, was examining the bodies.

You didn’t need to be a coroner to know there was something suspicious about these deaths. There were no wounds, no blood, no struggle. That limited down the possibilities to a few different methods of suffocation or asphyxiation, or more likely, some type of poison.

Given the champagne glasses on the small kitchenette bar top, I assumed it was poisoned.

Kimberly was on her knees near Daphne, holding her hand, but was otherwise strangely distant. Her eyes were exacting, looking Daphne up and down, her head pulled back as if she were very uncomfortable.

I had my arm around Daphne, but I was feeling similarly. Something odd was going on, and Daphne wasn’t telling us the whole truth.

“When did you last see them?” I asked gently.

She didn’t answer at first.

“Rachel, sweetheart,” I said. “When did you last see them? It couldn’t have been too long ago.”

“Yes,” she said. “I… they were fine the last time I was here.”

The person who had done this had been let into the room and had to have been friendly with Robert and Beth Hutchins.

It was strange.

Last I knew, they had gone back to their room to turn in for the night after an exhausting and hectic wedding day. However, Beth and Robert were still wearing the clothes they had worn to the wedding.

“I just can’t imagine,” I said, “who would want to hurt them. Can you?” I asked Daphne pointedly.

Typically, you could narrow down suspects by looking at their choice of victim. I was less certain than ever.

“I don’t know,” Daphne said. “It must be a madman. Someone terrible and deranged.”

“Perhaps,” Andrew said. “I don’t have the equipment or supplies to do a proper autopsy. I can rule out several possibilities, but narrowing down further would be impossible. There is one thing I am certain of. Your parents were poisoned.”

He then went on to explain how he had arrived at that conclusion.

“If you look here,” he said, pulling back her father’s lips. “You can see… the evidence of vomiting. It appears that he was cleaned up afterward. The small hairs on the corners of his mouth are still matted from the fluids. There is fiber consistent with a napkin or paper towel….”

“But why?” Daphne asked, interrupting Andrew’s thorough explanation. “I don’t understand.”

“Maybe it was the blackmailers,” Kimberly suggested.

While we couldn’t narrow down a real motivation they would have, other than taking out witnesses, someone had to say it. There was a real possibility the motive could be pretty straightforward.

“Blackmailers were not expecting to get caught in a storm. They realize that they will be the only suspects in Antoine’s murder if anyone knows they were here. They start taking out witnesses, right?” I added. It felt off. These weren’t quick, pragmatic murders. The Hutchinses were laid to rest. Still, it was the best theory we had. “People are less afraid to go all in when the chips are down.”

I’d been itching to use a poker metaphor. My character did play the game for a living, after all.

“The modus operandi doesn’t make sense,” Andrew said. “Antoine was beaten to death. The receptionist was stabbed cleanly and efficiently. And now Mr. and Mrs. Hutchins appear to have been poisoned and died mostly peacefully in their sleep.”

Here, “peacefully in their sleep” meant “drowned in their own bile.”

While we continued to discuss this, the door to the bathroom opened up, and Jules, now freshly bandaged thanks to Bobby, stepped into the room.

“I can confirm that the blackmailers are desperate. Desperate people,” Jules said. “I don’t mean to interrupt, young miss. I realize you’re mourning your parents, but poisoning is not the act of a desperate killer. It’s the act of a professional.”

Jules sat down on the carpet, leaning against a wall, and told us the whole story of her captivity, even though it wasn’t a long one.

“They were breathing heavily, shaking, almost jonesing for me to tell them the combination to the safe. They couldn’t get a word out of me,” she said. “Even if I had known, I would have let them kill me first. And they were willing. I have no doubt in my mind.”

“Well, why didn’t they?” Kimberly asked. “If they’re killing witnesses, why let you live?”

Jules stared off into the distance for a moment and then said, “Maybe they thought they could still break me. They tied me to the radiator. What they didn’t know is that these radiators were built sixty years ago and have needed overhauling for fifty. I barely managed to escape.”

I was trying to piece this storyline together, not just from my character’s point of view, but from my own as well. When everything began, I was astonished to find out that I might have been cast as a main character, but as things progressed, I began to feel that I wasn’t a main character at all.

All of the events in the story revolved around someone other than me, and I couldn’t say who. Kimberly was a shoo-in. The celebrity aspect trope should have lent her a lot of gravity in a story like this, and perhaps it did.

Perhaps she was the true detective who might ultimately ferret out the answers. But Kimberly’s role in this story was painfully straightforward: a concerned friend, a mournful lover, a paranoid survivor.

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She even had a background trope for it. It dawned on me that I had yet to see what she had done with it. I had spent most of my time with Daphne, and in that time, we had been On-Screen an awful lot.

But if the story wasn’t about me, and we were On-Screen, that meant the story must in some way be centering on Daphne herself.

We continued talking, giving Carousel the footage it needed. Eventually, I did get to hear about Kimberly’s backstory, and it was Daphne who helped clue me in.

“This must be so familiar to you,” Daphne said to Kimberly through tears. “To the bank robbery.”

Kimberly had been leaning into a tougher persona to help explain why she wasn’t distraught over the loss of Antoine, but now I saw that it was also part of her backstory.

“Very familiar,” Kimberly said. “With any luck, this one will turn out the way the robbery did.”

“And how is that?” Daphne asked.

“The bad guys died,” Kimberly said coolly, staring into her eyes. I didn’t want to think about what she was suggesting.

“Of course,” Daphne said. “We can only hope.”

After a long beat of silence, illuminated only by the grey light of sunset miraculously making its way through the storm, Daphne looked up at her character’s parents.

“You know, at least they got to go out together,” she said. “At least they got to see their daughter on her happiest day.”

Such a weird dialogue choice, but maybe she was trying to find a silver lining that could motivate her character… or… something… I didn’t know.

She stood up suddenly.

“Our portrait!” she said. “Our family portrait. It’s still in the banquet hall.”

I started to say something, but she interrupted me.

“I have to go find it,” she said.

She started moving toward the door.

“Rachel, what are you talking about? It’s just a picture,” I asked.

“And now it’s all I have of them. If the flood ruins it, I don’t know what I’ll do,” she responded.