Chapter Ten

(1)

When she was little, Rima used to play a game that she’d gotten from a book. You walked around the house holding a large mirror in front of you, pointing up. You weren’t allowed to look at the ground beneath your feet. You looked only into the mirror. This transformed the terrain most familiar to you into something new and strange, a fantasy-land hidden in plain sight above your head in your very own house. You couldn’t get anything like the same effect simply lying on your bed looking upward. You had to be seriously disoriented—up down and down up.

Rima had been playing the mirror game one day when she saw something on top of one of the kitchen cabinets. She had to put the footstool on the counter and climb onto both to reach it. Her mother walked into the middle of this. “For goodness’ sakes, get down from there,” she had said. “You’ll break your neck. One more thing to charge to Addison’s account.”

The object turned out to be Addison’s wedding gift to Rima’s parents, an antique silver samovar. It was a wedding Addison had not attended. The samovar was engraved on the bottom. Rima ran her finger over this. The wedding date and then the words: One is silver. “What does it mean?” Rima had asked, and her mother sang to her. Make new friends, but keep the old. One is silver and the other gold.

This didn’t exactly answer the question. Rima’s mother put the samovar back on top of the high cupboard and, to the best of Rima’s memory, took it out again only when she was cleaning the shelves, which is to say, never.

This maybe had nothing to do with Addison. Rima’s mother disliked essential household chores bad enough, never mind the optional ones. Silver tarnishes. And Rima remembered her mother as distinctly not the jealous sort. Her father traveled so much. He’d covered Vietnam before Rima was born, and the Peace Talks in Paris. Cambodia later. Nigeria. The reunification of Germany. Baghdad. Madrid. Her mother never seemed to mind—always happy to see him come home, the two of them constantly touching each other in small ways, a hand on the back or the knee, a hand in a hand.

But her mother also seemed happy when he left. And busy. For Rima and Oliver, pancakes at dinner and a general relaxation of the house rules compensated for his absence. Not that they would have made the trade. Just that they were okay with it.

Their father went to dangerous places; he flew on planes; he interviewed murderers; he was much, much older than their mother. The chance that he would die someday had occurred to Rima, which meant the notion had been shared with Oliver. They thought of all the times he’d arrived like Santa Claus, with sugar skulls from Mexico, polished rocks from Thailand, wood clocks from Germany. Rima and Oliver would be so sad when he died. But they would be okay. What mattered was their mother.

Rima’s mother was beautiful in a sixties sort of way—a Joan Baez with long, thick hair, nose slightly hooked, Gypsy eyes. Rima had the same eyes, which is why Martin had admired them. Her mother was a photographer who did portraits of families in front of fireplaces, brides looking out windows, kids under Christmas trees. She did dogs, birds, and horses, but her passion was old railway stations. On weekends the three of them would drive to Indiana, Illinois, Kentucky, so she could take photographs of people arriving, people departing, people waiting, or, if there were none of those, empty stations. Rima, Oliver, and their mother would stay in hotels, eat hamburgers, go to whatever movie was showing at the cinemaplex. They would sleep, all three of them, in a single room and often in a single bed. Her mother had seemed to need no one’s company but her children’s.

The reverse could not be said. As Rima grew older the weekend trips interfered with birthday parties or sleepovers, or with nothing at all, only Rima was increasingly reluctant to tag along. Kari Spector, a popular girl at her school, a high-status female if there ever was one, might call on a Saturday morning, ask whether Rima wanted to hang. If Rima was gone, Kari would move on to Siobhán McCarthy, and then all the next week at school there would be oblique references to things Rima had missed, jokes she wouldn’t understand, boys she hadn’t met. The next weekend it would be Siobhán whom Kari called first. Rima’s whole life ruined so that her mother could take another stupid picture.

Stupid. Who was Kari or Siobhán to Rima now? What wouldn’t she have given for one more trip with her mother and Oliver, one more night in a stale little room with one double bed, the mattress so scooped out that the three of them would wake up in a heap in the middle, push apart, roll together all night long.

At first Rima had kept the mirror game to herself. By the time she taught it to Oliver, it had become much more intricate. The world in the mirror was now an actual place. It had a name—Upside-down Town—and a history that Rima was always adding to. Queens, of course, in honor of Alice’s Through the Looking-Glass, and also because who doesn’t like a story with queens in it? Plus a mirror image of Rima (and now Oliver)—kids who looked just like them, but were otherwise opposite in every way.

Unlike most second children, Oliver was a games enthusiast. He played nonstop, even through dinner, until he fell down the stairs on his way to bed and Rima’s mother said that was that and took the mirror away. Rima thought he might have fallen on purpose. Oliver was also a Band-Aid enthusiast.

Later that same night he came into Rima’s room. He was supposed to be asleep, but sleep had always held little charm for Oliver. “How would you know,” he asked Rima, “if someone who looked just like me took my place?” Rima couldn’t tell whether he was agitated or merely philosophical.

“I would know you,” she said. She too was supposed to be asleep, but was reading in the time-honored flashlight-under-the-blanket fashion. The heroine had just been locked in her room by her evil governess. This was no time to be talking to Oliver.

Oliver lifted the corner of the blanket and, with his feet still on the floor, slid his face into her little lighted tent. “How? If I looked just the same?”

“I would smell you.” As a child Oliver had smelled like oatmeal. Rima made sure her tone suggested something far less pleasant. She returned the flashlight to her book.

Oliver leaned on his elbows. He rocked slightly. The mattress creaked. “Go back to bed,” Rima told him. He stretched his hand out, covered the flashlight bulb so his hand turned that neon red. He wiggled his fingers, and shadows rippled across the words in Rima’s book. “Stop it,” she said.

Oliver grabbed the hand with the flashlight in it, directed the beam into his own face so he was all lit up, a moon Oliver. “Hey,” he said. “Pay attention.” Like all second children, he was hypersensitive to those moments when no attention was being paid. “Listen. Which me would ask you that? The one before or after I switched?”

(2)

Jeopardy! April 5, 1990. “Books and Authors” for a thousand.

Answer: The only A. B. Early mystery with a dollhouse in it.

Correct question: What is Ice City?

(3)

Like Upside-down Town, Ice City is an imaginary place. Even in the fictional context of Ice City the book, Ice City is not real. Ice City is a made-up bar where made-up drinks are served to made-up people. Maxwell Lane is always one of those people. The others are whomever Maxwell wants them to be—people from his past, the famous, the infamous, the real, the fictional, the living, the dead. In every book, even those published before Ice City, Maxwell Lane spends some time in his imaginary bar with his imaginary friends. It’s the closest we get to inside his head, although never presented as such.

Ice City is a state of mind, a psychological destination. Maxwell Lane goes there when he wants to drink more, feel less. He can’t go to a real bar. Like most fictional detectives, Maxwell Lane has both a problem with alcohol and a problem with facing the world sober. Ice City the bar is the feeling-no-pain stage of drunkenness, but you have to get there without drinking, which is why it’s imaginary.

Ice City the book is about betrayal, the unforeseen consequences of careless actions, the advisability of keeping secrets. These same things can be said about all A. B. Early books. But in no other does Maxwell Lane have such an intimate relationship with the murderer. In no other is the betrayal of one by the other so nearly equal. Maxwell goes to Ice City in every book, but Ice City is the only book that ends in Ice City.

“How do you deal with the things you’ve seen?” Rima once heard a friend of her father’s ask him when he’d just returned from South Africa.

“I go to Ice City,” he’d said.

So one of the many things Rima didn’t know about her father and Addison was whether she’d gotten the idea of Ice City from him or it was the other way around.

Nor did she know how to get there.