Chapter Twenty-four

(1)

Before Rima found herself on the slick, deadly Highway 17 in the passenger seat of Martin’s old blue Civic, she’d had one more chat with Addison.

Just as she was going to bed, there was a knock that she immediately feared might mean Martin had confused insincere groveling with foreplay. He wouldn’t be the first. But when she opened the door, it was Addison standing in the hallway, a glass in each hand, whiskey bottle under her arm. “You asked about your father and me,” she said, and Rima let her in, let her take the seat by the window. Addison poured a glass and passed it to Rima. Then she stared for a while in silence at the black water, the string of harbor lights, the distant roller coasters.

“My uncle always wanted his own boat,” she said finally. “When he was my father, he used to say he’d name it after me. The Addie B. Never could afford it, though.”

“One of my favorite books when I was little was called The Maggie B.,” Rima said. “It was all about a girl who took her little brother James out on her boat, and they ate a soup she made with fish and crabs, and then they slept under the stars. I don’t think it was the boat I found so appealing. It was more how competent the big sister was. It was how she managed the boat and the supper and bath and bedtime. I used to love books where it was up to the big sister to keep everything together. Like Homecoming.” By “keeping things together” Rima meant mostly not losing people.

“I used to love books about big families,” Addison said. “Little Women. Cheaper by the Dozen. The Family Nobody Wanted. I used to fantasize about brothers and sisters.”

Rima sipped her whiskey without answering. This was an effort, because ordinarily Rima liked nothing better than to talk about the books of her childhood. In the conversation she wasn’t having, she told Addison she’d also loved Cheaper by the Dozen, and what was up with the movie? She didn’t know The Family Nobody Wanted. She asked if the Edward Eager books had been around when Addison was a girl. Because of those books, if Rima were a writer—which she never would be, Addison had nothing to worry about on that score—she would write books with magic in them.

But Rima said none of this. Rima said nothing at all. Her throat was hot where the whiskey had been. Addison too was silent, staring out the window for what seemed to Rima to be a long time.

Addison was thinking about her uncle’s boat, the one he’d never gotten. After her new aunt had talked to her mother about finances and Addison had gotten the Sentinel job, she went to her aunt and uncle’s house in their absence and looked for his canceled checks. Because he had moved so recently, things were unusually well organized. She’d found them in a box in the study closet, labeled “Canceled Checks.” She wanted to know how much her uncle had been giving her.

She’d started back a year before his marriage. He’d paid the rent and utilities on their house. No phone payments, and nothing directly to her mother. Addison didn’t much notice the first check to William Riker. She didn’t know who he was. But the next month there was another, and the month after that another, and every month since, her uncle had sent him two hundred dollars, the last checks having been written and cashed in the months since the marriage.

There was no William Riker listed in the Santa Cruz phone book. Addison asked at work if anyone had heard of him. “Holy City,” one of the reporters told her. “I’m sure his obit’s already in hand. Look it up.”

Her uncle’s politics were straight-up union, left-wing labor, and he loathed racists; there was nothing in Riker’s obituary of which he would approve. This was not a man Addison would ever have imagined her uncle sending money to. It took her a couple of days to figure out what any reader of A. B. Early books would have guessed instantly.

Of course, back then there were no A. B. Early books. “You don’t know half the things your parents do for you,” Addison said, and Rima didn’t know quite where that was coming from, but she figured it was true.

Those checks were the reason Addison had wormed her way into the Fill Your Hole banquet, an event planned for seasoned hard-drinking reporters and not callow high school girls with part-time or summer jobs.

Which is how she’d come to know Rima’s father at just that time when she had a big secret and no one to tell it to. At just that time when Addison understood what the man who wasn’t her father had sacrificed for her, month after month, year after year. Not just the money, not just his own boat, but his principles as well.

“I had an enormous crush on Bim when I first met him,” Addison said finally. “Of course I was only seventeen. Prime crush years. I also liked a guy at school named Charlie Bailey, who led the debate club, and wore argyle sweaters. And the guy who bagged at the grocery. But especially Bim. And then he left and we wrote letters—he wrote great letters—and it turned into something else. Something better. He was my dear reader,” Addison said. “For a very long time, he was the first person to read every book I wrote.”

Rima had her doubts. The box she’d seen in the attic was not the sort of box you put together for your dear reader. “And then what happened?” she asked. She didn’t look at Addison’s face. She looked at Addison’s face in the window, her ghost face, just visible underneath the bright spot of the reflected table lamp.

“I was hoping you’d tell me,” Addison said.

(2)

One day a letter Addison had written was returned unopened, along with a note asking her not to write again. She wrote again immediately, asking what she’d done, and that was returned unopened too, no note this time, just “Refused” written over the address. And then when she learned that Rima’s mother had died, Addison tried again, and even that letter came back, though the handwriting on that envelope was different; she thought it might be one of Rima’s aunts’.

“You must have heard something over the years,” Addison said. “You must have a guess. I’d settle for a guess.”

Rima pictured her aunts again, Oliver under the table, her mother dead and about to be buried. “She won’t come,” Auntie Sue was saying. “She wouldn’t have the nerve to come, today of all days.”

Auntie Lise had answered with a question. “Like she wouldn’t come to the wedding?” she had asked.

Did Addison really want to have this conversation? “Were you at my parents’ wedding?”

“No. Why?”

“Just something my aunts said.”

“I flew out before the wedding. Behaved very badly. But I was forgiven. All charges dropped,” Addison said. “That was a joke.”

“So when did you stop being friends?”

Addison drank again. “The Ice City dollhouse wasn’t really destroyed in the earthquake,” she said. “It’s the only one I ever dismantled. We stopped being friends after I published Ice City.”

Which was what Rima had always suspected. “I think it was Bim killing his wife. My mother mentioned that pretty often.” Even as Rima spoke, it didn’t make sense. Her mother had mentioned it often, and just that often her father had said, “For Christ’s sake, it’s just a book. It’s just a made-up murder in a made-up book.” He wouldn’t have lost an old friend over that. Her father had seen the real world. He had perspective on the made-up ones.

“But that woman is nothing like your mother. That Bim is nothing like your father,” Addison said.

“Was my father your first reader for Ice City? Did he see it before you published?”

“No. He was off somewhere, back in the days of no e-mail. But he knew I was using his name. He said he was fine with it. He said he was tickled. I certainly meant it affectionately.”

“I don’t think he thought he’d be killing his wife.” Rima wasn’t as sure as she sounded, but she was more sure than she’d realized. Her mother had complained about the wife-killing, the zeal, the sheer electricity of it, and her father had told her not to be silly. And there had been an edge there. Every time the conversation happened, there’d been an edge.

Addison finished her whiskey. “The only man I ever truly loved is the one I made up,” she said, and there was no reason not to let her remember it that way if she chose. In point of fact, couldn’t you argue she’d made up Bim too? The real one as well as the fictional?

“Maxwell’s taken good care of you,” Rima said.

“Everything I ever wanted,” said Addison.

(3)

There was an empty soda can on the floor of Martin’s car by Rima’s feet. It rolled one way and then the other as the road turned, until finally Rima stepped on it hard. They were just pulling into a parking lot at the base of a hill. The sun was out but not insistently so. The ground was still wet from the week’s rain, and the breeze was cool, sometimes cold. A strand of hair blew into Rima’s mouth. She took it out.

On the hilltop, in the sun, was a lovely old villa. The wine bar at its base was smaller and more rustic. Seven other cars were parked in the lot, three of them Priuses.

The door was heavy, with handles shaped like sheaves of grape stalks. Martin held it open for Rima, and she passed through into a large room with exposed beams and a gleaming copper counter. Her first impression was that it was crowded; on second look, though, she could see there were fewer than twenty people in the room. On a table left of the door was a gigantic chess set. Rima noted the novelty of seeing something scaled up rather than down.

The pianist was playing “Blue Skies” and pretending that someone, anyone, was listening, despite the hubbub of voices and the clinking of bottles and glasses. She wore a sleeveless black sheath and had a spray of white flowers pinned into her wild, curly hair. “Blue Skies” gave way to “Blue Moon” gave way to “Love Walked In.” Rima was good at identifying songs, even those popular long before she was born. But then she heard something that stumped her, though in another context she might have thought it was Kelis’s “Milkshake,” a song she knew because of all the times she’d heard it in the school yard and had to pretend it had no sexual subtext of any kind.

By now she’d already tasted the Blanc de Blancs. She’d had a pleasant exchange with a middle-aged couple from Kentucky who said they came every year and shipped wine home by pretending it was vinegar. Apparently there were states you could ship wine to and states that you couldn’t, but vinegar could be shipped absolutely anywhere, which the couple thought made no sense at all, as so many people preferred wine to vinegar.

Rima couldn’t quite see the outrage, but she shook her head disbelievingly to be polite.

Their server was a cheerful hippie with large brown eyes, a braid down her back, and moon earrings, the full moon in one lobe, a crescent in the other. Her name was Fiona. What were the chances, Rima asked, that they might see the ghost today?

None at all. There was no ghost, Fiona said, though the winery had once made a Syrah-Zinfandel blend and called it Pierre’s Ghost after the winery’s founder, so maybe this had caused the confusion. She consulted briefly with another server, a chubby man in a blue Hawaiian shirt who looked too young to be pouring wine, but presumably wasn’t. He said he’d heard there was a haunted winery somewhere around Livermore. Footsteps, windows open when they’d been left shut, the air in the room suddenly cold—that sort of thing. No actual sightings, which would have been so, so much cooler. If there’d been sightings, then he’d be working there instead of here.

Martin shrugged and changed the subject. He seemed untroubled to find he’d lured Rima with the promise of ghosts he was in no position to deliver. His sunglasses were pushed to the top of his head; his nose was in his wineglass. “Raisins?” he said to Fiona.

“Very good,” Fiona told him.

Had Martin just been complimented for guessing that the wine was made of grapes? It appeared that way to Rima. The piano switched to “The Streets of Laredo.” Martin reached over and took Rima’s hand.

Rima took it back. “Martin,” she said, but he’d already flushed, bright, distinct patches on his cheeks as if she’d slapped him. “I’m not in any shape for that. I’m not even missing that right now,” she told him. “I’m too old for you.”

“Okay,” he said. “Whatever. One reason’s plenty. Don’t take my head off.” He emptied what was left of his Pinot Noir into the dump bucket, returned the glass to the counter. “How about a Chardonnay?” he asked Fiona, and even though it was backward, going from red to white that way, Fiona said sure, they had one, which she poured, and pointed out its many notes and undertones, berries and chocolate and pudding and tomato sauce or something; Rima wasn’t really listening, she was too embarrassed.

But this was good, really, Rima told herself. Good to get it out in the open and avoid confusion. Still, very awkward.

Or maybe not. Martin was already flirting with Fiona, telling her there should be a wine named for her, something light and fresh-tasting. It was angry flirting, but Rima liked him for the effort. This seemed to be the pattern with Martin—she liked him and then she didn’t like him and then she liked him. Not liking him would come next. She had only to wait.

The truly awkward part was that Rima wanted Martin to do something for her, and it wasn’t an ordinary something, like drive her to the airport or pick up her mail while she went on a trip. It was something requiring not only a request but an explanation as well. And after he’d done that, she still needed him to drive her back and stay for dinner and be nicer to his mother. It was quite a list. She started at the top. “What I really need,” she began, “is a little brother.”

“So flattering, and yet no, thanks.” Martin swirled the golden wine in his glass and sniffed at it. “Too late to start sharing Mother’s love.”

“All you have to do,” Rima said in her nicest voice, “is tell a bunch of lies to someone I’ve never met.” She felt how wrong this was as she said it, a bad idea, a bad thing to be talking Martin into.

Right would have been Oliver’s talking Rima into it. Rima liked it so much better when she got to express her strong objections, go along reluctantly, predicting the worst, and then find herself completely validated when the worst happened. She was still certain the worst would happen, but now she didn’t get to say so and turn out to be right. Now Martin got to do that part. Martin had been training for that part his whole life.

Rima had never appreciated how hard it was to be Oliver. “It’ll be fun,” she said, which was what Oliver always said, but he probably believed it when he said it. Oliver had an expansive idea of fun.

Fiona brought a dessert wine. Something about it—Rima didn’t hear what, because Fiona was hardly bothering to talk to her now; it was all about Martin—made it just right for the holidays. Two men had replaced the couple from Kentucky at the counter. “My cat likes wine,” one said to other. “But only the good stuff.”

“That’s a cat for you,” the second man said. The pianist was playing “The Wanderer,” hitting the notes hard to rock them out. “What’s your cat’s name again?”

“I can fill you in while we drive,” Rima said.

Martin looked straight at her, moving his sunglasses from the top of his head to his eyes so she couldn’t see in anymore, his face blank behind the lenses. His hair fell forward and he brushed it back. “So where are we going? Where is this person you never met?” he asked. The question had undertones of raspberries in it.

(4)

They missed Holy City Art Glass on their first pass. It was a low-slung building set into a deep curve on the road with no prominent sign and no prominent address and almost nothing but trees around it. Coming back from the east, Martin spotted the name in the window and pulled into the parking lot. Across the old highway, behind a screen of birches, Rima could see part of a decaying house that had once been painted white with maybe a green trim on the windows. Next to that, an empty lot with the brick foundations of a vanished building.

The door to the Holy City Art Glass company led into a studio, an open-beamed workshop with long tables on which several projects were in process. The windows were coated with dust, and the place smelled of wood chips and blowtorches. A man was bent over one of the tables, matching pieces of glass to a paper pattern of a mermaid under a low-hanging fluorescent. “Can I help you?” he asked without looking up. He had a bald spot on the top of his head, but he was so tall that normally no one would see this. Rima guessed he was in his forties or fifties.

“Are you Andrew Sheridan?” Rima asked.

“Last I looked.”

To the left of the worktable was an open door into a second room. Rima could see through to shelves of Christmas ornaments, vases, and many rows of glass pumpkins, some orange, some purple, some mottled like pebbles. One of the larger ones was a Cinderella carriage with gold wheels, but no horses and no footmen.

“I got your letter,” Martin said. “About Constance Wallace.”

“Wellington,” said Rima.

Martin held out his hand. The man took it, looking up at them for the first time. He was wearing a green shirt that advertised his own shop, and there was an old scar, barely visible, along the bone beneath one of his eyes.

“I’m Rima,” Rima said. She gestured toward Martin. “This is Maxwell Lane.”