Wit's End

by Karen Joy Fowler

  Pamela got to know Constance because they both liked mystery novels and Constance had stacks of them. Pamela was always ducking over to return one book and borrow another.

  Constance thought what was going on in Riker’s house was another cult, as if the old one were renewing itself, only with white and black people this time. She worried about Pamela, but it wasn’t like that, Pamela said. There were a couple of older guys who sometimes said who should do what, but mostly they were all on their own.

  Constance thought that Pamela was sleeping with them all, when she wasn’t sleeping with anybody, except that, of course, sometimes you had to. It was in this context that Constance told Pamela about how Father Riker had made girls leave Holy City if they got pregnant. She’d given Pamela a couple of names, one of which was Marjorie Early—easy to remember, Constance had said, because of Marjorie Morningstar. Constance had given Pamela Marjorie Morningstar to read, but Pamela hadn’t finished it; it seemed kind of 1950s. A. B. Early had just published her first book, and Pamela was the one who told Constance to read it.

  “Does Addison know she’s Riker’s daughter?” Rima asked, and she knew the answer before she’d finished the question. Why else would Addison have the Holy City Santas up in her attic?

  “Read the books,” Pamela said. “She’s obsessed with cults and who joins them. I don’t think she gives a fig about Riker. She’s obsessed with her mother.”

  The living room light flickered briefly and noisily, off and back on. “What did you do with Constance’s letters?” Rima asked.

  “I burned them.”

  “Why?”

  “So Early would know this isn’t about blackmail. So there wouldn’t be any evidence.”

  Pamela had been trying to get Addison to Holy City for weeks now. She’d left clues everywhere—in the bookstore, online, in the mail. She expressed surprise that it was taking Early so long, great mystery writer like her. But at least it had given Pamela time to work out exactly what she wanted to say.

  Rima had done a good job of keeping Pamela talking; she had maybe only seven hours to go now. It was clear that Pamela was willing to go on. The story of her life, she was just telling Rima, would make a great book. Recently, she’d started living mostly online, where you could be anyone you chose, a new person every hour if you wanted. It was a lot like being a writer, she guessed. She’d made up a lot of characters by now.

  Rima found herself actually interested in how Pamela had gone from hippie squatter to queen of the chat room. But her hands and face were freezing, and she couldn’t stay on her feet a moment longer. Some time ago, she’d stopped being scared. Pamela’s demeanor was so reasonable. Her story so linear. It was hard to stay focused on how insane she was. “I’m exhausted,” Rima told Pamela, who said that she was exhausted too. Then she gave Rima back the keys. Just like that.

  “All this just so Addison would tell you what she’s got planned for Maxwell in the next book?” Rima asked. She and Pamela were walking together toward the door, and Rima didn’t absolutely believe yet that she was being let go, even though the keys were in her hand and she didn’t see how Pamela could stop her now, short of a brick to the head. She let Pamela through first, though. Better safe than sorry.

  “Addison can do what she likes with Maxwell Lane,” Pamela said. “I trust her. I just said that in the chat room. That’s who I was pretending to be at the time.” She pushed the door fully open. Rima was on the porch now, and could see the car down the slope of the yard.

  “I just wanted her to see how I put the clues together,” Pamela said.

  Then Pamela realized she’d left the light on. She went back to turn it off, because of global warming. While she was inside, Rima got into Addison’s car, cranked the heater up high as a promise to herself, even though it was blowing only cold air at the moment. She drove away without waiting for Pamela to come out.

  It occurred to Rima to wonder where Pamela was sleeping. She’d come not from the upstairs, where she said her old bedroom was, but through the front door, and she was already in her nightgown when she arrived. Rima had seen no car but Addison’s. She supposed this was the way it would always be—the closing of one mystery would only open another. What was the point, really?

  Are you happy now? she asked Oliver.

  He was. It was much better than his own bench, his own rock. It was everything he could have hoped it would be.

  (4)

  The lights were on at Wit’s End when Rima got home. Tilda and Addison were sitting in the breakfast nook, arguing with themselves and each other over whether the police should be called, and drinking oceans of calming teas. “Where were you?” they asked Rima angrily, and that touched her; it was so parental.

  “Was it Martin?” Tilda said, and of course it was, though Rima had forgotten.

  Sometimes a story is best told in the wrong order. “He’s fine,” Rima said first off, and then went on to describe the call, the car, the tow truck. She didn’t mention the big fight they’d had. She said nothing about Holy City and Pamela Price.

  She avoided Addison’s eyes. Rima was uncomfortable now that she knew so much more about Addison than Addison wanted her to know. Rima knew where Addison had come from. She knew whom Addison had loved. These were intimate things. It seemed rude to know so much about someone so private.

  “I hate that road,” said Tilda, but Addison said it was better than it used to be. In the old days there were two hundred fifty serious accidents on the 17 every year. That number had been slashed by almost a hundred when the dividers were put in.

  Rima left them arguing the merits of the dividers and went to her room. She tried to sleep, but was too tired to close her eyes. Her brain throbbed in her hread. So she got up, plugged in the phone line, and waited to pick up her e-mail.

  She had a message from Martin. “You keep telling me I’m not allowed to dump my mother. So if I’m your little brother, then you’re not allowed to dump me. You can’t have it both ways. Either we’re all family and nobody leaves, or we’re not and nobody stays. Your choice,” he’d written. “Thanks for the lift.”

  He was no Oliver. He was no Oliver, but Tilda loved him and Rima could see he had his good points. There weren’t many people, she supposed, who would have pretended to be Maxwell Lane just because she asked. Cody, probably, and Scorch for sure, and probably that fan from the pizza parlor, but not many others. “Nobody leaves,” Rima wrote back, and it was so far past midnight that it was morning already, so she went ahead and sent it.

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  (1)

  Rima came back from a walk on the beach to find a box labeled “Ice City Papers” on the floor by her bed. Inside, among the notebooks, early drafts, false starts, rejected scenes, plot trees, and bits of research on Brother Isaiah and his immortals, was one more letter from Constance Wellington.

  21200 Old Santa Cruz Hwy

  Holy City, California 95026

  July 2, 1976

  Dear Maxwell Lane:

  Had a man into the post office yesterday who runs a stable in Scotts Valley. Interesting discussion with him about the different behaviors in prey animals (rabbits) and predators (cats). All of which is to say that I finished Native Dancer last night. Good job on the detecting front, but your horses are too much like cats and not enough like rabbits.

  Confess to being thrown by the hanging. You did your homework there. I saw a hanged man myself, back in 1959, good friend of mine. Man named Bogan.

  That was the year Father gave the city away. Came to his senses and tried to take it back, but the courts said no. Maurice (the new owner, Hollywood Jew) promised to keep it all as it was, and then right off had the telescope and the old radio station building brought down.

  That was when the fires started, when Maurice didn’t keep his promise. Father called us all together and carried on something awful about how the burning had to stop, that this was no way to settle the score, and I thought that would end the fires, but it didn’
t. Bim said it wasn’t supposed to. Bim said that all that speech was for was plausible deniability. I’d never heard that term before, but I knew what he was saying. He was saying Father was behind the fires the whole time, that he wanted to make Mr. Hollywood sorry he’d ever heard of us.

  We live too close here for secrets. Bogan warned me to stay away from the print shop, and that burned to the ground. Stay away from the ice plant, and sure enough, a couple hours later, the smoke was rising. We lost the barber-shop and a corner of the garage, and then I was the one found him hanging in the restaurant kitchen, no warning at all.

  I was the one called the police. Ruled a suicide. No more fires. Case closed. Bim stopped coming around, too, and who can blame him? Things were ugly here.

  Never did sit right with me. Heard him just before, don’t you see, whistling to beat the band. And Bogan would have said to stay out of the restaurant. Wouldn’t have let me find him like that.

  Which is man, predator or prey, Mr. Lane? Interested in your thoughts on the matter.

  VTY,

  Constance Wellington

  (2)

  The way Rima had found out she was expected for Thanksgiving was that Tilda had asked if there was anyone she’d like to invite. At first Rima had thought this might be Tilda’s way of asking her to ask Martin, but it turned out Tilda had already done that. Martin wasn’t coming; he would be with his father and step-mother. Rima thought this was just as well. He’d told her he was ready to broach the Ice City bar scheme and Rima couldn’t guess exactly what Addison’s response would be, but it wouldn’t sound like thanksgiving.

  Rima e-mailed her aunts to say she was staying in Santa Cruz for the holiday, and their responses managed to be simultaneously shocked, hurt, disapproving, and relieved.

  Scorch and Cody had also been asked, but Scorch had a family thing in Yosemite she couldn’t get out of and Cody was going with her. One day at breakfast Scorch had gently let Rima know that she’d made her first appearance in the fanfic sex sites. “I’m sorry,” she said. “But they’re pretty hot.”

  “Tell me I’m not sleeping with Bim,” said Rima, and Scorch said of course she wasn’t; that would be perverted. It was all Rima-Maxwell. It was all a meeting of wounded souls.

  “Good stuff. Classy,” said Cody. “Not that I’ve looked.”

  If Rima had wanted to see, she could have done so on the new second-floor computer. Addison had sprung for something state-of-the-art, memory and speed added, and a larger screen. She’d also had a new computer installed in the outback.

  On Thanksgiving morning, while Tilda cooked, Addison told Rima she had something to show her. They went to the second floor, where Addison launched a program, logged in, and then got up so that Rima could sit down. She was on a You.2 island called The Murder Capital of the World.

  The Santa Cruz boardwalk unfolded before her. There was Neptune’s Kingdom, complete with sound and color, the beach, the ocean behind it.

  Rima found the body downtown, on Pearl Alley. A well-dressed woman had been stabbed from behind and lay on the ground, the knife a few feet away, blood like a veil around her. A fly circled the knife and occasionally landed.

  Rima zoomed out until she could see the Farmers Market, the Bad Ass coffee shop, the used-book store. Over on Cooper Street, Maxwell’s office had replaced the Portuguese widow’s rug shop. The Ice City bar was close by, on Pacific.

  “It’s the new dollhouse,” Addison said. “And the new book.” She was going to New York in a week to have lunch with her editor and explain how the new book was a website. A print version would follow, but not until a few months after the site went up, even though the Democrats were taking charge in January and Addison assumed that restoring habeas corpus would be their first priority. By February, at the latest, we’d have our rights back and the book could go to press.

  The print version had already been written. Finished, in fact, more than a year ago. Writing the book had been the easy part.

  Even the virtual world, with all its detail, hadn’t taken more than six weeks. She’d hired a team—A Million Red Sheep—to put it all together. The mystery on the island and in the book would be the same, except one would be a linear narrative and the other wouldn’t.

  The hard part had been Maxwell Lane.

  Where was he?

  “Where do you think?” asked Addison.

  Rima walked into Ice City. An old man sat at the bar. He turned and motioned to the stool next to him. His eyes were dark and his hair gray. He was handsome, not in a presidential way, but more lifelike.

  “He’s an AI—avatar interface,” Addison said, “connected to an advanced chatbot with a learning knowledge base. We’ve already uploaded all the novels. He knows those better than I do.”

  Addison had been working on him most of the last two years, helped by her tech wizard, Ved Yamagata. The technology wasn’t quite there yet, but Ved was doing his best. There were constant modifications. Someday when the world caught up to him, Maxwell Lane would walk and talk to visitors throughout the You.2 world. In the meantime, he was a collaborative project, something like Wikipedia. Parameters had been set. There were things he would not do; things he would not say. But anyone could enter Ice City and talk with him, and every interaction would potentially refine and deepen him.

  A certain few, a very few (Rima was surprised and flattered to learn she was one of these), would be given a password that allowed them to train him. Someday he’d be as real as the character in the books.

  Rima’s password was “biggame.” The prompt “Suggest an improvement” appeared in the corner of the screen when she entered it.

  Addison was called away to the phone. Rima’s avatar took the stool next to Maxwell. “I thought you’d be younger,” she said. She typed this.

  “Did you really?” he answered. His facial expressions changed when he talked, but not when he listened.

  Rima clicked on “Suggest an improvement.” This opened a special text field into which Rima typed, “Come back in a few years and I might be.”

  “Can I buy you a drink?” Maxwell asked.

  “Thanks,” she said, and a bartender appeared at the far end of the bar, poured her something that foamed, and slowly disappeared.

  She took a three-sixty look around her. The counter was a dark, polished wood with copper edgings. One of Picasso’s Don Quixotes was on the wall. Rima faced Maxwell again. “Come here often?”

  “I’m always here,” Maxwell said. “Tell me something about yourself. What’s your name?”

  “I’m Addison’s goddaughter. Would you call me Irma?”

  “I won’t talk about Addison.”

  She made a guess. “Politics?” she asked, and he offered to name every congressperson who had voted away the great writ if she wanted, but she said she already knew them.

  Instead she typed in a long message about Oliver, and her mother and her mother’s photos of train stations, and her father and how Addison and her father had once been close—“I won’t talk about Addison,” Maxwell said—and then about Constance, who used to write him letters that Rima promised she’d read to him someday. One of these letters, Rima said, was about a man who maybe hanged himself or maybe was murdered in Holy City.

  “The Santa Cruz cult,” Maxwell said. It was not a question. “Established by Father Riker in 1919.”

  Rima told him about Pamela Price, trying to make him understand that she wasn’t talking about the Ice City Pamela Price, but someone else she was sure he’d be meeting soon, though who knew what name she’d be using when that happened, maybe ConstantComment, maybe Hurricane Jane. Maybe LilLois. Who knew?

  The door to the outside opened. The day was turning to dusk. A clown came in, dressed in pink and carrying a pink umbrella. He took a seat at the far end of the bar. Maxwell gave no sign of noticing, and Rima ignored him.

  “Tell me more about the hanging, Irma,” Maxwell said.

  She told him the little that she knew. He recognized the
parts that came from Ice City. It was easy to solve, he said.

  Constance had told Bim that Bogan was the firebug, and Bim had told Riker, who had Bogan killed. For starting the fires, if that wasn’t all at Riker’s instructions, or more likely because it was on Riker’s instructions and now the word was out. Bim never meant for Bogan to die, Maxwell said. Though he blamed himself, of course.

  Rima began to explain that Maxwell had confused the real Bim with the fictional one. She started to type this, but stopped, deleted it. What if?

  What if Constance had given Bogan’s name to Bim? What if Bim had taken it to Riker? Bim was in Holy City to get a story. He wouldn’t be the first reporter making something happen just so he could write about it. He wouldn’t be the only person to make the mistake of believing that since Riker was ridiculous he wasn’t dangerous.

  It made sense then that Constance would be so insistent about Bim’s innocence. If he was innocent, so was she.

  So Addison had picked up enough from Constance’s letters to write the book just the way it had happened, without even knowing she’d done so. While Rima’s father had read the book as a threat and a betrayal.

  What if the rift hadn’t been over the third murder, after all? What if it had been over the first? She should probably give more credence to Maxwell’s opinion. He was the professional.

  “Are you still there?” Maxwell asked.

  “Yes,” said Rima.

  And then she went ahead and told him that there were two Bim Lanisells and that one of them had been a good husband and a good father and a good man. Don’t confuse Holy City with Ice City, Rima said. Her father had spent most of his adult life in the world’s worst places. If he’d caused Bogan’s death, then he’d never gotten over it.

  Would you want to be remembered as you were or as better than you were? her father had once asked her, and Rima chose as he would have wanted. She gave Maxwell the wise, brave, self-deprecating version that Bim had carefully crafted in his columns as if it were the whole truth. She clicked on “Suggest an improvement.” “I see how the Bim Lanisell who was your father couldn’t have killed anyone,” she typed, and made Maxwell give it back to her.