Wit's End (27 page)

Two totally different people.

 

 

S
o my father never did write anything about Holy City?” Rima asked.

“No. A few months later he was offered a job on the sports desk at the
Chicago Tribune.
I never met the man who wouldn't give it all up to work the sports desk,” Addison said.

Rima finished her ale and ordered another. She hadn't had breakfast and she'd drunk quickly, so maybe that was causing the pleasantly buoyant feeling on the edges of her brain. Or maybe it was a delayed reaction to the catnip tea. “Okay, then,” she said.

She looked across the table to Addison, and was filled with affection for this woman without whom the world would have no Maxwell Lane in it and no one would even know what they were missing.

“What exactly was it that went on between you and my father?” Rima asked.

R
ima was instantly sorry she'd asked. Addison's face locked tight for a second; her cheeks had no color. But before she could speak, Rima became aware that someone was standing behind her. She turned to see a young Asian woman with tiny glasses and black hair just long enough to tuck behind her ears. “I don't mean to interrupt,” the young woman said, “but I'm such a fan. I can't even fly on a plane unless I have one of your books to read. Otherwise I spend the whole flight expecting to crash and die.” She had a preppy look—a powder-blue sweater set and jeans with embroidered flowers on the knees. Gold stud earrings, only two, and only in the lobes. Very un-Santa Cruz. But very pretty.

“Air travel has become impossible,” Addison agreed. She'd managed a smile. Unpersuasive, but high-wattage all the same. “I'm so pleased to hear I help.”

“That's all I wanted to say.” This was a lie. The woman's eyes were big and her voice nervous. More words came out, all in a rush. “I love every book you've ever written. I won't read anyone else. Until you write a new one, I'll just keep rereading the old ones. Will there be a new one soon?”

Addison stopped smiling. “I hope so.”

“Does it have a title?”

“Not yet. Maybe when we get habeas corpus back.” Addison gestured to Rima. “This is my goddaughter, Rima Lanisell.”

“Oh!” The word came out in a gasp. “Bim's daughter? I love Bim! I'm the biggest M-and-B-shipper!”

A couple of weeks earlier, Rima wouldn't have known what to make of that description. Now she knew it meant that this woman was a fan of the Maxwell-Bim relationship. Possibly she wrote sex scenes and posted them on the Web. Probably she read them. Probably these sex scenes were lousy with deep emotional connection. Rima didn't imagine that anyone who wore sweater sets would be into meaningless sex.

“You do understand that those characters are under copyright?” Addison asked. (In point of fact, since Bim was not only a character in a book but also a newspaper columnist for
The Plain Dealer
and dead, the issue of copyright was kind of interesting. Addison wasn't doing the nuance.)

The woman took a step backward. “I'm not a writer,” she said. “I won't interrupt you anymore. I just wanted to say how much I love your books.”

“Aren't you sweet?”

The woman backed into one of the Ping-Pong players. The backswing of his paddle hit her right on the ass. This mortified everyone concerned, so there was a string of apologies in multiple languages. It brought the smile back to Addison's face. “Ping-Pong is a deadly game,” she said to Rima. “Few survive it.”

The cavalry arrived, a bit late, in the form of the owner with a water pitcher. “Are you being disturbed?” she asked in a whisper, topping off their already full glasses.

“By someone who reads my books? Never,” Addison said. “She'd have to bite me before I'd find her disturbing.”

The owner and Addison were both members of the Bonny Doon wine club. They discussed the latest shipment in such detail that Rima felt Addison was deliberately prolonging it. If enough time passed, she could pretend to have forgotten the question Rima had asked. Rima did her bit by excusing herself and going to the bathroom.

The rest room mirror was recessed, and framed by a wooden box painted with vines. The silver base of the sink matched the chairs in the restaurant. There was the usual sign about employees being required to wash their hands. No such requirement for customers. Rima washed her hands voluntarily.

Someone knocked on the door. Rima dried her hands quickly and opened it. The young M-and-B-shipper was standing outside.

“Oh my god,” she said. “I was trying so hard not to babble and all I did was babble. I insulted her!”

“You didn't,” Rima said.

“I gushed! I babbled! I got paddled! That's what she'll remember. I'll probably be in her next book.”

“She was charmed.”

“You're such a liar.”

Rima stepped aside so that the woman could step in. It was that sort of bathroom, a single toilet, no stalls. One person at a time. But the woman blocked Rima's exit. “I actually wanted to talk to you,” she said. She closed and locked the door with Rima still inside. “I'll only take a minute.”

Rima didn't suppose she should let herself be locked in a rest room with a strange woman even if it was only for a minute. Any more than she should let one in the house to rifle through the shelves. And yet somehow, here she was.

“You're staying with her, right?” the woman asked. “I was just wondering if she ever talks about the new book. You've probably seen the dollhouse at least.”

“No,” said Rima. “And no. And why would I tell you, even if I had? She obviously doesn't want it talked about.”

“There's this person,” the woman said. “On the Web. Who's offered two thousand dollars to anyone who can find out what's going to happen to Maxwell. Of course, I'd share the money if you found out something. Fifty-fifty. I mean, you could just look around, right? The dollhouse has to be somewhere.”

“When did this offer go up?” Rima asked. “The two thousand?”

“A few weeks ago.”

“We had a break-in recently.”

The woman brushed her black hair back nervously with her hand. Her eyes skipped from Rima's face to the mottled gray-and-white tile on the floor. “Yeah,” she said. “Listen. That's the other thing I wanted to say to you. You know how on the Web you mostly can't tell who's crazy and who isn't? That woman's crazy. You should watch out for her.”

“You know about the break-in?”

“She posted about it. She figured she had some leverage, now that she had something Early would want back.”

Rima had been picturing Pamela Price as a drug-addled homeless type. Not, she corrected herself hastily and for Tilda's sake, that the homeless were usually drug-addled or even that there was a homeless type. But the thing Pamela Price had never struck Rima as being was a Web maven.

“What's her handle?” Rima asked.

“ConstantComment. Avatar of a teapot. But I think she uses a lot of other names and avatars too. But I think she's all over the discussion boards. Sock puppets here, there, and everywhere. Nothing I can prove.”

“Thank you for the warning,” Rima said, “and I'm going to decline your offer. Are we finished, then? Can I go?”

The woman let her out. “I really do love her books,” she said apologetically. “I really do love Maxwell Lane.”

“Don't we all?” said Rima. Halfway through the open door, she had another thought. “How did you know we were here?”

“She comes here all the time. I got a phone call,” the woman said.

Poor Addison! So worried about governmental spying, while her fans were tracking her every movement. Every pizza parlor a nest of spies. Rima had changed her mind about the young woman's being pretty. Apparently they were letting just anyone wear a sweater set these days.

Martin had said he would come for dinner and would arrive around six-thirty. By seven, Tilda was so nervous she was practically airborne. She stood at the stove, stirring the mushroom soup and fretting that it was getting a skin.

Rima had told Addison about the woman in the rest room and the two-thousand-dollar bounty on Maxwell Lane sightings. Addison had gone upstairs to see what she could find on the Internet. Now she came back down. If she'd found anything out, she wasn't sharing.

“Just leave the soup,” she told Tilda. “Rima and I are going to play Trivial Pursuit while we wait for Martin.” This was the first Rima had heard of it. “Come join us.”

“Which board?” Tilda asked.

“Lord of the Rings. It's a party in a box,” Addison said temptingly.

Tilda turned the burner off and put a lid on the soup. She moved the baking dish from the oven to the counter and covered it with a dish towel.

“No one has ever beaten Tilda at Lord of the Rings Trivial Pursuit,” Addison told Rima. “Not in the whole history of Middle-earth.”

Rima didn't think of herself as a Middle-earth expert. But she did know that Gandalf's sword was named Glamdring and that Glamdring had once belonged to Turgon, the only Elf ever to be king of Gondolin. She had no idea how she knew this. But she thought she'd probably do okay. Like all first children, when she played games, she planned to win.

Addison got the board from upstairs; Tilda got the books from her room. Rima cleared some magazines that Addison would maybe read someday from the living room coffee table. There was a chair for Addison and the couch for Tilda. Rima would sit cross-legged on one of the deep pile rugs Addison had bought from the Portuguese widow whose shop occupied the address given in Addison's books as Maxwell Lane's. The rug was a Persian pattern in black and red, the red so vivid it glowed.

The living room contained three dollhouses—
Folsom Street, Native Dancer,
and
Party of None.
The largest and most elaborate was
Folsom Street
—San Francisco woman pushed from a balcony during the Gay Pride parade. The dollhouse was actually a street scene with three housefronts and two parade floats. The corpse lay on the sidewalk, head cracked open and flattened where it hit. The victim had missed a Nancy Sinatra impersonator by inches. This dollhouse took up most of the window seat that looked out on the yard toward Addison's studio.

On the opposite wall was a fireplace in white tile with white wood shelving on either side.
Native Dancer
was to the left of the fireplace and three shelves up—the tack room of a stable, plus two stalls, one with an arch-necked palomino inside. Hanging from a rafter was the corpse, western bridle around his neck.

Party of None
was on the lowest shelf to the right of the fireplace—a long, narrow diner with a linoleum counter, tiny napkin dispensers with tiny napkins, and a shiny black jukebox. The corpse had bits of green foam around her mouth. She'd overdosed on caffeine.

The three women heard a car outside, and each stopped what she was doing for a moment to listen. The motor cut off somewhere down around the Morrisons' house. The door slammed. The women picked up where they had left off.

They gathered at the coffee table and the game began. Tilda took the wizard token, Addison the man. This left the Elven princess or the halfling for Rima. She made the obvious choice. The halfling's sword curved, but not like a scimitar, more like a mistake.

The game provided answers as well as questions; Tilda and Addison ignored the former. Too many of the answers were based on the movies rather than the books, and even when based on the books, they were often not based on what Addison called a deep reading. Who solved the riddle that opened Moria's West-gate? If Rima had answered Gandalf, she would have gotten the pie wedge. If she'd answered Merry, there would have been wiggle-room enough to count the answer, since in the book Gandalf credits Merry with being on the right track. But Frodo, the answer Rima gave and the answer listed as correct on the back of the card, could not be credited. It could not even be countenanced.

In addition to ignoring the official answers, Tilda and Addison had inserted a system of challenges into the game. Rima, for instance, was free to challenge the decision on Frodo. If she did so, Tilda would find and read the relevant section from
The Fellowship of the Ring.
If Tilda and Addison turned out to be right, as they had no doubt they would be, the challenge would cost Rima the only pie wedge she had so far—the green one for remembering that the name of the Elven bread was Lembas. She passed on the challenge.

The game was interrupted when Addison noticed that Berkeley was chewing on something. It took both Addison and Tilda to pry the Ringwraith pawn from Berkeley's jaws, and it looked nothing like a Ringwraith by the time they'd done so. If Rima ever wrote a horror movie, the world would find itself menaced by gigantic dachshunds, dachshunds the size of semis. “Has anyone tried to reason with them?” the scientist would say, and before the scene was over he would look just like the Ringwraith pawn now looked.

Rima fell behind. She wasn't missing the answers so much as sucking at the die-throwing part of the game. This too had been made more difficult by the substitution of Addison's Dungeons & Dragons die for the normal six-sided one. With a single throw you might lose as many as three turns battling balrogs, or two turns for orcs, or one turn to stop and eat your second breakfast.

The clock upstairs chimed eight. Addison got up and went to the kitchen. She returned with a tray and three salads made of lettuce, jícama, and blood oranges. When they'd finished those, Addison went back to the kitchen and dished up the mac and cheese.