A/N: I hope everyone has enjoyed the story so far. That, and piquing an interest in Agatha Christie's works were my goals. I've laughed, hopefully you have too, so let's not beat around MacGuffin Island...I mean, the bush, too much more and get right into the thrilling conclusion, aptly entitled, "The Thrilling Conclusion."
It lasted an eternity, their eyes fastened on each other. Whole sunsets and sunrises passing before them, eons passing by them like sports cars on a highway. That's what it felt like, the few seconds of heart-stopping terror and confusion between them before either of them spoke.
"There's nobody else on this island now, Lizzie. Just the two of us," Jack spoke first, his mind working overtime. They unconsciously circled the other, cornered by denial.
Elizabeth averted her eyes and planted them on the body.
"Poor Barbossa…" she began, shuddering at Jack's cold laugh.
"Poor Barbossa? My, we're lowering our standards somewhat, aren't we? He only left us to die, kidnapped you, and tried to kill everyone…not this time, of course, but before. Rotter's better off dead." Clenching his fists, he walked over and kicked the corpse. Should know better than to trust her, he thought. How did he always end up falling for it? And yet, it didn't feel right at all. He believed her with one hundred percent certainty.
"Maybe w-we should move him to the house with the others," she tried.
"He can stay out here and be seagull-chow."
"Fine." She wedged herself between Barbossa's arms, he himself wedged between the two rocks, and took hold of his hands. Heaving, she stepped backwards in an attempt to dislodge him. Her feet dug deep into the sand, the body not budging an inch. Had it been under better circumstances, Jack would have found her efforts amusing. "I've got it. I don't need your help," she gasped out, breaking a sweat. "He's only, what, one hundred and eighty pounds or so? Two hundred and ten at the most? I helped Byron push his piano up onto the stage at the airport. Barbossa should be nothing." She grunted again and heaved, her arms about to feel pulled from their sockets.
"Bugger," Jack snapped and took an arm, pulling the body side by side with her. At last it slipped through the rocks and onto them. Rolling out of the mass that smelled of rot and seaweed, they scrambled back to their feet. "Not an easy task. But I suppose you're satisfied now?"
"Quite satisfied."
He didn't have to turn. Her tone was deeply mournful, heartbroken, even, but there was just a hint of triumph in it. Triumph in survival. His hands up, he swayed around until he could see his own pistol pointed at him.
"Picking pockets now, lounge singer? I would have thought they tipped you better than that."
"How dare you speak to me! I trusted you!" The pistol wobbled in her trembling arms. "Don't take another step, Jack. I don't want to kill you a second time."
"I don't want you to kill me a second time!" he blurted, fighting off the building panic. "Now you think I did it and I think you did it? This doesn't make any sense! How could either of us have killed Will?"
"Easily," she said. "You didn't like him. You took every opportunity you had to put him down…"
"I mean means, not motive!"
"I…you're a smart man. You could have rigged it up somehow…although you would have had to change your mind about becoming captain of the Flying Dutchman." Her eyebrow rose as she examined Jack. "You didn't kill Will at all, did you? This is ridiculous! Of course, one of us did! Everyone else is dead!"
They locked eyes. Every cog in both their minds drew out the same conclusion.
"Not everyone else is dead," Jack breathed. His eyes widened at Elizabeth lowering the pistol. "No, keep it on me. We're probably being watched."
"That would explain that feeling of being watched all the time," she said, nodding. "Here's what we'll do. I'll yell out 'bang' and you'll fall down like I shot you. Then I can go back in the house and shoot whoever it is."
"That would only work if it's Pintel," Jack said, raising his hands higher in the air. "You think you can miss me if you really fire?"
"And go back in there unarmed?"
"You'd drop it like you were in shock and I'd reload while you were going back up to the house. Yes, you'd be the bait, pretty much, but who would suspect it? I can't think of another story in all of history where a woman was used to bait anything." He paused. "Do we have an accord?"
"Tropical rhythms and drinks, right?" she asked. Waiting for his nod, she gestured slightly for him to move. "I trusted you!" she bellowed, her voice already growing hoarse.
"Give me the pistol," Jack shouted, eyes darting towards the house.
"I'll give it to you! Give it to you till you die!" With that, she fired and Jack slumped onto the sand.
Realistic. He was a fine actor, to add to his many talents, she thought, walking over to him and pretending to check him. Leaving the pistol, she walked up through the rocks to the steps of the house, half expecting "Welcome home, Elizabeth" to be written in blood on the walls like in The Haunting. Inside the main foyer, the rays shone in through the windows, lighting the house up in a way it hadn't been since the first day she'd arrived. It would be sunset in about two more hours, she noted, crossing into the dining room to inspect the Indian figures.
"You're behind the times, my dears," she said, throwing two of them out the window before picking hers up. "You're coming with me, Elizabeth Jr."
So far no one met her, no one was waiting to spin around in a chair at the last minute and reveal himself. For the briefest second, she wondered if this was a trick Jack was pulling, but she kept her faith in him. Cleaving onto the banister, Elizabeth ascended the staircase, eyes lurking all around. Just then, Mother Bates marched out of her bedroom with a kitchen knife and slashed at Elizabeth until she toppled down the stairs, the latest victim of the Bates Motel.
Just kidding.
Elizabeth opened the door to her room, unlocked, and gasped. Everything was packed for her, not just the carry-on she'd packed for herself. Every shoe and hairpin was out of the drawers and hangers and in her luggage.
"I took the liberty of preparing everything for you."
She spun around and squeaked out his name to avoid screaming.
"James!"
James Norrington strutted over to her with a smirk for the ages. She raced to the other side of the bed for some distance between them.
"It all went according to plan. I knew you'd bump off Sparrow. You'd already done it once. How hard could it be to do it again?" he laughed. "Oh, Elizabeth, you'll be so happy as the wife of the captain of the Flying Dutchman. This time around, not like how things were when you were married to Turner." He laughed again.
"You're alive."
"Yes. Yes, I'm alive. I'm also delightfully mad." He gave another maniacal laugh. "Sunset will be upon us soon. We don't have much time. I made this for you." He opened his coat and produced a noose. "We'll just take care of a few technicalities and then it's smooth sailing. I hope Will's dad doesn't carry a grudge. Ready to stand on the chair and get this over with?" He hung the noose on the hook on her ceiling.
Wide eyed, Elizabeth pieced the puzzle together. To die. To die, she could be on the Dutchman with him without reprieve, without separation.
"But how did you do it?" she stalled, unzipping her luggage and finding her hairbrush. "I want to look my best for when they find my body." With a quivering hand, she started brushing her hair.
"Oh, easy. I faked my note…well, before that, I hired Pintel and Ragetti to do the catering and buttler-ing… Teague was easy. Just slip in a bit of cyanide when Ragetti fainted. That night I went up to Ragetti's room with the last of the cyanide and said Barbossa instructed him to take this. He did it unquestionably, of course."
"And now he's dead," she said.
"Now he's dead. Uh…who was next? Your father. Sorry about this one, Elizabeth, but I couldn't leave you with any living attachments. I bludgeoned him with the life preserver…still can't get over the irony there, after we were done with our walk. Early in the morning, I left my room and hacked up Pintel and grabbed the master key from him. In the confusion to find him, I let myself into Sparrow's room and stole, er, commandeered his pistol. Come on over here now. Stand on the chair."
"Not without my good heels," she said, shuffling through her bag. "Woman's vanity, you know!" she chuckled, wondering why the hell Jack hadn't shot him yet.
"It wasn't long before I recruited Barbossa's help," James continued his monologue. "He believed me to be above suspicion as the only non-pirate here. He suspected Sparrow and I pretended to concur. It was easy to slip Gibbs a sedative and then stick him with the syringe when we were all making our way to the sitting room. But then here was my genius. I had to pretend to be a victim so I could move about freely and watch all of you. Barbossa thought it was an excellent idea, that we would throw the killer off-guard. He was the only one to closely examine me anyway."
"Where did you hide the pistol?" she asked, trying to apply lipstick without a mirror.
"Oh, in one of the tins in the pantry where the ham and cheese were. All I had to do was replace the adhesive tape. No one thought to check sealed tins of food. I hid the chest behind all the tins."
"That's the last time any of us try to cut corners," she said to herself.
"I figured no one would look there, and I was right! Barbossa and I met at the cliffs to discuss strategy when I pushed him off. Didn't suspect a thing. And then I was left with three unpredictable people, one with a returned pistol, and anything could happen!"
"You stabbed the heart after that," Elizabeth finished, laying on the bed and pulling out a magazine. It was a long monologue.
"And it felt glorious! That's what Turner gets for kicking me off after I was resurrected! Ha ha ha!" He pulled her to her feet. "And now, my dear Elizabeth, we can be together. There can't be anywhere else your heart truly lies because everyone's dead! I told you that you and I would make it out of this and we will!" Wrenching her arms, he forced her near the chair.
"James, James, hear me out," she stammered. "You're being so forceful. Before, with all your stoic suffering in silence and unrequited love, it was…it was cathartic!"
"Well, I came back a little wrong when I was resurrected. Haven't you seen Pet Sematary? On the chair."
"James, I have flying lessons at the airport next week. They'll wonder where I am and…and…I left my gerbil at home. I can't back out of that kind of commitment."
"There will be plenty of gerbils on the Flying Dutchman," he said in a blissful abandon. "Gerbils as far as the eye can see if that will make you happy! Now then." He manhandled her onto the chair and struggled to fit the noose around her neck. "We have to follow the rhyme, my dear. 'He went and hanged himself and then there were none.'"
"And then there were two, you son of a bitch!" she heard on the other side of James. Jack fired his pistol straight into James' head. Staggering back, James wiped the blood off his forehead and blinked a few times.
"Oh," Jack said. "Immortal ship captain. Forgot."
"I'll take care of both of you before the sun sets!"
Elizabeth leapt onto James, clawing at him as Jack rammed the butt of the pistol into him. It would do no good, they knew, but if they could only survive until sunset.
Without warning, a plunging sound thundered from outside. The Flying Dutchman emerged, each of its cannons aimed directly at the house. The crew stood at the ready on the main deck, swords in hand.
"All right, boys, get ready," Bootstrap ordered. "Heads up!" he called.
Jack and Elizabeth dropped what they were doing and sprinted down the stairs, not bothering to give a backward glance to James who was closing in behind them. Far from the house, far from the house, was their only thought process. Diving through the front door, they teetered on the rocks on their way down, finally able to hurl themselves onto the beach before the cannons fired, eliciting an explosion that would make Michael Bay proud.
"You guys all right?" Bootstrap asked, stepping down off the docked Dutchman with buckets of water strapped to his legs. He helped them up and looked back at the house with them, all in shambles. The debris smoked, a black mass of cinders and ash where a fine house had once stood.
"Talk about a deus ex machina," Elizabeth said as she tottered, backing away from the rubble. "What about the heart?"
"I think plenty of shit just stabbed Norrington's heart, don't you?" Bootstrap chuckled. "Why so shocked looking, Jack? The crew and I thought about it and we thought to ourselves, 'reparations?' Since when does any government give handouts to folks who deserve it? Well, William, bless his heart, he was a good kid and mighty fine with a sword, but he wasn't the brightest. Reminds me of the joke: an old blacksmith realized he was soon going to quit working. He picked out a strong young man to become his apprentice. The old fellow was crabby and exacting. 'Don't ask me a lot of questions,' he told the boy. 'Just do whatever I tell you to do.' One day the old blacksmith took an iron out of the forge and laid it on the anvil. 'Get the hammer over there,' he said. 'When I nod my head, hit it real good and hard.' Now the town is looking for a new blacksmith." Bootstrap wiped a tear. "Good stuff. Well, seeing as I'm captain now, where can I drop you guys off?"
"The airport," Jack said, looking at Elizabeth. "We have flying lessons to arrange."
"Jack!" she squealed, clapping her hands. "I promise we'll use our little Cessna to find the Pearl. I'm already qualified on Microsoft Flight Simulator. She'll be all right."
"I know, love," he said, kissing her as they stepped on board the Dutchman. "Going after her is kind of my shtick."
THE END