“I mean it could have been anything. A rock or a bottle. Something heavy enough to break bone…”
“But there aren’t really rocks out there.”
Declan’s right. There’s dirt for as far as the eye can see behind the Inn, but it isn’t very rocky. Sure, there are larger rocks out towards the mine, where the land has been dug up, but otherwise it’s mostly just compact dirt and pebbles. Someone would have to really search for a rock big enough to kill someone. So whoever killed Phoebe likely brought the weapon outside with them.
“Whatever weapon they used had to be strong enough to endure repeated hits. Something like a bottle would have broken; we would have seen shards of glass out there when we searched.” I cringe at Declan’s analytical approach, but then I realize, this must be how he approaches his stories as a journalist.
We sit in silence for a few moments, thinking. Declan shifts on the bed.
“Ow.”
I look at him curiously.
“Something just poked me in the leg,” he says, reaching for something in his pocket. He pulls out his room key from the Inn. “Shite, I forgot to return it to Randy before we left.”
I look at it. The wood carved roughly into the shape of a raven. It’s almost obscenely heavy for a room key. I take the key from him, holding it in my hand.
“You don’t think…” Declan says, his eyes glued on the object.
I wrap my fingers around it and imagine raising it over my head and plummeting it back down.
“I mean, this would definitely be heavy enough to crack bone,” Declan says, taking it back. “It’s a possibility.”
My mind jumps back to yesterday afternoon.
“When we checked in, I noticed there was a key missing from the cubbies behind the front desk. And we were the only people staying there. It’s a reach, but maybe…”
“Did you see what room the key was missing from?”
“Room eleven,” I answer quickly, the image of that empty cubby and the number beneath it burning bright in my memory.
“Right. Is there any way for us to figure out who was staying in that room back then?”
“I can’t think of…” But then I stop, remembering.
I rush to my tote bag, flinging out items until I find what I’m looking for: the notebook I stole from the Inn’s front desk when I was searching for the computer connected to the hidden camera. I forgot about it amid everything that happened.
I throw it open on the bed. Declan hovers behind me, peeringover my shoulders as I flip through the pages. The first few are filled with lines of numbers, which I surmise must be finance related. But as I continue to thumb through it, those fade away, leaving only blank pages or those decorated with scribbles and doodles of half-naked women.
“There’s nothing here,” I mutter, disappointment sinking low in my heart.
I wait for him to comfort me, to reassure me that things will be alright, even though there’s no way they can be. But he’s silent, and when I turn to face him, he’s staring down at the notebook, having flipped back to a page I’d previously ignored, discarding it as nothing more than doodles.
“This is a list,” he says finally.
My eyes follow where he’s pointing, and I realize that in between the inexpertly crafted cartoons are numbers and names. And then I notice a set of numbers on the upper-right corner of the page:17-11-2012. A date, in the flipped day-month-year format that Australians use.
Declan is already flipping the pages, and it doesn’t take long until he reaches the date we’re looking for:22-12-2015. December 22, the day we checked in.
It’s all there, a list of 1 through 20, which I assume must be the Inn’s rooms, and a hyphen and name or two to go along with each number, depending on whether the room was a single or a double. A quick scan reveals all our names—the students plus Hari and Nick. I start with the most familiar number—13—and look at its accompanying names:Phoebe Barton and Claire Whitlock. I holdmy breath as my eyes move up two lines to room 11, the one with the missing key.
I drag my eyes along the line, to the name of the person who was staying in that room.
Ellery Johnson.
We both stare at Randy’s spindly handwriting, the silence growing stagnant between us. Morphing into something darker, more real.
Ellery stayed in that room. She had access to the missing key.
