Wit's End (15 page)

Scorch said the chatrooms were well aware that Addison was getting older and that the day would come, though everyone hoped not soon, when one of the Maxwell Lane books would be the last of the Maxwell Lane books.

“Harry Potter has everyone worrying about endings,” Cody said. “And there's suspense because she hasn't published in so long.”

There was a woman who'd been in several Maxwell Lane novels now, sexual tension building delightfully, and then, three books ago, a consummation. Maxwell seemed to be opening up, letting someone in at last, which was very gratifying. The happy ending was so close people could taste it.

And then, in the very next book, the girlfriend was gone.

But there was still hope. The path to true love, et cetera, and she hadn't, in the time-honored tradition of detectives' girlfriends everywhere, been murdered. She'd merely dumped him. Even the news, one book later, that she had gotten married, didn't destroy all hope. Wasn't there also a tradition of ex-girlfriends' husbands' being murdered, so that they found themselves not only bereft but in need of a private detective?

Time passed with no new book, and the last couple of novels were reexamined. They hadn't been popular when published; they grew less so. Maxwell had done things in them, small things, but things people couldn't see him doing. Addison didn't seem to be on the same page as her readers; in fact, she seemed a little tired of Maxwell, or else she didn't know him as well as people had thought. On Addison's own site, someone posting under the tag LilLois was all but accusing her of character assassination.

“She doesn't want him to be happy,” other posters agreed. “She'll destroy him first.” LilLois said that Addison wanted to take Maxwell with her when she went, like some Indian rajah who made his wife burn herself alive on his funeral pyre.

Rima remembered how, in her dream, she'd been afraid for Maxwell; he'd seemed imperiled. How she'd thought that someone (not her) needed to save him. In her defense, she'd been asleep at the time. Awake, it was all a little too Stephen King.

She was momentarily distracted by the description in the paper of Le Pétomane, a professional farter who played the Moulin Rouge in the late 1800s and outearned Sarah Bernhardt by a ratio of three to one. Someday that fact would surface in Rima's mind, and she wouldn't have a clue how she knew it. Not that this had anything to do with Addison's readership. Rima was confident that Addison's readers would be the ones buying tickets to Sarah Bernhardt.

Of course, in a perfect world, you wouldn't have to choose.

“Have you ever heard of Holy City?” Rima asked. And when she could see they hadn't, “Old cult in the Santa Cruz mountains.” She didn't mention the white supremacist stuff on account of Cody's maybe being black. And its being too early in the morning for white supremacists. “Do you think Addison used a real murder when she wrote
Ice City
? I mean, did she do that sometimes?”

“I don't think you could really murder someone with a cat,” Scorch said.

“Not that murder,” said Rima. “The first one.”

“Here's what I know about that. If she did, she'll never tell you.” Scorch ate her toast. The part of her hair that was pink fell in a feathery web against her cheek. The part that was red took on a deep honey color in the sun. You couldn't tell by looking that her ears were ringing. She was a transitory Rembrandt, the leaves in the window behind her just turning to yellow and a sparrow cavorting in the birdbath. The fig tree had a sweet sap smell.

Outside, of course. Not in the kitchen. The kitchen smelled of butter and tea.

“There's a new site on the Web,” Cody said. “Some fan is trying to collect her obituaries. Of course, nobody signs an obit, they're just guessing. But might be worth a look, go see if your Holy City murder is there.”

“She'll go nuts when she finds that site,” Scorch said. “She'll make them take it down. God forbid that anything get on the Web without her approval.”

So Addison had had that little word with Scorch about her blog. Rima tried not to feel guilty about this. Scorch had no business laying Rima's drunken breakdown out on the Internet for anyone and everyone to see.

Still, no one likes a tattletale, as Oliver used to say preemptively whenever he was planning something worth tattling about. Stanford was whining again, and higher; it was an awful pitch. Berkeley came and laid her head on Rima's shoe, the picture of deprivation and despair. Was there anyone in the room not suffering because of Rima?

“I'm sorry,” Scorch said, and Rima had no idea what she was apologizing for, but it probably wasn't the thing she should be apologizing for. It made Rima feel even guiltier.

The feeling receded when she put her own knife into the marmalade and found Scorch's toast crumbs there. Rima hated toast crumbs in the jam. They were just plain thoughtless.

R
ima was on the second-floor computer, where connection to the wireless was automatic. She'd decided to check out the Wikipedia Holy City entry, but accidentally found herself on the Holy City Zoo entry instead. Apparently someone had taken the sign for the zoo to a 1970s San Francisco comedy club, which was then given the same name. Any number of famous comedians—Robin Williams and Margaret Cho—had performed there.

Rima spent half an hour googling the Holy City Zoo, reading postings about its closing night and also a reminiscence from one of the emcees about how he once bought a drink for a beautiful woman, only to have some other comic move in while he was fetching the second drink, so he told the interloper to reimburse him for the two drinks he'd already bought, and the club owner backed him up, but the woman left during the ensuing kerfuffle over the six dollars, so in the end nobody got any
value
for the money spent. It was all quite sad.

Eventually Rima remembered what she was about and that it had nothing to do with San Francisco stand-up or the expectations of men who bought women drinks. She found then:

Addison was working at the breakfast table on a speech for the library; the studio was reserved for her real work, her books. She scribbled on a yellow pad, writing a few words, striking them out, writing a few more. Rima had come downstairs to ask her about the reference to Maxwell Lane on the Wikipedia Holy City entry. Instead she found herself listening to a story about Addison's uncle, who was her father at the time, and how he worked on a commercial fishing boat but sometimes borrowed a friend's boat and took little Addison out fishing or whale-watching or something.

In this story he shot a sea lion. Addison had all the tender feelings of a child toward sea lions, their faces so much like dogs', intelligent, unfathomable. With a look at Berkeley and Stanford, who were sitting at her feet hoping for crumbs, because it was the breakfast table, even though no one was eating on it just now, Addison clarified that dogs weren't unfathomable, dogs were all too transparent in their hopes and dreams, but a sea lion had the sea in its eyes. So to see such a creature shot, especially by a man she loved, was horrible to her. Yet so ordinary to him that he hadn't even stopped to think how Addison would take it. To this day, she told Rima, she could still see the body, blood floating on the surface of the water like a veil.

Rima recognized the veil image from
H
₂
Zero
and also
Absolution Way.
It was an image Addison was fond of.

In Addison's story, her father/uncle woke her before dawn the next morning. They drove to the wharf and cast off, and there, in the dark, a hundred pairs of glowing orange eyes opened around them. Demon eyes.

He was trying to make her love them less. There were too many of them, he said. They were picking the ocean clean, and the hungrier they got, the more aggressive they became. They'd follow the fishing boats, swim into the nets, eat their fill, and then destroy the net in the process of escaping it. “You have to take sides sometimes,” her father/uncle said. “The fish or the sea lions.”

You can argue that a fisherman is on the side of the fish, but it's a nuanced case. “I learned something from the whole episode,” Addison said. “I learned that even the people you love most are capable of murder.”

The theme of Addison's library talk was supposed to be the impact of the coast on her writing. She wasn't using the story she'd just told Rima; it seemed dark for the library. (Though Rima's father had always told her never to underestimate librarians. The Patriot Act, he'd said, had made the mistake of underestimating librarians, and now they were the only thing standing between us and
1984,
and they weren't all spineless the way Congress was. They read books. His money was on them.)

Addison was trying to use the ocean as a metaphor for the imagination. As a child, she'd thrilled to stories about the SS
Palo Alto,
a concrete ship grounded off Seacliff State Beach in Aptos, and the USS
Macon,
a dirigible downed during a great storm before her birth. She'd followed avidly in the 1990s, when, with advances in infrared technology, pieces of the
Macon
were mapped off Point Sur. Every life had its wrecks, either right there in plain sight like the
Palo Alto
or dimly sensed somewhere below like the
Macon.

And then there were those messages the ocean left on the sand—the shells of things long gone, wood from forgotten ships and trees, now polished into something more like stone. Addison made a note of the way that sea birds didn't sing like land birds, but called and cried instead.
The flukes of whales,
she wrote. And then,
Sea lions = mermaids.
With a question mark.