Of course, as soon as I opened the door, the camera would be visible, and the jig would be up.
It was at that moment that I decided to take off my pants.
I’ve been dreading typing that sentence for a while because I’ve long known that there isn’t a way to write it that doesn’t turn out insane, but hear me out. (1) They were wet and horrible, (2) I needed to disguise the laptop, (3) given the oversize nature of Nathan’s dress shirt, I wasn’t really showing anything, and (4) (although this point I realized later) murderers are very disoriented when being confronted by a pantsless woman.
I glanced at the stream, which was a strange combination of misogyny, gratitude, and a creeping sense that something was very wrong.
WHAT?
WHAT IS HAPPENING?
Waifu!
WUT.
!!!!!
What is this I don’t even.
My waifu.
Waifu!
This game has everything.
When is next match?
DEAD WOMAN HAS NO PANTS!
And so on. I opened the door, and above me, the last match of the tournament started. Down here, it was a whole different kind of crazy.
“Oh gosh,” I said, faking surprise when I saw Tricia in the engine room. “I didn’t expect to see you guys here.”
It wasn’t my best line, but as is probably clear from my pantlessness and possibly concussion, I had left the realm of good decision making. In my defense, I was shooting more for sarcasm, because I’d intended this to be kind of a big reveal, but they didn’t get it. I’m not great at sarcasm, apparently. In fact, Tricia and Kyle didn’t even question what I was doing there. They just asked me, almost in unison:
“What happened to your pants?”
That was a real problem with this pants-as-disguise plan of mine because it drew a lot of attention to them. Oh well. I went with the honest approach.
“I took them off—they are wet, because someone tried to drown me earlier. You guys don’t know anything about that, do you?”
“No,” said Tricia flatly. “We don’t.”
Tricia was already cold to me, but Nice Guy Kyle was still trying to charm. I’m going to chalk it up to my gams.
“Tried to drown you,” he said, sounding genuinely concerned. “What happened?”
“Someone struck me in the head, and then left me in this room. I slipped out by jumping into the water from that porthole.”
“This room?” asked Kyle. “Spooky.” Although, he didn’t sound spooked at all.
Tricia, on the other hand, looked supremely spooked, and also seemed quite perturbed by my presence here. Although, she may have just been digesting that I was wearing no pants. Undine, who was in her carrying case in the corner, was apparently asleep, but I felt that if she had been awake and verbal, she would have mentioned the whole pantless thing as well.
“Yes,” I told him, pleased to be off the topic of my partial nudity. “I came in here to look for clues,” I told him, which wasn’t exactly a lie. “What are you guys doing in here?”
“We were looking for a little solitude,” Kyle said, adding, “romantic solitude.” He looked pleased with his ad-lib, like he had stumbled into something ingenius. Kyle was so happy-looking; it was disconcerting. Although Tricia’s face looked like it could have been carved out of stone.
“What could be more romantic than the engine room?” said Kyle, pointing the enormous thrusting mechanical dildo thing that presumably had some kind of useful purpose vis-à-vis the motion of the boat. It wasn’t my idea of romance.
I couldn’t help but notice at this point that Tricia was slowly moving toward me, staying along the wall. My plan here was to get Tricia on film saying something implicating, but so far I was having no luck. Only Kyle was talking, and not usefully at that.
“Are you guys usually this frisky?” I asked, inanely, because this was not a useful question.
“Yeah, we’re trying to conceive,” said Kyle, rattling on like a first-year Groundling. “The doctor has Trish taking this drug, and there are certain times where I’m supposed to strike. It’s, like, astrology or something.”
“I don’t think it’s possible to conceive right after a birth, is it?”
I don’t know why I was getting into this with Kyle. It’s clearly a character flaw. Here I was, in a somewhat dangerous situation, and I was going to get myself killed because I was arguing with someone on the Internet who was wrong. And he was on the Internet—being streamed as we spoke. I imagine that #Twitch had a lot of positive and female-embracing things to say about the post-birth bleeding situation. It pains me that I was not able to look at the screen to see them. Oh, poor, poor Twitch chatters. Yours is a brief and fleeting star.
But I digress.
“Guys, I know that one of or both of you did this. You wanna tell me what’s up?”
Kyle looked at Tricia. Tricia looked at Kyle. Undine looked at nothing, because her eyes were closed.
“Why are you here,” said Tricia, “asking questions? Are you wearing a wire or something?”
“You do seem to stream an awful lot,” observed Kyle.
And this was where being pantless was actually not such a bad thing.
“Don’t be silly,” I told her. “Where would I find a wire on a steamboat?” I asked, although now that I asked the question aloud, this was exactly the sort of thing that was perfectly up Charice’s alley. I wish I had thought of that rather than Operation Twitch, but the die was cast now.
“Also, in the unlikely event that I had been wearing a wire, it certainly would have been destroyed when I fell into the Mississippi River. Finally, as you can see, I don’t have any pockets. Or pants.”
“What makes you think it was us?” asked Tricia. This sounds like an innocent thing to say, but it was delivered in a sort of a “the better to see you with” way that was thoroughly alarming.
“You have bandages all over your fingers,” I said.
“Oh, yes,” said Tricia, sounding ever more threatening. “I burned myself earlier. On the stove.”
“You weren’t wearing them earlier,” I said.
“The wound was bothering me anew,” said Tricia, calmly and unperturbed.
“You haven’t, by any chance, seen my purse anywhere?” I asked.
“No,” said Tricia, cold. “I haven’t.”
“You’d recognize it because it has a quilled cactus inside.” And God bless Nathan Willing.
Tricia looked amused by this.
“All right,” said Tricia. “It was me.” This was a line delivered without a lot of embarrassment. Or emotion. It was the sort of “It was me” that you would use to answer a question like, “Who ate the last of the tomato salad? Yeah, I stuck my hand in your purse.”
Well, mystery solved.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
Why did you kill Karou? And Chul-Moo?”
“Do what?” asked Tricia, who was not a natural at admitting things. “I don’t know anything about that. I just found your purse in the bathroom and put my hand in it.”
“Why do you have a cactus in your purse anyway?” asked Kyle, which double murder or not, was a very reasonable question.
“I know that you did this,” I said.
“I haven’t heard anything yet that says you do,” said Tricia. “You sound like you’re fishing. Are you sure you aren’t wearing a wire? What kind of person asks questions like these?”
I’d really underestimated how suspicious a person Tricia was, who was not taking anything for granted.
“An angry woman with a concussion,” I told her.
“Is this blackmail?” asked Tricia. “Is that what you’re playing at? You wanna blackmail us? Because let me tell you, dear, we don’t have the money for that.”
“Not even close,” said Kyle.
Tricia, admirably, still hadn’t admitted to anything. I wanted to pin her down into an honest-to-gosh confession, but I could tell she was going to be hard to maneuver
.
“I don’t have any beef with you guys,” I told them. “I was no fan of Karou either.”
I had no idea where I was going with this; I was just trying to lay down the track fast enough to keep this train from barreling off the tracks. Although, I had to be careful, lest I falsely confess to a double murder myself. That was exactly the sort of notoriety my stream needed.
Tricia looked skeptical, but not altogether unwilling to entertain my gambit.
“How did you know him?”
“We went to school together. We played spin the bottle at a party one time, and he refused to kiss me.”
I actually said this out loud. I don’t know where it came from. It was not my best work.
“What?” said Tricia.
“He kept saying the bottle had spun to the left, over by Pamela Davidson, but it hadn’t spun to the left; it was pointing at me exactly.”
“That’s a pretty shabby reason to want someone dead,” said Tricia, who, lest we forget, is a double murderer.
On the one hand, yes, it certainly was. I had grabbed this story from my past, although it was junior high and not college, and not Karou but a guy named Leland Banks, who I didn’t want to kiss me in the first place. He was built like a shrimp, Leland. Not shrimpy like he needed to work out more, but shrimpy in that he had bad posture and a face like a crustacean. He was no dreamboat, and yet he acted like the bottle landing on me was the equivalent of bankruptcy on Wheel of Fortune. He actually said “Wah-wah-wah” when the bottle landed on me. I was so ticked. Although, I didn’t want Leland dead. I haven’t even unfriended him on Facebook, even though he mostly posts inane political rants about getting America on the gold standard. But I digress.
It was a strange feeling, here, having my murder motivation being judged harshly by actual murderers. I didn’t feel like Tricia should somehow get the moral high ground. But I bit back this impulse.
“Why did you kill him?” I asked her.
“Who says we killed him,” said Tricia. “You wanted him dead.”
“We loved Karou,” said Kyle. “He was a great guy. You’re the pantless psychopath who carries a cactus in her purse.”
“Enough of the games,” I told them, “because I’m pretty sure that you murdered him.”
“Nope,” said Tricia.
I had another bit of evidence that was somewhat iffier and I hadn’t planned on wheeling out at all. But it was clear I was going to need more if I wanted to move these guys from their foothold.
“There are baby wipes in the trash can. Those are for Undine.”
Kyle looked ashen, but Tricia was as stolid as ever.
“That’s nothing to do with us,” said Tricia. “We didn’t put those there.”
“I think you did.”
“Lots of people have babies,” said Tricia. “Undine’s not the only baby in the world.”
“In the engine room of a steamboat?”
Tricia had changed tacks, however. She was the antithesis of the woman on Perry Mason who broke down, saying, “It was me. It was me.” She would have reached across the stand and slapped Raymond Burr in the face. “How about you shut the fuck up, Perry?”
“We put those there just now,” said Tricia.
“So if I touch those now, the poop will feel wet,” I said. I could not believe how much I was engaging with the crazy here. My plan involved touching poop. But Tricia was unmoving.
“Undine has dry ass. It’s a condition.”
“Her shit just comes out dry? Honestly, that’s your line?”
Tricia changed tack.
“The baby wipes don’t prove a thing. They could have come from anywhere. Lots of people have babies.”
“On board this steamboat?”
“Or maybe it’s just some weird adult,” continued Tricia.
“Some kind of freaky sex thing,” volunteered Kyle helpfully.
“There are DNA tests that can be done to prove that they belong to her.”
“There’s no poop DNA test.”
“Actually, I’m pretty sure there is.”
Tricia was absolutely unmoving. I was in awe of her, in one sense, but she was also being completely exasperating.
“Anyway,” said Tricia, “it doesn’t prove that we were down here. Maybe Undine came down here on her own.”
“Maybe your two-week-old infant came down to the basement by herself? That’s your suggestion?”
“Or with some unseen nanny.”
“Why don’t you tell me why it is that you killed Karou, Tricia?”
“Maybe someone stole some of Undine’s used wipes and put them down here.”
And Tricia liked this one, because her eyes lit up with possibility. Despite myself, I couldn’t help but engage with this woman’s ridiculous alibis.
“So wait, you’re proposing that—just to make sure I understand this correctly—that someone stole used baby wipes, covered in shit—and left them in the basement.”
“Boats don’t have basements,” said Kyle, and Tricia and I both rightfully ignored him.
“That’s exactly what happened,” said Tricia. ”In fact, I noticed they were missing from the restroom earlier. I thought a porter had emptied the trash.”
“That’s deeply implausible,” I told her. “Why would anyone do that?”
“To frame us,” said Tricia, her eyes blinking at me, practically daring me to defy her.
Kyle, after being ignored, had wisely retreated from the conversation, recognizing that this crazy wife-fu act of denial was Tricia’s special role in their relationship. But I was keeping an eye on him, because I was half expecting him to pull a gun on me or some such. Yes, I know I didn’t get shot in the ass earlier, but once you’ve taken a bullet, you get wary of guns. I even was keeping tabs on Undine, because these two were quite a piece of work, and who knew what their offspring was capable of?
“I think,” I said, considering the stream that was capturing all this behind me, “that you should give this up and tell me why you did it. What did you have against Karou?”
“I think you put these wipes here,” said Tricia. “You hated Karou because he spurned you, and you were out for blood. You planted those things here because you wanted to destroy us.”
“I just met you,” I told Tricia. “I watched your baby for you. Multiple times!”
“We do appreciate that,” said Kyle.
And then I was hit with a terrible truth. I realized it all at once.
“You murdered Karou while I was watching Undine! You didn’t have a bathroom emergency at all!”
This didn’t exactly crack Tricia, but it did seem to make her slightly embarrassed.
“You fucking asshole!” I said. “What kind of person asks a stranger to watch their infant while they commit a murder?”
Tricia was still backpedaling, but she was backpedaling in a different direction now.
“You weren’t a stranger,” said Tricia. “I’d seen you stream before. And you seemed like you’d be good with Undine.”
“Oh my God,” I said, still connecting dots. “I watched Undine for forever this morning. Tell me you did not kill again while I was watching your baby a second time!”
“I did not,” said Tricia, her denial in a completely different—and markedly honest—tone this time. “I just needed a break.”
“You needed a break because you killed Chul-Moo!”
Tricia was, however momentarily, speechless.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
What really makes this exchange embarrassing—embarrassing to me, at least—is that there was a corpse on the floor the entire time that I had failed to notice.
If you will go back and look at the stream transcript later—you will see that—had I been watching—there had been, up to this point, hundreds of comments about the dead body. Here I was trying to needle Tricia with fine little points about soiled baby wipes in a trash can, when I should have just said something like: “Hey, is that a corpse behind you?”
But even without the stream, I eventually noticed that there was a trail of blood—and yuck, I don’t know, skull bits?—that led from the near porthole to immediately behind Kyle.
“I’m not setting aside the wipes point,” I told Tricia. That was how proud I was of that point, actually. I wasn’t willing to let it go. “But there’s also a trail of blood, and I don’t know, brain that leads behind your husband.”
Tricia turned to face the blood, which was a thin smeared red-and-brown streak that was nauseating once you saw it.
“What blood?” said Tricia. “I don’t see any blood.”
“It’s on the floor.”
“Where?” said Tricia, who also, I observed, had some of it on her feet. “I don’t see any.”
“It’s also on your shoes,” I said.
“These aren’t my shoes,” said Tricia. “I borrowed them. They had this on them already. It’s the new style.”
“Would you mind moving a little, Kyle, so that I can see what’s behind you?”
Kyle moved—I don’t know why—and there was more of Chul-Moo’s corpse. Tricia must have kicked him in the head? It was terrifying, really. He seemed to look worse every time I saw him.
“Oh my God,” said Tricia. “This is terrible! Who knew this was here?”
“Unnnghh,” said someone. That’s right, “unnghh.” Because behind Chul-Moo was another half-murdered person. It was like a murdered-person white sale down here.
The Not Quite Murdered Person was tall, and dark skinned, and I said:
“Oh my God. You did not knock out Detective Maddocks. That is not good.” If you shoot at this king, you best don’t miss. I’m sure that Detective Maddocks would not like that joke, actually. However, if I saved his life, he was totally going to owe me. Seriously. He’ll have like a blood debt.
Anyway, Tricia and Kyle did not answer. (Neither did Undine.) And so I answered their earlier question, “Who knew this was here?”
“Probably Kyle knew he was there,” I said, given that his boots have blood on them. Maybe they had been rolling him over, not kicking him. It was probably a little ungenerous to go straight to kicking. There was a giant hole in the engine room that led down to whatever other mechanisms powered the ship, and perhaps they were just trying to roll him in there? I could only guess, because there was no chance I’d get any honest answers from these clowns.
The Astonishing Mistakes of Dahlia Moss Page 23