Wit's End (21 page)

They drew closer to the man in the turban, close enough that Rima began to hear him. His voice was trained and melodic.

“. . . all spirits, and are melted into air, into thin air,” he said. “And, like the baseless fabric of this vision, the cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces, the solemn temples . . .”

Thanksgiving had been her mother's favorite holiday. Thanksgiving is the holiday, her mother used to say, when everyone gathers in the strays and orphans. Rima had never thought to be the orphan at the table.

“. . . the great globe itself, yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve, and, like this insubstantial pageant faded, leave not a rack behind.”

To Rima's horror, she was in full sob again before she knew it, and again the breakdown was occurring in front of Cody and Scorch, should they only turn to look. She spun about without a word and walked back quickly, climbed the stairs to Wit's End, climbed the stairs to her third-floor room. She closed the door behind her, collapsed soddenly onto the bed. She hoped Scorch and Cody would imagine some other reason for her leaving so abruptly, maybe simple rudeness.

In her own defense, Rima thought that lots of people would find themselves crying, blindsided by Shakespeare that way.

A
fter Rima had cried for a good long while, she took a shower. She stood under the hot water, washing her hair with a shampoo that smelled of melon. She turned off the water, reached for a towel, and then froze. She was thinking about Constance's letter, the last one she'd read. The letter had been about
Average Mean;
it had talked about
Average Mean
as if that book had only just been published. And also mentioned Bim. What was it Bim used to say? Nothing to see here. Move along.

Rima didn't remember the year
Average Mean
had come out, but she did know it was before 1982, which was the publication date of
Ice City.
There'd been at least three books in between, enough time for Maxwell to send the wrong man to death row in one of those and realize it in the nick of time in another.

Rima wrapped herself in the towel and went to look for the letter again. If it had been written before 1982, as Rima felt sure it must have, then the Bim that Constance had mentioned could not have been Addison's character. The Bim that Constance had mentioned must have been Rima's father.

Rima couldn't find the letter about
Average Mean.
She would have kept looking, but she was cold, wet, and dripping all over the box and the papers inside. Anyway, she knew what she knew.
Average Mean
was published before
Ice City.

“You should solve the case,” someone suggested, and she wasn't sure who, might have been Maxwell, but was probably Oliver—sounded more like Oliver, all hopped up by the fact that no one had guessed about the letter Rima had sent Constance.

Solve the case.

The more Rima thought about this, the better she liked it. She couldn't spend the rest of her life just lying around. She needed a reason to get up in the morning. Places to go, questions to ask, clues to uncover. What was missing in Rima's life was structure. Maxwell Lane never had to wonder what to do when he woke up in the morning.

Really, she should thank Addison for a lovely time and head on home to find a job. She could always substitute-teach. Her father had once devoted an entire column to her decision to get her teaching credential. Nothing had ever made him prouder, he'd said, because the world needed good schoolteachers a sight more than it needed Pulitzer Prize-winning journalists.

Nice touch of modesty there, to mention his Pulitzer in that dismissive manner. Apparently Rima's getting a Pulitzer would hardly have pleased him at all. (So why bother? Oliver had asked. And if Rima wasn't going to get a Pulitzer, then Oliver wouldn't be caught dead with one.) But Rima hadn't become a teacher to make her father proud. She had become a teacher because she loved kids. Even the ghastly thirteen- and fourteen-year-olds, which virtually no one could do, and so, she thought, much to her credit.

Sadly, as it turned out, she loved them only one at a time. In the aggregate, by the classful, not as much. Solving the case would give her something to do that wasn't teaching “American History:

Growth and Conflict” to a rabble of conflicted and confrontational eighth-graders.

Here was the downside. What case?

It was all very well for Maxwell Lane to go around solving cases when A. B. Early did the heavy work of providing a body, suspects, and clues. That was case-solving with training wheels. Rima, by contrast, was on her own. She would have to do it all.

What case? Not Bogan. She didn't imagine she could solve the mystery of his death, with no witnesses, no information, and all these years later. She'd have to leave that one to Maxwell Lane.

Not Pamela Price. Pamela was obviously up to no good, but Rima would rather not see her again if it could be helped.

The case Rima thought she could maybe solve involved her father and his connection with Holy City. Maybe the mystery of his estrangement from Addison. In an A. B. Early book, these things would turn out to be connected somehow. Maxwell Lane would tease loose a single thread and watch as the whole mystery sweater unraveled.

Rima dried her hair and dressed. This was the moment she realized she had no shoes. They weren't technically lost, she remembered where they were. She just didn't have them. Her face was still the patched red of someone who'd been crying, and she would still have preferred that Cody and Scorch not see it. But she had that case to solve. Could she solve a case entirely in her bedroom slippers? She didn't see how.

The longer she put off retrieving the shoes, the more likely they'd vanish into the ether like sunglasses or cell phones. So she went downstairs, creeping past the kitchen, where Scorch and Cody were eating in the breakfast nook, the dogs watching every bite. So far so good. The whining covered the sound of her footsteps, and she made the beach unseen.

Her shoes were already gone. In their place someone had left, in honorable trade, a pair of old red Converse high-tops. The right one had a large hole in the toe, and they were at least a size too small for Rima. But they had shoelaces, which was what she really needed. She picked them up.

Back inside, she made it to the second floor, where she helped herself to several sheets of paper from the printer. Her past was littered with no end of attempts to keep a journal, or a dream diary, or a calendar, or a to-do list. Even if she lost the actual paper, writing things down had always helped her remember them. This paper was for her notes on solving the case. Maxwell always kept notes.

Since she was on the second floor anyway, she took a quick look at her e-mail—nothing of interest—and then punched up the Wikipedia Holy City entry, thinking to make a list of the important details. She saw that the line concerning Maxwell Lane had been taken out, then returned, since she last looked. She checked the site history, clicking through the archived pages. The person inserting the line was still Hurricane Jane.

Rima recorded the date of Riker's death. As far as Wikipedia was concerned, that date marked the end of Holy City. Yet there were still three disciples (eight if your source was the
San Jose Mercury News
) on the property who had lived there almost thirty more years.

Rima wrote: “Who were the last disciples?”

And then: “When did Bogan die?”

In the time it took to do this, the line concerning Maxwell Lane had disappeared once again.

 

 

R
ima went back to her room and upended the box of Maxwell's letters onto the unmade bed. Now there was dust on the quilt and between the sheets. In retrospect, thoughtlessly done.

But done—no point in regretting it now. One by one, she put the letters back in the box, keeping out only those that seemed to be from Constance. When Rima had finished—and this took some considerable time—she had fifteen letters and four cards.

Several of these had no envelopes, and two of the cards had no dates. Rima made a list of the dates she did find. The earliest had been written on March 23, 1972. The last on September 30, 1988. Six of the letters had come in 1983 and 1984. None of the letters was dated July 2.

Rima picked the two with the earliest postmarks and read them. Constance had introduced herself first as an employee of the federal government, then as a fan of the mystery genre, and then as something of an amateur detective in her own right. As such, she congratulated Maxwell Lane on the excellent sleuthing he'd done throughout
Our Better Angels.
It was her first exposure to Maxwell's work, but she predicted she'd be seeing more of him. She believed he'd fingered the right man, and noted that while to some the full confession would have erased all doubt, she had found in the course of her own quiet but not uneventful life that human nature was complex. Reason took you just so far. She applauded Maxwell for his fluid, intuitive approach.