Wit's End (22 page)

The only part of this letter that Rima jotted down took the form of a promissory note. “Perhaps when we know each other better,” Constance said, “I'll share some of my own sleuthing with you. Some old business from the old days. Think the professional perspective might prove helpful.”

 

 

T
he second letter had been mailed shortly after the publication of
Below Par.

Rima heard the doggy commotion that meant Addison had come in from the studio. She put the letters she'd read back in the box, and left the unread ones on the bed. Washed her hands and went downstairs to conduct her first interview.

The fog had rolled up neat as a rug, and there was water all about the base of the birdbath. The sun was shining through the fig-tree window onto the wood table and Rima's hands. She was peeling an orange with her fingers. Nothing prettier than an orange in the sun. Addison had made herself a sandwich with leftover steak and was dipping the bread into the leftover soup. Her hair haloed her head as if she'd spent the morning running her hands through it, desperately searching for
le mot juste.
“I think we've all gone completely mad,” she said. “I think we're suffering a nationwide psychosis.”

This was surely a response to something in the political landscape. Rima didn't disagree, but she didn't allow herself to be diverted either. “Is the dollhouse for
Ice City
out in your studio?” she asked. She didn't mention her father, because her father was what she really wanted to know about. Maxwell Lane recommended this tactic. He called it coming in sideways.

“That one went in the earthquake. Along with
The Hat He Left Behind
and
Our Last Three Days.
The bookcase crushed them.”

“I was just wondering which murder you put in the dollhouse. You remember the first one, with the whistling man?” Rima asked.

Addison looked up. Her sandwich dripped onto her plate. Tick, tick, tick. Tick, tick, tick, went Stanford's hopeful tail, hitting the table leg.

“Did you get the idea for that from a real case?” Rima didn't need Scorch to tell her how unlikely it was she'd get an answer. She'd read enough A. B. Early interviews. But Maxwell recommended asking some questions you knew wouldn't be answered. He called this upsetting the balance.

“Maybe,” said Addison. “Could be. I don't remember. Why?”

“Constance Wellington,” Rima said. “In one of her letters she wrote something that made me think there'd been a suicide like that at Holy City. And she'd maybe told you about it. Told Maxwell about it. But I don't find anything on the Web.”

“Was this letter before or after she read
Ice City
?”

“After. But there might be something from before, too. I haven't been through all her letters yet.”

Addison took a bite of her sandwich, chewed, swallowed. Stanford's tail moved faster. He was starting to whine, quietly, as if he knew he shouldn't, he knew the pointlessness, the hopeless-ness of it all, but was unable to stop himself. “Constance was a strange bird. I mean, everyone in Holy City was strange. But most of them were also quite dim. Not Constance. Constance was sharp as they come.

“Not so great at separating fact from fiction, though. I don't think we can rely on her. Or me.” Addison tapped her temple. “Second law of thermodynamics. In today's performance, the role of entropy will be played by my very own brain. Oh, look!” She pointed suddenly across the table and out the window. “Humming-bird,” she said.

Rima turned. The leaves of the fig shifted in the breeze.

“Gone now,” said Addison. “Sometimes I can pull things back to the surface. Up from the muck. I'll let you know if that happens.” She took another bite of sandwich. Stanford's whine grew louder. Rima nudged him quiet with her toe. The effort of not whining made him quiver. He began to whine again.

Rima finished peeling the orange. She separated the sections with her sticky fingers, laying them out on her plate in a fan. Maxwell Lane recommended doing something with your hands so you seemed a little distracted. Also, he said, people talk differently if you're looking at them from the way they do if you aren't. Sometimes you need the one, sometimes the other.

Don't you be the one to fill the silences. Don't you be the one to get uncomfortable because nobody is talking. And go ahead and let the suspect ramble. You learn a lot, Maxwell said, when you figure out why one thing has led to another.

“Riker had a son,” Addison said, “from one of his earlier marriages. Bill Riker. He joined the Navy during the war, never had much to do with his father. But one day he was jumped in a bar in San Jose. Bones broken. And nose. The police found him by following the trail of blood. He said it was his father's men, trying to force him into Holy City, but he wouldn't identify anyone. He said they'd kill him if he did.

“There probably was a suicide in Holy City. I wouldn't be a bit surprised. They had everything else. Back in the twenties Riker was accused of murdering an ex-wife and burying her in quicklime. Not true, as it turned out. He'd never cared enough about the ex-wives to even take the bother of divorcing, much less murdering them.”

Outside, the gate creaked open. The dogs raced to the kitchen door, Berkeley scrambling up and over Stanford to get there first. Through the window, Rima saw Tilda, bags of groceries (reusable cloth bags of groceries) in her arms. Tilda passed behind the screen of yellow leaves.

Addison rose to go to the stove, put the teakettle on. “Bill Riker sued for the land in the fifties. Argued that his father was incompetent and likely to just give it away. Which is exactly what happened, but he lost the court case anyway. Disappeared, then took off to Seattle, people said. There was a time I wanted to meet him.”

“Which?” Rima asked. “Father or son?”

“Son. I did meet the father, remember? At the Fill Your Hole confab.”

Maxwell would have managed things so as to keep an eye on Addison's face even while appearing not to be looking. Rima was too late for this complicated and delicate maneuver. Addison at the stove was a back-view Addison. “I still wonder about him from time to time,” she said. The burner gasped into flame.

“Was that for a book?” Rima asked. “You wanting to meet him? Was that research?”

“Everything a writer does is research,” Addison said. “Every breath you take.”

Tilda came in, stamping her shoes clean. “My god, what a beautiful day! I would have stayed and hiked, but it's all mud.”

“They really weren't nice people up there,” Addison said. “Even Constance. Is my point.”

“Who?” asked Tilda.

“The gang that couldn't shoot straight. Holy City.”

Rima got up to help put the groceries away. She emptied one of the bags—tangerines, green olives, Irish oatmeal, and Goldfish crackers—all the things she liked best to eat. Rima's appetite had not been good since she'd arrived. She thought she was hungry, until someone put food in front of her and then it turned out she wasn't. She realized that, without asking or saying a word, Tilda had figured out how to cook for her.

Rima was incredibly touched by this. She felt something else, something she hadn't felt in so long it took her some time to recognize it. What she felt was mothered.

Maxwell never took notes during an interview, because he never wanted it to look like an interview. But he did make time as soon as possible after to write things down.

Rima's notes, made later that afternoon, read:

“Question leads to Bill Riker (son) and lyric from Police. Rest of song:
Every move you make, I'll be watching you.
Possible connection? Warning?

“Addison not so interested in senior Riker—just a dime-store hustler. More interested in the others. Why did they join the cult? What did they get out of it?”

(You join a cult, Addison had said, and people around you start doing crazy things, only no one reacts as if they're crazy. When there's no one from the outside, providing perspective, then you lose track of where the line is. Someone tells you to go beat a man half to death and you do it.)

Rima wrote: “What Addison wants to know: Were they all crazy first and that's what brought them to HC? Or could any of us be led there, step by step?”

“Check out
Ice City
,” Rima wrote. So maybe Addison didn't remember everything about writing that book. But to the best of Rima's memory, what she'd said about cults and craziness was very close to what Maxwell had said. Maybe something could be learned from that context.

Tilda had noted that you saw the same thing sometimes when you were on the street. “Speaking of crazy,” she'd said. She'd made her usual tea and come to sit at the table, stirring, stirring, stirring while the steam rose from the cup. She had a high color from being outdoors. She glowed with health. Or else drink. Hard to tell one high from another.

“Morgan's been picked to be part of another research project.” She'd turned to Rima. “Morgan's a local serial killer. Sexual predator. He went on a yearlong spree that left about twenty mutilated bodies behind. All of them sexually molested. Bitten in the face, and then held underwater till they drowned. They finally caught him in Elkhorn Slough.”

There'd been evidence, Tilda had added, of a second killer, a copycat who'd disappeared without a trace. Now Morgan had been outfitted with radio transmitters and trained to dive for food.

“Morgan is a sea otter,” Addison had told Rima quietly. “The victims were all seal pups.”

“Didn't I say that?” Tilda had asked.

It was like a novel by Thomas Harris. As written by Beatrix Potter. Apparently Morgan had been rescued by the Monterey Bay Aquarium as a youngster. He'd spent seven formative months in the rehabilitation facility before being released to begin his reign of terror. The case of the murdered seal pups had been solved by eyewitnesses. Still, it took a year to recapture him, and then he spent several months in solitary until the research was proposed.

“Same question, really,” Addison had said. “I mean, these behaviors are unnatural. I gather they're unheard of. So probably there was something every little otter needs—some sort of feedback or modeling or something—which the humans couldn't provide.

“But maybe he was abandoned by his mother because he was just wrong from the get-go. Maybe he looked like an ordinary otter to people, but the other otters, they knew better.”

All of this was represented succinctly in Rima's notes:

“Very bad otter.”

A
ddison went upstairs to take a nap. Tilda was in the laundry room. Rima knew because she heard the dryer door slam, the motor start. Rima finished her tea. The song from the Police was running incessantly through her brain.
Every yard you rake, every cake you bake.
She thought she should get right on those notes before she forgot the details of what had been said.

She was waylaid on the second floor by the sight of the idle computer. Her first stop was Scorch's blog, which had been friend-locked. Maybe this was a good thing. Rima wouldn't know what, if anything, was being said about her and her little breakdowns, but neither would anyone else, beyond the small and select circle of Scorch's two hundred twenty-seven friends.
Every friend you make, every hand you shake.

Rima went then to Addison's blog. Several new pictures of the dachshunds had been added, so the load took its sweet time. It was the genius of owning dogs that Addison could post regularly and with a casual familiarity while revealing nothing about herself. A glamour shot of Stanford appeared, gazing out a rain-streaked window. Below this was a flirty shot of Berkeley shaking a small stuffed mouse. Stanford in a sweater. Berkeley watching the figure skating on ESPN Classic.
Every day you wake.

Rima noticed considerable recent action in the forums. Given the length of time since Addison's last book, she thought this surprising. There had been talk of another movie, maybe Colin Farrell as Maxwell Lane. Perhaps there'd been some movement with that.