The Astonishing Mistakes of Dahlia Moss Read online

  “You press buttons and try not to fall into the water,” I told him.

  “Any particular buttons better than others?”

  “You’ll have to press them to find out.”

  The match started, and my bodyguard immediately walked off the platform and fell to his doom. He wasn’t punched, he wasn’t dragon kicked, he wasn’t hit with a jet of flame. He just walked off to his death.

  “What does this joystick do?” asked Daniel.

  Oscar the Grouch, apparently some kind of vampire, flew toward me and tried to bite my leg, and so I leaped away, and then swept him, knocking him on the ground, but not off the platform. His brother, a flaming ninja, started his dragon kicking at me, which was to say that he was kicking me, but the kicks somehow shot fire.

  Fighting games are not known for their gritty realism.

  Anyway, the kid was clearly very fond of using one move over and over again, and so it was just a question of watching him to figure out how this “dragon kick” worked.

  Burst of fire, kick, shooting into the air, and then there was a moment or two where his character was vulnerable. You can see where this is going.

  Once I realized what he was doing, I let him kick me, blocked the fire, blocked the foot, and punched him in the face.

  Fighting games have a lot of special moves that involve complicated inputs on the joystick. Quarter rolls forward plus punches, half rolls backward, this sideways down diagonal motion that I could never do very consistently. It’s sort of like playing the piano, I guess, if the piano were also being attacked by birds.

  But the truth of the matter is that you can go a long way with just the basics, especially against beginners. People always think of fighters as being twitchy, and they are, but they are fundamentally about controlling space and about picking their moments.

  So I picked my moments. I let Jacob jump toward me, blocked, and then I beat the living shit out of him. Dodging his brother was easy, because he would always yell out, “I’m going to get you!” right before he attacked. Again, five.

  Jacob attacked and—blam!—I punched him in the face. He blocked his face, and then—blam!—I punched him in the stomach. He blocked his stomach, and then—blam!—I punched him the face again. Then he tried to dragon kick me again, and so I blocked for a second and then punched him in the face again.

  This went on for a while. To be clear, I punched a kindergartener in the face seven or eight times in succession. By the time I knocked him into the pool, he was crying, and his brother had put down his controller and was hugging him.

  I then knocked his brother into the pool.

  “Victory!” I said, realizing only later that I should have looked more abashed. I wasn’t trying to rub it in so much as I was surprised that I wasn’t defeated by these two, especially with Daniel zerging into oblivion like that.

  Anyway, Oscar the Grouch wasn’t particularly upset by his defeat, cheering, “Now we get sodas!” but Jacob was really broken up, and I felt I should apologize. Happily, I had Daniel with me to handle this sort of people stuff.

  “Don’t feel bad, kid,” said Daniel. “You did better than me.”

  And then he held out his hand for a handshake, and Jacob took it.

  “Yeah,” Jacob said. “You didn’t do too well at all.”

  “I got confused by this joystick. I should have brought my own. The one you have is pretty cool.”

  “I got this at GameStop,” said Jacob. “I saved my money for six weeks!”

  Thank you, mouthed Game Mom to us, because Jacob appeared to be happy now that he had something else to brag about. The organizers cleared us out of the way to make room for the next victims, and Daniel continued to charm the kids. Also he charmed Game Mom, who I thought might give him her phone number.

  I don’t want to diminish the narrative that Daniel was pretty nice, because he is pretty damned nice, but he was acting, essentially. He was playing the role of the cool older brother, and playing it to the hilt. Maybe it’s a strange response to someone being kind to children, but I suddenly realized that I couldn’t really tell when Daniel was being genuine. Aside from cutting his teeth on new accents, Daniel could project whatever emotion he wanted. Like a sociopath. But a nice one, hopefully.

  “Do you want to check out this storeroom?” I asked Daniel when we got away from the children.

  “I’m not sure I do,” said Daniel. “I feel a little nervous about it, actually.”

  He said that, but he didn’t sound nervous at all. He sounded confident. He sounded like someone who was boldly heading into the future.

  “We have to do it. That’s why we came here.” And despite my affirmative statement, I sounded like someone who was being dragged into the future, kicking and screaming.

  The second floor of the Endicott Hotel was an extension of the first, with a balcony that overlooked the main floor. There were no hotel rooms on this floor, just amenities, like an “exercise room” and some sort of repurposed smoking lounge called the “office room,” with rich dark wood furniture and an oriental rug.

  I was feeling a little weird about coming up here, both because I wasn’t sure who I was meeting, and also because I felt like I was trespassing. I had not paid for the privilege of using the “office room,” and so who was I to go tromping around up here?

  I had insisted that Daniel walk in front of me, as designated victim, but I was also anxious about the decision. From my limited experience playing Dungeons & Dragons with my brother, Alden, whenever the DM made a point of asking for Party Order (i.e., who’s in the front of the line), it was, about half the time, a trap, because you were getting sprung upon from behind. The truly safe place to be was in the middle, but I did not have enough victims for that. I would need to surround myself with bodyguards. Maybe they could carry me around in an egg, like I was Lady Gaga.

  There were two primary halls to go down, and we chose, entirely at random, the one on the left, which led, sure enough to a room marked “Storeroom.” Had we chosen the one on the right, this story might be very different. But this was not an astonishing mistake; this was pure chance.

  I made it to the door of the storeroom—unassuming, uninteresting, and quite misleading.

  “Try the handle,” I told Daniel.

  “You try the handle,” he told me, again in a confident, firm, and very adventuresome voice. He sounded exactly like an adventurer; he just behaved like a sane person.

  I opened the door, although I was prepared to leap back, in case someone had fashioned a dart trap to shoot out at me. (Note to self: I really haven’t played a LOT of Dungeons & Dragons, but it has made an impression on me, at least when opening mysterious doors.)

  There was no dart trap, but it was just as well, because there was Doctor XXX, sitting in the corner, bludgeoned to death.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Is he okay?” asked Daniel.

  It’s easy, and in fact, very tempting to make fun of this question, because Doctor XXX was clearly not okay, given that much of his skull was scattered across the floor. But there’s no normal way to react to this kind of trauma, is there? Besides which, I leaned down and said:

  “Doctor XXX? Psst. Hey, buddy?”

  Which wasn’t appreciably better. Doctor XXX, for his part in this, said nothing.

  “These sorts of stories sound more fun when Charice tells them,” said Daniel. This was true, although Charice had never stumbled across a corpse with me before. I had never stumbled across a corpse with me before. This was my first corpse, aside from my nana, and I didn’t really so much stumble across her as visit her at the funeral home. Also, she hadn’t been bludgeoned to death.

  “I wish we had come up here before we beat up those children,” I told Daniel. “Maybe we could have saved him.”

  It perhaps tells you more about me than I would like that my primary reaction to Doctor XXX’s corpse was guilt.

  “Maybe it’s good we didn’t,” mused Daniel. “How long has he been dead?”<
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  Daniel posed this question to me as though I had a reasonable way of answering it. True, I had managed to suss out a murderer once already, but it didn’t involve measuring out how much blood had pooled on the floor and making calculations. It was an appealing idea, but to do it scientifically, I would need a control, Daniel presumably, whom I could bludgeon to death in a different room, and use the stopwatch app on my iPhone to gauge how much time elapsed before there was a comparable amount of blood.

  I suggested this plan to Daniel, who did not spring for it.

  “Maybe we should get the police,” he said.

  “I think that’s a good idea.”

  “You stay here and guard the corpse, and I’ll run downstairs and tell the desk.”

  It was undoubtedly Daniel’s commanding voice that talked me into this plan. He sounded like someone who knew what he was doing. Someone vaguely Australian who knew what he was doing. But this was nonsense. He didn’t know anything. I didn’t know anything.

  When you run across a dead body, no one has any idea what to do, so every reasonable idea and also unreasonable idea seem equally sensible.

  Anyway, Daniel left. After he headed downstairs, I took a moment to look around. It wasn’t so much that I was sleuthing as that I was afraid someone might jump out from behind something like the water heater.

  The room wasn’t anything special; there was a rack with cleaning supplies, the aforementioned water boiler, a floor sink where a mop could be drained, and, obviously, a bloody corpse. The corpse was definitely the highlight of the room.

  I’m joking slightly, but it wasn’t just the viscera. Whoever Dr. XXX had been, he was certainly natty, with copper-colored corduroy pants, an orange-and-blue-plaid shirt, and plaid socks that matched the shirt. He was a fellow who matched his socks to his shirts. I was happy if my socks matched each other, much less any other outside influence. It was hard to imagine what he looked like, with his complete skull, but I thought probably that he was Asian, although the blood and missing bits made the question a little open. Jet-black hair, though. Mostly Asian facial features, from what I could tell, but it made me queasy to look. Better to focus on socks.

  I took a few minutes to ponder this sock-matching situation, which is probably just a way of coping with a terrible situation. You rest your mind on the less-terrible parts of the arrangement. Had he bought the socks and shirt together? Had them custom made? I wouldn’t even know how to do such a thing if I tried.

  But in terms of distraction, this was a thin soup, compared to a room with a dead body in it.

  And the longer Daniel was gone, the edgier I started to get. Also, the less sense it made to stay in here. He had commanded me to “guard the corpse,” but this was surely something ridiculous that had just been said in the heat of the moment. Guard it from whom? Was this some kind of sketchy spring break situation where someone was going to bust in here and take out Doctor XXX’s kidney? How likely a concern should this actually be?

  What seemed more likely, and in fact, suddenly became rather vivid was the notion that whoever killed the guy might swing back by. Maybe they got nervous about leaving fingerprints? I didn’t see any fingerprints, but no matter. I also didn’t see any obvious weapon. But those are sleuthing questions, and I wasn’t sleuthing. I was just covering my bases. Maybe the murder weapon was in here somewhere, and the murderer wanted to drop by and pick it up. I did not want to stand in the way of this plan.

  I decided that I don’t like being left alone with very recently murdered people, for reasons that I think unnecessary to elucidate. It makes me anxious. And when I get anxious, I need human contact. This is probably why I decided to start streaming again. If someone came back in and murdered me, it would be on film.

  “Hello, Twitch chat,” I said. “How’s everyone this morning?”

  This was too casual an opening for a tiny room with a corpse in it, but I was trying to make myself feel calm.

  To hell with you, said Twitch chat, their customary greeting.

  “So, good news, bad news,” I told chat. “The good news is that I met with Doctor XXX, and that he did not drug me at all. Not even in the slightest.”

  He stood you up, guessed Twitch chat.

  “Not exactly,” I said.

  What’s the bad news, Twitch chat began to eventually ask.

  “The bad news is that he’s been murdered.”

  !!! said Twitch chat.

  “Bludgeoned to death, looks like. I’m in a tiny room with his corpse right now. Someone is fetching the police.”

  Pics or it didn’t happen, said Twitch chat.

  I had been holding the camera specifically so that it did not include Doctor XXX’s corpse, because even I have some sense of propriety. Besides which, snuff was surely in violation of Twitch’s policy. Sexual harassment, certainly not. In fact, I believe that the official jingle for Twitch chat includes several pejorative terms for women and also some racial slurs. It’s basically just harassment with some gaming in the background. But a single corpse, and they’d scream bloody murder, no pun intended.

  “I think I’m going to keep that out of the frame,” I told Twitch chat, who were surprisingly irritated by the development.

  Show us the corpse! they kept typing.

  “I don’t think that’s appropriate.”

  Corpse! Corpse! Corpse! they started chanting.

  “No,” I said. “Good God, no.”

  Maybe just describe it. What does it smell like?

  I was finding their presence a lot less comforting than I had hoped I might, and I began to realize the wisdom of bringing an end to this conversation, and so I cut to the chase. I hadn’t reached out to chat randomly, after all.

  “Police are already on the way,” I told them. “So you don’t need to contact them. Just, you know, if I vanish, take a screenshot for clues.”

  What kind of clues, asked Twitch chat.

  “I don’t know, the last thing I was wearing. A time stamp that shows when I was alive …”

  Do you think a murderer is going to come back and kill you? Get the hell out of there! typed Twitch chat, although there was also a side conversation about my incorrect grammar usage. (It should be the last “things” I was wearing, not “thing,” lest I was wearing just a onesie. I did not engage on this point.)

  “I’m guarding the corpse,” I said in hopefully an authoritative voice, which sounded only a little Australian. Maybe New Zealand.

  From whom? Who wants a corpse? asked Twitch.

  “I don’t know,” I told them. I decided not to develop my Dahlia-might-get-murdered theme, and instead offered a cheerier proposition: “It’s a hotel. If I don’t keep watch, maybe some small children would wander in here and play with it. Or a dog or something. It might lap up all this blood and destroy valuable evidence.”

  All this blood. I really shouldn’t have started talking about the blood at all, because it was a thing that was best to keep out of my mind. Best to focus on socks. Or chat. But there I had gone and started talking about blood.

  And then it just sort of hit me.

  The sensation manifested itself, initially, as a sense of numbness, an awful lot like what I imagine a stroke feels like. Then, I threw up. Over everything. Well, mostly the corpse. It happened very quickly, and my first thought was: Don’t throw up on your computer. So I turned.

  Okay, it mostly hit the wall, in my defense, but it was a small room and there was some ricocheting. A lot of ricocheting.

  Then another wave hit me, this time not vomit, but guilt. Not only had I failed to prevent Doctor XXX’s murder, I had thrown up on him and contaminated the crime scene. Seriously contaminated. I had a comically large breakfast this morning—with oatmeal and strawberries and orange juice and waffles. It was precisely the sort of breakfast that one sees on commercials for sugary cereal, a “Froot Loops is part of this nutritionally balanced breakfast” breakfast.

  That the coroner would now study.

  I a
m so sorry, Doctor XXX.

  “You know what, guys,” I told Twitch chat, whilst wiping vomit off my face. “I think I’m going to get back with you later.”

  Fuck you, said Twitch chat, which was its customary farewell.

  I closed the computer and surveyed the chaos I created. It’s hard to know what the etiquette is for throwing up on a crime scene. Should you clean it up? The corpse-y area, obviously not, but what about the non-corpse-y bits? Do I really just leave my vomit to pool throughout the room?

  I also noticed on the floor by the door an extremely dampened sheet of paper—dampened with my vomit, that is—that appeared to be a program for the improv group that Daniel was a part of. It seemed to me that this was certainly Daniel’s paper, and he somehow dropped it here in the scuffle and excitement. Given that I had thrown up on it, I thought the least I could do was to pick it up.

  Later I would brood on this, and decide it was a mistake, but give me a break. I don’t even consider this one an astonishing mistake—just a regular rookie error.

  But I didn’t get much time to consider it in the moment because I heard screaming from down the hall.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Maybe screaming is too poetic. Hollering? Let’s go with hollering. Because screaming implies shock, or fear. And there wasn’t a lot of that. This was more of an irritated yelling.

  Regardless, when you’re in a room with a corpse, and you hear yelling, you investigate.

  So I left the room, leaving Doctor XXX’s corpse totally unguarded. Although, I had vomited an awful lot in there, and if someone wanted to go in there and mess around, they would probably leave vomit-y footprints. They’d also smell. So in that sense, throwing up was a smart move! Next-level detectiving.

  As the crow flies, the voice was very close to me, and I felt I could hear it pretty well. A little muffled, because it was coming from the other side of the wall, but certainly audible.