Chapter Four
THE CELLAR IS A THING OF BEAUTY.
Malcolm first admired it the night before, when he came to find something to go with dinner. It’s cool but not damp, rustic but clean. Rough stone walls arch overhead, just high enough he didn’t have to duck, and old-fashioned lights hum faintly as they fill the room with an amber glow.
The walls are lined with racks of bottles, their top sides filmed with dust. Reds, whites, champagnes, rosés. And in an alcove at the end, a wall full of stronger spirits; not the usual fare, but the kind that occupies the top shelves of fancy shops.
Only the best for Arthur bloody Fletch.
Malcolm liberates a bottle of Macallan 30, still in its wooden case. It’s a sin to drink the stuff, and a crime to leave it undrunk. Given the circumstances, Malcolm chooses sin, freeing the bottle from its coffer.
He sinks into an old wooden chair a few feet from the table where Sienna has been laid.
They bundled her in the yellow tartan blanket taken from the bed he and Sienna had shared, and he and Kenzo did the carrying, while the others formed a kind of procession, making sure the doors were open and the way was clear, reminding them to duck so they didn’t hit their heads while going down the cellar steps.
More than once, Malcolm had to readjust his grip. Sienna was surprisingly heavy, and Malcolm couldn’t help but think of the phrase dead weight. How many times had she told him a killer’s method wasn’t plausible, or at least not as effortless as he’d wanted to portray it?
“Bodies are unruly things,” she’d say. “They’re harder to get rid of than you think.”
But they got her down here in the end.
At which point he told the others the truth: He wanted to be alone.
To grieve, yes, but also to drink. Claw his way back to the safety of that muffled state.
And yet he cannot help but marvel at how easily they all retreated to the safety of their rooms, to sleep or, more likely, write their bloody chapters. As if the world hadn’t fallen apart.
Amazing, how people simply carry on.
Malcolm shakes his head and lifts the bottle toward the table. “To you, Sisi,” he says, before taking a long swig. It goes down bitter, and lands sweet. The room is so quiet, he can hear himself swallow.
Malcolm, in the cellar, with the whisky, he thinks.
Like it’s all a game of Clue. Except, of course, Malcolm didn’t kill Sienna.
Not directly. It wasn’t the husband, on the landing, with the typewriter.
He might have driven Sisi to those stairs, but he didn’t push her down them.
Maybe the others were right, and nobody did.
Maybe it was the worst of all things: an accident.
Writers rarely deal in accidents. Readers don’t like them. They find them unsatisfying; they want explanations. Motives. Cause. But sometimes, in life, things just happen.
“What are we going to do?” he says, because he can’t yet bear the weight of saying “I,” the fact that she’s not there to help him anymore. He knows, of course, that there hasn’t been a “we” since well before the trip.
He knows, but he wanted her to come along because, deep down, he thought there was something to salvage.
That whatever had happened to them, it could still be fixed.
That if they had a chance to spend the weekend in this place, surrounded by all the symbols of success, it might pull them back together.
Remind Sienna why she’d fallen for him, all those years ago (Malcolm, for his part, needed no reminding).
Turn back the clock a day, a week, a year, to whenever things were good, or at least good enough.
But he was wrong.
Sienna had made that painfully clear.
There was no fixing it. The cracks had spread so deep, and this place was just the final bit of pressure.
They’d gone and shattered, like a cup against the floor.
That was one of Sienna’s favorite turns of phrase.
She has a gift. Had. Grief washes over him again.
He wants to rend his clothes, to beat his breast, but to what end? It won’t bring her back.
“What a mess,” he says, taking another swig. Their last fight, rising as the Scotch goes down.
We haven’t been a team in years. I’m done propping you up.
“Is that how you remember it?” he asks the body on the table. “After everything I did?”
He’d plucked her from the early stages and let her skip half a dozen grueling steps. She’d added a finesse, a flair, but he had the expertise, the experience, the personality, the face—the face, how she’d held that against him!
“You know, Sisi,” he muses, now that she has no choice but to listen, “you always had a way of rewriting anything you didn’t like. Revising history.”
In one of their last fights, she went off about how everyone thought of him as Penn Stonely, because it was his face on the back jacket. But what she conveniently managed to forget was that putting it there had been her idea.
She knew as well as he did that male authors were taken more seriously by reviewers—it was simply a fact; hence Penn Stonely and not something silly like Penelope.
He’d been magnanimous, offered to find them a stand-in, pay for a headshot with some stranger’s face, but she’d said why bother, when he had such a handsome one.
How was it his fault, then, that people came up to him instead of them at conferences? That they asked him, instead of them, to sign their books? It wasn’t as if he didn’t correct them, almost every time.
And yet he’d let her voice shine through, on each and every page. Deferred to her on matters of pacing and plot, let her take the creative lead, and she’d turned around and accused him of resting on his laurels while she worked, of taking her for granted!
“For granted? Really, Sisi?” The wooden chair groans as he slumps back.
Even if he had begun taking her for granted, toward the end, well, it was only because she was good. No, not just good. Better than he was. Better than he’d ever been. Would ever be.
And he was afraid that if she knew, she’d be the one to leave. And he would simply be the one who had been left. And now it doesn’t matter.
Because she’s gone.
Their star had risen, sure, but it hadn’t gone as far as he’d hoped.
And now it never would.
Malcolm sighs and shoves himself up to his feet. He shuffles up to the table, the bottle landing with a heavy thunk beside the tartan quilt. Feeling bold, he folds back one corner of the blanket, forces himself to look.
“Oh, Sisi,” he murmurs.
It isn’t so bad, from this angle. Her hair has tumbled across her face in a way that hides the worst of it. He brushes his knuckles against her cheek. Her skin is cooling, waxy to the touch.
He takes another swig—it really is good Scotch, and he’s reaching that perfect state, where he feels liquid, a melting-butter kind of warmth—but even though the face is tipped away, her disapproving look is burned into his mind.
“I know, I know,” he mutters. “But it won’t save you, and right now, it might save me.” He lowers the bottle. It’s not a half-bad line. It tickles something in his head, the pleasant flutter of a promising idea. Not for Fletch’s book, no, but something else, something new.
Malcolm begins to pace as he says the words again.
“ ‘It won’t save you, but it might save me.’ There’s something there.
” He raps his knuckles on the table. “A once-hardened detective, softened by the love of a good woman. Maybe he’s even out of the game.
He’s happy. He’s sober. He’s left that world behind. ”
He pauses, waiting for Sienna to reply before remembering she can’t. The whiplash of it stings, but he presses on.
“Then someone from his past shows up, and kills his wife.”
He can practically hear Sienna’s sigh. She’d tried to convince him, more than once, that axing a loved one for the plot was called fridging, and it was to be avoided, but in Malcolm’s opinion, that was just good old-fashioned storytelling.
“Now,” he continues, because Sienna can no longer interrupt, “he swore he wouldn’t go back to that life, but he can’t rest until he figures out which of the criminals he put away has done this to him. Her death is the start of his new story. The catalyst. That could work, right?”
No answer, of course, but that’s okay, he just needs to talk it out.
“We’ll call him Hardwick. Leo Hardwick. And he’s standing over her, just like this”—He positions himself flush with the table—“full of helplessness, and rage, and Scotch, when he swears he’ll find the killer.
He thinks he’ll be able to rest once he does, put that life to bed for good, but we know better.
Because this is what he’s made for. What he loves. ”
His heart is pounding now with the promise of it.
Malcolm looks around the cellar for a scrap of paper, a pencil, some way to capture the idea before it escapes. But his own pockets are empty, and the cellar isn’t much help either. He scours the floor and comes up dry.
His gaze drags toward Sienna, still dressed, in yesterday’s clothes, a rumpled sweater and jeans. She never goes anywhere without a notebook and pen. He can’t see either on her now, but he can’t imagine she’ll mind if he checks.
The drink has steeled his nerves, but he still tries not to think of words like rigor mortis as he pats her down, lets out a small “Aha!” when he frees a pen from her back pocket. And then, miracle, a piece of folded white paper in a front one.
He jots down the bones of the idea, hoping that when the whisky wears off, it doesn’t lose its shine. (More than once he’s scribbled something down mid-drink, convinced it was the Next Great Work, only to look at it with sober eyes and find only half-formed nonsense. But this, this is good.)
It’s only when he runs out of space and turns the paper over that his world comes slamming to a stop.
There are two words in the center of the blank page, one misaligned letter at the start.
GET OUT.
Malcolm’s heart begins to race. The bottle sloshes, the whisky somehow half gone, but his mind is stunningly clear. Life and art, in perfect parallel. Proof that Sienna’s death was no misfortune. She was murdered by someone in this house.
“I knew it,” he growls.
He knew it couldn’t be an accident. Not with so much at stake.
And Malcolm, loving husband that he is, will not rest until he finds out who did this to his wife.
“Don’t worry, Sisi,” he mutters, gripping the table till his knuckles hurt. “I’ll find them.”
He shoves the paper in his pocket and marches up the stairs.
Hardwick’s case will have to wait.
Right now, Malcolm has to solve his own.