Wit's End (3 page)

And who knew what else? No one was allowed in during the dollhouse phase of a book, which meant that no one but Addison had been inside the studio for three years now, with the exception of one much-loved computer technician, Ved Yamagata, who also worked for the university. Ved kept Addison's gear upgraded, and his silence apparently could and had been bought, though on the subject of Japanese
manga
he was chatty enough.

You would have had to scramble up the rocks at the cliff base and then scale the face just to look inside, which you could hardly then claim to have done by accident. Even so, Addison closed the shutters whenever she left.

For some writers three years isn't a long time to work on a book. For Addison it was unprecedented. Perhaps there was no new one, her friends said to one another, but only when she wasn't around. Why should there be? How many books could one woman write?

Addison was a national treasure. She didn't have to write another word to collect lifetime achievement awards for the rest of her life. The reviews of her last two books had been chilly. They mentioned the earlier work with the sort of conventional courtesies people adopted when speaking of the dead; no one wanted to be in the room with Addison when she read them. There was no shame in knowing when to quit.

Still, Addison went to her studio, without fail or interruption, from eight every morning until lunchtime, so usually this was when Tilda vacuumed up the sand and dog hair, but today

3. Tilda was over in Soquel attending her twelve-step meeting at the Land of Medicine Buddha. Since the weather was so good—no season warmer and sunnier in Santa Cruz than the glorious fall—she would stay after and do the forty-minute hike through the sequoias up to the red-gold temple. Two acolytes worked full-time painting the temple. Like housekeeping, this was a job acknowledged to be endless, red and gold paint until the heat death of the universe. Tilda might or might not be home for lunch, depending on what they were serving at the Land of Medicine Buddha.

Tilda was a tall, athletic woman in her mid-forties. Her hair was shiny, dark, and short; there was a tattoo of a snake, coiled, head down, around her left biceps. She took yoga at the Santa Cruz veterans center, where her headstand was rock steady. She was Addison's housekeeper unless she was something more, had lived with Addison for nearly three years. Sometime before that she'd been homeless, and while she was fond of Addison, her real love was Wit's End. She loved the house the way a captain loves a ship. She listened for plumbing problems, sniffed for bad wiring, kept the wood oiled, the glass polished.

Her affection did not extend to the dollhouses. They were nests of constant dust, requiring constant dusting. Before the earthquake, Addison had told her, there'd been four more, but they'd been crushed when some bookcases fell. Tilda tried to remember this whenever she was thinking that there were way too many. Not only did they all have to be dusted, but they all had to be dusted so as not to disturb the crime scene. She had to use toothpicks on some parts.

Tilda hadn't been living in Santa Cruz at the time of the quake, but she was retroactively proud of how little damage Wit's End had taken. Such a good house! One crack in one bedroom wall, some china and four dollhouses lost. When the cliff beneath gave way, as all Santa Cruz cliffs eventually would, Tilda pictured Wit's End sliding into the ocean, floating on the water like an ark.

This, then, was the household: Tilda on the first floor, with a bedroom off the kitchen and a private door out to the garden. Addison on the second floor, with the large master suite, an even larger library, and a small room for watching television. And Rima on the third floor, with two bedrooms besides hers, which Addison sometimes offered to artists she knew but which were empty at the moment.

“You'll have the whole floor to yourself,” Addison had promised Rima when she suggested the visit, so when Rima did finally get out of bed, she felt free to check out that part of the house.

She saw immediately that the other two bedrooms were smaller than hers and that they shared a bath. One had a view of the ocean, the other of the lake (though no one in Cleveland would have called that a lake—it was a pond in a good mood, or a puddle in a bad), but only Rima's windows overlooked it all, and the boardwalk too. Addison was being so good to her!

Something else was pleasing Rima; she felt this long before she was able to tease out what it was. It had to do with the woman who'd lived here once, the woman who'd survived the Donner Party, and it had to do with the rooms, with the house. Finally Rima got to it—that later in her life, the woman had had so many people around her she needed a big place like this in which to keep them all. Who doesn't like a happy ending? Even Addison wrote one occasionally.

The bedrooms were all similarly decorated—brass bedsteads, shadow quilts, glassed-in bookcases (sometimes containing Addison's own books), pile rugs, and murders. On various shelves and tabletops, Rima quickly found:
Our Better Angels
(young woman stabbed in the backseat of a blue convertible);
Absolution Way
(old woman drowned in her bathtub); and
It Happened to Somebody Else
(old man beaten to death with the Annu-Baltic volume of
Encyclopaedia Britannica
).

There was no sign of the dogs. This puzzled Rima until she looked out a window and saw them climbing the stone stairs up from the beach. Tall stairs, short legs, they hopped from step to step like Slinkys, only upward and all tired out. A man with a bandanna over his head and a woman with red hair were holding their leashes. By the time Rima got downstairs, all four were in the kitchen, finishing off what seemed to have been a breakfast of poached eggs and toast. The dogs looked up from their bowls briefly when Rima came in, and then back down, as if now that she was actually in reach, the prospect of ripping her open with their bare teeth had become tedious to them. The kitchen smelled of melted butter, dead fish, and exhausted dog.

The couple looked to be about college age. (Were college age, as it turned out. Junior and senior at UC Santa Cruz.) The young woman was talking. “So she goes, ‘Excuse me. Your hair is touching me.' And I say I'm sorry, because I always say I'm sorry, it's like a reflex, you know, I just can't help myself, sometimes I say I'm sorry for saying I'm sorry. So I push my hair down and five minutes later she's tapping me on the shoulder, going, ‘Your hair is touching me again,' like she's really losing patience with me now. I can't hear the music, I'm so busy trying to figure out how to make my hair stop doing that. And it's not like I have big hair.”

“Maybe you have rude hair,” said the young man. He was reading the paper, mopping up the last of his egg with the last of his toast. It was possible that he himself had no hair, though with the bandanna it was hard to be sure. “Maybe you're a rude-head.”

“So funny.” The young woman looked at Rima. “Do I have big hair?”

“No,” said Rima. It was very red, though. Except for the short bits right around her face, which were pink, it was very red, but not red like red hair, red like strawberry Jell-O. The woman was wearing camouflage pants, which seemed pointless with such unstealthy hair, unless the only thing she didn't want looked at was her legs, because then the hair was diversionary. But no one would have said big.

“See?” the young woman told the young man. And then, “You must be Rima. I'm Scorch. I walk the dogs in the morning and pick up the mail. This is Cody. He thinks he's my boyfriend.

Addison said you were to help yourself to breakfast. She left you a note. She's out in the studio and can't be disturbed, on pain of death. Do you want a piece of toast? We made one too many. How do you know Addison?”

“She's my godmother.”

Scorch took a moment to process this. “I don't have a godmother.” Her tone was aggrieved, as if everyone had a godmother but her. “My family doesn't go in for that.”

“Water's hot if you want some tea.” Cody didn't look up from the paper.

“I'm sorry,” Scorch said. “I should have said. Water's on the stove and the tea is over there.” She pointed to the window above the sink, where several canisters were wedged on the sill between the potted ferns and ivy. Rima went to look.

Someone in the household had a powerful faith in tea. There were fruit teas, green teas, black teas; cleansing teas, fortifying teas; teas that sweetened your thoughts, improved your rest; teas for longevity, teas for celebration, teas for contemplation.

Wisdom, fortune, health, or happiness? What kind of a monster would make a person choose only one? Rima went back to the table and took the spare piece of toast instead.

One of the dogs came to sit beside her. It was Berkeley, the female, though Rima didn't know it; she couldn't tell them apart yet. Berkeley looked up at her with brown, brown eyes, sighing in a smitten sort of way. She hardly seemed to notice the toast, just the shadow of a blink when it moved to and from Rima's mouth.

But when Scorch began to gather her things—backpack, coat, car keys—Berkeley lost interest in Rima. She joined Stanford at the door, tail wagging hopelessly. Scorch knelt to say good-bye, and the dogs collapsed like deflated balloons. Rima wouldn't have thought they could get smaller. “Don't look at me like that,” Scorch told them. “I'm sorry. I'll be back soon.”

And then to Rima—“Tell Addison that Maxwell Lane got a letter. Just junk. He can get a credit card or something. It's on the table in the entry with the rest of the mail.”

“He's in the ether again,” Cody said. “They're rerunning the television show. The eighties one. With the moustache.”

Scorch coughed suddenly. It was a painful sound. “My throat is killing me.” She wiped one hand across her eyes. “I think I'm getting a cold.”

“We're all going to die of the bird flu,” Cody said. He folded up the paper with a shake and a snap. “I got to get to class.”

The breakfast table was in an alcove overlooking the courtyard. Fig leaves pressed like hands against the windowpanes; sunlight rippled on the table, softening the butter in its wake. There was a hutch built into one corner with china on the top shelves and a dollhouse on the bottom:
Spook Juice
—man in a tux, brained in the atrium with an unopened bottle of Brut Impérial Champagne. Rima thought she remembered that the fact that it was unopened had been a major clue. Or maybe that had been another book, an Agatha Christie or an Elizabeth George.

The china was painted with poppies, a replication of the pattern once used in the dining car on the Santa Fe Railway. Rima knew this about the dishes, and she wondered how. There were many things Rima inexplicably knew, the residue, presumably, of lost conversations, books, classes, television shows, crossword puzzles. Like her mother before her, Rima was a devotee of the
Nation
crossword puzzle, and as a result, she had a surprising store of slang circa World War II, much of it British.

She looked at the paper Cody had left, a thin magazine-style weekly called
Good Times,
which said fifty-one people had been arrested on Halloween, two for stabbings, and an unspecified number for public urination. The paper said this was a vast improvement over last year.

Rima made herself another piece of toast and considered the possibility that she was going to die of bird flu. She couldn't make herself think so. But everyone else probably would, Rima could easily picture that.

Next she thought about Maxwell Lane's letter. She should go get it, apply for that credit card. Buy something. That's what Oliver would have done. (Don't start thinking about Oliver.) Oliver would have done that, just to see what happened next.

She was still in the kitchen when Addison arrived, hungry for lunch after a hard morning of whatever it was she'd been up to. Rima considered escaping to her room, but it would have been rude. Sooner or later she and Addison were going to have to get to know each other. Sooner or later they would have a couple of drinks together and Rima would find herself feeling oddly comfortable, or maybe drunk, and against all her better instincts, she would suddenly say, “Okay, then. What was it exactly that went on between you and my father?” Even though, right now, drinking nothing but orange juice, Rima truly believed it was all so long ago, who cared?

This regrettable conversation could occur only after an initial extended period of politeness. So Rima stayed put, getting on with the politeness part, and Addison fixed herself a lunch, slicing, salting, and eating tomatoes while making a sandwich with many tomatoes in it, because this was California and the use of the word “autumn” here was no more accurate than the use of the word “lake.” Eventually Rima remembered to mention Maxwell's letter.

Addison told her that Maxwell Lane got a surprising amount of mail. He was on any number of charitable lists, and not a single nonprofit had ever been discouraged by the fact that he never responded. It was an inspiring testament, Addison often noted (though not on this occasion), to the tenacity of the world's dogooders.

In addition to charitable requests, there were the political. Maxwell seemed to have been identified as both a leftist and a white supremacist. You could understand the latter, but it was a sad misreading, or else the white supremacists didn't read her at all, which was the explanation Addison preferred. White supremacists, she was fond of saying, were the living refutations of their own theories. In point of fact, Addison had a lot of readers of whom she did not approve. Most of them, if you really want to know.

Anyway, Maxwell received special introductory offers from
The Skeptic
and
Mother Jones,
but also from
White Hope, White Heart
and some group called the New Thules. One unsolicited news-letter kept him updated on the schemes of the mongrel races, another tracked Big Pharm, Big Oil, and Big Brother.