The Unfortunate Decisions of Dahlia Moss

by Max Wirestone

  “You look like a cross-stitch sampler.”

  It was the orange gauze. You could see the stitchwork in it. Honestly, the whole effect made me look like a demented Raggedy Ann doll. I wasn’t going to admit my discomfort in front of the Fontbonners though. “Embroidery is a luxury,” I said. “And I’m nothing if not luxurious.”

  “Embroidery in childhood is a luxury,” said Stephen. “Of Idleness.” Stephen had a schoolmarmish tone in his voice, as though he were correcting me.

  “Are you quoting from something?”

  “Yes,” said Stephen. “Benjamin Britten. I wrote my senior thesis on Benjamin Britten. I thought you were sucking up to me by quoting him.”

  “Is that an opera singer?”

  “He’s a composer,” said Stephen with a sigh. “It’s from Peter Grimes.”

  “Is he an opera singer?”

  Basically all I could remember about Stephen’s senior year was that he talked a lot about opera singers.

  “Peter Grimes is an opera. There was a local production of it like two weeks ago.”

  “Sure,” I said. I had learned long ago to switch to monosyllabic responses when Stephen started talking about opera. Any additional responses could send him into full-fledged lecture mode.

  “I was in the production. I’ve been posting about it on Facebook for weeks. How can you not know this?”

  I gave Stephen my best aw, shucks smile. “I missed you too.”

  And he was off. Maybe the Fontbonne boys were serendipitous for me too, because clearly I had some extra sucking up to do. Why had I written everyone off? Was it because I was just embarrassed? Depressed?

  Seeking clarity for those kinds of questions can haunt you, and I was being haunted with enough already. I wasn’t going to invest mind space in whatever the hell had been wrong with me months earlier. Because what did it matter, really? And Stephen was, well, still Stephen. Apparently less caffeinated now, but behind his crusty layer of tut-tutting, he was still happy to see me. I thought, possibly, that we were still friends, even. He gave me a harp, which had to stand for something.

  There wasn’t time to worry. I had things to do.

  My transformation into crazy woman was complete when I awoke at three AM with a burning idea. I should speak to Aishwarya Patel. She was a real person, Emily had mentioned. Just not a person at the address provided. So my question—the question that woke me up in the middle of the night—was: Why the address change? And why fake having received a copy of the spear? Was Aishwarya on the move for some reason? Did she have something to hide?

  There I was, pink-haired in the moonlight, googling Aishwarya’s whereabouts. You might think that Aishwarya Patel is very particular name—Ophelia Odom revisited—but this is a decidedly American perspective. There were scads of Aishwarya Patels, most of them in India. The first name was slightly unusual, but the last name was common. The English equivalent would be googling “Ruby Jones.”

  The truth is that I couldn’t rule out the Indian Aishwaryas. All I really knew about her is that she didn’t know anyone in Saint Louis, which is probably true of a plurality of people in the Western Hemisphere. If she did live in India her–ping would be high, which I suppose would have been a useful thing to check if I had thought about it earlier. Which I hadn’t.

  It was 3:07 in the morning, however, and this was a time to simply play the odds. Let’s assume that Aishwarya lived in the United States. That narrowed it down to five people. If you took out the folks who seemed too old, I was left with two ladies. One of them had an open Facebook page, and I could see that she was studying at Duke. She was pretty, with long black hair, and she was improbably wearing an old-time country-western outfit. It was pretty silly—pink suede with a cowboy hat and actual rope for fringe. Probably a Halloween costume, but who knew?

  The other Aishwarya was on Twitter. No picture (of herself) but she was a different person because she lived in San Antonio, which was a helluva commute to Duke. She tweeted a lot, but only about Shonda Rhimes. I sent a private Facebook message to Dukewarya and tweeted directly at Shonda/warya, in full view of anyone following me.

  “Do you play Zoth? Pls respond. I am a private detective investigating a murder and this is improbably important.”

  I probably shouldn’t have done that. In addition to potentially tipping off the spear thief, there was a distinct chance that Grandma Moss was going to spot that tweet and query me about it later. Six years earlier, Grandma found the online detritus of an aborted booty call, and I’d been getting grief about it ever since.

  But I’d risk Grandma’s wrath for this. I wanted answers.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  I managed to get through the rest of the night without messing up my apostrophe hair too badly, and Syd had given me extremely explicit instructions on the care and management of it. There were manuals for Microsoft products that were less detailed. So, I’m saying I looked pretty good.

  I dressed for the airport of course, which meant that I was business-professional. I felt that security was going to be looking at me askance, given my hair, so it was best to compensate with the rest of my clothing. The result was confusing. Was I an extremely conservative and homely-faced supermodel? A successful businesswoman for a company that sold E? I tried to carry off confidence and normalcy as well as I could, but this was certainly made more difficult by Charice, who was in full Griselda garb, minus the neon lights and wings. Even without the wings, she was disturbing and harpy-like. She had fangs, which is never what you want to see next to you on a passenger plane.

  And you have never lived until you have gone through airport security with pink hair and a traveling companion wearing fangs. My greatest fear, however, was that Detective Shuler was going to show up yet again, and I would have to explain (1) why I was not only spending time with Jonah’s friends but doing so extravagantly and at great personal expense and (2) what was going on with my hair.

  Probably I should have listed those things in the opposite order.

  It was strange that I should have been quite so excited on the plane to Phoenix, but there was a palpable sense of something growing in me. Anticipation? Fun? Whatever it was, it made me nervous and excited and simultaneously embarrassed and proud of my pink hair. I both was amused and mortified by the looks we were getting from our fellow passengers. It was fun to be an oddball. And it was even more fun to be an oddball on a mission.

  This was more than just a convention I was going to. This was a showdown—the thief would be here, Chtusk would be here, possibly Orchardary would be here—and I would have two days to piece everyone’s lies together. Plus there would be a costume parade. I could handle this.

  There were a series of steps from the plane to the Games Summit, and each step made a little clearer why I was excited. On the plane, we were utterly out of place. Two clownishly dressed people in a world of business travelers. At the Phoenix airport, we were almost entirely out of place—but not quite. A careful eye would notice things. A Zoth T-shirt. Someone with ridiculous hair. A man with a papier-mâché shield. By the hotel we were not out of place anymore. We were a contingency. Fully a third of the people here were like us—twentysomethings with elaborate costumes and geeky T-shirts. One third of the people at the hotel were people in African garb, and someone in a kitenge asked me what all the crazy costumes were for, and I told her a computer-game convention. I asked her what all the kitenges were about and she told me a Swahili ESL convention. It’s exchanges like these that make me love America.

  By the time we got on the hotel bus, the inmates had taken over the asylum. There were still some folks in plain clothes, but the looks we got were not of shock or concern. Instead we were given cool nods of recognition or outright smiles or thumbs-ups.

  Charice had put on her full regalia for the bus, even though the wings were terribly impractical, and no one complained. Rather, people moved out of her way and gratefully gave her as much space as she needed. “Oh, excuse me, Auctioneer Griselda!
,” “I’m glad to see you here, Auctioneer Griselda!,” and “Have you seen my lamb, Auctioneer Griselda?,” the last of which was some Zoth in-joke that I never did quite understand. It was suddenly as if I was traveling with the queen of England.

  I am not a Zoth player. Truthfully, I wasn’t. RedRasish was only level two, and I did not understand half the references that were on people’s T-shirts, and yet. Zoth had dominated my life a little bit, with the spear and even before that with Erik’s obsessive raiding. Maybe it was Stockholm syndrome, but I was happy to be here. It was enough to just be among their number. Maybe I wasn’t a queen or demigod of Zoth, but I was at least a citizen. And for once, I was just happy to be on the pilgrimage.

  While I’m sure there are nicer convention centers—and nicer halls somewhere—at the particular moment in time that I entered the Games Summit, I couldn’t imagine one. An enormous black dragon battled with a phoenix in the main lobby, and even though they were just enormous balloons, really, it somehow filled you with a sense of scale. Charice, whose last-minute cosplay really was turning a lot of heads, instinctively knew that she did not want to tour the main floor with me and quickly ditched me with an only half-interested “good luck with your case.”

  This was perhaps fair, because I had all but pretended to not know her at airport security, but too soon, Charice, too soon.

  I texted Clemency shortly after I left. “RedRasish is in the building” was the message, which should give you some sense of the giddy rush I was feeling. After a few exchanges where we tried (unsuccessfully) to figure out where we were relative to each other, we managed to meet up at a snack bar.

  “What’s happened to your hair?” she said when she saw me, not even bothering to mask her surprise.

  Clemency was not dressed up at all. Well, she was wearing a white dress that could be said to be slightly fancy, but she was certainly not dressed up in healer garb, with a gnarled staff and a headdress. Frankly, I was a little disappointed. I was also disappointed that Threadwork wasn’t around. It wasn’t until I saw Clemency without him that I realized how much I had imagined them as a sort of old married couple. But no matter.

  “I had my hair styled like RedRasish,” I told her.

  “Ah.” I had expected a little more warmth from Clem, but although she clearly registered an opinion of dismay regarding my new pink coif, she quickly returned to form and hugged me anyway.

  “I’m glad you came,” she told me. “I always wanted to come to this event, but now that I’m here, I’m a little sad. It’s a little like a second funeral for Jonah.”

  “It’d be his third funeral,” I told her. “Although it’s not going to be as grim as all that. It’s a party. Jonah would have wanted a party.”

  I didn’t ever know Jonah terribly well, but from what I had put together about him, I think I was on the right track. Certainly Clemency seemed to think so, because her face brightened right up at the idea.

  “There’ll be food, at least.”

  I needed to ask Clemency about the business with Jonah’s parents. I didn’t want to, and every pore in my body was telling me that, truthfully, it wasn’t relevant. But I had to ask. So I did.

  “Why did you see the Longs the night before the funeral? You told Threadwork you were going to the grocery store.”

  Clemency gasped audibly at the question, which I had asked without any kind of preamble. I suppose it’s these sorts of gasps that the Sam Spades and Inspector Alleyns live for, but I found it embarrassing. Sure, I wanted to catch Clemency unaware—not give her a chance to create a cover-up story if she were hiding something. But that’s just it—if she wasn’t hiding something, then I was kind of just being a jackass. A lot of detective work involves being a jackass, actually, which is maybe why it plays to my strengths.

  “I know Mrs. Long. And Jonah, years ago. I used to be his babysitter, many thousands of years ago, back when they lived in New Hampshire.”

  “Why didn’t you tell Threadwork? Or me?”

  “Jonah had invited me to be in the guild, you know. He’d always sort of kept in touch with me, like I was his older sister. But at the same time, he was also embarrassed about it. He never introduced me to anyone as his former babysitter. Actually, he sort of pretended to not know me.”

  “That’s it? I don’t see why you couldn’t tell Threadwork about it.”

  “It’s not that I couldn’t tell Threadwork about it. It’s that I didn’t. I just didn’t feel like it was my secret to tell. Jonah was cool about it while he was alive, so I didn’t feel right to make a big deal about it the day before he was going to be buried.”

  “Sylvia was glad to see you?”

  “Sylvia adores me. I think she always had some scheme that I was going to fall in love with Jonah and start a family, which seemed really bizarre to me when I was younger but has started making more sense to me lately.”

  “You’re getting the motherhood thing?”

  “Don’t even start with me, Dahlia.”

  “And that was the entire extent of your relationship with Jonah.”

  I could tell that Clemency was holding something back—I hadn’t the slightest idea what it was, but I knew it was there. When you confess, you relax, or at least slump with embarrassment. I knew from what I was speaking. Three months earlier I had run into an ex-roommate at a greasy spoon, where I had been applying for a job. I had an entire lunch with her at that damned diner, the job application hidden under the place mat the whole time. When I got home, my back was so stiff I had to take a muscle relaxant.

  Clemency was still tense and nervous and looked like she hoped a waitress might come and bring the check. There was still something under her place mat.

  “You’re a horrible person, Dahlia Moss.”

  This was undoubtedly true, but I was at least a horrible person who was going to get to the truth.

  “Go on,” I told her.

  “I think I was Jonah’s first kiss. He was fourteen, I was eighteen. Which is probably illegal somewhere, somehow. But it’s not I like planned anything. He just came out and kissed me out of nowhere!”

  “You didn’t date him after.”

  “No. Honestly, it was a pretty poor kiss. I’m embarrassed I’m talking about it now.”

  And thus concluded my digging into innocent people’s lives. Oh sure, I could have dug deeper—checked times and dates to see if the story checked out. I could have interviewed Jonah’s high school friends for mention of a hot babysitter, and God knows what else, but I let it go. Clemency didn’t look nervous anymore; she looked freed.

  “Let’s go downstairs,” I told her. “And enjoy the floor.”

  I won’t go into the details of the floor at the Gamers Summit. There were vendors selling geeky T-shirts, some of which I understood, some of which I didn’t. There were voice actors, there were design artists. There were giant videos of PvP tournaments.

  Truthfully, I didn’t understand most of it. I got the gist, but not the details. But sometimes, enough enthusiasm for something becomes infectious. And you don’t need to understand it; you can just enjoy it. It is for this reason, I believe, that soccer is popular anywhere.

  As Clemency and I were waiting in line to have a painting of hers signed by a gaunt-faced man (he’s the voice of Jaelin Thorn, Clemency explained in an absurdly reverential tone) we were texted by Oatcake:

  “Horizons, time to converge. North End, Level 2. By the beanbags. With smiles on please, gents, this is a funeral.”

  Through a combination of haste and the good fortune of being close to the North End, we were able to get there before anyone else. Oatcake was someone who I had imagined looking a little more imperious than the fellow before me. He had a small face with short hair and delicate features. He also wasn’t wearing any sort of geek T-shirt, which marked him a little in the crowd, opting instead for a plaid overshirt that was entirely too hot for Phoenix in the summer.

  And true to form, he had brought food for everyone. He handed a
cupcake to Clemency when she arrived, whom he seemed to recognize.

  “Are you Dahlia?” he asked me with concern in his voice.

  “Yes,” I said, suddenly wondering if I wasn’t welcome here. I was not, after all, a Horizon.

  “I didn’t make you a cupcake,” he said. “I’m afraid you’ll have to go without.”

  This did not concern me. And I had suspicions that Chtusk and Orchardary weren’t going to show anyway, which would leave me two cupcakes to eat. I told Oatcake not to worry about it.

  The next person to show up was Wayne, who was a lot more handsome than I had imagined, with wavy blond hair and quarterback good looks. Plus he was wearing a fancy gray suit, and I’m a sucker for that sort of thing. But then he spoke with that awful Southern accent of his, and the spell was broken.

  “Dahlia Moss? Is that you? Jesus, you didn’t change your hair to look like your level-two character, did you?”

  “No,” I told him, “my hair looked like this all along. It’s just one of life’s funny coincidences.”

  There was chortling, not so much at my joke as at my hair. My hair was going to be the source of amusement for many of the Horizons, but I just took it in stride. Somewhere, sometime, my hair would have been considered wonderful.

  Ophelia and Kurt arrived together, and it struck me that they were conspicuously trying to not act like a couple. They walked apart, they didn’t touch, but if you left your eyes on them for any length of time it was impossible to miss the little looks, the shared smiles. Well, good for them. Kurt was wearing that same devil hoodie I’d spotted him in the other day, and Ophelia—who had dressed in full battle regalia for Jonah’s online funeral—now wore a funereal dress to his after-party. Or maybe it was how she always dressed—I recalled the picture of her in the Globe in a similarly subdued outfit.