“Our time is up?” ventured Nathan.
“Doctor XXX is streaming. He’s not just watching now. He’s actually streaming. We can get a visual.”
I whipped out my phone and opened up the Twitch app. Charice and Nathan were super interested now, and it even felt like Undine was in on the action, although I’m probably projecting that because her eyes were closed.
In front of me was a white guy, about my age, with a magnificent beard and great hair. Short on the side and with kind of a pompadour on the top. That sounds a little silly to type out, but he looked amazing. He was wearing a maroon V-neck sweater with a navy dress shirt. He was dapper and did not look especially threatening. Another reason he wasn’t threatening: The tables had turned; now he was the one broadcasting, and I was the unseen typist showing up in his chatroom. Which felt great.
“Louise,” said Doctor XXX. “I thought if I started streaming, you’d show up. I’m so glad I don’t have to just keep droning on while I wait for you.”
First thing: accent. Doctor XXX was British. I was pretty sure it was real, because it was very particular and not overdone. He sounded a bit like Stephen Merchant, actually, which is probably some regionalism that I don’t quite get the details of. But regardless, it wasn’t the accent an American would do if you were going to fake a British accent.
“Glad to see you,” I typed. “I wanted to meet with you today, actually. I had a few questions about yesterday.”
“Well, that’s it, isn’t it?” said Doctor XXX. “We can’t really meet because I’m on the other side of the world, actually.”
I had been fooled recently enough by someone faking an accent, so I was bound and determined to check everything here.
“I see,” I typed. “So where are you, actually?”
“You haven’t heard of it, probably. The South East Dorset conurbation?”
Again, this was a very particular answer.
“South East Dorset what?”
“Conurbation.”
“Is that even a real word?” asked Nathan, watching over my shoulder. “Ask him if that’s a real word.”
I typed Nathan’s question, such as it was.
“Of course it’s a real word,” responded Doctor XXX. “What kind of a question is that?”
“What time is it there?” I asked.
“Three forty-seven,” said Doctor XXX.
“Hmm,” I typed. “I’ll have to check that later.”
“I anticipated that you might be suspicious,” said Doctor XXX, whose Britishness seemed to expand and expand, like an invasive plant species. “Anything else you’d like to ask me?”
“Yes,” I said. “Take me outside,” I said. “I want to see the sun in the sky.”
Nathan looked impressed. “Dag, Dahlia.”
I shrugged.
“Unfortunately, there’s not much sun today, but I’ll show you the clouds. How’s the weather in St. Louis?”
Cloudless. The weather was completely cloudless here. It was drizzling a bit on Doctor XXX, which was beginning to make it look more and more like he really was a round-the-world rando. Anyway, he shuffled around outside some more, and the camerawork was making me a bit nauseated. I was going to tell him that I believed him and to pack it in when he had another great idea.
“Wait,” said Doctor XXX. “I’ve got it. Take a look at this vehicle registration plate.”
And he focused the camera on a license plate that was yellow and had an EU sticker on it, and was obviously not American. It was a nice detail, although it was the fact that I observed traffic behind him traveling in the “wrong” lanes that really sealed the deal for me.
“Yeah, okay,” I said. “So you’re British. Why were you jerking me around?”
“Yes, I feel a bit sheepish about that, actually,” said Doctor XXX. “Fun, really. I was just trolling a bit. Someone told me you were a geek detective, and I thought it would be fun to play around with you a tad. But I didn’t know anything about a murder, and I don’t want to get involved in that. Very unlucky.”
“How did you hear I was a detective?”
“You know,” he said. “I don’t remember, really.”
“Was it Wilbur?” I asked. “Did he tell you?”
“I don’t know anyone named Wilbur. But it doesn’t matter, really. Anyway, I ought to be going now. There’s a television program I’d like to watch.”
“Why are you following Imogen?”
“Just someone else to troll? Anyway, must be going now. Good luck with your detectiving.”
And he was gone, as quickly as he had arrived.
“Who’s Wilbur?” asked Nathan.
Traps like this always look amazing when detectives employ them successfully. But the corollary to this is that you look like a moron when you try one out that doesn’t work.
“Just a name I made up,” I said. “I was hoping to catch him out. Like he would say, ‘Oh yes, it was definitely Wilbur,’ and I’d say, ‘Aha! That’s where I’ve got you! There is no Wilbur.’”
“And then he’d say, ‘Drat! Your fiendish trap has caught me! I’m embroiled in a web of my own lies!’ I like it,” said Nathan.
Yes, that was exactly what I wanted. More’s the pity.
“So,” said Charice. “At least we know that Doctor XXX isn’t trying to kill you. I wonder who sent that message to me. Maybe it was Doctor XY?”
“No,” said Nathan. “That was me. I mean, I’m Doctor XY. I didn’t send you a message.”
“Oh,” said Charice, unconcerned by this confession. “What Doctors do we have left?”
“Two things,” I said, and I was beginning to feel more confident now. “One: I know who your Doctor is, but I’m sworn to secrecy.”
“Ooh,” said Charice. “That gives me a pretty good clue. What’s thing number two?”
“That guy who just spoke to me? I buy that he’s in the South East Dorset Conservation.”
“Conurbation.”
“Right. Because who would make that up? But he’s not Doctor XXX.”
“How do you know that?” asked Nathan.
And I really wished I had a better answer, but I didn’t. What I had was a hunch, a feeling in my bones. I felt like there was a clue somewhere that I had missed, but I couldn’t put my finger on it just yet.
“I don’t quite know it yet,” I said, “although I’ve got some strong clues in that direction.”
“He was definitely in England,” said Charice. “We can agree on that.”
“Yes, but I was streaming at midnight last night. Which meant that he was up at four a.m.”
“Maybe he works the night shift,” considered Charice.
“Maybe,” I said. “And maybe he happened to get up at exactly the right time to catch me in the afternoon. Maybe he’s some kind of zombie that doesn’t require sleep at all. But I think it’s more likely that Doctor XXX is someone else here at this tournament, and maybe this conurbation clown is just some friend he got to throw me off the trail.”
“I love it when you say suspicious things,” said Nathan. This sounded almost like a joke, but it wasn’t. Nathan did love it when I said suspicious things. He enjoyed mysteries, at least as long as they didn’t involve anyone shooting at me.
“It’s not entirely suspicious. It’s logical. Did you notice how he didn’t want to talk to me when I started asking him questions that only Doctor XXX would know? When we were talking about proving his location, he had all the time in the world.”
“So, what’s the plan?” asked Charice.
The plan. What I would really like to do would be to look through all of my correspondence with Doctor XXX. And maybe I would do that later. But there were more pressing plans first.
“Before anything,” I said, “I’ve got to get rid of this baby.”
“Gotcha,” said Charice. “You want to give me any clues as to who my broom closet captor is?”
“It’s a pleasant surprise,” I told her.
“O
oh,” said Charice. “How about a location?”
“Just make yourself visible, and the surprise will find you,” I told her. I really wanted to add, “Congratulations,” which I include here to show how generous and magnanimous I am, but I didn’t, just because I didn’t want to give away Daniel’s game. Charice, for all her frivolity, is whip smart when you get down to it.
“Well, I do love making myself visible,” said Charice. “Toodles.” And she literally backdashed away. Like I was going to jump in at her.
“Hey,” said Nathan. “I’m sorry about before. I’m not good at this detective stuff. Sometimes I have a hard time seeing the line between improbable and insane.”
“It’s fine,” I said. “Maybe we should follow Charice,” I said. “I kind of want to see her be proposed to. Is that weird?”
“I don’t think it’s weird,” said Nathan. “But I think you ought to let her have her moment. Besides,” said Nathan, “I have a present for you.”
“It’s not a cactus, is it?”
“It is a cactus,” said Nathan. “How did you guess?”
“Nathan,” I said. “You’ve got stop with the cacti. Did you buy them in bulk at some point?”
“I just like giving you plants,” said Nathan.
“But I don’t want plants,” I said.
Nathan took this as a natural cue to produce said cactus, which was tiny but somehow looked especially dangerous, with formidable spines and no flowers to speak of.
“The Opuntia glochid,” said Nathan. “I thought you might appreciate this one. Be careful. It’s very prickly.” Nathan coughed. “Like someone I know.”
I looked at the cactus in front of me, and at Nathan, the strange boy who was holding it. He was remarkably pleased by this development, so much so that I felt obligated to take it.
“What am I supposed to do with this thing?” I asked. “I can’t walk around with a cactus all day.”
“It’s not that big,” said Nathan. “You could put it in your purse. It’s not like you don’t have weirder things in there.”
“What could be weirder than a cactus?”
Nathan had worked out this gambit in advance, obviously, because he had an answer at the ready. “A cassette tape of the best of Belinda Carlisle?”
“Alden gave me that,” I said, although my brother actually hadn’t given me the cassette in question. I was just making him my fall guy. “And my car still plays cassettes. It’s hard to find them anymore.”
“I’m just saying a cactus will fit right in,” said Nathan. “Besides,” he said, “if anyone attacks you, you can hit them with it.”
“Fine,” I said, shoving it into my purse. Actually, I’m using the verb ‘shoving’ here because it described my mood, but in fact I handled the cactus very carefully. “I accept your glochid of apology, but no more cacti, Nathan. I mean it.”
“Yes,” he said idly. “We should transition to something else. Perhaps small fruit trees.”
“I’m ninety percent sure you’re joking right now,” I said, “and I’m just not going to acknowledge the other ten percent.”
“You know,” said Nathan, “this boat is not that big. I’m surprised this baby’s mother hasn’t found you yet.”
This was a fair point. And yes, of course, my mind went to Tricia getting murdered, because apparently that’s just what I do now. If Tricia and Kyle were somehow both to get killed, then I would be responsible for this infant forever, which seemed, however improbable, entirely terrifying.
“Okay,” I said. “Here’s the plan. We find Tricia. I take a moment to look over my conversations with Doctor XXX, and after that—”
“After that, fruit trees and model trains.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
I made it back to the bar and found that Tricia was having a drink. She was kicked back—in a comfy-looking brown leather chair in the corner, and looking torn between twin desires of wanting to drink and wanting to have a nap. She did not look like she was terribly concerned how her husband was doing in today’s tournament. She also decidedly did not look like someone who was concerned about a missing baby.
“Great,” she said. “You’re back.”
I felt like I should chastise her somehow, but I wasn’t sure for what, and this is usually a good sign that you don’t have the moral high ground.
“You get your whole vomit situation resolved?” I asked her.
Tricia was looking wet and clean. Literally, her hair was wet and slicked back, as if she had washed it in a sink somewhere. This was actually a much better look for her, than frazzled and dry, but that’s an observation just between the two of us.
“Clean as a whistle,” she told me. “Who’s your friend?”
“Undine didn’t give me any trouble,” I said, feeling that this question ought to have been asked, and as it wasn’t, I would answer it anyway. Nathan and Tricia just ignored me, however.
“Nathan Willing,” said Nathan. “I’m Dahlia’s tentative squeeze.”
“Everyone’s gotta start somewhere,” said Tricia. “Thanks for watching Undine for me. If you see Kyle or Remy, tell them to check in. I don’t have the energy to keep up with them today.”
And then Tricia rested.
We retreated. The bar would have been a great place to go over my computer conversations with Doctor XXX, but I wanted a little privacy, and I felt that if I did that stuff in front of Tricia, she was going to want to make small talk with me the whole time. So we headed out along the deck and found a nice spot with some white wicker furniture and a glass coffee table that looked like it had been ripped from the pages of Southern Living.
It was a pretty scene. And Nathan was right, it wasn’t being completely ignored by the gaming crowd. There were people out here, watching the sun set and warding off mosquitos. Not as many as there were inside watching the game, but it was still a scene. There have certainly been worse Kickstarter goals.
I opened my computer and started looking through my conversations with this Doctor. I felt like there had to be some kind of clue in there. I looked through who he was following again, and read the conversations aloud with Nathan, who performed the Doctor’s voice in a preposterous British accent.
“I know this is going to sound forward,” he said, “but I was wondering if you could come to the Endicott Hotel in St. Louis tomorrow.”
“The British voice is not helping me. It makes him seem more British.”
“Excuse me there, gov’nah—just wondering if you could come to the Endicott Hotel in St. Louis tomorrow, wot wot.”
“Are you listening to me?”
“I am,” said Nathan. “I just needed to get it out of my system.”
I was irritated with Nathan. Moderately, not significantly so, but I had to give him that his British performance of the Doctor’s dialogue had put me in exactly the right frame of mind for detective work.
I’ll cut out the irrelevant dialogue—although, Nathan and I went through the whole thing—several times—and cut straight to the clues.
“Why are you telling me this?” I asked Nathan.
“Because I feel guilty,” said Doctor Nathan. “I can’t imagine anything crueler than sending you to a room with a violently murdered person. It was an accident. I am frightfully sorry.”
“He didn’t say ‘frightfully,’” I said.
“I was editorializing a little bit there,” said Nathan. “I’m getting bored. Dreadfully bored. A spot of boredom.”
I really wanted to thwack him now, perhaps with a cactus, but all of these Briticisms gave me a thought.
“How did he spell ‘crueler’?”
“Correctly.”
“Correctly, how?”
“I don’t understand the question. He used letters, and the like, not emoji or anything.”
“Spell it.”
“C-R-U-E-L-E-R?”
“So he used the American spelling?” I asked.
“There’s a British spelling for ‘crueler’?�
�
“There is. Wot, wot.”
“That’s a nice little discovery,” said Nathan. “But what does it mean?”
I was actually weirdly excited by my little mini-revelation, even as I accepted its limits. Yes, it was technically possible that the Doctor had taken to using American spellings while messaging me, but why? And to catch such a minor one? It wasn’t as if he avoided “meet me at the lift with your flatmate.” Nope, the likeliest possibility was that he was an American all along.
“It means,” I said, doing this slowly not out of a sense of drama, but because I didn’t want to fuck it up, “that Doctor XXX is probably on this boat.”
“How do you figure that?” asked Nathan.
“Well,” I said, “whoever it is, he doesn’t want me investigating him. And he wants that to stop, pronto. If he was some guy who went home to Duluth after losing in the tournament yesterday, why would he care that much?”
“Hmm,” said Nathan. “Okay. So, do you know who it is?”
I thought about it. I honestly didn’t. I knew that Tricia had watched me streaming, though, so it could possibly have been her? But that was nonsense. To what end? And it just as easily could have been anyone; that’s the point of streaming. Your stuff is out there live, for anyone to see.
“I don’t know who it is,” I said. “But whoever they are, they have a friend in Dorset.”
“This seems very hard to work out,” Nathan considered. “Maybe we go around talking about visiting Dorset with random people until someone says, ‘Oh yes, I know Dorset. It’s lovely.’”
“Maybe we use the word ‘conurbation’ in conversation and we see who knows what we’re talking about.”
“A clever gambit,” Nathan said. “But I think it’d be tricky to naturally bring the topic up.”
I was still thinking about the streaming thing, however. Every time I streamed, it seemed, Doctor XXX was watching me. This was not particularly shocking, really, because he obviously just had set up some sort of alert to go off whenever I started streaming, just like I had done for him.
And that, I suddenly realized, was a piece of information worth knowing.
The Astonishing Mistakes of Dahlia Moss Page 17