This was the second time Margo Dumas’s sex life had been mentioned in casual conversation. The repetition was intriguing. Rima made a mental note to google Margo Dumas’s sex life and see what was what.
“I can monitor the Web or I can write a book. Can’t do both,” Addison said.
Rima put “That must have been posted quite recently” together with “Can’t do both” together with Addison’s minute-by-minute information concerning political matters. She thought she knew which of the two Addison was doing.
“Did you want to go play miniature golf?” Martin asked.
“I don’t like miniature golf,” Rima said. This wasn’t true. There were few things Rima liked better than miniature golf. But you had to be in the mood. You had to be with Oliver.
“Oh!” said Tilda. “Holy City! I completely forgot. Maxwell Lane got a letter from Holy City today.”
And then Addison said that seeing as how Rima was the one so interested in Maxwell’s mail, Rima should be the one to go and get that letter.
She should bring it back to the table.
She should open it right there.
She should read it out loud so that everyone could hear.
Wouldn’t that be fun, is what Addison said.
“And you got a letter from Animal Control,” Tilda told Rima. Her voice was carefully uninterested. “That’s on the table too.”
(2)
This would have been a good time for a diversion. Where was Pamela Price when you needed her?
Or Scorch. A few days before, Scorch had burst into the kitchen with the dogs, all three of them in a state. These dogs, Scorch was saying, so angry there was spit, these dogs are the worst dogs ever. The worst dogs ever! Stanford and Berkeley made themselves busy, chewing their own rumps and paws, and not meeting anyone’s eyes.
Scorch said that she’d been taking them to the beach, where they would have all had a lovely time if everyone had behaved in a civilized manner. Except there were two women on stilts, wearing bustiers and tricorne hats, sword-fighting on the stairs while someone took their picture. Before Scorch knew what was happening, the dachshunds had pounced. They harried the women, nipping and snarling at their stilts and ignoring Scorch, who was shouting herself hoarse. It was just God’s mercy, Scorch said, that no one had fallen down the stairs and broken her neck. The women stumbled about on the uneven steps, and one of them screamed. Plus the man with the camera shouted at Scorch for not having leashes on her two nasty little dogs.
“I’m sorry,” Scorch said angrily to Rima, “but don’t you think the stairs are probably private property? And not part of the state beach?” And to the dogs, “What is wrong with you?!”
This would have been a good time for something like that to happen.
In fact, Rima had never seen a place to beat Santa Cruz for the sheer number of people determined to provide you with free entertainment. There were always drummers at the beach, drumming the sun up and then drumming it down. There were buskers who played the guitar or the flute or sang. There was that man, or else it was a woman, dressed like a donkey outside the Bad Ass coffee shop. And the body piercings! Don’t tell Rima a person would go through all that for only selfish reasons if it weren’t also so very crowd-pleasing.
Addison had told Rima once about being in a bookstore in Malaysian Borneo and how two kids from Santa Cruz, with their earlobes stretched and their teeth filed, had walked in. The Dayaks, Addison had said, were very entertained.
There were clowns on the streets! And now stilt-walkers in push-up bras. It was wonderful. Suddenly Rima was all about Santa Cruz. Cleveland had nothing.
“Am I the only one who sees that clown downtown?” Rima asked. “With the pink umbrella?”
She could tell that she had startled them all with this wild segue, but not so much that they forgot Maxwell’s letter. They blinked at her obstinately. There was nothing for it, then, but for Rima to rise, letting her food go cold, and walk through the kitchen and down the hallway to the entry table by the door, where the mail had been stacked in the front yard of the Missing Pieces dollhouse.
Rima took a moment to notice the workmanship of the Missing Pieces murder scene. She felt she’d not sufficiently appreciated how meticulously the dollhouses were assembled. There were teacups painted in the same poppy pattern as Addison’s dishes. A half-smoked cigarette stubbed out in the ashtray under the lamp. Rima suspected that if she gathered up the tiny, tiny puzzle pieces, some would actually fit together. She felt the impulse to do this. Right now. Even if it took all evening.
Addison was very good with her hands. If the writing hadn’t worked out for her, there were lots of other things she could have done. Hairdresser. Brain surgeon. She wondered whether Addison had made the entire jigsaw puzzle or just the corner of it she needed.
The letter to Maxwell Lane was on top of the stack of mail. The envelope was business-size, the address in blue pen. The words were printed in capital letters. The return address was for Holy City Art Glass. This was not the letter Rima had written. And someone had already opened it.
Rima took it to the table. “ ‘Dear Maxwell Lane,’ ” she read aloud.
“I’m very sorry to tell you that Ms. Wellington is no longer with us. She was the last surviving member of Holy City (by a great many years), and the only one I ever met. She died in 1997 in a nursing home in San Jose at the grand age of eighty-nine.
“I tried to find an heir for all the books she left here, but eventually donated them to the SPCA thrift store. Her cats I took in, and the last of them, Mr. Bitters, died only a year ago. Although I gather you weren’t close, perhaps you know if there are surviving relatives. I still have her letters. I kept them for their possible historical value.
“As old as she was, her death can’t come as too great a surprise. Still, I’m sorry to be the one telling you.
“Yours, Andy Sheridan”
There was a flyer enclosed. On December 1 the factory was having an open house, at which a collection of glass Christmas ornaments would go on sale.
“How very mysterious,” Addison said. “Maybe Pamela Price has struck again?”
One of two things had just happened. Either: Everyone knew that Rima had written a letter to Constance and signed Maxwell’s name, but they were too polite to say so. They were using Pamela Price as a convenient fiction. It was possible they didn’t even believe Pamela Price existed. Why should they? No one but Rima had seen her, and Rima was already seeing clowns and such wherever she went. The only real evidence was the missing doll, and Rima could simply have lost that. This would explain why everyone was so casual on the subject of Pamela Price.
Or: Rima had gotten off scot-free. Of course, it wasn’t right, letting an innocent thief take the blame like this. Rima should confess. Now was the moment to do so. If she let this moment pass and had to confess later, how much worse that would look.
Addison held out her hand for the letter and Rima gave it over. “People are really interested in Maxwell Lane,” Martin said, which could have been the perfect opening to talk to Addison about his bar, but he took it no further.
“Does anyone want dessert?” Tilda asked.
And just like that, it was done, the blame settled on Pamela Price, who, Rima suspected, Tilda at the very least thought she’d made up. She vowed not to use Ms. Price again this way. She could see how it might get to be a habit. “Okay, then. I’ll just put this letter in the box with the others, shall I?” she said.
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.
(3)
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 t
he 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.
Chapter Sixteen
(1)
That 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.
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