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were Emily Seaver, a freckle-faced lass of twenty-two with blue eyes and braces, and Joanne Nobele, a nineteen-year-old of French descent with too much baby fat, but a lovely face beneath carefully coiffed blond tresses. They were the housekeepers. Margaret, the two girls, and Hans were all employees of John Everson’s, and usually worked at his enormous estate in New Bedford. When offered the chance to spend a weekend by the ocean, they’d all readily consented. Eric Thomas, a brooding, dark-haired man of thirty-eight with sullen eyes and sunken cheeks, was also along for the weekend. Eric was Everson’s chauffeur, and Hans was the handyman and gardener, but for the next two days they’d be doing whatever assorted tasks were required of them. Eric was not crazy about being stuck on an island, but he could use the extra money to pay assorted bar bills and gambling debts.
    The group of fourteen trudged over hill and dale, their assorted bundles making the relatively short trip from deck to guest house seem like a month in the New York subway. The housekeepers groaned under the weight of the boxes Mrs. Plushing had ordered them to carry, boxes full of canned goods, liquor bottles, pots and pans, plates, glasses, and cutlery. Gloria waddled along in her sensible sneakers, her body fat tucked into ridiculously tight designer jeans, dangling her sunglasses in her hand and commenting on the freshness of the air and the beauty of the view.
    Finally they stood in front of the guest house.
    “Well, it isn’t the Hilton,” Gloria quipped, “but it will do.”
     
    The guest house was rather spacious. Everyone would be quite comfortable, and the separate rooms would even afford a certain amount of privacy. The house had three floors, a gracious living room and dining area, a fairly large kitchen, and several small but attractive bedrooms. John Everson, Hans, and some other hired men had come out some days before to make sure that the lights were working, the water running, and everything else in order so the guests would have no nasty surprises. John had resisted taking a good look around the island at the time, figuring he’d save the main event for when everyone else was there. He and Hans were the only two of the party who had already seen the entire guest house.
    John had already picked out bedrooms for everyone. The large room on the top floor with the big double bed was for him and Lynn, seeing as how she owned the island and he was sleeping with her … although the way their relationship had been going lately, he wasn’t sure he wouldn’t wind up bunking down somewhere in the living room. As far as he knew, none of the others were romantically involved—besides Gloria and Jerry, of course—so he had to team up roommates, when necessary, with an eye to personality and not existing partnerships. Andrea Peters, the psychic, and Cynthia Marcovicci already seemed to know one another pretty well, and looked just a few years older than your typical college roommates; he put the two of them together in a bedroom on the second floor. Gloria Bordette and Jerry Hardington he placed in the room next to the one he was sharing with Lynn, hoping to limit the sound of creaking bedsprings to one floor.
    There were two smaller bedrooms on the second floor, in which he placed Betty Sanders and Anton Suffron respectively. They would have to share a bathroom (each of the bedrooms on the third floor, and the larger bedroom on the second floor, had its own private bath), but he thought Betty would prefer that minor inconvenience to sleeping in the quarters he’d chosen for his writer-relative, Ernest Thesinger. John had put him in a small storage room on the first floor, in which Hans had placed a cot, a desk, and a typewriter.
    He figured Ernie might want to stay up late typing, working on his article about the island, and this way he would have privacy and not keep everyone else awake. It was the least glamorous “boudoir” in the