The wet shoes and socks finally served their plot purpose, as Rennie has gone back to her rental car and, as we’ll soon find out, the solution to Cory Rivkin’s murder falls into her lap, as does so much in this series.
This girl turns up and asks Rennie if that’s who she is, and we get a description of this girl. I’ll blow a twist in the chapter—this is the “groupie” that Cory Rivkin was with at the time of his death. Pay attention to the description, because Kennealy-Morrison is at pains to paint this girl as being of legal age despite both looking and talking like a child. Would Cory Rivkin having fucked a fourteen-year-old taint her beloved “rockerverse?’ Any numbers of rockers in the Sixties and Seventies had sexual relationships with underage girls, so why does she insist this girl is of legal age, based on nothing? Because she couldn’t slut-shame this girl adequately if she accepted her as a child? Maybe it’s the prettiness she noted in the below description. Maybe this girl has to be punished for being pretty, because aside from the hick deputy in the third book, nobody in this series to my recollection has ever called Rennie beautiful. Not even Turk.
…a bedraggled Woodstock waif. The child appeared to be about fourteen, but was probably four years older, though not much more than that, and very pretty under the grime of the field: long dark-brown hair, damp and straggly from the downpour, flowed out from under the scarf tied around her forehead like an Apache headband. Muddy jeans and peasant shirt, bare feet and big hoop earrings, a sodden backpack dangling from one grubby paw, and of course the damn Woodstock Smile, all completed the look.
Note the use of the word “paw” for hand here. It’s a quick and dirty dehumanization of this girl, and dehumanization is one of Kennealy-Morrison’s favorite tactics when dealing with people she doesn’t approve of. The entire section involving this girl is quite distasteful, with the author doing her best to depict her as stupid, so I’m going to try to just skim over the contents, which will be difficult as she was involved in Cory Rivkin’s death. The girl indicates she knows something about the murders and wonders aloud if she needs to tell the police, and Rennie maneuvers her into getting into the rental car and spilling her guts.
The girl’s name is as stupid as humanly possible but still not as bad as the Honorable Sacharissa Huntingforest from the fourth book as this girl’s name isn’t her real name. She introduces herself to Rennie as Rainbow Galadriel Silverwindmistdancer, and in the meantime they’ve gone to talk to Marcus, even though he isn’t a cop anymore and the matter he’d come to investigate has been resolved, so there’s no longer a reason for him to be around except authorial contrivance. Anyway, he tries not to laugh at her because he’s a shitty a person as Rennie is. Rennie calls her “the now-degrubbified child” and “the grandiosely self-nomenclatured ragamuffin,” in addition to “the waif” and “the stray” (more dehumanization) later on. Rennie’s contempt and self-satisfaction just rolls off the page.
Her real name turns out to be Sydell Radenburg, which I think is an anagram but I don’t mess with those anymore. Then Kennealy-Morrison does one of her patented time-skips and we go back to establish where we are and what’s going on. I hate her damned time-skips so much. True to character, Rennie hasn’t taken this girl to the police to help with their inquiry, but gotten her back to the motel room and called in Marcus to take her statement, essentially. And Rennie calls him Agent Dorner, even though he isn’t an agent of anything, so editorial fail. She explains away her broken promise to Sheriff Lawdog to give him “first crack at any information she turned up” by rationalizing that “this kid would turn to dandelion fluff and blow away at the first sign of an official lawman.” It’s all self-serving bullshit, but we know Rennie always can cobble together an excuse to do whatever she wants.
During this time-skip, Rennie forces Rainbow Galadriel to take a shower and has her clothes washed, which could be considered a kind gesture but Rennie has no fucking kindness in her soul. It’s really because this girl’s reminding her of Adam Santa Monica, the first murder victim in California Screamin’, and trying to undo her failure to save him by saving Rainbow Galadriel. But it’s not that Rennie didn’t save him; it’s that he annoyed her and she didn’t care if he died because anyone who annoys the living Queen Emma Peel is subject to the death penalty.
There is a funny and telling line after Rainbow Galadriel tells Marcus about how she knew who Rennie was.
Rennie pridefully swelled like a puffer fish, and Marcus scowled at her until she deflated.
That almost makes it sound like the writer knows what an ass Rennie is, but the rest of the series disproves that hypothesis.
Long story short, some guy gave Rainbow Galadriel a peanut butter sandwich to eat, then she met Cory, they started making out, he died, and she took off because she was scared. She doesn’t know who the guy was and he was dressed like everyone else at the festival, but he gave her three peanut butter sandwiches and took her over to the performers’ pavilion and had a performer’s pass. Rennie pries some description of Cory’s death out of her, which seems to have been painful if quick, for no particular reason as they already know he died of the peanut allergy. Then Rainbow Galadriel starts crying and Rennie and Marcus start talking in front of her like she can’t hear anything or is too stupid to understand. Well, maybe the author thinks she is.
Rennie, and possibly Marcus, figure out that the man who gave her the peanut butter probably wants to tie up her particular loose end, and offers to let her stay in one of the eight hundred or so rooms that Lionheart has rented. Not only is her stash box a TARDIS, so is this motel.
The room on offer is Niles Clay’s, as the band has left, and Rainbow Galadriel creams herself over the chance to sleep in his bed for almost a page, even if he isn’t in it. I guess this is a shot at her intelligence because Rennie’s already told us Niles is mad because he isn’t the “big sexy frontman of the band.”
In the course of talking to Marcus, Rennie manages to get in some shots at other women on the subject of Cory Rivkin and Owl Tuesday: Phrases used are “godawful groupie poetry,” “squealy fan stories,” and “illiterate besotted gibber.”
Somehow Rennie thinks this proves that Amander died of a peanut allergy too. Here’s her logic chain for that assertion.
Rennie sighed with exasperation. “Do I have to spell everything out? A p.b. sarnie killed Cory. What are the odds another one did the same for Amander?”
Pretty poor, seeing as WE STILL DON’T HAVE ANY CAUSE OF DEATH FOR AMANDER EVANS. She figures it’s this guy that also killed Amander, and I have to assume it’s Not Keyser Soze, as he’s the only guy other than Niles Clay that she’s been seen to despise in this book. I can’t even guess as to why he’d want Cory Rivkin dead, but I’m sure the writer can pull a nonsensical motivation out of her ass.
I’m also waiting to see if the narrative deals with my objection to the “kissed to death” peanut butter assassination.
Namely, since Cory Rivkin knew he was violently allergic to peanuts, he would know what they smell like and might just be sensitive to it. Since Rainbow Galadriel hadn’t brushed her teeth or used mouthwash, even if she’d eaten and drunk other things, Cory would have smelled peanut butter on her breath and shoved her away. Failing that, he would have tasted the peanut butter when he kissed her and would have called for help immediately. I’ll bet it doesn’t. (Future Me: Rennie claims that eating other things removed the peanut taste and smell. Our mileage varies.)
And Rennie goes on to admit they still don’t know if Amander had a peanut allergy and presses him to find out. I’d press him to find out the cause of death, but what do I know? I’m not Murder Chick.
Rennie and Marcus have about two pages of dialogue that don’t add much to the plot or characterization before the section ends. There’s no real reason for the section to end here, though, as Rennie just gives us two and a half pages of repeating what we just went over in the preceding section with Marcus.
And she still clings to the peanut-murder theory for Amander based on nothing at all. She is so stupid. But maybe the writer is trying to hold back the much more reasonable poisoning-by-red-wine at the Rainshadow Records party to be a final-act twist? It would have worked better if she’d done it the other way around and put in the peanut-murder as the twist. It wouldn’t be any more believable, but it would be more surprising. She does cut at Cory about not being successful enough to attract pretty groupies (what a bitch) and we find out that Chin Ho Kanaloa is still around, as Rennie’s going to assign a guard for the entrance to their eight-hundred-room wing of the hotel. Is she paying his salary? Well, that’s a stupid question. What’s Turk’s is Rennie’s, including all his money.
Turk calls and Rennie fills him in on the peanut-murder and Turk has forgotten all about her putting herself in danger that he was throwing a fit about the last time they talked on the phone. Or the writer has. One of these.
Anyway, what he cares about is Marcus being around and obliquely reminds her that Marcus is in love with her and finds it “droll” that Rennie runs into him every time he turns around. Which I don’t think he would, given how insecure Turk has been made in his relationship, but then the section ends and I don’t have time to worry further.
Rennie starts thinking about the performances on tap for Sunday and doesn’t want to see anyone except Crosby Stills Nash & Young and Jimi Hendrix, and cuts at him for insisting on closing the festival. Then she starts thinking about the burglary and asks Sheriff Lawdog about it when she sees him. That’s a major time-skip because we were still in her room when she was wondering and now she’s somewhere else. And somehow Sheriff Lawdog has decided that Female Jimi Hendrix’s falling box and Ned Raven’s electrocution were attempted murders, based on nothing we know about at the moment. And he also called Marcus “Agent Dorner.” Is he going to join the FBI and be assigned to New York City so Rennie can always have a cop in her hip pocket?
Rennie remembers Turk’s poisoning and mentions it, but has now downsized the suspect list to fifty people instead of two hundred, based on nothing we know about at the moment. I need to make a macro of “based on nothing we know about at the moment.” Anyway, Sheriff Lawdog also thinks this was a murder attempt and Rennie agrees.
And—chapter! It’s true that someone with a violent peanut allergy can die from just coming into contact with peanuts, which is why fast food places have the warning signs in the windows that food prepared there may have come into contact with anything that could create an allergic reaction. It’s just not likely that two performers at the festival would both be that allergic.
Just FYI, we have three chapters and an epilogue left, or sixty-two pages, and since the last chapter and the epilogue are for telling us how beautifully things turned out for Rennie, we have two chapters and twenty-seven pages to solve the murders.
So right now I’m assuming that Not Keyzer Soze is the one who murdered Cory Rivkin and probably Amander Evans. I’m still betting on Dian Cazadora for one of the murders, probably Turk’s poisoning as she was at the party. At least I know Loya Tessman isn’t the murderer, because she shows up in the deadly dull “the Rennieturk and their entourage go to a restaurant and sit at the coolest table” sequence from Scareway to Heaven that’s on Kennealy-Morrison’s Facebook account. This book needed a lot more work done on the plotting and I’m actually wondering if this is a first or second draft.
Regarding Niles Clay, I made the mistake of checking the end of the next book for his fate. The writer doesn’t kill him, but I wish she had—it would have left him with more dignity. Rennie is a micro-Sauron who will never experience the consequences of her actions and become a better person. Being Rennie would be like living in hell.
Next time, chapter 22, in which we get a lot of historical information about Sunday at Woodstock, Rainbow Galadriel gets attacked but is okay, and Rennie finally figures something out, but not because she collected clues and put them together, but because something else got dropped into her lap by the author like it was Rennie’s birthday.