“I suppose,” she said, looking sad and far away. “They were all alone. I had expected that there would be family and well-wishers, but it was just them, hanging around in their son’s apartment. I barely explained who I was before they just sort of melted into me. I think it might have been the first food they have had in days.”
And now I felt guilty. Clemency was worried about their well-being. I had been worried about my prime position as fake detective, and evidence. Touchy-feely bits weren’t really part of my wheelhouse.
“So, Dahlia,” said Clemency in a tone of voice that suggested she was putting the unpleasantness of the morning behind her. “What would you recommend one do with two days in Saint Louis?”
“Keeping ADA compliance in mind,” added Threadwork.
It was, of course, at this point that Charice popped out from behind a tombstone. Well, not exactly. More that she just came into my field of view—she had been sitting modestly in the back, mostly out of sight. Probably she had been supervising the photographers, which is why I hadn’t noticed her before. The other reason I might not have noticed her was that she was wearing a disguise. Charice was standing there in a little gray hat, with luxurious brown curls coming down her shoulders. I realized, with dawning horror as she drew closer, that this had been Jesus’s hair.
Her sudden appearance shouldn’t have surprised me, at any rate. The question “What would you recommend to do in Saint Louis?” was practically an invocation of Charice—the way saying “Bloody Mary” three times in the mirror brings forth evil spirits.
“Dahlia,” she said, smiling broadly, all but daring me to ask about the wig. “Are these friends of yours looking for a diversion?”
It had barely been twelve hours since Detective Shuler had given me explicit instructions not to hang around with Jonah’s friends, and so I started to say, no, Charice, let’s let them find their own way. But I stopped myself because I was momentarily confused if I should call her Charice or not. Given her getup, she may have already introduced herself as Dorothy von Higgenbottom, and I would be giving her away.
Charice took my confusion and ran off with it. Also, she ran off with the suspects, telling them, “I’m Dahlia’s roommate. I’d be happy to show you around town. How do you feel about cheap sushi?”
I would have been irritated, but I had business inside.
I knew what William Chetwood looked like from the funeral home’s website. He wasn’t quite the man I would have imagined for the job—that guy would have been tall, thin, and cadaverous. A nice character-actor type. Actual William Chetwood was more of a fuddy-duddy; bald and pear-shaped, always futzing with his bifocals. Still sort of a character actor, but less Hitchock and more Dickensian countinghouse. Probably it was the suit.
“Mr. Chetwood!” I said, drawing his attention as he headed back toward his car.
He turned to look at me, and his face lit up with a kind of illumination. It was exceedingly grandfatherly, and despite not knowing him, I felt an unexpected rush of warmness toward the man. I presumed it was this sort of thing that made him good at dealing with the bereaved.
The illumination wasn’t an affect, though. He recognized me.
“Dahlia Moss, isn’t it? Are you Dahlia Moss?”
Jesus, had I applied for a job at a funeral home in the past thirteen months? I couldn’t remember doing so, but it wasn’t strictly impossible.
“Yes, that’s me. How do you know who I am?”
“I didn’t,” said Mr. Chetwood with a lot of cheer for a funeral director. “I was just sort of hoping.”
The obvious question to ask was: Why would you hope this? But I felt this all had the influence of Charice about it, and so I saved the question for the end of the conversation. I never liked giving Charice her treats right away, even if she wasn’t around. Besides, she was probably listening in.
Instead I got to my point: “You didn’t make my announcement.”
“Announcement?”
“For a funeral for Jonah Long?”
Mr. Chetwood smacked his lips in a gesture of confusion.
“We just had the funeral for Mr. Long. You missed it, my dear. Dead and buried.”
“No,” I said. “For another one. An online funeral.”
“Another funeral? No, I don’t think so. Usually our patrons die just the one time.”
I think perhaps this was a joke, but it was very dry.
“An online funeral. More a remembrance, really.”
Mr. Chetwood looked at me with confusion. “Online? Like Facebook?”
“This is to be in the online world of Zoth. In the Sunsalt Marshes?”
And his face lit right up again. Clowns had less buoyant smiles.
“Oh yes, right! I do remember that now. No, I didn’t announce it. I thought that was a joke.” Then he seemed to suddenly realize that this was some sort of faux pas, and his face transformed into the very picture of contrition. He was good at faces; he seemed to have quite a tableau of them.
“I’m quite sorry.”
I frowned. “It wasn’t a joke. I really wanted to invite everyone to Zoth.”
“Is that a bar?”
“No, an online world. With dragons, and ogres, and there’s this talking crab that wants you to kill fish for him.”
Mr. Chetwood gave me an appraising look. He may have been slightly bumbling, but the guy oozed empathy. Mentioning the talking crab wasn’t the smartest thing to say, and there were plenty of openings for snark. He avoided them all. “I apologize, Miss Moss. I’m really not very up-to-date on the hobbies of young people. I gave up somewhere around Go-bots. I thought it was a joke. Mea culpa.”
“Is there some way to get the announcement out after the fact?”
Mr. Chetwood made a sort of a thoughtful clucking noise. “Tell me. Do you think that very many of those people who attended the funeral today will visit an online world with dragons and ogres and a talking crab? I’m not up-to-date, but I do have a good sense for people. The crowd I saw looked a bit on the, hmm, august side. I don’t they would be interested in talking crustaceans, unless they were mascots for a seafood restaurant. Even then, many of them would have questions about heartburn.”
“That’s not the point.”
“What was the point?”
I suppose the point was to show Jonah’s parents that I had been trying. Then again, based on their dazed and beleaguered (and entirely natural) behavior at the funeral, they probably wouldn’t have noticed anyway. Easy come, easy go? But I suddenly had a second thought.
“I don’t suppose I could pick your brain about a slightly related matter?”
“My brain, my dear,” fluttered Mr. Chetwood, “is always ripe for picking. Even for matters less than slightly related. Sometimes ideas fall out of it without any picking at all.”
“If you had to deliver a eulogy for someone you didn’t know,” I began. “Let’s say, in a fantasy world. How would you go about it?”
Mr. Chetwood rapped his fingers along his face. “I would avoid doing that. And not just the fantasy world. A eulogy ought to be personal. If you really must have it delivered by someone who didn’t know the deceased, you should get a priest.”
My face must have sagged, because Chetwood instantly asked, “Can’t find a priest?”
“I can, but he’s a war-priest, and I don’t think it means the same thing. Any other advice?”
“Platitudes and quotes from the Bible. Shakespeare, if they’re not religious.”
This was less encouraging than I might have hoped. Sensible, but not encouraging.
“Thank you. Incidentally, why did you hope I was Dahlia Moss?”
Mr. Chetwood looked at me blankly, as if he had forgotten this portion of the conversation, then lit up again with recognition. It was like dealing with Kurt Campell’s senile grandfather. “Right, oh yes,” said Chetwood, fishing into his pocket for a plain white envelope. “I was supposed to give this to you.”
I looked at the envelope
, which had my name on it.
“Who is this from?”
“From?”
“Yes, who gave it to you?”
“Samantha?” suggested Chetwood with very little commitment.
“I don’t know anyone named Samantha.”
“Perhaps it was a Julie. Or a Linda?”
“I don’t know anyone with any of those names.” And they aren’t even related names, I thought, although I wasn’t going to badger Chetwood on this point. He obviously dealt with a lot of names and faces. “What did she look like?”
Chetwood was giving me a face—a tableaued one this time, from his bank of expressions—that quite clearly said: I’m very busy and why don’t you just take your envelope and leave? With his lips, however, he said: “I must confess that I’m not entirely sure. Someone tallish? Or perhaps medium height. Definitely not short.”
“White? Black?”
“Probably one of those, yes. But not short.”
“How are you sure not short?”
“I have a smallish coffin I’m trying to get rid of. So short people are on my brain.”
There was a little more small talk, and I thanked Chetwood again for his advice. I was back in my jalopy when I opened the envelope, which was white, and unassuming, and unlabeled. It was an article, clipped from the Cadenza, about gaming addiction. The headline read: “How I Overcame My Gaming Addiction and Found My Life.” I didn’t read it because even starting the article made my blood boil. I did see one passage that had been helpfully highlighted for me: “Players of MMORPGS are three times more likely to be unemployed than nonplayers.” Very helpfully highlighted. At the bottom of the article, written in the same block-lettered handwriting from the job-fair flyer were the words: “Just worried about you, Dahlia.—An anonymous friend.”
I wanted to storm away, but my car wouldn’t start. It’d been doing this thing where its anti-theft mechanism randomly kicks in, so I had to wait a half hour in my car, reading the article over and over and considering: Who is this really from? I don’t have any friends.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
I really didn’t have friends. Usually when people say things like that, they’re angling for some kind of hug, and believe me, I’m not. But let’s be honest—I did not have people in my corner. I had Charice, obviously, but she was less a friend and more an elemental force, like fractals, or entropy. My friends had just sort of evaporated away with the end of college. They had moved away, or gotten jobs, or gotten married, or done all of these. And even before they’d wandered off into whatever brave new world was supposed to await you in your twenties, they were direct. Charice, insane as she was, was a decent model for what my friends used to look like.
They were not writing anonymous concerned notes about my “gaming addiction.”
When I had finally gotten my car safely ensconced back in its traditional parking place, I headed over to Nathan’s. Charice was out—always out—and whatever proto-thing this was becoming, it was what I needed.
Thanks to an extremely unfriendly iPhone upgrade, my phone was powered down. Whenever I attached it to my car charger, I now received a scolding, telling me that my iPhone was “no longer compatible with this [antediluvian] device and may not work reliably.” You have to love that language: “may not work reliably.” Although it was completely accurate—the phone seemed to charge on a schema vaguely akin to a d20 table for “Wild Magic.” One of these days I was going to plug it in and get, I don’t know, a swarm of rats or a Limited Wish. But today I got nothing. If anything, I seemed to lose power at a quicker rate.
So I showed up at Nathan’s without texting first. I didn’t think he would mind, and I was probably correct about that. But when I knocked on his door, I found that he too was out. Masako was there, looking dark and radiant all at once, and I decided, on the spot, that hanging out with her was what I had wanted all along anyway.
“Let’s lunch together in secret,” I told her when I knocked on the door. Masako, for her stake in the matter, seemed utterly unsurprised by my appearance, or the request.
“If you like,” she told me. “But let’s not go to that awful Thai place you took Nate. It’s…” And she searched for a word that appropriately expressed her unspeakable venom and, not finding one, settled on “inauthentic.”
We ended up at another Thai restaurant, a much more expensive one, but what did I care? I had money. Masako regarded her silver noodles with squid with something akin to reverence, but as for me, I felt like the same green curry I always got was about the same as usual. They were a little stingy on the rice.
“I’ve brought you here for a solemn purpose,” I told Masako, who just looked at me blankly, eating noodles.
After an entirely too long pause, she asked, “Fine. What?”
“I have recovered the Bejeweled Spear of Infinite Piercing.”
I explained the story to her, how it had been emailed to me anonymously after Jonah’s largesse guilted the group. I had mostly expected her to be unfazed, because this was her thing. But instead she brightened.
“So you have the digital version of the spear that Jonah was murdered with?”
I told her yes.
“Who else have you told?”
“A police detective, through the veil of metaphor,” I told her. “I only got it last night.”
Masako considered this with what struck me as a dawning happiness. “Who else do you intend to tell?”
“No one, immediately. Eventually Charice, if I ever see her again.”
“I am your trusted confidant.”
“So it would seem. I can’t tell Nathan; he would tell Kurt.”
“He would tell everyone.”
“What do you think? Is it a reasonable plan to keep the spear secret?”
Masako considered this as she sipped on her iced coffee. “It’s reasonable, yes. But I’m doubtful that keeping it secret will immediately do anything. If the thief is that broken up about it, they’ll probably just communicate with you in the same way as before. You’ll get threatening anonymous emails in-game.”
“Maybe they will leave incriminating clues as to their identity,” I said a tad too hopefully.
“Possibly. But it’s also possible that by returning the spear to you, the thief has solved the problem. They didn’t feel guilty because they had stolen the spear; they felt guilty because they had it. Now that they’ve sent it to you, it’s your problem. If you want to really leverage this into something, you’re going to have to twist the knife.”
Generally speaking, I was on an upswing. Things were going my way—powerfully so. Clues were appearing, romance was vaguely slumping around in the background, and I’d actually made a little coin. However, in the grand tradition of Mosses, I did find something to be grouchy about. My apartment—once impregnable to outsiders—had been seriously impregnated.
Okay, not the best word choice. The sanctum sanctorum wasn’t what it used to be. It wasn’t even a sanctum anymore. It was practically a hotel. The Swing-by-um Swing-borium, which even Chris Claremont’s Doctor Strange wouldn’t have put up with. But I digress.
It was probably because of this general sense of edginess that I was noticing the door. In previous incarnations of Dahlia, the door was simply a piece of wall that could swivel. I didn’t concern myself with it. Should anyone be there, they were certainly not there to see me.
But now the door was a point of interest. I had been surprised twice now—three times if you count the cops—and I felt like it would be prudent to keep an eye on it. Even if I wasn’t a detective, it’s no fun to be constantly surprised by strangers.
So that’s probably why I noticed it. It wasn’t a loud sound. It was just a rustling. The sound that you would make if you wanted to keep quiet. Someone was out there.
The door was unlocked, and it wasn’t as if I was expecting an ambush, so I took the opportunity to make a good first impression. I glanced at a mirror, sat down at the sofa, and grabbed a copy of a book that I
thought would make me look studious. I was hoping for Ulysses, or Malcolm Gladwell. I did not have these handy, and by “handy” I mean that I did not own copies of either of them and would probably physically recoil at their presence. What I found was a copy of the writings of the Marquis de Sade, Charice’s, obviously—which was smuttier than I would have hoped for but was at least classy smutty. I arranged myself in a pensive and thoughtful-looking position, readied my “Come in—oh, excuse me, I was just doing a little light reading,” look and waited for the knock.
No knock.
Someone was out there, I was sure of it. Nathan again? We really would have to have a conversation about this door-crouching predilection of his.
I quietly got up from the sofa and, as soundlessly as I could, crept over to the door. I peeked out of the peephole, and there, in fish-eye lens, was the most nervous-looking woman I had ever seen.
No one is flattered by a fish-eye lens, but the girl in front of me was especially maligned. Probably, she was an okay-looking gal, but the bent view through the peephole gave her the Innsmouth look. It was a woman, about my age, who could be described as exceedingly flat. Not just her chest—everything. Long, flat brown hair, flat little nose, flat little hands. She was dressed in flat clothes too, lavender heather sweatpants and a white T-shirt.
She looked nervous. Not “I hope I don’t turn into a Deep One” nervous, but in a similar neighborhood. She had big eyes, and she seemed to be in some sort of internal battle over whether to knock on the door. She lifted her hands twice to knock, but then those big Innsmouth-y eyes would flicker, and the hand would come right back down.
Who was this gal? There was a chance, of course, that she was somehow involved with Charice. But she looked tightly wound, and no one involved with Charice was tightly wound. Charice’s visitors usually didn’t knock at all; they just came in. Often with props. She was here to see me.
Hell with it. I just opened the door, but Miss Innsmouth was gone. She apparently moved quickly—she was practically all the way down the hall, heading toward the elevator.
The Unfortunate Decisions of Dahlia Moss Page 17