Serious Moonlight(52)

And that’s when the power went out.

Blackness fell over the room. Utter darkness. I couldn’t see the table or the guests.

Gasps and a single scream echoed around the room. I panicked, thinking the storm had picked up again outside and knocked out the electricity. Was it thundering? That’s when I realized two things: (A) the thunder was a recording being played over speakers, and (B) the scream was coming from Colonel Mustard’s wife, and it was a scream of joy—not terror.

A bloodcurdling cry erupted from the far end of the room, and then there was a loud thump. Someone cried, “Murder!” And several people laughed. Then there were footfalls everywhere—behind us, to the side . . . across the room. Someone bumped into the back of my chair. What was happening? Were people running around in the dark? Upstairs, too?

“Everyone, stay calm!” Mr. Wadsworth’s voice boomed somewhere in the blackness. “It’s just the storm.” People snickered. “We’ll have the power back on shortly. Until we do, please stay in your seats.” And then he said in a lower voice, “Mrs. Mustard, I can smell your perfume. Please remove your hand from my leg.”

Daniel gripped my hand harder, and on instinct, I did the same. Before I realized what was happening, he’d slung his arm around my waist and pulled both me and my chair closer. I leaned into him, arm tucked against his chest. Then I was breathing in the warm skin of his neck, smelling the dye in his bow tie and his minty shampoo.

He whispered, “Okay?” into my hair. I wasn’t sure if he was inquiring about my well-being or asking permission, but we sat like that together, listening to scurrying and giggling and people calling out “Marco!” and “Polo!”

The lights came back on without warning. I pulled away from Daniel while people began shouting, and then Mr. Wadsworth was telling us what we already knew.

“Someone killed Mr. Boddy!”

The actor playing Mr. Boddy was nowhere to be found, nor his dead body, but whatever. I could roll with it. And naturally, under the threat of us all going to jail for the murder, we had to uncover the real killer by searching nine rooms for clues. There was a flurry of activity, and Mr. Wadsworth and Apollo the Maid were herding us all back into the foyer, dividing us into upstairs and downstairs groups, and spouting off a long list of rules. The gist of it seemed to be that each couple would take turns searching each room for five minutes. One prop weapon and one character card were hidden in each room, and we had to find them to deduce the murderer.

Easy.

Except it wasn’t. Because after we’d all been assigned rooms and Mr. Wadsworth signaled that our first five-minute search period had started, Daniel and I ended up in the study: a desk, a conference table, a giant globe, a seating area. And clues were nowhere to be found.

“What does the character card look like?” Daniel asked in frustration. “How big is it?”

“No idea. Why can’t we even find the weapon? Where could it be hidden?”

Daniel stopped. Looked at the desk. And slapped his forehead. “Shit!” He raced to the desk and began opening drawers. “Aha!” he said, holding up a toy gun. “The murder weapon was not a gun. Check it off the list, Nora.”

“That’s a water pistol. The gun was a revolver. It was brown.”

Daniel cocked his head. “They hid red herrings to throw us off?”

They did. Which was sort of brilliant and maddening at the same time. But not half as maddening as the conversation at dinner between Daniel and the couple from his high school, which was now stuck in my brain like a splinter embedded in skin: small but painful, constantly nagging. I just wasn’t sure if I wanted to bring it up, and I suppose I hoped Daniel would, to spare me the awkwardness of asking him.

But he didn’t. Not in the study, where we found zero clues, and not when Wadsworth called time and made us shuffle to the billiards room. There, we found Miss Scarlet’s character card, hidden in one of the pool pockets. I crossed it off on our little detective notebook sheet before we were shuffled again, this time into the library, where a small fire burned in the fireplace.

“N-o-o-o,” Daniel moaned. “The character card could be in any one of these books? There must be a thousand.”

“Better look fast,” I said, searching behind books on the lower shelves. But my mind wasn’t on the task at hand. “Hey. So. At dinner . . . those people from your school.”

He sighed heavily. “Yeah. I was hoping you’d forget that.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I don’t mean to pry. It’s none of my business.”

Another sigh. “It’s not that. It’s . . . I wanted tonight to be nice, you know, and I just don’t want to spoil it.”

“Say no more. I won’t bother you.” I’d just stew on it, imagining the worst, until I exploded. It must have been bad, whatever this thing in his past was, because those kids from his school were freaked out; the way they were acting, it was as if they’d heard a crazy story about him, passed along like an urban legend. Maybe he did something stupid like steal a car. Maybe he got arrested. Maybe he set the school on fire.

The more I tried not to think about it, the more it bothered me—both the not knowing and the fact that he didn’t want to share it with me. That stung, and like a turtle, I withdrew into myself for protection and disengaged from the Clue for Couples mystery to ponder over the mystery that was Daniel: Suspect: Daniel Aoki . . . if that is his real name.