Read Online Wit's End by Karen Joy Fowler - Free Book Online Page A

the surface everything was fine, only clearly Scorch was still uncomfortable, Rima was still uncomfortable, and the dogs were in shock. They hadn’t yet figured out that Rima was to blame, but surely that was simply a matter of time.
    While Rima was having this horrid conversation with Scorch, Tilda was moving Miss Time from Rima’s nightstand to the first-floor bathroom. She put the tableau by the sink, since there was already a murder scene— Chain Stitch, man strangled with the unfinished sleeve of a hand-knitted sweater (and really, you’d think there’d be more hand-knitted-sweater murders)—on a shelf by the guest towels.
    Rima hadn’t asked for Miss Time to be moved, although she’d not said not to move her either. What this meant to Rima was that Tilda could and would go into her room without invitation. It made the bedroom less of a sanctuary, but less of a sanctuary in a dusted, mopped, sheets-freshly-washed kind of way. Rima’s feelings about the intrusion were mixed.
    Meanwhile, the nightstand was surprisingly bare. Tilda had left a vase with dried flowers, but if you stopped and thought about it for even a moment, the flowers were deader than Miss Time had ever been.
    Martin arrived while Rima was upstairs getting her coat. She met him on the stairs, she going down, he going up to leave his duffel in the Our Better Angels bedroom. He was taller than Oliver, but the same height as Rima, if she stood a step higher. “You must be the famous Rima,” he said. “I’m Martin. Tilda’s boy,” and there was nothing in his tone to suggest this was sarcastic, though Rima felt that it must have been.
    Martin was wearing a pair of expensive sunglasses on the top of his head. He took them off and his hair fell into his face—his mother’s hair, dark brown and straight. Martin also had a postage-stamp patch of hair under his lower lip. There was a name for that, but it wasn’t a moustache, it wasn’t a beard, it wasn’t a goatee, and Rima couldn’t remember what it was called. She herself didn’t pay more than twenty-five dollars for sunglasses as a matter of policy; she wondered that anyone would. In her experience expensive sunglasses seldom went home with the girl who’d brought them.
    â€œI’ve invited myself along tonight. I’m just going to dump my stuff,” Martin said, “and I’ll be right down.”
    They went in Scorch’s car, an old maroon Saturn. The backseat was littered with discarded clothes as if Scorch changed there often. There was a red bra printed with white hearts on the floor by Rima’s foot, and a matching pair of panties on the back window ledge, flung there, perhaps, on some happier occasion, because on this one Scorch and Cody appeared to be having a fight. He turned on the CD player; she snapped it off. He lowered his window so the ends of his piratical bandanna fluttered in the wind. She promptly raised it.
    The car curved between the ocean and the lake, which, Rima had recently learned, most people called the lagoon in spite of the beach’s being Twin Lakes State Beach. The moon was behind them, round and white as bone. Martin pointed it out to Rima, framed in the back window above the heart-print underwear. “Wolf moon,” he said. He howled and shook out his hair. “Damn, I’m in a good mood. Is everyone in a good mood?”
    Silence in the car.
    â€œThen you get in a good mood,” he said. “I can’t do this alone.” He stretched his arm along the backseat so that his fingers were near Rima’s neck. He drummed them briefly. “Addison’s your godmother,” he said.
    â€œYes,” said Rima.
    â€œYour fairy godmother,” and Rima didn’t know where Martin was going with that. It seemed to her there were multiple possibilities, none of them meant to be nice, even though he was smiling nicely at her. She decided not to