Scavenger Hunt

by Dani Lamia

  We get off the subway near the ferry. I run to the club, flanked by Ed and Mel. Before I go inside, I call my siblings again, but none of them answer. I do have a message from Angelo Marino. He tells me that Henley’s memorial service will be tomorrow morning, in accordance with his wishes. It will be a low-key affair held at his favorite dive bar, Ugly American. The bar has generously agreed to let us have the run of the place before it opens.

  The club lobby is full of women coming and going, their hair swept back in fashionable ponytails and wearing the trendiest Lycra athleisure. I think about calling the cops, but what good will they be at this point? They don’t care about anything that is happening to me or my family. They don’t even seem to think anything is wrong or out of the ordinary. At least I’ve got my bodyguards, even though I obviously can’t bring them in with me.

  “I hate to say it,” I tell Ed and Mel, “but you guys need to wait outside. I won’t be long. If something crazy happens and I find myself in trouble, I’ll text you.”

  “We aren’t supposed to let you go anywhere on your own,” says Ed. “Especially if your life is at risk.”

  “Yeah,” adds Mel. “This is really when we should be at your side.”

  “That’s true,” I say. “But they aren’t going to let you in. We could wait for your security company to send us some female agents, but we really don’t have the time. We’re just going to have to risk it.”

  Neither Ed nor Mel is happy about this, but there isn’t much they can do. They are bound to obey my orders.

  I walk past the front desk with purpose. I act as if I am meant to be here so that no one will dare question me. I’m already dressed the part in my red tracksuit, a lucky choice this morning, as it turns out.

  “Uh, excuse me, ma’am?” says a young blond, grinning and running up to stand bashfully in front of me. “We need to sign you in.”

  “Of course,” I say, reluctantly following her back to the desk. “But wait”—I pretend to search my purse—“I left my fob at home.”

  “Oh, okay, that’s fine,” she says. “What’s your last name?”

  “Nylo,” I say.

  She looks at me, recognizing the name. She frowns, scanning her computer.

  “Oh, okay, it actually looks like you already signed in and left,” she says.

  Gabriella must have a membership here. It is definitely the kind of place where she would enjoy hanging out, looking for validation and camaraderie.

  “Yeah,” I say. “I did the hard part first and then grabbed a quick, early dinner and now I am going to do my long run for the week.”

  “Enjoy your workout!” she says sunnily, not really hearing my lame excuse.

  I at least know that I’m behind Gabriella, which makes sense. She would remember where Mom used to work out, especially if she now has a membership here herself.

  I take out my game phone and hold it in my hand as I peruse the main floor of the gym, where people are lifting kettlebells, running on treadmills, stretching, and riding stationary bikes while watching the business channel.

  Mom liked to exercise late at night. She would leave at one or two in the morning, frustrated and yelling, letting us all know that she was tired of our bullshit and that she needed some time alone.

  She wasn’t subtle about it. She would tell us that we were the ones who were making her crazy, that it was our fault she was leaving and that maybe she would never come back. She would usually return early in the morning, sweaty and ashen. We always assumed she went out drinking in her workout clothes rather than to the gym. And yet, she must have been exercising at least some of the time. What else could explain her perfect figure, despite how much she ate and drank?

  I head to the treadmills, holding my phone up beside each one, pretending to check a series of texts. My heart is beating fast.

  What if I’m the last one here? What will happen to me? Will I be electrocuted? Will someone smash in my head with a twenty-five-pound plate?

  None of the treadmills trigger the game phone. I walk around the perimeter of the club, growing increasingly frustrated.

  I corner one of the towel girls, almost pushing her up against the wall.

  “Listen,” I say. “Have the treadmills always been right where they are now?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” she says, as she puts a hand up to steady the stack of white towels in her arms. “I think so. They’ve been right against that wall ever since we moved them up here from downstairs.”

  “From the basement?” I ask.

  “Yes, ma’am. That was before my time. All the treadmills used to be down in the basement and all the showers used to be on the third floor, but we switched everything up after the hurricane.”

  “After the flooding,” I say, as if I have been coming here for years.

  “Yes, ma’am,” she says, looking relieved to have appeased me. “They say nothing ever changes here, but I guess sometimes things do get shifted around.”

  The basement. Fine.

  As I walk down the short, sharp stairwell to the lower floor, I have all sorts of fantasies for how I might be exterminated in the basement of this gym. I might be drowned, or attacked by a plague of rats, or walled up in some dark corner—asphyxiated—my bones left to molder and dissolve in the humid walls.

  I take a deep breath and grip my game phone so hard that my knuckles turn white. Either I am the last Nylo here, or I am not. There’s nothing I can do about it.

  I walk around the perimeter, holding my phone up like a metal detector. The space is relatively empty. There are showers and lockers, but not many women taking advantage of them. I try to be discreet so that nobody will think I’m snapping inappropriate pictures.

  I walk all the way along one wall, then another, then a third. On the fourth wall my phone starts to vibrate and then it plays the Nylo Corporation theme song. My whole body clenches up in a paroxysm of fear and stomach acid, like a reverse orgasm.

  I look down, afraid of what I’ll find. And then I heave a huge sigh of relief.

  I am in the third spot, behind Gabriella, who came in first, and Alistair.

  I cannot believe my luck. It is almost 6 p.m. How did I beat Bernard?

  Even though I should feel safe, I still wait a moment for something terrible to happen. To be scalded by boiling water pouring from an exploded pipe. To be shot at point-blank range by a sulking towel assistant. But nothing happens. I walk back up the stairs to the first floor, salute the blond girl at the front desk, and then go outside, my brain abuzz with the madness of this crazy game.

  What does it mean that all the clues revolve around how much we know about our dead mother? What is Dad trying to say to us? Is he trying to say that the person who should inherit the company is the one who paid the most attention to Mom? Who absorbed her qualities instead of his? Is he trying to say that he wants the company to go to the one of us who loved what he also loved: our poor, broken, mean, cruel, suicidal mother?

  Or is this a confession? Of something dark and transparently sinister? Is he admitting a role in her death? What if all the rumors were true, and our father killed our mother for breaking his heart and then used all of his strategic skill and money to cover it up? What if his last message to his children is a cry for absolution?

  Or what if his last will is somehow to extinguish us all just like he extinguished her?

  I shake off this dark feeling. In the same way that I know our father didn’t kill our mother, I know he didn’t kill Henley either. I know that he wasn’t the one who tried to kill Alistair and me at the aquarium.

  “Is everything okay?” asks Mel as soon as he sees me walk out through the club’s front doors.

  “I mean, as far as it can be,” I say and give him and Ed a wan smile.

  There is a sudden noise right above us that sends all the trash in the street spinning. People scream an
d point, running out of the way. Are we being attacked?

  I look up and see a helicopter breaking the law and heading right for the ground in the middle of the small triangular park.

  Who is it? The fucking president?

  No, it’s just my brother Bernard, trying to win twenty billion dollars.

  People are running in all directions, pointing and taking pictures. How much money did Bernard spend to bribe the city into letting him land his helicopter wherever he wants in Manhattan without getting shot down? A few cops race to hold people back. I can hear them loudly explaining that everything is fine, everything is normal.

  A trash can blows over and a cop races to put it back to rights. That is the only real damage done, except for some tulips that get flattened by the whipping air. Luckily, the Financial District is mainly closed to traffic and so there aren’t any car accidents as people stop and gawk.

  Bernard’s security detail gets out first. They shake hands with the cops and check everything out from the park to the door of the gym. Finally, Bernard gets out, eating a Zero bar, wearing sunglasses and a red silk shirt under his suit jacket. He looks like the devil himself.

  He walks right up to me, his hands held out at his sides as if in embarrassment. It’s like running into a friend at the same brothel.

  “Hello, big sister,” he says. “This was an easy one, wasn’t it?”

  “Bernard,” I say. “What took you so long?”

  “I had to make a few calls before I could land the copter here. Do you know how hard it is to reach city officials on a Saturday? Fucking bureaucrats. I finally made it, though.”

  Should I tell him that it won’t matter? That down in the gym basement someone will try and kill him? Would he tell me?

  31

  Bernard brushes past me, stabbing a finger at one of the cops. I almost let him go inside. I hate myself for doing it, but I almost let him jauntily run down the stairs to his doom.

  “You are the last one,” I blurt out, right before he disappears inside. He stops on the threshold, then looks back at me. He takes off his sunglasses. A woman elbows past him on her way out of the gym. He returns to stand in front of me.

  “You are the last one,” I say again. “If you go inside there and use your phone, something terrible will happen.”

  “What?” he says.

  “I don’t know,” I say. “I wish I did.”

  He stares at me for a long time before finally nodding.

  “If it was any of the others, I wouldn’t believe them,” he says. “But you don’t like to win like that. You don’t pick favorites. You don’t lie or cheat. You like the feeling of everybody always knowing that you have beat them because you are better than they are. You get off on it. And for that to be true, you need to always be incorruptible and always play with perfect, hateful sportsmanship. So I believe you.”

  “You don’t have to believe me,” I say, showing him my phone. He looks at it, frowning.

  “So what? What now?” he says, gritting his teeth.

  “I don’t know,” I reply. “We all could have been coordinating before this. We could have all gone on strike.”

  “Fuck that,” says Bernard. “I had a shot. I could have beat you. It was a fair game, not one of your dumb puzzles. I liked my odds. I got the helicopter.”

  “Well, you’ve crapped out,” I say.

  “You guys formed a cabal against me,” he says. “Despicable, though I will admit not technically cheating.”

  “Yesterday we formed a cabal,” I say. “But not today. Today everyone was on their own. The stakes are just too high now, I guess.”

  “I’m gonna get in that helicopter and fly away,” he says. “I don’t even know where I’m going to go. Nobody can find me if I don’t know where I am going myself. I’ll roll the dice against the alphabet and pick a random city. I’ll mail you a letter from wherever I end up. Then you can mail me back some money when you win. When this all blows over.”

  I don’t know what to tell him. It actually sounds like a pretty good plan.

  “We’ll catch whoever is doing this,” I say. “And then you can come back. If I win, I’m going to make sure that nobody goes broke and nobody starves. Like I said.”

  He nods. He glares at me and I smile at him, hoping his icy stare will soften. He isn’t the smartest of us, or the nicest, or the funniest, but he may be the shrewdest. He has never been able to tolerate nonsense. He almost has a physical aversion to it.

  “Alright,” he says. He pats me once on the shoulder before getting back in the helicopter. He turns around to the pilot and twirls his finger. The rotors start spinning, faster and faster, and then the helicopter takes off. The trash can falls over again and this time a cop doesn’t bother to put it back in its place. The cops disperse, no longer needing to cordon off the tiny park from lookie-loos.

  I call for a car while Mel and Ed commiserate with their counterparts. They all smoke cigarettes until our Uber arrives. We crowd in and head back across the bridge to Dumbo.

  “He ditched his security detail,” says Ed. “But we’ll find him. Don’t worry. He’ll be safe.”

  “I kind of hope you don’t find him,” I say. “I kind of hope he’s unfindable.”

  I text Pez and tell him to meet me at my office. I call my favorite Indian restaurant in Jackson Heights and order chicken tikka masala, lamb korma, vegetable biryani, and a big plate of naan to be delivered. My stomach is growling. My hangover is basically gone and I am hungry as hell.

  Pez is waiting in my office when I arrive.

  “You look better,” he says. “You got some sleep. Good. I was worried about you.”

  “Listen,” I say. “I need you to figure out another very important mystery for me. And I need you to do it basically by tomorrow.”

  “What do you need to know, kid?” asks Pez.

  “I need to know if my dad killed my mom,” I say. “I need to know if he is some kind of psychopathic murderer and if this is all his fucked-up revenge from beyond the grave. He has moved onto the top suspect list.”

  “Jesus,” says Pez after staring at me for a while. “You aren’t kidding.”

  “No, I’m not,” I say. “There are only three of us left in the game now. I managed to warn Bernard before he triggered some kind of death trap, but the other two aren’t returning my calls.”

  “Your dad didn’t kill your mom,” says Pez. “There’s your answer. Okay?”

  “How do you know?” I ask. “Do you know that for a fact?”

  He doesn’t say anything. He sighs, looking at the desk. I feel like he wants to get mad at me. I feel like he wants to tell me off for even insinuating something so insane, so cruel. His brow furrows and he starts to get red under the collar. But he is saved by the arrival of the food. The weekend building assistant, Jennie, sets up a giant spread on a table behind us, and Pez is momentarily mesmerized by the warm spicy funk of cardamom and curry.

  We fix ourselves giant plates of chicken, lamb, and rice. I pour us bourbons. He nods at his drink like an old friend.

  “I knew your mom and dad very well,” says Pez, after taking his first bite and chewing it thoughtfully. “They loved each other very much, in their own awful way. That’s how everybody does it, you know. They do the best they can. It isn’t ever easy. They had five children together. You have to like each other to have five children with each other, don’t you? There’s just no getting around the logistics of that.”

  “I’m not sure my mother ever wanted to have one child, much less five,” I say. “I don’t think she liked being a mother very much. In fact, she hated it. Sort of with a rare psychotic fervor, in fact.”

  “She doted on you all,” says Pez. “She fretted and worried about you and she gave you the best parts of her. Especially you. You are so much like her, you know? You have your dad’s head for busin
ess, but you bend people to your will like she did. You both had Prescott wrapped around your finger. And you both had a hard time respecting the men who chose to love you.”

  “I don’t need any therapy,” I say. “I need answers. I want to know for sure, one way or the other, whether my father killed my mother. You are going to find out for me, or at least tell me what you know. You are going to tell me every dirty secret that my father ever kept from his children.”

  Pez shakes his head in defeat.

  “Well, I do know by now that your father was involved at least on some level with the planning of this game,” he begins. “He was an integral part from the beginning, and I have tracked down that he was the one who stole people right out from under Alistair and redirected them to begin developing the game using already existing technology.”

  “How do you know this?” I ask.

  “I interviewed some of the engineers who did the developing in house,” says Pez. “They finally cracked. Members of Alistair’s team. They said that the only person who ever dealt with them directly was your father. He wouldn’t tell them why they were working for him. He swore them to secrecy to the grave. However, they broke down and told me the truth when I explained what their work was being used for. That Henley was dead.”

  “Did you tell the police to interview them?” I ask.

  “Yeah, and those detectives said they would ‘get right on it.’” He curves his fingers into air quotes and shrugs. “I didn’t hear very much enthusiasm. I don’t think they’re taking any of this very seriously.”

  All of a sudden, the muffled yet unmistakable sound of the Nylo theme song emanates from my pocket. I am seized with an overwhelming sense of dread.

  “Henley’s funeral is tomorrow,” I say, warding off whatever is coming from the game phone, hoping that if I don’t answer it, I won’t have to deal with the latest horror it wants to show me.

  “I will definitely be there,” says Pez, raising an eyebrow. “Um, Caitlyn, your phone is ringing.”

  “I know,” I hiss. I gingerly remove the phone from my pocket, letting the jingle repeat until I’m ready to commit to the inevitable.