Wit's End (5 page)

“ ‘Letters slash Maxwell'?” Tilda asked.

“Bingo,” Addison said.

The box was large enough that Tilda needed two hands to pick it up. She handed the flashlight to Addison. The light bounced about the attic, hitting the sphinx lamp, the dining room chairs, Rima's shoes. It swept the Santas, brushed over the shoe box with the crushed corner, turned a dachshund's (Berkeley's) eyes to mirrors.

“You'll like Martin,” Tilda told Rima, and from the darkness behind Tilda's shoulder, Addison gave Rima another look, hard and right at her.

This look meant: Martin's a conniving little snot. Here's what Rima thought it meant: I know I said you'd have the whole floor to yourself, and now I'm sorry I said so.

There were more letters in the box than Rima would have expected, and they were jumbled together, some in envelopes, some not, some typewritten, some by hand, and none in any order that Rima could discern. She wondered if Maxwell had answered any of them; she wished she'd thought to ask. Though honestly, she wasn't as interested in the letters as Addison had assumed; it had simply seemed rude to say so. She would rather have brought down the box with her father's name on it.

Since her father's death, she'd lacked the concentration for books. The letters were short and undemanding, and just enough like reading to substitute for reading. She read a few that night before she went to sleep.

The first was on three-ringed binder paper, in a faded blue ink. There was no envelope.

In pencil on wide-ruled paper:

In black ink, Eaton stationery:

Rima supposed this fell into the category of inappropriate proposals. She hoped they wouldn't all be so vague.

The effort required to read the handwritten letters was getting to her, so she fished through the box for something typed. And found, on an onionskin paper so thin some of the periods were holes, the final page of a longer letter. The first thing she saw was her father's name.

Rima felt a friendly connection to this woman who thought her father had been falsely accused. She stirred through the letters, looking for the first page, but it didn't surface and her hands became unpleasantly dusty. She put the box on the floor and went to wash up and get ready for bed.

She thought that she'd look again for the first page tomorrow and maybe reread
Ice City
too, see if a case could be made for someone's wanting to kill the cat. Of course, that still wouldn't explain the other deaths, but murdering two people is not as bad as murdering three. And only the one with the cat was premeditated. Only the wife's death was Murder 1.

Rereading seemed like something she could manage. It wasn't the same as reading, not when you'd read a book as often as Rima had read
Ice City.
You didn't need to concentrate so much when you already knew a book backward and forward.

It would be hard on Maxwell if she found out he'd been wrong all those years. He was already angsty enough. He was filled with angst. But her own loyalties had to lie with Bim; anyone would understand that.

 

The next day it rained. Not a driving rain, but a steady drip, just loud enough for Rima to hear over the ocean when she woke up. She couldn't remember her dreams, only that they'd been bad, and instead of feeling relieved the way most people get to do, waking from bad dreams, she was in a bad mood. Her real life was what it was—lonely, abandoned, all the wrong people around her. Nothing to be done about that. But there was no reason her dreams couldn't still have been good. She decided to stay in bed until she was so hungry she couldn't stand it anymore.

The clock in the hallway chimed the quarter-hour, the half, the three-quarters. She heard the dogs once, barking their way down the stairs. Later, deep in the house, there was the muffled sound of a phone ringing. The clack of eco-friendly clogs in the hall. Three soft knocks on Rima's door.

The knocking was Tilda, brisk but apologetic. The phone had been Scorch. She had a terrible cold, or maybe the flu, there was something really nasty going around at school, and given the weather, she didn't think she could walk the dogs. She was really sorry about it. The thing was that Cody couldn't walk the dogs either, because he had an exam this morning, and Addison, of course, couldn't be asked; she was already working. And Tilda had a dental appointment—living on the street was hard on your teeth—to which she was already late, and if she was much later she'd lose the appointment entirely but still have to pay for it and not be able to get another for weeks.

The dogs would hate being out in the rain, but the only way to convince them of this was to take them. So would Rima mind too terribly? There was a rain hat she could use, hanging by the kitchen door, and plastic bags on the counter. “Just let them run around for a few minutes,” Tilda said, “and they'll be cold and want to come back inside.”

Rima thought that it was early in her relationship with the dogs for such responsibilities. Why, it seemed only yesterday they'd been hurling themselves against the bedroom door like little furry battering rams. What if they ran away? Plus this was a lot more active than the morning she'd planned.

But there was no way to say no. Rima got up heavily, dressed, and went down to the kitchen, where Tilda was already gone but the dogs were waiting, leashed and dragging their leads, shivering with the excitement of it all.

An Asian woman with a large white dog was coming up the stairs to the beach as Rima and the dachshunds went down. The woman spoke and the white dog halted to let the little dogs go by. The woman spoke again. In labored English, as Rima passed, she was explaining that she would be gone all afternoon, but that there would be another walk before dinner. It made Rima wonder. She was, after all, talking to a dog. Why not use a language in which she was fluent to do so?

Rain dripped from Rima's hat, soaking the shoulders of her jacket. The sea was the dull color of iron. The Monterey Peninsula was hidden behind a wall of cloud; the seam between sky and water blurred as if it had been penciled in and then badly erased. At the shallow edge of the water, sandpipers drilled for whatever it was sandpipers ate. A pelican flew across the waves so low the tips of its enormous wings dipped into the water like oars. Rima knelt down and let the dogs loose.

She turned and took her first daytime look at Wit's End from the outside. It was painted in white and Nantucket blue. Shingles like fish scales covered one wall, and a row of gold shells was pressed into the roofline along the eaves. A round cupola with a whale weathervane. Rima found the window to her own room, the blinds halfway down. Below, off the second floor, was a porch looking out to the ocean. If the weather was warm, Rima thought, if it were Rima's house, she would sleep on that porch sometimes.

There were only two other people on the beach—a woman in a green hooded sweater, hood up, and a man in an orange slicker who turned out to be Animal Control. There was a leash-free beach up the coast, he told Rima, more in sorrow than in anger, but this was not it. He wrote out two tickets, one for each dog. As the rain hit the paper, the ink spread. There was no way Rima would be able to read them.

Rima had a number of reasonable points to make.

She was from Cleveland and hadn't known about the leash laws. [The beach was posted. All she had to do was read the signs.]

Who were they bothering? The beach was practically deserted. [The law was pretty straightforward on this matter. There weren't a lot of clauses.]