End of Story

by A.J. Finn

“You want some of this action?” he asks, stroking the cat, and Nicky, not one to resist an animal, particularly of the monocular variety, rubs the downy tummy until the cat is writhing.

TODAY MADELEINE LEADS STORY TIME at the library, feeding Green Eggs and Ham to a gaggle of toddlers, most of them calm and quiet, a few who wouldn’t fare well at a custody hearing. At lunchtime, she slumps on the floor in the plant-sciences section, where no one will discover her, possibly for years.

Sometimes, in a light breeze, you can detect the faintest hint of a personality.

“What we all dread most is a maze with no center,”

“I think it’s good to learn to live with fear,” he said. “Fear and failure. And the unknown.”

“It’ll be a hangover room,” replied Mrs. Trapp, “for anyone who needs a quiet morning after.” This has been its primary function, and Madeleine its primary tenant, ever since, although Diana did get to select the open-sesame book on the shelf. Rebecca.

Women, he adds, make better crime writers than men; “I think it’s because every day they must contend with sinister forces.”

Also in his possession: certain personal effects of their authors—Ngaio Marsh’s opera glasses; Georges Simenon’s cufflinks; a tumbler from which Anthony Horowitz once tippled whiskey; a fountain pen stolen from Louise Penny; David Handler’s umbrella.

His stories burst like fireworks, one after another; they pop and dazzle.

He wants a new audience. In print, yes, but in performance as well. For Sebastian Trapp, the joy is in the telling.

Sebastian seems to have tired of time travel; the conversation remains firmly fixed in the present. (The future goes unmentioned.)

“‘A woman who doesn’t lie,’” she replies, “‘is a woman without imagination and without sympathy.’”

She loads a classical-piano mix on her phone. The wine in her blood burns hot and sweet. Her fingers flex, cats stretching before the nightly hunt. Nicky writes well when she’s had a drink, and tonight she feels more sure of herself, of her mission.

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

She liked San Francisco, liked its multiple personalities.

“But in any marriage—you’re not married? I didn’t think so—in any marriage there are places you don’t visit. Like plots of acrid land.”

“Life is loss,” says Diana, very softly. After a moment, Nicky shrugs. “Life is change. And—discovery.”

Her voice is like soil, deep and warm.

Hope’s tone is calm but dangerous; Nicky pictures a crocodile cruising toward a riverbank.

“Tell them that Misty is what a stripper calls herself, and Aspen is what a stripper calls herself when she thinks she’s too high-class to be a Misty.”

“I saw students bullied as a teacher. Sometimes the abuse was physical, but far more often it was psychological, or social, and so insidious that even I couldn’t make out its exact shape. Although it shapes the person who’s bullied.”

“I don’t think it’s true that bullies always hate themselves, or that they necessarily hurt others because they’re insecure. Some Aspens genuinely believe they’re special, they’re better. Common thugs and cowards is what they are, the shits.”

Even his taste in music stopped developing in the mid-aughts. And that was not a good time to stop.

Do you feel a nasty thumping at the top of your head? It will lay hold of you. The detective-fever is breaking out across her brain.

“In which we observed that crime fiction is a form of moral education, and the detective—you’ve read it?” “The detective restores order and upholds justice.” “It’s irreducibly ethical. Aristotelian, even.

“Philosophy,” says Isaac, slowly, “teaches you how to highlight the strengths of an idea while hiding its weaknesses behind your back. Creative writers—you; me, in my way—we do it all the time when we’re crafting a story.

“It’s like when a magician waves his right hand so you don’t notice what the left is doing.”

How sad to feel so helpless.

“No case is ever too cold to touch.”

“Too many rooms, too many stairs. B.B. says it was the kind of place where at any moment someone very dangerous could be standing right behind you.”

“Agatha Christie went missing once. Just up and left, no abduction or anything. National manhunt, media circus, the works.” “How long until they found her?” “Eleven days. She was identified by a banjo player at the hotel where she’d holed up.”

Theirs was a language. The person on the other end of this line is a native speaker.

How do people in films text so flawlessly, even when they’re saving the world?

She wants to ask what he knows, of course, the same way that bony Disney princess wanted to touch the spinning-wheel spindle: it’ll hurt, but what if he’s right? (But what if he’s wrong?)

the question surfaces in her mind, like a weighted body that won’t stay submerged:

Madeleine was not apologizing to the dog, who now trudges into the room with the air of one who minds very much, but whatever.

“A lot of me is gone.” She says it very simply. “A lot of bits are missing. For a while I waited, thinking they’d be restored to me in time—but no: They were gone. Like jigsaw pieces you’ve lost. You’ve still got the borders, you know, the clean edges on the outside, but the picture isn’t complete. And it never will be.”

I feel like Death keeps aiming darts at me, keeps hitting those I love. Perhaps he’ll catch up with me abroad. An appointment in Samarra.”

Now, though, in the weak moonlight, the weight of a stare is like a tap on her shoulder.

he blows through the journal like a spring wind, so brisk and biting that the pages nearly ruffle.

“It’s a strange city. You’ve got aging hippies, local aristocracy, tech bros stepping over homeless people on the sidewalk—oh,

They slice across the bay, pinballing between the islands, swapping shifts as the waves roll and the sails hum. Nicky feels giddy with oxygen.

we don’t much like American authors playing dress-up in our past.”

Nicky looks past him at the Golden Gate, radiant in the afternoon light. Tonight, fog will pour across the bay, across the bridge, only the peaks of its towers and the swoops of its cables rising above the vapor; for now, under a sun rolling slowly down the sky, all is clear, and bright, and diamond-edged. They could stay the course, glide into the ocean, never to be found. So easy to disappear.

Like birdsong: a language she can’t speak yet likes to listen to.

No telling who he might become. He could be anyone.

“Any guesses?” “Oh, I’m no good at guessing. But I know it’s never who you think it is.”

This is a hoary Hammer horror film, or the death-trap house on Soldier Island in And Then There Were None, cowering with its ten guests beneath the tempest.

It was a dark and stormy night. Now thunder growls. The three women watch the ceiling, as though a predator is passing overhead.

“I’m lonely,” says Madeleine, throat tight. Saying it to herself somehow feels much sadder than saying it to somebody else.