Wit's End (19 page)

Call Rima crazy, but if she confessed to writing letters to dead people and signing them “humbly yours, Maxwell Lane,” she doubted that her courageous honesty would be the thing people noticed.

Martin wanted Rima to come to the movies with him. There was an old-fashioned drive-in down in Capitola, one of the few left, and
Borat
was playing, and
Borat
was awesome. Martin had seen it twice already. When Rima said she was too tired, Martin took his duffel and drove home.

She started to clear the table, but Tilda told her not to, said it sharply, said that Rima should go to bed, given she was so very tired. Clearly Martin would surely have stayed the night if Rima had been nicer to him. Probably he'd packed a bag hoping this would be the case. Probably Tilda, unhappy when she thought Rima was sleeping with Martin, was now unhappy that Rima wasn't.

The wind was rising sharply, filling the hush of the earlier evening. It whistled about the eaves. Rima went to her room, turned on her laptop, planning to connect the phone line, but then, all of a sudden, an unsecured wireless network, Unchained Melody, manifested like a ghost on the screen. It must have belonged to one of the neighbors, blown here by the wind.

Rima connected quickly, checked her e-mail, which was all spam, but you could hardly blame her friends for this. She was the one who'd spent the last week being unresponsive.

Then she googled Holy City and suicide. The only thing that came up was the Wikipedia site:

“Holy City promised a world of perfect governance. A sign welcomed all visitors. ‘See us if you're contemplating marriage, suicide, or crime,' it said.” Rima clicked on the link and saw that the sentence concerning Maxwell Lane had already been removed.

She googled Holy City Art Glass. According to its own website, the company occupied the corner where the Holy City post office had once stood. Andrew Sheridan was listed as the artist and owner. He'd recently done a series of windows based on Celtic runes. Rima saw the spaces where these windows should have been displayed, but before the pictures could load, the wireless connection disappeared and she was left with the Art Glass website and the blank spaces. The bottom of the screen showed an ad for eHarmony. Now I'm meeting people that really get me, the ad said.

Rima moved her laptop about, on her knees and off, a foot to the right, a foot to the left, searching for Unchained Melody, but it was gone.

She shut down and got ready for bed. Off in the distance there was an odd sound, like someone blowing over the top of a bottle, but very regular, every ten seconds or so. Rima wondered whether it was a foghorn, and if so, where. She had no sense of how far away it might be.

She pulled the comforter up so that it covered her mouth. The clock chimed the half-hour. She couldn't sleep. She might have stayed on the computer if the connection hadn't failed. She was tempted to get up, see if she could find it again. She would have liked to look for a website that discussed Maxwell Lane's history. This information had been spread out over many books, but surely someone had gathered it all together.

It was too cold in the room to leave the covers. So she tried to assemble the facts herself, from memory and as a soporific, like counting sheep.

Fact number one: Maxwell Lane had certainly grown up in a cult.

Five of the A. B. Early mysteries involved murders that took place within cults or communes.
Ice City
was one of those five. Addison began to write in the late sixties and to publish in the early seventies, when murderous cults were a more ordinary part of the zeitgeist, especially in California. Because of his upbringing, Maxwell Lane was often called in when cults were involved. He was a cult specialist.

But Rima saw little to suggest that Maxwell's cult was based on Holy City. Fact number two: It wasn't a compound in the mountains. It was a farm property, an almond grove on CA-128, halfway between Davis and Winters, wherever that was.

Fact number three: It wasn't a celibate, white supremacist cult.

When Maxwell was sent by the FBI to infiltrate it, he discovered that it was operating under the command of a South Korean corporation that was dedicated first to making unholy amounts of money and second to replacing the U.S. federal government with a foreign religious theocracy in which salvation was spread through sexual relations.

Fact number four (and most important): The cult Maxwell Lane grew up in seemed to be run by truly dangerous and competent people. In contrast, Holy City under Father Riker, in everything Rima had read and in everything Addison had told her, seemed like a version of the KKK in which the first two K's stood for Keystone Kops.

Six people had gone to jail on Maxwell's testimony (and none of them ever knew it was Maxwell who put them away), but these were his neighbors, friends of his parents, people who'd made him cookies when he was a child and babysat him. They were, none of them, the people he'd wanted to get. They were none of them anything but dupes and dopes. And they were, most of them, people who loved Maxwell.

Maxwell had cooperated with the FBI because they'd suggested that the cult was responsible for his mother's death first, and then later his father's. He'd never found any evidence of this. They'd also assured him they were after the big fish. Their decision to prosecute only the underlings came as an abrupt change of heart. It seemed to coincide with the prophet/mastermind's buying a newspaper whose editorial pages could be counted on to support conservative causes and Reagan's taking the presidency. (It was a puzzle to Rima how anyone could have missed the fact that Addison was a hippie liberal. But maybe if you hadn't read
all
the books.)

This explained Maxwell's usual state of mind, which was, simultaneously, that of the betrayer and the betrayed. Although he occasionally reopened the case of his parents' murders, or the file he still kept on the cult leaders, there'd been just enough progress over the years of his career to make some readers worry that the series would end with Maxwell's assassination. Surely even Addison wouldn't be that cruel.

Rima had lost track of what number she was on. The wind sawed at the shutters, which drowned out the clock in the hallway. Her door creaked open. She heard footsteps in the room, fast, light, and too numerous to belong to only two feet. Berkeley whined to be lifted into the bed, where she burrowed under the covers until Rima felt a wet nose against her ankle, the heat that radiated from Berkeley's little body. Soon Berkeley was snoring the snores of the innocent.

In the morning, Rima would have said that she hadn't closed her eyes the whole night, if this hadn't been contradicted by a clear memory of having sex with Maxwell Lane. The sex was powerfully satisfying even though Rima had slept through it. Compared with some of the bewildering people (him? really?) Rima had previously had satisfying sex with in her dreams, an entirely made-up man like Maxwell was a catch. Now I'm meeting people that really get me, Rima thought.

T
hat morning, Cody and Scorch invited Rima to go with them to Steamer Lane, a world-famous surf spot. Cody needed to observe the short-board surfers for his term paper on primate behavior. The surfers at Steamer Lane, Cody said, were the most territorial pricks you'd ever hope to meet. But wicked good, and Rima should come along to see them. There was a great view from the cliff above, and always an audience.

Rima could tell that she was being asked only as an afterthought, simply because she happened to be at the table when they were leaving. There was an awkwardness about the invitation. Rima, who rarely wished to leave her room, who'd forced herself into the routine of joining them for breakfast as a sort of unpleasant medicine you took to get better, was a little hurt to think they might actually prefer if she didn't come.

“Cody surfs,” Scorch said.

“Wicked bad,” said Cody.

Rima said yes to punish them for not wanting her along if they didn't want her along. If they did want her along, then she was saying yes only to be polite. She was so much older than they were. There was no reason for them to want her company.

She wondered exactly who would be her age. Most twenty-nine-year-olds hadn't buried their whole families. So how old was she? It was no easier to calculate than the ages of fictional characters.

Rima went upstairs for her shoes and remembered that Martin had cut the laces in her sneakers. Every morning she remembered this, and every morning she planned to buy new shoelaces, and every morning she forgot to do so. So she'd have to wear her pumps. They had a low, thin heel, all wrong for walking in sand, or anywhere else.

Rima half expected to run into Pamela Price now every time she went out. She wasn't frightened, not in the daylight, but it would be good to have Cody around if Pamela showed. Cody was a big guy, even if not a scary big guy.

She climbed into the backseat of Scorch's car and they wound their way through town, past the boardwalk, past the statue of the unknown surfer, who Cody said really should be Hawaiian but wasn't. There he stood, his board upright, his hair curly, his very straight back to the ocean, and just beyond him, a parking lot beside a lighthouse, where they left the car. This was not the tiny lighthouse close to Wit's End, but a larger one, and it wasn't a lighthouse anymore; it had become the Santa Cruz Surfing Museum. It was situated on a grassy point with the ocean on both sides and the wind slashing about.

The museum was closed for the day, which was a shame, Cody said, because there was a lot of good stuff in there, especially about the battle between Santa Cruz and Huntington Beach for the title of Surf City. “It should really be Santa Cruz,” Cody said loyally. “The first surfing outside Hawaii was right here, right at the river mouth.” The fight for the title had been a long one, involving the courts and the legislature up in Sacramento. Rima had never pictured surfers so litigious. Territorial pricks indeed.

There was a beach on one side of the point, and a large rock straight off it, covered with cormorants, pelicans, and sea lions. The sea lions were barking. It made a nice change from the high-pitched dachshunds.

Holding her hair back with one hand, Rima read an informational marker that showed the line of the coast all the way up to San Francisco. Although she'd seen the curves of Monterey across the water almost every day now, she felt she'd never completely understood that Santa Cruz was on a bay. There was nothing bay-like about the large waves of Steamer Lane. The cliffs were a tumble of rocks, and it looked to Rima as if here was the place a ride would end, and end badly.

A three-foot-high restraining grille ran along the cliff edge. Beyond the grille was a sign saying that since 1965, ninety-two people had drowned along the coast.

Beyond the sign, two boys in baseball caps were smoking something that had to be passed from cupped hand to cupped hand. They couldn't have been any older than middle school. Kids in middle school were very self-absorbed, in an I'm-an-immortal-with-bad-skin-so-don't-look-at-me kind of way. They probably hadn't even stopped to think how someone like Pamela Price could come up right behind them and give them a push.

The air was cold and the sun bright. There were maybe twenty wetsuited surfers in the glittering water, and at least a dozen spectators watching from above. One of the surfers was an old man with white hair and a long white beard. He looked like Santa Claus in a wetsuit, if Santa Claus ever got himself seriously into shape.

Cody found a spot along the railing. He'd brought binoculars, and occasionally he pointed to something, gave Rima the binoculars to look. She never knew what she was being shown. She trained the binoculars on the waves themselves, the explosion of white, the sculpted curve, which magnified like this had facets like a jewel.

“What an asshole,” Cody said. Apparently he could see assholery even without the binoculars, while Rima, with them, could not. She gave the binoculars back. A surfer stood, went down. Another paddled to catch a wave that slipped from beneath her board. Rima saw several rides that defied belief. Who would look at the ocean, the crashing surf, and think, I bet if I had a plank I could stand up in that? Rima added surfing to her list of heroic firsts. The first person to swan-dive. The first person to eat an artichoke. She watched the surfers, all of them dressed like seals, rising and falling in the water.

Eventually she tired of awesome athletics, as one inevitably does. The wind whipped her hair against her cheeks, and the light was too bright. She went to sit on one of the nearby benches, but there were words carved into the seat and back; she ended up reading it instead.
Mark David Alsip. Sit on a happy bench.
This last sentence was punctuated with happy faces.

There were several more annotated benches. Rima worked her way down the sidewalk, reading them all.

In Memory of Ron MacKenzie. He Knew How to Keep Christmas Well.
Illustrated with holly. The cliff was one long, copacetic graveyard.

A hand on her shoulder made her jump, but it was only Scorch. They left Cody at the railing and walked across the curve of West Cliff Drive into Lighthouse Field State Park. Over here the ecosystem was completely different. On one side of the road, gulls and kelp. On the other, crows, eucalyptus, and pine.