One by One - Ruth Ware Page 0,87

key in the palm of my hand and trying to cudgel my brain into figuring this out. Somehow, someone got hold of this key—probably during the kerfuffle over getting entry to Tiger’s room, after Inigo’s disappearance. It’s not hard to imagine someone slipping it surreptitiously out of the lock while we were all preoccupied with checking if Tiger was okay. Whoever took it used it to gain entry to that same room in the middle of the night, and kill Ani. And then at some point after that, presumably this morning while we were all distracted by talking about the plan to ski down to the village, it slipped out of their pocket and fell between the sofa cushions.

The only question is: Who took it? Who was sitting on that space on the sofa this morning? Because I cannot for the life of me remember.

I shut my eyes, trying to picture the scene—Tiger lying on the sofa, sobbing, Miranda trying to comfort her, Rik handing out whiskeys… I need to place all the characters in the room, one by one, figure this out.

Danny and I were standing. I remember that clearly. Topher… Topher was leaning up against the mantelpiece. Miranda was kneeling on the floor by the coffee table. Liz was in one of the armchairs by the fire. Rik and Carl… they were on a sofa, but which one? I squeeze my eyes shut harder, and have a sudden vision of Rik leaning forward, filling up the whiskey glass at the far end of the table. It was the other sofa, the one beneath the window. Which means… I open my eyes.

It means Tiger was lying on the sofa where I found the key, her hip right on the point where the cushions join. It would make complete sense—the key could so easily have slid out of her pocket while she was lying there crying. Except… it makes no sense at all. Tiger is the only person who didn’t need a key to kill Ani. She was already in the room. And if she wanted an alibi, she could have simply said she forgot to lock the door.

But no one else occupied that seat after the key went missing, apart from me…

And Liz.

As if hypnotized, my gaze drifts upwards, to the ceiling, where on the floor above Liz is moving around her room, gathering up duvets and pillows. I can hear the faint creak of the floor joists, and then the sound of her door shutting.

I hear the shush, shush as she drags the duvet along the corridor.

Then I hear the halting noise of her feet on the spiral stairs, going carefully this time; she does not want to slip again.

Then she appears in the doorway of the living room, her hands full of bedcovers, her face unreadable in the dim light, the firelight flickering off her big, owl-like glasses, and with a funny little pang I remember that very first day, the way she reminded me of an owl, paralyzed by the lights of an oncoming car.

She still looks like an owl, but suddenly the resemblance seems very different, and quite another kind of chill comes over me as I realize I was right all along—but so very, very wrong.

Because here is the thing. We think we know owls. They are the soft, friendly, blinking creatures of children’s rhymes and stories. They may be wise, but they are also slow, and easily confused.

The problem is, none of that is true. Owls are not slow. They are fast—lightning fast. And they are not confused. In their own element—the dark—they are swift and merciless hunters.

Owls are raptors. Predators.

That was what I saw in Liz, right back on that very first day. I was just too blinded by my own preconceptions to recognize it.

In the dark, owls are not the hunted, but the hunter. And right now, it is dark.

“Hi,” Liz says, and she smiles, an unreadable smile behind those blank, flickering lenses. “Are you all right?”

LIZ

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When I come back down, my arms full of duvets and pillows, Erin is standing stock-still in the middle of the room, one hand on the sofa-bed frame, as if a thought has just occurred to her.

“Hi,” I say. I throw the bedding into the armchair. Then, when she still doesn’t move, I add, “Are you all right?” I don’t know why I say that, except that she looks really odd. “Is the sofa bed stuck?”

“What?” She seems to