Wit's End Page 5

  Rima rose, intending to go up to her room, check the pockets of her jacket and pants, see if she could produce the actual tickets. But Tilda seized her arm as she passed, swung her to face the corner.

  Tilda’s finger pointed into the tiny glassed-in atrium of the Spook Juice dollhouse. The murder weapon, the Brut Impérial Champagne bottle, lay under the ferns, cork intact, everything just as it should be. But the tuxedoed corpse was gone.

  Chapter Five

  (1)

  The missing corpse had a name. He was, he had been, Thomas Grand, undercover agent specializing in domestic terrorism, back before Waco, before Oklahoma City, before the Unabomber, back when middle-class white people hardly knew there was such a thing. Tilda and Addison discussed the advisability of calling the police.

  Tilda was against it. There’d been two murders of homeless people during the time she’d been on the street, and the police hadn’t solved either of them. All they’d done, as far as she could see, was make comments about the homeless, comments she could describe only as gratuitous. Tilda had no faith in the police.

  Rima considered telling Tilda that only sixty percent of all reported murders are ever resolved (as distinct from solved, so Rima wasn’t even sure what the statistic meant), but since she didn’t know how she knew that and maybe it wasn’t even true, she kept her mouth shut. Was sixty percent a lot or way too little? It apparently beat the success rate in other cases—rapes, muggings, thefts—all hollow.

  Addison was also against making the call. This seemed to her the sort of story that would immediately make it into the paper and onto the Internet, where it would live forever. And not on some little site no one ever visited either; Addison could picture this in the day’s AOL headlines. If they were willing to post “Airline apologizes to passenger. He couldn’t hold it any longer,” then obviously there was nothing too low. Addison had lived much of her adult life faintly convinced that a large segment of the reading public and the entire news industry would be really happy if she died in some bizarre and puzzling way. She said that she’d put a watch on eBay, and proposed that they all start locking the doors even when someone was home.

  They were interrupted by Kenny Sullivan, postman of myth and legend. Addison stepped out onto the walkway to tell him all about it, and Rima heard him promising to spread the word to the neighbors, with utmost discretion, of course. Possibly someone else had seen something.

  Then the women sat together, eating the sausages, drinking the tea, and listening to the radio. Addison and Tilda assured Rima many times that none of it was her fault. They repeated this once too often; it lost its credibility.

  Rima was amazed. A crime had been committed in the home of a world-famous mystery writer, and as far as she could see, nothing was going to be done to solve it. It occurred to her that she herself was the most likely suspect. A troubled young woman, new to the household, with an unlikely story, and offering only the vaguest description of the perpetrator.

  “The best way to clear yourself,” said Maxwell Lane, “is to find the one who’s guilty,” and if Rima were a world-famous mystery writer, then surely she would know how to go about doing that. If she were Addison, she would at the very least search Rima’s room. Really, the only thing that could be said in Rima’s favor was that she was too obvious.

  (2)

  Even minus Thomas Grand, Wit’s End had no shortage of tiny corpses. Over the next few days Rima found: The Box-Top Murders, poison in the breakfast cereal; One of Us, rattler in the medicine chest; and The Widow Reed, weed whacker in the hedges. The Widow Reed was a particularly grisly dollhouse, bits of tiny gore on the leaves in the garden and on the flagstones of the walkway. Rima was ashamed to remember that this had been one of her favorites among Addison’s books; she hadn’t pictured the body quite so chewed. Addison had the Widow Reed dollhouse in the formal dining room.

  What Rima didn’t find: the dollhouse for Ice City; the tickets she’d been given for the leashless dogs; the first page of the onionskin letter.

  She had managed to find another onionskin letter that appeared to be from the same woman:

  21200 Old Santa Cruz Hwy

  Holy City, California 95026

  May 4, 1983

  Dear Maxwell Lane:

  Expect you got my letter of April 20th even though you didn’t respond. I meant no insult, hope none was taken. Expect you are just real busy with your crime solving. Me, I feed the cats (did I mention I have twenty-two of them?), let the ones outside in, put the ones inside out, repeat, repeat, repeat until the sun goes down. Drop by anytime, is what I tell people. Here I’ll be.

  Looked at the book again, by the way, since I wrote. It just doesn’t seem like your others. Not in a bad way, but it unsettles me. Like maybe my copy is missing a chapter.

  Of course, I’m no detective. Probably you got it right, after all. You read people real well, and no one’s ever accused me of the same. Would I be here if I did? I’ve always liked you, but you probably aren’t impressed by that. You’ve always been too hard on yourself. You couldn’t have known what would happen.

  I might write you again. Don’t worry about answering. You’re probably real busy.

  VTY,

  Constance Wellington

  And a postcard, handwritten and signed with the same name in the same hand. The script was New Palmer. Rima had no idea how she knew that. The postmark was July 6, 1976: Regarding my letter of July 2, you know how cats sometimes engage in heroic battles with imaginary enemies? Am persuaded I’ve done the same. Please disregard.

  The picture was of a musical group identified in a cursive made of ropes and lassos as the Watsonville Cowboy Wranglers.

  As for the Ice City dollhouse, there was still the whole second floor in which to look, and Addison’s studio. But Rima decided to shortcut the process and asked Tilda outright if she knew where it was. “I can’t ever keep straight which one goes with which book,” Tilda told her. “They’re all just dust to me.”

  “There would probably be a cat,” Rima said, which didn’t help; Tilda claimed there were lots with cats, even though Rima had yet to find a single one. Tilda didn’t appear to like the dollhouses or want to talk about them, so Rima didn’t press her.

  She wouldn’t have asked Addison, though she couldn’t have said why. Rima had expected that she and Addison would talk about Rima’s father. It had seemed inevitable, in light of his recent death, that Addison would reminisce. Rima had steeled herself for this. Now that it wasn’t happening, she longed for it. When she ate with Addison, there were lots of silences between them. They might have been awkward silences, or they might have been companionable. How did you tell the difference?

  Addison’s main mode of conversation was to tell stories. She was, as you would expect, quite good at it, but there was a polish, a sense of practice that, no matter how intimate the content, kept Addison behind glass. Tilda told stories too, and she was terrible.

  She always left out some crucial piece and had to go back and add it later. “Did I say he was blind?” “Did I tell you they were identical twins?” “Did I say they were on horseback?”

  Rima was surprisingly comfortable at Wit’s End. She loved her room. She loved looking at the ocean. The night before, among the ticking clock, the rattling shade, the pulse of waves, and a distant train, she’d imagined she heard someone walking in the attic above her bed, somewhere in the vicinity of the Bim shoe box, and even this noise was comforting, as if someone—Maxwell Lane, maybe, or maybe the woman from the Donner Party—was watching over her. She’d fallen asleep imagining those circling footsteps. If Wit’s End was haunted, it was haunted by her own people. Her tribe. Survivors.

  Assuming she was surviving. Sometimes it seemed too close to call. Addison had told a story over lunch, a story Rima already knew. There’d been a time in her life when she did her best to find and read every interview Addison gave, and this story had appeared in those interviews often. It was the Mystery of A. B. Early.
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  When Addison told it, the story wasn’t explicitly directed at Rima; in fact, it came up with regard to Tilda’s son, Martin, and how Tilda had been absent for so much of his life. But something in the way Addison looked at Rima, just quickly and sideways when she finished, made Rima suspect she was the target audience.

  (3)

  The story started with Addison’s mother, a little robin of a woman with sentimental ideas about children and their delightful imaginations. Addison recounted the triumph of a dinner party at which she’d told her mother’s guests that she thought that every time a child made a wish and blew out the birthday candles, those same candles relit in heaven as stars. That the stars were the birthday candles of every child who’d ever lived, which is why you could wish on them too. She was six at the time. Her mother had been so enchanted that Addison was often called on to repeat the performance; she was all of twelve before it was finally retired.

  Even at six Addison had known that she was pretending to be more childlike than she was and that the stars were nothing of the sort. A child’s imagination is such a beautiful place, her mother used to say, but it was also, in her opinion, a public place. What are you thinking, little Miss Sunny Day? she persisted in asking Addison. Why that face? Why that tone? Why so quiet? No secrets allowed.

  This put Addison in a difficult position. Her mother wished her to be thinking of fairies and dewdrops, but she was already the knives-and-curses type. You can tell me anything, her mother used to say, and then respond to anything she was told with disappointment or alarm. So Addison was compelled into a life of deceit and charade, which is what always happens whenever honesty is forced upon someone.

  And yet this same mother had a secret so big. When Addison was in high school, she came home one evening after a planning session for the Model UN—her team had been assigned Sweden—to an awkward dinner at which she was told that her father wished to get married. And not to her mother. In fact, he couldn’t marry her mother, because they were brother and sister.

  Apparently (it took some time for Addison to piece this together; she was in shock, and no one there managed a linear narrative), apparently, he’d come to live with her mother to help out during the pregnancy, and since they shared a last name and there was a baby on the way, people had made certain assumptions, which he was too gallant to contradict. But now he’d fallen in love with a court stenographer he’d met at the library, in the travel and adventure section, and he felt the years he’d already given to his sister’s reputation were maybe sufficient. “Nothing will change with us,” he’d assured Addison. “You’ll always be my girl.” The dinner was corned beef, which was Addison’s favorite.

  “So who’s my father?” Addison asked her mother later that evening, when she’d stopped crying.

  “Lot’s wife,” her mother answered, which seemed unlikely. But was her way of warning Addison not to dredge up old news.

  And then there was a small wedding, in which Addison was carefully made important, and the couple left on a honeymoon cruise, and everyone, the neighbors, the milkman, Addison’s mother’s bridge group, but especially Addison’s mother, behaved as if they’d never thought he was anything but Addison’s uncle. It was an amazing thing to watch. They’d all wheeled in unison like a school of fish.

  Addison counted the corned-beef dinner as the first day of her writing career. In her interviews, this was the point of the story. This was the day that her obligation to her mother was canceled and she was free to begin to think up the dreadful books she would someday write. It took her many more years to do so, but from this day on she never pretended again that her imagination was a frolic through the dewdrops. She gave up the Model UN, and the piano too.

  In telling the story to Rima and Tilda, her point was a different one. Sometimes something happens to you, she said, and there’s no way to be the person you were before. You won’t ever be that person again; that person’s gone. There’s a little freedom in every loss, no matter how unwelcome and unhappy that freedom may be.

  You have to think of it like a reincarnation. One life ends.

  Another begins.

  Chapter Six

  (1)

  There was a bonfire on the beach, and near it, three kids, two male (one black, one white) and one female (white). The boys were reenacting something—a scene from a movie or a video game, something maybe with swords, but also kung fu. The black kid wore a long coat that flapped around his legs. The boys moved in slow motion through an intricate set of maneuvers with much stopping, restarting, and arguing, while the girl watched them both, and Rima watched all three from her bedroom window above.

  It was just past sunset, and Rima thought these kids should be getting home. She thought that if she were a vampire, these were just the kids she’d be looking for. She thought they were probably just about the same age as the ones she used to teach history to, back before Oliver died. The black kid in particular reminded her of Leroy Sheppard, who’d once told Rima that teaching black children about slavery was just one more way to keep them down. Planned and executed as such. Not that he was accusing Rima; he could see she was just a tool.

  The sea was an indigo blue. Rima was becoming a connoisseur of Pacific colors—a pale, translucent blue near the shore at dawn, but a silvered blue farther out, and the color of sunrise reflected on the sheen of the sand; green waves on a sunny afternoon, though purple in the shade of the dredge, throwing white water into the air; indigo after the sun set and then black, but with lights playing over the surf in small, unexpected reds, greens, and yellows. There was a great deal to see, even at night.

  And to hear too. It was Friday evening, and over the sound of the ocean, at reasonably regular intervals, Rima heard the screams of people on the roller coasters. It was a puzzlingly pleasant addition to the score. Except that Rima was just grabbing her coat and would miss it all.

  It had been Addison’s idea that Rima go out for an evening with Scorch and Cody. Addison was concerned that Rima was spending so much time in her room. Sixty-four years old herself, Addison had the impression that the age gap between Rima at twenty-nine and Scorch and Cody at twenty-one and twenty-two, respectively, was not great—an impression not shared by Rima, Scorch, or Cody.

  Rima agreed to go, regretted agreeing, tried to renege, saying that she was still on Ohio time and couldn’t make a late night of it (which was even true but caused a fuss, so that she regretted reneging), agreed again to go, though somewhat more resentfully. She would rather have stayed in, read some more of Maxwell’s letters, a few pages of Ice City, sat and looked out the window, which someone should be doing, because there was always a chance the woman from the beach would reappear. Perhaps she’d be good enough to wear the same green sweater, so that Rima could recognize her.

  Addison had given Scorch money for the cover charge and the first round of drinks. This was not quite paying Scorch to take Rima out, but it was just as well that Rima knew nothing about it.

  What Addison didn’t know was that Rima and Scorch were feeling awkward with each other. Rima had done an online search of obese dachshunds, with such distressing results—crippled legs, broken backs—that she’d forced herself to speak to Scorch about the poached-egg breakfast. Scorch had agreed instantly that of course she was in the wrong, of course it had to stop, and she was so very sorry and would never do it again and was really, really sorry, and would Rima please consider not telling Addison, which Rima had never planned to do, so on the surface everything was fine, only clearly Scorch was still uncomfortable, Rima was still uncomfortable, and the dogs were in shock. They hadn’t yet figured out that Rima was to blame, but surely that was simply a matter of time.

  While Rima was having this horrid conversation with Scorch, Tilda was moving Miss Time from Rima’s nightstand to the first-floor bathroom. She put the tableau by the sink, since there was already a murder scene—Chain Stitch, man strangled with the unfinished sleeve of a hand-knitted sweater (and really, you’d think there�
��d be more hand-knitted-sweater murders)—on a shelf by the guest towels.

  Rima hadn’t asked for Miss Time to be moved, although she’d not said not to move her either. What this meant to Rima was that Tilda could and would go into her room without invitation. It made the bedroom less of a sanctuary, but less of a sanctuary in a dusted, mopped, sheets-freshly-washed kind of way. Rima’s feelings about the intrusion were mixed.

  Meanwhile, the nightstand was surprisingly bare. Tilda had left a vase with dried flowers, but if you stopped and thought about it for even a moment, the flowers were deader than Miss Time had ever been.

  Martin arrived while Rima was upstairs getting her coat. She met him on the stairs, she going down, he going up to leave his duffel in the Our Better Angels bedroom. He was taller than Oliver, but the same height as Rima, if she stood a step higher. “You must be the famous Rima,” he said. “I’m Martin. Tilda’s boy,” and there was nothing in his tone to suggest this was sarcastic, though Rima felt that it must have been.

  Martin was wearing a pair of expensive sunglasses on the top of his head. He took them off and his hair fell into his face—his mother’s hair, dark brown and straight. Martin also had a postage-stamp patch of hair under his lower lip. There was a name for that, but it wasn’t a moustache, it wasn’t a beard, it wasn’t a goatee, and Rima couldn’t remember what it was called. She herself didn’t pay more than twenty-five dollars for sunglasses as a matter of policy; she wondered that anyone would. In her experience expensive sunglasses seldom went home with the girl who’d brought them.

  “I’ve invited myself along tonight. I’m just going to dump my stuff,” Martin said, “and I’ll be right down.”

  They went in Scorch’s car, an old maroon Saturn. The backseat was littered with discarded clothes as if Scorch changed there often. There was a red bra printed with white hearts on the floor by Rima’s foot, and a matching pair of panties on the back window ledge, flung there, perhaps, on some happier occasion, because on this one Scorch and Cody appeared to be having a fight. He turned on the CD player; she snapped it off. He lowered his window so the ends of his piratical bandanna fluttered in the wind. She promptly raised it.