The Questionable Behavior of Dahlia Moss

by Max Wirestone

  Vanetta was reasonably self-absorbed with her pregnancy problem, I thought, because she did not have follow-up questions about how I had been consorting with Cynthia. Instead she said:

  “My God, why is she telling people? Cynthia’s the worst! She’s just this awful, awful woman.”

  I nearly asked, God help me, “So would you kill her?” but something held me back.

  “Yeah,” I said. “I guess Cynthia likes spreading gossip around.”

  “She does. Always going on about dumb shit like Lawrence’s acupuncturist being a therapist, or some such garbage. Who cares? If Lawrence needs a psychiatrist, more power to him.”

  I was pretty sure that Cynthia had described him as a personal trainer, but no matter. This was the first negative description of Cynthia anyone had given, and it was actually a little helpful. Cynthia liked to gossip—and if she had found the wrong piece of information, even unknowingly—well, that could have caused some problems.

  And it also struck me, quite suddenly, that people might be much more willing to say negative things about Cynthia now that she wasn’t actually dead. When you’re dead, it’s impolite to speak ill of people—even awful people, right? And so it would be definitely unseemly to go in on a dead woman for what were only mild character flaws. I would need to repoll everyone as to their thoughts on Cynthia, now that she was among the living. Food for later.

  “So how are you doing?” I asked Vanetta, trying to sound empathetic.

  “I’m fine. The project was extended, and so everything is great. Also, DE really does have a connection with Morgan Freeman, and so there’s that. We could have a talking spearmint voiced by Morgan Freeman.”

  “I mean about the pregnancy.” Although, as an aside: Wow, Morgan Freeman.

  “I’m not talking about the pregnancy.”

  “Are you keeping the baby?” I asked, the question being arguably even less appropriate here than the last time I asked.

  “Perhaps you didn’t hear me say earlier, to your face, loudly and clearly, that I was not discussing this pregnancy.”

  “Well, it’s just, you know, if you’re going to have the baby, you should probably take it a little easy.”

  Was this true? I had no idea. I actually wasn’t sure how many months pregnant Vanetta was—she certainly wasn’t showing—and I had no idea at what point a gal should start resting. My knowledge of pregnancy mostly stems from a video in my tenth-grade health class, which I pretended to watch while actually reading Love and Rockets, which was way better, if less immediately useful now. Still, I have no regrets.

  “What are you, Cynthia’s homunculus? This isn’t your business. Just back off about it.”

  The problem about being a detective, however, is that you are necessarily up in things that aren’t your business. That’s the job, really. Still, I couldn’t argue with Vanetta on this point. After all, where was the lie?

  “You should talk to someone about it,” I said. “Have you told anyone about it?”

  Vanetta’s body tensed up like she was ready to sock me, but her face looked like it was going to disembark from the rest of her and run.

  “I just need some time to process it,” said Vanetta. “I’m not saying that I’m going to ignore it forever like I’m an idiot. I only just found out about it, and my game is in terrible trouble and a woman was murdered, and I just want a couple of nights’ sleep before I make any decisions. Is that really so fucking unreasonable?”

  Put this way, it was not unreasonable. I hated being such an ass, but my job was to try to figure out who the father was and not be pleasant, and so I just kept hitting the beehive with a stick.

  “Do you know who the father is?”

  Vanetta’s face—I swear to God—did a black hole thing where part of it drew in on itself. It was not a natural face, and I was frightened.

  “Of course I know who the father is,” she said, her face puckering so much that I was being drawn toward her against my will. “What kind of a question is that?”

  “I don’t know, why did you try to keep it a secret from Archie?”

  Vanetta grabbed me, physically grabbed me, and pulled me into her office. Then she closed the door. I half expected that she was going to open the window and throw me through it, and honestly, I’m not sure that I could blame her, but instead she said:

  “I’m ninety percent sure who the father is.”

  “Ninety percent?!?” I said, with way more punctuation than was necessary.

  “Maybe eighty percent.”

  “Oh my God. Who’s the other candidate?” I asked, but I knew. I already knew.

  “Lawrence and I have known each other for a very long time,” said Vanetta.

  “Lawrence is an ass,” I said.

  “Yes,” said Vanetta, irritated and embarrassed in equal parts. “Of course he’s an ass. But he’s an ass I’ve known for a very long time. He probably knows me better than anyone, which is dumb, I grant, that the person who knows me best is Lawrence Ussary, but that’s just how Fate worked it out.”

  I was momentarily past investigating anything and was just processing the sheer horror of Lawrence Ussary possibly being the father of Vanetta’s child. It was like Rosemary’s baby, except instead of Satan it was a really douchey guy. “But Lawrence is such an ass,” I said, unnecessarily, for the second time.

  “He is,” said Vanetta. “Hell, Archie’s kind of an ass. Neither of these people are life partners.”

  “I guess I can identify with that,” I said, thinking of the weird middle place I’d found myself with Nathan and Shuler.

  “No. You can’t with this. None of this is any of your business,” said Vanetta, finding herself. “And if you tell anyone, I will break your neck.”

  “Of course,” I said.

  Although, Vanetta looked a little happier now and said: “Maybe you’re right, though. It maybe was a good idea to tell someone about it. I’ve just been sitting on that news for days.”

  “You should find out who the father is. I mean, there are tests for that.”

  “First of all, it makes me feel like some sort of goddamn Maury Povich guest. Do you have any idea how disappointed my parents would be if I had to take a paternity test?”

  “I’m not suggesting that you bring them with you to the clinic. You don’t need to involve them at all.”

  “Well, I can’t.”

  “You really need to buck up about this, Vanetta.”

  “No, I actually can’t. The test doesn’t work until I’m eight weeks pregnant.”

  “How many weeks are you?”

  “Not eight.”

  The mental ramifications of this gradually began to seep into my head. Waiting long enough to be able to test for the father also meant that that the baby … well, I had stopped investigating and suddenly started commiserating with Vanetta.

  “So what are you going to do?”

  “I’m going to make this game fucking awesome. It’s going to be so awesome that nothing else in my life will exist or even matter.”

  I finished with the conversation and then proceeded to Hamburglar up all of Cynthia’s possessions. I tried doing this quietly and slowly, but Cynthia actually had a lot of stuff here, and I had to fill up multiple white kitchen bags from the workroom with her things. Gary, in particular, noticed me doing this and after several moments of watching and saying nothing, finally decided to come over.

  “You realize that Cynthia’s alive, right?” he said, a little too conspiratorially.

  “I do,” I said.

  “So…” said Gary. “It’s not like you’re robbing the dead.”

  “It’s more that I thought people would be happier if her possessions were out of sight.”

  “Why would we be happier?” asked Gary.

  “We could all move on from this terrible tragedy,” I said.

  “I suppose,” said Gary. “But Cynthia’s not dead. So why hide her stuff?”

  “Right,” I said. And he had me there. “
I guess I hadn’t thought about that.”

  Gary took a moment to survey the contents of one of the white bags, which suggested a storied life, even if the stories weren’t very interesting. There were Mardi Gras beads, a rock that said “Branson Missouri” on it, pictures of a presumed grandchild—a nine-year-old with red-rimmed glasses.

  “There used to be a picture of her sister around here,” said Gary. “That’s what you should take down.”

  I hadn’t seen a picture of Joyce, but I hadn’t exactly been looking for it either. I asked Gary about it.

  “Yeah, it was one of those pictures that’s taken when you go down a roller coaster. They’re both screaming. It’s probably not the way you’d want to remember her, regardless.”

  Cynthia had an entire drawer filled with knickknacks like this, and it wasn’t as if I had made a catalog of them, given that (1) they weren’t especially interesting and (2) Cynthia was waiting for me, still, downstairs. But I started going through the bags now, trying to find the picture that Gary had been referring to.

  “That’s it,” said Gary, finding an unframed photograph of the two of them, just as he had said, plummeting down a coaster called the Death Drop. He was right; it wasn’t how I would want to be remembered, because Joyce (and Cynthia too) looked like they were screaming their heads off.

  But it was nice to have a picture of the two of them together, however unconventional. They weren’t twins, it was clear now, but they were similar-looking people in the broad strokes. Cynthia’s hair was resolutely brown, whereas Joyce had let her hair go gray. Cynthia also looked younger, although not necessarily better—and appeared to be a woman who believed very strongly in suntan lotion and skin moisturizer. Joyce’s face was a little more rugged, showed a little more mileage.

  Joyce also looked like she was having the time of her life on that coaster, while Cynthia just looked scared. Actually, the more I looked at the picture, the more I thought that perhaps it wasn’t such a bad way to be remembered after all.

  I packed up the stuff as discreetly as I could, although I’m pretty sure that Gary was watching me, and headed back downstairs.

  I never did find the holiday tea.

  Shocking developments in murder mysteries typically involve massive amounts of blood, killers with guns in closets, and police flooding the scene at a pivotal moment. I don’t want to take away from those things, because they are shocking—but in life, honest, day-to-day life, it’s often the smaller things that really gobsmack you. And we come to one of these moments now, because I came downstairs, back to the dog-washing shop, and discovered that Cynthia was now wearing an orange T-shirt and was blow-drying a peekapoo.

  “Oh, just put my stuff down in the corner,” said Cynthia.

  In retrospect, I’m not quite sure why I was so surprised by this turn of events because:

  1. I didn’t know Cynthia very well.

  2. I had, admittedly, left her down here for a very long time, having had a heart-to-heart with Vanetta and a mini-investigation with Gary.

  3. She did need a job.

  But I didn’t expect to her to be blow-drying a dog. It just wasn’t how I imagined the scene going down.

  “Do you work here now?” I asked.

  “It’s a funny story,” said Cynthia. “While I was waiting downstairs, I was complaining to Deb about how hard it is to find work once you get to be a certain age, and then she said she was shorthanded around here ever since Evan fell in love with that baker and moved to Chicago, and then one thing led to another.”

  “And now you work here,” I said.

  “Just for now,” she said.

  “Aren’t you concerned about running into Vanetta and company?”

  Cynthia looked contemplative. “Well,” she said. “I guess not. For one, I don’t think they come down here very much. But for another, I’ve got a job now. Like within two days. Maybe they’ll see me and think: Wow, we shouldn’t have let Cynthia get away. She’s been scooped right up.”

  I didn’t think that Vanetta would be particularly displaced by the burgeoning career of a woman wearing a button that said “ask me about free bows,” but I understood the sentiment. When you’re unemployed, you feel gross, and you want to stay out of sight. When you’ve got a gig, other people’s opinions of you seem not to matter so very much.

  “So I saw a picture of Joyce up there. I put it on top, in case, I don’t know, you wanted to do something with it.”

  “Oh, on the Death Drop? I don’t know what I’ll do with it. We were out with my granddaughter, who was celebrating her sixteenth birthday. But Paisley didn’t want to do the roller coaster, and Joyce insisted that we go. Paisley is such a cautious child, not at all like most kids these days.”

  Cynthia seemed to be revving up into a story about her granddaughter of all things—but I was trying to stay on track.

  “Joyce was a fan of roller coasters?”

  “Oh,” said Cynthia, still looking for a way to turn the topic back to her granddaughter. “She just liked getting her picture taken, really. Not like Paisley. Paisley doesn’t use Twitter or MySpace because she doesn’t approve of social media.”

  “You and Joyce look a lot alike,” I said.

  “Everyone says that,” said Cynthia. “People say I look ten years younger than her.”

  Who were these people, I wondered, and why would they lie to Cynthia in this way? Five years, tops.

  “You don’t really think of people Joyce’s age being a fan of roller coasters, you know? I always thought of it as a teenager’s game.”

  “Oh, well, Joyce sort of took a professional interest in being scared. She used to manage the House of Hell.”

  “I’m sorry, what?”

  “The House of Hell?” said Cynthia. “It’s this big haunted house that’s built into a cave. A fake cave. It was a huge deal in the nineties; I don’t know if it’s still around.”

  “She managed a haunted house?”

  “I mean, it’s not actually haunted. She had that job for years, until corporate decided she started looking too much like Mrs. Claus, and then she moved over to Santa’s Village.”

  It struck me, suddenly, that Joyce was, by far, the more interesting of the two sisters.

  “Did anyone at Cahaba ever meet Joyce?”

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  I didn’t push very much at Cynthia’s theory about being a murder target, mostly because I didn’t think that she believed it very much herself. She was taking a job immediately below where this alleged attempt on her life went down, which is not the behavior of someone who was in fear of being murdered. But I would have been deeply skeptical even before that point, simply from her tone and body language.

  Cynthia liked the idea that she was important. She was flattered by the notion—I could tell because she talked about the murder in a vaguely bragging manner. Frankly, I didn’t think she thought the attempt on her life was real at all. I wish I had more specifics about how Joyce had actually been killed, but even I couldn’t find a way to casually ask:

  “What kind of poison killed your sister?”

  I came back upstairs half expecting Gary to give me the third degree, but I instead ran into Tyler, and by ran into I mean that he was waiting for me at my desk.

  “There’s a rumor going around that you just stole all of Cynthia’s possessions,” he said.

  “My God, when did all of you become so detail oriented?”

  “I credit the healing power of sleep,” said Tyler.

  I lowered my voice down to a whisper and said, “I’m trying to keep this on the down low, but Cynthia was downstairs. She didn’t want to come up here and have everyone make a fuss over her.”

  “I wouldn’t have made a fuss over her.”

  “Well, she also was wary about coming back to the place where her sister was killed.” Although not wary about hanging out downstairs.

  “Are you investigating this case?” asked Tyler, too loudly for my tastes.

  �
��Ix-nay on the vestigation-nay.”

  “Well, that answers my question,” said Tyler.

  “I’m mostly focused on this whistle-blower’s letter,” I said. Also, code theft, which I kept forgetting about.

  “Not on the murder,” said Tyler.

  “Apparently not,” I told him, thinking of Emily’s weird insistence that I give the Cynthia business the brush-off.

  “I can give you details about how Joyce got killed,” said Tyler.

  “How did you learn that?” I asked.

  “I just got off the phone with Detective Tedin, who asked me some very revealing questions. Also, I’m a murder suspect, so there’s that.”

  “What did you learn?”

  “But wait, I thought you weren’t interested in this murder?”

  “I’m taking an academic interest in it.”

  “Well, I’m not giving this information away for free,” said Tyler. He toyed with his wisp of green hair again. If we were playing poker, that would have certainly been his tell. Here it was just telling me what I already knew: Tyler was a bastard.

  “Are you trying to shake me down?” I asked.

  “I’m not trying to shake you down,” said Tyler. “I am shaking you down.”

  “If you want money, you came to the wrong gal.”

  “Tell me about Masako.”

  “Oh lord,” I said. “Do your own detective work.”

  “She’s friends with you. She likes you. Just give me some tips.”

  “Just ask her your own questions. Masako is very direct.”

  “We had a really good time last night,” Tyler said, and that mixed with the foot business was giving me entirely too much information.

  “I don’t want to hear about it,” I said, assuming that there had to be some kind of funny business, because hanging drunkenly around a church until the police showed up was surely not the good time he was referring to.

  “Well I’m not giving you a play-by-play,” said Tyler. “I just want an excuse to text her. Help me come up with some sort of pretext.”

  “It’s Masako. You don’t need a pretext. She lives in a world without pretexts.”