End of Story

by A.J. Finn

After a minute, Madeleine glances at her phone. Dark and dreaming.

“Stay as long as you like,” he calls. “Die here.”

“Just you and I,” he says as his window slides down, “out here at the northwesternmost ends of the earth. No cares . . .” The breeze whips his hair. “No worries . . .” “No witnesses,” says Nicky.

Nicky catches up—and the scene beyond her guide erupts into view, sudden and vast, pushing forth to meet her even as she approaches. This is a slow-motion moment, she thinks: the ocean waves, chapped with sunlight, green-screen pristine; the scuffed clouds floating above them, plump enough to pinch; and below, just over the edge of the wall, a steep cascade of rock that topples into the boiling surf. All clear and sharp as though engraved.

She senses that they’re escaping from the present, retreating in time—years, decades, more.

“We say ‘She’s full of heart’ or ‘He’s got guts,’ but the fact is, most of us are made of not a little scar tissue. I’m interested in the wounds a person keeps secret. Even the madness. Why do we hide them?” “Why would we show them?”

I like my life. Sometimes I feel I should keep that secret: I like my life, I’ve got few complaints.”

A labyrinth appears before them. Seven concentric circles radiate across the ground, each a hoop of rocks, the outermost skirting the very edge of the bluff; within the rings, byways and blind alleys swirl around a vacant center. Fifty feet wide, its routes just broad enough to navigate on foot. The rocks rise only a few inches, but to Nicky, they seem almost forbidding.

“If I knew, would I ask?” “If you knew, would you say?” “Depends what, exactly, I knew.” “We’re talking in circles.” “You’re standing in circles.”

“‘All human wisdom,’” says Sebastian, “‘is summed up in these two words: wait and hope.’ Monte Cristo. One of my favorites. The original psychological thriller, I’d say. The gamesmanship! ‘Do your worst, for I will do mine’—imagine saying that to someone!”

“You’ve never fully solved somebody else, have you?” Diana says, slow, thoughtful. “A person can still surprise you. A person can remain a mystery.”

“My mask has nothing to prove,” she replies. “It’s confident in its body, and it plays by its own rules.

She senses that a curtain is rising. Ladies and gentlemen, please take your seats. Act 2 is about to begin.

Favorite film? “The Lady Vanishes.”

“‘A quotation for everything saves original thinking,’” observes Nicky. “Beautifully said!” “Dorothy Sayers said it.

“Gossips everywhere. There is an expression: moral indignation is envy with a halo.”

“Who dies next?” booms a voice, and she looks up to behold her hand-holder, teeth bared in a laugh. The floor tilts beneath her. “That’s what tugs the reader forward. That’s what reels him in. Oh, he wants to know whodunit, of course; he’s eager for the solution. And if our reader is the unimaginative sort, he can reduce the book to a . . . what’s it called? Litmus test. Gladiator rules: thumbs up, thumbs down. ‘Does the ending surprise me?

“Who dies next? Anybody. It could be anybody. Yet once you turn that final page, the game is no longer afoot; it’s over. For them—not for you. You no longer share a dilemma, no longer fear a common foe. Your mystery endures. Your death awaits.”

“And so once you learn whodunit, you’re already alone again. No one to face death with you, or cheat it. You’ve said goodbye.”

“For as Chandler reminds us, ‘To say goodbye is to die a little.’”

Their faces part, but linger close, as if in a magnetic field.

Gauzy moonlight swoons through the window; the bridge wears fog tonight.

“Proprium humani ingenii est odisse quem laeseris.”

“Who’s that Russian playwright chap? Had a theory about guns?” “Chekhov. If you introduce a gun in Act One, you have to fire it by the finale.”

Recumbent at the window, eyes shuttered and hair loose as she speaks a dead language, Diana looks almost oracular.

‘It belongs to human nature to hate him whom you have harmed.’”

“I don’t think I can imagine wanting to die,” she says, slowly. “But I guess I can imagine not wanting to live.”

Death was intrigue. Death was a challenge. Death seemed a thrill.

“Do you really think this is a murder?” Foreign on her tongue, like a word she’s read but has never spoken.

The bay is bright today, tiny whitecaps like metal shavings, the bridge lunging into the headlands beyond; yet still the room—cavernous, ravenous—traps the light in its teeth and devours it.

“I don’t like most guns,” he adds. “You’re a cop.” “Not because I like guns.”

“Curious things, rooms. Tell you quite a lot about the people who live in them.

“What exactly are you investigating, Detective?” asks Madeleine. “A murder,” says B.B., the suicide note in her hand.

They’re in a bad play, the costumes haphazard, the set in disarray: six characters in search of an answer.

B.B. eyes him the way you would a crossword you just can’t crack.

Timbo bends toward him: “Would you recognize your son if he returned?” Sebastian’s eyes snap open so fast that Madeleine steps back. Her father stares straight at the detective. When he speaks, his voice is low but clear. “I’d know him anywhere,” he says.

To die like this isn’t a plot.

All of a sudden, she craves escape—not from this house, not from the attic, but from the here and now. She wants transport: to an alternate dimension where death isn’t a tragedy but a puzzle; where lives are as disposable as yesterday’s crossword; where people die for money or lust or revenge, never for reasons unknown.

Her fingers scurry along the top of the Christies, each touch releasing a memory, like sweeping her hand over piano keys: a cruise ship on the Nile; a crowded train compartment in the dead of night; a hand carefully pasting strips of text to a poison-pen note; seven diners at a restaurant table.

Too many rooms, too many stairs. The kind of place where, at any moment, someone very dangerous could be standing right behind you.

The outburst has calmed her, or (maybe) it was the embrace.

“What it must be like, to feel there’s no hope. No possibility.”

“So—back up: why would anyone want to . . . what, murder her?” Like it’s a dirty word. Nicky supposes it is. “I sound as though I’m stressing every syllable in that sentence. Why? Anyone? Her?” “You stressed murder, too.” “Murder is inherently stressful.”

Minutes later, beneath a frail lattice of cable-car wires, they park and cross into the gauntlet of Castro Street. Rainbow flags swell like sails from telephone poles; clothing boutiques and laser-treatment centers shoulder the upper stories of Golden Age townhomes. Light blanches their bay windows, dazzles the glass doors of delis and pet shops. The lone bank in sight, clad in drab brick, looks like the chaperone at a party.

They pass the regal Castro Theatre (on the marquee: BOHEMIAN RHAPSODY SING-ALONG! and a German war drama called Phoenix, presumably not a sing-along) and a cannabis dispensary and a pizzeria.

“A Manhattan you shake to foxtrot time, a Bronx to two-step time, and a dry martini you always shake to waltz time.”

“J’ai descendu dans mon jardin.” I went down to my garden.

It’s a comfort, knowing that Diana has an afterlife in her hardware, a ghost in the machine.

“Have you always been in love with him?” Nicky knows instantly that nobody has ever asked her this. Simone turns her head, almost in wonder, like a lonely spirit whom suddenly someone can see.

I read Sherlock Holmes, too. I wanted to see what he saw in them. I remember only the man who fell in love with a woman on an ocean voyage years earlier, the man who said to Sherlock, ‘When we parted she was a free woman, but I was not a free man.’”