Wit's End Read Free Page B

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