Chapter Eleven
MALCOLM WATCHES KENZO GO, TAKING THE LAST lead with him. Only it’s not the last one, is it? He sags back in Fletch’s chair, scrapes a hand over his face.
A good detective has to examine every angle. Even when it’s hard to look at.
Malcolm didn’t kill his wife.
He’s sure of that.
And yet. In stories like this, it’s almost always the spouse, isn’t it?
But he would never. Never.
Can’t even fathom it.
But. He racks his brain, trying to account for every moment of last night, and he can’t.
There is a window—there are several windows, if he’s being honest with himself—during which the view gets hazy.
He always enjoyed a tipple, and had always been able to hold his drink, but then again, he hadn’t drunk that much in years.
Not since the Edinburgh Incident, the memory of that shot through with holes as well.
But last night, he was just so angry. She made him so angry. Knew exactly which buttons to push to get a rise, and he didn’t want to lose his temper, not with the editor around.
Still, he’s never laid a hand on her.
Never would.
How dare Kenzo even suggest such a thing? The idea’s enough to turn his stomach, make his anger flare again. He reaches for the whisky bottle on the desk and then stops, disgusted with himself.
Here it is, the source of all his troubles.
If he hadn’t been drinking, if they hadn’t fought, if Sienna hadn’t left the room, then she would still be here. He wouldn’t be alone.
Malcolm lobs the bottle across the room, hoping it will shatter when it hits the wooden floor, burst into a thousand shards of sharpened light. Instead, it thuds, and skids limply to a stop against the rug, as if to say, See? You can’t even break something right.
Malcolm shoves up to his feet and abandons the makeshift interrogation room, legs dragging, leaden, beneath him.
He’s no Leo Hardwick.
And no closer to finding his wife’s killer.
He crosses the foyer, starts up the stairs, and is on the landing before he registers that he’s walking right over the spot Sienna lay.
The landing of course is empty now, marked only by a dark stain on the runner, and maybe Priscilla was right, and he should have gone to the cottage, but he’s already come this far, and fears that if he stops, he might not have the energy to start again, so he keeps going, up, up, up, retracing the steps he took in the wee hours of that morning, until he’s at the bedroom door.
The room has taken on a different air, a shrine-like atmosphere. The window shut, the last dregs of Sienna’s scent still hanging on the air. He holds his breath, as if afraid to disturb it.
Someone has returned the typewriter to its place on the desk, even taken care to clean the blood off the keys, which he should take issue with—it is, after all, the murder weapon—but a quiet worry is burrowing into the back of his head. A troubling what-if.
What if Priscilla’s right, and it really was an accident?
What if the truth is, Sisi simply fell?
He sinks onto the bed, touching the indent of her body before flopping down on top of it.
What would Leo Hardwick do, in this position?
What would he do, if he based his whole identity on finding his wife’s murderer, only to learn it was nothing but cruel fate?
No criminal to catch and punish. Only the universe to blame.
Would he feel like his purpose had been taken?
Or would he simply feel as if he’d been cut free?
Malcolm would never admit it, of course, but he does feel a little lighter.
The last few weeks have been so miserable.
A silent war, a systematic destruction of everything they’d built.
All because Sienna declared she was no longer satisfied.
That she wanted more. It was her own unhappiness that made her decide to leave.
Her own unhappiness that made her drive a spike into their lives, cleaving them apart.
Her own unhappiness that drove her from Penn Stonely, and from Malcolm, and—if indeed there was no killer—her own unhappiness that made her heft that typewriter from the desk and lay claim to it?
Malcolm cannot help but wonder: Did she pause with it, over his sleeping form? Contemplate, even for a moment, bringing the weight down upon his head? Or had she simply taken it from him and fled, only to lose her balance on the stairs?
Felled by her own ambition.
A grim smile plays across his tired lips.
In that case, it is a rather twisted kind of karma.
Leaving Malcolm, alive but alone, to carry on without her.
A tragedy, to be sure, but then, tragedy is the font from which great stories flow.
He chuckles softly—perhaps he’s not so bad at coming up with metaphors, after all. He simply has to be inspired.
And he is—truth be told, he’s felt more creative stirrings in the last four hours than the last four years. He could write the Leo Hardwick series and finish Fletch’s work.
He rolls onto his side, studying the desk—and sees something he missed before.
The typewriter isn’t sitting flush atop the wood. It’s propped up on something. A shallow stack of pale-yellow pages . . . and something else. Something blue.
Malcolm sits up—too fast, the room spotting black and white for just a moment. He waits for the world to steady before he stands and shuffles to the desk, sliding the object free.
It’s Sienna’s notebook.
Do you think it was because of her idea?
His heart begins to pound, and he clutches the notebook to his chest, as the knowledge of what he’s holding washes over him.
Her sudden spark of inspiration.
Priscilla handing her a pen.
Her brilliant ending. The one she couldn’t wait to write.
Without him.
“Ironic, isn’t it, dear Sisi?” he murmurs, thoughts racing now.
It would be a crime to let good work go to waste.
If anything, he tells himself, she’d probably want him to go on, to finish what they started.
Malcolm snorts, if only to himself. The truth is, Sienna was petty enough that she’d probably set fire to the notebook just to spite him.
But she’s not here to do it. She left him, tragically, to carry on.
And he intends to do just that.
Sienna may be dead, and Penn Stonely with her, but Malcolm Buchanan could have a second shot. A phoenix, rising from the ashes. What a story it would make, the pain behind the prose.
He’ll dedicate the book to her, of course.
To my late wife, he’ll write, with me still, in every word I write.
He can see the articles, already being written. From grief comes greatness.
No one needs to know divorce was ever on the table. The papers hadn’t been drawn up. And as long as none of this lot spill the beans—but that’s right, the NDAs they signed will cover it.
He can make the best of this bad situation.
But first, he has to win.
Malcolm flips through the pages, eyes struggling to focus. Reluctantly, he puts on the reading glasses Sienna made him get, but it doesn’t help him decipher her cramped and slanted script.
A door slams somewhere in the house, and he jumps and drops the book as if burned, nerves jangling.
Not that he’s doing anything untoward—after all, what’s hers is his, he thinks, as he fetches it back up.
But he doesn’t open it again. Not here. The room’s too still.
He needs to clear his head. Maybe take a nap?
No, he can’t imagine sleeping now. There will be plenty of time for that when this is done.
Right now, he’ll settle for a cup of strong black tea and a dose of fresh air.
Nothing like a crisp Scottish breeze to clear the head, blow away the dregs of whisky. He’ll be sober as a saint in no time.
He tucks the blue notebook under his sweater and sets off, jogging down the stairs and stepping neatly around the dark spot on the landing.
No sign of the others, but that’s well and good; he needs to focus on the task at hand. He brews a cup of tea and steps outside, fills his lungs as he crunches over the gravel toward the bench that looks out at the cliff and the sea.
The weather’s changing, a storm front moving in. Dark clouds hang over the mainland in the distance. The wind has a cold edge, and Malcolm wishes he’d brought a coat, but no bother—if anything, the chill will clear his head.
He takes a long sip of tea and looks out at the water, frothing whitecaps over gray waves. The wind tousles his hair. This would be the perfect spot, he thinks, for a new author photo. He’ll need one, after all. Not for the back of Fletch’s last book, of course, but for the ones he’ll write after.
He takes a long, steadying breath and sinks onto the bench, confident no one will bother him here. If anyone looks out and sees him sitting by the cliff, they’ll think he’s simply mourning, lost in contemplation.
And in a way, he is—contemplating. Deciphering his late wife’s final words, even if they weren’t to him.
Malcolm takes a last glance around, then slips the blue notebook from beneath his sweater and cracks it open, thumbing until he sees yesterday’s date scratched in a corner. He spreads the book out on his knees and starts to read.
Or rather, he tries. But he can’t seem to make sense of the scribbles, and after a moment of furious squinting, he understands: It’s not his tired eyes that are the problem.
It’s Sienna’s shorthand.
A mixture of atrocious penmanship and some private system of demarcation.
Malcolm feels his temper rising in frustration, heat breaking out across his skin.
How many times has he asked her to write more clearly? How many times did she insist that this was the only way for her pen to keep pace with her thoughts? He’s long suspected she carried on to spite him.
He holds the book inches from his face, desperate to decode the chicken scratch that passes for her writing.
He makes out a jagged F that might be the start of Fletch. Or Fire. Or Flying? And a P in front of a scribble that he’s guessing is Petrarch. But it could also be Pacing. Or Plot.
There’s also a horizontal line, branching in two, the markings at the end of each prong about as legible as someone testing their pen to see if it’s run out of ink. And is that an asterisk or an A, or is it short for something else?
He can hear Sienna laughing at him now, cackling harshly. When he looks up, it seems to be coming from a nearby crow, but it has the exact same tenor of disdain. He picks up a rock and hurls it at the bird. And misses.
He looks back to the book. There has to be something.
Some words (he thinks they’re words, but they’re really just letters followed by wiggly lines) have boxes around them, and some have circles.
There are arrows every which way, some solid, some dotted, and halfway down the page there’s a single illegible sentence, important enough that she’s underlined it twice.
But no matter how hard Malcolm stares, he can’t make out more than the number 2 and a symbol that might mean “U-turn.”
He holds it to the sun, as if that will somehow illuminate the message.
The longer he looks at the marks, the less resemblance they have to words at all.
He turns the page, desperate for something, anything, but it’s more of the same nonsense, and Malcolm feels a roar rising in his throat as he grips the blue notebook in one hand and begins to tear the useless pages out.
“You fucking bitch,” he growls, as the sheets of paper come free. He flings them from him in disgust, letting the air scatter them along the narrow strip between the bench and the cliff.
He drops the notebook to the ground between his feet before collapsing forward, his head in his hands.
She’s gone. She’s gone and left him nothing. Nothing he can use. The bloody book stares up at him, and he’s about to kick the thing away when the breeze flutters the blank pages at the end, and he sees it, scribbled on the inside cover, heavily slanted, but undeniably legible.
A key.
A key to all the little shorthand symbols, the meanings behind the letters and the scribbles, and only then does he remember the last time they fought about her penmanship, and she told him, didn’t she, that it was right there.
Malcolm looks up as the pages he’s torn out flutter away toward the cliff, caught up in that crisp Scottish breeze.
“No, no, no!” he stammers, scrambling after them.
He catches two, stumbles before snatching up the third, but the wind steals the fourth out from under his fingers, whipping it toward the edge of the cliff.
He lunges, shoes skimming the loose pebbles at the land’s brittle edge, and manages to catch the corner of the paper before the breeze can drag it out of reach.
Malcolm lets out a triumphant roar, hands shaking as he looks down at the paper he’s just caught, the one with the diagram. And maybe it’s the surge of panic that’s cleared his head, sobered him right up, but suddenly, even without the key, he sees the shape of it.
Laid out on the page.
The ending that lit up Sienna’s eyes last night, and now he knows why, because by god, it’s good. Genius, even. Unexpected and yet inevitable, somehow. Like all the best endings.
And it’s his.
Malcolm clutches the papers to his chest, and laughs, and cries, because he’s going to win. He’s finally going to—
“DON’T!” screams a nearby voice.
Malcolm’s head whips toward the sound, and as it does, his left foot shifts back ever so slightly, and the ground beneath it crumbles.
His arms windmill, and the pages fly up into the air as he clings to balance, and he might have gone right over the edge if not for the wind, gusting like a pair of hands against his back.
He regains his footing and sees Jaxon, of all people, running toward him, hands outstretched, as if Malcolm means to jump, which is absurd, and he’s about to tell him so when the cliff’s edge gives way beneath him.
And he falls.
He falls, cold air rushing past him, and it’s true what they say, time really does slow down.
The heartbeats stretch, and he sees the crow, now wheeling overhead, and in the churning sky beyond, he sees his life, not the mistakes or the missed opportunities, no, he sees his life rolling forward, sees himself sitting at a dark wood desk, his characters immortalized in glass behind his head, and the shelves full of books with his name printed on the spine, like a chanting crowd, and Malcolm smiles, right before he—