***SPOILER ALERT*** Before reading any further, have you read The Cul-de-sac? If not, this blog post could ruin the ending of a thriller. If you want to avoid that, stop now and return after you know the ending.
So, the ending of The Cul-de-sac was not intended to be a cliffhanger. As I wrote the final words, I knew exactly what happened to each of the key players—except maybe for Jean Claire. But if you didn’t know for sure, that is OK also. Nothing in life comes as an absolute; everything we experience has some amount of uncertainty. And I’m comfortable with drawing my own conclusions.
But open endings appear to be out of style these days, so I will let you off the hook, at least to some degree, and tell you what I think happens after the end of the book.
This epilogue shouldn’t be considered as canon. You are still free to draw your own conclusions about anything that happens after that fade to black on the page. But if you would like to read my personal thinking about how the unlikely alliance of Peg, Alex, and Eliza finally unraveled on that fateful day, well, here goes.
Leave a comment on detailing how closely my vision matches up with yours.
This is your last chance to back out before I reveal this thriller’s twist!
***SPOILER/SPOILER/SPOILER/SPOILER/SPOILER/SPOILER/SPOILER***
Epilogue
Eisenstein
We were still strategizing the plan to pick up Peg Jurgenson the following morning when the call came in and beat us to the punch. It was the van Damal woman, in hysterics. Simmons relayed the details to the room quickly: their next-door neighbor, she said his name was Alex, was dead in his living room, and the daughter we’d interviewed, Eliza, had found the body.
I let Simmons drive and said nothing as he blew through every stop sign with utter abandon. What can I say? We were first to arrive.
When we entered the cul-de-sac, we found Judy van Damal standing outside the house, pacing. I acknowledged her quickly but pointed Simmons to the house next door, a home we’d visited previously but had never stepped inside of. Nor had we ever met the occupant. Busy man, I supposed. We pulled into the driveway and burst from the car, still running.
We followed standard procedure to clear the house, room by room, as more and more officers arrived, eventually filling the place. The house was empty, save for a single corpse: a frail, pale man compressed into the couch, surrounded by cushions and a pair of cell phones. His lips and mouth were dark blue, and his face was swollen. We’d have to wait for the medical examiner to get all the facts, but this man had clearly been asphyxiated, and it surely wasn’t self-inflicted.
“Pick up Jurgensen now,” Agent Davis said to another FBI grunt after taking a cursory look at the scene. “We should’ve done it this morning.”
I had to agree.
And yet my logical brain revolted at all of it. Peg Jurgensen. Peg. The scattered woman with the groceries and the Volvo? Killed her neighbor? It all seemed impossible.
While the feds swarmed Peg’s house, I walked the other way to the van Damal place. Judy was still outside, clearly unsure of what to do with herself. “You OK?” I asked as I approached.
She clutched her arms tightly around her chest and shook her head.
“You think I can talk to Eliza about what happened?”
Judy shrugged. “You can try,” she said. “She’s in pretty bad shape.”
The mom was right. I found the teen upstairs, in her room, lying in a bed covered in dirty clothes and tears. She was in even worse shape than her mother. “Hi Eliza, it’s Detective Eisenstein,” I said. “We met before, remember?”
Eliza didn’t respond.
“You found the body next door?”
Still nothing.
“And you knew the victim?”
Finally, she looked up, made brief eye contact, and nodded. “He was my tutor,” she said between sobs. “And he was my friend.”
“Do you know what happened to him?” I asked.
Eliza pulled it together for just a moment. “Yeah, I know,” she said, holding my eyes with hers. “Peg killed him. I know it.”
“And how do you know it?” I asked.
“Because she killed that guy Klaus, too.”
* * *
Jurgensen was nowhere to be found in the house, which I had expected. But her car was still in the garage—there would have been no way to slip it past the crew at the end of the street—and most of her belongings seemed to remain in the house.
It didn’t take long for the impromptu manhunt to track her down. She had barely made it a few miles into the open space that backed up to the cul-de-sac and hadn’t even ventured off the hiking trails. The officer who found her said she was just sitting in plain sight, her back to a tree, with her purse in her lap. The photos they took of the moment before they brought her in look almost feral; she had a glassy look in her eye that indicated something was very wrong. Something inside her was completely broken. People are going to have a field day when those pics get leaked and end up on TMZ.
Jurgensen is now sitting just a few rooms away from me in the lock-up while the powers that be figure out what to do with her. She didn’t resist when she was arrested, and she hasn’t spoken a word yet. This is new territory for me. For once, I’m happy to have the FBI here to assist, but even they look baffled by the woman. This isn’t someone who fits any profile they teach you about at Quantico.
What then will become of Peg Jurgensen? Prison? A mental hospital? The star of a Netflix documentary? All of the above?
I moved to this town because I thought it would make for an easy paycheck. No drama. Get home in time for dinner. That was the idea, anyway. Well, what do the facts have to say now?
About the Author.
Christopher Null is an award-winning writer who regularly contributes to Wired magazine and who muses daily about wine and spirits on the website Drinkhacker, where he serves as editor in chief. His first novel, Half Mast, was hailed by critics as “the best of contemporary American fiction.” He currently lives in Austin, Texas with his wife Susanne.
Oh, thank heaven for an epilogue. I’m sorry, I was very upset over the cliff hanger ending. Whew. My books, like my movies must have an ending and I truly prefer the ends tied up unless I know it’s a series. Grateful I went back and looked at the back pages or I wouldn’t have found the link. Grateful, indeed.
I am the mother of the author, Christopher Null, and was a little surprised with the cliff hanger ending. I am pretty used to “choose you own endings” in books and movies, so I chose my own ending which was very similar to my son’s epilogue. I thoroughly enjoyed the book and am obviously proud of him for his clever writing.
What ever happened to Jean Claire? Great book btw.
In my head, I worried Peg was still there when Eliza walked into the house. I even had a idea that she might have saved him.
Unlike most other folks, I didn’t think the book’s ending was a disappointing cliffhanger. I figured that Eliza would discover Alex’s body and conclude that only Peg could have killed him, because Eliza knows why. She would confess everything to the police and cast the net on Peg.
I did consider the possibility that Peg could still be in Alex’s house and kill Eliza, too. In that case, I imagined that Peg would escape somehow and become a character in Chris’s next novel.
That plot line occurred to me when I discovered near the end that Alex was a character from Chris’s first novel, “Half Mast.” Chris planted an early clue when Alex explains at the dialysis center that he suffers from heavy-metal poisoning, which was a central feature of “Half Mast.” But it’s been 23 years since I read that book, so I didn’t make the connection right away. Near the end, when Alex reveals his criminal past, I remembered “Half Mast,” found my copy (autographed by the author, thanks Chris!), and verified that Alex was a continuing character in a larger story arc. So I speculated that Peg might appear in a future Null novel. If so, I hope we don’t have to wait another 23 years.
This was such a great read! I happened upon it through the library and once I started reading, I couldn’t put it down. The voices of each character were excellent – lots of funny moments. Can’t wait to read more of his books!