The Ending Writes Itself

The Thriller Writers

THE BOAT SKIPS LIKE A STONE ACROSS the choppy water.

Sienna leans her elbows on the rail, squinting into the distance.

She’s of the mind that no trip should ever require three forms of transportation, and yet, here they are, on the far side of a red-eye flight (plus a layover), a three-hour drive, and thirty minutes at sea, and thanks to the fog, the end isn’t even in sight.

The boat hits a swell, and somewhere behind her Malcolm groans and heaves his guts over the side. It is a wretched sound, as if with enough force he might successfully turn himself inside out.

Sienna lifts her chin, lets the damp air mist her tired face.

She hasn’t been on a speedboat since Spring Break her junior year. She vividly remembers standing at the bow, her arms aloft, reenacting her favorite part of Titanic with her college boyfriend, Brody, which was great until he went and ruined it by sticking his hand down her pants.

No chance of that happening today, thank goodness. Malcolm’s hands are otherwise occupied, clutching the railing as he loses what’s left of his breakfast.

To be fair to Malcolm—not that Sienna has any great desire to be fair to Malcolm right now—the North Sea is a lot rougher than the Gulf of Mexico.

She’s been in Scotland for approximately four hours, and so far her first impressions amount to gray, windy, and the kind of cold that paws at her clothes with about as much tact as Brody, all those years ago.

Malcolm, however, stepped off the plane, breathed in, and proceeded to let out a strange kind of roar, before bounding down the stairs and kissing the asphalt. Just like the pope.

“The boat skips like a stone across the choppy water.”

Sienna repeats the words to herself, pleased with the turn of phrase. Description has always been her forte. That, and plot. And pacing. Which begs the question, of course, of what Malcolm contributes. A quippy line of dialogue here and there, perhaps. The occasional twist. But she knows.

Of course she knows.

If she’s the mind behind Penn Stonely, he’s the face.

Not that Sienna has ever been considered unattractive—but Malcolm’s photo was always the one at the back of their books, satisfying the public’s expectation of a crime writer. Equal parts gravitas, mystery, and charm.

He’s always had a power over people—including her.

She used to shiver when he so much as looked at her with those dark eyes tucked beneath his brow.

His voice, like rucked velvet, accent smooth until it snagged on the corner of a word and the Scottish brogue peeked out.

A brogue that had grown thicker over the course of the three-hour car ride north, as Malcolm crooned about being back where his bones belonged. In the old country.

As if he missed it every day.

As if he hadn’t sworn off his entire homeland fifteen years ago, after the Edinburgh Incident.

Ever since they’d met, Sienna had been trying to convince Malcolm to swallow his pride and take her to Scotland, to no avail, and yet a single email from Arthur Fletch, and here they are.

The past apparently forgotten at the first sight of heather and gorse, Malcolm waxing poetic over the hills and the glens and every sighting of a Highland coo.

The cows, with their majestic horns and shaggy reddish-brown fur, were in fact disarmingly cute, but Sienna resisted the urge to snap a photo. He didn’t need any more encouragement.

“Skelbrae, ahead!” the captain barks, his voice at once low and wind-whipped, less a caw than a hiss, like cold water over hot coals.

Another good line.

Sienna tugs out her phone, swipes open the notes app to write it down (her notebook is somewhere in her bag, but that’s fine, she keeps a running file, capturing little snippets, turns of phrase to use in future scenes—though she always lets Malcolm think the lines come off the cuff), just as the weak sun chooses that exact moment to break through the clouds, illuminating the island up ahead.

A jagged chunk of moss-lined rock surging out of the white-capped water. At first glance it looks like a sinking ship, one side jutting up into a cliff, the other sloping down into the sea.

A dark stone house—no, house isn’t the right word, more a fortress, a manse, a miniature castle—perches precariously at the top, so near the cliff’s edge, it looks like a strong wind would topple the whole thing into the churning water.

“Is that not the most beautiful sight you’ve ever seen?”

The stench of vomit wafts toward her with her husband. Sienna grimaces.

“It’s certainly dramatic,” she says. “But who would want to live there?”

The answer, of course, is Arthur Fletch.

Arthur Fletch, who went and bought not just the house but the entire island on which it sits, christening it the House That Petrarch Built after his most famous series and proving once again that few things are as bottomless as the male ego.

Especially considering the house itself has clearly been here for centuries.

Malcolm wraps an arm around her shoulders.

“Oh come on, admit it,” he says, flashing her a cheeky smirk. “You’re a wee bit excited.”

Sienna is feeling many things right now, but excitement isn’t at the top of the list.

She’s tired from the flight, and the car, and the boat, and the fact that she didn’t sleep for two nights before they left.

She’s nervous about this whole weekend, though she’d never admit it to Malcolm.

She’s worried about her dog—Edgar has really always been hers, not theirs, even if Malcolm insisted on naming him—a geriatric Chihuahua who’s been at death’s door no less than four times in the last year and will probably will give up the mortal coil out of spite while she’s away.

And somewhere beneath those three pervasive feelings, as well as hunger, and thirst, and a nausea that clearly pales compared to Malcolm’s, sure, she’s just a little excited.

“Sisi,” he murmurs, that pet name she’s always hated. “We are on the same page, aren’t we?”

Sienna turns in his arms and looks up, studying her husband of thirteen years.

The way his gray hair curls across his temples, in desperate need of a cut.

He refuses, insisting it makes him look ten years younger like this.

And the infuriating thing is that he’s right.

No one ever seems to notice the wrinkles around his eyes, the slight sag under his chin.

They don’t even seem to care that his teeth are crooked and several shades off white.

He’s a notorious flirt, always has been.

Sienna has watched women, and even a few men, proposition him at writing conventions and conferences—when she’s standing right next to him.

His co-author. His wife. She never minded much—in truth, at times, she even took some pleasure in it, knowing that for all that flirting, he was hers.

When she doesn’t answer the question, his voice goes gravel-low. “You promised me.”

Which is true. She did promise. Or at least, she agreed.

And she’s already beginning to regret it.

“Mm-hm,” she says, forcing herself to smile, a thin, tight-lipped thing, as she runs down one of her many mental lists, this one titled Ways to Dispose of a Body.

It soothes her more than meditation ever could.

And as the boat slices toward the island, and Malcolm squeezes her close and begins to hum a Scottish tune, Sienna wonders, not for the first time, whether she’s capable of murder.

* * *

SIENNA TURNS HER BACK ON HIM.

Annoyance flickers through Malcolm—she knows how much he hates that—but then she points to a figure on the cliff.

“Is that him?”

Malcolm squints, trying to make out the shape. He knows he needs glasses, now that fifty’s in the rearview mirror, but it seems like such an acquiescence, a surrendering to age, and he’s not about to go gently into that good night. To trade words like handsome for distinguished.

He can make out the man’s long coat, the wide-brimmed red hat on his head, one hand raised to keep it from being torn away by the wind.

Hard to tell for sure at this distance, but who else would it be?

“Yep,” he says, “that’ll be Arty.”

Malcolm waves up at the figure as the captain guides the speedboat toward the jetty, but the man on the cliff doesn’t wave back; he simply turns and trudges back in the direction of the house.

“Hmm, must not have seen us.” As Malcolm’s hand falls, he feels a fresh swell of nerves, rising like bile, an anxiety that’s been slowly mounting since they took off from JFK.

He’s vaguely terrified of being back. Not that he’d tell Sienna.

As the familiar greens and grays of the Scottish countryside slid by the car window, and Sisi oohed and ahhed over the long-haired coos, he kept replaying the incident that had precipitated his departure all those years before.

One that had started with a bottle of Macallan smuggled into the author yurt at the Edinburgh International Book Festival, and somehow progressed to trading drunken insults with a Booker Prize winner, swinging a punch at said Booker Prize winner, then being manhandled out of the tent by a poet laureate before being permanently and unceremoniously banned from the festival. For life.

It had been a mortifying end to a terrible week—a poorly attended talk, a derisive comment about the state of Scottish fiction, his pride grievously wounded and his reputation in tatters.

But it’s time to put the whole affair to rest.

To move on. To move forward.

And he can’t think of a better way to close that old chapter, and start this new one, than in the company of Arthur Fletch.

A man famous for several things.

The first, of course, is his books, a mix of thriller and crime with his signature twists.

But the second, at least in bookish circles, is his salons.

Not for their frequency—he sometimes goes months, or years, between—but for the list of names that have come out of them.