“This is all Jeannie Desjardin’s fault,” Caro declared to the people in the hallway.

Lynn Myers blinked at her. “Who-who’s Jeannie Desjardin?”

“My friend. She’s this awesomely horrible woman who generally revels in being bad. You know—she’s one of those New York publishing types. But every once in a while she gets an attack of the guilts and tries to do something nice. Her husband and I try to talk her out of it, but…anyway, this was supposed to be her Maine getaway. But she gave me the tickets instead and stayed in New York to roast along with eight million other people.” And the yummy, luscious Steven McCord, Caro thought rebelliously. That lucky bitch. “And now look,” she said, resisting the urge to kick the bloody candlestick. “Look at this mess. Wait until I tell her being nice backfired again.”

“Well,” Lynn said, blinking faster—Caro suspected it was a nervous tic—“we should—I mean—we should call the—the police. Right?”

Caro studied Lynn, a slender woman so tall she hunched to hide it, a woman whose darting gray eyes swam behind magnified lenses. She was the only one of the group dressed in full makeup, pantyhose, and heels. She had told Caro during the first “Get Acquainted” brunch that she was a realtor from California. If so, she was the most uptight Californian Caro had ever seen. Not to mention the most uptight realtor.

“Call the police?” she asked at last. “Sure. But I think a few things might have escaped your notice.”

“Like the fact that the storm’s cut us off from the mainland,” Todd Opitz suggested, puffing away on his eighth cigarette in fifteen minutes.

“Secondhand smoke kills,” Lynn’s Goth teenage daughter, Jana, sniffed. She was a tiny brunette with wildly curly dark hair, large dark eyes edged in kohl (making her look not unlike an edgy raccoon), and a pierced nostril. “See, Mom? I told you this would be lame.”

“Jana…”

“And secondhand smoke kills,” the teen added.

“I hope so,” was Todd’s cold reply. He was an Ichabod Crane of a man, towering over all of them and looking down his long nose, which was often obscured by cigarette smoke. He tossed a lank of dark blond hair out of his eyes, puffed, and added, “I really do. Go watch Romper Room, willya?”

“Children,” Caro said. “Focus, please. Dana’s in there holed up waiting for les flic to land. Meantime, who’d she kill?”

“What?” Lynn asked.

“Well, who’s dead? Obviously it’s not one of us. Who’s missing?” Caro started counting on her fingers. “I think there’s…what? Maybe a dozen of us, including staff? Well, four of us—five, if you count Dana—are accounted for. But there’s a few of us missing.”

The four of them looked around the narrow hallway, as if they expected the missing guests to pop out any second.

“Right. So, let’s go see if we can find the dead person.”

“Wh-why?” Lynn asked.

“Duh, Mom,” Jana sniffed.

“Because they might not be dead,” Caro explained patiently. “There’s an old saying: ‘A bloody candlestick does not a dead guy make,’ or however it goes.”

Jana was startled out of her sullen-teen routine. “Where the hell did you grow up?”

“Language, Jana. But—but the police?”

“Get it through your head,” Todd said, not unkindly. “Nobody’s riding to the rescue. You saw the Weather Channel…before the power went out, anyway. This is an island, a private island—”

“Enjoy the idyllic splendor of nature from your own solitary island off the Maine coast,” Lynn quoted obediently from the brochure.

“Don’t do that; it creeps me out when you do that.”

“I have a photographic memory,” she explained proudly.

“Congratufuckinglations. Anyway,” Todd finished, lighting up yet another fresh cigarette, “the earliest the cops can get here is after the storm clears, probably sometime tomorrow morning.”

“But they have helicopters—”

As if making Todd’s point, a crack of lightning lit up the windows, followed by the hollow boom of thunder, so loud it seemed to shake the mansion walls. The group pressed closer to each other for a brief moment and then, as if embarrassed at their unwilling intimacy, pulled back.

“They won’t fly in this weather. We’re stuck. Killer in the bedroom, no cops, power’s out. The perfect Maine getaway,” Todd added mockingly.

“It’s like one of those bad horror movies,” Caro commented.

“Caro’s right.”

“About the horror movies?”

He shook his head. “Let’s go see who’s dead. I mean, what’s the alternative? It beats huddling in our rooms waiting for the lights to come back on, don’cha think?”

“What he said,” Caro said, and they started off.