Wit's End (6 page)

She was staying in the house just there on the bluff behind her. She would probably have to drive to the leash-free beach, whereas this one was just down a flight of stairs. [Most of the people who used the dog beach had to drive to it. Did she know how expensive beachfront property here was? You would never buy a beach house on a ranger's salary, that was for sure. What was the address again?]

The dogs belonged to the famous writer A. B. Early. Had he heard of A. B. Early? [He had not. But he recognized the dogs. Last time they were on the beach, he'd let them off with a warning. Evidently, this had not had the desired effect.]

Had he heard of Maxwell Lane? A. B. Early wrote the Maxwell Lane books. [No shit. He had just watched that Maxwell Lane show on television last night. That was an hour of his life he'd never get back again.]

He handed her the limp tickets and left. By this time the dachshunds were back on their leashes, a development that startled and displeased them. The whole time Rima had been talking, they'd been circling her legs in some anxious, angry Maypole dance.

Soon she'd be unable to take a step. She leaned down to untangle them.

The woman in the hooded sweater came over. “Cool dogs,” she said. Her hood was sequined with drops of water, her nose red and chafed as if she'd been blowing it often. Rima put her age somewhere between forty and sixty. “Bummer about the tickets. Sometimes they crack down. Let me help.” She took the leashes out of Rima's hands, separated them, then passed Stanford's back and kept Berkeley's.

“It's okay,” Rima said, holding out her hand, but the woman merely smiled, led the way up the stairs. She continued through the gate, up the walk, under the fig tree. She stood back while Rima opened the door, and then, instead of handing Berkeley over, she pushed past Rima into the house.

“Hey,” said Rima. “Hey!” She dropped Stanford's leash and ran after her.

The woman was standing in the center of the kitchen, turning slowly, checking out the cabinets, the posters, the plants. She gave Berkeley's leash back to Rima. “Cool teas,” she said. Then she left the way she'd come, with Rima standing at the door to make sure she descended the stairs, then throwing the lock behind her.

Rima consoled herself that the woman had been inside for only a few minutes and unobserved for even less time. There was further consolation in having proved she'd been right all along, that walking the dogs was more than she could handle. She went upstairs to take her wet clothes off and go back to bed, where she belonged.

When she heard Tilda return, she went downstairs again. It was lunchtime now; Addison as well as Tilda was in the kitchen. The teapot was whistling, the windows sealed with steam. Tilda was cooking sausages. The radio was on—John Fogerty's “Walking in a Hurricane.” It was a cozy, fragrant, melodic scene. Rima wished she could leave it that way.

“Look at this.” Addison handed Rima the front page of the
San Jose Mercury News.
The headline Rima read, “Sea Lion Attacks Swimmers in SF Aquatic Park,” was not, in fact, the right headline. The headline Addison meant her to see was further down the page. “For Sale: Holy City (It Was Neither).”

Rima didn't know why she was being alerted to the sea-lion attacks. (Except who isn't interested in animal attacks?) Sometimes she could hear sea lions barking from her room. Obviously Santa Cruz had a lot of them.

She would have been even more puzzled by the Holy City story. If she'd read it, she would have found out that the asking price for Holy City was eleven million dollars. The property was one hundred forty acres in size, and the owners were three men in their eighties. Between the 1920s and the 1960s, Holy City had been home to a cult run by a man named William Riker. The
Mercury
described William Riker as a necktie salesman turned cult leader, noting that he'd run for governor four times but never been elected; been charged with bigamy, fraud, tax evasion, sedition, and murder but never been convicted. He'd died in 1969.

In the 1930s the cult had numbered three hundred or so, but this dropped precipitously when Highway 17 became the standard route to the beach. In the sixties, the property had passed briefly into the hands of an unnamed Hollywood musical director, who'd next sold it to a group of investors; and then, in 1968, the current owners had purchased it with the proviso that the eight surviving cultists not only be allowed to stay but also be paid either a thousand dollars a year for eight years or the equivalent in food, clothing, and shelter.

In the 1970s, hippies squatted in the abandoned buildings until they were evicted. The only going concern now was an art glass business. Riker's old farmhouse was one of the few buildings still standing, but the property boasted creeks, waterfalls, cliffs, and valleys as well as ten potential parcels for development. The owners would prefer to see it preserved as a park rather than go to housing.

All this was in the newspaper article. But Rima was intent on confession, and so the misunderstanding neither knew was a misunderstanding wasn't straightened out. Instead Rima described the morning's intrusion but briefly, without the added drama of detail.

What did she look like? Addison asked. Did she have red hair? Was she wearing an ankh necklace? There was a female fan who haunted the beach below, and once they'd caught her going through the garbage. Rima couldn't tell whether Addison was upset or not, or if so, how much. She wasn't looking at Rima, and some people didn't look at you when they were angry, but Rima didn't know if Addison was that sort. The radio station in the background identified itself as KPIG.

“Of course, anyone can buy an ankh,” Tilda said. “That doesn't mean anything.”

“She had a hood on,” Rima said. “I didn't see a necklace. Or her hair. She was only here a minute. Only here in the kitchen.”

“You shouldn't let strangers in the house,” Tilda said, as if this were something Rima needed to be told. The dogs, unusually for a mealtime, had made themselves scarce. Where were those tiny teeth when you needed them? Why was Rima the only one taking the fall?

Suddenly she remembered the tickets. The last memory she had of them was on the beach, the ink smearing in the rain. She hoped they were upstairs. She should go get them. Oliver was a great believer in delivering great wads of bad news all at once—his reasoning was that it was more thoughtful not to upset your mother repeatedly when you could do it all in a single go. Sometimes their mother would find out something he hadn't told her, and he would explain that he'd been saving it until he had more.

Rima rose, intending to go up to her room, check the pockets of her jacket and pants, see if she could produce the actual tickets. But Tilda seized her arm as she passed, swung her to face the corner.

Tilda's finger pointed into the tiny glassed-in atrium of the
Spook Juice
dollhouse. The murder weapon, the Brut Impérial Champagne bottle, lay under the ferns, cork intact, everything just as it should be. But the tuxedoed corpse was gone.

T
he missing corpse had a name. He was, he had been, Thomas Grand, undercover agent specializing in domestic terrorism, back before Waco, before Oklahoma City, before the Unabomber, back when middle-class white people hardly knew there was such a thing. Tilda and Addison discussed the advisability of calling the police.

Tilda was against it. There'd been two murders of homeless people during the time she'd been on the street, and the police hadn't solved either of them. All they'd done, as far as she could see, was make comments about the homeless, comments she could describe only as gratuitous. Tilda had no faith in the police.

Rima considered telling Tilda that only sixty percent of all reported murders are ever resolved (as distinct from solved, so Rima wasn't even sure what the statistic meant), but since she didn't know how she knew that and maybe it wasn't even true, she kept her mouth shut. Was sixty percent a lot or way too little? It apparently beat the success rate in other cases—rapes, muggings, thefts—all hollow.

Addison was also against making the call. This seemed to her the sort of story that would immediately make it into the paper and onto the Internet, where it would live forever. And not on some little site no one ever visited either; Addison could picture this in the day's AOL headlines. If they were willing to post “Airline apologizes to passenger. He couldn't hold it any longer,” then obviously there was nothing too low. Addison had lived much of her adult life faintly convinced that a large segment of the reading public and the entire news industry would be really happy if she died in some bizarre and puzzling way. She said that she'd put a watch on eBay, and proposed that they all start locking the doors even when someone was home.

They were interrupted by Kenny Sullivan, postman of myth and legend. Addison stepped out onto the walkway to tell him all about it, and Rima heard him promising to spread the word to the neighbors, with utmost discretion, of course. Possibly someone else had seen something.

Then the women sat together, eating the sausages, drinking the tea, and listening to the radio. Addison and Tilda assured Rima many times that none of it was her fault. They repeated this once too often; it lost its credibility.

Rima was amazed. A crime had been committed in the home of a world-famous mystery writer, and as far as she could see, nothing was going to be done to solve it. It occurred to her that she herself was the most likely suspect. A troubled young woman, new to the household, with an unlikely story, and offering only the vaguest description of the perpetrator.

“The best way to clear yourself,” said Maxwell Lane, “is to find the one who's guilty,” and if Rima were a world-famous mystery writer, then surely she would know how to go about doing that. If she were Addison, she would at the very least search Rima's room. Really, the only thing that could be said in Rima's favor was that she was too obvious.

Even minus Thomas Grand, Wit's End had no shortage of tiny corpses. Over the next few days Rima found:
The Box-Top Murders,
poison in the breakfast cereal;
One of Us,
rattler in the medicine chest; and
The Widow Reed,
weed whacker in the hedges.
The Widow Reed
was a particularly grisly dollhouse, bits of tiny gore on the leaves in the garden and on the flagstones of the walkway. Rima was ashamed to remember that this had been one of her favorites among Addison's books; she hadn't pictured the body quite so chewed. Addison had the
Widow Reed
dollhouse in the formal dining room.

What Rima didn't find: the dollhouse for
Ice City;
the tickets she'd been given for the leashless dogs; the first page of the onionskin letter.

She
had
managed to find another onionskin letter that appeared to be from the same woman:

And a postcard, handwritten and signed with the same name in the same hand. The script was New Palmer. Rima had no idea how she knew that. The postmark was July 6, 1976:

The picture was of a musical group identified in a cursive made of ropes and lassos as the Watsonville Cowboy Wranglers.

 

 

A
s for the
Ice City
dollhouse, there was still the whole second floor in which to look, and Addison's studio. But Rima decided to shortcut the process and asked Tilda outright if she knew where it was. “I can't ever keep straight which one goes with which book,” Tilda told her. “They're all just dust to me.”

“There would probably be a cat,” Rima said, which didn't help; Tilda claimed there were lots with cats, even though Rima had yet to find a single one. Tilda didn't appear to like the dollhouses or want to talk about them, so Rima didn't press her.

She wouldn't have asked Addison, though she couldn't have said why. Rima had expected that she and Addison would talk about Rima's father. It had seemed inevitable, in light of his recent death, that Addison would reminisce. Rima had steeled herself for this. Now that it wasn't happening, she longed for it. When she ate with Addison, there were lots of silences between them. They might have been awkward silences, or they might have been companionable. How did you tell the difference?

Addison's main mode of conversation was to tell stories. She was, as you would expect, quite good at it, but there was a polish, a sense of practice that, no matter how intimate the content, kept Addison behind glass. Tilda told stories too, and she was terrible.