Wit's End Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Part One

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Part Two

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Part Three

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Acknowledgements

  ALSO BY KAREN JOY FOWLER

  The Jane Austen Book Club

  Sister Noon

  Black Glass: Short Fictions

  The Sweetheart Season

  Sarah Canary

  Artificial Things: Stories

  A Marian Wood Book

  Published by G. P. Putnam’s Sons

  Publishers Since 1838

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3,

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  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Copyright © 2008 by Karen Joy Fowler

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in

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  Purchase only authorized editions. Published simultaneously in Canada

  ISBN : 978-1-1012-1389-6

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers and Internet addresses at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

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  To Mike Burke:

  mathematician, cook, teacher, backpacker, brother

  It seems only fair that I live with the people I’ve killed.

  —A. B. Early, interview with Ms. Magazine, June 1983

  Part One

  Chapter One

  (1)

  Miss Time was seated with her feet on the floor and her head on the table. Her neck and back were stiff, but stiffness was her natural condition; perhaps nothing should be made of this. The kitchen curtains were pulled. There were two glasses on the counter. One was empty, the other half so. A wine bottle (red) was beside the glasses; the cork was in the sink.

  A tiny clutch purse had fallen to the floor beside Miss Time’s leg. Among the contents spilling out were a lipstick, keys, and a pair of reading glasses. Someone had written something on the tablecloth, using a faint red ink, or maybe the wine. It might have been a phone number back from the days when phone numbers began with an exchange. A D and an A were clearly legible. Davenport 7, 3, and then maybe a 5 or maybe a 2. Those numbers had spread and the rest were fat and indistinct.

  The purse was the size of an aspirin, the lipstick slightly larger than a grain of rice, the kitchen floor about as big as a sheet of typing paper. Poor murdered Miss Time was only three inches tall. And the whole tableau was on the bedside table under the reading light, where Rima would see it first thing every morning and last thing every night.

  “I’ll have Tilda move that tomorrow,” Addison told her. “I guess you don’t need it in your bedroom. I’m so used to it I don’t even stop and think anymore how it looks to someone else.”

  Rima already knew about the dollhouses. Of course she did; they were as famous as Addison was. This was the way Addison outlined her mysteries, spending the first few months of each book making a meticulous replica of the murder scene, right down to its tiny clues and tiny gore. “If I can just get the murder scene right,” she told Ms. Magazine (“A. B. Early Thinks Small,” an interview Rima kept for many years in her sock drawer and reread often), “well, then the book practically writes itself.”

  The interview was accompanied by a picture of Addison making minute adjustments to a pin-size bread knife. She’d aged since then, though not much. In her middle sixties now, she was too thin, but she’d always been too thin, all bone and sharp angles, as if she’d been made from coat hangers. Deep-set eyes and Eleanor Roosevelt’s teeth.

  “I got my first dollhouse when I was four,” she’d said, first in an interview with Ellery Queen, October 1985, and then in many interviews after. “And a few years later a little man and woman to live in it. Mr. and Mrs. Brown.

  “I hated the Browns the second I laid eyes on them. I loved the little furniture. The little people made my skin crawl.

  “I didn’t want anyone to live in it. I wanted it to be my house. Or maybe fairies, you know, that you wouldn’t ever see, but you’d pour milk into the thimble-teacups and when you came back later the milk would be gone.

  “So I rigged a noose from a rubber band and hanged Mr. Brown from the banister. Mother always said that was her first clue about me. He had a name, she always said, as if it wouldn’t have been shocking at all if only I hadn’t known his name.

  “But there was something so creepy about little Mr. Brown. He wore a hat you couldn’t take off.”

  All A. B. Early’s books begin with a death. This one starts here, with Miss Time’s plastic head on the table in the kitchen on the nightstand in the guest room of the old Victorian house on the cliff over Twin Lakes State Beach in Santa Cruz, California.

  The house was called Wit’s End. It was a bed-and-breakfast (though with a different name) when Addison bought it, and before that it had been the final home of some woman who’d survived the Donner Party. Rima heard her father say that once to her mother, she was five at the time, and for months she’d anguished over this deadly party the Donners had given. Was it the punch? She became frightened of birthdays, a fear that had never completely gone away.

  Rima slept at Wit’s End before she saw it. She’d arrived late, even later if you were on Ohio time, and Addison had taken one look and brought her straight up to the guest room—her room now, Addison said, for as long
as she liked, Rima was her goddaughter, after all. Which was kind of Addison, because even though Rima was her goddaughter, they didn’t know each other well and might not like each other. Rima would have said the odds of that were high. She felt that Addison was trying to make her welcome, and that the operative word there was “trying.”

  The guest room was on the third floor. It was a beautiful room with ivory walls, dove-colored wainscoting, dark sloping ceilings, a fireplace, a private bath, quilts that smelled like cedar, and candles that smelled like apples. In the bed-and-breakfast days, people paid two hundred fifty dollars a night to sleep in this room. There was no corpse on the nightstand then.

  Rima had only two suitcases to unpack, but she was tired enough to leave them till morning. Even so, it took her a long time to fall asleep, and maybe this was because of Miss Time.

  But maybe it was Berkeley and Stanford, Addison’s matched set of long-haired miniature dachshunds. “They don’t know you yet,” Addison said. “You should probably hook the door.” So the dogs spent the night in the hallway, egging each other on, clicking back and forth on the wood with their claws, and occasionally hurling their little bodies against the guest-room door to see if the hook still held.

  Or maybe it was the invocation of Rima’s father. “You know I was very fond of your father,” Addison had said, which Rima did know, because her father had always said so, though her mother used to say that Addison had a mighty funny way of showing it.

  Rima had heard once, or maybe read, that when someone important to you dies, they come back in a dream to say good-bye. She was still waiting for the dream about her mother, and her mother had been dead almost fifteen years. (Aneurysm.) Her little brother, Oliver, had died four years ago. (Car crash.) Probably her father (leukemia) was caught in the queue.

  The stairs creaked. The window blinds rattled whenever the heat came on. Rima could hear the clock on the landing at the hour and the half-hour, and the tick, tick, tick of the dogs’ nails. The pillow was too fat unless she slept on her side, and she had a pinch in her neck from the ghastly plane seat, a clamp in her chest from everything else. There was another incessant sound, a sort of sobbing heartbeat.

  After several hours of not sleeping she got up, went to the window, and opened the blinds. As soon as she saw the ocean, she realized it was the ocean she’d been hearing. It was a cloudless, moon-soaked night. There were lights in the distance—a single green one on the top of a very small lighthouse, a white cluster at the yacht harbor, and farther off, a line of lights where the wharf was. To the right of the wharf, less lit, more ghostly, she could just make out the high curves of a roller coaster, a second roller coaster, a Ferris wheel, brightly colored, but all distant and small, like something for Miss Time.

  Rima recognized these things though she’d never seen them before; she had stepped into one of Addison’s books. And even as she looked right at them—the yachts, the wharf, the boardwalk—they remained make-believe, the night too bright, the ocean too black, the lighthouse too small.

  In fact, wasn’t everything too small? A mocked-up, scaled-down representation of the real thing? Rima made a little mental list:the tiny lighthouse the tiny boardwalk, no bigger than the pane of glass in the window

  Addison’s tiny dogs and their tiny teeth

  Addison’s tiny dollhouses and their tiny deaths

  And Rima was fine with that, relieved—in fact, eager to be little herself, to do and have and feel little things. A little room of her own. A little job for Addison. Someone else’s little life that she could just slide inside until all her emotions had shrunk enough to be manageable.

  The night Rima arrived at Wit’s End she was twenty-nine years old. The list of things she’d lost over those years was long and deep. Her father used to say that when they decided to get rid of Jimmy Hoffa they should just have handed him to her. Among the missing: countless watches, rings, sunglasses, socks, and pens. The keys to the house, the post office box, the car. The car. A book report on Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone plus the library’s copy of the book plus her library card. Her mother’s dangly turquoise earrings, the phone number of a guy she met playing pool and really, really did want to see again. One passport, one winter coat, four cell phones. One long-term boyfriend. One basically functional family.

  The boyfriend left when a lump in Rima’s breast turned out to be benign. “I just can’t go through this,” he said, and when she repeated that there was nothing to go through, that she didn’t have cancer or anything else, he said, “But when I thought you might, I saw that I just couldn’t go through it.”

  “You’ll always have me,” Oliver used to say whenever a boyfriend went missing, but this time he wasn’t there to say it. Rima still had her father then, but they both knew about the leukemia and no one was making any promises no one would have believed even if they had.

  Rima pulled the quilt from the bed, wrapped herself in it, and sat in a chair at the window. A bright road of moonlight lay on the water. She imagined herself walking it, the warp and dazzle beneath her shoes. She began to dream. It wasn’t a big dream, not like her father’s last good-bye, but Maxwell Lane was in it and she’d never dreamt of him before. She supposed it made sense that he’d show up here; she supposed, in fact, it’s just what you’d expect. Rima remembered that Addison had once called this The House That Maxwell Bought, before she learned that the original name, the name the Donner Party survivor had used, was Wit’s End.

  In Rima’s dream, Maxwell Lane was walking beside her into Ice City. He put his arm around her shoulder. “Don’t be so hard on yourself,” he said. “Everyone misplaces stuff,” which, of all the things someone could say to you, in or out of a dream, has got to be one of the nicest.

  In Ice City, Maxwell Lane is Rima’s father’s archnemesis.

  (2)

  There is no Ice City. There is no Maxwell Lane. It was one of the peculiarities of Addison’s profession that she, though quite famous in her own right, was considerably less famous than the detective she’d made up. She’d never been in a movie, for one thing, and he’d been in eight, plus three television series, none of which lasted more than a season, but still, there’d been three of them. And a television season was a lot longer back in those days; it lasted most of the year.

  Rima had her own colorful history with fictional characters. Her father had been more fictional than you might guess. A character in Addison’s seventh book was named after him—Edward Charles Wilson Lanisell—though the name he went by was Bim; even on Rima’s birth certificate he was listed as Bim Lanisell. Addison had used every one of these names, and one of her father’s verbal tics as well—a habit he had of starting a conversation with “Okay, then.” There could be no mistake about Addison’s intentions.

  Addison and Rima’s father were old pals, unless they were something more. Rima’s father was a writer too; for many years, he wrote a newspaper column that appeared in the Cleveland Plain Dealer. Once, when their finances had taken a tumble, he went on local TV, shilling for a tire company in a silly voice and a silly tie. He was famous enough. But nowhere near as famous as the made-up man of the same name who killed his wife with her own cat and almost got away with it.

  In Rima’s case, the character came first and she later. Rima was named after the heroine of Green Mansions, and she’d liked her name until some kids at school figured out that you could do dirty things with it if you worked phonetically. Her brother Oliver, who heard some of them, said she should have a name all of her own anyway, and offered her four choices he’d made simply by rearranging the letters she already had. She could be Irma, he said, or Mari or Mira or Rami, and he took it in turns to call her all four, each for a week, so she could test them out. Rima liked Rami best, but she couldn’t get people to switch over. Oliver liked Irma—the Irm part made him laugh—and he called her Irma until the day he died, though no one else did, which was so Oliver, that intimacy of a private name. Of all the people who’d died, Oliver was the
one she missed the most.

  The Green Mansions Rima was the last survivor of a doomed people, a fact that, in retrospect, her parents might have paid more attention to.

  Even Oliver was an orphan’s name.

  (3)

  But the names were only the beginning, and arguably the least of it. Sometime when Rima wasn’t watching, sometime after her mother died and she was kept busy being both motherless and adolescent, Rima’s father’s writing changed. Bim Lanisell had been a political journalist. When he became a columnist, his work turned personal. He was struggling to learn how to be a father and a mother both, he wrote, and he was sharing his struggle with the entire population of Cleveland, Ohio. And its environs. A few international subscribers.

  Rima found this out one day after he’d been actively soliciting confidences. She remembered it later with outrage, how she’d offered up her biggest secret so that he could feel like a good parent. She’d told him about a boy she liked in her world history class; she told him that this boy didn’t know she was alive. She asked her father how to get a boy to notice her, even though she knew this wasn’t a problem he could help with. It was all about him, this generous pretending that it was all about her.

  The whole conversation was the topic of his next column, a musing on how you didn’t really grow up until you watched your children grow up. He stopped short of discussing the boy, but not his daughter’s—he actually used these words—budding sexuality. The next day when Rima went to school, there was no one there who didn’t know she was alive.

  Rima was particularly incensed at how well her father had come off in his own column. Not stammering and useless, the way he had actually been, but awash in midwestern profundities. Every woman in Cleveland was in love with him—the number of women who wished to date him was directly inverse to the number of boys who wished to date Rima, if negative numbers could be applied, and Rima felt they could. And he wasn’t even completely real. (But when has that ever stopped a woman in love?)