Wit's End

by Karen Joy Fowler

  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!

  (2)

  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 some
thing?” 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.

  (3)

  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.

  Ice City,

  That my father killed himself was our new article of faith. Without that, Brother Isaiah was a liar and every one of us was going to die someday. I was the only one with doubts.

  So Brother Isaiah sent me Pamela. She began to touch me whenever we spoke. She’d lean against my shoulder, her hair falling into her face. “You should come by,” she’d say, her fingers floating across my upper arm. “I can’t bear to think of you all by yourself. I can always find a use for a big, strong, lonely boy.”

  She figures to manage you, my father warned me from his throne inside my skull. Her with her dyed hair.

  The truth was, she was frightened of me. All of them were—terrified of what I might do or say that would stop them believing. That kind of power is no good for anyone, much less a young man.

  I behaved badly and the results were disastrous. But I chose to believe that my father loved me too much to kill himself, even when that choice cost me my immortal life. I’m not ashamed of that.

  “I don’t understand why she’s got you all, even Mr. Lane, eating out of her hand,” I said to Bim one afternoon. We were standing outside the trailers. Kathleen’s laundry was on the line. Her old blue dress billowed suddenly, as if there were a body in it. I’d just heard that Pamela had told Mr. Lane my father couldn’t keep his hands to himself, and I was angry. My father was so uninterested in women my life is something of a miracle.

  Bim said that when a woman flirts with you, it’s rude not to flirt back. But he also said that it’s rude for two men like us, two men of the world, to discuss a woman in this way. So he moved from the particular to the general. “Okay, then,” he said. “Some men don’t require imagination. Some men are turned on just by the effort. They don’t ask themselves if it’s real or not, because they don’t care. They don’t see a difference between a woman trying to be sexy and a sexy woman.”

  Someone was walking in the gravel behind us. I lowered my voice. “Is that the kind of man Mr. Lane is?”

  “I think Mr. Lane’s more the polite kind,” Bim said. “Don’t you worry about Mr. Lane.”

  (4)

  Addison was on the second-floor computer. Rima found her there, her neck thrust forward like a turtle’s toward the screen, her shoulders rounded if not downright hunched underneath a gray shawl shot with green threads. Nothing remotely ergonomic about the setup; maybe the studio was arranged better.

  “The woman who took Thomas Grand was just outside,” Rima told her. “I can’t get Tilda or Martin too interested.” It occurred to Rima that if this were an A. B. Early book, Martin and his mother would be suspects. In a Daphne du Maurier novel, the actual perps. Martin had the motive, Tilda the opportunity. This whole estrangement could be an elaborate performance to cover a nascent operation in the fencing of tiny corpses on the Internet to unsuspecting fans of Maxwell Lane. It would explain their unconcern.

  But it would also make the fortuitous forced entry of Pamela Price too contrived to believe. Bad plotting there. “It seems like I’m the only one who wants to solve the case,” Rima said. Me and Maxwell Lane.

  “It’s not a case.” Addison pushed back from her desk, turned to Rima. She had a shallow scratch on her chin. The people at Wit’s End, at least that subset who slept with dachshunds, often awoke with shallow scratches on their faces. Rima had done so herself about five days earlier. You could hardly see her scratches now. “We know who done it. It’s just some fan who went off her medication. I still can’t believe the Democrats have the Senate.”

  “Counting Lieberman,” Rima reminded her. Why be happy? Life was short. And then, just to deliver all the bad news in a single go: “I think Martin may be joining us for dinner.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  (1)

  Given that it was a small group with at least one open hostility and several hidden ones, dinner went about as well as could be expected. The food was good.

  Addison wanted to talk about politics. The last two candidates to concede had been Burns and Allen; it tickled her. Time for the Republicans to say good night now, Addison said. Rima got the joke, but had no idea how. How did she know the tagline to a show that ended years before she was born? Martin, she assumed, was mystified, but he gave no sign of it, caught up as he was in the complicated maneuver of asking for seconds without appearing to be enjoying the meal.

  Tilda was keeping the conversation light. “This beef is grass-fed,” she said. “Usually everything you eat turns out to be corn-based. We are a corn-made people, in general. I try to include some things that aren’t corn in every meal.”

  Martin wanted to talk to Rima. “You must be awful glad not to be in Cleveland anymore,” he said. He was the second person this week to tell her this. She felt an unexpected wave of patriotism. What was so great about Santa Cruz? The pirates? The clowns?

  “Do you think we don’t have miniature golf in Cleveland?” Rima turned to look at him. “We have miniature golf.”

  Rima wanted to talk about Pamela Price. “What should I do the next time she shows up?”

  “Never talk to a stalker,” Addison said. “It only reinforces the fantasy that you have a relationship.”

  “Then how will we get Thomas Grand back?”

  No one answered. Rima hadn’t realized that Pamela Price would be coming back until she said it. But why stop at two visitations? Of course there would be a third. Rima tried to figure out if she was frightened by the prospect or not. She decided she was. But only slightly, so for a few moments she barely attended to the conversation around her; that’s how focused she was on making sure it wasn’t some other emotion instead, like exasperation or fatigue.

  “We could go play miniature golf this weekend. If that’s what you’d like.”

  “I remember once when you were about four years old. We went out to eat and you told the waitress you wanted a petite filet mignon. She just about dropped her pencil.”

  “I was always saying something cute after you left. Hardly a day went by.”

  “This puts the D
emocrats in very good shape for 2008.”

  “There’s even corn in toothpaste now. Did I mention that?”

  Something wet landed on Rima’s ankle. Stanford was drooling; it brought her back to the moment. “How did she know my father’s name?” Rima asked, just to make the point that the answer was obvious. The information about the lovely houseguest and her connection to Addison was carelessly strewn about Addison’s blog, where anyone, on or off her medication, could read it.

  Thinking of the blog reminded Rima that she hadn’t told Addison about Wikipedia yet. She did so now, in the form of a question. “Did Maxwell Lane really grow up in Holy City, the way it says on Wikipedia?” (“I knew your father,” Constance Wellington had written to Maxwell. If he had grown up in Holy City, maybe she wasn’t as loony as she seemed.)

  “That shouldn’t be there,” Addison said, in what was clearly not an answer. “Everything on Wikipedia is supposed to have been published and peer-reviewed somewhere else first. It’s not the place for grad student theories.” Addison’s knife scraped her plate with an irritated sound. “That must have been posted quite recently. I’ll take it down after dinner.”

  This led to a story about an assistant she’d had a year back, a young man from the UC English Department who, among other duties, kept an eye on the websites for her. His name was Tom Oppenfeld. Tom and Addison parted messily one day after she came home from a movie matinee to find him stretched like a rock climber over the ice plant on the cliff face below the studio window. He was trying to find a gap in the blinds. Or else he was planning to kill himself. Either way, he needed to be sacked.

  In retaliation, he e-mailed everyone who’d asked, and said Addison would be happy to: speak, write a blurb, write an introduction, teach a workshop, critique a manuscript, officiate at a poetry slam, auction off the naming rights for a character, do an online interview, host library donors for a literary-progressive dinner, get all dressed up and attend a fund-raiser. Tom Oppenfeld was as much to blame as anyone for the fact that Addison was so far behind on her new book. She’d spent so much time being a writer there was no time left in which to write. “An assistant is always a mistake,” Addison said. “Would anyone know anything about Margo Dumas’s sex life if she hadn’t hired that assistant?”