Wit's End (17 page)

She stopped at a booth called Remote-A-Boats. This featured a miniature lagoon made of algaed water with some tiny islands, a lighthouse, and an inn called the Rusty Rooster. It was like something Addison might have made, if only there'd been a body somewhere. Rima felt the lack of one. She could see just where it ought to be floating, blood like a veil around it.

She turned right, went down a covered walkway, the beach a flat expanse seen now through a row of fat purple-and-yellow pillars. On the inland side of the walkway were a restaurant, a candy store, some shop whose windows were filled with carousel horses. Seaward, the sun came through the clouds in a great golden shaft. Lovely, but it made the day no warmer or brighter.

Two women sat at an outdoor table drinking coffee and discussing, presumably, a third woman. As she walked by, Rima heard one woman say, “She doesn't sparkle.”

And the other—“
You
sparkle.”

And the first—“
You
sparkle too.”

Rima felt a wave of sisterly solidarity toward the absent, unsparkling woman. This was followed by an image of Scorch, dancing in the black light of the bar, sweat and body lotion glittering on her bare shoulders. There'd been an undertone in Scorch's blog, maybe even in a few comments Addison had made, or maybe Rima had imagined it. You weren't supposed to love your brother more than anyone else in the world. Maybe in a Dickens novel you could get away with that, but not today. Not here at the start of the twenty-first century, when the whole world of MySpace friends lay before you. Rima's eyes began to sting and she had to wipe her nose.

She heard laughter. The entrance to Neptune's Kingdom was past a glass case that held an enormous, cacophonous automaton named Laffing Sal. Laffing Sal wore a green jacket and a dress with a ruffled collar. She had stiff red hair under a straw hat, freckles, and a tooth missing. Inside her glass box, Sal writhed and bellowed, and Rima could still hear that asphyxiated laughter after she had gone indoors and was listening to the added sounds of shooting from the arcade, old-school rock and roll on the speakers, and from somewhere undetermined, the screeching of parrots. Neptune's Kingdom couldn't have been noisier, even though there were only a handful of other people in it.

A mural stretching two stories covered the wall opposite Rima. In it a pirate stood at the base of an erupting volcano, the eruption artistically depicted in blinking red lights. Above her, a second pirate, another automaton like Laffing Sal, shimmied up and down a rope that hung from the ceiling. A third popped from a rum barrel like a jack-in-the-box.

Rima had that déjà-vu-all-over-again feeling. Neptune's Kingdom was ringed with arcade games and glass booths containing the heads of various fortune-tellers—Omar and The Brain and yet another pirate—but most of the first floor was taken up by an indoor miniature golf course. As if all that miniature golf lacked was pirates to make it nautical as hell.

It would be hard to imagine a more Oliver-type place. Rima decided to get a table on the second floor, above the battery of cannons. Her plan was to buy a beer and cry into it.

She reached into her back pocket for her wallet, which was not there. In her front pocket was a handful of change that fell considerably short of beer money. She had a faint hope that she'd left the wallet on her bed at Wit's End and not in the bar Saturday night, which was the last time she was sure she'd had it. This should have made crying easier, but now that she'd set the mood with miniature golf and pirates and volcanoes, the tears didn't come. Annoyingly, she felt better. Not sparkling, mind you, but not bad either. Not as bad as Oliver deserved.

Suddenly she realized why the scene beneath was unsurprising to her. In
Below Par,
Maxwell Lane had found the body right down there, right on hole seven, beaten to death with a golf club. (
Below Par,
Addison had said in interviews, had been a learning experience. Never title a book as if you were playing straight man to the reviewers.)

Rima added
Below Par
to the list of dollhouses she hadn't yet found. It would, of course, contain a miniature miniature golf course. If only a few more miniatures could be added! Rima had a momentary glimpse of infinity as a set of miniature golf courses, one inside another like nested Russian dolls.

She closed her eyes and someone came to stand beside her, which could have been Oliver but was Maxwell Lane instead. “I'm a good listener,” he said, “should you ever want one.”

On the pages of the A. B. Early books, Maxwell was a good talker too. Half of being a good listener is in knowing what to say to keep the talking going. But outside the books, listening was what Maxwell was best at. It didn't matter. Rima didn't feel like talking. She was just glad he was there. He stayed until she opened her eyes.

On her way back out she turned her pocket change into four golden tokens. She put one of them into Omar the Fortune-Teller. His eyes lit up like Christmas lights.
Omar sees great things for you,
he began. And then abruptly switched to
Coin Jam Error. Call for Service.

The fortune-telling pirate cost two tokens, but you get what you pay for. Rima put the tokens in, and the machine spit out a ticket.
A mountain is composed of tiny grains of earth,
it said.
The ocean is made up of tiny drops of water. Even so, life is but an endless series of little details, actions, speeches and thoughts . . . and the consequences whether good or bad of even the least of them are so far reaching. Patience and thought will show you the right way.

Rima's first reaction was that this was a lousy excuse for a fortune. Now she had no idea what was coming next!

Rima read her fortune again and more carefully. This second time through, she was struck by the images of sand and water, by the part about the little actions and thoughts. This second time through, the message seemed clear.

She had been making a special effort to be the one taking delivery when Kenny Sullivan dropped off the mail. This was made more complicated by wild variations day to day in the time the mail was delivered. Rima had never seen a postman so unpredictable.

Today she had forgotten. It would be just her luck if today was the day Maxwell's letter came back. It was probably already sitting on the entryway table, in front of the
Missing Pieces
dollhouse (woman strangled, tiny pieces from a jigsaw puzzle of the Egyptian pyramids scattered over her body).

Rima should go right home and get that letter before someone else did. Find her wallet. Find and pay those dog tickets. Stop feeling sorry for herself. Get things under control.

As she pulled into the driveway at Wit's End, a woman approached the car. “I know who you are,” the woman said. She was pale and thin, with a mole on her upper lip. Light brown hair, small, sharp incisors like a rat's. Stoned little eyes. Rima hadn't been a middle school teacher for nothing. The woman was maybe forty years old, but in California, who could tell? Might be fifty. It was the woman from the beach; there was no doubt in Rima's mind. I know who
you
are, Rima thought.

She locked the doors and raised the windows. “You need to return the doll you took, or I'll call the police,” she said. She pretended to be searching through the car for her cell phone. Rima hadn't had a cell phone since she lost her fourth one two years ago. There was just no point.

Not that sometimes you didn't really need one.

The woman didn't appear to notice her pantomime. She put her palm on the window by Rima's head. “You're Bim Lanisell's kid,” she said.

Now that Rima could see the woman's neck she revised her estimate of the woman's age. Definitely older than forty. “And you are?”

“Pamela Price. I'm sorry about your dad.”

“Give the doll back.”

And the woman smiled in a way that suggested her complete and enthusiastic cooperation. Then she walked off, down the slope of the drive toward the Pacific Coast Highway. By the time Rima made it inside, the woman was long out of sight.

Tilda was at the stove, stirring a pot of something or other. Her hair was pulled off her face by a black band, and she was flushed from the steam of whatever she was cooking. Rima could have identified it by smell as onion soup and red wine if her mind hadn't been on other things.

“Where's Addison?” Rima asked. “Are we still not calling the police? Because the woman who took Thomas Grand was just outside on the driveway.”

“Did she have red hair?”

“No.”

“Could her hair have been colored?”

“Who's Thomas Grand?” someone asked. Rima stepped farther in until she could see the breakfast table, where Martin was sitting, ignoring the cup of tea his mother had made for him. His feet were on his overnight duffel. “Are alcoholics allowed to cook with wine?” he asked Rima.

“Look who's here,” Tilda said gaily. “Look who came to surprise us.” She gestured toward Martin with her wooden spoon.

“We were just talking about you,” Martin said, and Rima didn't have to see the little flick of Tilda's shoulders to know otherwise. Sometimes when you enter a room, you kind of know you weren't being talked about.

None of this was to the point. “She knew my name,” Rima said, and then—since this wasn't necessarily true—“She knew my father's name. She left fingerprints on the car window.”

“You've watched too many cop shows,” Tilda said. “They're not going to break out the fingerprint kits for one tiny little missing corpse. Cooking removes the alcohol. All that's left is the flavor.”

“Dad and I sure didn't eat like this when I was growing up,” Martin said. “I don't remember many home-cooked meals.” Martin's father was a lawyer who had thrown Tilda out when she couldn't stop drinking, sued for and won sole custody of Martin, and then married a much younger woman. In a different kind of story, he would be a thoroughly unsympathetic character. In this one, he's quite a nice man.

“You should have dinner here tonight,” Tilda told Martin. “I can always throw another steak on. There's plenty.” She looked surprisingly motherly with her hair back, a spoon in her hand, and red meat at the ready. Even the snake tattoo could be a sort of Eve-in-the-garden, mother-of-us-all image, assuming you even saw it, which you couldn't just now, as Tilda was wearing a plaid shirt with long sleeves. No necklace, which was a shame.

“I could give the police a good description,” Rima said. “I was really paying attention this time.”

“Good for you,” said Martin. “Who's Thomas Grand?”

Tilda put down her spoon and joined him in the breakfast nook. She filled him in, pointing out the
Spook Juice
dollhouse, making note of the fact that it contained no body. When it had contained a body, she told him, that body was Thomas Grand. She was just getting to the heart of the story, the break-in, and doing Rima the courtesy of making her sound more imperiled than stupid—“Did I mention that Rima was here? Alone?”—when Martin waved her through to the end of it.

“Would that really be worth something?” he asked. “Just one of the bodies all by itself? What would a whole dollhouse go for?”

“I'd pay you to take the lot of them,” Tilda said.

Rima heard the sizzling sound of soup boiling over. Tilda leapt to the stove, and there was some brief excitement concerning broth and flames. When everything was quiet and the room filled with the smell of burnt onions, Rima spoke. “Okay, then,” she said. “Did I mention that the woman told me her name was Pamela Price?”

“Good to know,” said Tilda, fussing with the stove dials.

“Pamela Price.”
Rima looked from Tilda to Martin. Nothing.

Was she the only one who read the books that Addison took so much trouble to write?

“Who's Pamela Price?” Martin asked.

“A character in
Ice City.
”

“So. Probably not her real name, then,” Martin said, just as if Bim Lanisell was no one's real name. He sounded disappointed. Rima could think of no reason why any of this should be a disappointment to him.

He rubbed his fingers over the little scrap of hair above his chin, and Rima suddenly remembered the name for a beard like that. Soul patch. She couldn't imagine why. “Is Pamela Price a good character or a bad character?” Martin asked. It was clear which answer he expected.

The woman Rima had encountered on the beach and by the car was considerably older than the character in the book, and had made no obvious effort to look the part. Nor had she bothered to look like someone who might at some point in the past have looked the part. Pamela Price was a bottle blonde, a plastic woman with lush curves and a pink complexion. The woman from the beach was gaunt, with bruised eyes and skin so thin she was practically blue.

It seemed to Rima that Pamela Price was an odd character to choose of your own free will to be. She was
Ice City
's Miss Scarlet, a tired flirt with an eye for Bim Lanisell. Bim discovered the limits of her infatuation when he tried to use her as an alibi.