Then he swallows and says, “I have an idea.”
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 phrasedead 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 thehusband, on thelanding, with thetypewriter. 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: anaccident.
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, buthehad 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 ofhimas Penn Stonely, because it was his face on the back jacket. But what she conveniently managed to forget was that putting it there had beenheridea.
She knew as well as he did that male authors were taken more seriously by reviewers—it was simply a fact; hencePennStonely 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 ithisfault, then, that people came up tohiminstead ofthemat conferences? That they askedhim, instead ofthem, to sign their books? It wasn’t as if he didn’t correct them, almost every time.
And yet he’d lethervoice shine through, on each and every page. Deferred toheron matters of pacing and plot, lethertake the creative lead, and she’d turned around and accused him of resting on his laurels while she worked, of taking her for granted!
