Wit's End (31 page)

A single chair, upholstered in a fabric that might once have been flowered, remained dead-center in the room. The seat cushion was gone, and one of its springs was sprung. Newspapers were piled next to it, tall enough to make a sort of table; a Starbucks paper cup was on the top. Rima stepped toward this, the room darkening around her as she narrowed the light toward the papers. There was the
Good Times,
the one with the article about male beauty. And underneath but not covered, a recent
Sentinel,
the one with Addison's picture.

Rima's heart was racing before her mind could catch up. I shouldn't have come, she was thinking, and even as she formed the thought, she heard footsteps in the entryway leaves behind her.

She turned.

The living room light came on.

Pamela Price stood between her and the way out, and she was holding the keys to Addison's car. Rima had no memory of having left those behind. This is the way car keys get lost sometimes, when you let yourself start thinking of other things instead of tracking their every movement—now I'm taking them out of the ignition, now I'm putting them in my pocket, and so on.

Pamela Price was dressed in a long coat, with an even longer nightgown showing at the hem. She had UGG boots on her feet, of a light and dirty blue. Her hair was loose and uncombed, tangled above one ear. Rima watched her put the hand with the keys in her coat pocket and keep it there.

“I was expecting A. B. Early,” Pamela said. “Is she with you?”

“Yes,” said Rima. She didn't have enough breath, and her voice sounded nothing like her voice. “She's waiting in the car.” Don't engage with the stalker, Addison would have said, but perhaps, since she'd broken into and entered a house that was not hers, the usual rules didn't apply.

“No, she's not,” Pamela said. Rima's score for the day on lies well told remained at zero.

Rima made a list of reasons she shouldn't be scared. No one knew she was here. No one would miss her until morning, and then they wouldn't know where to look. This wasn't the list she wanted.

She tried again. Pamela appeared quite sane, if a little sleepy. And maybe Addison had one of those OnStar systems. That would be money well spent. Tilda and Addison would be getting up, six, seven hours from now. Where did Rima go, they would ask each other, and discover that her bed hadn't been slept in, that the car was gone. Addison would call the OnStar company, and they would find the car in minutes. All Rima had to do was make small talk with the stalker for seven or eight or nine hours until help arrived.

“I didn't mean to wake you,” Rima said. “I didn't think anyone would be here.”

“Oh.” Pamela waved her hand dismissively. “I don't sleep. Don't even worry about that. I really wanted to talk to Early.”

“How about coffee tomorrow?” Rima said. “I could set that up.”

“I planned on here. I have it all planned out. Like a scene from one of her books. I'll show you,” Pamela said. She came toward Rima, which meant that Rima backed up, but not fast enough;

Pamela had Rima's sleeve in her hand. She turned Rima away from the graffiti. The room had once been wallpapered, and some bits of this remained, purple-and-gold fleurs-de-lis with a faded patch where a picture might have hung, and in other places an earlier, striped pattern. Rima realized her flashlight was still on. She turned it off.

“There was a shelf right there.” Pamela pointed with her free hand. “Where the dollhouse was. I'll ask Early if she remembers the dollhouse. You be Early. Pretend I said that.”

“Do I get Thomas Grand back?” Rima asked.

“Not yet. Then I point to here,” indicating the faded patch, “and I say there was a picture of Father Riker with the globe here. ‘I know who you are,' I say.”

“Who am I?”

“Not yet. Now we go upstairs.”

Pamela was pulling on Rima's coat. Rima reached over and removed her hand. Pamela's fingers were much warmer than her own. Rima had begun to shiver. Something rattled in the dry leaves by the door. “I'm not going upstairs. Just tell me this part,” Rima said.

So Pamela told her the part about Riker's being Addison's father. Then she complained that she hadn't meant to say that yet; it was all coming out of order because Rima wouldn't go upstairs. Then she consoled herself that this here, with Rima, was just for practice anyway.

“How do you know that about Addison?” Rima asked.

The short answer was that Pamela had worked it out from the clues.

When she'd heard the story, it didn't seem to Rima so much that Pamela had put the pieces together as that Constance had outright told her. The only tricky part that Rima could see was that Constance had said it was Maxwell Lane that Riker had fathered. Which, in its own weird way, Rima guessed was true.

Pamela said that 1970 was not as bad a year as 1968, but it wasn't good. One day, after she'd had a fight with her mother, Pamela climbed out the window and hitched a ride into Chicago and from Chicago she got a lift all the way to Des Moines. She turned fifteen on I-80 in Wyoming, but she told the truck driver she was nineteen and he bought her a couple of beers for her birthday. Then she hooked up with a married couple who were on their way to San Francisco until they heard of a place in the Santa Cruz Mountains where the trees were big and the rent was free.

Pamela had lived in this very house for almost three months back then. If Rima would go upstairs with her—but Rima wouldn't (which, she had to be honest, was beginning to piss her off)—Pamela could show her the room she'd slept in, which wasn't the big bedroom, but more of a closet at the end of the hall. Riker was already dead when she arrived, but his things were still here. And there were four Holy City survivors—Elton Grange, Frank Mulligan, Paul Larson, and Constance Wellington—skulking about the place, all of them old and mad as Lear. At least it looked that way if you were fifteen and knew who Lear was. “I've always been a reader,” Pamela told Rima.

She couldn't say how many young people were squatting; the numbers fluctuated. Mostly there was only one other girl. Her name was Harmony, or
so she'd have people believe.
She and Pamela didn't really get along.

Pamela got to know Constance because they both liked mystery novels and Constance had stacks of them. Pamela was always ducking over to return one book and borrow another.

Constance thought what was going on in Riker's house was another cult, as if the old one were renewing itself, only with white and black people this time. She worried about Pamela, but it wasn't like that, Pamela said. There were a couple of older guys who sometimes said who should do what, but mostly they were all on their own.

Constance thought that Pamela was sleeping with them all, when she wasn't sleeping with anybody, except that, of course, sometimes you had to. It was in this context that Constance told Pamela about how Father Riker had made girls leave Holy City if they got pregnant. She'd given Pamela a couple of names, one of which was Marjorie Early—easy to remember, Constance had said, because of Marjorie Morningstar. Constance had given Pamela
Marjorie Morningstar
to read, but Pamela hadn't finished it; it seemed kind of 1950s. A. B. Early had just published her first book, and Pamela was the one who told Constance to read it.

“Does Addison know she's Riker's daughter?” Rima asked, and she knew the answer before she'd finished the question. Why else would Addison have the Holy City Santas up in her attic?

“Read the books,” Pamela said. “She's obsessed with cults and who joins them. I don't think she gives a fig about Riker. She's obsessed with her mother.”

The living room light flickered briefly and noisily, off and back on. “What did you do with Constance's letters?” Rima asked.

“I burned them.”

“Why?”

“So Early would know this isn't about blackmail. So there wouldn't be any evidence.”

Pamela had been trying to get Addison to Holy City for weeks now. She'd left clues everywhere—in the bookstore, online, in the mail. She expressed surprise that it was taking Early so long, great mystery writer like her. But at least it had given Pamela time to work out exactly what she wanted to say.

Rima had done a good job of keeping Pamela talking; she had maybe only seven hours to go now. It was clear that Pamela was willing to go on. The story of her life, she was just telling Rima, would make a great book. Recently, she'd started living mostly online, where you could be anyone you chose, a new person every hour if you wanted. It was a lot like being a writer, she guessed. She'd made up a lot of characters by now.

Rima found herself actually interested in how Pamela had gone from hippie squatter to queen of the chat room. But her hands and face were freezing, and she couldn't stay on her feet a moment longer. Some time ago, she'd stopped being scared. Pamela's demeanor was so reasonable. Her story so linear. It was hard to stay focused on how insane she was. “I'm exhausted,” Rima told Pamela, who said that she was exhausted too. Then she gave Rima back the keys. Just like that.

“All this just so Addison would tell you what she's got planned for Maxwell in the next book?” Rima asked. She and Pamela were walking together toward the door, and Rima didn't absolutely believe yet that she was being let go, even though the keys were in her hand and she didn't see how Pamela could stop her now, short of a brick to the head. She let Pamela through first, though. Better safe than sorry.

“Addison can do what she likes with Maxwell Lane,” Pamela said. “I trust her. I just said that in the chat room. That's who I was pretending to be at the time.” She pushed the door fully open. Rima was on the porch now, and could see the car down the slope of the yard.

“I just wanted her to see how I put the clues together,” Pamela said.

Then Pamela realized she'd left the light on. She went back to turn it off, because of global warming. While she was inside, Rima got into Addison's car, cranked the heater up high as a promise to herself, even though it was blowing only cold air at the moment. She drove away without waiting for Pamela to come out.

It occurred to Rima to wonder where Pamela was sleeping. She'd come not from the upstairs, where she said her old bedroom was, but through the front door, and she was already in her nightgown when she arrived. Rima had seen no car but Addison's. She supposed this was the way it would always be—the closing of one mystery would only open another. What was the point, really?

Are you happy now? she asked Oliver.

He was. It was much better than his own bench, his own rock. It was everything he could have hoped it would be.

The lights were on at Wit's End when Rima got home. Tilda and Addison were sitting in the breakfast nook, arguing with themselves and each other over whether the police should be called, and drinking oceans of calming teas. “Where were you?” they asked Rima angrily, and that touched her; it was so parental.

“Was it Martin?” Tilda said, and of course it was, though Rima had forgotten.

Sometimes a story is best told in the wrong order. “He's fine,” Rima said first off, and then went on to describe the call, the car, the tow truck. She didn't mention the big fight they'd had. She said nothing about Holy City and Pamela Price.

She avoided Addison's eyes. Rima was uncomfortable now that she knew so much more about Addison than Addison wanted her to know. Rima knew where Addison had come from. She knew whom Addison had loved. These were intimate things. It seemed rude to know so much about someone so private.