The Questionable Behavior of Dahlia Moss

by Max Wirestone

“I suppose,” I said, “to be perfectly honest, I mostly came to ask you a few questions.”

  “Knitting questions?” asked Linda, her voice flooding with optimism.

  “Questions about a fellow knitter of yours—Cynthia Shaffer?”

  “You’re here to ask us about Cynthia?” asked Joanne, who was in more disbelief at that revelation than at my forgotten yarn.

  “Yes, actually.”

  “How do we know you’re really a detective?” asked Joanne.

  “She could be one of those Internet identity thieves,” said Linda.

  “I suppose you’ll just have to take it on faith,” I said. “I’m a private detective. I’m not with the police. But I’m definitely not going to ask identity-thieving questions.”

  “What would be an identity-thieving question?” asked Margery, quite contemplatively, as though she were taking up the idea herself.

  “Social security number, birthday, all those things they ask you when you want to reset a password.”

  “Where did you go to elementary school?” said Linda.

  “Right.”

  “What’s the name of the first boy you ever kissed?” said Linda.

  “Yup,” I said. “And it was Leland.”

  “What possible reason could you be investigating Cynthia for?” asked Joanne. “She hasn’t done anything.”

  In the moment, I observed that the topic of Cynthia Shaffer had affected the three ladies in markedly different ways. Linda had brightened, and I got the impression she’d have been perfectly happy to talk about Cynthia ad infinitum. Joanne had darkened, which was impressive given the skeptical point she had started from, and Margery just seemed like she was along for the ride.

  “I didn’t say I was investigating Cynthia,” I said. And suddenly I was at a crux point. For once, I hadn’t hit upon it blindly; I had known this moment would come. I had even made a little mental flowchart about it on the ride over here.

  I didn’t love this flowchart. It wasn’t my best work, as I’m sure there should be other options, nor was I fond of its moral implications. But, it was decision time. I did not want to deal with weeping knitters, and so I decided not to bring up Cynthia’s passing.

  “I’m not investigating Cynthia,” I said. “I’m investigating the company that she worked for.”

  “Worked for?” said Joanne. “She doesn’t work there anymore?”

  “She was fired.”

  Joanne looked floored by this somehow, although the other ladies didn’t even miss a purl.

  “I don’t think it’s appropriate,” said Joanne, “for us to be talking about her behind her back.”

  “She could walk in on us,” said Linda. “What would we say?”

  “I would love if she walked in on us,” I told Linda, in what was certainly an epic lie. “My questions aren’t anything secret. I’d like to talk to her too. I haven’t been able to reach her.”

  “Me neither,” said Margery. “But I’m sure she’ll be here. She’s often a little late.”

  “I don’t like this,” said Joanne.

  “Anyway,” said Linda. “She hated that place she worked for. What was it called? Caldera?”

  “Cahaba,” said Joanne. “It’s named for a river in Alabama.”

  “It sounded like a nightmare. Cynthia would tell us all about it every week. I always figured she was making some of it up, you know, for the sake of a good story, but, goodness, now there’s a detective here,” said Linda.

  Joanne, for her part, was shooting off daggers and also knitting in a loud and dangerous-sounding manner, as though she intended her needles to be a sort of threat. But Linda was one of those people who possessed powerful rockets of optimism, such that things like threatening scowls and needles were rendered powerless.

  “What kinds of things went on?” I asked. “I’d heard the work schedule was crushing.”

  “For everyone else,” said Linda. “Cynthia didn’t stay any longer than her eight hours.”

  “She’d stay nine hours some days,” Joanne said. “And she’d bake for the kids that worked there. She just felt terrible for them. Being run ragged by some corporate monster.”

  “Did you know,” asked Linda, “they had a special room for crying? Isn’t that amazing? It was called ‘The Crying Room.’ People would just go in there and cry, you know, privately.”

  “They had to add a second room,” said Margery. “There was ‘Crying Room A’ and ‘Crying Room B.’”

  “Did she mention anyone who particularly hated the company?” I asked. “Did Cynthia hate the company?”

  “These are questions for Cynthia,” said Joanne.

  “I wouldn’t say Cynthia hates the company,” said Linda. “She just thought it was very badly run. The only thing I’ve ever heard of Cynthia hating is Kanye West.”

  “Who’s that?” asked Margery.

  “Some rap man,” said Linda.

  “Why is she even familiar with him?” asked Margery, and I was grateful to Kanye for taking some of the heat off me.

  “Her granddaughter is a big fan,” said Joanne. “She keeps making Cynthia listen to his songs so she will appreciate his genius.”

  “Oh,” said Linda, “that sounds terrible,” and I was a little with her on this point, although I did not have time to interrogate these ladies over Kanye’s career.

  “I thought Cynthia was single,” I asked. “She has a granddaughter?”

  “She has three,” said Margery.

  “Her husband died ages ago,” said Linda. “In the eighties. Drunk driver.”

  “I just don’t think we should be spilling Cynthia’s personal details like this,” said Joanne.

  I asked another question to head this off.

  “Did Cynthia mention anyone else from Cahaba who hated the company—maybe about not being able to spend enough time with their spouse?”

  “Maybe Joanne is right, Linda,” said Margery. “This is getting a little personal. We should wait for Cynthia to show up.”

  But there was no stopping Linda.

  “Everyone there hated it,” said Linda. “The boss lady, the artist, black guy, beard guy. Everyone hated it, except for the rich one—what was his name? Lawrence?”

  “That’s the guy.”

  “He was happy. What are you looking for, exactly?”

  “Linda,” said Joanne. “Let’s not answer all of these questions.”

  “Did you know that the boss lady and the artist were having an affair?”

  “Linda,” said Joanne again.

  “How about that the boss lady was pregnant—or that’s what Cynthia said—”

  “What?”

  “Linda,” said Joanne. “Let’s wait for Cynthia.”

  “She found a used pregnancy kit in the trash. Two blue stripes.”

  “Linda,” said Joanne, with remarkable patience at this point.

  “I assume it was the artist. Oh, did anyone tell you about his violent drawings?”

  “Linda,” came a voice, which I initially assumed was from Joanne again, even though it had come from behind me. I suppose I had assumed that Joanne was employing ventriloquism to make her case, since normal speech wasn’t working. But I turned, and found, quite to my shock, that it wasn’t Joanne.

  “Hey look,” said Linda. “Cynthia’s here! Margery was just talking about you.”

  I’ll be damned.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Cynthia Shaffer, dead woman, walking into the room and giving me guff was not a scenario that I had included in my flowcharts. If I had, it would look like this:

  This was roughly my mental state. I stood up and was rapidly moving into a sprinting stance. Dead women don’t show up while you are investigating them. I was not ready to cross the line into urban fantasy, and if I was, I wanted to do it with a shirtless guy who could turn into a hawk, not a dead old woman with a calico knitting bag.

  Anyway, I was a freaked-out mess, which was a marked contrast to everyone else there, who wer
e saying things like:

  “Hi, Cynthia!” and “Sit yourself down.”

  “Why are you standing?” asked Linda.

  The answer to this question was that I was giving even odds that Cynthia Shaffer was a dead apparition who meant me harm. But I did not want to state that aloud because it (1) sounds crazy and (2) might give the apparition some ideas. But I sat down.

  “This detective,” said Joanne, who was still gruff, but less so, “has been asking questions about Cahaba.”

  “A detective,” said Cynthia. “That’s exciting. Of course, a detective’s not going to help that place. They should send an exorcist.”

  Then Cynthia laughed. It wasn’t a booming, see-the-face-behind-the-skull laugh, although I may have processed it that way at the time. With the power of retrospect, it was just a plain old guffaw.

  I was beginning to pull my wits about me. I’ve discovered enough corpses now that I just don’t get as upset as I once did. I’m not a superstitious person, but when you encounter a dead woman at a knitting group—a live dead woman—it tends to pull at your rationalism.

  “You’re”—I was going to say alive, but I decided that this was the wrong word choice—“looking well.” Which meant the same thing but was less suspicious.

  And the thing was, Cynthia was looking well. She exuded energy and relaxation. She also smelled like lemongrass and lavender. And her hair was exceptionally coifed. She did not look at all like a dead woman. She looked like she could be above an infographic in AARP magazine about living your best life. She seemed exceptionally alive. “Jonathan Strange back from the dead” alive. She looked like she could go jogging.

  “Why thanks,” said Cynthia. “I knew I liked you when I walked in.”

  “What’s that smell?” said Margery.

  “Some fancy shampoo,” said Cynthia. “After they fired me, I took a spa day.”

  “Well, that seems decadent,” said Joanne.

  “I had a coupon,” said Cynthia. “Valerie got it for me for my birthday.”

  “Was it the place out on Hamilton?” asked Linda. “That place is the best.”

  “No,” said Cynthia. “I don’t know that one. What’s it called?”

  “Something about Wax. WaxWorks? House of Wax?”

  “House of Wax is a horror movie,” said Cynthia.

  “Excuse me,” I said. “I need to run to the bathroom.”

  “Don’t you have questions for Cynthia?” asked Linda.

  I had plenty of questions for Cynthia. Some of which now included: How are you alive? Can you tell me what the afterlife is like? But I did not venture into these philosophical waters with the knitters. I found the women’s bathroom and I hid there.

  As I calmed down, I put together some salient points. I had not closely studied the corpse on the ground. Corpse woman was facedown, and I only got her in profile. While this person certainly looked like Cynthia Shaffer—the same age, the same body type—maybe this was my mind playing tricks on me. Surely they were different people. They had to be.

  I decided to call Detective Anson Shuler, which I felt was entirely reasonable given the circumstances.

  “Dahlia?” he said. “Are we still on for roller-skating tomorrow evening?”

  I had unwisely agreed to—nay, suggested this plan—a few days ago after being hit on the head. But there was no backing out of it now.

  “I found a body,” I said.

  “What?” said Shuler. “Another dead body? What are you, Harper Connelly?”

  “No,” I said. “This is a living person. She’s just walking around, talking about spa days.”

  “You found a living person,” said Shuler.

  “Talking about spa days,” I added. “Like it’s no big deal.”

  “Are spa days a big deal?” asked Shuler. “I’ve never been to one. I was reading this article in the New York Times about how men are starting to use them, but I’d feel weird about it. Why, did you want to go?”

  Taking a spa day with Shuler would be more fun than roller-skating, I imagined, but this was not the point.

  “She is supposed to be dead,” I said. “I found a woman who is supposed to be dead.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “She is supposed to be dead.”

  “And she’s—”

  “Talking about her spa day.”

  “Hmm,” said Shuler. It was a noncommittal hmm. It was a hmm that possibly meant: I think Dahlia is out of her mind. And so I updated Shuler on my adventure thus far, carefully leaving out that I entered into this shitshow because I was doing work for Emily Swenson. When I finished, Shuler asked me where I was, and then told me that he would be there in a half hour.

  My next task was to leave the restroom and interrogate the obviously not-dead dead woman. I had come to my senses now and regarded Cynthia Shaffer as I would any living woman who had somehow elaborately faked her death. Which is to say: wtf. But I wasn’t worried about her killing me with her wraith touch, so that was good.

  Mostly because I wanted to forestall this interview, I called Emily, who also needed some updating.

  “Dahlia,” said Emily. “Two phone calls in one day. Any progress on that stolen code?”

  “No,” I said. “None whatsoever. But I thought I’d keep you posted on the lay of the land.”

  “I like knowing the lay of the land,” said Emily.

  “Quintrell King, a programmer for Cahaba, was arrested about an hour ago for Cynthia Shaffer’s murder.”

  “Yes,” said Emily. “I’d heard that. Why, do you know anything about it?”

  “I know that he didn’t do it,” I said.

  “How do you know that?” asked Emily.

  “Because Cynthia Shaffer is in the next room, talking about shampoo.”

  Emily, for once, was quiet.

  “Cynthia Shaffer is alive?”

  “Not only is she alive,” I said, “she’s knitting.”

  “And that’s the lay of the land,” said Emily.

  “Yes,” I told her. “The lay of the land is a Boschian hellscape.”

  “Thanks for letting me know,” said Emily. “But don’t get tangled up in this. Just focus on the whistle-blower letter and the code. We need that code.”

  I did have to admire Emily’s single-mindedness. A woman getting murdered, a man getting arrested, and the murdered woman apparently returning from the underworld to cash in a coupon at the House of Wax was not enough to bend her from her task. I did not possess this level of focus, but I told her I’d try.

  I then got off the phone and returned to the room.

  Even coming to my senses, as I now was, I found that it wasn’t any easier being in the room a second time. The banality of the knitters’ discussions mixed with the improbable element of a dead woman sitting around, talking about missed purls, proved to be a bizarre and distracting cocktail. What was happening?

  “It’s very strange,” said Joanne, “that you came here on this big cloud of puffery about needing to ask questions to Cynthia, and then when she arrives, you disappear.”

  Had I arrived on a cloud of puffery? I felt cloudy, but I was pretty sure I had kept the puffery to a minimum.

  “I had some intestinal experiences in the bathroom, Joanne. It’s not like I ran for the border.”

  Joanne looked exceptionally irked by my tart response, but it buoyed Linda, who slid over some yarn to me. Still no needles, but there was a pile of yarn. I had no idea what to do with it. Literally everything I know about knitting is from Yoshi’s Woolly World, a game in which a dinosaur eats yarn and spits out sweaters. It was not a great point of reference.

  “It’s fine,” said Cynthia. “It’s not like I’m leaving anytime soon.”

  I picked up the yarn, which was tangled, and tried to fix it, both because this looked like a productive thing to do and because it was a metaphor. As I wound up the yarn, I put together what I knew.

  1. I had found someone in that storeroom.

  Right?
Somebody was dead. I didn’t hallucinate it.

  2. The dead person was not Cynthia.

  Because she was here, obviously.

  3. The dead person was Cynthia shaped.

  Everyone thought it was Cynthia. Yeah, I didn’t really roll over the corpse and take photos of her, but the impression was that this was Cynthia Shaffer. So why was there a dead person shaped like the secretary in the storeroom?

  “So anyway,” said Cynthia. “Did you see CSI last Thursday? It was a good one.”

  “No,” said Joanne, “we all hate that show. You’re the only person here who likes to discuss it.”

  “I like the show,” said Margery.

  And they carried on, apparently untroubled by my rattled yarn skeining. The fact that they were so untroubled by my presence—Joanne was irritated, but no more—led me to another point.

  4. Cynthia Shaffer had no idea about the Cynthia Shaffer–shaped dead woman, or else she wouldn’t be so blasé.

  “So,” I said. “Do you have time to answer a few questions about Cahaba?”

  “Oh look,” said Margery, “she’s come back to us.”

  “Are you on drugs?” asked Linda. “I’m asking without judgment. It’s just—you were miles away for a moment there.”

  “It’s just been a long day,” I said.

  “You’re really a detective?” asked Cynthia.

  “I’m really more of a junior detective,” I said, regretting my choice of words, because it made me sound like I should be operating out of a wooden tree house. “I’m still taking coursework. I guess you could call me sort of a working intern. Although I’m getting paid.”

  While this was arguably oversharing, I had found that the more honest I was about being legit but inexperienced, the more people tended to open up to me.

  “Why are you looking into Cahaba?” asked Cynthia.

  “That’s an interesting question itself,” I told her. “But my client really wouldn’t want me to say.”

  “What do you want to know from me?” asked Cynthia.

  “Do you want to go somewhere private?” I asked.