Wit's End

by Karen Joy Fowler

  Tilda gave Berkeley a piece of broccoli, because you should be careful what you wish for. Berkeley took it off to the living room and hid it under a chair. For the next two days, until Tilda found it, Berkeley would snap at anyone who tried to sit in that chair. She didn’t want to eat it, but that didn’t mean it didn’t belong to her.

  “You know,” Addison said. “If I got that suicide from Constance, then I might have put the letters about it in with the Ice City papers instead of the Maxwell Lane ones. Tilda could get that box down for you. If you want. I mean, you still won’t know any more than Constance knew.”

  Things were so amicable between Tilda and Martin that he actually asked for a cup of tea. Tilda got up to put the water on. “What kind?” she asked.

  “Surprise me.”

  Tilda chose something caffeinated, something for staying awake. They’d eaten early, so that Martin wouldn’t be on the road late, and now it was dusk, the light fading rapidly, the sunset colors turning gray. The day had been mild, but the night would be cold. At least the road had dried.

  Addison chose a tea with chamomile for going to sleep. “I imagine”—she was dipping the tea bag in and out of her cup—“that if I’d thought it was a murder I would have contacted the police. Whatever Constance said, it can’t have persuaded me.”

  “Andy said the police just didn’t care what went on in Holy City,” Martin told her. “Maybe you did contact the police and they didn’t follow up.”

  “I’m not that old. I’d remember that.”

  It was the first snippy comment of the evening, and it passed without a ripple. Rima took a moment to congratulate herself for having brought this about. She was the one who’d invited Martin. She was the one who’d convinced him to stay the night. She was the one who’d dragged him to Holy City and made him pass himself off as Maxwell Lane so that he’d had a story to tell.

  “So who did Andy give Constance’s letters to?” Martin asked.

  “Pamela Price,” said Rima. “Obviously. The wild-eyed, more-believable-than-us Pamela Price.”

  (3)

  In spite of the early dinner, Martin didn’t leave until almost nine. He’d been strong-armed into taking the rest of the sherry cake home. The shrimp was gone, which made Tilda fret that there hadn’t been enough, no matter how many times Addison and Rima told her otherwise. “It was a good dinner,” Addison kept saying. “A good evening. I liked that Martin. That relaxed Martin.” She went to her bedroom. She was in the middle of one of the biggest novels Rima had ever seen—something to do with magicians in the Napoleonic Wars, and Addison was anxious to see what happened next, if she could only manage to stay awake after all the sleepy tea she’d drunk.

  Tilda rolled up her sleeves to reveal the snake’s head, and Rima brought her the dishes to be washed. Then Tilda too went to bed. She hugged Rima when she said good night. It was a stiff, self-conscious hug, but Rima’s was no better. They were both out of practice.

  Rima sat for a while in the living room, Stanford on her lap. She didn’t go upstairs, because she didn’t want to wake Stanford and also because she wasn’t tired. She fell asleep in the chair.

  The phone rang. She picked it up and was speaking into it before she’d actually woken. “Hello,” she said, asleep, but frightened, because late-night phone calls are frightening things. Stanford was gone and she was staring at the crushed skull of the Folsom Street victim as she spoke.

  The voice on the other end was Martin’s. “Don’t tell Mom,” he said. “I scraped the railing, and the front end is crap. And there’s no cell-phone reception in the goddamn mountains so I had to walk about three miles before a car would pick me up. I’m at the Oakwood Saloon, down by the Los Gatos exit. The saloon is closed, but the guy who owns it is waiting with me. Could you come get me? There’s a tow truck on the way, but they’re coming from the Santa Cruz side. I said I’d meet them back at the car.”

  Rima heard the clock in the hall upstairs chime the half-hour. “What’s the exit again?” she asked.

  She took the keys from the scallop-shaped dish. The tank was nearly empty, so she had to stop for gas. She saw Martin’s car as she drove past. It had been either driven or dragged to the side of the road. The left headlight was smashed, and the driver’s door was so dented that Rima doubted it would open.

  It was past eleven by the time she found Martin. He was inside the saloon, having a draft beer with the owner. He’d bitten his lip, which was swollen and had turned many exciting colors. “Now I don’t feel so sorry for you, bro,” the owner said, looking Rima over. “Now I think you maybe make up the crash.”

  The very divider Martin had hit prevented them from crossing the highway to get to his car. They had to go past it in the wrong direction to an exit and then double back. By now it was eleven forty-five.

  Martin was sorry for the inconvenience. He wasn’t sorry for the thing he should have been sorry for, because he hadn’t thought about Oliver, about what it might be like for Rima to get a call concerning an accident. Rima was furious. She knew it wasn’t fair, but there it was. She could hardly look at Martin, him and his fat lip. How dare he drive so badly? “Were you drinking?” she asked.

  “Not until after. Jeez. I’m not my mom.”

  The tow truck was already waiting. Rima was working hard not to show how angry she was, because she didn’t want Martin to think she minded coming to get him. She didn’t mind that part at all.

  A genial guy named Jerry loaded the car onto the truck. “I could make my whole living off the Seventeen,” he said. “Never work anywhere else.” He was wearing a Giants baseball cap and a filthy sweatshirt with greasy handprints on it.

  And just like that, Rima stopped pretending. “Listen,” she said to Martin quietly, so Jerry wouldn’t hear. “Don’t come back to Wit’s End unless it’s to see your mother. That’s all I care about, that you be nice to your mother.”

  “So you don’t want a little brother anymore?” Martin asked. It had taken Rima the whole way from Santa Cruz to get as angry as she was. Martin did it in an instant.

  “Not one who can’t drive,” Rima said.

  (4)

  Rima had to go in the wrong direction again until she was back at the Los Gatos exit and could turn around. Eight or nine cars passed her, most of them going much too fast. There was no shoulder to the road. It was a miracle Martin hadn’t been hit while walking to the saloon.

  Finally she was headed back to Santa Cruz. She drove all the way to Scotts Valley, and then an exit came up and she took it, made another flip around, headed back to San Jose. She got off at Redwood Estates. There was a large sign for the Estates, and underneath that a small sign that read “Holy City.” Inside Addison’s glove box was a flashlight with the batteries still working. Some things are just meant to be.

  The Old Santa Cruz Highway was as dark as dark gets on the California coast. There were no cars in the lot in front of the glass company, and no cars on the road either. Rima turned off the old highway and into the driveway behind the trees. She parked in front of the house with the peeling white paint. William Riker had lived here once, and after him, Constance Wellington. Rima dimmed the headlights and then switched them off.

  She’d believed Andy when he said there was nothing to see there. Still, there could have been a box in a closet, a letter slipped behind the bathroom mirror and then forgotten. It would take only a short time to know for sure.

  There were no stars overhead, so Rima assumed clouds she couldn’t see. The air was damp, and she wished she’d worn her Cleveland winter coat.

  She flicked the flashlight on and made her way up the sidewalk, up the steps to the front porch. The middle stair had rotted away and Rima narrowly avoided stepping through it. There was no bulb in the porch light, but she threw the switch anyway, because there is a larger world than Maxwell Lane allows for in his philosophies, and of course no light came on, because there was no bulb.

  She directed the beam of the flashlight to the doo
r. She tried the doorknob, which was locked. Above was a grid where nine panes of glass should have been. Two of these were cracked, four had been entirely removed. Rima reached through an empty space and unlocked the door from the inside. It was no warmer in the house than out.

  The entryway was filled with dead leaves. Rima picked her way through them by the flashlight beam, nervous that they might be some sort of nest. On the entry wall, four holes suggested that a picture or a hat rack had been removed. Her light skipped over a dark stain shaped vaguely like a camel, as if someone had thrown a bottle of beer at the wall. Her feet uncovered something that might have been a condom had she looked more closely. Maybe just a plastic bag, but if so, very small. The place smelled of leaves and something else Rima could only assume were rabid bats.

  This is another fine mess you’ve gotten me into, she told Oliver. The leaves ended and she was on the gritty surface of a wood floor. A few steps more and she found herself in what obviously had once been the living room.

  She cast the light around, startled when it reflected brightly back at her from the black windows. The inner wall had been tagged with graffiti. She saw the initials PTC, fat and filled in, and under that someone literate had written, “Look on my works, ye mighty.” Someone else had written, “I heart Amelia,” in red marker.

  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.

  Chapter Twenty-six

  (1)

  Ice City,

  Mr. Lane said that it seemed to him if there was anything I wanted from the house, I should take it. I was leaving the trailer park for a foster home up in Truckee. I was telling myself that it would be all right, that I could do the four years until I turned eighteen, no sweat. I didn’t believe it for a minute. What would high school be like for someone like me? How normal could I pretend to be?

  There was nothing here I wanted.

  Mr. Lane stopped in front of the dollhouse. “Did you never notice that he had you all represented here?” he asked. “It was really the dollhouse tipped me off. This was how he gave orders. To Ernie mostly, but also Kathleen and Pamela and Julia when he wanted them in his bed. He must have felt like God, looking down on his little kingdom, moving you all this way and that.”

  As he spoke, Mr. Lane took hold of the little man who stood for Bim.

  I picked up several of the others. Here was Kathleen, who was in a home now and had to be fed and put to bed like a baby. Here was Pamela, who’d left after Brother Isaiah died, saying she was going to Hollywood, going to make it in the pictures, when we all knew she wasn’t. Here was Julia, Bim’s poor wife. I put them back.

  Mr. Lane was still holding Bim. In that moment I saw his true face. When Bim had told Brother Isaiah about my father, he’d no idea it would get my father killed. I’d watched the guilt eat him up, and never known what I was seeing.

  This time, I knew. Bim was no murderer when Mr. Lane first came to Camp Forever. It was Mr. Lane who’d made him one. Mr. Lane, who understood people so well, who knew just what to say and when to say it. Mr. Lane, who never saw that coming. Mr. Lane, who was dying inside. “Where will you go next?” I asked.

  “Ice City,” he said.

  (2)

  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.

  The long answer started back in 1970. Which did Rima want? Rima had those eight hours to fill. “Start in 1970,” she said.

  (3)

  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 Maxwe
ll 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.