The Unfortunate Decisions of Dahlia Moss Page 11
“What gives you that idea?” I asked once I’d put a password on the channel just to make extra sure no one walked in on us. Told you I was paranoid.
“Hmph,” said Ophelia. I had thought it goofy when she had typed it, but to hear her say it seemed utterly right. Honestly, everything about Ophelia’s character seemed right. With Clemency, there had been a kind of disconnect between her smoky voice and Pre-Raphaelite digs, and one might expect that here. But something about Ophelia’s stately little voice—I could just see her at home, dressed in pearls and a classy black dress—that felt perfectly placed coming out of this lanky goth troubadour.
“That’s your answer, hmph? I’m glad to know you’re comfortable accusing total strangers of wrongdoing.”
“Someone spoke to me a couple of days ago, said Jonah had mentioned joining our guild. A level-one character?” Ophelia made this question sound uncomfortably accusatory.
“I’m level two,” I said, like an idiot.
“Why would Jonah invite a level-one character into the guild? And an archer? We don’t need archers. Whoever that person was—she was lying. And she knew about Jonah’s spear being stolen.”
I did not like her choice of personal pronoun, given that I had been masquerading as a guy. I felt like protesting, meekly, that this had nothing to do with the funeral I was planning, but it didn’t seem worth the effort. The last thing I wanted was to invite funereal etiquette questions. I kept mum and let Ophelia have her say.
“And now you show up, supposedly planning a funeral, but then you go around harassing people about the spear. And only the people who could use it. What kind of funeral planner does that?”
“All right, fine,” I said. “You got me.”
“You’re just after the spear for yourself.”
The conversation had been slightly humiliating up to this point—not Silas at the Windmill humiliating, but humiliating—but when Ophelia hit this wrong note, I instantly cheered up. She was just as bad a detective as I was. Maybe worse. I turned her own emoticons against her and /guffawed at her.
“Wait, what? I don’t want the spear. That’s ridiculous,” I said.
So attuned was Ophelia to her avatar’s emotions that she /scowled at me again. Probably she typed these things without even realizing it.
“Why should I believe you? Who are you really?”
“I’m a detective,” I said evenly. “I was hired by Jonah’s parents to get the spear back. And yes, I’m planning his funeral as a sort of cover operation to investigate.”
Ophelia’s avatar /crossed his arms at me. “I don’t believe you,” Ophelia said. “What are Jonah’s parents’ names?”
I admired Ophelia’s stubbornness, fending me off as if I were some sort of online infidel. I told her Jonah’s parents’ names, which she /scoffed at. Then, amazed at the serendipity of being able to do it, I gave her a parlor trick of my own.
“Believe me, or don’t. But I’m looking at all the angles. I know about you, for example.”
Ophelia said nothing, but she/narrowed her eyes at me.
“Your name is Ophelia Odom; you live outside of Boston and occasionally play viola for the Boston Symphony Orchestra and Pops. You’re involved in a long-distance romantic relationship with Kurt Campbell, and…” I felt like there should be a fourth thing, because these kinds of things go in threes, but I was out of ammo. But it didn’t matter, because Ophelia gasped. Not /gasped, but a straight-up real-world gasp, the kind you would get in a Victorian novel.
“Who told you that?” she asked, sounding less impressed than I would have hoped but definitely irritated. “That’s a secret.”
“Secrets are my trade,” I said. This was such a whopper that I half expected God to come down from the sky and smite me and RedRasish both, but nothing happened.
Ophelia sighed. “I guess you’re legit,” she said grudgingly. “Don’t tell anyone about me and Kurt. We’re kind of in a wait-and-see-what-happens phase.”
Less embarrassing if things fall apart? I could hear that. “Fine,” I said smartly. “Don’t tell anyone about me being a detective.”
“And the viola,” added Ophelia with an edge of conspiracy in her voice. “Don’t mention the viola to anyone.”
This was not the turn I was expecting the conversation to take.
“Why can’t I mention the viola?”
“Viola jokes,” said Ophelia. “When people find out you play the viola they like to make viola jokes at you.”
“What are viola jokes?” I asked, but I was already alt-tabbed to google them.
“I can hear you typing,” said Ophelia. “Tell me you are not googling viola jokes in front of me.”
She did have a preternatural ability to guess what I was doing, that Ophelia. That didn’t stop me from reading a joke to her anyway.
“You mean like: How do you keep someone from stealing your violin?”
Ophelia /clucked at me and said, “Listen, RedRashish, whoever you are. I know like thirty violists. I don’t care how far away you live, or clever you think you are, but if you start with the viola jokes, I will gather all thirty violists up and we will come to your house and FUCK YOU UP.”
Technically, the correct answer was “you put it in a viola case,” but Ophelia’s answer was compelling too.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
I finished the night by sending out a mass email to the Horizons asking about material for a eulogy for Jonah. I stayed up entirely too late waiting for responses, because I got not a single email in return. Was Jonah just not that liked, or was it just too depressing to come up with material for a eulogy? At any rate, when morning rolled around, I slept in. It wasn’t something I usually did, but so far doing things unusually had been working out for me. So when my alarm rang at eight, I acquainted myself with the snooze option. I honestly don’t think I had ever used it before. However, fifteen minutes later, I was hating myself because my iPhone had shot out a stern reminder that I had to be across town in a half hour for yet another sad job interview.
I saw the reminder and thought, quite vividly: “Fuck it.” But I didn’t say it aloud, and I didn’t do anything differently. Such are the silent, sad rebellions of Dahlia Moss. Instead I got dressed with less time than it would usually have taken, and began my day in a grand tradition of half-assing it.
I had learned nothing from my last bombed job interview, because when I arrived at the agency, dressed far too casually in a tatty gray blouse that would have been pushing my luck on casual Friday, my mind was still swirling with questions. I couldn’t get over that initial hunch that Jonah had hired me to shake down someone who he himself didn’t think had stolen the spear. I was probably being cocky to trust my instincts so much—I had zero detective experience, as Maddocks had reminded me. But I couldn’t let go of it. Something told me that this was an important piece of the puzzle.
The waiting room was filled with applicants who in other circumstances I would be scowling at and studying. It was disheartening because you would often see many of the same faces. But this time I was in another world altogether, thinking through what had been said last night. I wasn’t exactly amassing a treasure trove of clues. There wasn’t any reason to suspect anyone, except perhaps Ophelia, and even then, my evidence was mostly that she was kind of crabby.
I couldn’t even tell you how long I was waiting out in the lobby. Someone eventually called my name, and I was shuttled down a long corridor to a colorless, coffin-shaped room where I was interviewed by someone named Beth. Interview rooms were always colorless. Never had I been interviewed in a room painted vividly in chartreuse. Maybe it would have riled candidates up too much. Or maybe I was applying for the wrong jobs.
Beth was in her thirties, and looking at her, I was reminded of Jennifer Ebel from just a few days earlier. She looked like a downmarket version of Jennifer—same black dress, same efficient manner, but not as put together. Although, she lacked ridiculous earrings, which had to be a point in Beth’s favor.
She was droning on about the virtues of her company, but I couldn’t honestly say that I was listening to her. Instead, I was thinking about Jennifer herself. Maybe it was a mistake to limit my investigation to the world of Zoth. Jennifer probably didn’t steal the spear, sure. But she could give me more insight into Jonah’s life, and the news of Jonah’s murder just might have melted part of that icy exterior of hers. Detective Maddocks probably wouldn’t love it if I talked with her, but that was part of being a private eye, right?
I’m sure she’d have great ideas about an online funeral.
“I said, Miss Moss, it looks as though you’ve been unemployed for quite some time.”
Oh dear, Beth was speaking to me. And she was complaining about me being unemployed, which was a riddle I never had patience for, even in the best of times. It works like this: Once you’ve been unemployed for too long, you’re somehow deemed unhireable, because you’ve been unemployed for too long. It was a cruel circular logic. Generally, I would give my standard answer about being especially keen to make my mark on my career as a whatever I was trying to get hired for. But I suddenly couldn’t remember what I was interviewing for that day. This was clearly destined to go down the tubes, although this time I was very resilient to the anguish of it.
“Have I? I’ve been so busy lately,” I mumbled.
Beth regarded this statement with a polite skepticism.
“You ought to update your résumé, as your new activities are not reflected in what you’ve given us.”
This is where I would ordinarily be backpedalling to try to recapture the interviewer’s favor. But this time I was still distant, even thinking about the case a little.
“Well, let’s see how it works out first,” I said. “Before I put it on the résumé.”
Beth was undeterred. I suppose she thought I was lying. “What are your new activities?”
“I’m wary to say, because it’s slightly insane.”
And she perked up at this. I suddenly realized that Beth’s job must be terribly boring, interviewing the same identical schlubs for a job none of them wanted. I got tired of seeing them all in the waiting room every interview; at least I didn’t have to maintain a dialogue.
“Go on.” She was perking up, all right.
“I’ve been working as a private detective.”
“Oh. Why is that insane?” Beth asked, a little more disappointed than I expected. I guess she was hoping for actually insane, not merely slightly so.
“You’ve got my résumé. I don’t have the background for it.”
“Meh,” she said. “People transition into jobs all the time. Is it working out for you?” She was being unexpectedly kind, but skepticism had begun creeping back into her voice. I’m sure people lie to her outright all the time, so I didn’t take it personally.
“I’ve made eleven thousand dollars in five days. So it’s been going well in a financial sense, I suppose. I don’t know if my investigation is going well. I’ve definitely learned things, but I don’t have a supervisor or any sort of rubric to tell me how I’m doing.”
I knew people like Beth appreciated words like “rubric,” so I made a point of throwing it in, and it did indeed seem to please her. “So, why are you applying for this job?”
It was a good question. Even if Beth was a little snotty, it was fair to ask. I thought for a moment before I gave my answer. I think this unnerved Beth more than anything—someone calmly considering a completely bullshitless answer.
“I don’t even remember what this job is,” I told her. “I applied for it before this all happened. I probably shouldn’t even have come. It’s embarrassing, really. Even when I succeed, I’m slightly embarrassed; it’s like discovering that you’re really good with a garrote. Detecting is not a respectable skill.”
“Respectable skills are overrated. The job market is saturated with them. But yes, you probably shouldn’t be here if you don’t know what you’re applying for. Why did you come?”
“Habit? I was also thinking I would make more progress on the case somehow, if I wasn’t thinking about it all the time.”
Beth seemed to regard this as interesting.
“Did that work?”
“I haven’t ever stopped thinking about it,” I said, sighing. “It’s like when you’ve looked at the sun and then close your eyes, how you can still see its outline.”
“Maybe try the Botanical Garden,” said Beth. “I’ve always thought it’s a good place to clear your head. It’s where I send applicants when they start crying mid-interview.”
“Does that happen a lot?”
“Often enough. And you never know the questions that will set people off. I asked one woman if she could use Microsoft Excel, and she starting bawling and threw a chair.”
This was clearly the strangest interview I had ever had, and I had applied to be one of the people who scares you with a bladeless chainsaw at a corporate haunted house.
“Well, thanks for coming in,” said Beth. “We’ll keep your résumé on file. For what that’s worth.”
“Hey,” I said, “how about I ask you a quick question about my case? I told you I needed a supervisor.”
“Is that appropriate?” asked Beth. She was trying to bristle, but her eyes told me that she was enjoying this.
“I didn’t realize we were bothering with appropriate,” I said.
Beth shrugged, but she couldn’t completely repress her smile. I took that for a yes.
“Here it is: If you were sure that your friend hadn’t committed a crime, why would you tell a detective that you thought he did? And then send that detective to investigate him?”
“I’m one hundred percent sure my friend is innocent?”
“You have no doubts,” I told her, despite the fact that I had plenty.
Beth thought about it and gave an answer that was the kind of wormy little response that I would expect from Human Resources.
“Maybe I’m sending a message.”
“What kind of message?”
“Maybe I want the thief to think I’m on the wrong track. Or maybe I want to visibly threaten someone who’s innocent to make the thief feel bad.”
Ophelia had a connection with Kurt, and she could use the spear. Was Jonah’s hiring all a show to get Ophelia to give the spear back? There were worse theories.
Beth was looking at me expectantly.
“Is that the right answer?” she asked.
“Could be. Ask me again in a week,” I told her.
“Sure,” said Beth, amused. “When I call to tell you you’re hired, you can give me an update.”
I didn’t know what to make of Beth, but I did find myself taking her advice and making an unexpected trip to Saint Louis’s Botanical Garden. It was not on my way. Going there meant killing hours of my day, and yet now that the idea had been planted there, it seemed like the only possible course of action. I’d always liked the place. But it was somehow another of these locations that the combination of my failed career and disastrous breakup had made toxic. Most of the best parts of Saint Louis had this aura, come to think of it. Lately, I had been living in fear of running into people I knew. They would ask questions, and the answers invariably prompted these looks of involuntary pity.
I do not love involuntary pity. In fact, it’s my least favorite kind of pity. If I want to be pitied, I absolutely require it to be the sort of pity that I am actively clamoring for. As in, I’m pretending to be out of gas in a strange town, and I’m scamming you out of ten dollars. That sort of pity is okay, and even then only in limited circumstances. When I ran into people I knew, it was instead the kind of pity you gave to a dog that was hopping around on one leg. Dahlia, who has no job. Dahlia, whose friends all sided with her ex-boyfriend. Blech.
And yet something felt different. It was a typical morning—an interview for a job that I certainly wasn’t going to get—but I was electric. I didn’t want to jinx it, but I think I felt like my old self. And my old self was awesome.
My head was covered with a plastic shopping bag.
“Guess who?” a voice asked me.
There was no need to ask who might have sneaked up behind me outside a hedge maze and dumped a plastic bag over my head, even if I didn’t recognize the voice, which I certainly did.
And she didn’t wait for an answer anyway.
“It’s Charice!”
“Yes, Charice. What are you doing here?”
“I’ve been tracking you.”
The next obvious question would be for me to ask how she was tracking me, and I really, really, really wanted to skip over this part, but I couldn’t help but wonder—how was she tracking me?
“Fine,” I said. “If you take this plastic bag off my head, I’ll ask how you’re tracking me.”
She removed the bag, and I bit.
“I’ve got your iPad. I’m using the ‘Find My iPhone’ app. Pretty great solution, eh?”
“A solution for what?”
“For not being able to track someone.”
I was not sure that it was that great a solution, no. For one, it involved slipping my $400 iPhone surreptitiously on someone. Which was a large, bulky, easily findable thing. Which would lead back to me. And cost $400. But these were not details I was going to waste on Charice right now.
“Why have you tracked me, exactly?”
“To give you an update!”
“You are aware that I have my iPhone, clearly. You could have called me.”
“Well, I also wanted to test my tracking system.”