Wit's End Read Free Page A

went black, and then came on again briefly to show the stadium rocking, and then went black for good. They remembered that Santa Cruz had been near the epicenter, though what they really remembered was the collapsed freeway in Oak-land and the car that went off the Bay Bridge. Anyway, it was all California, wasn’t it? California had earthquakes.
    All of them had seen the movie The Lost Boys. When they pictured the boardwalk, they pictured it infested with vampires. Of course, they didn’t suppose it was really infested with vampires; they thought that “Murder Capital of the World” stuff was just made up for the movie, not based on an actual, dreadful period in the seventies when Santa Cruz had been home to two serial killers and one mass murderer. They didn’t know how hard (and unsuccessfully) the city had tried to be known as Surf City instead.
    They just said that Santa Cruz seemed to have a sort of dark energy. And then they dropped the subject, having cleared their consciences by speaking up. Honestly, they were relieved to have Rima going. They loved her, and they hoped she’d come back, and it wasn’t her fault that she was in a dark space, but she was kind of bringing everyone down.
    So when I tell you that she woke up on that first morning at Wit’s End with the sun floating over the house like a big, bright pie and a sense of peace in her heart just because of what Maxwell Lane had said in her dream, you will understand how unexpected, inappropriate, and downright miraculous that feeling was.

Chapter Two

(1)
    T hat 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.
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    R ima,” 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”
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    H ere 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