Wit's End (23 page)

She clicked over to the message boards and went cold. Quite literally. She could feel the blood draining from her face and fingers. All this activity, sixty-seven postings in the last week, was confined to a single topic. The thread head? “Rima Lanisell: Is she her father's daughter?”

Rima clicked back seventeen pages to the beginning of the thread. The early postings were all about Oliver's death and/or Rima's drinking. A brief description of Oliver's death had been on Addison's blog, but Rima's drinking could have come only from Scorch's. Apparently the A. B. Early completist kept up with A. B. Early's dog walker as well as her dogs.

Oliver's death was a sad thing, the posters agreed, a criminally irresponsibly sad thing, but what Rima could and should do was make it matter. Make it count for something.

Wouldn't Rima be the perfect person to appear at school assemblies on the topic of drinking and driving? How many young lives might she save, just as soon as she laid off the sauce herself and stopped making this be all about her. It was a teaching moment, and Rima was, by god, a teacher. What would Oliver have wanted? The posters on Addison's website were pretty confident they knew.

About a dozen postings in, someone self-identified as Beezer finally asked the other posters to show some sympathy. If my father killed my mother, Beezer said, I'd probably turn to booze. I'd probably add some pills to the mix. Cut her a break, you guys. She needs counseling not scolding.

Downstairs the dogs were barking furiously. Rima refused to even wonder at what. The chat had turned to O.J.'s poor children. They were reported to be in college now, and no one knew how they were doing, though no one could imagine they were doing well. Then a posting about L.J., the kid in the television show
Prison Break,
whose father had been falsely accused of killing the vice president's brother and who wasn't really relevant to the discussion except that the poster felt sorry for him too, and then the name L.J. was so very similar to the name O.J., which, the poster said, was probably the real reason L.J. had come to mind and not the murderous-father part.

Your father's being a murderer was conceded to be a hard thing to get over. Your father's murdering your mother? Forget about it! Rima was much to be pitied.

Not just pitied. Loved! Someone posting as Norcalgirl said that Rima was the best character in
Ice City.
Norcalgirl described Rima as touching and absolutely believable.

Maxwell Lane is the best character in
Ice City,
the poster LilLois riposted. And after Maxwell, Bim. And then, but only then, maybe Rima.

It fell to Hurricane Jane to point out, with admirable brevity, that Rima hadn't been a character in
Ice City.

The dogs came racing up the stairs. They danced at Rima's feet, frantic with the need to communicate something to her. Little Timmy's down the well! Feed us ice cream and potato chips! Sometimes there's a benefit to not sharing a language. For all their noise, Rima hardly noticed them. Online, things had taken a nasty turn.

JBC242, a self-identified Ohioan (which probably meant that he [or she] had never left his [or her] Pasadena basement), posted that he (or she) had been in high school with Oliver. Never had a class with him, but their lockers had been close together, at least until senior year, when the school had gotten a series of bomb threats and done away with lockers altogether as a safety precaution. JBC242 said that Oliver had won the senior award for Most Likely to Talk Himself out of a Speeding Ticket.

JBC242 wasn't content with that. Although no one had responded, s/he posted again. This time s/he said that Rima used to pick Oliver up after school because Oliver had lost his license over a Minor in Possession infraction. JBC242 said that on prom night Rima had to drive Oliver and his date around and that somehow during the evening Rima had lost the car.

For the first time, Rima was tempted to post herself. She reminded herself that nothing good would come of it. She heard Addison warning her not to engage. But not one word of that post was true except the losing-the-car part, and the car wasn't so much lost as misplaced for a couple of weeks, and this had happened long before Oliver's prom and had nothing to do with Oliver, who had still been in braces, for god's sake. When would ancient history be consigned to the dustbin of ancient history?

The other posters were immediately deferential to JBC242. Weren't they right, they asked, when they said that Oliver would have wanted Rima to make his death mean something?

JBC242 didn't doubt it. That was certainly the Oliver s/he'd known. Heart of gold, even if he liked a party. Terrible dancer, btw. Like a chicken.

(Was this to be Oliver's permanent memorial? Was it too late to get him a bench?)

Hurricane Jane returned to pose the obvious question. How likely was it that Oliver would win Most Likely to Talk Himself out of a Speeding Ticket if he'd already lost his license over an MIP? JBC242, as always, she said, you are so full of it.

These were Rima's thoughts exactly. In spite of the Wikipedia shoot-out, she found herself liking Hurricane Jane.

Then there was a flurry of postings about
Prison Break,
which had maybe jumped the shark or maybe not. As well as
Battlestar Galactica,
another show on which generational guilt apparently loomed large.

On to
Bones,
which was about a female mystery writer/forensic anthropologist who solved her own cases, as if A. B. Early and Maxwell Lane had been mashed into a single really smart person. This really smart person's father had murdered a bunch of people too. It began to seem as if there was hardly a made-up father anywhere who hadn't. And this really smart person was having her own hard time with it, though she was too smart to turn to drink or pills the way Rima had done.

Woven periodically throughout, ignoring the TV chat and focused like lasers only on each other, Hurricane Jane and JBC242 continued to snipe:

You have some special expertise on the Lanisells?
JBC242 asked.
Dazzle us.

Hurricane Jane:
No special expertise. Just a good bullshit detector.

JBC242:
I hope you don't keep that in the bedroom. I bet it smells.

And two minutes later, another JBC242:
Well,
someone's
got her bitch on today.

Hurricane Jane suggested that JBC242 would have been right at home in Nazi Germany, because Hitler's rule had also been based on gossip and innuendo. (Rima's only surprise was that it had taken so long to get to Hitler. In her online experience, this usually happened pretty quickly. Godwin's Law.)

Meanwhile LilLois was posting that it was too bad Oliver was dead, because a brother-sister detective team was a really great format and, in the right hands, could be gold. It wasn't clear whether what was being suggested was a book or a television show.

Nor was Rima sure the suggestion was serious. Some of the people who posted in response obviously thought so. Others did not. Jake and Maggie Gyllenhaal were suggested. It would be so cool, one poster said, to have an actual brother and sister playing the fictional Lanisells. It would be post-fucking-modern.

The final message, dated the day before at 3:17, was from Norcalgirl again: Okay, maybe it wasn't
Ice City,
Norcalgirl said.

But whatever that book was with Rima in it, Norcalgirl had really loved Rima in that.

Rima's imaginary adventures so tired her out that she decided to go upstairs and take her own nap. But when she got to her bedroom, her bed had been stripped. This disappointed, embarrassed, and irritated her all at the same time. She shouldn't have gotten the sheets dirty, dumping the box of letters out on top of them. Tilda had enough to do without Rima's thoughtlessly making a new mess.

On the other hand, who asked Tilda to clean it up? Rima was perfectly capable of changing the bed for herself. She'd had every intention of doing so as soon as she had a minute.

The notes she'd taken from Wikipedia had been moved to the dresser. She wondered if Tilda had read them. Tilda was always snooping around her room.

Luckily, so far they were pretty innocuous. Nothing Tilda or Addison had said at lunch was in them yet. Rima added that now. Then she folded the pages and put them in the pocket of her heavy coat. She realized that if she left them there, she wouldn't find them again until she put the coat on next winter in Cleveland. She moved them to the sock drawer, because that was where anyone in her right mind would look first.

Next she searched for the pile of unread letters she'd gone to such trouble to separate out and catalogue. They weren't on the dresser and they weren't in the sock drawer. She hoped Tilda hadn't simply dumped them back in the box, but sure enough, that was where they were, the letters Rima had separated out commingling once again with the letters she hadn't separated out.

It wasn't the problem she'd thought it would be. The sorted letters remained on the top, the only thing disturbed was the chronological order. Rima picked up a Christmas card with no envelope and no date. On the card, Santa Claus slept in his chair. He'd been knitting a stocking; his hands still held the needles. His beard hair was deeply tangled into the yarn and his mouth was open in a snore. The printed message—
It's the thought that counts.

On the blank space opposite, Constance had written in her clear New Palmer cursive:

A
bout the same time Rima fell asleep, Addison woke up. She often took an afternoon nap, and sometimes it refreshed her, but sometimes it left her addled and logy. This was one of those second kinds of times. Addison had grit in her eyes and a nasty taste like spoiled cheese in her mouth. She brushed her teeth, washed her face, and went to be with the second-floor computer until she was fit for human company again.

She started by checking the Internet for the definitive word from some source she trusted that it was safe to eat raw spinach. President Bush had managed to send even the FDA off its rails. The government was now claiming the spinach problem had been caused by wild pigs. Truer words were never spoken.

Her eye was caught by an ad for something called an obituary hunter. Addison wasn't sure exactly what this was, but what she imagined was a search engine you could customize for certain kinds of deaths or for certain people's deaths. UFOlogists, say. Or nudists. Or the intersection of the two. She was sorely tempted. Decades had passed since the days when she worked at the
Santa Cruz Sentinel,
but she still took a professional interest.

Her e-mail contained a message from her editor in New York, saying she was going to call this afternoon. Just to check in, see how the new book was coming. Chat about this and chat about that.

Addison turned off the computer and went downstairs for her coat and car keys. She told Tilda she had to go downtown, which was true, and she wasn't so much avoiding the call as refusing to adjust the plans she'd already made in order to accommodate it.

After parking, she walked a few blocks to the used-book store to check out the bottom floor, as was her habit, see if any Peter Dickinsons had shown up. It was a crime that man was out of print. While in the mystery section, she ran into Carolyn Wallace, and Carolyn made the predictable ironic fancy-meeting-you-here noises. Carolyn had been a year behind Addison at Santa Cruz High School and was one of the few class of '61 Cardinals still in the area. The last time they'd run into each other was several Halloweens before, at a neighbor's haunted house. Carolyn had been wearing a black garbage bag over her regular clothes, cinched at the waist, with a top hat on her head. Addison had been carrying a whip and had forty plastic spiders glued to her back. Even though her hat was not right, Addison was clearly Indiana Jones, which maybe meant it was more in the past than Addison was thinking it was. She remembered that she'd had no idea what Carolyn was supposed to be.

Carolyn had put on some pounds since then, and also added an indigo skunk streak to her gray hair. “I figured if I'm going to be a little old blue-haired lady anyway . . .” she said. She told Addison that the tree in Addison's old front yard on California Street had had to be taken out, and it was only last week some guys had managed to dig the stump up.

Addison wished she'd heard this earlier; she would have liked to say good-bye. That tree was a great valley oak, at least a hundred years old—a spring chicken in oak years—and in the bloom of health as far as Addison had known. She'd had a tree house in its branches until a terrible storm had blown the boards two whole houses down the street, where they broke the Bartholomews' dining room window. Addie's nest, her father used to call that tree house. Addie's crow's nest, because from up there, she'd be the first to see whatever was coming at her. (About which, in retrospect, and specifically regarding her mother's marital status, ha, ha, and ha.)

Addison got in her car and drove up California, but the sight of her old house denuded of the tree that had lent the property its only grace was too sad. She turned around at the historic Weeks House without stopping and parked instead in front of the high school. She'd been editor of the student paper, the
Trident,
for about five minutes once, until her article on Hawaii's proposed statehood was censored of all references to imperialism and the American-led coup that deposed Queen Liliuokalani, and she'd been forced to quit in protest.