The Unfortunate Decisions of Dahlia Moss Page 16

  That little mystery was troubling enough. I didn’t even know what to say about the slightly cheeky vibe I had picked up around Anson. It was like the pseudo-flirting you can do around gay guys: fun and brazen and, because you know there’s zero chance of a relationship starting, totally risk-free. I was doing it around Shuler, without the fail-safe. Dangerous waters, Dahlia. Canceled? GLECAD’s cast was expanding like it was working toward a spin-off.

  I found myself wishing that I had asked more questions of Shuler when he had made his vague little proclamation. Which friends? I should have asked him. Biology friends? Gamer friends? Nathan and company? Technically speaking, Jonah was someone who didn’t really have friends. He had people, acquaintances of varying degrees, whom he probably referred to as friends. But they weren’t friends, at least not as I understood the word. They were, well, a politician’s idea of friends. People who Jonah had a little history with, and who perhaps might prove useful down the road, career-wise, or for tanking aggro off a raid boss. If he had lived, he’d probably be describing me as one of his “friends,” eventually.

  The trick was, with Jonah’s broad definition of friendship, an edict to avoid friends of Jonah Long was not practical. Jonah was one of those souls who just went around collecting people. He wasn’t the head of the Event Horizons, he wasn’t the heart of the Horizons, but he was definitely its fingers. More than half the guild seemed to know him personally. He interacted with everyone, however facilely. So the question of avoiding his friends was not very constructive. Doing it properly would probably entail avoiding wide swaths of Saint Louis.

  Of course, Charice was nowhere to be found. I took this to mean that she went home with one of the actors, which was a very safe bet. My money was on the half-naked man I saw who was playing Jesus. From what I saw, Jesus had abs. Plus, it would play to Charice’s sense of the grand.

  But it was just like her to not be around when I actually wanted to speak to her. Hot and cold, that Charice. Instead, I spent the rest of the morning in solitude. A quick trip to the library, a little mulling around the mall. I took Shuler’s advice, but that meant making no progress on the case at all. It worried me that this was perhaps the intended result of his warning.

  I still hadn’t told Charice about the spear. By the time I made it to Jonah’s funeral, I was ready to shout it from the rooftops. If Jehovah’s Witnesses had wanted to enter my home to go over the wonderful appeal of eternal life, I would have more than happily entertained them, provided I also got to bounce off my own exploits.

  It was certainly not the attitude I should have entered the scene with. I should have been solemn, respectful, and most of all observant. I was none of these. “Peevish” was a good word to describe my mood. And the only person I was looking for was Charice, who, goddamn it, really should sit and listen to how amazing I was for a minute. Or so I felt at the time.

  I didn’t have a lot of experience with funerals. The only one I had ever attended, at least that I was old enough to remember, was for my uncle Kyle’s grandmother, who died at 103. The entire family went, because my aunt Lorraine had been cheating on Kyle for some time, which my parents knew about, and they felt guilty. So we went to the funeral of this strange unknown woman to compensate. I realize that doesn’t make any sense, but it’s how we Mosses operate.

  It was basically a kind of nightmare. Kyle cried constantly. Lorraine glowered at us for coming. Alden hit on a pallbearer and disappeared with him behind the church while the rest of us sang “Amazing Grace.” Me, I just sat there and squirmed. At fourteen, I could notice the details, but I didn’t have any of the subtext. The only clue I had was what all fourteen-year-olds have: Grown-ups are weird.

  It was an insight that, while still true, didn’t help me now. Surely this funeral would go better. Even if I didn’t get any clues, it had to go better. Right?

  I got there early for the purpose of speaking to Charice before the funeral began and because I took a chance and drove my jalopy, which you always need to allot extra time for. But she was not there, still. My other purpose was to figure out where these alleged photographers were, which I found was not hard at all. There were just photographers around, taking pictures of things. They made no particular effort to hide themselves. It looked like three people to me. But they weren’t being a burden—it wasn’t as if they had flashbulbs that they were irritating everyone with or were forcing people to stand awkwardly together.

  The funeral was taking place outdoors, at a cemetery I had never visited or even heard of. This was probably because it was not a cemetery for poor people. It was very old—at least for Saint Louis—and had the lavish sort of mausoleums that one expects in the Northeast. Jonah’s gravestone, by contrast, was pretty modest. A crowd, smaller than I would have guessed—perhaps sixty people or so—sort of muddled about in folding chairs, most of them not sitting down just yet, as if they weren’t ready to commit to the thing. From the uneasiness and uncertainty in the air, I guessed that Jonah’s parents hadn’t shown up yet. Perhaps they were making an entrance with the priest. The thing wasn’t going to start without them.

  I was scanning the crowd for Charice but instead found Jennifer Ebel. She was dressed as soberly as she had been when we first met, but then it struck me that she was probably perpetually dressed for a funeral. She took my polite nod for a suggestion to come over and talk; that, or she was bored. I couldn’t blame her—for someone so young, it seemed that most of the mourners here were rather advanced in age. It was hard to guess how they could have known Jonah, except for the obvious guess that they were all friends of his parents.

  Jennifer was upon me faster than one would have thought possible to move in a getup as highly starched as the one she was wearing. As she got near to me, I realized that she was also wearing tiny skull earrings, which, while subtle, had to be said to be unspeakably tacky. At least it answered my earlier question about her. Jennifer was a humorless girl who had somehow acquired an inexplicable penchant for novelty jewelry. No one, as Christopher Durang says, is all one thing.

  “How’s your case coming?” asked Jennifer.

  Had I said that I would have confessed details of my case to Jehovah’s Witnesses earlier? I meant it then, and damn if I didn’t want to spill the beans now, but there was something in Jennifer’s fake casualness that made the hair on my not-recently-enough-shaved legs stand on end. Who did she think she was fooling?

  “So far,” I told her, “he’s still dead. Nothing I’ve accomplished seems to have brought him back.”

  As comments go, this was a little like fetid air. It meant nothing, signified nothing, and was vaguely distasteful. It was just the first thing I had thought to say. It did not deter Jennifer in the slightest, however. Why would it? She was wearing skull earrings to a funeral.

  “I heard that Jonah was murdered,” she told me. She could not have achieved a more fake version of a casually lobbed-off comment if she worked on it. Maybe if she had thrown in a “girlfriend” to preface the phrase—as in “Girlfriend, I heard that Jonah was murdered.” Maybe then. But then again, it was all so forced and fake that I’m not sure it would have made a difference. This second query didn’t irritate me as much as the first. Mostly it just left me embarrassed at Jennifer’s terrible social skills.

  “I don’t know that a funeral service is the best place to discuss this, Jennifer.”

  “That’s why I thought I’d ask you before it starts. You’re the detective. Who do you think killed him?”

  At least she had had the good graces to keep her voice low, although apparently the gentleman behind me had heard her mindless theory-mongering, because he was graceful enough to give me a chance to escape.

  “A detective?” he said, in a faux British-y voice that I realized instantly had to be Threadwork’s. “You must be the unstoppable Dahlia Moss. A pleasure to meet you.”

  I don’t know why I was so shocked to see a Horizon at Jonah’s funeral. I suppose I thought of Zoth, however irrationall
y, as a distant land only reachable by modem. Of course, it wasn’t. And here was living proof.

  “Good grief,” I said. “I didn’t realize you were a local.”

  “I’m not a local,” said Threadwork, just as puffily as you would imagine it. “I hail from the fabled city of Baltimore, glimmering city of glassphalt.”

  It was a ridiculous delivery of what was already a very silly line, and I regarded the man in front of me with what must have been too long a stare. Jennifer seemed to be doing it too. It was just that I was checking to see if he were some sort of hologram or ventriloquist’s doll. The voice that was emanating from him—this fey, wispy British thing—seemed to belong in a completely different body.

  The gentleman—Threadwork—was African American (or I supposed, possibly African English—but really, who in Britain actually spoke like that?) and must have been close to seven feet tall. Or would have been, if he were standing. But he wasn’t standing—he was sitting in a wheelchair. Despite this, he seemed to sort of loom over me and Jennifer both. I’d generally never describe someone in a wheelchair as being menacing, but I had to admit that Threadwork was indeed very large. His muscles had muscles. If his legs were inoperable, it seemed as though his arms and chest were going to pick up the slack. And when they were done picking up slack, they might just rip a tree out of the ground and throw it.

  It was not the man I had imagined, to say the least.

  But it was definitely Threadwork—you could tell that from how he expanded to fill the conversation.

  “There’s no good weather for a funeral, don’t you think? Either it’s dreary and cold, and makes everyone miserable, or it’s sunny and beautiful and seems as though God isn’t actually all that sad about you being dead.”

  He looked up at the sky, which was indeed sunny and beautiful. “Still, I suppose. Better this than hail.”

  Threadwork went on for a bit more while I gaped at him, and Jennifer quickly made her escape.

  “What a detestable woman,” he said after she left. “Asking you who you thought murdered Jonah. Oh, by the way, I’m Threadwork.”

  Incidentally, just so he doesn’t come off as a complete crazy person—Threadwork did tell me his real name. But to keep things simpler, I’m sticking with Threadwork. It suits him better anyway. And less hyphens.

  “Yes,” I said. “I gleaned that. Thank you for driving her off. Although I don’t think that she’s detestable so much as awkward.”

  “Awkward or not, there are things that we do not do.”

  It was such a puffy thing to say that it prompted my next question with almost no thought at all.

  “Is that your real voice?”

  “Not in the slightest, no. But I’ve decided that I’m going to use it for my adventures today, and at the convention. Are you going, by the way?”

  “I hadn’t planned on it.”

  “You should. You’d have a lovely time, and perhaps you would solve your case. Besides, I’m going to go, and you would be another interesting person to talk with.”

  Crowds were beginning to gather, and I found myself thinking that we should move toward the chairs. But I was still slightly hypnotized by the improbable figure in front of me.

  “Why don’t you use your real voice?”

  Threadwork paused for a moment, as if deciding to answer my question cleverly or truthfully. “I don’t much care for the way people react to me when I use my ‘real voice.’”

  “Is this some kind of race thing?” I asked him. Apparently the wake of Jennifer had left me with a surprising directness.

  “Partially,” he said. “But mostly it’s that when I speak in my regular voice, people regard me as some sort of walking tragedy. ‘That poor man.’ I’ve actually heard someone say that when they thought I was out of earshot. But when I’m Threadwork, they regard me as a curiosity. Have you met that strange fellow in the wheelchair? What a curious gentleman he is.”

  I wasn’t sure what to make of any of this. Frankly, I thought using a false voice all the time seemed a little tragic myself. But it was as if Threadwork had read my mind and answered this unspoken thought at once.

  “I don’t use this voice in my regular life, please understand. It was just for the character. Just for Threadwork. But now that I’m being dragged into the light, as it were, I don’t want to be recontextualized. I am not a tragedy.”

  “Do you want to tell me your story?”

  “Most definitely not, no. Although I fear you’ll just look it up anyway.”

  “Probably so. I’m not very good at leaving unanswered mysteries alone.”

  “I’ll give it to you in six words, then. I played college basketball,” said Threadwork, then gestured at his legs. “Very briefly.”

  “Car crash?”

  “A horse.”

  “It’s nice to meet you, Threadwork. I’m sorry to force you out of your comfort zone.”

  “Well, you didn’t murder Jonah Long and steal the Bejeweled Spear of Infinite Piercing. You’re not the cause of any of this, just another thing to be endured.”

  And his tone had gotten shorter with me. It was a mistake to force the story out of him. It wasn’t relevant to the case; it wasn’t relevant to anything. Being a detective, if you’re not careful, can give you false license to get into everyone’s business. Like one of those horrible people at dinner parties who consider themselves “truth tellers”—and yet only seem to offer truths that are critical. Any virtue can be taken too far.

  “Did Clemency come with you?”

  It was an unjustified question, honestly—but something about Clem and Threadwork struck me as a pairing. Not a romantic pairing, just a pairing. Like Laurel and Hardy, or Tycho and Gabe.

  “I met her at the airport. She’s with Jonah’s parents now, I believe. I assume they’re going to all arrive together.”

  This surprised me more than Threadwork’s backstory. “How does she know Jonah’s parents?”

  “I don’t believe she does. But she went to meet them this morning with food she had made, and I haven’t heard from her since. But you know Clemency. She’s so good at feelings.”

  The funeral started late, because no one was willing to begin without Jonah’s parents there, although at twenty minutes after its start time, doubts began to foment that they were going to make the event at all. On the one hand, it should be inexcusable to miss the funeral of your son, but on the other, it really feels like an event that you shouldn’t witness. Getting there very late, and looking dazed and beleaguered, as Sylvia and Harvey Long did, was perhaps the most socially acceptable way to deal with the situation.

  The funeral was more secular than I had imagined. The priest spoke only in generalities and never mentioned God or any particular religion. Rather, he focused on how much Jonah would be missed, all the holes he would leave behind, and how it was up to us to honor his memory.

  It was depressing as hell.

  After the funeral, I had had a vague hope of speaking with Sylvia or Harvey Long, but they were swarmed with well-wishers, and they clearly didn’t want to deal with the ones they had. Sylvia, it had to be said, looked remarkably like her son. Same facial structure, same body type. Harvey, on the other hand… If I had to describe him quickly on a Ouija board, I’d go with LLWBRIMLEY. Regardless, they bolted out of the funeral as if they expected the coffin to explode in a rain of fire, mowing through friends and family as they headed toward the limo that had brought them here. Stopping them would have required an elemental force, such as lightning, or a wall of plague rats. And frankly, I wasn’t sure the rats would do it.

  I still hadn’t seen Charice, but I could just feel that she was here. She was waiting for me to let down my guard so she could pop out at me from behind a tombstone, or leap out from a casket. I was not having it.

  I made small talk, but it was clear that this was a work obligation, not some terrarium of suspects, which was what Charice had hoped for. I did notice the pretty brunette that was talking to
Threadwork. She was as unsurprising as he had been revelatory. Clemency was exactly as I had imagined she might look.

  She looked to be about thirty, with the short, straight plain hair that one expects a kindergarten teacher to have. Her face was small but expressive, and she had—I could tell, even from a distance—a teacher’s way of talking with her hands. When she spotted me, she brightened visibly.

  “Dahlia!” she said, hugging me. “Thank you for coming out for this.”

  At least from outward appearances, Clemency had the sort of pregnancy that women’s magazines yearn for. She was pregnant but otherwise rail thin, a cute little baby bump showing at her waist, while the rest of her looked ready for a trip to the beach. “Glowing” is the word my mother likes to use for the phenomenon.

  “It’s nothing,” I said. “How are Jonah’s parents?”

  “As well as can be expected. So, lousy, really. They’re very impressed with you—I guess their lawyer is sending them good reports.”

  I think I preened a bit at the line, which probably wasn’t wise or appropriate given that Clemency was a suspect herself. Perhaps not a very likely suspect, but a suspect nonetheless—and I should accept her secondhand assessments of me with Bogart indifference. That’s in retrospect, however. In the moment, I preened. I don’t even think she noticed, though—she had her own problems on her mind.

  “I went over to see them this morning with cinnamon buns. Which seems like a ridiculous offering, I know. Your son was murdered, here are some cinnamon buns. But you know, people die and you bring food. That’s what you do.”

  “You came with them, so I guess the cinnamon buns worked out.”