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on a cat’s claws for real, the cat would lick it right off, no matter how bad it tastes. Cats are very aware of their bodies. I know whereof I speak. I have twenty-two of them.
    Of course, all this assumes Ice City is a mystery novel. Can we be sure of that? Not clear from the cover. In a horror novel the cat could have acted alone. There is a larger world than you allow, Mr. Lane, and the truth you end up with often depends on where you are when you start. I knew your father about as well as anyone knew him. Not highly thought of today, but that much he had right.
    VTY,
Constance Wellington
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    PS. Joking about the cat, of course.
    Rima felt a friendly connection to this woman who thought her father had been falsely accused. She stirred through the letters, looking for the first page, but it didn’t surface and her hands became unpleasantly dusty. She put the box on the floor and went to wash up and get ready for bed.
    She thought that she’d look again for the first page tomorrow and maybe reread Ice City too, see if a case could be made for someone’s wanting to kill the cat. Of course, that still wouldn’t explain the other deaths, but murdering two people is not as bad as murdering three. And only the one with the cat was premeditated. Only the wife’s death was Murder 1.
    Rereading seemed like something she could manage. It wasn’t the same as reading, not when you’d read a book as often as Rima had read Ice City. You didn’t need to concentrate so much when you already knew a book backward and forward.
    It would be hard on Maxwell if she found out he’d been wrong all those years. He was already angsty enough. He was filled with angst. But her own loyalties had to lie with Bim; anyone would understand that.

Chapter Four

(1)
    Ice City, prologue
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    A girl came to the house today claiming to be a reporter. She had dirty-blond hair and a sharp chin. She said she was doing a history of Camp Forever for the local-color section of the paper. People are interested in communes again, she said. It’s because of that mass suicide in Guyana.
    Then she took me quickly to the end of things, the events of 1963, the deaths, starting with my father’s. Who can blame her? What reporter doesn’t hope that every story will have blackmail, sex, and murder in it?
    I wondered for a moment if her interest was personal. I thought she might be Kathleen’s daughter. She had something of the look of that demented elf, Kathleen.
    I made her a cup of coffee she didn’t drink. I showed her a photograph of my father when he was a far younger man than I am now, and another of Brother Isaiah, a publicity shot with the sun lighting him up. I asked her, if there was a way she could live forever, would she? She didn’t answer.
    â€œTell me about Maxwell Lane,” she said instead. “You were the one who hired him, right?”
    There was no way she could have known that.
    I used to get asked about Mr. Lane a lot. I had my answers back then, scripted them out and stuck to them. In my whole life, I never told anyone that I was the one who brought Maxwell Lane to Camp Forever.
    I’ve worked hard over the years to forget that simple fact. I told her she had it wrong, and then I showed her the door. Now I’m alone with the cold coffee and the smell of lavender perfume and cigarettes. Now there is nothing I can do that stops me remembering.

(2)
    The next day it rained. Not a driving rain, but a steady drip, just loud enough for Rima to hear over the ocean when she woke up. She couldn’t remember her dreams, only that they’d been bad, and instead of feeling relieved the way most people get to do, waking from bad dreams, she was in a bad mood. Her real life was what it was—lonely, abandoned, all the wrong people around her. Nothing to be done about that. But there was no reason her dreams couldn’t still have been good. She decided to stay in bed until