It suddenly struck me that Jennifer had read a good many more Harlequins than I would have put her down for at first glance.
“You were hoping that he would fall in love with you online?”
“Not really. It was just fun to spend time with him in a different environment, in a different way. We weren’t competing, and I didn’t have to be perfect Jennifer Ebel. It’s just, the longer I did it, the more Orchardary became sort of a prison.”
“You couldn’t just give it up?”
“When you’ve been speaking in a fake Indian accent for close to a year, it becomes hard to figure out how to suddenly change. The disguise had gotten so elaborate—I had a name, a job, a sister. A whole double life.”
Goddamned Wilfrid Laurier. But his Canadian insights from beyond the grave weren’t going to help me now. And I wanted the rest of the story, regardless.
“Then Jonah found out,” I added, as Jennifer looked a little faraway.
“No,” said Jennifer, instantly back from wherever she had been. “I wish he had. No, what happened was that we went on, playing the game together with me as his girl Friday online, and being cordial rivals in the real world. Until Freddie Garrison’s party.”
I didn’t know who Freddie Garrison was, but I decided to try leaving him out of the exchange altogether.
“Nathan told me that you and Jonah had gotten together.”
“You spoke to Nathan? Yegads.”
I had done more than speak to Nathan, but this was not the time to detail my sexual conquests. I nodded.
“At Freddie’s party. But it was the next day that had been so wonderful. It was just a perfect day. Like in a novel. Well, aside from the hangover. Jonah made me breakfast, spent the morning with me, and then he made me a picnic lunch at Forrest Park. And we talked—really talked. It wasn’t even like a romantic surge or anything, it was just sort of as if we had always been a couple. It was like being given this wonderful present that I hadn’t known I wanted. It went on like that for a couple of days, and he started getting weird and distant. I thought—oh, we’ve been moving too fast.”
“And he still didn’t know that you were Orchardary.”
“No—and there were like seven or eight times that I had thought about telling him.”
“So what made you snap?”
Jennifer sighed. “I was online. Orchardary was doing a little gardening, as she does, and Jonah showed up. He wanted to talk. Not to Jennifer. To Aishwarya. He wanted to talk to the fake me about the real me.”
“Oof,” I said, thinking that this could not possibly be good.
“At first I thought that he was playing some sort of romantic game with me—that he had known all along that Orchardary and I were one and the same.” Jennifer’s voice grew dark. “But that was not it.”
“What did he say?”
“He was looking, from me, on advice on how to break up with me. Which I could have handled. But his descriptions of me were just so cruel and unfair and… I don’t know. I don’t even want to talk about the details of it.”
“So you went over there to his place to murder him?” I tried asking that neutrally, but I couldn’t keep the incredulousness out of my voice.
“I went over to his place,” said Jennifer, her voice raising suddenly—and then, just as quickly dropping back down to a whisper, “to break up with him. Things just took a hard turn. We started arguing and he called me selfish, without a hint of self-awareness—while this enormous fifty-pound, jewel-studded replica of the theft he had made only days before just sat there on his expensive Oriental rug. How selfish is that? He stole from his own guild mates and then spent thousands of dollars to make a trophy out of it. And dared to call me selfish? After I picked it up, I even started speaking to him in my Orchardary voice, and he still didn’t put it together. Jonah was book smart, but he really wasn’t very clever. I mean, he shouldn’t have made the thing so sharp in the first place. But of course, it was done exactly as it was in the game. Jonah just didn’t ever think ahead.”
I was listening to her little soliloquy somewhat spellbound. Jennifer hadn’t known that the spear was a test model for the ones that would be sent out to the guild later. That the final model would not be quite so sharp. She murdered Jonah Long with his own apology.
“You don’t think that much ahead either, do you, dear?” asked Jennifer, her voice even more manic than before.
And I realized that what had emerged from her fanny pack was a gun.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
I am pointing a gun at you,” said Jennifer evenly. “I don’t want to fire it, because it would make a terrible scene and could also send bits of your face flying everywhere. Important bits. The bits that you like.”
To be perfectly honest with you, I don’t like many bits on my face. At best I have a relationship of ambivalence with them. But I told Jennifer that I agreed with her premise.
“Good,” she said, tucking the gun behind her moss beard. “What I would like for you to do is walk with me. A nice walk, with no incidents. As easy as that. A pleasant stroll, in which nothing bad will happen.”
I did not like the way she was repeating the same idea with different words. A cheerful jaunt, in which you will not be murdered. An idyllic promenade, in which your face will not be blown off. Anyway, I must have looked skeptical, because Jennifer was all reassurances.
“Look, Dahlia,” said Jennifer, using that fake friendly voice of hers, “I’ve got no hard feelings here. I don’t want to kill you. I just can’t trust you to not tell the police. You understand?”
I did understand. I knew too much.
“See, I’m not going to kill you, unless you make me. We’re going to go somewhere nice and secluded, and we’re going to drug you. Then I will get out of town. Maybe I’ll go to Canada. They need botanists in Canada.”
It was hard to tell whether Jennifer was extremely bonkers or extremely sane. I felt as though her factoid about the botanical job market of the great white north lent itself to the bonkers camp, but what did I know about it? She spoke in a dementedly ingratiating voice; the kind you would use to speak to some family dog—a frilly one, like a Pomeranian.
“Don’t worry,” she told me. “Nothing bad is going to happen.”
When people who are pointing guns at you inform you that nothing bad is going to happen, it’s generally wise to take it with a grain of salt. It seemed that not only was something bad going to happen, it was happening right now. That said, what was there to do? Marching to undisclosed locations with a gun-wielding treant was clearly a dunderheaded move, but the alternative was worse. I walked.
And walked, and walked. Jennifer lumbered along behind me every so often, saying something ominous like, “I’d hate to see you get shot” and “Don’t forget I’m pointing a loaded gun at you.” Jennifer apparently believed that without these reminders my mind would wander and that I might momentarily forget that I was being marched at gunpoint. Without her help I would start lingering at a merch booth to buy a T-shirt, or get a Zoth sound track signed. She needed to wave the gun periodically so I would recall—“Oh, right! The death march. You know, I just don’t know where my head is lately.”
I was alarmed as well, because if Jennifer wanted to make a quick egress from the Games Summit, I would expect her to move downstairs. Toward an exit. Instead we went up—all the way to the secluded top floor of the convention center. There was not much on the top floor, and as we reached the top of the stairwell, I had an uncomfortable feeling that Jennifer was weighing the merits of killing me on the spot. It was about as secluded as we were going to get.
But thankfully, we reached the top floor. Jennifer hustled me down a wide hallway, and gestured for me to sit down on a wooden bench next to a planter.
“That was easy, wasn’t it?”
I had not found it terribly easy. I had found it deeply stressful. They say that your life is supposed to flash before your eyes in situations like these, but I kept thinking of
odd little details. I had library books that were due in a week. If I were killed here, there was no way in hell that Charice would return those. It was just going to cost the Saint Louis Public Library a lot of money, and I did not feel that they were an institution that could afford to take the hit.
Jennifer was eyeing the crowd up here. It was not empty, but it was very sparse. Imagine mall walking—at a lousy mall—on a Tuesday morning. That should give you the idea. There were people about, but they seemed to be on the way to something else, and not interested in a fairy and treant resting on a bench.
Jennifer reached back into her fanny pack of doom and pulled out a syringe. A motherfucking syringe. Who the hell travels with a syringe?
Jennifer gave me the syringe and an unmarked vial. It looked like it might hold insulin—there was something clear in it.
“You must think I’m out of my mind. But I did allow for this contingency. I tend to worry, you know. I even had this with me at Jonah’s funeral, just in case. It’s just a nice sedative.”
There was something markedly false about Jennifer’s voice when she said “nice sedative” that gave me reason to believe that it was less a nice sedative and more a death-inducing poison. But then, a bullet to the head was pretty death-inducing as well.
“I’m going to stand over here,” said Jennifer, “and continue to point this gun at you. Just because you can’t see it behind the lichen doesn’t mean that it’s not pointed at your head.”
Jennifer was loving that gun.
“I’d like for you to stick the syringe into the vial and fill the vial to the fifty. Not any less, not any more.”
I filled the vial to the fifty.
“Now,” said Jennifer amiably. “I need you to inject the vial into your skin. If you want to lift your shirt, you could put it in your belly.”
“I’m kind of squeamish about needles,” I told her.
“How are you with bullets?”
“What if someone comes over?” I asked hopefully.
“They will not. But if they do, you can explain that you are a diabetic.”
I lifted my shirt a little. It felt like there had to be a point at which I could divert this path; knock Jennifer from this plan that she had apparently perfectly envisioned. I thought about throwing the syringe at her face, ninja-style, but it’s the kind of flourish you can imagine much more readily than you can do. It was obvious that it wouldn’t stop her. There was nothing to do.
“Please do it so I can see it.”
I did it where she could see it. The syringe stung quite a bit more than I felt it should. What can I tell you? My skill in at-gunpoint, self-induced phlebotomy could use some work. Jennifer, at least, seemed happy by the sight of blood.
“Now slide the syringe back to me.”
I did. Jennifer packed it back up into her fanny pack of horrors and then smiled at me.
“No cotton ball?” I asked her.
“Use your shirt,” she told me, smiling brightly.
Were this scene ever to be re-created on film or stage, the next bit would most definitely have to be excised. What followed was twenty minutes of Jennifer silently pointing a hidden gun at me as whatever drug she had injected me with gradually began to take hold. I was feeling tingling in my extremities now, and I felt reasonably confident that I was going to die. Internally, I suppose things were in a bit of a turmoil, but if you were to have been watching us for that twenty minutes, it could have passed for an early experimental film of Andy Warhol.
That is to say: Nothing happened.
I thought about Nathan, and Erik and Lurleen. I think perhaps that I had made a muddle of things with all of them. And I was angry at myself—not about the fact that I had stupidly gotten myself killed. But angry at myself for being so self-involved that I had spent the past two years of my life not having any fun at all. Stephen was right. Why hadn’t I seen him? Why had I talked myself into seclusion? I had been unemployed and had maybe had the wrong boyfriend for a couple of years. So what? I was young, not horrible-looking, and…
And people were coming up to us. I was feeling clearly drugged now, but I was together enough that I enjoyed the look of alarm on Jennifer’s painted-green face peeking out from behind that beard.
“Don’t move,” she hissed at me.
“You are just beautiful,” said the man, who himself was dressed as a surprisingly scantily clad elf. There was a second female elf, even closer to clotheslessness, who also came up to Jennifer, who was equally, if not more, enamored of Jennifer. They were all over her costume.
“I love this,” said the elf. “I always want to wear a more elaborate costume, but my husband always steers me toward outfits with visible boobs.”
The man laughed awkwardly. “My wife is kidding.”
Jennifer was momentarily dumbstruck by the nigh-upon-naked couple, who were actually fondling her bark and saying things like: “Is this real wood?”
There was a moment—just a moment—where one of elves crossed the path between Jennifer and me. The whole thing happened fast enough that I had been as surprised as Jennifer. But drugged or not, I was operating on hairline reflexes, whereas Jennifer was wearing a tree costume and being pawed at by naked people.
I threw the harp at her. I had been gripping it tightly for a while. I’m guessing she had thought it was costume harp—light, made of balsa wood or something. It was, of course, made of metal, and it made a terrific cracking noise followed by a strum as it hit her face.
“Eat harp!” I yelled, running as fast as I could down the hall.
Blood was dripping down Jennifer’s face when I glanced back, still running.
“It’s a lyre, you uncultured clod!” she boomed at me, the elves staring agape at us both. She pulled out her gun, scaring the bejeezus out of the near-naked elves, and I supposed meant to end me as I turned the corner. What happened next was the most improbable thing ever. Jennifer’s aim was the slightest bit distracted by the “Flight of the Valkyries” ringtone that suddenly emanated from inside her knoll.
I have three ringtones—one for my family (“A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall”), one for strangers and friends (“Who Could It Be Now?”), and one for job callbacks.
This was a job callback. Boo. Yah.
“Is that a ringtone?” she asked to the elves.
The elves said nothing because it’s the sort of question that is rhetorical even before you factor guns into the equation. But the moment the Wagner ringtone sounded meant that when Jennifer pointed her firearm at my head and shot—the bullets missed me and went through my fairy wings and into a plate glass window.
I’m not in amazing shape, but it’s surprisingly easy to outrun a woman in a tree costume, even drugged.
I zipped down the hall with a fairy’s quickness but also with the mental capacity of a cloudy bowl of soup.
“You’re only spreading the poison through your bloodstream,” coughed out Jennifer, who sounded impossibly far away. To be fair, she was far away, but it was clear that the syringe was doing something to me. I felt loopy and light-headed as I ran down the hall with no particular idea where I was going. The stairs were behind me, and there was not another way down unless I made it all the way to the south side of the building, which seemed to be towns away.
I did my best to keep running. I turned the corner and saw, in an alcove far over the main floor, what I believed was my salvation. It was Auctioneer Griselda, with her enormous black wings spread, peering over to look at the chaos on the main floor. The neon-blue letters of her name were backward, of course, since she wasn’t facing me—but I’d recognize that “adlesirG” anywhere. It was Charice, who was going to somehow save me from this madwoman.
I didn’t actually manage to stop before I reached Charice; rather I collided into her, pushing us both dangerously against the rail that protected us from falling to our deaths.
When I spoke, I realized that my tongue and lips had gone numb, which could not possibly be a good sign. “Th
arith! Thenither Abuh muthud Donah Lonth and thees a thwee anth ith thasingth me and poisoned me with themon!”
The above line is a very charitable rendering of what I said, which was probably about half as intelligible. I did feel I did a good job with the “poisoned me” bit, however, which in many ways seemed like the most pressing part.
Apparently Jennifer was not so far off after all, because she came lumbering up toward the two of us. She made a pass at seeming friendly and sweet, but the effect was somewhat dimmed by her still holding a smoking gun.
“Oh, Dahlia!” said Jennifer. “You’re not having another one of your panic attacks, are you? It’s okay. Come and sit here under my branches, and I’ll take care of you.”
“Tharitwith! Pwothec me!”
And it was at roughly that moment that I realized that I wasn’t clinging to Charice at all. The Auctioneer Griselda I was holding on to for dear life had black, pupil-less eyes, and much scarier makeup, and there was actually blood coming from her mouth. Her actual name, I would learn later, was Linda Yoon, and she was a paralegal who worked in Santa Monica whose hobbies included cosplay, Zoth, and windsurfing. But I’m not embarrassed to admit that at the time, I actually thought that this woman was Auctioneer Griselda and that all of this Zoth paraphernalia had brought her in the world and made her manifest. She spoke in this terrible withered rice paper voice—as if her words were not spoken but somehow darkly effervesced. This may have been the drugs.
“Why have you come to Griselda, treant?”
Jennifer was not interested in cosplay.
“Stay away, harpy. This fairy is meeting her end.”
“She claims you have poisoned her. You dare attack someone under the protection of Griselda?”
At the time, I was thinking that Griselda did not know what a gun was, since she had never seen them in her world. Yes, it was definitely the drugs. My plan was to warn Griselda about the danger of firearms, but my lips had swollen to the size of Chinese sausages. And what did it matter, because Jennifer was going to fire her handgun regardless. I don’t know why the presence of it had surprised me so greatly. There was, of course, no metal detector at the convention center. Because this was Arizona. At the Phoenix airport white people are offered complimentary handguns after passing through baggage claim, as way of saying thank you and welcome to the Grand Canyon State.
The Unfortunate Decisions of Dahlia Moss Page 25
