I clutched the air in front of me, hoping to grab Harriet. My eyes were getting used to the wind, and her blur had started to take shape. She looked like she’d turned around. In fact, I could see her well enough to watch as she raised the broken bottle and brought it down firmly into my shoulder.
The bleeding was immediate, and serious. It felt like a bucket of water had been tossed over my back. I tried to grab her but realized I couldn’t move my right arm. I felt my skin pucker as she pulled the bottle out. Saw her clamber away. So much for a big fight scene. I was getting light-headed. All I could do was lie flat and hope the wind didn’t blow me off the train before we came to a stop.
I felt a hand on my shoulder, then hot breath on my ear. Jasper, leaning close.
“Use my name,” he said. “My real name.”
Then he was moving ahead of me. He widened his arms as he approached Harriet, and she dropped the bottle. I couldn’t tell what he was saying to her. She wiped her face with the back of her hand. And then Jasper made his move.
He hugged her.
It was a tight embrace, tight enough that their hearts would beat against each other’s chests. Like a soldier home from war. Harriet nuzzled her face into Jasper’s shoulder. Maybe, for a second, they forgot everything around them: the wind, the blood, the death, the pain. They just held each other.
Then Jasper rolled them both over the side.
From: ECunninghamWrites221@gmail.com
To: <REDACTED>@penguinrandomhouse.com.au
Subject: Epilogue
Hi <REDACTED>,
The epilogue is proving tricky, mainly because it hasn’t happened yet.
I’m supposed to catch you up on the bits after the climax, and that’s easy enough. There are not all that many opal mines left to fill in. Royce has been arrested for covering up the rape. Douglas Parsons, to my understanding, has been fined for illegal possession of a firearm. Lisa Fulton sidestepped criminal charges for grand theft auto, but Hatch grumbled that she owed him a new Land Cruiser. Given Brooke is now officially the McTavish estate (courtesy of DNA results), I’m sure he’s hoping for the newest model. And Jasper and Harriet, well, they’re just a red smear on the side of the Ghan. You’ll have seen that photo in the papers.
Majors’s plagiarism accusations are now much more public, so she’ll get the lawsuit she wanted. I can’t prove this, but I have a feeling she was going to shred whatever confidentiality agreement she’d signed at the same time as Lisa. Besides, you can’t defame the dead, so she could accuse McTavish of whatever she wanted now. I also suspect she knew a little more than she was letting on about everything. Why else would she invite McTavish, Royce and Lisa all together on the same trip? Perhaps she and Lisa had planned it together: a chance to expose McTavish once and for all for both of his crimes. Of the other guests, we were truly just barnacles: Wolfgang was invited, as she’d told me, for the grant funding pedigree, and me, well, now I know I wasn’t invited at all. Majors had a spare slot and wanted Juliette to give her a blurb.
I know you think I’m being harsh on Simone. I don’t care about the one-star review, really I don’t. But if she’d told me about the ghostwriter earlier, instead of hoping I’d solve some riddle so the book would be more complex, Wyatt and Jasper would still be alive. Probably Harriet too. And maybe Harriet should have lived to face just punishment. Though it’s far from the worst lie told on that train, it’s opened up a strange chasm between Simone and me, so I feel it’s best we end our professional relationship.
But the actual ending, therein lies the problem.
One of the fallacies of most books written in first person is the perception that everything is happening in real time. That’s why readers are able to indulge suspense when, say, a character scrambles across the roof of a train—it’s a tacit agreement that they won’t acknowledge the author, sitting in a hotel room in a sling, bashing away at the keys. But underneath it, we always know. It’s why readers anticipate that I survive this book the whole way through.
We’re about as close to real time as we can get, seeing as they won’t let me out of the hotel. I don’t know how long it will take to verify the facts in the case, but I do know that Hatch isn’t a detective worthy of writing books about. By this I mean he may well be precise, methodical and competent, but he doesn’t really have a grasp on pace, does he? Plus the drugs they’ve given me for my shoulder (which I still can’t move, by the way—should I be worried?) make my fingers fly. That’s how I’ve been able to get the story down so quickly.
Another upside is that I’ve had plenty of time to google things. Did you know Mathison is Alan Turing’s middle name? You know, the bloke who made the Enigma machine to do the Nazi code-cracking—he’s considered the father of machine learning. Or, as we now know it, AI. Ha. Classic Wolfgang.
And as to your complaints: yes, I did say seven writers would board the train. But McTavish hadn’t really been a writer for a long time, had he? Plus Juliette and Jasper, it all adds up. I said five would leave the train alive at the end of the line too. Again, without counting McTavish as a writer: Jasper dies in the fall—yes, I saw him go under the wheels (ick, that’s dead body number ten for me)—and Juliette departs halfway. Leave it in as a clue for the mathematicians, I reckon?
As for Aaron and Cynthia, no dark pasts to report there. But I can’t omit them from the book entirely. Someone has to work on the train, right? I can’t just ignore that they were there. If a reader wishes to consider them a red herring purely based on the fact that they exist and haven’t done anything to contribute to the plot, that’s on them for reading too many books with unfair twists. I said at the start it wasn’t a butler-dunnit.
Another thing I said was that in books like these, two cases always spin together. Andy’s business is, apparently, booming with calls after his poppy thief turned out to be a multiple murderer. I let him have his narrative. I even told him he can do all the media—and the festivals—this time.
So, back to the epilogue. I know you want the big-ticket item: the reunion between me and Juliette. The embrace and the tears and the one knee down (note to self: do Pilates). Obviously Juliette and I have talked, and I’ve apologized. But there’s only so much you can do on FaceTime. She should get here soon. It was hell getting out of the holding cell at Alice Springs, for starters, and then there were no flights because of the bushfires and the cops and the media. Now she’s got a rental car, but it’s like a fifteen-hour drive and it’s safer with a couple of stops.
I did joke that maybe she should catch the train. That was not well received.
My point is that the big reunion hasn’t happened yet. I know you’d love a bit of romance to cap off the book, but all I can tell you is what happened: which is, at the moment, nothing. An improvement on the last proposal, granted, but that’s not saying much.
Of course, I know how I’ll apologize. Writing it all out has made me think about that a lot. When I started, I thought this story was about legacies. That’s why writers write things down, after all. From Royce’s vanity, to Majors’s truth, to Wolfgang’s principles, to Lisa’s rage, to my memories. It’s to leave something behind. I thought that’s what a legacy was: putting your name on something.
But legacy isn’t a stamp left by the people with ink. It’s not about leaving your fingerprints, it’s about having fingerprints left on you. In the case of books, the legacy isn’t created by writing it, it’s created by the people who pick it up, who expand and enrich and enlighten your words with how they reinterpret, remember and relive them. It’s passion, it’s tears. It’s internet forums, it’s MongrelWrangler22. It’s Juliette secretly giving her invitation to me instead. Jasper Murdoch knew that his name was the least important thing about his work, and now I know that too. A book isn’t a book until it’s read.