The Unfortunate Decisions of Dahlia Moss

by Max Wirestone

  The nice thing about tracking a treant is that they are a giant fucking tree. The treant costume was seven feet tall, and it was as wide as a truck. I might have been a lousy private eye, but even in a crowded show floor with people dressed in glittering costumes of genies and harpies and elves, you’re not going to lose a giant tree.

  I came down the escalator and tried to track Jennifer, while keeping a respectful distance. I wasn’t sure if the iPhone plan was going to work, despite my confidence on the phone with Nathan earlier. It would have been much easier if she had been carrying a bag that I could have just dropped the phone in. It was crazy that she wasn’t—everyone here was carrying bags; they came free with your ticket. But not the tree. Perhaps she had felt that it would distract from her costume.

  She was waiting in line to get something signed by a shaggy-haired voice actor, and I took a spot a few people behind her. Looking at it up close, I could see that I had a problem. The costume looked to be entirely made of wood—or maybe some sort of polyurethane that was made to look like wood. It was astonishingly detailed—there were even little sprouts growing out of the legs in places. But I was less impressed than flummoxed. There were no pockets, no crevasses, nowhere obvious to squeeze an iPhone.

  Of course, I could only see the costume from the back. I was wary of getting much closer, because I did not want to be seen, and I wasn’t entirely sure where the eyeholes were on that thing. Still, there were some flyers you could take on a red table nearby, and so I zipped out of line, and pretended to be very interested in them. It was apparently a design document for a zone called “The Hive,” and I looked at it intently despite the fact that I could not imagine a zone less interesting. I was in front of the treant now, and I had this awful feeling that Jennifer was boring eyes in my back. Paranoia, surely. When I turned around, I would be able to get a good glimpse of the front of the costume, possibly being able to confirm my suspicion that it was indeed Jennifer Ebel, and maybe—maybe—plant my extremely expensive bug on her?

  Having stared at the Hive flyer well beyond any credible length, I decided to take my chance. The front of the costume gave me no clues to its inhabitant, but there on the treant’s shoulder was my opportunity. She had carved a knoll into her shoulder, and a terrifyingly realistic squirrel peered out. But there was no realistic way that I could shove my phone down the burrow of a tree in front of everyone. Besides which, it would surely rattle around when she walked, giving up the game.

  I needed to prep.

  What follows is the most pissant episode of MacGyver you have ever seen. I acquired, on the floor of the Left Field Games Summit, a cheap paper Princess Penelope mask, a gray “Visit the Sundered Lands” T-shirt—which cost thirty dollars—and three packs of chewing gum, which was another nine dollars. This bug was getting more and more expensive. I chewed the gum, wrapped my phone inside the T-shirt, and tried to affix as much chewy gum to the outside of the shirt as possible. The effort was barely passable. Laughable, maybe, but passable. If I could find the right moment, I could probably shove the squirrel out of the way and wedge the sticky T-shirt down her hallow. The right moment would be something like an earthquake, but there you have it.

  I put on the cheap mask and I tailed the tree for another few minutes. Clearly, I had gone insane. This was what it was like to lose your mind. Probably what was going to happen was that I would going to molest this tree with my sticky gum and discover that it was not Jennifer Ebel at all but an angry Hells Angels biker. That was undoubtedly it.

  A moment came. Music swelled over the loudspeaker and someone announced that designers of the spider goddess Zxlyphxix would be answering questions on level two. I don’t even know what this meant, but there was actually an “Ooh!” that went over the crowd, and I took my chance. My heart was racing, my palms were sweating. But I did it. I scampered up to the side of the tree—all fairy-like—and pushed the ruined T-shirt down into her crevice. I tried frolicking away—difficult when you are on the verge of a heart attack—and saw a slightly tubby mummy staring at me, clearly having watched the whole exchange. I lifted my mask and winked at him and tried to make a silent hand gesture that suggested this was good clean fairy fun. The mummy sighed at me but shuffled away.

  I couldn’t bring myself to look back at the tree. I just picked an arbitrary direction and kept walking toward it. Fifteen seconds later, I looked back and the treant was gone.

  I was frayed at this point, seriously frayed. I waited in line nervously at a hamburger place—thirteen dollars!—and tried to calm my nerves with food. Maybe it was just the butterflies in my stomach, but the sandwich I got seemed more than worth every penny. I really wanted to speak to Charice now, but of course I couldn’t call her. Hopefully she would respond to my text soon—I wasn’t sure why she hadn’t shown up already. This was exactly the kind of thing that would draw her out.

  I retreated to the safety of the women’s restroom. I’m embarrassed to say that I didn’t need to actually pee. I sort of thought I might sneak into a stall and cry for just a bit—but when I got in there, I suddenly found that I wasn’t stressed or even sad anymore. I felt amazing. This could be my moment; I could catch the killer, return the spear, make peace with my ex-boyfriend, and in one stroke make right everything that had gone wrong in the past two years. That looks a little melodramatic when I type it out now, but I told you already that I had lost my mind.

  I left the stall, washed my hands, and stepped out of the restroom to find an enormous tree waiting patiently for me.

  “I noticed you’ve been following me,” said the tree in a thick Indian American accent. “Do I know you?”

  I wasn’t wearing that stupid cardboard mask anymore, and I would have killed to have had it on right then. There was nothing to do but lay my cards on the table.

  “Oh, yes,” I said, shooting for casual friendliness. “I’m sorry. You look like a friend of mine in-game. Your name isn’t, by any chance, Orchardary, is it?”

  As the tree’s eyes were unmoving lumps of wood, it was hard to read the face for a reaction, but if I had to guess by her voice, I would have said that she was as nervous as a cat.

  “No,” said the tree. “Although I think I know the person you mean. People keep mistaking me for her.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” I said amiably. “I suppose I could see why. Two female treants with Indian accents.”

  “What are the odds?” said the treant.

  And that was my chance to leave, safely and without incident. She didn’t seem to know about the iPhone, as far as I could tell, so I could have just walked away and kept tabs on her from a distance. But I just couldn’t resist pressing my luck.

  “I love your accent,” I told her. “What province of India are you from?”

  There was a pause that was just one beat too long.

  “The Marhashi province. You probably haven’t heard of it.”

  I had not heard of it, no, although to be fair I couldn’t name a single province of India. I wasn’t even 100 percent sure that India had provinces—maybe they had states or counties or something? But I had googled my line days ago, and I tried it now.

  Jennifer might have sensibly responded with confusion. Or laughed at my terrible accent. I was speaking from a memorized version of a speech learned from Google Translate, so even if my pronunciation was close (and I can assure you that it was not), there was no telling if the construction was correct.

  Instead Jennifer took an intuitive leap of her own—a brilliant one, a leap that could have secured her own success in her deceit, had it only been right. When Jennifer went in, she went all in. What’s the one phrase that everyone learns to say in a language?

  “I believe,” said Jennifer, with false certainty, “the bathroom is right behind you.”

  But as soon as she said it, she knew the gig was up. My face is entirely too expressive for detective work. I was thrilled to catch her out, and I must have lit up like a candle. So much for bluffing.

 
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Jennifer sighed.

  “Anyway, I like your costume,” she told me, dropping the accent. “Especially the hair.”

  Of course she did. The one incongruous element. This was her modus operandi.

  “Jennifer Ebel,” I said to her, trying to make it not sound like an accusation but like a pleasant surprise. “What are you doing here?”

  “Oh, you know, I’m a big fan of Zoth. Like you, I guess.”

  My mouth could not be stopped, nor even quieted. “Is that so? You told me that you didn’t play the game when I interviewed you.”

  “I’ve only just started,” said Jennifer with the same fake tossed-off enthusiasm that I had tried using on her. This line might have been plausible if she weren’t wearing an elaborate tree costume that must have taken months to build.

  “You are Orchardary,” I told her.

  “You caught me,” said Jennifer. Then she shifted into her Indian accent, which now sounded incredibly fake, but perhaps this was only because I knew it was coming out of a decidedly occidental tree. As if to confirm her identity, Jennifer brushed away the moss beard of her treant, revealing her own face beneath the costume. “Was it my voice that tipped you off? You’d think that more people would see through it, although no one does.”

  “You also didn’t know what city we are in when I asked you in Hindi.”

  “Yes, well, this wasn’t a charade that was worth learning a second language for.”

  There was an air of practiced innocence about Jennifer now, as if this were all just a delightful misunderstanding, or kooky coincidence, but I just wasn’t having it. I had come this far, and I wanted answers.

  “Why did you lie to me?”

  Jennifer was looking at me with a catlike thoughtfulness that was a little alarming. She was trying to piece together what I had figured out. At the same time I was looking at her and trying to determine if she had any inkling that she was wearing my iPhone.

  “I was embarrassed,” she said. “I’m a very serious person”—a line that seemed terrifyingly true, even as it was being delivered from an elaborate tree costume—“and I feel like people would respect me less if word got out that I was this into Zoth.”

  “You didn’t tell me that you had been dating Jonah when I first interviewed you.”

  “It was more of a one-night stand. And he was alive at the time, so I didn’t think it was any of your business.”

  Jennifer had answers for everything. But if she had been concerned about her privacy, why had she sought me out in the women’s bathroom in the first place? She needed to know how much I knew. The trouble was that I needed to know the same thing. Some part of me was crying out that Jennifer was implicated in this deep—as deep as it gets. But I couldn’t prove any of it, or even tell you why I felt so strongly. But my mind was churning around everything I knew. Jennifer was Orchardary. It was like working a cryptogram—the extra information I had from this had to reveal another clue.

  “Did Jonah know your secret identity as a tree?”

  Jennifer thought about her answer, scrunching up her face as though she were considering a verbal trap. “No. I didn’t want him to know. Jonah allowed himself a frivolity that he would have certainly mocked in me.”

  “He invited you in the game without knowing who you were?”

  “Oatcake invited me into the guild. When I realized that Jonah was in the guild, I decided to fake an identity.”

  “Aishwarya Patel? You think quick on your feet.”

  “She was an old college roommate of mine, and I did a decent impression of her. I never imagined I’d be doing it for so long. I wonder if that’s how it went for Threadwork’s silly voice.”

  I couldn’t resist showing off how much I knew.

  “Duke University, right? Likes country music?”

  Jennifer stared at me incredulously.

  “When you started dating him,” I told her, “you tried telling him.” It wasn’t a question.

  “No,” Jennifer said flatly.

  “You gave him the ‘Walk to Wachusett’ idea.“

  Jennifer seemed suddenly alarmed. This was a revelation, however small, that she hadn’t been prepared for. I explained.

  “An obscure reference to Henry David Thoreau? I didn’t know Jonah well, but I’m guessing that nineteenth-century philosophers did not occupy a lot of his reading. But you’re a philosophy person,” I told her. “Your workstation in the graduate office was lined with tracts. And you were the only person that caught Jonah’s reference in the invitation. ‘This level life too has its summit.’ It was your idea all along, and you couldn’t stand that we wouldn’t get the reference.”

  There was an almost audible click in Jennifer’s thoughts.

  “I had thrown him some clues,” said Jennifer. “I had hoped that he would piece it together himself. I had this silly idea that he would be deliriously happy when he discovered that I was already in his guild. But he never figured it out. Jonah was many things, but he was not intellectually curious.”

  Why was I not walking away? Why did I keep peppering Jennifer with questions?

  “How did you know what the spear looked like? The replica, I mean?”

  Jennifer’s response came instantly—the words coming out faster than she could actually lay down the track for the thoughts. “Well, I mean, of course I was just bluffing about having seen it. And I knew what the spear looked like in-game. And other people had described it and I just piggybacked off their responses. I did a pretty good job, didn’t I?”

  But I had been there for that conversation. No one described the spear at any length but Jennifer. And no one had actually wielded it in the game—she shouldn’t have known what it looked like at all. Because unlike everyone else in the guild, she had not received a copy, her copy going to Aishwarya Patel and returned to sender.

  “You even said that it was heavy. How would you know that?”

  Typing up this account now, I have no idea why I would say that out loud. My best analogy is that you’re like the nerd in algebra class who, despite their nerdy reputation, nonetheless is completely baffled by algebra. And in one shining moment, the clouds part and you suddenly get it. And so you shout out the answer to every question, even though it’s going to get you seriously ostracized after class. Because you’re right and you can’t help it.

  That analogy, you might guess, is closer to home than I would like.

  “Right,” said Jennifer. She didn’t look angry or maddened, or even particularly remorseful. “I guess that’s where we are, then.”

  “You sent me those job-fair flyers. You didn’t want me to come here. You were afraid I’d recognize you.”

  “You couldn’t just go to a fucking job fair, Dahlia? It was a good idea.”

  “And you killed Jonah Long,” I told her, still beaming with accomplishment. Then once the moment passed, I was suddenly confused again. “Why?”

  Jennifer sighed. “I guess you’d say it was a crime of passion.”

  She was digging around in a fanny pack that she had on the inside of her bark. I should have been alarmed by this in retrospect, but my thinking at the time was What dangerous thing could possibly come out of a fanny pack? And besides which, she was still talking. I suppose my expectation was that she was getting a tissue.

  “We’d had a romantic interlude the weekend before. I’m sure you heard about that. I was coming by to break up with him, and he, of course, beat me to the punch.”

  “But why did you do it?” I asked her.

  “He was an asshole.”

  That was probably true. But if I went around killing every guy who was a jerk, America would have a population problem. “That’s not much of a reason,” I told Jennifer.

  “You’re asking me why I snapped?”

  Yes. That’s what I was asking. Jennifer was, clearly, a very tightly wound woman. But it wasn’t as if she had gone on routine killing sprees to let off steam. Something put her over the edge
.

  And I was curious too because I remembered what it was like when I found out that Erik had been cheating on me for months. I remembered that white-hot rage. I had directed it inward. There had been no danger that I was going to kill Erik—even in my craziest fantasies. But look at what it had done to me. I had become completely deflated. No friends, no job. I was like some horrible shadow of myself. Maybe murder wasn’t such a terrible option—for all her faults, Jennifer could at least be said to have vigor.

  “It was Orchardary that killed him.”

  I pondered this. Was Jen crazy enough to have multiple personality disorder between her and a tree? I thought, Crazy, but probably not that crazy. But Jennifer caught my confused expression.

  “No, not like that,” she said. “I killed him—not some imaginary tree. But it was the tree that caused it.”

  I didn’t comment. With something so oblique the explanation had to be coming,

  “You ever read one of those romances where the heroine and the hero hate each other at the beginning? And then it turns out that behind all that hate is passion?”

  I never read books like that, but I lied. “I’ve skimmed a few.”

  “It started out like that. Or I thought it did. Jonah joined our program and infuriated me. Everything came so easily to him—the science, money, relationships. I had gotten where I was by working harder than anyone I knew—and then he just shows up, waltzing around like he’s enchanted. But I couldn’t take my eyes off him. He was so… magnetic.”

  I had never thought that Jonah was magnetic. He was good-looking, sure, but I could take my eyes off him easily. I can take my eyes off car crashes. Just let them rest on a point in the distance. But that’s chemistry for you.

  Jennifer went on with her story. “Then Oatcake invited me to join the Horizons, and there he was again. At the time it had felt like this weird kismet. But I didn’t want him to know it was me, because I was sure he would make fun of me doing something so frivolous. So I made up a disguise. A false-face to wear when he was around—like at a masquerade ball.”