Chapter 7 #2
Eventually Hugh got my cue and put a steadying hand on my shoulder, gave it a comforting squeeze, and turned the key in the
door for me. They retreated inside to give me privacy—Neena the only resister, being dragged away by Hugh. The rest of the
conversation was the same, a slow slit to the throat as I bled out little by little.
Just your normal, very average, very common confession of betrayal.
Just your normal, very average, very common death of an eight-year relationship, a once living thing.
And if I could survive that death, be it of far less weight than this, I know I can survive this too.
As for the others today, though . . . well . . . their mental health is another matter.
“How long has it been like this?” I lean over and whisper to Nash.
We’re sitting at the long table in the dining room, quite literally roped off with a cream and golden rope that looks to have
been plucked straight from a unicorn’s tail. Carragan has apparently decided that we’ve all had enough “time to process the
unfortunate news” and it is now time to act normal.
With several hundred heads looking our way. Expectantly.
It isn’t going well.
Neena, for one, just screamed when Ricky picked up his steak knife.
“Everyone’s lost the plot,” Nash says grimly, picking up a roll from the untouched basket on the long table. “It’s too much
to ask of them. I think they could handle losing . . .”—there’s a pause in his voice before he adds—“him. But then to pit everyone against each other? It’s too much.”
He scrapes his knife across the butter, and Jackie on the other side of him winces.
Her glassy blue eyes stare as he scrapes for a full five seconds, then suddenly she blinks three times in rapid succession,
stands, and leaves the table.
Now that I sit here, I realize Nash and I are the only ones sitting within arm’s reach of each other.
I lean in closer to him and say lowly, “What did everyone do today?”
“Stayed in their rooms, mostly, and waited for Carragan to call them in for questioning. He spent thirty minutes on all of
us, down to the minute. Then they went back to their rooms.”
“With nothing to do except become more paranoid,” I muse.
Nash tilts his head at me as if to ask, Have you met them? Paranoid doesn’t begin to explain it.
“Maybe it’s good to go back to normal then. Maybe it’ll be good for everybody.”
“Another twenty-four hours like this and I’m convinced they’d all accidentally kill each other.”
I purse my lips. “Surely it wouldn’t get that bad.”
“They’re authors. Half of their brains are dedicated solely to the imagination. It’s bad, Pip.”
I raise a brow.
He looks at my reluctant expression and puts down his knife. “Watch this. Oops.”
The roll falls from his hand and, like a soft miniature bowling ball, begins a path past me, the braised beef plate, two large
vases overflowing with peonies, and the stemware glasses of champagne everybody assumes are poisoned and nobody has touched,
finally landing on the floor beside Neena’s purse.
Pandemonium ensues.
Chairs tip over, champagne glasses spill, somebody cries out about a bomb, and the group bumps into, and then even more desperately
away from, each other like bumper cars at a carnival of death.
Nash lifts his plate and fork quietly from the table just as it’s being turned over.
Crystal ultimately ducks behind it as some sort of hideout.
I watch in absolute shock as terror fills the entire room.
It’s like one of those movies where a food fight erupts at a summer camp, only everybody’s seventy and the plates are fine
china.
It’s not until thirty staff members jump in threatening to tranquilize everyone that things calm down. Everyone is dismissed to their rooms after a thousand assurances, and nobody is quite certain how the chaos itself began.
“See?” Nash says. He and I are the only two who remained seated—or even with upright seats for that matter.
“Carragan was right,” I say. “The ship would sink.”
Both of our phones go off simultaneously, and we reach into our pockets.
It’s a group text.
From Carragan.
He’s not happy.
Meet in the library. NOW.
As we move along the hall, Nash’s hands are stuffed in his pockets. “Will you tell on me?”
A whisper of a smile lifts my lips. I can absolutely see him as a first grader, wooden slingshot behind his back, paper ball
in the teacher’s hair.
And it’s funny, because a part of me couldn’t imagine it possible to ever smile again.
When we get to the room, Nash turns the knob.
The door swings open.
It looks just like the cover of a Clue board game.
Carragan is standing with his hands on his hips to one side of the velvet couch.
Ricky is beside the curtain.
Neena stands beside the bookshelf, gripping a hardback book like a weapon.
Jackie is clenching her handkerchief between tight white knuckles by the lampshade.
Gordon sits at the chess set, looking up and over his shoulder at Jackie as though ready to knock the pieces over and use the board as a shield at any moment.
And Crystal, facing everybody with her back to us, is drowning herself in her phone.
I look at the bold letters at the top of the article she’s reading. “Ten Easy Ways to Use a Water Bottle to Kill in Self-Defense.”
Super.
Great to see everyone is handling this like champs.