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 tohim.
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, hetries. 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 jaggedFthat might be the start of Fletch. Or Fire. Or Flying? And aPin 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, itseemsto 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.
