Nine Lives(61)

He went and looked in the refrigerator. There was a complimentary bottle of white wine and a fruit plate, covered with plastic wrap. He left them both there. In his backpack he had his one hitter, packed with some pretty potent indica, but he wanted to be straight when he first saw Caroline. It seemed important, somehow.

There was a knock on the door, and his heart hammered in his chest. He went and swung it open, and there was Caroline, taller than he thought she’d be, her cheeks flushed, a smile on her face.

“I’m nervous,” she said.

“I’m nervous, too. Why?”

“Right.”

She came inside the cabin, put down her overnight bag, and they embraced. It felt good, but also surreal, like the world had suddenly added a dimension and Ethan was rushing to catch up with the feeling.

“What should we do now?” she said.

“What do you want to do?”

“I asked you first.”

“I think we should get into bed with each other,” Ethan said. “I don’t care whether we have sex or anything, but I want to lie by your side and be able to touch you and kiss you.”

“That’s what I want to do too.”

Two hours later they were drinking the wine and eating the fruit in bed, both enormously relieved that they felt as close to each other now as they’d felt for the past few weeks. Periodically, one of them, or both of them, would suddenly laugh.

“If anyone saw us …” Caroline said.

“I don’t care. I’m so happy to be here with you.”

“I am, too.”

An hour later they both lay facing each other, sheet and blankets pulled up tight around their naked bodies. They were both exhausted. “‘We met at the end of the party,’” Ethan said.

Caroline looked confused for a moment, then laughed. “You’re quoting poetry at me.”

“It was the poem you found.”

“Yes,” she said. “‘We met at the end of the party, when all the drinks were dead.’”

“Do you know the rest?”

“Some of it. Not all of it. I’m done quoting poetry.”

“I’m glad we did this,” Ethan said.

“Think how strange it is, the way we met.”

“I think about it all the time.”

“Do you believe it was somehow fated?” Caroline said.

After a pause, Ethan said, “No, I don’t. I don’t believe in soul mates or that there’s only one perfect match for all of us out there. I think there are many perfect matches, and sometimes people never find theirs, or they find two or more. It’s random.”

“I agree with you. I don’t believe in soul mates, but I do believe in disposition.”

“Oh, yeah?” Ethan said.

“In some ways we’re not alike, but we have similar dispositions. It’s everything, I think, and I’m very glad we did this.”

“Me, too. If nothing else, this is the most comfortable bed I’ve ever slept in.”

“Ha. It is, isn’t it?” Caroline said.

They fell deeply asleep, aided by the liquid benzodiazepine that had been injected into the wine through the cork. Neither was awakened by the injections they then received, first of much higher doses of the same benzodiazepine, followed by injections of fatal doses of morphine. Caroline, nearly forty pounds lighter than the man in whose arms she was sleeping, convulsed slightly, her brain starved of oxygen, then died.





THREE





1





SATURDAY, OCTOBER 29, 2:22 A.M.


Twenty minutes later, Ethan Dart died in the same manner as Caroline Geddes had.





TWO





1





SUNDAY, OCTOBER 30, 4:39 P.M.


The Saints game had just started, and Sam Hamilton cracked open a beer, even though he had no intention of sitting down in front of the television. He was in his study, the volume of the TV turned up loud enough so that he could hear if anything momentous happened. Sam had filled an entire wall with photographs and newspaper clippings and his own handwritten notes, all pertaining to the Frank Hopkins case, or rather, as he thought of it, the List-of-Nine case. Since his trip to visit Frank Hopkins’s sister, Cynthia, down in Florida, Sam had become consumed, not just in getting periodic updates from Mary Parkinson of the state police, but in researching the two incidents that had taken place at the Windward Resort that Cynthia had told him about. And now he’d finally found something that seemed like it might be the key to everything that was happening.

At first, he had focused on the murder/suicide that had occurred in 1961. A man named Bart Knapp from Portland, Maine, had committed suicide in one of the Windward’s rooms after murdering his mistress, a woman named Betsy Sturnevan. Both were married, and both worked at the same accounting office in Portland, Maine. Details about this particular story were not too hard to find, since the case had made national news. Because there had appeared to be no significant struggle in the room, and because both of the deceased had been found with sedatives and alcohol in their bloodstreams, the official verdict had been a double suicide, the assumption being that Betsy had slit her own wrists while she was in the bed, then Bart had gone to the tub and used the razor on himself. Betsy Sturnevan’s family had rejected that verdict, claiming that not only had Bart murdered Betsy Sturnevan, he had taken her to the Windward Resort against her will, keeping her drugged with sedatives.