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.
“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.)
To be fair, Charice was also sated by the story of my getting $10,000, which admittedly packed a wallop. Also, she got rent money, which continued to cheer her. I even told her about Clara and the mints. She had never heard me mention Clara before, but I was riding high. She cleared out the séancers and celebrated. I drank a gin and tonic, retreated to my room, and tried playing a round of Dota, a computer game that marries my triplet loves of deep strategy, quick reflexes, and collecting clothes for the walrus. After I was throughly buzzed and I had made a reasonable dent in my MMR, it was time to get to work.
I had business in Zoth to arrange.
I needed to create a new character, but my fingers were now pleasantly numb. Not frostbite-victim numb, just cheerfully floopy. Like a giant squid attempting to play an Elton John song.
I was done with my archer, though. I did not want Tambras connecting me to that particular interview. I needed something new, and because I was a little floopy myself, I wanted someone who would express me.
This general light-headedness is probably why when I attempted to name my character “RedRadish” it came out as “RedRasish.” I did not realize this until much later, when a sugarplum fairy instructed me that gathering ten dumblemoor flowers from the Fetid Swamp would bring glory to the RedRasish family name. I read that initially and thought, Is this fairy drunk? It was then that I realized that I was the drunken fairy.
Of course, if I had spelled it correctly, I would muse later with the benefit of sobriety, the game wouldn’t have let me in, as the game already had a RedRadish in it. Which was me, a year earlier, under my ex-boyfriend’s account. RedRadish was a happy, carefree ogress, with dreams of financial gains and a certainty that her boyfriend was not cheating on her with a dental hygienist. She also had tremendous facial scarring and an enormous tree trunk that she used as a sort of club. This was because the old me wanted to be badass. The dreams of youth.
Despite the fact that I had no intention of really playing the game—my business here was to meet up with other guild members and do a little reconnaissance—I found myself taking an inordinately long time picking out my character. First impressions were important.
RedRadish had been an ogress with a facial scar. RedRasish was a delicate-looking fairy, with rosy-pink skin and on whom I spent ninety-nine cents for especially elaborate hair. Yes, this was the gin, but ninety-nine cents for candy-colored hair with thick curls that coiled on the top of my head like a luxurious apostrophe seemed appealing at the time. I was looking for the girliest starting class I could find, which I assumed to be dancer, but then I discovered a new god named Usune, (new gods crop up in Zoth relatively frequently), and by becoming her priestess, I would get to carry a harp.
So it was in this way that a drunken harp-wielding fairy with fabulous hair entered the Kingdoms of Zoth. Clovemince, a surprisingly stern-looking sugarplum fairy, gave me a brief but efficient description of the current state of the fairy kingdom and strongly suggested that I would be doing both myself and Usune a favor by wandering into a deadly swamp to gather flowers for our people.
I ignored her request, as well as that of a handsome green fairy man who wanted to know if I was a girl in RL, and looked for the guilds tab. I needed to find Jonah’s guild so I could interrogate its members. I could have just sat there and queried names, but I wanted more of a personal connection this time around.
And I did not feel like putting off the provocations of a green fairy man, who seemed to want to sit on me.
I certainly didn’t want to gather flowers while battling the mud people who would shamble out of the swamp. I just didn’t. I realize that this was a privilege that other people paid for (and that technically I had paid for), but as far as I was concerned, RedRasish was just an elaborate, badly spelled disguise. Squashing mud people was just not part of my wheelhouse. Besides, what was a harp going to do to them, anyway?
I dialed Kurt Campbell, whose phone number Jonah had given me, “in case of an emergency.” I had fully expected it to go to voice mail, and then I would end up in the swamp after all, but lo, there he was.
“Hello?” he said.
He must have seen my Saint Louis cell number and assumed that I was someone who knew him.
“Hi, Kurt. This is Dahlia.”
Silence.
“Dahlia Moss? The—” I was going to say “detective,” but I remembered Detective Maddocks and rethought it. “… The woman you ignored at dinner on Sunday?”
“Why are you on my phone?”
The way he phrased it made me sound like I was some sort of insidious lolcat. “I in ur iphone, calling ur contacts.” But I was not having this. Why shouldn’t I be on his phone? I was a somewhat legitimate businesswoman.
“Well, I’ve logged in to the Kingdoms of Zoth and I was hoping you could show me around.”
“You’re what?” That got him.
“I’m on the edge of a swamp. Some fat purple fairy is trying to get me to gather flowers.”
“I do. In fact, his parents have hired me to manage his online affairs.”
“Jonah’s dead and you’re still after that damned spear?”
Something about Kurt suddenly made me think of Clara. Not that I thought Clara was involved—although it was a fun idea—but in the same sense that he did not want me to succeed. I found myself briefly wondering if he didn’t want me finding the spear, or if he was just generally bad tempered. Our text-filled dinner together certainly didn’t give the impression of him being a people person.
“Primarily, I’m here to arrange a funeral for him online. Some sort of open service, I was thinking. Of course, if you know anything about the spear, I’m sure that Jonah’s parents would be happy to learn of it.”
“Sylvia hired you?”
It was nice, for once, to hear the question with the emphasis somewhere other than the word “you.”
“Indirectly,” I told him. “I was hired by their lawyer.”
This seemed to relax Kurt, although I couldn’t tell you why. Did he not want me speaking directly to Jonah’s mother? Why?
“I’m glad that’s settled,” I told Kurt. “So, how about this swamp?”
“I’m not going to game with you, Dahlia.”
“I’m not looking to play, Kurt. I just want to talk to other people in the guild.”
Kurt sighed—not a real sigh, actually. The sort of audible stage sigh you would make so the people on the back row would know that you were sighing.
“Go talk to them, then. We have a webpage. I’m sure you can look everyone up.”
“I could do that, or you could introduce me to everyone and explain that I’m a friend of the family who’s putting Kurt’s affairs in order.”
“Why would I do that?”
“It will sound better coming from you.”
“That’s why you would want me to do it; why would I want to do it?”
It was like dealing with Clara. I don’t know why I hadn’t realized it before. Weirdly, even as I made this realization, I decided to try an approach that I would never dare to take with a battle-hardened bank teller.
“To make amends? You were a real jerk to me over dinner.”
“You accused me of a crime.”
“You were rude well before that. And besides, this is a good thing to do. Don’t you want Jonah’s affairs settled? Wouldn’t you like to see some sort of remembrance for him online?”
Kurt paused for a second, and I took it to mean that the conversation was going even worse. But his response sounded rational and even.
“Fine,” said Kurt. “Meet me in two hours. Let’s say… at the Broken Sickle Bar in Hochstein. That should be easy enough for you to find.”
And he hung up on me. I’m not sure if smirking makes an audible sound, but if it did, that was definitely the sound I heard before the click.