(1)

That first morning Rima was slow to get up. Getting up would mean getting started, as company or hired help or goddaughter or whatever it was she was going to be here. Getting up would very likely involve chatting; her good mood was too baseless to survive a chat. Better to stay in bed, watch an odd medallion of light slide slowly down the wall, smell the cedar on the quilt, listen to the sound the ocean made, like a distant washing machine. Better to note, as if from that same distant place, that she had taken comfort from her father’s archnemesis and shelter from her mother’s. If her parents found that objectionable, then they should have stuck around to prevent it.

In fact Wit’s End was empty, as Rima would have known if she’d gone down to the kitchen, read the note Addison had left on the counter for her.

It was an opportunity lost. Rima would have liked having the whole house to herself, would have explored a bit, maybe seen if she could find the dollhouse for Ice City, the book in which her murderous cat-wielding father starred. Sometime last night she’d wondered whether Addison would mind if she moved that one into her bedroom in place of The Murder of Miss Time, and then she’d wondered what was wrong with her that she would even think such a thing.

Rima,” the unread note said. “The dogs are being walked, I’m working in the studio, and Tilda has gone out. Help yourself to breakfast. Eggs and tomatoes in the fridge. Bread in the breadbox. See you at lunch. A”

Here is the long version:

1. Berkeley and Stanford were down on the beach, ecstatic and leashless, chasing gulls the size of beach balls and getting sand on their bellies, between their toes, inside their ears. They would quarrel over a dead fish, have to be forcibly separated, and come home in disgrace. Addison referred to each and all of their frequent fights as The Big Game.

2. Addison was out in her studio, and no one knew what she was doing anymore. She hadn’t finished a book in three years, and two had passed since anyone who knew her well had asked how the new one was coming.

The studio had been added after Addison bought the house. She called it her outback, though it was really to the side of the main building. You walked on a paved pathway to get there, through a Spanish courtyard, past a trellis of roses, a clay birdbath, and a sticky, sweet-smelling fig tree.

The studio was a modern room with wireless broadband. Addison had a Norwegian recliner for napping, a desk, and a craft table. The ocean-side wall was made of five glass doors, each of which slid inside the next like a telescope, so that in good weather the room could be opened to the sea. A mobile of murder weapons, made by a reader in New Hampshire, hung from the ceiling, and when the breeze came off the ocean, the dangling knives and blunt objects struck against one another with a soft sound like wind chimes.

And who knew what else? No one was allowed in during the dollhouse phase of a book, which meant that no one but Addison had been inside the studio for three years now, with the exception of one much-loved computer technician, Ved Yamagata, who also worked for the university. Ved kept Addison’s gear upgraded, and his silence apparently could and had been bought, though on the subject of Japanese manga he was chatty enough.

You would have had to scramble up the rocks at the cliff base and then scale the face just to look inside, which you could hardly then claim to have done by accident. Even so, Addison closed the shutters whenever she left.

For some writers three years isn’t a long time to work on a book. For Addison it was unprecedented. Perhaps there was no new one, her friends said to one another, but only when she wasn’t around. Why should there be? How many books could one woman write?

Addison was a national treasure. She didn’t have to write another word to collect lifetime achievement awards for the rest of her life. The reviews of her last two books had been chilly. They mentioned the earlier work with the sort of conventional courtesies people adopted when speaking of the dead; no one wanted to be in the room with Addison when she read them. There was no shame in knowing when to quit.

Still, Addison went to her studio, without fail or interruption, from eight every morning until lunchtime, so usually this was when Tilda vacuumed up the sand and dog hair, but today

3. Tilda was over in Soquel attending her twelve-step meeting at the Land of Medicine Buddha. Since the weather was so good—no season warmer and sunnier in Santa Cruz than the glorious fall—she would stay after and do the forty-minute hike through the sequoias up to the red-gold temple. Two acolytes worked full-time painting the temple. Like housekeeping, this was a job acknowledged to be endless, red and gold paint until the heat death of the universe. Tilda might or might not be home for lunch, depending on what they were serving at the Land of Medicine Buddha.

Tilda was a tall, athletic woman in her mid-forties. Her hair was shiny, dark, and short; there was a tattoo of a snake, coiled, head down, around her left biceps. She took yoga at the Santa Cruz veterans center, where her headstand was rock steady. She was Addison’s housekeeper unless she was something more, had lived with Addison for nearly three years. Sometime before that she’d been homeless, and while she was fond of Addison, her real love was Wit’s End. She loved the house the way a captain loves a ship. She listened for plumbing problems, sniffed for bad wiring, kept the wood oiled, the glass polished.

Her affection did not extend to the dollhouses. They were nests of constant dust, requiring constant dusting. Before the earthquake, Addison had told her, there’d been four more, but they’d been crushed when some bookcases fell. Tilda tried to remember this whenever she was thinking that there were way too many. Not only did they all have to be dusted, but they all had to be dusted so as not to disturb the crime scene. She had to use toothpicks on some parts.

Tilda hadn’t been living in Santa Cruz at the time of the quake, but she was retroactively proud of how little damage Wit’s End had taken. Such a good house! One crack in one bedroom wall, some china and four dollhouses lost. When the cliff beneath gave way, as all Santa Cruz cliffs eventually would, Tilda pictured Wit’s End sliding into the ocean, floating on the water like an ark.

This, then, was the household: Tilda on the first floor, with a bedroom off the kitchen and a private door out to the garden. Addison on the second floor, with the large master suite, an even larger library, and a small room for watching television. And Rima on the third floor, with two bedrooms besides hers, which Addison sometimes offered to artists she knew but which were empty at the moment.

“You’ll have the whole floor to yourself,” Addison had promised Rima when she suggested the visit, so when Rima did finally get out of bed, she felt free to check out that part of the house.

She saw immediately that the other two bedrooms were smaller than hers and that they shared a bath. One had a view of the ocean, the other of the lake (though no one in Cleveland would have called that a lake—it was a pond in a good mood, or a puddle in a bad), but only Rima’s windows overlooked it all, and the boardwalk too. Addison was being so good to her!

Something else was pleasing Rima; she felt this long before she was able to tease out what it was. It had to do with the woman who’d lived here once, the woman who’d survived the Donner Party, and it had to do with the rooms, with the house. Finally Rima got to it—that later in her life, the woman had had so many people around her she needed a big place like this in which to keep them all. Who doesn’t like a happy ending? Even Addison wrote one occasionally.

The bedrooms were all similarly decorated—brass bedsteads, shadow quilts, glassed-in bookcases (sometimes containing Addison’s own books), pile rugs, and murders. On various shelves and tabletops, Rima quickly found: Our Better Angels (young woman stabbed in the backseat of a blue convertible); Absolution Way (old woman drowned in her bathtub); and It Happened to Somebody Else (old man beaten to death with the Annu-Baltic volume of Encyclopaedia Britannica).

There was no sign of the dogs. This puzzled Rima until she looked out a window and saw them climbing the stone stairs up from the beach. Tall stairs, short legs, they hopped from step to step like Slinkys, only upward and all tired out. A man with a bandanna over his head and a woman with red hair were holding their leashes. By the time Rima got downstairs, all four were in the kitchen, finishing off what seemed to have been a breakfast of poached eggs and toast. The dogs looked up from their bowls briefly when Rima came in, and then back down, as if now that she was actually in reach, the prospect of ripping her open with their bare teeth had become tedious to them. The kitchen smelled of melted butter, dead fish, and exhausted dog.

The couple looked to be about college age. (Were college age, as it turned out. Junior and senior at UC Santa Cruz.) The young woman was talking. “So she goes, ‘Excuse me. Your hair is touching me.’ And I say I’m sorry, because I always say I’m sorry, it’s like a reflex, you know, I just can’t help myself, sometimes I say I’m sorry for saying I’m sorry. So I push my hair down and five minutes later she’s tapping me on the shoulder, going, ‘Your hair is touching me again,’ like she’s really losing patience with me now. I can’t hear the music, I’m so busy trying to figure out how to make my hair stop doing that. And it’s not like I have big hair.”

“Maybe you have rude hair,” said the young man. He was reading the paper, mopping up the last of his egg with the last of his toast. It was possible that he himself had no hair, though with the bandanna it was hard to be sure. “Maybe you’re a rude-head.”

“So funny.” The young woman looked at Rima. “Do I have big hair?”

“No,” said Rima. It was very red, though. Except for the short bits right around her face, which were pink, it was very red, but not red like red hair, red like strawberry Jell-O. The woman was wearing camouflage pants, which seemed pointless with such unstealthy hair, unless the only thing she didn’t want looked at was her legs, because then the hair was diversionary. But no one would have said big.

“See?” the young woman told the young man. And then, “You must be Rima. I’m Scorch. I walk the dogs in the morning and pick up the mail. This is Cody. He thinks he’s my boyfriend.

Addison said you were to help yourself to breakfast. She left you a note. She’s out in the studio and can’t be disturbed, on pain of death. Do you want a piece of toast? We made one too many. How do you know Addison?”

“She’s my godmother.”

Scorch took a moment to process this. “I don’t have a godmother.” Her tone was aggrieved, as if everyone had a godmother but her. “My family doesn’t go in for that.”

“Water’s hot if you want some tea.” Cody didn’t look up from the paper.

“I’m sorry,” Scorch said. “I should have said. Water’s on the stove and the tea is over there.” She pointed to the window above the sink, where several canisters were wedged on the sill between the potted ferns and ivy. Rima went to look.

Someone in the household had a powerful faith in tea. There were fruit teas, green teas, black teas; cleansing teas, fortifying teas; teas that sweetened your thoughts, improved your rest; teas for longevity, teas for celebration, teas for contemplation.

Wisdom, fortune, health, or happiness? What kind of a monster would make a person choose only one? Rima went back to the table and took the spare piece of toast instead.

One of the dogs came to sit beside her. It was Berkeley, the female, though Rima didn’t know it; she couldn’t tell them apart yet. Berkeley looked up at her with brown, brown eyes, sighing in a smitten sort of way. She hardly seemed to notice the toast, just the shadow of a blink when it moved to and from Rima’s mouth.

But when Scorch began to gather her things—backpack, coat, car keys—Berkeley lost interest in Rima. She joined Stanford at the door, tail wagging hopelessly. Scorch knelt to say good-bye, and the dogs collapsed like deflated balloons. Rima wouldn’t have thought they could get smaller. “Don’t look at me like that,” Scorch told them. “I’m sorry. I’ll be back soon.”

And then to Rima—“Tell Addison that Maxwell Lane got a letter. Just junk. He can get a credit card or something. It’s on the table in the entry with the rest of the mail.”

“He’s in the ether again,” Cody said. “They’re rerunning the television show. The eighties one. With the moustache.”

Scorch coughed suddenly. It was a painful sound. “My throat is killing me.” She wiped one hand across her eyes. “I think I’m getting a cold.”

“We’re all going to die of the bird flu,” Cody said. He folded up the paper with a shake and a snap. “I got to get to class.”

(2)

The breakfast table was in an alcove overlooking the courtyard. Fig leaves pressed like hands against the windowpanes; sunlight rippled on the table, softening the butter in its wake. There was a hutch built into one corner with china on the top shelves and a dollhouse on the bottom: Spook Juice—man in a tux, brained in the atrium with an unopened bottle of Brut Impérial Champagne. Rima thought she remembered that the fact that it was unopened had been a major clue. Or maybe that had been another book, an Agatha Christie or an Elizabeth George.

The china was painted with poppies, a replication of the pattern once used in the dining car on the Santa Fe Railway. Rima knew this about the dishes, and she wondered how. There were many things Rima inexplicably knew, the residue, presumably, of lost conversations, books, classes, television shows, crossword puzzles. Like her mother before her, Rima was a devotee of the Nation crossword puzzle, and as a result, she had a surprising store of slang circa World War II, much of it British.

She looked at the paper Cody had left, a thin magazine-style weekly called Good Times, which said fifty-one people had been arrested on Halloween, two for stabbings, and an unspecified number for public urination. The paper said this was a vast improvement over last year.

Rima made herself another piece of toast and considered the possibility that she was going to die of bird flu. She couldn’t make herself think so. But everyone else probably would, Rima could easily picture that.

Next she thought about Maxwell Lane’s letter. She should go get it, apply for that credit card. Buy something. That’s what Oliver would have done. (Don’t start thinking about Oliver.) Oliver would have done that, just to see what happened next.

She was still in the kitchen when Addison arrived, hungry for lunch after a hard morning of whatever it was she’d been up to. Rima considered escaping to her room, but it would have been rude. Sooner or later she and Addison were going to have to get to know each other. Sooner or later they would have a couple of drinks together and Rima would find herself feeling oddly comfortable, or maybe drunk, and against all her better instincts, she would suddenly say, “Okay, then. What was it exactly that went on between you and my father?” Even though, right now, drinking nothing but orange juice, Rima truly believed it was all so long ago, who cared?

This regrettable conversation could occur only after an initial extended period of politeness. So Rima stayed put, getting on with the politeness part, and Addison fixed herself a lunch, slicing, salting, and eating tomatoes while making a sandwich with many tomatoes in it, because this was California and the use of the word “autumn” here was no more accurate than the use of the word “lake.” Eventually Rima remembered to mention Maxwell’s letter.

Addison told her that Maxwell Lane got a surprising amount of mail. He was on any number of charitable lists, and not a single nonprofit had ever been discouraged by the fact that he never responded. It was an inspiring testament, Addison often noted (though not on this occasion), to the tenacity of the world’s dogooders.

In addition to charitable requests, there were the political. Maxwell seemed to have been identified as both a leftist and a white supremacist. You could understand the latter, but it was a sad misreading, or else the white supremacists didn’t read her at all, which was the explanation Addison preferred. White supremacists, she was fond of saying, were the living refutations of their own theories. In point of fact, Addison had a lot of readers of whom she did not approve. Most of them, if you really want to know.

Anyway, Maxwell received special introductory offers from The Skeptic and Mother Jones, but also from White Hope, White Heart and some group called the New Thules. One unsolicited news-letter kept him updated on the schemes of the mongrel races, another tracked Big Pharm, Big Oil, and Big Brother.

Only very rarely did he get a personal letter. Sometimes these contained proposals more suited to a younger man. At least that was Addison’s opinion. A silence followed this statement, broken only by the sound of the knife on the cutting board.

Rima would have liked to hear more about those proposals, but not if Addison was going to make her ask. “How old is Maxwell?” she asked instead.

Rima genuinely wanted to know the answer. Addison had been careless with her details; greater minds than Rima’s had struggled to put together a coherent timeline that worked over the many books, and failed. It simply couldn’t be done, not with any math yet invented.

“Eight years older than I am. Seventy-two.”

This Rima seriously doubted. She didn’t suppose even Addison believed it. Fictional characters don’t age at the same rate as the rest of us. Some don’t age at all. Rima’s father, to give just one example: Rima’s father was dead, but the murderer with his name was fleeing east in a green Rambler station wagon on Interstate 80 and always would be.

And then there was the man in Rima’s dream. There was no proposal he would have been too old for. Rima felt the ghost of his dream hand on her dream shoulder.

So how about this math instead? Addison was twenty-eight when she published her first Maxwell Lane book. Ergo, instead of being eight years older than Addison, Maxwell must be twenty-eight years younger. Strange to think that back when Addison first met Rima’s father, Maxwell Lane didn’t even exist.

Twenty-eight years younger than Addison was a perfectly plausible and entirely suitable age. Mid-thirties. His whole life ahead of him. Rima had a peculiar sense of satisfaction. She’d just given Maxwell Lane an additional thirty-six years in which to solve all sorts of crimes, and she’d done it with only simple arithmetic.

Addison finished making her sandwich and came to sit with Rima. Addison’s hair was flattened on one side, as if she’d been sleeping on it. She looked more fragile by daylight, her elbows sharp enough to shatter on contact. Countless interviews had remarked on the paradox that the author of such chilly books could be this pale, frail woman with the friendly smile. Rima wondered briefly if “friendly smile” was magazine code for big teeth. Not that Addison didn’t have a lovely smile. Probably. Rima had hardly seen it so far, but it was probably very nice.

“I’ve had the same postman for almost twenty years,” Addison said. “Kenny. Sullivan. Kenny Sullivan.” She took a bite of sandwich.

When Rima looked next, there was a little tomato on her cheek, and a seed and a smear of skin the color of blood in the deep crease beside her mouth. Funny what a difference one tiny bloody smear made on an otherwise friendly face.

Rima’s mother had thought there was something vampiric about the mere act of writing murder mysteries; Rima heard her say so once at a dinner party. How it had come up, she didn’t remember. In a gesture of daughterly solidarity, she decided not to tell Addison about the tomato skin.

Anyway, Addison had a napkin; it might well get taken care of without anyone’s saying a word.

And anyway again, only Rima was there to see. She wasn’t making a decision as much as removing herself from the outcome. Leaving things to fate.

When Rima began to listen again, Addison was still talking about Kenny Sullivan. Kenny Sullivan was a famous postman,

Addison was saying, because he had once delivered the mail to a bank right smack in the middle of a robbery. He hadn’t even noticed that the tellers were all facedown on the floor, just walked in, put the mail on the counter, walked out again. He’d always been the sort of postman who lived mostly in his own head. He’d been on Letterman after.

But reliable, certainly, neither sleet nor snow nor armed robbery, et cetera, and Kenny could be counted on to bring any mail for Maxwell straight to Wit’s End no matter how it was addressed. When there was a substitute postman, Maxwell’s mail might go to a rug shop on Cooper Street that was owned by a widow from Portugal. She had Addison’s number; she would give Addison a call, so no harm done. The widow’s rugs were beautiful. There were two of them in the living room.

“We need to tell Kenny that you’re staying here now,” Addison said, just as calmly as if she weren’t a really famous person with bits of tomato all over her face. “Is your mail being forwarded?”

There had been some discussion of Rima’s handling light secretarial work for Addison—keeping her calendar, answering her phone. It would have been nice, therefore, to demonstrate a bit of organizational competence. “I didn’t think to do that,” Rima said.

“Who writes letters today?” Addison shook her head, embarrassed to have brought it up. She herself was guilty as anyone! It was all e-mail now. She wiped her eyes with her napkin. Her eyes were nowhere near the tomato skin. “I pity social historians.” Addison wiped her hands. “A hundred years from now, we’ll know more about daily life in 1806 than in 2006.” She wiped her chin.

“What about novels?” Rima asked.

“Unreliable. No one in novels watches TV,” Addison said. “Would you be interested in Maxwell’s old letters? I think I have some up in the attic.”

Rima heard boots on the brick walkway outside the kitchen door. Addison heard them too, because she was saying she’d have Tilda get the letters down for Rima at the very same moment that Rima was telling Addison there was tomato on her face, pointing to her own cheek—key in the keyhole—her own mouth—doorknob turning—so when Tilda came in, stamping her feet and saying what a beautiful day it was, she’d seen an osprey at the Land of Medicine Buddha (surely not, Addison said, maybe a hawk, maybe a redtail, when even Rima knew that an osprey looks absolutely nothing like a red-tailed hawk) and first thought there was a mouse in its talons, but later seen it was a ragged old tennis shoe, Addison’s face was perfectly clean.

What happened next was that they all went up to the Our Better Angels bedroom on the third floor, where Addison made Tilda pull some stairs out of the ceiling. The stairs didn’t come easily—Tilda had to wrap the rope around her hands and hang from it with her feet braced and the coiled snake swelling on her biceps. They didn’t come quietly—wood ground against wood, hinges squealed and popped. The noise brought Berkeley and Stanford racing in from wherever they’d been, both of them barking frantically.

“There was a mouse in the attic once,” Addison said. She raised her voice to be heard over the dogs; she was shouting. “Maybe four, five years ago. Ever since, it’s their favorite place in the world. Better let them go first. You’ll trip over them if you don’t.”

Tilda returned to the osprey and the tennis shoe, a sighting she thought had all the earmarks of portent. “What could it mean?” she shouted. It was one thing to get a message from the universe. It was entirely another to successfully decode it.

The steps landed and the dogs swarmed up them. The barking rose in pitch and excitement. “Static on the radio,” Addison said. She was too focused on the probable misidentification of the bird to think deeply about the tennis shoe.