Page 17 of Seven Reasons to Murder Your Dinner Guests
“Gordon, what are you doing?” Elizabeth suddenly appeared behind him, glancing from the toothbrush still in his hand to the contents of the toilet.
When they’d first met at university in Edinburgh, he confided in her about the bulimia that had beleaguered his teenage years. “But I’m over it now,” he’d assured her, and she’d squeezed his hand, telling him some totally unrelated story of how she’d stopped eating for three days when her first boyfriend dumped her. When the problem had reemerged during a stressful time at work, Gordon put it down as a one-off and never mentioned it to Elizabeth. But gradually, over the last three years, gorging and then purging became part of his routine.
Elizabeth was furious.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” she yelled over and over, not listening to his perfectly reasoned explanation. Eventually, he promisedit wouldn’t happen again, and she agreed not to tell their daughter or anyone else.
“After all that lecturing you do about nutrition and looking after your body?” she said, an almost smug edge to her voice.
The comment stung, and later that morning, as he faced the cameras onThe Morning Show, he heard it again. When asked about the apple-cider-vinegar diet, he faltered, started to answer, and then stopped, doubting himself. Silence filled the air—that loud, oppressive silence you only get on live television or radio. The host stared at him, her perfect eyebrows raised in anticipation. The seconds stretched out, painfully, agonizingly. His heart started to beat loudly between his temples as his anxiety spiraled before flatlining. Finally, he mumbled something about lack of scientific evidence, and they cut away to a commercial break. Afterward, the producers played it down, but he could tell they weren’t impressed.
The following week, Gordon was in the middle of typing an email to a producer on the show, passing along his availability, when Melvin’s message popped up in his email. That young woman, Stella, was dead. He pictured her rudely turning away from him at the table, diamonds glistening in her ears.She got what she deserved.The words were in his mind in an instant. He read over Melvin’s message, along with the news article. That’s when he remembered the envelopes in his briefcase. He pulled them out and read over the names on the front: Stella and Melvin. At the dinner party, Gordon had been bemused by Janet’s dramatic reaction to her envelope, by Vivienne’s overzealous questioning of the waitstaff. Clearly, the event had been an orchestrated PRprank, certainly nothing to concern himself with. But now Stella had died, and he had her envelope in his possession. He pushed Melvin’s envelope into his desk drawer and focused his attention on Stella’s. Turning it over, he noticed that it had already been opened. He had a quick look, then typed out his reply to Melvin’s email.
In the days running up to Stella’s funeral, Gordon regularly cast his mind back to that night at Serendipity’s. At the time, he’d dismissed it as a frivolous event by a misguided media company, but another theory was percolating. A theory that excited him, that energized him, and perhaps would prove to be his making. He wasn’t sure how much he’d reveal to the other guests, but he wanted to entice them to gather once more with his hint about more information, specifically the envelope. He’d expected them to thank him for his quick thinking in picking it up. But, oddly enough, they all looked horrified. No one had even tried to touch the envelope.
“It’s been opened,” Janet gasps, narrowing her eyes at him.
“It was like that when I picked it up,” Gordon says, holding up his hands. “Matthew, you’re the last one of us to see Stella. Did she mention that she’d opened her envelope?”
Matthew shakes his head.
Gordon reaches over and picks it up. He wasn’t going to let Janet or Melvin steal his big moment.
“Don’t you dare,” Janet cries, slapping his arm.
“What do you mean?” he asks, genuinely confused. “If we open it and it says twenty-three, then we’ll know that the predictions are correct.”
“You should have left it there,” Vivienne says. “What benefit is there in knowing the number inside?”
All Gordon can do is stare at her. Does he really need to state the obvious? She was an experienced journalist—albeit on a women’s magazine—he’d taken her for having a bit more intelligence than this.
“Perhaps we should leave it alone, and Melvin could take it to the police station, look into it for us,” Tristan says, glancing over at the police officer, who is nonchalantly tapping on his mobile phone.
Gordon can’t fathom it.What is wrong with these people?
Janet
Janet stares at the black envelope in the middle of the table, Stella’s name written in perfect cursive script. Her right hand is pressed against her chest, where she can feel her heart galloping underneath. She closes her eyes and sees her own envelope on the night of the dinner party, bearing those unforgettable words.
You will die aged forty-four.
She’d been enjoying the evening, the delectable food and wine, the company of a gorgeous young man, the amusing conversation. In an instant, it felt like the air had been sucked from the room, sucked from her very lungs, as if Death himself had appeared and pointed directly at her. She did her best to pull herself together afterward, to tell herself that it had been the work of a rogue PR company. It didn’t help that the light of Matthew’s attentionsturned to shine on that skinny Stella, but thankfully, the policeman, Melvin, swooped in, offering to take her for another drink, and she was relieved to leave that suffocating place on his arm. But when they settled into the hotel bar, got to work on a bottle of whiskey, the truth about Melvin came spilling out.
“I think I’m falling in love,” he admitted, referring to hismalecolleague. “I can’t stop thinking about him.”
“You have to be honest with yourself. And honest with Mary,” Janet counseled. As the minutes ticked by, Melvin became more drunk and melancholy, while Janet grew antsy, in need of something more distracting to wipe that number from her mind.
Finally, once they’d polished off the bottle, she persuaded Melvin to get a taxi home and make plans to come clean to his poor unsuspecting wife, then ordered her own cab to take her to Giles’s place. He’d been her lover for the last six months, but she’d called it off a few weeks ago, that spoilsport emotion guilt having reared its ugly head. Yet, in that moment, she neededsomething.
“I thought you said our little liaisons were over?” Giles beamed, appearing in the doorway with adorably ruffled hair.
“I missed you,” she told him. He satisfied her as he always had and cleared her mind for a good hour or so, but afterward, with him snoring beside her, she found sleep impossible. Once she’d recovered her red dress from the kitchen floor, she called a taxi to take her home just before 2:00 a.m. Crawling into her own bed, she found Bill disappointingly still breathing and starfishing right in the center. In the end, she marched into the spare room, where she finally drifted off but slept fitfully, tormented by dreams ofdinner parties with farm animals wearing tuxedos and numbers scrawled in blood on the walls.
She woke up with Bill standing over her, squinting unattractively without his glasses.
“Don’t you have a meeting this morning, dear?” he asked, scratching his pajamaed crotch.
“Shit!” she yelled when she realized it was nearly 8:00 a.m. and the shareholders’ meeting was due to start at 8:30.
