CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

If I didn’t know Charice as well as I did, I might be concerned that she planned to murder Weber. It was an ominous-sounding line, to be sure. But presumably she meant that Weber would end up going out clubbing with her, which was precisely the sort of utterly improbable and yet strangely commonplace thing that seemed to happen around my roommate. It was like she was the Scarlet Witch—the old Marvel superhero—but instead of manipulating probability to fight crime, her goals were just to have a really good time. If you think about it that way, the Scarlet Witch is exactly the girl you want to hang out with at the bar. Way more fun than Marrow, anyway, who could take out her bones and throw them. Although I guess it depends on the evening you have planned.

Anyway, I didn’t stick around to see what sort of tomfoolery was going down there. I’d ask later, probably when Weber invariably joined Charice’s wedding party. I had work to do on the ship.

My goals were primarily of a vengeful nature, but this was tough, because despite it all, I still didn’t actually have any idea who had done this, which made vengeance challenging. Unless you just want to go kill everyone, like Rambo or some Buffy the Vampire Slayer villain. Which was an idea that had an appeal. I, for one, would love to read a mystery where the detective said: “The killer is one of the twelve people in this room. However, I can’t quite work out which one of you it is, so I just said to hell with it, and I’ve poisoned you all. Let God work it out!”

Probably this is head-wound talk.

Still, almost getting killed was an undoubtedly huge development in the case. Like, there had had to be evidence. Possibly I had kicked the murderer—possibly. So if someone had a footprint on their face, that would be a good clue.

More plausibly, I decided that I should check out the bathroom that I was attacked in. I had informed Maddocks about Chul-Moo being in the engine room, but I didn’t really have time to mention the whole bathroom situation. Besides which, I wanted to dry off.

I felt very uncertain going down the stairs again—what’s the Einstein quote about doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting a different result? But I wanted to dry off, which was the casting vote. Also: I truly wanted a bodyguard now, but no one was around. Not Nathan, not Daniel, not Shuler. And Charice I’d already tasked with nonsense. I would have gone with the fourteen-year-old, if he’d been around. Even Undine. I actually did try to grab a random person—this blond-haired kid who, I swear to God, was the skinniest boy I’d ever seen.

“Hey, guy,” I said. “You wanna go down to the bathroom with me?”

Again, head-wound talk, because I could have delivered this request a little more artfully.

“No,” said the blond guy.

Keep in mind that I’m actively oozing river water from my clothes and hair, as though I am some sort of terrible mud elemental.

“It’s not like that,” I said. “I’m just concerned that someone might attack me.”

“You’ll be fine,” said the guy, backing away from me. I had half a mind to chase after him, because I really didn’t want to get hit in the head again, but if strangers were actively alarmed by my presence, maybe this was armor enough. However, it didn’t come to that point because God bless him, Daniel Simone showed up.

“You missed your match,” he said. Which is really quite a thing to say to someone who is dripping water on a steamboat. He didn’t ask why I was wet or what had happened to me. He and Charice were going to make it, I could tell.

“You want to come down to the basement with me? I’m doing some sleuthing, and I don’t want to get attacked. Again.”

“Boats don’t have basements,” said Daniel. “But sure. You want a towel or something?”

My shoes were the worst, honestly, which I hadn’t taken off yet, because it felt sort of undignified to walk around barefoot, but every step I made oozed water. It was exactly as unpleasant as you are imagining.

“Yes,” I said. “But first, bathroom. Besides, they’ll probably have paper towels in there.”

“I think you’re well past paper towel.”

We headed back down below the decks of Major Redding. It felt remarkably less scary with Daniel in tow, who was arguably intimidating looking, especially in the dim light. I mean, he was wearing a mask that was not unlike Jason’s, and he had blades for claws. Who is going to bother someone with blades for claws?

“So what happened to you?” asked Daniel as we approached the bathroom.

“Someone smashed my head into a sink and tried to kill me. I escaped into the river.”

Daniel took this very calmly, I thought. Much better than my mother would take it, who would probably start thrashing around the floor, screaming, “My baby! My precious baby!” although maybe I’m overselling her reaction. Daniel just looked at me quizzically.

“Is that why the police came aboard?” he asked.

“Yeah,” I said. But I suddenly realized that I didn’t really want to discuss this with Daniel. It made me seem crazy, going into the details. Eventually Daniel would ask something like “So we’re returning to where you were attacked, seriously?” and I would have to defend this entirely reasonable, completely understandable position, which I did not want to defend.

Because of this, I changed the subject.

“You still haven’t proposed to Charice yet. What’s keeping you?”

“We keep getting interrupted,” said Daniel, who was maybe also happy to get off the topic of my near murder. “I didn’t appreciate that people would keep coming up to us and asking to have their pictures taken.”

“You haven’t lost your nerve?” I asked, because I wasn’t sure I completely bought Daniel’s narrative. Yeah, they were getting interrupted. But every second? All the time?

“I just want to find the right moment,” said Daniel. “I want to make it memorable.”

And in retrospect, this was the sort of statement that Daniel shouldn’t have made aloud, much in the way I shouldn’t have been saying dumb things like “but I don’t need a bodyguard.” But I’m getting ahead of myself.

“She suspects something,” I said. “You’re going to have to work fast.”

And we entered the bathroom, which was not locked this time. I honestly feel like this should have been creepier, or unnerving, but whatever fear might have been augured by the place was dispelled by the combination of blade-claw Daniel and me being dripping wet. And also—it was just a bathroom. It wasn’t covered in blood, or bits of skull, or marked in any way. I didn’t know if it had been cleaned or if there hadn’t been anything to find in the first place.

“There was a corpse here,” I said. “In the corner.”

Daniel looked in the corner, which was decidedly corpse-free. “I guess someone moved it.”

But I already knew that. What I was hoping, I suppose, was that the killer would have left a telltale clue in here. Like a distinctive lapel pin. Or an ID. An ID would have been ideal. But there was none of that.

I was also vaguely hoping that I’d find my laptop in here, which hadn’t made it out to the engine room of death, so it had to be somewhere. I even looked in the trash, which had nothing but old chewed gum in it. I wasn’t so much trying to find it for clue value as much that I am not made of money. On that note my iPhone was also missing, which I suppose we could have tracked, but the strongest guess was that it was floating along the bottom of the Mississippi. Probably with my laptop.

“Didn’t find what you were looking for?” Daniel asked.

“Not a damn thing,” I said. “Detecting things ought to be easier. You don’t have a laptop, do you?”

“I’m a desktop luddite,” said Daniel. “Why?”

“I should get back online. Twitch chat saw me when I got attacked. Maybe they saw who the killer was.”

This is what I told Daniel, but it’s not what I thought. If Twitch chat saw who hit me, presumably one of the thirty-seven people who called the police would have passed that info along. What I really wanted was to just let them know I was alive, which seemed like the right thing to do.

“Doesn’t Nathan usually carry his MacBook with him?” asked Daniel.

“Sometimes,” I said. And sometimes was good enough.

You would think that being a dripping elemental of river water would have somehow made me something of a celebrity aboard the Major Redding, but this was not the case. I didn’t know what Maddocks was doing elsewhere on the ship, or what Charice and Weber had gotten up to, but there was apparently enough chaos that Nathan did not immediately notice me. No one seemed to notice me. Actually that’s not true, mostly people were pretending not to notice me, as though I were a shambling river monster. Like something that had been coughed up by a bad Southern Gothic. Dead River Girl yearns for vengeance!

I liked that line, and I had a head wound, so I said it aloud. Naturally that was when Nathan came up to me.

“Jesus Christ,” he said. “You’re covered in rainwater.”

“Not rainwater,” I said—honestly, rainwater? “River water.”

And he was taking off his shirt, right off his back. “Put this on,” he said, “you’re freezing.”

At the time this had really impressed me. And it still impresses me. Maybe Nathan isn’t perfect, a little jokey sometimes, a little glib, but he was giving me the shirt off his back.

Of course, as I recount the event, I’m now struck by the fact that Nathan was not overly surprised that I was soaking wet. I guess he just assumed I had fallen into the water, as if this were something I just did all the time.

“Do you have your laptop with you?” I asked him.

“That’s a weird question to ask while you’re dripping wet.”

“I need it for research.”

“I didn’t bring it with me,” said Nathan. “And I wouldn’t give it to you, anyway. It would be an electrical hazard. Take my shirt.”

“I don’t need your shirt.”

I don’t know why I was saying this, because it really ranks among “I don’t need a bodyguard” in terms of stupidity. Nathan’s shirt looked so very dry. I had never seen an article of clothing as dry and as warm looking. He didn’t even respond before I started backtracking, in fact.

“I can’t put it on here in front of everyone,” I said.

“No one will care,” Nathan said, which isn’t exactly the most romantic angle he could have taken, but I was willing to forgive the line amid the rest of this chivalry. ”Hide behind this golden Italian cypress,” he suggested.

I was always slightly taken aback by Nathan’s referral to plants by their full names. Yes, he had a degree in plant sciences, but this was a man who referred to his love seat, the remote control, a Ginsu knife, and a small plushy doll of Gammara as “that thing.” It was also a slightly silly idea, because the “golden Italian cypress”—to my eyes it looked like the sort of potted pine tree thing you’d find in the garden section of a Home Depot—was not remotely big enough to cover my body. But what the hell. I turned my back toward the wall and put on the shirt.

“Do you want my pants?” asked Nathan.

Now that I was experiencing the life-changing magic of dry clothing, I most certainly did. But concussion or no, I had not lost my mind.

“There is no way that your pants would fit on me, Nathan. To even attempt the idea would be an exercise in humiliation.”

And the notion of me trying to effectually pull Nathan’s skinny jeans over my wet and bloated body clearly cheered Nathan, whom I could practically see chortling at the idea.

A word about shirtless Nathan. I have a real thing for Nathan—I admit it—but this is not a Janet Evanovich-y romp here where Rick ManSlab takes off his shirt to reveal a six-pack, or an eight-pack, or a seven-pack (which is a six-pack and an abdominal hernia, possibly?), or whatever packs guys have these days. Shirtless Nathan looks like a turtle who has somehow gotten out of its shell. He has no body mass! No fat, which is admittedly appealing, but no anything else. He was a brazen little turtle, though, because he seemed cheered by the turn of events.

“So how did you get wet?”

“Chul-Moo is dead, and whoever killed him tried to kill me.”

“Which one is Chul-Moo again?”

“You know,” I said, “it doesn’t matter.” It did matter, but it honestly didn’t matter to Nathan, and part of managing a successful relationship is understanding your beau’s strengths and weaknesses. Mysteries weren’t Nathan’s strength.

But as if to rebut me, Nathan had a little revelation of his own.

“Your plan worked, by the way,”

“Which plan?” I asked. Quite genuinely. Plans I hatched seemed like an entire lifetime ago. And if I had been hit in the head a little bit harder, it would have been.

“You don’t remember it? You had a plan to unmask Doctor XXX? Boy, one little murder attempt really derails your thinking.”

“I will cut you.”

“It’s Swan,” said Nathan. The moment felt dramatic, but it was undercut by Nathan’s adding, “And I’m going to find you some pants.”

“Don’t get me pants—yet. Tell me about Swan.”

“He was horrified that his phone kept going off,” said Nathan. “I think he figured out what you were up to. He was frantically trying to turn the thing off, and he kept looking around to see if anyone noticed. But I don’t think he was paying much attention to me. I was being slick.”

“Well, he’s never seen you before,” I said. “So you wouldn’t have had to do anything to go unnoticed.”

“That might have been part of it,” said Nathan, “but I think mostly it was my excellent slickness.”

“Did he,” I started—and I didn’t know how to ask this without sounding at least slightly crazy—“start watching my stream and then run downstairs, saying, ‘That Dahlia! I will smash her head into the sink!’”

This got a quizzical look from Nathan, as it probably should have.

“No,” he said. “Did someone smash your head? It looks the same to me.”

“We have got to work on your flattery.”

“You love my flattery! But no, he didn’t do any of that. He turned off his alerts, and then stood very still. I think he’s afraid you’re going to come up to him.”

“As well he should be,” I said.

But if Swan was the guy who had been trolling me along—and apparently had an alibi, since Nathan had watched him not come downstairs and attack me—who the heck smashed my head?

Nathan embarked upon PantQuest, and I—once again bodyguardless—found Swan peering out over the water. He looked terribly sad, even before he saw me, and it struck me that he was a person who was improbably difficult to remain angry at. But I started pretty well:

“What the hell, dude? I dragged you up a flight of stairs. While you were handcuffed to a chair! Naked! And this is how you jerk me around.”

I’m not good at anger, as a rule. Me being angry is like trying to hold on to water. Or mercury. Even when I want to hang on to the emotion, it just doesn’t work.

Case in point now: Swan looked saddened and completely defeated. He looked like he was going to throw up. I was already wondering why I was yelling at him, since he seemed to be dejected enough already.

“I’m sorry about that,” he said. “It was awful. It was dumb and awful. And dumb. But mostly awful.”

It was nice, at least, to have skipped over the denial bits. And I would work out the anger later. But first I just wanted to understand what happened, exactly.

“So,” I told him. “Explain this dumb and awful plan to me.”

“It wasn’t supposed to go down like that at all. I was tricked,” said Swan.

“By who?”

“Chul-Moo.”

“How was it supposed to go down?” I asked.

“Chul-Moo was angry at Imogen because she stole his teammate.”

This was not an answer that involved me, and I told Swan so.

“Imogen stole Mike away from Chul-Moo. And we wanted vengeance.”

This plan still did not involve me. In most circumstances, I could be patient about these things, but I was still wet—even in Nathan’s shirt—and my patience was at a premium.

“How does being angry at Imogen involve me?” I asked.

“We were going to discredit her,” said Swan. “Chul-Moo had me wait in that room, and then we contacted you. You were supposed to find me, and you were going to figure out that it was Imogen that met me in there. We were going to have you discredit her for us.”

“But it wasn’t Imogen in there,” I said.

“No, but we were going to leave you clues that it was.”

I remembered the perfume in the air, which at the time seemed ridiculous. And the Monopoly-token charm bracelet.

“You’re right,” I said. “That is a dumb plan.”

“Well,” said Swan, suddenly defensive about it, “it would have been better if it had gone off. But we didn’t end up doing it. You told me that the police were there, which freaked me out, and then when Chul-Moo found out about Karou, we dropped the whole idea. We wanted it to look like she was bribing her opponents, but everyone dropped out anyway. And Chul-Moo fucking betrayed me.”

“How did he betray you?” I asked, thinking that betrayal was a decent motive for murder. Although it would be odd to volunteer.

“He depantsed me! That wasn’t part of the plan. He just did that after he cuffed me to the chair because he thought it was funny. Such an asshole.”

Maybe not murder then, because depantsing is a real third-tier motive for a killing. “And shoes,” I said, suddenly thinking. “He also took your shoes.”

“Yes,” growled Swan. “Another ad-lib of his. Once I was cuffed to a chair, he had all sorts of hilarious ideas.”

I was thinking.

“If Chul-Moo took your shoes, why did you have to go out and buy a new pair?” I asked. “Why not just wear the shoes he took?”

“I did! But then you were going around looking for a shoeless Asian guy, and I realized that I couldn’t wear my own damned shoes without you asking how I got them. So I had to pretend to lose them. So I ripped Chul-Moo’s shoes off his feet and ran out of there. Anyway, you should be talking to Chul-Moo about this. It was all his plan. I was just his victim.”

I wasn’t sure if this was the right time to tell Swan that Chul-Moo was dead. But it seemed indecent not to mention it.

“Well, Chul-Moo was murdered,” I told him. “So I won’t be talking to him any time soon.” This came out not nearly as soft as I had expected, which I realized because Swan’s brain began hemorrhaging.

“What?” said Swan.

“Someone bashed his head in,” I said. “Maybe with a fire extinguisher?” I’m not good at soft.

“When?” asked Swan.

“I don’t know when,” I told him. “After he came on the boat. Someone tried to kill me too. But they missed.”

“What?” asked Swan.

I was using my best detective eyes, but I couldn’t detect anything from Swan other than shock and disbelief.

“Is that why you’re wet?” asked Swan.

I didn’t really understand why people kept asking me this question. No, Swan, my being covered in river was an unrelated matter. I thought it would be a fun thing to do after a near-death experience. Is that what he expected me to say?

Of course, he was probably in shock, so I suppose I should be more forgiving. Although, in practice, what I did was take advantage of the shock to badger him with questions.

“So did you do it?” I asked.

“What?” said Swan again. Nothing but “what”s from this guy.

“Did you kill Chul-Moo?” I asked.

“Chul-Moo is dead?” asked Swan.

“Yes,” I said. “And someone tried to kill me.” No one reacted to that second part of the statement as well as I wanted.

“Am I a suspect?” asked Swan.

“Hell if I know. I’m not the police,” I told him. “But you had some sort of secret plan with Chul-Moo, and you’re telling people that you were afraid that he was going to betray you. So maybe you killed him? I’m just putting that out there.”

“No,” said Swan, suddenly anxious. “Don’t put that out there. Reel that back in.”

“Well, I find that solving crimes is a lot like Rhonda Byrne’s The Secret. I just put theories out there for the Universe to take hold of.”

“I didn’t kill Chul-Moo, and I don’t think that’s how The Secret works.”

“Well, by the Universe, I sort of mean ‘the Police.’”

“I’m really sorry about everything,” said Swan. “I didn’t mean to mislead you.”

This was a complete lie, obviously, because Swan did mean to mislead me. His entire plan was misleading me. That was the plan, period. But it was a good thing to say, nonetheless. Sometimes bald-faced lies can be almost sort of nice.

“The person you should apologize to is Imogen.”

“No,” said Swan. “Don’t tell her. She’ll kill me.”

And I was inclined there, for a moment, to think: What a fucking knucklehead. But then I remembered how anxious Chul-Moo was about getting killed yesterday, possibly by Imogen, and I began to wonder if perhaps Swan wasn’t onto something.

I realize that the last time I saw Mike and Imogen in a bar, it was a different bar—but they somehow managed to be sitting in exactly the same places. They also, and I watched them closely, did not display any signs of being kicked—no wincing, or stitches in the side, or footprints across their faces, which I really feel ought to be a clue in a book, even if not here. But exactly the same places. They were creatures of habit, I was guessing. Maybe this was a fighting-game thing, where players are rewarded more for execution than creativity? Or maybe they’re just cold, robotic creatures. I told you earlier that Imogen smelled like a cyborg.

“Dahlia,” said Imogen, inexplicably happy to see me, “tell me you aren’t here to accuse us of more murders?”

“Why are you wet?” asked Mike.

These were not my favorite questions, because (1) I was here, if not to accuse them of murder, at least to float the idea by them, and (2) I was getting tired of answering the question about being wet.

“Well,” I said, not really knowing the best way to do this, “as it happens, those two questions are somewhat related.”

“Oh God, is she going to start a story?” asked Imogen to Mike.

“I think she’s going to start a story.”

It was difficult to imagine that someone who had tried to kill you earlier would then snark their way through your confrontation with them, but who knows? I didn’t know if they were guilty or not, but I did know they were snarky.

“The story is that someone tried to kill me, and that I had to dive into the river to escape.”

“That’s terrible,” said Mike, looking genuinely shocked. “But how are those questions related?”

“She doesn’t know who tried to kill her, and she really has come here to accuse us of another murder,” Imogen said, then sighed.

“Seriously?” said Mike, who was less sad today and more put out. “Why would you think that I would be murdering people? At a tournament with a ten-thousand-dollar prize. It’s actually insulting.”

“I don’t think you’re involved, Mike,” I told him. “I just have some questions for Imogen.”

Mike looked immensely pleased by this, and any minor concerns he might have felt for his fighting-game partner were drastically dwarfed by his surging excitement about being deemed innocent.

“Whoop, whoop!” said Mike. “Who’s innocent? I’m innocent!”

“Oh Jesus,” said Imogen grimly.

“Chugga-chugga-chugga—Oh, hey Imogen, do you know what that sound is?”

“You saying chugga-chugga-chugga like a jackass?”

“It’s the murder train, and it’s coming into the station! Watch out! Watch out, Imogen! You’re gonna get hit by the murder train.”

Fighting-game players, I will observe here, are a bizarrely competitive group of people. These were teammates, I want to point out.

“I am not going to get hit by the murder train,” said Imogen.

“Should I step away?” asked Mike. “So you can ask Imogen these murder questions?”

“Don’t step away,” said Imogen. “I’m happy for you to ride the murder train along with me.”

While I’m pointing things out, I’m also just going to put out there how unconcerned these two were about my nearly getting killed. No one was overly alarmed by this development. I didn’t even get a hug. But I digress.

“So, Imogen,” I said. “The reason that I wanted to talk to you is that the guy who got killed was Doctor XXX—who had been threatening you.”

“Karou had been threatening me? He seemed like such a sweetheart,” she said, and she looked appropriately shocked.

“No, not Karou: Chul-Moo.”

And now it was Mike’s turn to look shocked. “Wait, what happened to Chul-Moo?”

“Karou was yesterday’s killing, Chul-Moo was today’s.”

There was a long pause. A very long one. I watched their faces gradually transform to anger.

“That’s awful!” said Mike. “Why would you tell us this?”

“We have more matches to fight,” said Imogen. “That’s terrible. We just don’t need this bad news right now.”

“Jesus,” said Mike. “I feel like I should have a drink.”

“No drinking until the tournament is over,” said Imogen. “Seriously, though, why would you bring this to us?”

The answer, I felt, was pretty obvious, but I was feeling more and more like a jackass as I developed it aloud.

“Well, Imogen—a man threatens you, tells you you should have never been born, apparently has a plan to discredit you, and then winds up dead. I’m not trying to be the boogeyman, but the police are eventually going to connect those dots themselves.”

“Dahlia,” Imogen said, “I really don’t want to seem glib about this, like I’m perfect or unstoppable or some sort of superheroine, but—if every guy on this ship who had threatened me or said something terrible to me got killed today—it would be like we were on the Black Pearl.”

“Even I’d be dead,” said Mike.

“You wouldn’t be dead,” said Imogen dismissively.

“I guess not. But my legs might be broken.”

Imogen thought for a moment, quietly, and considered. “You know, that might be true.”