Wit's End (26 page)

They'd come across Riker passed out on a bed of needles in a sunken bowl inside a perfect ring of redwoods. Bim had taken his pulse and covered him with his coat. Luckily it was a warm night. The fairies got him, Bim had said. He'll wake up about a hundred years from now. Bim had said that as long as Riker was sleeping for a hundred years, this would be a good time to check out his house.

Midnight was gone, and the moon was slipping from the sky. Stars were flung over the black like rice at a wedding. The doctored punch Addison had drunk was still spinning her head. She felt her heart rising in her chest. There was nothing she would have said no to.

She followed Bim back toward the Showhouse and Lecture Hall and then across the parking lot, across the Old Santa Cruz Highway to the house on the other side. They heard someone walking in the gravel toward the dormitories, and Bim pulled Addison with him behind one of the trees. It was a thin tree, and there was something cartoonish about the two of them pretending they could hide behind it. Addison started to laugh, and once she'd started, she couldn't stop. She was able to stay quiet only by biting her fingers. She was, she realized, hysterical. This struck her as extremely funny. Bim reached over and put his hand over her hand over her mouth to muffle her. She could smell the bay aftershave on his fingers.

The footsteps faded. “All right now?” Bim asked. “I can count on you?” His hand moved her head in a nod. “Okay, then. I'm letting you go.” He took his hand away and Addison assumed a shaky control. Riker's house was a white two-story, set on top of a hill. They climbed up the sloping yard together.

Everything appeared dark, but the shades were down tight; there was no way to see in and be sure. The porch light was on, moths and smaller insects beating about it, a moment of unavoidable visibility through which Bim and Addison had to pass. “I'm going in,” Bim told her, and he moved into the edge of the light, and quickly up the porch steps.

The middle step cracked like a gunshot when his foot hit it, a sound that made Addison jump. Then she was laughing again, and the effort of doing this silently brought tears to her eyes.

Bim tried the doorknob. It spun. He disappeared into the house, and Addison followed at a run, taking the stairs two at a time so that she skipped the middle step. She'd stopped laughing as soon as she hit the light.

With the front door open, she could see the entryway. There was a coat on a coat rack, an umbrella hanging from the same hook. Then Bim closed the door behind her and she couldn't see a thing.

He lit a match, cupping his hand around it so that his face floated above the tiny flame. Addison saw the shapes of a sofa and chairs. A bookcase. A lamp. They were in the living room. The match went out. The room smelled of pipe tobacco, which was pleasant, and cat piss, which was not. Bim sneezed three times, all in a row. Muffled pitchy sneezes.

Just because the dim starlight outside didn't make it in didn't mean a bright light inside wouldn't make it out. A whole night of darkness can be conquered by one small flame, as Addison's mother had often told her. Bim gave her a matchbook. Later she would see it was from a bar in the city. “You take that side,” he said, directing her by touch to the interior wall while he took the wall with the windows.

“What are we looking for?” Addison asked.

“A story. Really anything we can get a few columns out of.”

Addison took two steps in the dark. Her left foot landed in sand. She lit a match. She was in the cat litter box. She raised her shoe; the wet sand stuck to it. “God damn it,” she said. She was seventeen years old. She never swore. She remembered vividly the bravado of doing so.

“Try not to break anything,” Bim said. He sneezed again. “There are cats here somewhere,” he said. “I'm never wrong about cats.”

Addison's memory didn't really come like that, as a whole coherent narrative. It was more like flashes, a visual here, an audio there. Like a room seen one minute by matchlight, and the next dead dark.

Two young men in baseball caps, one brim backward, one forward, began to play Ping-Pong. The ball pinged on the table and ponged on the paddles. Stevie Wonder came over the loudspeakers.

One of the Ping-Pong players said something to the other in Spanish. It did not sound complimentary. It did not sound like a thing a good sport would be saying. The ball skidded under Rima's chair. She reached down, tossed it back.

“Did my father ever figure it out?” Rima asked Addison. “Did he catch the arsonist?” Addison's face had an abstracted, distant look. Rima thought she was maybe eavesdropping on the people at the table adjacent. Addison had always maintained that eavesdropping was a professional obligation. Rima had read that in more than one interview.

Besides, the conversation one table over had become compelling; Rima was listening too. Perhaps they were not father and daughter, after all. The older man was suggesting that sexual innuendo was entirely a matter of tone of voice. The words were insignificant. In fact, any words would do so long as the tone was right.

“How about you and me
take the dog for a walk
,” he said by way of example.

“I like a pizza with
some cheese on top.

“What say you and me go back to my place and
play some bridge
?”

Addison's eyes were on Rima, but not so they looked at her. Rima leaned forward. “Did anyone ever catch the arsonist?” she repeated. Although her tone was unimpeachable, suddenly the words “catch the arsonist” had a lascivious ring that hadn't been there the first time she'd said them. What say you and me go back to my place and see if we can't
catch the arsonist
?

Addison answered slowly. “No.” She picked up her ale, and her eyes focused. She was paying attention again. “The fires stopped.

Maybe they stopped because your dad was poking around,” she said. “Maybe Constance knew that as soon as she gave your dad a name, he wouldn't be dropping by to see her anymore. She was a lonely woman. Maybe she made the whole thing up. Maybe nobody who joins a cult isn't pretty lonely to begin with.”

“How do you know it wasn't Constance herself setting the fires?” Addison asked.

Suddenly it was strange for Addison to think that the young woman across the table was Bim Lanisell's daughter, who had Bim's mouth and Bim's smile, not that you saw it often on Rima's face. Addison looked at Rima, and what she remembered next was the wide-awake, so-alive feeling she'd had, standing in the dark next to a young man she hardly knew, in a house where they weren't supposed to be. She saw herself and Bim from above, the two of them bending over the little lights of their matches and the room large and dark and unseen around them.

She'd worked her way down the bookcase, leaving a trail of sand. She didn't think this would be too incriminating. It seemed like something the cats probably did. “Lots of pamphlets,” she told Bim.

“Forget them. That's the public face. That's not what we're after.”

On one of the shelves was a tiny bottle with a paper rolled inside and a price on the glass, so this was surely also the public face, something they sold at the arcade. The littleness of it appealed to Addison, and she put it in her pocket, as if this wasn't stealing, just because the object was so small and cheap.

She moved from the bookcase to the pictures on the wall. She was going through her matches very quickly. The pictures turned out to be framed photographs. There was one of Father Riker holding a world globe in his hands, captioned “The Wise Man of the Far West.” Another picture was of the line of penny peep shows with a billboard at the end: “Good Things Are Bad Things for Some People. And Vice Versa.” All this was the public face again. Addison moved on.

Whatever it was they were looking for was more likely to be upstairs in the bedroom than down here in the living room. She didn't say this aloud. Her bravado was already pushed as far as she could push it. A staircase would snap her last nerve.

She knelt by the coffee table and struck her final match. By its light she could see the dark spot that the oil in Riker's hair had left on the back of the easy chair. She could see that the coffee table was dusty and there were plates from someone's breakfast on it. Addison could see a crusting of egg yolk on one of the plates.

She heard the crack of the middle porch step and blew her last match out. “Bim,” she said as quietly as she could, but the room was silent and completely dark.

Someone knocked. “Are you in there?” a man's voice asked. He tried the doorknob, but apparently Bim had thrown the lock. There was a long silence. Then Addison heard the crack of the step again. More footsteps, now receding.

A minute passed, maybe two. Addison noticed that she'd stopped breathing. She started again. Bim struck a match and came over to her, helped her up. He shook the match and the room went dark. “I'm out of matches,” Addison said.

“Me too.” Bim took her hand, turning away from her and putting it on his shoulder so that he led her as they went back through the room to the front door. They stopped there. “I have something for you,” Bim said. “A birthday present.”

“It's not my birthday.”

“You have to promise not to open it till it is. I won't give it to you unless you promise.”

Addison promised. Bim handed her a bundle made of his handkerchief, with something small inside it. She put this in the same pocket as the bottle. Now she and Bim were standing in the dark, facing each other, so close she thought he must feel that she was shaking. This would have been a good time for Bim to kiss her.

He didn't. Maybe this was because his nose was running and his eyes were puffed and swollen. Maybe it was because people who smell like cat piss seldom get kissed.

Addison got home around sunrise. She left her shoes at the door, tiptoed through the hall so as not to wake her mother.

Addison put Bim's handkerchief into her jewelry box and slammed it shut, because, when open, it was also a music box and quite noisy. The song it played was “Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing,” which Addison's mother loved. Hated the movie. How hard is it, she'd asked when they saw it, to give the people in movies a happy ending? You're making the whole thing up. Why not make it up happy? The thing in Addison's handkerchief turned out to be the kind of little plastic birthday cake you might see in a dollhouse, but she didn't find that out for months.

She didn't wait to break the little bottle open. She did that as soon as she'd put the handkerchiefed bundle in her jewelry box. She fished out the roll of paper, smoothed it flat, and read it. In fancy, curly lettering, it outlined Riker's doctrine of The Perfect Christian Divine Way:

O
f course, sitting there in the pizza parlor, Addison didn't remember it all word for word like that. She remembered just something evil and oddly vague. The only words she remembered for sure were “true solution.”

What was the true solution? Riker neglected to say, but it had a Nazi ring to it. True solutions that couldn't be revealed seemed, to Addison now, to belong to the same family tree as secret plans to end the war, FOIA documents with everything but the verbs blacked out, secret prisons with secret lists of prisoners in them, secret methods of extracting information from those secret prisoners in those secret prisons, and all those things that for national security reasons couldn't be counted up, like Iraqi deaths and private contractors. Addison couldn't say any of this online, though she would have liked to. The myriad fallacious Hitler references had ruined it for the legitimate ones.

“Which is worse, competent or incompetent evil?” Addison asked Rima. “That's really the question of our times, isn't it? William Riker was the first man to make me ask that. How I wish he'd been the last.”

At the next table, the older man was on his feet, helping the younger woman into her coat. He turned to Addison. “William Riker had some serious father issues,” he said. “Sorry. Didn't mean to eavesdrop. I just heard the name and I'm kind of a buff.”

“I didn't know that about Riker,” Addison said.

“Oh, sure.”

Addison was only being polite. She had yet to meet the person who didn't have father issues. It came with the standard package. She'd never supposed for a second that the exception would be a white supremacist cult leader.

The man flashed the Vulcan hand signal from
Star Trek
on his way out the door. He did it surreptitiously, shielding his hand with his body, so the young woman wouldn't see. This was puzzling. Not the fact that he'd hidden it—there are few situations in which Vulcan hand gestures add to a man's allure—but the fact that he'd made the gesture in the first place.

Neither Addison nor Rima knew it, but the man had confused William E. Riker with William T. Riker. William E. Riker was born in California in 1873 and ran Holy City from the 1920s through the 1950s. His followers sold gas, dirty pictures, and holy water to travelers on the Old Santa Cruz Highway.

William T. Riker was born on Earth (Valdez, Alaska) in 2335 and served as first officer on the USS
Enterprise-D
and -
E
under Captain Jean-Luc Picard until his promotion in 2379 to the command of the USS
Titan.