Wit's End (13 page)

Rima's mother was beautiful in a sixties sort of way—a Joan Baez with long, thick hair, nose slightly hooked, Gypsy eyes. Rima had the same eyes, which is why Martin had admired them. Her mother was a photographer who did portraits of families in front of fireplaces, brides looking out windows, kids under Christmas trees. She did dogs, birds, and horses, but her passion was old railway stations. On weekends the three of them would drive to Indiana, Illinois, Kentucky, so she could take photographs of people arriving, people departing, people waiting, or, if there were none of those, empty stations. Rima, Oliver, and their mother would stay in hotels, eat hamburgers, go to whatever movie was showing at the cinemaplex. They would sleep, all three of them, in a single room and often in a single bed. Her mother had seemed to need no one's company but her children's.

The reverse could not be said. As Rima grew older the weekend trips interfered with birthday parties or sleepovers, or with nothing at all, only Rima was increasingly reluctant to tag along. Kari Spector, a popular girl at her school, a high-status female if there ever was one, might call on a Saturday morning, ask whether Rima wanted to hang. If Rima was gone, Kari would move on to Siobhán McCarthy, and then all the next week at school there would be oblique references to things Rima had missed, jokes she wouldn't understand, boys she hadn't met. The next weekend it would be Siobhán whom Kari called first. Rima's whole life ruined so that her mother could take another stupid picture.

Stupid. Who was Kari or Siobhán to Rima now? What wouldn't she have given for one more trip with her mother and Oliver, one more night in a stale little room with one double bed, the mattress so scooped out that the three of them would wake up in a heap in the middle, push apart, roll together all night long.

At first Rima had kept the mirror game to herself. By the time she taught it to Oliver, it had become much more intricate. The world in the mirror was now an actual place. It had a name—Upside-down Town—and a history that Rima was always adding to. Queens, of course, in honor of Alice's
Through the Looking-Glass,
and also because who doesn't like a story with queens in it? Plus a mirror image of Rima (and now Oliver)—kids who looked just like them, but were otherwise opposite in every way.

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?”

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
?

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.

E
verything 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:

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.

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.