End of Story

by A.J. Finn

Doesn’t sound travel in this house? Or is that only human voices?

Observes that she has left two lamps lit all day. San Franciscan of the year.

The house is Styles, where Poirot investigated that first mysterious affair; it’s 221B Baker Street, the walls pocked with bullet holes, the windows braced against London pea soup. It is Manderley. It’s the Piccadilly flat where Lord Peter Wimsey styled himself a detective. It’s perfect.

“The very likeness of Spring-Heeled Jack,” as Inspector Trott says, “that Victorian bogeyman always jumpin’ ’cross rooftops and rappin’ on kiddies’ windows.”

A very popular novelist who suffered a devastating misfortune, perhaps. Or a very popular novelist who committed the perfect crime.

Conversations are always dangerous if you have something to hide.

“He’s like a fire. You want to pull up beside him and warm your hands.”

He is like fire, and being here—in the Mystery House, a staircase away from him—is like passing your hand through flame. The thrill of contact with a dangerous substance.

The word of the day: absquatulate, “to decamp or suddenly leave a social gathering.”

‘my mind is like a crowded box-room with packets of all sorts stowed away therein, so many that I may well have but a vague perception of what was there.’” He eyes her. “That’d be Sherlock, ‘Lion’s Mane.’

Now, Saint Sebastian is the patron of soldiers and athletes. Painters love Sebastian. Obscenely handsome heretic, arrows plunged into his flesh like he’s a pincushion. Usually looking distressed.”

“Life is hard. After all, it kills you.”

“Young Hunter,” he says, “there is one pursuit, and one alone, that engages a man who has lost his wife and son in a single night, and that is resisting the almighty urge to blow his brains out.”

Nicky wants to linger in those lost later years, pin him there like a butterfly to a board; yet already he’s flitted away.

“Or The Count of Monte Cristo. Imagine plotting merciless revenge!”

With each word, his voice sinks lower, softer, as though tethered to a weight.

He’s slipped her grip again, retreated into the mists of time. Quietly Nicky sighs; she’s interested in his past, certainly, but that turn-of-the-century vanishing act is like a scar—she can’t look away from it, even if she wanted to.

He’s speaking in spirals, circling back to his opening chapters the way Simon revisits witnesses, exposing the next layer of the story, the secret beneath the skin.

Motive was trickier, but then motive is always tricky.

“Obsessed with death in general.” He squints. “Wondering if it would come for me. When it would come for me. Because I would not stop for death, would he kindly stop for me?”

“‘Man is the most dangerous animal of all,’ the Zodiac wrote. Christ, what a monster.”

“People your age—young people, I mean—you treat your lives like galleries, for public display, open to all. My life is no gallery. It’s a vault, a black box, and—I’m sorry I can’t put this more elegantly—it’s nobody’s damn business.”

“Death would obsess him as it obsessed me. Coined a catchphrase, just before the finale: ‘I should have wrapped this up in a ribbon a long time ago.’ Thought it sounded self-deprecating. So many detectives are such know-it-alls, yet it takes them forever to crack the case.”

She envisioned the story not simply as a book, printed and bound, but as a bestseller. To some people that’s a dirty word. Those people do not write bestsellers.”

“For ages, I couldn’t understand writers who resented their characters. Those characters were their meal tickets! Golden geese! Conan Doyle killed off Holmes, as you’re aware. Pitched him over the Reichenbach Falls. He stayed dead for nearly ten years. Christie loathed Poirot—called him a ‘little creep.’ A bit ungrateful, I thought.”

But her heart is thumping proudly, her teeth are set; Nicky will defend a beloved book as if it’s her young. Even from its author.

He can mock his own work, if he likes, but he ought to consider how he’s also mocking his readers.

The greatest joy in any writer’s career is the attention of his audience. And mystery readers are the most attentive audience of all.

There’s no trap so deadly as the trap you set for yourself.

“You’d make quite the psychoanalyst. Or at least a priest. There’s a whiff of the confessional about you.” Sebastian’s eyes are narrowed, as though he’s trying to locate the exact words. “A man finds himself saying what he hadn’t meant to say. That’s a gift. And a weapon.”

“As Simon St. John tells us, the past is a poison. Tolerable only in trace amounts.” “I remember. But the past is gone.” “Oh, no.” Now he turns to her, and his smile is so sad she could cry. “The past isn’t gone. It’s just waiting.”

“How were the children?” asks her stepmother. “I do not mind them in a room, I do not want one in my womb. I ducked out during fingerpainting.”

A sudden silence, as though the electricity has been cut.

“And thanks, but tomorrow I’m scheduled to be overweight and out of shape all day, so I must decline.”

“He could do swans or fish, if you asked, but mostly butterflies. Sebastian dabbled in lepidoptery”—Nicky appreciates that Diana doesn’t define the word for her—“and boys want to be like their fathers, don’t they?”

In any classic mystery, a lady’s the cause of all the mayhem.” “Just possibly a man wrote that.

Quite a three-pipe problem, agrees Sherlock Holmes.

Do you feel an uncomfortable heat at the pit of your stomach? And a nasty thumping at the top of your head? I call it the detective-fever. It will lay hold of you. Wilkie Collins, The Moonstone—the original country-house whodunit.

You and I might even solve an old mystery or two, she’d remind him. And he would smile and say, Come—come; let’s sit by the fire and plot.

She’s the kid on the team who shows up, observes the game yet rarely plays, and maybe earns a participation trophy at the end of the season. Congratulations, Madeleine: You were there! You were bodily present!

“Hello,” she beams, and Madeleine suspects with horror that this is a Morning Person.

Boldface letters across his T-shirt: SURELY NOT EVERYBODY WAS KUNG FU FIGHTING.

She likes imperfections; she’s drawn to what’s broken.

Then, for an instant, he looks at her—and winks, a quick camera-shutter of his left eye. Automatically, Nicky winks back. The plot thickens.

WHY DID SHE WINK? Nicky feels as though she scanned a checkout item without wanting to. Or without meaning to, anyway.

A pile of cats stirs upon the cold hearth, tails wrapped like twine around themselves.

“Wouldn’t it haunt you?” she asks darkly. “Taking a life. Blowing past the—like he was a bump in the road. Never coming clean. Who could do it?”

“It’s sort of a crime-fiction precept. ‘Who benefits.’ When investigating a crime, pay attention to . . . well, the beneficiaries.”

They bro-hug, one arm apiece, each slapping the other man’s back as if to dislodge an obstruction in his throat.

The blood is fizzing in her veins; questions clamor in her brain. Do you feel an uncomfortable heat at the pit of your stomach? She does. The first symptom of that irresistible malady: detective-fever.