Wit's End

by Karen Joy Fowler

  You and me, we’re both real quiet. My wife is always after me to talk more. She says, cat got your tongue and penny for your thoughts, until I tell her, baby, you don’t even want to know.

  I don’t solve mysteries, but I’ve done okay for myself. I own a gas station and bait shop that I got all on my own, nobody helped me with that, and now I’m saving for a boat. I get to live all year round in a place lots of people come for vacation. It’s all about saving your money and having a plan. Anyway, I just wanted you to know there is someone out there who “gets you.”

  Sincerely yours,

  Bob Cronin

  Ps. I read a lot of books when I was a kid, because it was a good escape, not because anyone ever encouraged me. I used to think the characters in them were real people. I know you’re not real, but you seem real to me. I think my life would be a good book and maybe even encourage other kids like me to make something of themselves. B.C.

  In pencil on wide-ruled paper:In the most boring house

  On the most boring street

  In the most boring town

  In the world.

  Dear Mr. Lane:

  I am ten years old and I can’t check your books out at the library, because they’re in the adult section. The adults where I live care a whole lot about what kids shouldn’t read. If there was ever a real murder here, they would just die! But surprise! I read you anyway, because I have my ways. What do you think about kids who are allowed to watch you on tv, but not allowed to read your books? I know a family like that!

  Respectfully yours,

  Amanda Chan

  In black ink, Eaton stationery:

  March 17, 1985

  Dear Max,

  I know you’re not ready to hear this yet, but you’re better off without her. She was never good enough for you and I’m not the only one who thinks so. You know what would make you feel better? Hair of the dog and fish in the sea. You tell A.B. Early that it’s past time you had a new girlfriend. You tell her that there are readers out there who care about you and want you to be happy. I mean, it’s really up to her, isn’t it? The rest of us, we can spend ten years thinking we have this great marriage and aren’t we the lucky one, didn’t we just do everything right? And then it turns out we don’t have a friend in the world our husband didn’t try to screw at some barbecue or back-to-school night, and no one said a word about it to us so we were the only one in town who didn’t know. Real life is no story; it’s just what happens. But you can be happy any time Ms. Early chooses. So it’s annoying when she doesn’t and I won’t keep reading your books forever if you’re always going to be so mopey. If I were in charge, I’d start with your mouth and keep you guessing about what’s coming next.

  You need me, but you don’t need to know my name . . .

  Rima supposed this fell into the category of inappropriate proposals. She hoped they wouldn’t all be so vague.

  The effort required to read the handwritten letters was getting to her, so she fished through the box for something typed. And found, on an onionskin paper so thin some of the periods were holes, the final page of a longer letter. The first thing she saw was her father’s name.

  someone else with motive and opportunity. So here it is—I just don’t believe Bim Lanisell would kill anyone. He always seemed like a pretty straight-up Joe to me. Think you got it wrong this time.

  Bet if you put poison on a cat’s claws for real, the cat would lick it right off, no matter how bad it tastes. Cats are very aware of their bodies. I know whereof I speak. I have twenty-two of them.

  Of course, all this assumes Ice City is a mystery novel. Can we be sure of that? Not clear from the cover. In a horror novel the cat could have acted alone. There is a larger world than you allow, Mr. Lane, and the truth you end up with often depends on where you are when you start. I knew your father about as well as anyone knew him. Not highly thought of today, but that much he had right.

  VTY,

  Constance Wellington

  PS. Joking about the cat, of course.

  Rima felt a friendly connection to this woman who thought her father had been falsely accused. She stirred through the letters, looking for the first page, but it didn’t surface and her hands became unpleasantly dusty. She put the box on the floor and went to wash up and get ready for bed.

  She thought that she’d look again for the first page tomorrow and maybe reread Ice City too, see if a case could be made for someone’s wanting to kill the cat. Of course, that still wouldn’t explain the other deaths, but murdering two people is not as bad as murdering three. And only the one with the cat was premeditated. Only the wife’s death was Murder 1.

  Rereading seemed like something she could manage. It wasn’t the same as reading, not when you’d read a book as often as Rima had read Ice City. You didn’t need to concentrate so much when you already knew a book backward and forward.

  It would be hard on Maxwell if she found out he’d been wrong all those years. He was already angsty enough. He was filled with angst. But her own loyalties had to lie with Bim; anyone would understand that.

  Chapter Four

  (1)

  Ice City,prologue

  A girl came to the house today claiming to be a reporter. She had dirty-blond hair and a sharp chin. She said she was doing a history of Camp Forever for the local-color section of the paper. People are interested in communes again, she said. It’s because of that mass suicide in Guyana.

  Then she took me quickly to the end of things, the events of 1963, the deaths, starting with my father’s. Who can blame her? What reporter doesn’t hope that every story will have blackmail, sex, and murder in it?

  I wondered for a moment if her interest was personal. I thought she might be Kathleen’s daughter. She had something of the look of that demented elf, Kathleen.

  I made her a cup of coffee she didn’t drink. I showed her a photograph of my father when he was a far younger man than I am now, and another of Brother Isaiah, a publicity shot with the sun lighting him up. I asked her, if there was a way she could live forever, would she? She didn’t answer.

  “Tell me about Maxwell Lane,” she said instead. “You were the one who hired him, right?”

  There was no way she could have known that.

  I used to get asked about Mr. Lane a lot. I had my answers back then, scripted them out and stuck to them. In my whole life, I never told anyone that I was the one who brought Maxwell Lane to Camp Forever.

  I’ve worked hard over the years to forget that simple fact. I told her she had it wrong, and then I showed her the door. Now I’m alone with the cold coffee and the smell of lavender perfume and cigarettes. Now there is nothing I can do that stops me remembering.

  (2)

  The next day it rained. Not a driving rain, but a steady drip, just loud enough for Rima to hear over the ocean when she woke up. She couldn’t remember her dreams, only that they’d been bad, and instead of feeling relieved the way most people get to do, waking from bad dreams, she was in a bad mood. Her real life was what it was—lonely, abandoned, all the wrong people around her. Nothing to be done about that. But there was no reason her dreams couldn’t still have been good. She decided to stay in bed until she was so hungry she couldn’t stand it anymore.

  The clock in the hallway chimed the quarter-hour, the half, the three-quarters. She heard the dogs once, barking their way down the stairs. Later, deep in the house, there was the muffled sound of a phone ringing. The clack of eco-friendly clogs in the hall. Three soft knocks on Rima’s door.

  The knocking was Tilda, brisk but apologetic. The phone had been Scorch. She had a terrible cold, or maybe the flu, there was something really nasty going around at school, and given the weather, she didn’t think she could walk the dogs. She was really sorry about it. The thing was that Cody couldn’t walk the dogs either, because he had an exam this morning, and Addison, of course, couldn’t be asked; she was already working. And Tilda had a dental appointment—living on the street was hard on y
our teeth—to which she was already late, and if she was much later she’d lose the appointment entirely but still have to pay for it and not be able to get another for weeks.

  The dogs would hate being out in the rain, but the only way to convince them of this was to take them. So would Rima mind too terribly? There was a rain hat she could use, hanging by the kitchen door, and plastic bags on the counter. “Just let them run around for a few minutes,” Tilda said, “and they’ll be cold and want to come back inside.”

  Rima thought that it was early in her relationship with the dogs for such responsibilities. Why, it seemed only yesterday they’d been hurling themselves against the bedroom door like little furry battering rams. What if they ran away? Plus this was a lot more active than the morning she’d planned.

  But there was no way to say no. Rima got up heavily, dressed, and went down to the kitchen, where Tilda was already gone but the dogs were waiting, leashed and dragging their leads, shivering with the excitement of it all.

  An Asian woman with a large white dog was coming up the stairs to the beach as Rima and the dachshunds went down. The woman spoke and the white dog halted to let the little dogs go by. The woman spoke again. In labored English, as Rima passed, she was explaining that she would be gone all afternoon, but that there would be another walk before dinner. It made Rima wonder. She was, after all, talking to a dog. Why not use a language in which she was fluent to do so?

  Rain dripped from Rima’s hat, soaking the shoulders of her jacket. The sea was the dull color of iron. The Monterey Peninsula was hidden behind a wall of cloud; the seam between sky and water blurred as if it had been penciled in and then badly erased. At the shallow edge of the water, sandpipers drilled for whatever it was sandpipers ate. A pelican flew across the waves so low the tips of its enormous wings dipped into the water like oars. Rima knelt down and let the dogs loose.

  She turned and took her first daytime look at Wit’s End from the outside. It was painted in white and Nantucket blue. Shingles like fish scales covered one wall, and a row of gold shells was pressed into the roofline along the eaves. A round cupola with a whale weathervane. Rima found the window to her own room, the blinds halfway down. Below, off the second floor, was a porch looking out to the ocean. If the weather was warm, Rima thought, if it were Rima’s house, she would sleep on that porch sometimes.

  There were only two other people on the beach—a woman in a green hooded sweater, hood up, and a man in an orange slicker who turned out to be Animal Control. There was a leash-free beach up the coast, he told Rima, more in sorrow than in anger, but this was not it. He wrote out two tickets, one for each dog. As the rain hit the paper, the ink spread. There was no way Rima would be able to read them.

  Rima had a number of reasonable points to make.

  She was from Cleveland and hadn’t known about the leash laws. [The beach was posted. All she had to do was read the signs.]

  Who were they bothering? The beach was practically deserted. [The law was pretty straightforward on this matter. There weren’t a lot of clauses.]

  She was staying in the house just there on the bluff behind her. She would probably have to drive to the leash-free beach, whereas this one was just down a flight of stairs. [Most of the people who used the dog beach had to drive to it. Did she know how expensive beachfront property here was? You would never buy a beach house on a ranger’s salary, that was for sure. What was the address again?]

  The dogs belonged to the famous writer A. B. Early. Had he heard of A. B. Early? [He had not. But he recognized the dogs. Last time they were on the beach, he’d let them off with a warning. Evidently, this had not had the desired effect.]

  Had he heard of Maxwell Lane? A. B. Early wrote the Maxwell Lane books. [No shit. He had just watched that Maxwell Lane show on television last night. That was an hour of his life he’d never get back again.]

  He handed her the limp tickets and left. By this time the dachshunds were back on their leashes, a development that startled and displeased them. The whole time Rima had been talking, they’d been circling her legs in some anxious, angry Maypole dance.

  Soon she’d be unable to take a step. She leaned down to untangle them.

  The woman in the hooded sweater came over. “Cool dogs,” she said. Her hood was sequined with drops of water, her nose red and chafed as if she’d been blowing it often. Rima put her age somewhere between forty and sixty. “Bummer about the tickets. Sometimes they crack down. Let me help.” She took the leashes out of Rima’s hands, separated them, then passed Stanford’s back and kept Berkeley’s.

  “It’s okay,” Rima said, holding out her hand, but the woman merely smiled, led the way up the stairs. She continued through the gate, up the walk, under the fig tree. She stood back while Rima opened the door, and then, instead of handing Berkeley over, she pushed past Rima into the house.

  “Hey,” said Rima. “Hey!” She dropped Stanford’s leash and ran after her.

  The woman was standing in the center of the kitchen, turning slowly, checking out the cabinets, the posters, the plants. She gave Berkeley’s leash back to Rima. “Cool teas,” she said. Then she left the way she’d come, with Rima standing at the door to make sure she descended the stairs, then throwing the lock behind her.

  (3)

  Rima consoled herself that the woman had been inside for only a few minutes and unobserved for even less time. There was further consolation in having proved she’d been right all along, that walking the dogs was more than she could handle. She went upstairs to take her wet clothes off and go back to bed, where she belonged.

  When she heard Tilda return, she went downstairs again. It was lunchtime now; Addison as well as Tilda was in the kitchen. The teapot was whistling, the windows sealed with steam. Tilda was cooking sausages. The radio was on—John Fogerty’s “Walking in a Hurricane.” It was a cozy, fragrant, melodic scene. Rima wished she could leave it that way.

  “Look at this.” Addison handed Rima the front page of the San Jose Mercury News. The headline Rima read, “Sea Lion Attacks Swimmers in SF Aquatic Park,” was not, in fact, the right headline. The headline Addison meant her to see was further down the page. “For Sale: Holy City (It Was Neither).”

  Rima didn’t know why she was being alerted to the sea-lion attacks. (Except who isn’t interested in animal attacks?) Sometimes she could hear sea lions barking from her room. Obviously Santa Cruz had a lot of them.

  She would have been even more puzzled by the Holy City story. If she’d read it, she would have found out that the asking price for Holy City was eleven million dollars. The property was one hundred forty acres in size, and the owners were three men in their eighties. Between the 1920s and the 1960s, Holy City had been home to a cult run by a man named William Riker. The Mercury described William Riker as a necktie salesman turned cult leader, noting that he’d run for governor four times but never been elected; been charged with bigamy, fraud, tax evasion, sedition, and murder but never been convicted. He’d died in 1969.

  In the 1930s the cult had numbered three hundred or so, but this dropped precipitously when Highway 17 became the standard route to the beach. In the sixties, the property had passed briefly into the hands of an unnamed Hollywood musical director, who’d next sold it to a group of investors; and then, in 1968, the current owners had purchased it with the proviso that the eight surviving cultists not only be allowed to stay but also be paid either a thousand dollars a year for eight years or the equivalent in food, clothing, and shelter.

  In the 1970s, hippies squatted in the abandoned buildings until they were evicted. The only going concern now was an art glass business. Riker’s old farmhouse was one of the few buildings still standing, but the property boasted creeks, waterfalls, cliffs, and valleys as well as ten potential parcels for development. The owners would prefer to see it preserved as a park rather than go to housing.

  All this was in the newspaper article. But Rima was intent on confession, and so the misunderstanding neither knew was
a misunderstanding wasn’t straightened out. Instead Rima described the morning’s intrusion but briefly, without the added drama of detail.

  What did she look like? Addison asked. Did she have red hair? Was she wearing an ankh necklace? There was a female fan who haunted the beach below, and once they’d caught her going through the garbage. Rima couldn’t tell whether Addison was upset or not, or if so, how much. She wasn’t looking at Rima, and some people didn’t look at you when they were angry, but Rima didn’t know if Addison was that sort. The radio station in the background identified itself as KPIG.

  “Of course, anyone can buy an ankh,” Tilda said. “That doesn’t mean anything.”

  “She had a hood on,” Rima said. “I didn’t see a necklace. Or her hair. She was only here a minute. Only here in the kitchen.”

  “You shouldn’t let strangers in the house,” Tilda said, as if this were something Rima needed to be told. The dogs, unusually for a mealtime, had made themselves scarce. Where were those tiny teeth when you needed them? Why was Rima the only one taking the fall?

  Suddenly she remembered the tickets. The last memory she had of them was on the beach, the ink smearing in the rain. She hoped they were upstairs. She should go get them. Oliver was a great believer in delivering great wads of bad news all at once—his reasoning was that it was more thoughtful not to upset your mother repeatedly when you could do it all in a single go. Sometimes their mother would find out something he hadn’t told her, and he would explain that he’d been saving it until he had more.