The Unfortunate Decisions of Dahlia Moss Page 6

  And he was pleasing to look at, Nathan. He had dark brown hair that looked like something you would find on a Lego mini-fig. It was improbably thick—mini-fig thick—with a buoyancy that was either achieved with molten plastic or a lot of hair gel. He had the classic hipster black-rimmed glasses but had eschewed the bearded-youth look in favor of scruffiness. I’m not a fan of scruff, but it suited him, especially when he smiled, which was always. He looked like an adorable cactus is what I am saying.

  “Did you get roughed up by the police?” he asked me.

  I sat down on an armchair opposite him. Talking to Nathan made me feel prim, although I couldn’t have told you why.

  “The police did not rough me up. What do you mean you tipped them off to me?”

  “Well,” said Nathan, “the police came by after you left and asked a lot of questions. Jennifer didn’t mention you to them, so it was left to me to rat you out. I felt very guilty.”

  Nathan opened his messenger bag and procured a bento box from it. He then opened the bento box and began to eat matchstick carrots and radishes that had been cut into star shapes. When he noticed that I was watching him do all this, he asked: “Carrot?”

  “No, thank you,” I said, less offended and more confused. This was the sort of living theater that Charice usually gathered, but now it was mine. “The police did come by,” I said, “but it wasn’t the end of the world, and I’m sure they would have found me eventually. So I appreciate the apology, but really, it’s fine.”

  “I couldn’t believe that Jennifer didn’t mention you. It was the most exciting thing that’s happened all week, a private eye coming by to clarify that she’s not a sex worker.”

  “A concubine. I used the word ‘concubine.’”

  “So you are a sex worker?”

  Nathan seemed to be flirting with me, but I wasn’t sure. Flirting was, for me, an ancient language, like Phoenician or Ammonite, the particularities of which have been lost due to lack of usage and also antiquity.

  “I never told you I was a private detective,” I said. “Were you eavesdropping on my conversation with Jennifer?”

  “Oh, completely,” said Nathan. “I practically have a transcript. As do the police, now, which is why I came by to apologize.”

  There were a lot of thoughts going on in my head. One was that Nathan was kind of adorable. Adorable goes a long way with me. And he smelled like cucumbers. I was still smarting from my last guy, though, and I was looking for a way to shuttle him out. Sanctum. Sanctorum.

  My other thought, however, was that he probably didn’t know that Jonah was dead. I didn’t want to tell him, but at the same time it felt wrong not to mention it.

  “You heard the news about Jonah?” I asked, sounding him out.

  “Murdered,” said Nathan, now gnawing on a radish. “By some ornate spear, is what I hear. That’s what you were looking for, weren’t you? Jonah had told me about it.”

  This was very anticlimactic.

  “You don’t seem very broken up about his death,” I said.

  Nathan flashed a look of embarrassment. “I’m the strong, silent type who buries his feelings?”

  “You have a messenger bag,” I said.

  “I have hidden depths,” said Nathan happily. “And I didn’t know him very well, honestly.”

  “Except that you knew about the spear,” I pointed out.

  “You are very detective-like,” said Nathan. “But Jonah was always going on about Zoth. He tried to get everyone to play with him. I took a cab with him once after a party, and he tried to get the cabbie to play with him.”

  I would have pushed at this more, but the truth of it was that I wasn’t very broken up about Jonah’s death either.

  “Oh,” said Nathan, snapping his fingers. “I almost forgot. I’m also supposed to apologize for Jennifer. She’s usually a lot nicer. Quote unquote. I’m supposed to tell you that.”

  “Is she usually a lot nicer?” My experience with her had strongly suggested that stern was her default mode.

  Nathan considered this. “Well, perhaps ‘a lot’ is overstating it. She’s usually a degree nicer. But that whole sex-worker thing set her off. She was dating Jonah only last week, so a pretty lady dressed in the outfits of Atelier Long is the sort of thing that freaks her out. After you left, she was sharpening dozens upon dozens of pencils. It was good that you got out when you did.”

  There were two things in this explanation that had not escaped my attention. One was that he used the word “atelier,” which, between that and his bento box, was rapidly propelling him into the upper echelons of hipster geekery. The second was that he called me a “pretty lady.” I wasn’t going to pursue those things, but I noticed them. The sex-worker line I could let slide.

  “Well,” I said, “apologies have been made. Thanks for coming by.”

  I got up and Nathan stood quickly, stashing his bento box back into his bag. I was all but physically shuffling him out the room, but he was stalling me. If he were a Pokémon, this would have been where he revealed his super-effective stat reduction on me. He made pouty eyes and scratched at his neck.

  This worked surprisingly well.

  “Don’t laugh, but I kind of wanted to hang out with a private detective,” he explained. His embarrassment lasted nanoseconds, and he was bright again. “Makes you feel like you’re in on something. You know, put the squeeze on the old up and down. Derrick the gin mill. Hoosegow the bean shooters.”

  “You’re just stringing together nonsense words.”

  “Maybe,” said Nathan. “But you have to grant that I’ve got the cadence down.”

  “Out of my apartment, please.”

  Nathan took this well, like a game-show contestant happy with his parting prizes. “You can’t blame a guy for trying. That’s the Willing family motto.”

  “Yeah? The Moss family motto is ‘I Never Thought My Life Would Be This Way.’”

  This is actually true—it wasn’t a line to get a laugh out of Nathan, although it did. Obviously it’s not ancestral; it’s not written in Latin on our family crest. But it’s gotten a lot of usage.

  “I’ll bet there’s a story behind that,” said Nathan.

  “Yes, and I’m not going to tell it. Out of my apartment, pretty boy.”

  And he jetted out. I hadn’t intended to call Nathan “pretty boy” to his face. This was probably not a good sign.

  CHAPTER SIX

  When I finished recovering from the curious visit of Nathan Willing, I triple-checked that I had everything I needed and made my way to the bank. I have a somewhat complicated relationship with my bank tellers. Since I have been subsisting on garage sales and craft fairs, I deal largely in cash, and every time I make a deposit or withdrawal, I feel the judgment of the teller as he or she quietly observes the paltry amounts in my checking and savings accounts. This disgust is particularly noticeable when I try to deposit large amounts of coins, or in the circumstances when I have needed to withdraw less than twenty dollars.

  So it was with great pride that I walked into my bank and deposited a ten-thousand-dollar check. I waited in line, letting people go ahead of me to see James, the least judgmental of tellers (although he too has flashed me looks of pity), and waited for Clara.

  Clara is evil. I imagine that when everyone leaves and the bank closes, she leaps into the vault and swims in giant vats of money, like Scrooge McDuck, only creepier. I don’t like Clara.

  She was there today, wearing a sad black blouse and a pin that told me to ask her about a savings plan. It was a tempting notion, but I had other ideas. She looked at me with undisguised resignation as I came toward her.

  “How can I help you today?” she said. Only Clara could make this sound angry and petulant. Well, and also Renee. And Walter, but mostly he did drive-through, and I had a very unreliable car.

  “Hello, Clara,” I said as though I were addressing my archenemy. “I’d like to deposit this check.”

  I slid her the check.
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  “For ten THOUSAND dollars.”

  I didn’t really mean to say it like that, in a Dr. Evil voice, but damn it, I was happy. I had expected more of a reaction from her, honestly. She looked at the check, and me, and just sort of clucked in a sad, resigned way.

  “ID, please.”

  More like, ID? Please. You remember me, Clara. I’m the woman who made you recount a ceramic Death Star filled with pennies. Don’t pretend we don’t have a past.

  But I didn’t say any of that. I gracefully removed my ID from my purse and slid it over to Clara, who studied it deeply, looking for some sort of forgery, I presume. Because This Could Not Be Happening.

  Clara sighed and did some typing. After a moment she handed me a receipt of deposit. It was strange—holding the check didn’t affect me, but having the receipt of deposit made me feel like my hands were on fire.

  “Have a nice day,” she said tonelessly.

  I was still living large, and I wasn’t yet ready to walk away.

  “Do you have mints?”

  “Mints?” said Clara with a sigh, now regarding me as though I were wasting the bank’s very valuable time.

  “You know, complimentary breath mints? Like in a candy dish?”

  “Those are for children, ma’am.”

  “Do children like mint?”

  “Would you like me to get a children’s mint for you, ma’am?”

  I believe that I was now being sassed.

  “Two,” I told her, “if you don’t mind. I’m feeling very parched. After earning all of this money I just deposited.”

  The effort Clara had to expend to get my two mints was minimal, given that they sat in a candy dish on her side of the desk. But she managed to move her hands in a slow, exaggerated way, suggesting that she were moving mountains, or accomplishing some great Herculean, godlike burden that had been placed on her.

  She dropped each mint into my hand, separately, with a dramatic pause between each one.

  “Thank you,” I said, lording over the moment.

  “By the way,” she said darkly, “I’m sure you’re aware that with large checks like these, it sometimes takes longer for them to clear.”

  “How much longer?” I asked.

  “Five to seven days,” said Clara. “Sometimes even longer than that, if the bank deems it suspicious. You can call our customer service line if you have any questions.”

  I tried to be sunny, but I couldn’t help but frown at her. This, of course, made her brighten.

  “Enjoy your mints,” she chirped. “And have a nice day.”

  It was about the time that I would have started genuinely worrying about Charice that I got a text from her.

  “Chinese food,” it said.

  Which was a typical missive from Charice Baumgarten. Nothing about where she has been, nothing about what she has learned from the police. And it made no immediate sense. So it was good to know that she was her usual self.

  My guess was that she was asking if I wanted Chinese food, perhaps tonight? So I texted: “yes?”

  I went to the library for the afternoon and tried to find some books about becoming a detective. There’s less on the topic than you might imagine. When I got home I found no Chinese food, and immediately, no Charice. All the lights were turned off, and the place seemed to be lit by candlelight coming from the dining room. Two possibilities immediately sprung to mind—one was a candlelit dinner, which would have been lovely. I can’t say who might have prepared a candlelight dinner for me—Charice, possibly?—but setting aside reason, I occasionally like to be optimistic about things.

  It wasn’t a candlelit dinner. When I got into the dining room, I observed that someone had covered our table with a fancy red cloth and that Charice was gathered around a folding table with four people who I did not recognize. Four of them were dressed solemenly, practically in funeral garb, although Charice was wearing a hat that looked like it had been assembled from the remains of a violently murdered peacock. The fifth person wasn’t dressed solemnly at all. Her blond hair was pulled into a ponytail and she was wearing an inexplicable poodle skirt.

  “I came from a sock hop,” she explained, apparently feeling my eyes on her.

  “Ah,” I said. I didn’t want to get involved.

  “I didn’t have time to change,” she said, sounding more irritated.

  “Sure,” I said. But I must have still looked skeptical, because she looked put out.

  “It was for a charity,” she said. “Why is everyone giving me a hard time about this?”

  I didn’t want to get into the weeds about a sock-hop fund-raiser with this unknown woman, so I asked the more relevant question.

  “Charice,” I said, faking calmness, “tell me that you aren’t planning a séance.”

  “We are not planning a séance,” said Charice. “The planning has passed. We are séancing.”

  I got out my best ice-dagger glare, mostly out of habit, because it never did anything on Charice. It was more the principle of the thing.

  “I’m sure I don’t need to point out that it would be in amazingly bad taste to try to contact Jonah Long.”

  “Who would be so tacky?” asked Charice, in a rhetorical question that begged to be answered. But I held my tongue. “We’re just going to have a séance and see who shows up.”

  I should make very clear, although I’m sure it’s unnecessary, that Charice has no special abilities at communing with the dead. She does about as well with a Ouija board as she does with Catan, which is a game she wins only by stealing wool when people aren’t looking. My eye was drawn to Ms. Poodle Skirt, who did look familiar somehow.

  “I’m not participating in this séance,” I told her.

  “Oh good,” said Charice. “You have a bad psychic energy. Just sit on the sofa.”

  By “bad psychic energy” Charice meant that I was troublesome about not pushing the pointer where she wanted it to go. But I sat on the sofa and watched, because I knew it would make Charice happy, and there was often value in that. A man turned out the last light, and Charice started talking.

  “Great spirits of the beyond, we contact you now.”

  There was the associated pause and a Y-E-S-? skated its way across the board.

  “Can I ask with whom I am speaking?”

  Poodle Skirt helpfully read the words aloud as the spirit “spoke.”

  IT IS I, WILFRID LAURIER.

  “Who’s that?” asked one of the somber-looking men at the table. He looked genuinely confused, so either he was a good actor or he wasn’t in on the joke.

  YOU HAVEN’T HEARD OF ME?

  “No,” said Charice.

  AMERICANS.

  “Where are you from?”

  CANADA. I AM CANADA’S MOST FAMOUS PRIME MINISTER.

  “Really?” asked Charice.

  WELL, TOP TEN.

  “So, Wilifrid…,” started Charice, but she was interrupted by a jerking of the Ouija board.

  WILFRID. IT’S WILFRID.

  “Right, Wilfrid. So there’s been a…” And Charice looked at me as she spoke now, testing to see how far she could reasonably push me. “… a disturbance around here lately. Is there anyone there with anything pressing they want said?”

  HOW FARES ONTARIO?

  I noticed a smile starting to crack ever so slightly on Carnation Lapel Guy.

  “It’s fine. I could google it for you, if you want,” said Charice.

  AND HALIFAX? HOW IS THE GEM OF THE EASTERN SEABOARD?

  “You know, I’ve never been,” said Charice.

  OH, YOU SHOULD GO. IT’S VERY NICE. PEOPLE ALWAYS JUST THINK OF PRINCE EDWARD ISLAND FOR VACATION BUT HALIFAX IS A DELIGHT.

  “So do you have any clues, or…”

  IT’S LIKE BOSTON BUT WITHOUT THE CRIME.

  “Anyone recently murdered around there?” asked Charice.

  LOTS OF GOOD BARS TOO.

  “Any souls crying out to be heard? Even a cryptic message might be helpful.”

>   GOOD LOCAL BEERS.

  I could tell that everyone at the table was in on this farce, simply because of how completely ashen-faced they all were. If one of Canada’s top-ten prime ministers were legitimately giving you drinking advice, you would probably at least crack a smile. I was about to get up and retreat to my room when there was an honest-to-gosh thunderclap. It must have been close to us, because it sounded incredibly loud, and the power in the apartment dimmed. Maybe I’m misremembering it, but I think there was some serious candlelight flick-age as well.

  Whether it was a spirit or simply Charice not being one to waste an opportunity, the Oujia board wheeled out one final message.

  D-O-U-B-L-E-_-L-I-F-E

  Charice was not willing to let go of that DOUBLE LIFE line. I might have somehow believed that it had been somewhat real, given the overall spookiness and suddenness of it all, except for her hounding me about forever after.

  “Double life, Dahlia!” she kept repeating. “I wasn’t even moving the pointer. It was a message.”

  I let a lot of things slide here, as I usually did with Charice. First of all, her insistance that she wasn’t moving the pointer for DOUBLE LIFE was more or less an indirect confession that she was moving it the rest of the time. Not that I had genuinely expected that PM Wilfred Laurier was seriously using me as a window into Canadian affairs. Furthermore, even if Charice were telling the truth, there were a lot of other people at the table. Finally, DOUBLE LIFE is an impossibly vague sort of statement. When your clue from beyond the grave is too vague for a fortune cookie, it’s probably not worth spending a lot of time on. I mean, if you believe that Jonah Long sent me a final message—which I don’t—let’s consider it. Ten letters in DOUBLE LIFE. You could do a lot with ten letters. If I were a spirit with ten letters, I’d just spell out the name of the murderer. IT WAS TOM. Heck, with two characters you could do the guy’s initials. Even if I didn’t know what the guy looked like I could give a description. LLWBRIMLEY. (That would mean that the attacker looked like Wilford Brimley.) Not sure if they’d get that, but I’d try.

  “I’ll keep that under advisement, Charice. I’m writing it down now and putting in my big book of clues.” I had told her that as a sort of sarcasm, but it seemed to mollify her anyway. She apparently thought I did have a big book of clues. Maybe I should have a big book of clues. Isn’t that what Encyclopedia Brown did? (Please turn your page upside down for the answer.)