“Anyway, here’s my thing,” I said. “The police have told me not to spend time with his friends.”
“I was never exactly his friend.”
“I’m not going to debate you on that point. I think it’s probably pretty unlikely that you had anything to do with it, but you know, I do what the police tell me.”
“So, is this good-bye?”
“I just think that we should not hang out until the case is solved.”
“Oh,” said Nathan, brightening, “then you just need to solve the case.”
Yes, that was all I needed to do. Child’s play.
“If I tell you something, can you promise that you absolutely will not, absolutely will not tell anyone?”
“Hmm,” said Nathan. “It would depend upon what it is.”
“Just say yes.”
“No. What if it makes me an accessory to a crime? What if you tell me that you’ve kidnapped an eight-year-old and are feeding him cheese and Shiraz in your basement until his parents pay your ransom?”
“Is this about my ‘you killing me’ theory?”
And then Nathan just started laughing again, just at the memory of it. “Ho, ho, ho.” He actually laughed like that. He said “ho, ho, ho” like Santa Claus, except that his voice was very different, because he did not have a belly like a bowlful of jelly, but a tiny waist that was sustained seemingly only by unpopular vegetables.
“I’m sorry I thought you were going to murder me.”
“Meh. Let me guess. You found the spear.”
I just looked at him. My secrets always get away from me like this. I will go to the grave with nothing to hide.
“What else could it be? So who’s the guilty party?”
I explained that I hadn’t exactly recovered the spear, more that it had been mailed to me, probably the result of a guilty conscious crumbling at Jonah’s posthumous largesse. I considered this to be something of an admission of failure, but Nathan, as with Charice, regarded the news with excitement.
“So you plan to tell no one, and you figure that the guilty party will get irritated at you and reveal themselves.”
“That’s the plan. I don’t know if it will work. But it’s something.”
“You should do something to twist the knife.”
“That’s what Masako said.”
I expected him to look shocked or surprised that I had told Masako about it, but he did not. Perhaps she kept counsel with everyone. Perhaps world leaders visited her with secrets of state, which she addressed with her special brand of emotionless candor. She was like a Japanese Angela Merkel.
“Anyway,” I said after the lack of a visible response, “I’m going off to Phoenix for a few days, to spend time with more of Jonah’s friends the police warned me to avoid.”
“Well,” said Nathan, smirking. “Try not to get murdered.”
I left Nathan’s apartment in a chipper mood—as long as he hadn’t murdered anyone, I seemed to be acquiring a sort of proto-boyfriend. And that was good, wasn’t it? (That’s not a rhetorical question. I really would appreciate a second opinion. Tweet at me.)
As I was walking out, I got a FaceTime message from Emily Swenson. She was wearing black, which called into question every idea I had ever had about her.
“So, Dahlia,” she said, after I answered, “I’ve got an update for you.”
As a rule of thumb, I’m wary of Lawyers with Updates, but something about Emily’s creeping smile told me that this was going to be good news.
“What do you have for me?”
“Get this: A spear came back. Another one.”
“What do you mean ‘came back’?”
For something as supposedly unique as the Bejeweled Spear of Infinite Piercing, it certainly seemed to keep cropping up in unexpected places.
“Jonah shipped one to a fake address.”
“To who?” I asked. This was a big deal. Every Horizon had a received a spear, or at least claimed to, and all the spears had been accounted for. So if one of them “bounced,” then a Horizon was lying. But why?
“Aishwarya Patel. Her address is real, but no one by that name lives there. It came back to Jonah marked ‘Return to Sender.’“
It wasn’t hard to figure out who Aishwarya Patel was—the name was pretty obviously Indian and there was one heavily accented tree in the group. What was hard to figure out was why Orchardary would have told everyone she got a spear when she hadn’t. Was she embarrassed about being left out?
“I’ve also got a complete list of names and addresses for all the guild members who were sent spears. I thought you’d appreciate that.”
“I do.” And I did, although I was still trying to wrap my mind around the last piece of information. Orchardary, huh?
“Check your email.”
And here was my own bombshell.
“Some news from my end: I’ve been emailed my own copy of the spear. The digital one.”
“The original? Who was the thief?”
Emily was not nearly as gobsmacked as Detective Shuler had been. She honestly didn’t seem surprised at all, which managed to be simultaneously rewarding and deeply disappointing. I was glad she’d had the confidence in me, but there’s something to be said for getting a visible reaction.
“I’m still working on that. It was mailed to me from a new account. I think the account was created because the thief wanted to hide his identity.”
“Guilty conscience, you think?”
“Probably. What do you want me do with the thing, what is it, Spear Number Four now?”
“It’s the original, Dahlia. It’s Spear Number One. Email it to Jonah.” And she smiled at me. It was a smile that was worth the entirety of having a iPhone contract with AT&T. So, a lot. “Good work.”
I hadn’t exactly done anything to get the spear back, but I preened at the good work anyway. “Incidentally, don’t tell anyone that you’ve got the spear back. I’ve kind of got a plan to smoke the thief out.”
Emily raised an eyebrow at me.
“You’re full of surprises, Miss Moss.”
True to her word, Emily had forwarded me the billing and shipping info for the spears. Each one cost $2,000 dollars, which I found somewhat mind-blowing. It put Jonah’s hiring me as a detective into a kind of perspective. I’d been second-guessing his motivations for that ever since it had happened, and judging from the invoice, it would seem I had given the matter way, way, way more thought than he had. Jonah was a filthy-rich person masquerading as someone in the upper-middle class.
Once I got past the sticker shock, I settled on the information that was actually useful. For one, there were names and addresses for everyone. Aishwarya Patel of 100 Ladybug Lane, Akron, Ohio, did not exist. Some google-searching revealed that there was such a place, but it was not a house; it was an outlet mall. Aishwarya was not a real person. It had crossed my mind that she was not even Indian—that accent sounded perfectly acceptable to me when I thought it was genuine—but now it seemed a little overdone. It was like a carefully executed joke.
Of even more interest was that there were only nine spears mailed out. Which meant that one person didn’t get one at all. Matching names to what I knew of folks did a pretty good job of determining who the spearless Horizon had to be. The one mailed to Canada was Oatcake. Boston was Tambras. Kurt’s was mailed here. The one to Madison was harder—but that was where Jonah did his undergraduate work, so it probably meant that drunken fire mage, who had told me he was an old college friend of Jonah’s. The fictional address was Ochardary’s. Everyone else, save for our bug-person, matched up.
This meant that Chtusk had never gotten a spear at all.
Later, when I thought about the conversations the Horizons were having when they had all gotten Jonah’s early Christmas present, I would remember that Chtusk had never actually professed to receiving one, much less to copping, as Orchardary did, as to how breathtaking it was. She was just quiet, taking it all in, and keeping to herself.
But at th
e moment, I was thinking, You skittering little bug. You’re about to get squashed.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
When I got home, Charice was being fitted for what seemed to be a hoop skirt that was covered in skulls. So, a typical evening in my apartment.
“Bad news about the case?”
“Not at all,” I told her. My face must have been grim, though, and I was truthfully in a brooding mood. I had told Emily and Shuler both that I had a plan, and this wasn’t true. I didn’t have a plan; I had an idea of a plan. A vague sort of outline whose details needed to be filled in, and fast.
“What’s with the hoop skirt?” I asked.
“We have to dress for the convention, obviously. I’m going to be Griselda, the Auctioneer.”
I had no idea who this was.
“It will be amazing,” said Charice, and this was probably true.
It would help that Charice had filled our apartment with flouncy gay men. The boys—three of them—were from the Fontbonne Drama Department—and while I did not know them, officially, to be gay, they were flouncy enough to make the question moot. They seemed to be making a dress for Charice that was constructed largely from bone.
There was also a man there named Syd, who, in contrast, I knew was gay and yet could be described as resolutely unflouncy. Syd was possibly the least gay gay person I had ever met, and this came on top of his being a hairdresser. He was old, and exceedingly thin, and looked much like Keith Richards would awaking from a nap. He had a gruff, perpetually irritated manner about him that had suggested that he had spent some time—a bad time from the looks of it—in the military.
“All right, Princess,” he said to me in a voice that made it seem like he was insulting me, “Charice has paid for the works, so just lie back and I’ll work some goddamned miracles on you.”
In my usual mood and demeanor, I would not surrender my hair over to an agent of Charice, even if it were Syd, who was pretty good with hair. What alarmed me was the phrase “the works”—Syd was the kind of hairdresser who would push to make a simple trim a little avant-garde, so when he was paid for “the works,” it ought to at least give you pause.
But it didn’t. I was tired, and I felt weird and guilty, and so I just sat down at our kitchen sink with him.
“Do you ever think you should do something sensible?”
“With hair? Not when I can help it.”
“I meant more in life, really.”
Syd regarded me cooly with the sort of savage stare down that I would expect from a DEA agent.
“Every day of my life, cupcake. But this is the only thing that I’m good at. And I’m very good.” Syd’s face clamped shut to suggest he was done with the sharing part of our conversation. “Now how do you think you’ll look with pink hair?”
Why this didn’t send me screaming from the sink, I’ll never know. Instead I asked, “Neon pink or cotton candy?”
Syd showed me a picture that Charice had taken of RedRasish. Her cute little cotton-candy, apostrophe-shaped hair would have looked lovely on a very young drag queen. It was hard to imagine on my face, which was markedly rounder than the fairy’s. I did not have a tiny nose or enormous eyes. And while it was fetching on her, it seemed a fair guess that it was going to be considerably less flattering on me. Requiring even more consideration was the alchemy involved in transmuting my hair into it. My hair, which was basically a tangled nest of brown straw, was a long way from my best feature. The best that could be said for it was that it was abundant.
But I didn’t fight it. I was apparently giving up a real, normal-person job for what was basically an insane whim, and if that meant having the hair of a Manic Pixie Dream Girl, so be it.
Four hours later, Charice was being wired with neon lights, and I was RedRasish. It wasn’t quite as bad as I had feared—oh, I looked like a crazy person, perhaps a cross between vintage Susan Powter and a trained yet rabid pink poodle—but it could have been worse. I guess what I’m saying is that while I looked ridiculous, neither was I ugly. In some culture, somewhere, I probably looked sexy. The culture was probably the outer boroughs of the Lollipop Guild, but what can you do?
The Fontbonne boys had made an outfit for me that I was politely praising while privately acknowledging that I would never wear anywhere. It was ugly. RedRasish was a level-two fairy, and let’s face it, her starting digs were nothing to write home about. Orange gauze. I was not wrapping myself in orange gauze. It just was not going to happen.
But the hair I could live with.
Charice was terrifying, by the way. She was now a harpy—probably approaching seven feet tall with those platform heels of hers, and she had enormous black wings that were realistic enough to be a little alarming. No detail was overlooked; her fingers were now claws, she was wearing contacts that made her eyes into dead black orbs. But the killer was those neon lights. Floating above her head, just like it would have in Zoth, was her name: “Griselda the Auctioneer.”
“Who is Griselda, anyway?” I asked her. Syd had set off, giving me a curt nod when the job was over. But the Fontbonne boys remained, futzing over Charice, adjusting bits of fabric and feather here and there.
“Beats me,” said Charice, “but a straw poll of my geek friends told me that this would be received as a cool choice.”
I was surprised when one of the Fontbonners answered the question. It was a bit like a mime speaking.
“She’s an auctioneer at the Harpy Outpost. She’s not really very interesting in herself—like, she doesn’t have a backstory or anything—but everyone sees her a lot when they’re level ten or so. So there’s this kind of nostalgia for her. It’s a very cool choice.”
Charice gestured to the Fontebonne geek that she bowed to his superior knowledge.
“You’ve outdone yourself, Charice.”
This was the sort of sentence that Charice liked to hear best. She liked it even when it was negative—I had said it the time that a poisonous Gila monster had been released in our apartment, and she basked then as well. And she basked now.
“You and I are going to be the queens of Zoth at this convention.”
I somehow doubted this. Our costumes were pretty good, but cosplayers don’t mess around. We might be a princess or a duchess, but queens we were not. But my answer was more practical.
“Where’s my harp, by the way?”
“What harp?”
“RedRasish’s harp. I’m a priestess of Usune.”
“Forget it. You don’t need it.”
“I’m. A. Priestess. Of. Usune,” I repeated, but the emphasis was entirely lost on her. She didn’t even know who Usune was.
“You’ll look great without it.”
I had clearly passed over completely into a crazy woman, because it was clear to me that I did need it, especially since I wasn’t wrapping myself in orange gauze.
I made a quick phone call to Stephen, who was an old friend of mine who worked at Gaylord Music Library. I had not spoken to him in two years, but he was still in my iPhone contacts list.
“Stephen, it’s Dahlia Moss. I need a harp.”
I expect that Stephen was a little surprised by the phone call. It would have made sense for him to be spending a few moments in confusion as to who I was. He didn’t do that, however, but just responded as though I had been calling him all this time making requests of musical instruments.
“No one needs a harp. Just spend the money on an ice sculpture.”
“How are those things equivalent?”
“Your guests will be equally happy. I assume this is a wedding we’re talking about.”
“What? No. I’m not getting married.”
“Well, I haven’t seen you in a while, and it’s not as if it’s a crazy thought. You’re not getting any younger—”
“I don’t need a harpist, I just need a harp.”
“Well, that’s good because the harpists I know hate doing weddings. Loathe them. Three hours of ‘Ave Maria’ while people get drunk and hit
on the bridesmaids. What kind of harp do you need?”
“What? There are different kinds?”
“Lever, pedestal, hand. Why do you need the harp if you’re not going to play it? And I assume you’re not playing it, since you don’t know the three kinds of harps.”
I thought about RedRasish’s harp. “Umm… what kind of a harp does an angel have?”
Stephen sighed. “Is this for a costume?” The question was petulant.
“Yes?”
“First, that’s a lyre. And second, I’m not going to help you get a musical instrument for a Halloween costume. Just go to Amazon or something.”
“I need it by tomorrow. Please, Stephen, I’ll get you those coffee beans you like. With the maple syrup?”
“I haven’t had a cup of coffee in over a year.”
There was an awkward silence, in which it suddenly seemed that we were no longer talking about lyres and coffee habits. Stephen broke the silence.
“Where have you been for the past year?”
“Here, in Saint Louis,” I answered meekly.
“I realize that, Dahlia. I mean, why have you been ignoring everyone?”
Why had I been ignoring everyone? No one had ever put the question to me before.
“Things have been a little shitty lately. Everyone’s just been so successful, and I thought I’d just lay low a little until I got a job, and then months went by and I still didn’t have a job, and it just sort of became this cycle of, I don’t know, seclusion. Misery? Broad shittiness?”
“So you’ve found a job and you’re just trying to return to your old haunts, is that it?”
“Um, no. I still haven’t found a job. Well, sort of. My job vaguely involves dressing up as a fairy with a harp.”
“A lyre.”
“Right. So, I’ll tell you all about it if you can bring me a lyre? Pretty please.”
Forty-five minutes later, Stephen came in just as the Fontbonne boys were leaving, which was serendipity to him, undoubtedly. He gave me the lyre in a deadly earnest voice:
“Don’t break this.”
Stephen took a moment before commenting on my hair. As far as he knew, I had been wearing it like this for years. Maybe he thought this was why my job interviews weren’t going well.
The Unfortunate Decisions of Dahlia Moss Page 20
