The Unfortunate Decisions of Dahlia Moss Page 14

  “It’s somewhat complicated,” said Masako, in a completely uncomplicated voice, “but the gist of it is that I left him for my sister-in-law’s midwife.”

  “And that would be a woman?” As relationship-threatening answers go, switching to the other team was as good as I could hope for.

  “It would.”

  “So you’re a lesbian.”

  And Masako half smiled, which is as close as she gets to smiling most of the time, I would later learn. “It would seem not, no. But at the time, it seemed very reasonable to double-check.”

  This answer was less reassuring. Masako could read my face—I might be good at making guesses and deductions, but I did not have a private eye’s inscrutable face. When I tried to look inscrutable, mostly I gave the impression of mild constipation. And even this required an embarrassing amount of concentration to maintain.

  Masako had the opposite problem—her face would have been great for police interviews. Squeezing an emotional response out of her face was like trying to get the last bit of toothpaste out of a tube. It was as if she had been born Botoxed, and frowning, to boot. She was trying, mostly unsuccessfully, I should note, to look friendly now.

  “I am not interested in Nathan, so you should not worry about it. I am emphatically so not interested in Nathan that it was completely unnecessary to move out.”

  “I can still hear you,” shouted Nathan from the other room.

  Masako said loudly, “He is very handsome, however.” Then silently mimed the words to me, Not. To. Me.

  And there you have it. I decided to trust her. At least about that. I wasn’t ruling out that she hadn’t gone downstairs and speared Jonah to death, just on principle, but when two people emphatically insist that they’re not interested in each other, sometimes it’s best to just let go.

  I sat down on the sofa and asked, “What do you do for fun around here?”

  “Anything that does not involve model trains,” Masako said.

  At which point, Nathan entered the room and collapsed into the armchair across from us, in a clear rebuke to the yardage of sofa. He did not sit in the chair like a normal person but instead draped his legs over the side of it, affecting a pose of amused decadence.

  “Do you have an anagram?” he asked.

  “Hmm,” said Masako, poring over her phone. “Foist themselves a lithium Stoli?”

  There was a silence as we all considered the ramifications of this.

  “You’ve cracked this case wide open,” I told Masako.

  “I don’t know. I think it’s very practical,” said Nathan. “I believe that foisting a little Stoli on ourselves is exactly what we need.”

  “If it has lithium in it, I’ll pass.”

  “There’s always wine, if you want a softer approach,” offered Nathan.

  And suddenly we were all sitting on the floor, drinking a rosé. For detecting, it was probably not helpful. But it was sweet and good, and I realized that I had not sat on a floor and had wine with friends in entirely too long.

  Kurt stumbled back into the room. He hadn’t had any wine yet; he just stumbled.

  And he sat down, on the floor too. We were all on the floor now. Fields of sofa, and we just sat on the floor. But it felt right somehow.

  “Your email?” I asked. “You thought you would find something in your email?”

  “You were very dramatic about it,” noted Masako, pleased.

  “I didn’t,” said Kurt. “But I think I know what it’s about. It’s the Left Field Games Summit. He wants me to go to the Left Field Games Summit.”

  Left Field Games was the company that made Kingdoms of Zoth. I knew this because every time you logged in to the game, you had to watch their silly little three-second logo of a baseball landing in grass. Sort of a gaming equivalent of the Columbia Pictures woman holding the torch. But markedly less grand.

  “So this was an apology,” I asked. Nathan poured another mug of rosé. No fancy wineglasses here. Mugs. I think Nathan’s had the molecular structure of caffeine on it.

  “That’s how Jonah did apologies,” said Kurt. “He could never manage them head-on.”

  “This level life too has its summit. The Games Summit. Why are you frowning? I think it’s cute.”

  I had taken that Kurt wasn’t fond of wordplay. He frowned even more deeply now and said, “I’m not going. It’ll be terrible.”

  “Have you ever been before?”

  “No, it’s in Phoenix. Who goes to Phoenix?”

  “How do you know it’s terrible if you’ve never been?” I asked him.

  Nathan was still lounging on the chair. “This is why I said you have an interrogative manner.”

  “I’ve been to things like it. One con is like any other. Probably.”

  “Do what you want. It’s your theory, after all. But it sounds like Jonah intended for you to have a good time on his behalf.”

  Kurt’s frown grew deeper still. I wasn’t sure why the idea troubled him, but it apparently did. “Yes, you’re probably right. That’s just the kind of big gesture that Jonah was fond of.”

  “So… yay?” I hadn’t intended it as a question. I wasn’t sure what was so horrible about the notion of going to the Games Summit. I wasn’t even particularly into Zoth, but conventions were fun. People in costumes, visiting a new city, and late-night drinking with cute nerds. Or, at least, alcohol could make them seem so.

  “It’s just such a burden. It’s exactly like Jonah. It’s a big gesture, but with very little thinking behind it. The Games Summit is this weekend. Do you have any idea how much money it will cost to buy a ticket to Phoenix on such short notice?”

  Masako said, “You’re not working, you’re not in school. You could take a road trip.”

  “Not in my car,” said Kurt, which was a notion I could identify with.

  “It’s the last request of a dead man,” said Nathan with the carelessness and the caprice of someone who would not have to fly to Arizona. The comment deflated Kurt, however.

  “Right, then. Well, time to go to Zoth.”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Kurt, by the ancient rule known as firsties, was stationed at a very nice computer indeed, and I was splayed out on the carpet using a laptop of yesteryear, which meant that I had a frame rate that made Steamboat Willie look like Pixar. However, given that I wasn’t actually playing, and that I just flittered about the dangerous fields of Zoth with a harp, it didn’t matter terribly much.

  It did not take long to find out that the Horizons were in chaos.

  Everyone had gotten Bejeweled Spears of Infinite Piercing. That was wave one of the shock.

  “It’s fabulous,” said Clemency with a reverence I hadn’t yet heard from her. “I don’t know what to say.”

  “It’s beyond fabulous, Clem. It’s mythic. We are now living myth.” Threadwork was not made speechless by the spear exactly, but even he was choosing his words with a solemn care. And he sounded a little less catlike and a little more plain than was his custom.

  All the Horizons were there, all logged on. I haven’t mentioned most of them, as they aren’t strictly relevant, but taken altogether they made quite a group. They seemed very international, sort of like the X-Men. There was their leader, who was some Canadian kid given to saying things like, “Pretty flash, eh?” There was Terrible Southern Accent Guy. And speaking of dreadful accents, Orchardary and Threadwork seemed to be in a war of seeing who could dominate the conversation most.

  “It is, without a doubt,” she was saying in a thick Indian American accent, “the most outlandish thing I have ever seen. How much would such a thing cost? It is unthinkable.”

  Canada Guy was stammering. Kurt sounded like he was going to cry. Threadwork kept spitting out superlatives—this group, who was usually very restrained about everyone talking over one another on Teamspeak—was utterly disarmed. It dissolved into a cacophony of conversations.

  Only Ophelia was unamused. “This is the least practical present anyon
e has ever been given.”

  “It’s just an ornament,” said Orchardary. “Granted, it is too heavy to put on my mantel, at least when nieces and nephews come to visit.”

  “I can’t believe it,” said Scarred for Life with His Southern Accent Guy. “I mean, I was slightly pissed at him for stealing the spear, but I never imagined this.”

  “He was full of surprises, wasn’t he?” said Clemency.

  And that was just wave one. At eight PM, on the dot, everyone in the guild got mail. From Jonah.

  It happened like this—the wave of burbling about the spears, it mostly died out into a stunned silence, which was solemn and felt meaningful. Until Orchardary broke it with a speech, going on about the spear’s market value, which suggested she had planned to hock the thing later in the evening. I interrupted this speech and reintroduced myself—because, frankly, I think everyone had forgotten about me.

  “Guys, I’m here to plan a funeral for Jonah. I’ll email you all the details about that, but I’m also here to talk to you about the theft of the spear.”

  “So you’re a funeral planner and a detective both?” asked the Southerner, through that Mississippi drawl of his. “What else can you do?”

  And then it turned eight o’clock. I had thought that everyone must had registered this clown’s line as some great burn on me, because it was dead silent after that.

  “Well, yes,” I said. “I am doing both of those things. I grant you it’s a little unusual, but this is what I was hired to do.”

  But I needn’t have bothered. No one was listening to me.

  “Did anyone else just get mail in-game?”

  “Yes,” said Threadwork. “I got one from Jonah.”

  “As did I,” said Captain Canada.

  “Oh, dear lord,” said Orcharary, who was sounding more than a little frayed.

  “we all got them,” typed Chtusk.

  “You’ve got to get that mic fixed,” said the Canadian guy.

  “it’s a new mic. i don’t know why it isn’t working.”

  “This is not the time to berate each other over technical problems, Oat. We all just got mail from a dead guild mate.”

  I, of course, hadn’t gotten an email from my dead guild mate, but I knew better than to interrupt this.

  Threadwork spoke again, his cat-voice turned down to such subtlety that I thought I knew what he must have sounded like in real life now. “Does everyone else’s email just contain some TinyURL links?”

  “Yup,” said Oatcake. “In other circumstances I wouldn’t recommend clicking on these because there’s no telling what kind of virus they might link to.”

  “Yes,” said Clemency. “In other circumstances.”

  There was still a round of stunned silence. We had gone from everyone talking at once to no one talking at all. I was still working out how a dead guy had sent email. The way I saw it, there were three possibilities. Either Jonah had arranged for the email to go out in advance, before he died, or his parents had recovered the account and they had sent it. Or, and this was the alarming possibility, this email was sent by the same person who had hacked his account and stolen the spear in the first place. It could be a virus, a keylogger—or, if the person who stole the account was also the person who had murdered Jonah, something far more sinister.

  When you put it that way, I wouldn’t have wanted to click on the link either.

  “Fortune favors the brave,” said Threadwork, sounding much more resigned than brave.

  What I heard next was an agonizingly long period of typing and mouse-clicking, followed by a parade of gasps and a “Well, shit” from Southern Guy. And then silence again.

  I wanted to just yell out, “For chrissakes, just tell me what they linked to,” but it seemed wrong to interrupt the stunned silence.

  “Well,” said Clemency, “it looks like we’re all going to the Games Summit.”

  And then they were all talking again. Apparently they were links to vouchers for plane tickets and boarding accommodations—a hotel suite, rental cars, all of it. They were going to the Games Summit, and they were going in style. I don’t know if it was because Jonah was dead, or the double dosage of generosity or what, but I might have been participating in the weepiest chat-room channel in the history of the Internet.

  Oatcake was clearly, openly crying. “That bastard,” he was saying, “he was such an asshole sometimes. But he was our asshole.”

  Typed out, it might not look like the sweetest epitaph ever written, but somehow, those were the magic words that just sent everyone weeping. And cursing. There was a lot of cursing as well. But this was the Internet.

  “God bless Jonah,” typed—not said—Chtusk, who was apparently still having mic problems.

  “He stole the spear from us,” said Tambras. “But he wanted our respect. Oh, fuck him. I’ll miss the bastard.” And she was crying too.

  I tried to listen for someone who sounded especially bristly or guilty somehow, but it felt ethically incorrect—and beyond that, impractical. Everyone felt guilty, it seemed to me. When someone dies and posthumously gives you extravagant gifts, it’s impossible to feel any other way, isn’t it?

  “He was much cleverer than I had given him credit for,” Orchardary was saying. At least it wasn’t the Southerner going on and on—her accent was at least musical and fun to listen to. “It’s a literary joke. This level life too has its Games Summit. Ho, ho.”

  Kurt, whom I could hear in surround when he spoke loud enough: “I don’t get it.”

  “It’s from ‘A Walk to Wachusett’ by Henry David Thoreau. Hang on, I’ll google it.” A moment later, she was reading.

  Remember within what walls we lie, and understand that this level life too has its summit, and why from the mountain-top the deepest valleys have a tinge of blue; that there is elevation in every hour.

  And she paused, clearly having a sense of drama to her.

  And we have only to stand on the summit of our hour to command an uninterrupted Horizon.

  “Jesus fucking Christ,” said Tambras.

  And the rest of the Horizons were expressing similar shock.

  “It really is an apology,” said Clemency. “It’s kind of a beautiful apology. I didn’t know that he had it in him. It’s so… un-Jonah.”

  Tambras made a grunting noise that suggested that she was somehow amorphously skeptical of the whole apology concept but could not exactly explain how.

  The Horizons were all in a state about Jonah Long, and it dawned on me that I would have no better moment to state my case.

  I reminded them, now with much more agency, that Jonah’s online funeral would be held tomorrow night. And then I went in for the kill.

  I hate being overly earnest. I’m good at it; it just hurts. Like Delirium from the Endless can make plenty of sense when she needs to; it just damages her. This was my Delirium moment.

  “Guys, I just want to remind all of you that I’m looking for the Bejeweled Spear of Infinite Piercing on behalf of Jonah’s mom.” I was originally going to say “parents,” but I veered toward “mom” at the last second, sensing that it painted a better picture. I told you I was good at earnest.

  “I’ll be honest with you: I’m not a Zoth person. But I’ve played other games like this, and I know how inside of you they can get. If someone disrespects in Zoth, it feels like they’re disrespecting you in the real world too.” Pause, assess. “And in a way, they are.”

  And they were silent, every last one of them. And they say a Priestess of Usune can’t spellcast.

  “I also know that Jonah’s making off with the spear was contentious at best, and probably kind of a dick move. All I can tell you is that his parents wanted it back, and their wishes are for it to be deleted with his character.”

  “Deleted” was the wrong word choice—I needed something more evocative: “erased,” “entombed,” “buried.” I probably should have used “mom” again too, but I hadn’t lost them.

  “If you know a
nything about it, anything, please let me know. I’m not looking to place blame. I’m not trying to sell anyone down the river. I just want the spear back. For Jonah’s mother.”

  God, I was laying it on thick. But the thing was, I was making myself sad. It wasn’t all fake. And the words I was saying were technically true. Or mostly true anyway. Probably once I figured out who the thief was I would pepper them with follow-up questions and then report it all back to Emily Swenson, so I guess I was a little bit interested in placing blame. But globally, I meant what I was saying.

  Perhaps it was all the loot that Jonah had foisted on them, or perhaps I was just more persuasive this time, but suddenly everyone was interested in what I was saying. I didn’t know if I was going to get any clues, but at least it looked like Jonah’s funeral was going to be a hot spot.

  You might have expected Jonah’s posthumous largesse to prompt a lot of last-minute eulogy material, but this did not prove to be the case. It was only Chtusk—mic-less Chtusk—who had any material for me.

  “he had nice teeth,” she texted to me. “very clean.”

  I texted to her that this was not exactly the sort of material that made for a thrilling eulogy. I asked her if she had any more personal details about Jonah.

  “his breath was nice also. i can’t help much with personal details. i did not know him very well.”

  Generally speaking, when I have positive opinions of someone’s breath, I know them pretty well. I suggested this to Chtusk, who typed:

  “no sorry. didn’t know him. just nice teeth is all.”

  So, a Shakespeare quote, some platitudes, and nice teeth. This eulogy was shaping up to be awesome. At this rate, I was going to have to crib from Jonah’s real-life funeral tomorrow to get material, which seemed reasonable but tacky. Let’s face it, you don’t want to be the girl taking notes at a funeral.

  In any narrative such as this, there are a lot of things left out. Bathroom breaks, mostly, and I’ve probably said “er,” and “um” hundreds of times up to this point, but if I were completely faithful to the record, it will make me look like an idiot. You already look like an idiot, I can hear you saying. You’re probably right.