Wit's End (30 page)

“Constance wrote my father about a man who died here,” Rima said. “It was ruled a suicide, but she was really troubled about it. Do you know anything about that? The man's name was Bogan.”

“You name it, Holy City had it,” Andy said. “Arson, burglary, murder. During World War Two there was some quarrel about putting emergency fire escapes on the buildings. Where or how to put them. One of the residents beat another to death with an iron bar. I don't think the police were all that interested in what went on here. Constance said that Riker had an eye out for troubled young women. All that no-sex stuff was for everyone else.

“She wouldn't quite say so, but I think she'd come to see him as a sort of predator. He specialized in girls who had no one.”

Rima was a girl who had no one. She put this thought out of her mind as quickly as it had come in.

“He was a good-looking guy when he was young,” Andy said.

Martin snorted.

“Okay, you can't see it in the pictures. But he'd have recruitment meetings with free food during the Depression. That's why Constance came, because there was free food.”

Rima followed Andy and Martin up the steps. She stopped at the doorway. Her shoes were too muddy to go inside, but then so were Andy's and he hadn't stopped.

“Could I see Constance's letters?” Rima asked. This was the reason she'd come. Everything else, all the lies she'd told and made Martin tell had been to get to this question.

“See, that's the weird thing,” Andy said. He stood, blinking down at her. Light from the windows glinted off the green glass of the mermaid's tail, threw rainbows on the walls. “I gave them to this other woman who said she was a friend of Constance's. Just two days ago. The whole box. I helped her load it into her car.”

“Did this woman say who she was?”

“She said he”—motioning to Martin—“sent her. Older woman. Kind of wild-eyed. She said that she'd known Constance in the old days.”

By holding open the door, Rima had let a fly into the studio. She could hear it, bumping against the dusty windowpane, again and again.

“Frankly, she was more believable than you guys are,” Andy said pleasantly.

Martin told the story with great enthusiasm and in great detail at dinner. He did not forget to include: that someone had murdered someone else at Holy City in a disagreement over fire escapes; that we haven't gotten the full story on 9/11 yet and probably never will; that trees are boring conversationalists. There was very little left for Rima to add.

“Did I mention that I was pretending to be Maxwell Lane at the time?” Martin asked. He was teasing his mother, because he had not forgotten to say so; he had repeated this three times and counting. Granted, it was, along with the trees, one of the good parts.

Tilda had made scampi, rice pilaf, and broccoli amandine. Rima had never seen her as happy as she looked that night, listening as Martin talked with so much animation, and laughing whenever he wanted her to. Though she did pause for a sober moment to note that the way the towers had come down was more consistent with an explosive detonation than with an airplane crash.

“What did you hope to get?” Addison asked Rima.

“Constance's letters.”

“Why?”

Why indeed? Because that's what Oliver would have done, and the whole world can't change just because Oliver isn't here? “My father wrote her after I was born. I'd like to read that letter. And I was curious about the whistling man. Constance told Maxwell about him. You put him in
Ice City.
” Rima took a bite of shrimp and spoke around it. “Some of the letters she sent to Maxwell are missing.” She hoped the shrimp muffled any sense of accusation the observation might have contained. She would ask about the Santas later, sometime when it didn't feel like a piling on.

Addison responded by noting that cataloguing and curating were better left to the experts. UC Santa Cruz had a standing offer for her papers. They had also acquired a set of letters Ted Hughes had written to his mistress while married to Sylvia Plath. Hughes had made it clear before his death that he didn't want the letters made public. On the other hand, scholars were interested. Scholars, in Addison's opinion, were just gossips with degrees. She was waiting to see how the university would handle the Hughes collection before she made up her mind about her own papers. She said most of this aloud.

Tilda gave Berkeley a piece of broccoli, because you should be careful what you wish for. Berkeley took it off to the living room and hid it under a chair. For the next two days, until Tilda found it, Berkeley would snap at anyone who tried to sit in that chair. She didn't want to eat it, but that didn't mean it didn't belong to her.

“You know,” Addison said. “If I got that suicide from Constance, then I might have put the letters about it in with the
Ice City
papers instead of the Maxwell Lane ones. Tilda could get that box down for you. If you want. I mean, you still won't know any more than Constance knew.”

Things were so amicable between Tilda and Martin that he actually asked for a cup of tea. Tilda got up to put the water on. “What kind?” she asked.

“Surprise me.”

Tilda chose something caffeinated, something for staying awake. They'd eaten early, so that Martin wouldn't be on the road late, and now it was dusk, the light fading rapidly, the sunset colors turning gray. The day had been mild, but the night would be cold. At least the road had dried.

Addison chose a tea with chamomile for going to sleep. “I imagine”—she was dipping the tea bag in and out of her cup—“that if I'd thought it was a murder I would have contacted the police. Whatever Constance said, it can't have persuaded me.”

“Andy said the police just didn't care what went on in Holy City,” Martin told her. “Maybe you did contact the police and they didn't follow up.”

“I'm not that old. I'd remember that.”

It was the first snippy comment of the evening, and it passed without a ripple. Rima took a moment to congratulate herself for having brought this about. She was the one who'd invited Martin. She was the one who'd convinced him to stay the night. She was the one who'd dragged him to Holy City and made him pass himself off as Maxwell Lane so that he'd had a story to tell.

“So who did Andy give Constance's letters to?” Martin asked.

“Pamela Price,” said Rima. “Obviously. The wild-eyed, more-believable-than-us Pamela Price.”

In spite of the early dinner, Martin didn't leave until almost nine. He'd been strong-armed into taking the rest of the sherry cake home. The shrimp was gone, which made Tilda fret that there hadn't been enough, no matter how many times Addison and Rima told her otherwise. “It was a good dinner,” Addison kept saying. “A good evening. I liked that Martin. That relaxed Martin.” She went to her bedroom. She was in the middle of one of the biggest novels Rima had ever seen—something to do with magicians in the Napoleonic Wars, and Addison was anxious to see what happened next, if she could only manage to stay awake after all the sleepy tea she'd drunk.

Tilda rolled up her sleeves to reveal the snake's head, and Rima brought her the dishes to be washed. Then Tilda too went to bed. She hugged Rima when she said good night. It was a stiff, self-conscious hug, but Rima's was no better. They were both out of practice.

Rima sat for a while in the living room, Stanford on her lap. She didn't go upstairs, because she didn't want to wake Stanford and also because she wasn't tired. She fell asleep in the chair.

The phone rang. She picked it up and was speaking into it before she'd actually woken. “Hello,” she said, asleep, but frightened, because late-night phone calls are frightening things. Stanford was gone and she was staring at the crushed skull of the
Folsom Street
victim as she spoke.

The voice on the other end was Martin's. “Don't tell Mom,” he said. “I scraped the railing, and the front end is crap. And there's no cell-phone reception in the goddamn mountains so I had to walk about three miles before a car would pick me up. I'm at the Oakwood Saloon, down by the Los Gatos exit. The saloon is closed, but the guy who owns it is waiting with me. Could you come get me? There's a tow truck on the way, but they're coming from the Santa Cruz side. I said I'd meet them back at the car.”

Rima heard the clock in the hall upstairs chime the half-hour. “What's the exit again?” she asked.

She took the keys from the scallop-shaped dish. The tank was nearly empty, so she had to stop for gas. She saw Martin's car as she drove past. It had been either driven or dragged to the side of the road. The left headlight was smashed, and the driver's door was so dented that Rima doubted it would open.

It was past eleven by the time she found Martin. He was inside the saloon, having a draft beer with the owner. He'd bitten his lip, which was swollen and had turned many exciting colors. “Now I don't feel so sorry for you, bro,” the owner said, looking Rima over. “Now I think you maybe make up the crash.”

The very divider Martin had hit prevented them from crossing the highway to get to his car. They had to go past it in the wrong direction to an exit and then double back. By now it was eleven forty-five.

Martin was sorry for the inconvenience. He wasn't sorry for the thing he should have been sorry for, because he hadn't thought about Oliver, about what it might be like for Rima to get a call concerning an accident. Rima was furious. She knew it wasn't fair, but there it was. She could hardly look at Martin, him and his fat lip. How dare he drive so badly? “Were you drinking?” she asked.

“Not until after. Jeez. I'm not my mom.”

The tow truck was already waiting. Rima was working hard not to show how angry she was, because she didn't want Martin to think she minded coming to get him. She didn't mind that part at all.

A genial guy named Jerry loaded the car onto the truck. “I could make my whole living off the Seventeen,” he said. “Never work anywhere else.” He was wearing a Giants baseball cap and a filthy sweatshirt with greasy handprints on it.

And just like that, Rima stopped pretending. “Listen,” she said to Martin quietly, so Jerry wouldn't hear. “Don't come back to Wit's End unless it's to see your mother. That's all I care about, that you be nice to your mother.”

“So you don't want a little brother anymore?” Martin asked. It had taken Rima the whole way from Santa Cruz to get as angry as she was. Martin did it in an instant.

“Not one who can't drive,” Rima said.

Rima had to go in the wrong direction again until she was back at the Los Gatos exit and could turn around. Eight or nine cars passed her, most of them going much too fast. There was no shoulder to the road. It was a miracle Martin hadn't been hit while walking to the saloon.

Finally she was headed back to Santa Cruz. She drove all the way to Scotts Valley, and then an exit came up and she took it, made another flip around, headed back to San Jose. She got off at Redwood Estates. There was a large sign for the Estates, and underneath that a small sign that read “Holy City.” Inside Addison's glove box was a flashlight with the batteries still working. Some things are just meant to be.

The Old Santa Cruz Highway was as dark as dark gets on the California coast. There were no cars in the lot in front of the glass company, and no cars on the road either. Rima turned off the old highway and into the driveway behind the trees. She parked in front of the house with the peeling white paint. William Riker had lived here once, and after him, Constance Wellington. Rima dimmed the headlights and then switched them off.

She'd believed Andy when he said there was nothing to see there. Still, there could have been a box in a closet, a letter slipped behind the bathroom mirror and then forgotten. It would take only a short time to know for sure.

There were no stars overhead, so Rima assumed clouds she couldn't see. The air was damp, and she wished she'd worn her Cleveland winter coat.

She flicked the flashlight on and made her way up the sidewalk, up the steps to the front porch. The middle stair had rotted away and Rima narrowly avoided stepping through it. There was no bulb in the porch light, but she threw the switch anyway, because there is a larger world than Maxwell Lane allows for in his philosophies, and of course no light came on, because there was no bulb.

She directed the beam of the flashlight to the door. She tried the doorknob, which was locked. Above was a grid where nine panes of glass should have been. Two of these were cracked, four had been entirely removed. Rima reached through an empty space and unlocked the door from the inside. It was no warmer in the house than out.

The entryway was filled with dead leaves. Rima picked her way through them by the flashlight beam, nervous that they might be some sort of nest. On the entry wall, four holes suggested that a picture or a hat rack had been removed. Her light skipped over a dark stain shaped vaguely like a camel, as if someone had thrown a bottle of beer at the wall. Her feet uncovered something that might have been a condom had she looked more closely. Maybe just a plastic bag, but if so, very small. The place smelled of leaves and something else Rima could only assume were rabid bats.

This is another fine mess you've gotten me into, she told Oliver. The leaves ended and she was on the gritty surface of a wood floor. A few steps more and she found herself in what obviously had once been the living room.

She cast the light around, startled when it reflected brightly back at her from the black windows. The inner wall had been tagged with graffiti. She saw the initials PTC, fat and filled in, and under that someone literate had written, “Look on my works, ye mighty.” Someone else had written, “I heart Amelia,” in red marker.