Wit's End

by Karen Joy Fowler

  “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.

  (4)

  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.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  (1)

  Addison 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.

  She clicked over to the message boards and went cold. Quite literally. She could feel the blood draining from her face and fingers. All this activity, sixty-seven postings in the last week, was confined to a single topic. The thread head? “Rima Lanisell: Is she her father’s daughter?”

  Rima clicked back seventeen pages to the beginning of the thread. The early postings were all about Oliver’s death and/or Rima’s drinking. A brief description of Oliver’s death had been on Addison’s blog, but Rima’s drinking could have come only from Scorch’s. Apparently the A. B. Early completist kept up with A. B. Early’s dog walker as well as her dogs.

  Oliver’s death was a sad thing, the posters agreed, a criminally irresponsibly sad thing, but what Rima could and should do was make it matter. Make it count for something.

  Wouldn’t
Rima be the perfect person to appear at school assemblies on the topic of drinking and driving? How many young lives might she save, just as soon as she laid off the sauce herself and stopped making this be all about her. It was a teaching moment, and Rima was, by god, a teacher. What would Oliver have wanted? The posters on Addison’s website were pretty confident they knew.

  About a dozen postings in, someone self-identified as Beezer finally asked the other posters to show some sympathy. If my father killed my mother, Beezer said, I’d probably turn to booze. I’d probably add some pills to the mix. Cut her a break, you guys. She needs counseling not scolding.

  Downstairs the dogs were barking furiously. Rima refused to even wonder at what. The chat had turned to O.J.’s poor children. They were reported to be in college now, and no one knew how they were doing, though no one could imagine they were doing well. Then a posting about L.J., the kid in the television show Prison Break, whose father had been falsely accused of killing the vice president’s brother and who wasn’t really relevant to the discussion except that the poster felt sorry for him too, and then the name L.J. was so very similar to the name O.J., which, the poster said, was probably the real reason L.J. had come to mind and not the murderous-father part.

  Your father’s being a murderer was conceded to be a hard thing to get over. Your father’s murdering your mother? Forget about it! Rima was much to be pitied.

  Not just pitied. Loved! Someone posting as Norcalgirl said that Rima was the best character in Ice City. Norcalgirl described Rima as touching and absolutely believable.

  Maxwell Lane is the best character in Ice City, the poster LilLois riposted. And after Maxwell, Bim. And then, but only then, maybe Rima.

  It fell to Hurricane Jane to point out, with admirable brevity, that Rima hadn’t been a character in Ice City.

  The dogs came racing up the stairs. They danced at Rima’s feet, frantic with the need to communicate something to her. Little Timmy’s down the well! Feed us ice cream and potato chips! Sometimes there’s a benefit to not sharing a language. For all their noise, Rima hardly noticed them. Online, things had taken a nasty turn.

  JBC242, a self-identified Ohioan (which probably meant that he [or she] had never left his [or her] Pasadena basement), posted that he (or she) had been in high school with Oliver. Never had a class with him, but their lockers had been close together, at least until senior year, when the school had gotten a series of bomb threats and done away with lockers altogether as a safety precaution. JBC242 said that Oliver had won the senior award for Most Likely to Talk Himself out of a Speeding Ticket.

  JBC242 wasn’t content with that. Although no one had responded, s/he posted again. This time s/he said that Rima used to pick Oliver up after school because Oliver had lost his license over a Minor in Possession infraction. JBC242 said that on prom night Rima had to drive Oliver and his date around and that somehow during the evening Rima had lost the car.

  For the first time, Rima was tempted to post herself. She reminded herself that nothing good would come of it. She heard Addison warning her not to engage. But not one word of that post was true except the losing-the-car part, and the car wasn’t so much lost as misplaced for a couple of weeks, and this had happened long before Oliver’s prom and had nothing to do with Oliver, who had still been in braces, for god’s sake. When would ancient history be consigned to the dustbin of ancient history?

  The other posters were immediately deferential to JBC242. Weren’t they right, they asked, when they said that Oliver would have wanted Rima to make his death mean something?

  JBC242 didn’t doubt it. That was certainly the Oliver s/he’d known. Heart of gold, even if he liked a party. Terrible dancer, btw. Like a chicken.

  (Was this to be Oliver’s permanent memorial? Was it too late to get him a bench?)

  Hurricane Jane returned to pose the obvious question. How likely was it that Oliver would win Most Likely to Talk Himself out of a Speeding Ticket if he’d already lost his license over an MIP? JBC242, as always, she said, you are so full of it.

  These were Rima’s thoughts exactly. In spite of the Wikipedia shoot-out, she found herself liking Hurricane Jane.

  Then there was a flurry of postings about Prison Break, which had maybe jumped the shark or maybe not. As well as Battlestar Galactica, another show on which generational guilt apparently loomed large.

  On to Bones, which was about a female mystery writer/forensic anthropologist who solved her own cases, as if A. B. Early and Maxwell Lane had been mashed into a single really smart person. This really smart person’s father had murdered a bunch of people too. It began to seem as if there was hardly a made-up father anywhere who hadn’t. And this really smart person was having her own hard time with it, though she was too smart to turn to drink or pills the way Rima had done.

  Woven periodically throughout, ignoring the TV chat and focused like lasers only on each other, Hurricane Jane and JBC242 continued to snipe:

  You have some special expertise on the Lanisells? JBC242 asked. Dazzle us.

  Hurricane Jane: No special expertise. Just a good bullshit detector.

  JBC242: I hope you don’t keep that in the bedroom. I bet it smells.

  And two minutes later, another JBC242: Well, someone’s got her bitch on today.

  Hurricane Jane suggested that JBC242 would have been right at home in Nazi Germany, because Hitler’s rule had also been based on gossip and innuendo. (Rima’s only surprise was that it had taken so long to get to Hitler. In her online experience, this usually happened pretty quickly. Godwin’s Law.)

  Meanwhile LilLois was posting that it was too bad Oliver was dead, because a brother-sister detective team was a really great format and, in the right hands, could be gold. It wasn’t clear whether what was being suggested was a book or a television show.

  Nor was Rima sure the suggestion was serious. Some of the people who posted in response obviously thought so. Others did not. Jake and Maggie Gyllenhaal were suggested. It would be so cool, one poster said, to have an actual brother and sister playing the fictional Lanisells. It would be post-fucking-modern.

  The final message, dated the day before at 3:17, was from Norcalgirl again: Okay, maybe it wasn’t Ice City, Norcalgirl said.

  But whatever that book was with Rima in it, Norcalgirl had really loved Rima in that.

  (2)

  Rima’s imaginary adventures so tired her out that she decided to go upstairs and take her own nap. But when she got to her bedroom, her bed had been stripped. This disappointed, embarrassed, and irritated her all at the same time. She shouldn’t have gotten the sheets dirty, dumping the box of letters out on top of them. Tilda had enough to do without Rima’s thoughtlessly making a new mess.

  On the other hand, who asked Tilda to clean it up? Rima was perfectly capable of changing the bed for herself. She’d had every intention of doing so as soon as she had a minute.

  The notes she’d taken from Wikipedia had been moved to the dresser. She wondered if Tilda had read them. Tilda was always snooping around her room.

  Luckily, so far they were pretty innocuous. Nothing Tilda or Addison had said at lunch was in them yet. Rima added that now. Then she folded the pages and put them in the pocket of her heavy coat. She realized that if she left them there, she wouldn’t find them again until she put the coat on next winter in Cleveland. She moved them to the sock drawer, because that was where anyone in her right mind would look first.

  Next she searched for the pile of unread letters she’d gone to such trouble to separate out and catalogue. They weren’t on the dresser and they weren’t in the sock drawer. She hoped Tilda hadn’t simply dumped them back in the box, but sure enough, that was where they were, the letters Rima had separated out commingling once again with the letters she hadn’t separated out.

  It wasn’t the problem she’d thought it would be. The sorted letters remained on the top, the only thing disturbed was the chronological order. Rima picked up a Christmas card with no envelope and
no date. On the card, Santa Claus slept in his chair. He’d been knitting a stocking; his hands still held the needles. His beard hair was deeply tangled into the yarn and his mouth was open in a snore. The printed message—It’s the thought that counts.

  On the blank space opposite, Constance had written in her clear New Palmer cursive:Merry Christmas, Mr. Lane!

  Don’t know if you heard that the post office here has finally closed its doors. As has old Glenn Holland’s Santa’s Village over in Scotts Valley. Used to get a lot of visitors in December, driving through the mountains to have their Christmas cards stamped with the Holy City postmark. Very quiet this year; finding myself a bit blue. The good old days, end of an era, fa la la la la. Boring old woman. Don’t worry about responding. You’re probably real busy. Read about the arrival of your new adventure in the bookstores. Merry Christmas to me! God bless us each and every one.

  Chapter Twenty

  (1)

  About the same time Rima fell asleep, Addison woke up. She often took an afternoon nap, and sometimes it refreshed her, but sometimes it left her addled and logy. This was one of those second kinds of times. Addison had grit in her eyes and a nasty taste like spoiled cheese in her mouth. She brushed her teeth, washed her face, and went to be with the second-floor computer until she was fit for human company again.

  She started by checking the Internet for the definitive word from some source she trusted that it was safe to eat raw spinach. President Bush had managed to send even the FDA off its rails. The government was now claiming the spinach problem had been caused by wild pigs. Truer words were never spoken.