CHAPTER
1
IF ONE OF Errol Roy’s fans had passed him on the street, they wouldn’t have known who he was. With the wispy white hair that covered most of his head and nearly reached his shoulders, and his long cottony beard tinged with yellow, he was more likely to be mistaken for Santa Claus than for himself. Nobody knew what Errol Roy looked like, but his books were recognized around the world.
On this day in mid-March, the author stood at the bay window of his San Francisco apartment.
“It’s been a long road, Dash,” Errol said aloud to his cat, who was stretched across the windowsill. Dash swatted his tail in response.
Errol was thinking about his personal favorite of his own books. He doubted any of his readers could correctly guess which it was out of the twenty-some mysteries he’d written. It was arguably the most obscure: A Body in the Alley. A horrible title. Maybe that was why it hadn’t sold well.
In A Body in the Alley, Mickey Jones is a crook who continuously finds himself in the wrong place at the wrong time but finally pulls off the bank heist of his dreams. At the book’s close, he sails into the sunset while the detective on his trail watches him get away. The book ends with this line:
The boat disappeared over the horizon, rings spreading behind like a peacock fanning its tail.
Errol Roy had written millions of sentences in his lifetime, but that was one he had never forgotten. It wasn’t so much the writing he was fond of, but the image it painted and the feeling of freedom it gave him. It was an ending Errol had always wanted to try, but it turned out critics and readers didn’t like it when their detective hero lost.
Dash sat up and stretched out a paw to tap his owner, as though encouraging Errol to look up. The view below was of a hillside gouged from its quarry days, now covered in vines and shrubs. The scene straight ahead could be a San Francisco postcard.
On a crisp, clear day you could see all the way from the Golden Gate Bridge to the tiny stump of Gull Island, which had been on the news because two kids and their teacher had found buried treasure there. And if the bay was a stage, then front and center was Alcatraz.
Errol Roy rested his eyes on the famous former prison, which had had a reputation for being inescapable. Now Alcatraz was a popular tourist destination, attracting travelers from around the world, and soon it would be the setting of the latest cockamamie game creation by Garrison Griswold, the city’s beloved book publisher and game enthusiast.
Errol sighed.
Last fall, his most recent mystery had been published to great fanfare, not that he had participated in any of it. He never did. That decision had started out as a spontaneous choice made decades ago, which grew into his reputation. His “branding,” as the publishing industry termed it today. The most popular mysteries in America, written by a man who was himself a mystery. Once, he had stood in line at the grocery store behind a woman who had piled produce, a plastic tray of muffins, and his latest paperback onto the conveyor belt. She and the cashier had had a lively discussion about his books, never realizing the author stood right beside them.
Errol had planned for his most recent book to be the final of his career, but when Garrison Griswold announced this new game, he knew it was time to tell the last story he had in him. There would be considerable risk, but it rankled him to leave loose ends dangling.
He was a novelist, after all.
“It’s time, Dash,” he said, and turned from the view.
The cat meowed, as though hoping his owner meant it was time for dinner, and dropped to the floor with a gentle thud. When the man crossed the room to his computer desk instead of the kitchen, Dash meowed again. His tail quirked into a question mark.
Errol lowered himself into his chair and opened his laptop. He bent over his keyboard and began to type.
Text copyright © 2018 by Jennifer Chambliss Bertman
Illustrations copyright © 2018 by Sarah Watts