Chapter Eighteen

(1)

The night was so hot even Maxwell Lane was sweating. Inside the trailer, the air was thick and wet. My father grew up in a house with a sleeping porch. When it got this hot, we slept outside.

I fixed the fan so it pointed out the door, took my top sheet and went to lie on the lounge chair. The green mosquito netting fluttered around me. I slept fitfully and woke to the sound of voices. Someone was talking to someone else in the narrow space between my trailer and Kathleen’s, but I couldn’t hear them over the fan. I couldn’t even tell if they were men or women, but I could smell someone’s cigarette.

The talking ended. A moment later Maxwell Lane ducked inside the netting, took the chair next to mine. He spoke to me in a low voice. “There are predictable dynamics,” he said. “Sanity finds the lowest level. Just like water. If the group is small, if there’s little contact with the outside, if one member of the group is insane, then soon everyone will be. It’s like a sickness to which the group has no antibodies. This is just basic small-group theory.”

When I was older and looking back, I figured out that this was one of the ways Mr. Lane had of lowering your guard. He would start as if it were all hypothetical. Then he would slide the blade in. “In any cult,” he said then, “there’s someone does the dirty work. Brother Isaiah needs something done quietly, who would he ask?”

“That’s what Bim said. Ernie.” He was silent for a moment, stretching out his legs as if he were relaxing. His hand tapped on the arm of his chair. His voice was casual. “Who would you ask?”

He laughed. “Bim said that too.”

(2)

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.

Rima 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.

The only part of this letter that Rima jotted down took the form of a promissory note. “Perhaps when we know each other better,” Constance said, “I’ll share some of my own sleuthing with you. Some old business from the old days. Think the professional perspective might prove helpful.”

The second letter had been mailed shortly after the publication of Below Par.

21200 Old Santa Cruz Hwy

Holy City, California 95026

June 22, 1973

Dear Maxwell Lane:

Not an athlete myself. Still, can’t help but wonder if the clubs for mini-golf are smaller than the regulation clubs and if so, how much. Reminding you that Jeff Strubbe is a golfer. (Know this from Better Angels.) See no sign that you ever considered him as a suspect, but if the clubs are smaller, maybe you ruled him out on forensic evidence you didn’t share with us. (Not fair, if so.)

Also note that the body was left at the seventh hole. For a certain kind of person, the number 7 is a meaningful one. The Bible tells us 7 is the perfect number. The number of days in the week, the number of notes in the scale, the number of stars in the Big Dipper, the number of bones in the human neck. The seven deadly sins. I’m sure you know that most people, when asked to pick a number between 1 and 10, choose the number 7. See no evidence that you considered any of this. Goes to the psychology of the killer.

Not suggesting that you came to the wrong conclusion, only that there were other fruitful lines of inquiry. If I left a corpse on a golf course, it would be on the ninth hole. Leave you to figure out why. (Joking, of course.)

VTY,
Constance Wellington

PS. Believe that a hole in one is much more common in mini-golf than in regulation. Could be wrong. Never played either.

Rima heard the doggy commotion that meant Addison had come in from the studio. She put the letters she’d read back in the box, and left the unread ones on the bed. Washed her hands and went downstairs to conduct her first interview.

(3)

The fog had rolled up neat as a rug, and there was water all about the base of the birdbath. The sun was shining through the fig-tree window onto the wood table and Rima’s hands. She was peeling an orange with her fingers. Nothing prettier than an orange in the sun. Addison had made herself a sandwich with leftover steak and was dipping the bread into the leftover soup. Her hair haloed her head as if she’d spent the morning running her hands through it, desperately searching for le mot juste. “I think we’ve all gone completely mad,” she said. “I think we’re suffering a nationwide psychosis.”

This was surely a response to something in the political landscape. Rima didn’t disagree, but she didn’t allow herself to be diverted either. “Is the dollhouse for Ice City out in your studio?” she asked. She didn’t mention her father, because her father was what she really wanted to know about. Maxwell Lane recommended this tactic. He called it coming in sideways.

“That one went in the earthquake. Along with The Hat He Left Behind and Our Last Three Days. The bookcase crushed them.”

“I was just wondering which murder you put in the dollhouse. You remember the first one, with the whistling man?” Rima asked.

Addison looked up. Her sandwich dripped onto her plate. Tick, tick, tick. Tick, tick, tick, went Stanford’s hopeful tail, hitting the table leg.

“Did you get the idea for that from a real case?” Rima didn’t need Scorch to tell her how unlikely it was she’d get an answer. She’d read enough A. B. Early interviews. But Maxwell recommended asking some questions you knew wouldn’t be answered. He called this upsetting the balance.

“Maybe,” said Addison. “Could be. I don’t remember. Why?”

“Constance Wellington,” Rima said. “In one of her letters she wrote something that made me think there’d been a suicide like that at Holy City. And she’d maybe told you about it. Told Maxwell about it. But I don’t find anything on the Web.”

“Was this letter before or after she read Ice City?”

“After. But there might be something from before, too. I haven’t been through all her letters yet.”

Addison took a bite of her sandwich, chewed, swallowed. Stanford’s tail moved faster. He was starting to whine, quietly, as if he knew he shouldn’t, he knew the pointlessness, the hopeless-ness of it all, but was unable to stop himself. “Constance was a strange bird. I mean, everyone in Holy City was strange. But most of them were also quite dim. Not Constance. Constance was sharp as they come.

“Not so great at separating fact from fiction, though. I don’t think we can rely on her. Or me.” Addison tapped her temple. “Second law of thermodynamics. In today’s performance, the role of entropy will be played by my very own brain. Oh, look!” She pointed suddenly across the table and out the window. “Humming-bird,” she said.

Rima turned. The leaves of the fig shifted in the breeze.

“Gone now,” said Addison. “Sometimes I can pull things back to the surface. Up from the muck. I’ll let you know if that happens.” She took another bite of sandwich. Stanford’s whine grew louder. Rima nudged him quiet with her toe. The effort of not whining made him quiver. He began to whine again.

Rima finished peeling the orange. She separated the sections with her sticky fingers, laying them out on her plate in a fan. Maxwell Lane recommended doing something with your hands so you seemed a little distracted. Also, he said, people talk differently if you’re looking at them from the way they do if you aren’t. Sometimes you need the one, sometimes the other.

Don’t you be the one to fill the silences. Don’t you be the one to get uncomfortable because nobody is talking. And go ahead and let the suspect ramble. You learn a lot, Maxwell said, when you figure out why one thing has led to another.

“Riker had a son,” Addison said, “from one of his earlier marriages. Bill Riker. He joined the Navy during the war, never had much to do with his father. But one day he was jumped in a bar in San Jose. Bones broken. And nose. The police found him by following the trail of blood. He said it was his father’s men, trying to force him into Holy City, but he wouldn’t identify anyone. He said they’d kill him if he did.

“There probably was a suicide in Holy City. I wouldn’t be a bit surprised. They had everything else. Back in the twenties Riker was accused of murdering an ex-wife and burying her in quicklime. Not true, as it turned out. He’d never cared enough about the ex-wives to even take the bother of divorcing, much less murdering them.”

Outside, the gate creaked open. The dogs raced to the kitchen door, Berkeley scrambling up and over Stanford to get there first. Through the window, Rima saw Tilda, bags of groceries (reusable cloth bags of groceries) in her arms. Tilda passed behind the screen of yellow leaves.

Addison rose to go to the stove, put the teakettle on. “Bill Riker sued for the land in the fifties. Argued that his father was incompetent and likely to just give it away. Which is exactly what happened, but he lost the court case anyway. Disappeared, then took off to Seattle, people said. There was a time I wanted to meet him.”

“Which?” Rima asked. “Father or son?”

“Son. I did meet the father, remember? At the Fill Your Hole confab.”

Maxwell would have managed things so as to keep an eye on Addison’s face even while appearing not to be looking. Rima was too late for this complicated and delicate maneuver. Addison at the stove was a back-view Addison. “I still wonder about him from time to time,” she said. The burner gasped into flame.

“Was that for a book?” Rima asked. “You wanting to meet him? Was that research?”

“Everything a writer does is research,” Addison said. “Every breath you take.”

Tilda came in, stamping her shoes clean. “My god, what a beautiful day! I would have stayed and hiked, but it’s all mud.”

“They really weren’t nice people up there,” Addison said. “Even Constance. Is my point.”

“Who?” asked Tilda.

“The gang that couldn’t shoot straight. Holy City.”

Rima got up to help put the groceries away. She emptied one of the bags—tangerines, green olives, Irish oatmeal, and Goldfish crackers—all the things she liked best to eat. Rima’s appetite had not been good since she’d arrived. She thought she was hungry, until someone put food in front of her and then it turned out she wasn’t. She realized that, without asking or saying a word, Tilda had figured out how to cook for her.

Rima was incredibly touched by this. She felt something else, something she hadn’t felt in so long it took her some time to recognize it. What she felt was mothered.

(4)

Maxwell never took notes during an interview, because he never wanted it to look like an interview. But he did make time as soon as possible after to write things down.

Rima’s notes, made later that afternoon, read:

“Question leads to Bill Riker (son) and lyric from Police. Rest of song: Every move you make, I’ll be watching you. Possible connection? Warning?

“Addison not so interested in senior Riker—just a dime-store hustler. More interested in the others. Why did they join the cult? What did they get out of it?”

(You join a cult, Addison had said, and people around you start doing crazy things, only no one reacts as if they’re crazy. When there’s no one from the outside, providing perspective, then you lose track of where the line is. Someone tells you to go beat a man half to death and you do it.)

Rima wrote: “What Addison wants to know: Were they all crazy first and that’s what brought them to HC? Or could any of us be led there, step by step?”

“Check out Ice City,” Rima wrote. So maybe Addison didn’t remember everything about writing that book. But to the best of Rima’s memory, what she’d said about cults and craziness was very close to what Maxwell had said. Maybe something could be learned from that context.

Tilda had noted that you saw the same thing sometimes when you were on the street. “Speaking of crazy,” she’d said. She’d made her usual tea and come to sit at the table, stirring, stirring, stirring while the steam rose from the cup. She had a high color from being outdoors. She glowed with health. Or else drink. Hard to tell one high from another.

“Morgan’s been picked to be part of another research project.” She’d turned to Rima. “Morgan’s a local serial killer. Sexual predator. He went on a yearlong spree that left about twenty mutilated bodies behind. All of them sexually molested. Bitten in the face, and then held underwater till they drowned. They finally caught him in Elkhorn Slough.”

There’d been evidence, Tilda had added, of a second killer, a copycat who’d disappeared without a trace. Now Morgan had been outfitted with radio transmitters and trained to dive for food.

“Morgan is a sea otter,” Addison had told Rima quietly. “The victims were all seal pups.”

“Didn’t I say that?” Tilda had asked.

It was like a novel by Thomas Harris. As written by Beatrix Potter. Apparently Morgan had been rescued by the Monterey Bay Aquarium as a youngster. He’d spent seven formative months in the rehabilitation facility before being released to begin his reign of terror. The case of the murdered seal pups had been solved by eyewitnesses. Still, it took a year to recapture him, and then he spent several months in solitary until the research was proposed.

“Same question, really,” Addison had said. “I mean, these behaviors are unnatural. I gather they’re unheard of. So probably there was something every little otter needs—some sort of feedback or modeling or something—which the humans couldn’t provide.

“But maybe he was abandoned by his mother because he was just wrong from the get-go. Maybe he looked like an ordinary otter to people, but the other otters, they knew better.”

All of this was represented succinctly in Rima’s notes:

“Very bad otter.”