Wit's End Page 10

  Unlike most second children, Oliver was a games enthusiast. He played nonstop, even through dinner, until he fell down the stairs on his way to bed and Rima’s mother said that was that and took the mirror away. Rima thought he might have fallen on purpose. Oliver was also a Band-Aid enthusiast.

  Later that same night he came into Rima’s room. He was supposed to be asleep, but sleep had always held little charm for Oliver. “How would you know,” he asked Rima, “if someone who looked just like me took my place?” Rima couldn’t tell whether he was agitated or merely philosophical.

  “I would know you,” she said. She too was supposed to be asleep, but was reading in the time-honored flashlight-under-the-blanket fashion. The heroine had just been locked in her room by her evil governess. This was no time to be talking to Oliver.

  Oliver lifted the corner of the blanket and, with his feet still on the floor, slid his face into her little lighted tent. “How? If I looked just the same?”

  “I would smell you.” As a child Oliver had smelled like oatmeal. Rima made sure her tone suggested something far less pleasant. She returned the flashlight to her book.

  Oliver leaned on his elbows. He rocked slightly. The mattress creaked. “Go back to bed,” Rima told him. He stretched his hand out, covered the flashlight bulb so his hand turned that neon red. He wiggled his fingers, and shadows rippled across the words in Rima’s book. “Stop it,” she said.

  Oliver grabbed the hand with the flashlight in it, directed the beam into his own face so he was all lit up, a moon Oliver. “Hey,” he said. “Pay attention.” Like all second children, he was hypersensitive to those moments when no attention was being paid. “Listen. Which me would ask you that? The one before or after I switched?”

  (2)

  Jeopardy! April 5, 1990. “Books and Authors” for a thousand.

  Answer: The only A. B. Early mystery with a dollhouse in it.

  Correct question: What is Ice City?

  (3)

  Like Upside-down Town, Ice City is an imaginary place. Even in the fictional context of Ice City the book, Ice City is not real. Ice City is a made-up bar where made-up drinks are served to made-up people. Maxwell Lane is always one of those people. The others are whomever Maxwell wants them to be—people from his past, the famous, the infamous, the real, the fictional, the living, the dead. In every book, even those published before Ice City, Maxwell Lane spends some time in his imaginary bar with his imaginary friends. It’s the closest we get to inside his head, although never presented as such.

  Ice City is a state of mind, a psychological destination. Maxwell Lane goes there when he wants to drink more, feel less. He can’t go to a real bar. Like most fictional detectives, Maxwell Lane has both a problem with alcohol and a problem with facing the world sober. Ice City the bar is the feeling-no-pain stage of drunkenness, but you have to get there without drinking, which is why it’s imaginary.

  Ice City the book is about betrayal, the unforeseen consequences of careless actions, the advisability of keeping secrets. These same things can be said about all A. B. Early books. But in no other does Maxwell Lane have such an intimate relationship with the murderer. In no other is the betrayal of one by the other so nearly equal. Maxwell goes to Ice City in every book, but Ice City is the only book that ends in Ice City.

  “How do you deal with the things you’ve seen?” Rima once heard a friend of her father’s ask him when he’d just returned from South Africa.

  “I go to Ice City,” he’d said.

  So one of the many things Rima didn’t know about her father and Addison was whether she’d gotten the idea of Ice City from him or it was the other way around.

  Nor did she know how to get there.

  Chapter Eleven

  (1)

  Everything will be better now that the Democrats have the power of the subpoena, Addison had said, and sure enough, such was the magic of the Democratic Party armed to the teeth with the law that the very next time Rima put her hand into the box of Maxwell’s letters and rummaged around, she found, crumpled against the side, the page-one onionskin she’d been looking for. She put it together with the page two she’d already read. This, then, was the whole letter:21200 Old Santa Cruz Hwy

  Holy City, California 95026

  April 20, 1983

  Dear Maxwell Lane:

  Have recently finished your Ice City. Read it two times.

  Often reread books, but not so quickly. Appreciated the thought you gave to the whistling man’s murder. As you know, I’ve gone back and forth myself ever since I first wrote you about poor old Bogan all those years ago. You’ll remember the police ruled it a suicide. They call that a cold case if I’m not mistaken.

  Anyway, there our agreement ends. Now, don’t take me wrong. Have the utmost respect for you and your work. But something has been nagging at me. Sat at my dining room table, the book in front of me, and made a character list, a map, and a timeline. None of them disproved your case, but none of them proved it either.

  The book starts with a series of “pranks”—the sawed suitcase handle, the missing hat, the fishing lure in the onion dip. Submit that some people plain crave excitement. They make a big mess and don’t care who gets dirty and the only reason is they’re bored. Is there someone like this in your book? The answer is obvious and it’s not our boy Bim.

  Poison, I hear, is a woman’s weapon. So sayeth every man. Submit that it’s even more female to paint your poison like fingernail polish on the claws of a cat. If your target was the cat’s owner, this strikes me as a heck of a chancy way to go about things. Occam’s razor. What if all you wanted was to kill the cat? One more “prank” in the set.

  At the very least, you overlooked someone else with motive and opportunity. So here it is—I just don’t believe Bim Lanisell would kill anyone. He always seemed like a pretty straight-up Joe to me. Think you got it wrong this time.

  Bet if you put poison on a cat’s claws for real, the cat would lick it right off, no matter how bad it tastes. Cats are very aware of their bodies. I know whereof I speak. I have twenty-two of them.

  Of course, all this assumes Ice City is a mystery novel. Can we be sure of that? Not clear from the cover. In a horror novel the cat could have acted alone. There is a larger world than you allow, Mr. Lane, and the truth you end up with often depends on where you are when you start. I knew your father about as well as anyone knew him. Not highly thought of today, but that much he had right.

  VTY,

  Constance Wellington

  PS. Joking about the cat, of course.

  Rima read this letter over twice. Then she pulled her copy of Ice City from the nightstand drawer and thumbed through it until she found its first reference to the whistling man.

  Ice City,

  Maxwell Lane arrived on a typical summer day, which means it started hot and got hotter. I’d spent that morning picking up rotted apples. The orchard swarmed with black wasps and the air smelled so much like wine I got dizzy on it. By the time I finished, the wasps were buzzing inside my head.

  Part of me was surprised not to find my father at breakfast, mopping the egg from his plate with his bread and complaining about the weak coffee. I’d never been so popular. No one would leave me alone.

  “Your father wasn’t a man who expected much from life,” Brother Isaiah started off.

  Pamela was next. “Your father told me he never felt like he belonged anywhere.”

  “Why prolong what you don’t enjoy?” asked Ernie.

  And all the while, wasps were buzzing in my head.

  When Maxwell Lane arrived, Brother Isaiah was just as angry as I expected. It was dangerous, he said, to bring a stranger into our little world, particularly during this intimate time of our mourning. He began an investigation into who’d hired Mr. Lane.

  But there are advantages to being fourteen. No one ever suspected me. A second advantage: I was too young to guess what he usually got paid.

  I’d gotten his number from t
he yellow pages at the gas station. We’d gone into town for groceries and to have the tires rotated. I stayed with the car. He answered his own phone.

  “I heard my father,” I’d told him. “Not more than five minutes before he died. He was whistling.”

  “You would know your father’s whistle.” It wasn’t a question.

  “My father was a good whistler. A fancy whistler.”

  “You told the police that.”

  “They said it happens. Sometimes someone is relieved to have finally made the decision. The big finale, they said.”

  “Is that the way your father was?” It was Mr. Lane’s first actual question. It was the first I didn’t know how to answer.

  Well? my father whispered from somewhere inside me. Finish what you start, boy. “My father was the sort who did things. He didn’t have much use for talk or plans or dreams.”

  “He doesn’t sound much like a true believer.”

  “I’m the dreamer,” I said.

  I was running out of time and I didn’t think I’d managed to interest him. Any moment now the women would come out of the store. “I know people thought my father was ridiculous,” I said. Even if I never saw Mr. Lane or spoke to him again, I didn’t want his pity. If my father killed himself, then he killed himself.

  “No man whose children love him is ridiculous,” Mr. Lane said. “I’ll be there on Friday. Don’t tell anyone I’m coming.”

  (2)

  Though Addison was guarded now about her personal life, and almost everything else too, she’d once been more forthcoming. When Ice City was first published, she’d said openly that the cult in the book (not to be confused with the cult Maxwell Lane had grown up in—two different cults) was based on a real but obscure Oroville group once run by a man known as Brother Isaiah. The Oroville group had lasted only a short while, and little information about it was available. Addison didn’t mind this. It was, she’d said, the best position a novelist could find herself in. It left her free to make stuff up.

  In Ice City, she updated the cult from the ’30s to the early ’60s, moved it from Oroville to the trailer park in Clear Lake, and enlarged its numbers. These are the things she’d kept: the name Brother Isaiah and the cult’s fundamental defining feature. Brother Isaiah had claimed to be immortal, and he’d promised his followers, each and every one of them, an endless life of their very own.

  Time is money, always will be, world without end, so you mustn’t expect that immortality will ever come cheap. Both Brother Isaiahs, the real and the fictional, got rich selling it. The Oroville group ended when, shortly after gathering and fleecing his flock, Brother Isaiah died of a massive heart attack.

  In the Ice City version, the first death belongs to the whistling man. He dies in an apparent suicide. The Ice City Brother Isaiah responds by reassuring his followers that suicide is a special case, a door left open. Immortality, he tells them, isn’t meant to eliminate freedom of choice.

  But the man’s son is not so sure his father killed himself. It is this son who brings in Maxwell Lane and sets in motion the chain that will end with two more deaths—the second belonging to Brother Isaiah himself, and the third to Bim Lanisell’s wife.

  In the real world, there was a tenuous connection between the Oroville cult and Holy City. When the Oroville cult failed, Father Riker had offered to take in the survivors. He attached a couple of conditions: There would be none of that living-forever nonsense. And they had to shave their beards, cut their hair, and generally clean themselves up. Holy City, Father Riker said, was not interested in slobs. Among his own followers, Father Riker was known as The Comforter.

  There is no record suggesting that any of the immortals accepted his offer.

  (3)

  Of course, the one night Rima came to dinner with murder on her mind, the subject was never raised. “Did you get one of the murders in Ice City from Constance Wellington?” she’d planned to ask as soon as there was an opening. “Was there a real murder?”

  Instead there was only pointless chat about Oro Blanco grape-fruits. Someone had told Tilda they were in the market now, even though she knew it was far too early for Oro Blancos, and sure enough, when she’d asked the clerk, his little eyes widened as if he’d never heard such crazy talk. “I haven’t had someone cut me dead that way,” Tilda said, “since I was on the street.” She passed Rima the salad bowl. The salad was made of figs and mint and string beans. Tilda made a clicking sound, like castanets.

  She was wearing an audible necklace. It was large as well as loud, a string of shells and acorns and feathers, the sort of necklace that Andy Goldsworthy might make. The sort of necklace, in Rima’s opinion, that could cause a clerk in a grocery store to cut you dead even if you hadn’t been overly optimistic about grapefruit. Not that Rima minded the necklace herself. No one in such a necklace could ever come up behind you unexpectedly with a platter of roast chicken or an upraised carving knife. Tilda had been belled like a cat.

  And just then Tilda asked, “Have you heard anything from Martin since the weekend?” So she’d sneaked up on Rima after all.

  Rima thought it might be hurtful, if she’d gotten e-mails and Tilda hadn’t, to say so. Then she thought it wouldn’t be truthful to not say so. So she said she’d had an e-mail, but there was a suspicious pause between the question and the answer and, in fact, she’d had two e-mails, so though it wasn’t a lie, it wasn’t as truthful as it could have been.

  It seemed she ought to go on to say what the e-mail had been about, but that was even more complicated. Would Tilda be pleased or upset to think that Martin might have come again to Wit’s End if only Rima hadn’t turned him down?

  The whole thing put Rima off balance, so she never did mention the murder. That was the thing about a cold case. There was no particular hurry.

  (4)

  After dinner, the three women and the two dogs went up to the second-floor TV room to watch Lost, which Addison had Ti-Voed. There were two dollhouses in the TV room. Average Mean—botulism in the green beans—and H2Zero—instantly recognizable for its under-the-sea death. H2Zero was one of the weaker novels, but an excellent dollhouse, a functioning saltwater aquarium with real fish and the ceramic scuba diver often seen in aquariums, only this one’s air hose had been severed. A toy octopus floated over the corpse, because Addison loved octopi. They were clever, clever creatures, she said, and because of this she never ate them.

  The whole thing was the devil to clean, of course.

  Addison’s chair reclined. Rima and Tilda shared the couch, which had padded arms on which to put your head, and scarves and throws and dachshunds for added warmth.

  Addison announced that she was having a glass of whiskey to celebrate what now looked to be the taking of the Senate. In truth, Addison had a whiskey most nights; if she wasn’t celebrating, then the Bush administration was driving her to drink. “I’m going to enjoy this moment,” she said. “Even if it proves Pyrrhic. All my life I’ve been locked in eternal struggle with the same people over the same things. Vietnam, Iraq. ‘It’s not a crime if the president does it.’ Wiretaps, voter suppression. We lefties have to enjoy the few victories we’ve had.”

  Rima’s father had said much the same thing. He’d written columns about it. Although he’d also noted the strange reconfiguration—the enemy of my enemy is my friend—that resulted in a new thaw between the old liberals and the CIA. Some things had changed and some things hadn’t. Rima started to say this, but when she turned, Addison was wiping her eyes, which could have been a simple, sleepy gesture or could have meant she was crying. Drink sometimes did that to people.

  A low-wattage lamp cast a circle of light onto the ceiling. There was the soft bubble of the aquarium, the unlikely threat of polar bears on the television. If Addison had had collies they would have been gathered anxiously around her, but she had dachshunds so they weren’t. Stanford was on Tilda’s lap. Berkeley had crawled under the couch so that only her tail showed. It twitched now and then.


  “Cheney. Rumsfeld. Abrams. Negroponte, for Christ’s sake. We seemed so young and they seemed so old when it all started,” Addison said. “How is it that we got old, but they’re still here? It’s like something out of a Greek myth.” There was nothing sad in her voice. Probably she wasn’t crying, after all.

  “It’s a Star Trek episode,” said Tilda. “I mean, I don’t know that it’s not Greek too. But definitely Star Trek. The black-white one.”

  Addison took a sip, and Rima could see her throat tighten as the whiskey went down. “It’s a zombie movie,” she said. “It’s Night of the goddamn Living Dead.”

  Rima left Addison locked in eternal struggle and went up to her bedroom, where she still didn’t have the wireless key.

  People in Cleveland claimed to miss her, but they were getting pregnant, buying rugs off the Internet, going to concerts, playing intramural sports anyway. They were coping.

  There was a third e-mail from Martin. Subject line: Ice City. There was no telling what an e-mail tagged “Ice City” might be about. Rima was surprised to find herself nervous when she opened it. And then disappointed, so very disappointed that it wiped out both the previous friendly e-mails—the invitations to haunted wineries and mysterious gravitational anomalies, even the observation that she had cat’s eyes, now seemed like groundwork for this. She went back to not liking Martin so much.

  Martin had a plan for a bar in downtown Santa Cruz, a space as close as possible to the location of Maxwell Lane’s fictional office and called, of course, Ice City. The decor would be from the books, photographs of people Maxwell had had his imaginary conversations with, or else their books and paintings and what have you. Martin hadn’t worked it all out. But buying into the reality of Maxwell Lane would be key. There would be no mention of A. B. Early anywhere, which, given how much she liked her privacy, Martin thought she would see as a plus. Martin wanted Rima to talk A. B. Early into financing this. It was important the proposal come from someone Addison liked.