Chương 275: 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 2x6 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. Enjoying the story? Show your support by reading it on the official site. 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.

"Are you crazy?" Ramona said.

"Just go to the courthouse in a week like normal people! We need to bunker down; someone is trying to kill everyone!" She was still a bit woozy and held an ice pack to her head. She fell back against a wall and leaned against it, not prepared to put up a fight.

"All right, we don't cancel the wedding. We gather everyone into the chapel or the banquet hall, and we lock things down. If everyone is in the same place, then the killer can't pick us off," Jules said.

"You assume this is a serial killer," I said.

"I assume everything," she said.

"And when you assume everything, it's the same as assuming nothing. You don't leave anything to chance. There is a killer on these premises. There's no way they made it out into that storm. And I don't intend to have any of my people killed because Little Missy over here wants her mommy to watch her marry a mouth-breathing gambler." I was not a mouth breather. But still, that insult cut deep.

"Well, you know, Jules," Bobby said, "The wedding might be a good excuse to call everyone into the chapel or the banquet hall. We only have one guest who isn't part of the wedding. That and the employees. That makes sense."

"How am I supposed to cook with a body in the fridge?" the NPC Lucia cried out tearfully.

"Same as normal," Jules said.

"Don't put the cooked meat near the raw." Jules's idea of gathering everyone into the same room might work in real life, but it was doomed in a movie. There had to be tension, and no matter what we did, no matter how cautious we were, somehow another victim would be found. We could not make ourselves safe, certainly not this early in the movie. But still, we had to demonstrate to the audience that we weren't a bunch of idiots.

The decision to move forward with the wedding was going to harm our reputation in that department.

"She's right," I said.

"There's no guarantee of safety. But until we figure out who did this, we can't leave people alone." Unfortunately, our plan was at least slightly doomed, not just because that cliche of gathering everyone together didn't usually work out, but also because it was a plan worked up by an NPC. And while Jules had 20 Plot Armor, which was quite a bit more than most NPCs, she wasn't a high-savvy character.

For a while, Logan did his best to strengthen her plan, hoping it would last a little longer, by using his Voice of Dissent trope to force people to debate it. I didn't join in. There was no way it was going to work in the end, but the longer it lasted, the better it was for us. Kimberly sat on the floor, leaning against the wall. The tears had dried up, and now there was only numbness. Andrew had made her leave Antoine's side.

As the others continued to debate what we should do, given that we were stranded and unable to contact the authorities, I went and sat next to Kimberly. I didn't know what to say, but she leaned her head over on my shoulder, and maybe if we didn't say anything, that would be enough. Daphne looked at me while I did it. I thought she was going to come over and help me comfort Kimberly, but all she did was fiddle with her handbag.

"Everyone, come here," Andrew called from inside the walk-in refrigerator. We arrived as quickly as possible. We weren't that far away, but there was an odd quality because there were so many of us, it almost looked like a scene from Clue. He had Antoine's head leaning back. He had a pair of serving tongs reaching into Antoine's mouth.

"There's something in his throat," he said. Moments later, he retrieved that thing. It was a small, square object that I couldn't make out at first.

"Move aside," Andrew said as he took the object out into the kitchen, grabbed a sheet tray, and laid the object out. It was a folded piece of paper, a very tightly folded piece of paper. Andrew was wearing food service gloves and began unfolding the paper. The note was written on an old typewriter, from the looks of it. It read: Mr. Stone, We know about the injections. Steroids are how you carve stone. We have proof. One word to the right people and you're off the air, off the shelf, and out of business.

Twenty thousand dollars in cash. Small bills only. Bring it to the basement level of the Carousel Casino on the 8th. Boiler room. 3 PM. There's a red barrel near the far wall. Drop the money inside and leave immediately. No talking. No waiting. No second chances. We'll know if you don't follow instructions.

"Blackmail," Andrew said.

"Yes, and they were extorting him," Logan said. The funny thing about the game that Carousel was, that I had no idea if Antoine had actually swallowed that letter or if it had appeared there as a result of Andrew's The Slab trope, which rewarded him with information during an autopsy. In fact, I was almost certain that Antoine had not even known about his own backstory, or at least not as much as it would seem. He would never have agreed to meet in a dark basement without consulting us.

No, my money said, he had fallen into some sort of narrative trap. He might have had little choice in his fate. Maybe all he did was stumble into the basement, exploring, looking for weapons or information. Maybe he was lured there, thinking he was milking an NPC for information. And when he did, maybe he stumbled on a bag of cash in a red barrel and then had to fight off whoever this killer was, to no avail. I suspected that he had died, not even knowing why.

As I held my arm around Daphne, I promised myself that whoever had killed him would pay for it.