End of Story

by A.J. Finn

“We weren’t each other’s first choices. But that’s why we fit: we were both resigned to it. Neither one of us really wanted lives beyond those we had already led. We were each other’s afterlives.”

Nicky hovers in the doorway like an angel of death unsure whether she’s arrived late or early.

“‘A mother’s love for her child is like nothing else in the world,’” he says. “‘It knows no law, no pity, it dares all things and crushes down remorselessly all that stands in its path.’” His hands shift in hers. “So sayeth Agatha Christie. And a woman as ferocious as that would make a wonderful mother.”

“I wouldn’t be afraid. The truth is the best defense.”

“Change of scene. Gotta write.” Nicky clears her throat. “Also: I know your dad asked me to stick around, but—I think I ought to go. I do. Like I said out there, you’re grieving, and . . .” Her voice cracks in her throat like a pane of ice. Madeleine watches in horror. Her arms rebel, floating up for a hug, before she folds them firmly across her chest.

“And maybe the past is a better place for him. Even if it’s gone.” “Or it’s waiting.”

“‘The past isn’t gone. It’s just waiting.’”

“Well, I spied on you a little. Corner of my eye. If I turned in the wrong direction, I could see you pull up short. People spot trouble, they tend to apply the brakes. Tend to give themselves away.”

B.B. looks like a child who has just pushed a button and wants to see what happens.

“So what we do, me and Detective Martinez, is we stare at our theories, our if-this-then-thats. Stare real close, through magnifying glasses and monocles and such, until all the information, all the noise, all the details . . . You can sense it sharpening. Like a kaleidoscope.”

Wait and hope, as Sebastian had told Nicky. As Dumas had told Sebastian.

Up the hill, she sees the tail of Lombard Street—famed as the crookedest street in the world, although not actually the crookedest street in the world—slithering down the slope, pushing like a garter snake through the greenery.

The house is see-through at both ends; the air is chilled. An ice-cube home. Nicky slips into her coat again. “People tend to be more truthful in a cooler climate,” the woman explains. “It also discourages aggression. Come!”

“Sebastian Trapp is playing a game with you. Daring you to catch him. I know a thing or two about the human mind.” The woman pours. “Ask yourself: Why am I here, in this house, writing this story? Can’t he write his own story? Ask yourself. Out loud.”

The scream is like a smoke alarm.

She tries “grant jones” “lyme regis.” The Internet merely shrugs.

Nicky feels as though somebody has kicked her in the stomach but she hasn’t yet registered the pain.

“Our story. A person isn’t a slipknot—you can’t just tug a string and untangle him. His story is inextricably bound up with the stories of others.”

“You haven’t lived?” “Not as I would have liked. Not as anyone would have liked. It hurts to live, Nicky.”

you’re only as happy as your least happy child.

“Ye olde ghosts-of-long-ago. An instance in the present echoes an instance in the past. You certainly can’t write a traditional mystery without it. But, my dear child,” he says, his voice warm yet ominous, like winds whispering about a storm, “you’re not in a traditional mystery. You’re in a psychological thriller.”

“We’re all in that story. Life is a thriller. The ending is fatal and the conclusion is final.”

“Conversations are only dangerous if you have something to hide.”

“Some stories, they just end without you finding out what happened. You know?” “I know,” says Nicky. “I don’t like those stories.”

“Die? Oh, no,” he exclaimed—“Not die now, after having lived and suffered so long and so much!” The Count of Monte Cristo

She belongs to this world now more than theirs, she realizes, and the thought frightens her.

Morning has clarified the room. Through the windows, the Golden Gate gleams as though freshly rinsed, a few pennants of fog flowing from its towers.

But now, up close—how tired he appears, like a creased sheet of paper that’s been smoothed out again.

Perhaps time isn’t the best killer. Perhaps grief is.

“I suppose that if I’m grieving, then I must have loved whatever I lost, however I lost it. I suppose—it’s like a scar reminding me of some adventure I had. Or like the end credits of a wonderful film. So . . . no, I’m not comfortable with it, but I’m grateful for it.”

“Grief might feel like fear, but it also feels like memory, and with memory, there’s no—a story doesn’t end.”

“All stories end,” he says. Then he leans forward, rests his hand atop a short stack of pages.

“Excuse me. It’s been an eventful spell for me. I daresay it’s been an eventful spell for you. Christ,” he winces, “‘daresay.’ Write historical novels long enough and I daresay you, too, will croak speaking like that.”

“Have you figured out yet what’s going on?” asks Sebastian. “Have you seen through the plot?” “No.” “But you must know by now, my dear girl. We’re practically at the end of the book.”

“Well, it wasn’t that I’d tired of him. I simply couldn’t spend more time in the company of someone who unfailingly found answers to each and every problem he faced. Because I couldn’t solve my mystery. And I couldn’t watch Simon slip into a new disguise and solve his.”

Not much to read. Just some ideas firing in my expiring brain. A few flames gasping their last after you switch off the gas ring.

“‘It’s human nature . . . ,’” she recites slowly. “‘. . . to hate him whom you have hurt.’”

“I should’ve wrapped this up in a ribbon a long time ago,”

She tours Instagram galleries, braves the back rooms of Twitter, sifts through Facebook. It’s like looking through the windows at a party she wasn’t invited to and doesn’t want to attend.

He doesn’t look like much beneath the duvet: just a long craggy ridge of white, a distant mountain range in winter, and his face tipped toward her.

Just the house cracking its knuckles as it gets ready to sleep.

It’s as obvious as handprints on a window, as phosphorus on glass.

What game is afoot?

Not long ago, I told you (twice!) that we might solve an old mystery (or two!). But I concede that detective work is easier on the page. No dead ends, no superfluous characters, everything wrapped up in a ribbon.

“You can find the good in me,” he says. “And I hope you won’t have to dig too deep.”

But as they coast through the deep dark woods, trees on either side of the road linking hands overhead, silver fog like netting between their trunks, sand traps and Spanish tile and graveyards seem the stuff of another place, another age.

Mist slinks through the low beams like gray foxes.

the vault of the Golden Gate soars overhead, the bridge above trimmed with lamps and the towers waist-deep in fog.

“Vertigo was filmed over there, you know.” He knows she knows. “The girl jumps, tries to drown herself. That Hitchcock blonde—what was her name?” “Kim Novak.” “No, the character.” She knows he knows. “Madeleine.”

“‘The French have a phrase for it,’” says Sebastian. “‘The bastards have a phrase for everything, and they’re always right.’”