End of Story

by A.J. Finn

“‘To say goodbye is to die a little.’”

The Legion of Honor scrolls by, a stiff stone forest of columns and arches.

The cliff is an arrowhead, the tip aimed northwest; and at its center churns a whirlpool of small rocks, each the size of a human heart, shaped into alleys and switchbacks and dead ends. The hidden labyrinth, swirling on a secret ledge thrust into the sea.

The past is a strange place. My past, anyway. What about yours? But the past is gone. Oh, no. And his smile was so sad she could have cried. The past isn’t gone. It’s just waiting.

ALMOST SUNRISE. For some time they’ve sat in silence before the labyrinth. Sebastian, barefoot, gazes calmly at the ocean; Madeleine watches the bridge, strewn with tiny rhinestone headlights.

“One evening years ago—very chilly April—I drove to Lands End. With G. K. Chesterton on the brain. ‘What we all dread most is a maze with no center.’”

“Perhaps I thought it might help to see a maze with a center. A destination, even. Because I could wander into dead ends only so many times.”

Suddenly the bay booms, like a creature rousing itself at last, yawning and flexing and storming out of bed. Madeleine darts her eyes beyond the rim of the maze, over the edge of the cliff, to the knuckles of black rock in the bay, bulging from the deep, seething with sea foam.

The sky is rinsed soft blue and pale rose.

And so we crossed the labyrinth, circle by circle, until finally we met in the center and sank to our knees. She spread her coat over the ground, and there we lay for a while, and then I fell asleep. When I woke up, the skies had cleared and she was watching the stars.

“Not such a bad thing to be afraid, Maddy. Not such a bad thing to live with fear.”

“Dad, men look at me like I’m a suspicious suitcase.” “Men.” He snorts. “Men are where evolution backed itself into a corner.”

The sun remains hidden behind the Berkeley hills; still Madeleine imagines light flooding westward toward the bay, rushing past Treasure Island, pouring through the barred windows of Alcatraz, and at last leaping from wave to wave beneath the bridge and across the Golden Gate strait, gilt whitecaps and dazzled water in its wake.

“The sun will rise tomorrow. It is a very persistent star. I’d like to sit here awhile.”

The shot is so violent that the echo sounds like falling debris.

But Nicky continues to walk along the far rim of the maze, cool yet alert, like a hunter.

“‘I think you know. Nemesis is long delayed sometimes, but she comes in the end.’”

This is how she feels approaching the last chapters of a mystery—the curtain, the final problem, the end of the story: her blood hums, her eyes gleam; the heat in her stomach, the thumping in her head . . . the detective-fever is peaking.

Those inky sleuths presenting their solutions to vast casts of suspects in train cars and hotel suites, fanning out their clues like playing cards—were their nerves in flames, too? Sebastian watches her. You’re in a psychological thriller . . . Where the clues almost ineluctably lead you someplace you don’t want to go. No. She wants to go there. Solve the final problem, bring down the curtain. End the story.

“You know this?” “I’m sure of it.” “That’s not the same thing, sir.” “As the eldest and best-dressed person here, I say otherwise.”

Her nerves spark like nicked wires.

“Sam Turner saw me for who I was and who I had always been. He heard me, too, like someone fluent in a language nobody besides us understood.”

Vintage mysteries were my training wheels—short books, fun stories, easy language.

Kept inhaling detective stories, because they comforted me, and because they engaged my busy brain. And because”—I shrug—“it’s in my blood.”

“I lived,” I say. “Even if this cliff disintegrates, even if you shoot me, I lived. I lived as myself.”

In the wind, in the cold, on a cliff, by the sea, I’m struggling to remember my lines. Those last words surprise me; only a fictional detective would say that. Except I’m not a fictional detective. This isn’t a setting but a location. These people aren’t characters. My pumping heart is real. My sister’s tears are real. My father’s gun is real.

“I was the Count of Monte Cristo, back from the dead and armed with a plan, my eyes a little clearer and my heart a little colder.”

“And I—my heart . . .” My throat closes for a moment, and so do my eyes; when I open them, I’m gazing at the sky, soft blue and pale rose. They’re the loveliest colors I’ve ever seen. So much for my cold heart.

“The past isn’t gone, you said; it’s just waiting.”

“When you strip and skin someone until they feel like nothing—what you told them all along they already were: nothing—you shouldn’t be surprised to find that at last you’ve whittled them down to a fine point. You’ve made a weapon of them. You’ve made them dangerous. And once you rip everything away, they need nothing except air to breathe and your heart to run through. So well done: you’ve sculpted your very own nemesis, you’ve armed her, you’ve instilled her with one purpose and one alone. And here I am.”

“And so it began, as you said. I sensed us wrapping our fingers around the rope, felt a twitch upon the thread. You were searching for something—you had stepped out of the past in order to find it—” “The truth.”

“motive is where the mystery lies.”

When I look at him, I feel my mouth shape the word, although I don’t hear it. “Why?

“Just a couple of little bee-stings to agitate you, then. I hadn’t foreseen that you would sting back, and sting deeper.

Later, she wouldn’t remember how she was feeling, what she was thinking, as she drove; she simply imagined herself from on high once more, as though a silent helicopter crew in the battered night sky of a new century were tracking her flight.

She watched it speed south along the Pacific Coast Highway, famous and fatal.

She heard the waves detonating far below.

Saw herself as a cinematographer would, as though this were just a scene from a nightmare film.

She was looking straight ahead—not at an audience, not at an imaginary lens; she was looking at the dark mutinous Pacific waves. The same waves she could no longer hear. Silence.

But soon her hand clenched, and the chain dripped from her fist like water.

“I once researched tidal patterns for a story Dad wrote. I knew that a body in the bay might wash up, but a body in the water further south . . .”

“I suppose it helped me learn to live with fear.”

She could’ve remained silent, she knows; but, oh, she felt so very tired of silence.

Wouldn’t it haunt you? Taking a life,

Cherchez la—well, we all know it by now, don’t we? I write precisely this sort of story, I could make the proper deductions. The solution composed itself.

“I saw a bird die in flight once. On safari. A kingfisher. Pure blue feathers, bright orange breast. I was tracking it through my binoculars when it just dropped from the Congo clouds. As though some electric current had failed. Stopped my heart to behold it.”

And how absurd it suddenly seemed—not that a person could end somebody else, but that he might ever believe that that death wouldn’t end him, as well.

Somewhere a gull cries in mourning. Soon the sea will catch fire.

“The alternative to accident was suicide.”

Today’s sunrise, beyond the hills, has tinted the water a rough blue, colored the stones at our feet white and rust-red.