CHAPTER THIRTEEN

The rest of it was awkward. I think I would have felt less strange if Emily had asked questions about who Nathan was and why this moving boy was able to appear so suddenly, but she was utterly mum. This didn’t stop Nathan from trying to make small talk, joking about how heavy the package was and comparing Emily’s outfit to an Easter parade float. “Why can’t she help you carry this thing?” he asked. “We’re only going upstairs.” Lovable, chokable Nathan.

Nathan and I bid adieu to Emily and ascended the staircase with the hastily reboxed spear. I was fuming, incidentally—maybe it was unfair, but I was feeling mightily irritated that Nathan had neglected to mention that he lived above Jonah Long, Murdered Client. Nathan, for his part, seemed not to notice my anger in the slightest but kept laughing and joking around. He pretended to drop his half of the spear three times going up the stairwell. Lovable, and chokable.

When we opened the door to his apartment and were thoroughly and safely out of the ears of Emily Swenson, I let loose.

“Why did you not tell me that you lived above Jonah Long?”

Many things became apparent to me at once. I will enumerate them in the order of least important to most important.

1. Nathan’s apartment was improbably small. It was like entering the TARDIS, but in reverse. It seemed as though it should have been bigger from the outside. Part of this, probably, was an ambitiously large sofa sectional, which had a lilac floral print and was so enormous and distasteful that it threatened to leave the room and cascade down the stairs.

2. Nathan’s rumored half-Japanese ex-girlfriend Masako was in the apartment, phalanxed by lilac-printed cushions. She was eating alfalfa sprouts, not even with bread, just shoveling them raw down her face, where they spilled onto the sofa and became camouflaged among the foliage. She looked embarrassed that I had caught her in a particularly unseemly act of eating, but I was not, in the moment, in a pitying mood.

3. Kurt Campbell was there, sitting cross-legged on the floor, between Masako and Nathan, which was insane given the abundance of sofa. He looked not at all surprised to me again and was wearing a red hoodie that was, I distinctly noticed, embroidered with a monogram: KVC.

I had a lot of questions. Among them: “What the hell?” and “Lilac floral print, really?” and “Why is Kurt Campbell here?”

Instead, I asked a perfectly ordinary question, but as wrath personified.

“And how is everyone?”

Which is really a query that you can put a lot of force behind when you put your mind to it.

“Welcome to chez Willing!” answered Nathan, who looked utterly untroubled and who picked spilled sprout off the sofa and instantly ate it. “This is my roommate, Masako.”

“Nathan is very taken with you,” she told me. Which I assumed was her sneaky way of trying to not make me angry, and that was upsetting mostly because of how potentially effective it was. I was still angry at Nathan, but I now instantly regarded Masako as an ally, probably because I needed someone as an ally at the moment.

“And this is Kurt Campbell,” said Nathan, rubbing the back of his neck, in that sheepish/cute thing that he does. “I believe that you’ve already met.”

Nathan, of course, was as delighted as ever. I realized in that moment that he would have been perfectly happy to have a Thin Man–style party in his apartment, where we all drank a lot of booze over five courses and dessert and have the murderer revealed in the most dramatic way possible.

“Anyway,” said Nathan, still sounding more affected than genuine, “I’m sorry that I didn’t tell you that I lived above Jonah. I assumed that you already knew that, actually.”

Which was maybe a dig at my detecting skills.

“Nathan, dear flower,” I said to him. It sounded sweet, but four concerned eyebrows went up elsewhere in the room. “Would it be possible to adjourn to your room so we could discuss things privately for a moment?”

“I would be happy to do so.”

Masako and Kurt watched with concern as Nathan led me into his room and closed the door behind me.

I will describe his room to you later, when I am less angry. Scratch that—I won’t describe it at all, except to say that Nathan clearly had a thing for concert posters.

“Nathan.”

“Dahlia.”

“I am very, very cross that you did not mention to me that you live one floor above Jonah, who was brutally murdered a few days ago. Around the time that I met you.”

“Honestly, I thought you knew that. And I don’t see how it’s relevant.”

“For one, it makes you a suspect. I don’t know if I want to keep hanging around with you.”

“What? Get out of town.”

“Have you seen the first episode of Murder, She Wrote?”

“I’ve seen an episode of Murder, She Wrote. Aren’t they all the same?”

“Not the first one, no. Jessica Fletcher is this widow, right? She stumbles into a murder and because she is awesome, gradually she figures it all out. At the same time, she meets an old guy who seems sweet, and she starts thinking, Hey, maybe I’ll date this guy.”

“I have not seen that one, no.”

“Yes, well, it goes on. She figures out that the old guy she’s interested in is the murderer. She confronts him, thinking that he must have had some sweet, entirely reasonable explanation for why he committed the crime, and then he tries to kill her.”

“And then the sheriff pops out.”

“Not in the pilot. In the pilot, she thinks with her heart and nearly gets murdered.”

Nathan seemed to think this story was hilarious. “Are you telling me that you’re concerned that I’m going to murder you?”

“I’m saying that I haven’t ruled it out as a possibility.”

Nathan was laughing to the point that it was not fashionable. I don’t just mean that it was irritating and insulting; I mean he was actually making a ridiculous snorting noise. The kind of private, awful laugh you use only when you’re alone, or you’ve really lost it. He also dialed someone on his phone.

“Hold on a second. I want you to speak to someone.”

I stared at him. I was still angry, but what can you do? He was gradually beginning to make me feel silly, but perhaps this was a lure so that he could murder me more thoroughly. Regardless, it could not be ignored that he lived alarmingly close to the victim.

“Hang on a sec—I want you to hear something.” Nathan giggled into the phone, which he held out to me. “Explain your theory to the man on the phone.”

“Who is on the phone?” I asked.

“It’s my dad,” said Nathan as happily as ever.

I was beginning to feel like I was the straight man for a couple of pie-wielding clowns, but I dutifully spoke my lines into the phone.

“I have some concerns about spending time alone with your son, because I think that he might have murdered Jonah Long and, in turn, may murder me if I learn too much.”

I couldn’t even finish that sentence before the elder Mr. Willing lost it. I believe the sound he made was something along the lines of “Aaaaaaaaah!” Seriously, I was lightly worried about him having a heart attack. This went on for about thirty seconds before it devolved into a crazy attack of tittering and he said, “Can you repeat that for my wife? She needs to hear this.”

I repeated my statement for Nathan’s mother, which prompted Nathan to lie down and start stamping his foot repeatedly. I can only imagine what Masako and Kurt were thinking in the other room.

My fears were gradually—make that rapidly—morphing from a concern that Nathan lulls me into trusting him before he murders me to a concern that I was going to end up marrying Nathan, and I would have to hear this story at every holiday dinner from now until I die. Literally, flashes of little Nathan-and-Dahlia-spawn danced in my consciousness, and they chortled, saying things like, “Mommy, tell the funny story about thinking Daddy was going to strangle you.” On the one hand, it felt like a little victory, being able to effortlessly imagine a future with someone other than my ex, but on the other hand: every holiday dinner until I die.

I walked out of the room, leaving Nathan to collect himself.

Masako and Kurt didn’t even pretend to be interested in anything else. I appreciated their candor.

“Nothing on TV?” I asked.

“Nothing as exciting as that,” said Masako. Did I say “ally” earlier? Make that “neutral party.”

“All right, Kurt. Since Nathan is apparently too giggly to answer my questions, I’ll ask you. Why are you here?”

“Jonah kicked me out, and I didn’t want to stay with my parents.”

“But that only explains why you’re not there. Why are you here?”

“If I want to look for a job in Saint Louis, it helps to live here.”

“Okay, that puts you in the city. Why are you here?”

“I asked Nathan if I could crash here for a while, and he said sure.”

“There’s a spare room?”

“No, I’m in Nathan’s room.”

Well, there you have it. Nathan Willing was literally sleeping with suspects. This would have to be something we worked out later. At my place. When the production of Godspell was over. I don’t know why I was surprised—Kurt, Jonah, and Nathan were all grad-student buddies together. So was Jennifer Ebel. I wondered, suddenly, if she’d ever crashed here. But I put the thought out of my head because there was actual work to be done.

“So, I got a package for you. You’ll never guess what it is.”

Kurt appraised me with uncertainty. I think for a moment he thought perhaps my package was my fist. His face transformed, sad panda–style, as he figured out my meaning. “Oh, you mean that giant box.”

I thought this couldn’t have been plainer, but I suppose no one expects to get a giant spear in the mail.

“Yes,” I said. “The giant box. Guess what’s in it.”

Kurt looked thoughtful. He wasn’t checking his phone now, but he still didn’t seem entirely present. After a beat, he ventured an answer.

“Maybe a parasol? Like, an oversized one, for a picnic table?”

On the one hand, this was the dumbest thing that I had ever heard. Who busts in on you and wants to gauge your reaction while you unveil an industrial parasol? Who buys industrial parasols, aside from the Saint Louis Bread Company? On the other hand, he did at least pick out something that, dimension-wise, would fit into the box. Which is more than could be said for my first guess of corpse.

Kurt, faraway though his emotional manner may be, detected that I didn’t exactly admire this answer, and so he clarified, unnecessarily, “Like, an industrial picnic table. For a restaurant with a deck. On the ocean.”

Poetic, but still wrong.

“Open it,” I said. I figured I’d at least get his facial reaction; although, given my experience with Kurt thus far, it would probably be muted. But even that was ruined.

“It’s not a spear like the one that killed Jonah, is it?”

Masako still had a lap filled with sprout, and I wanted to tackle her.

“Why would you guess that?”

“I don’t know,” said Masako. “You’re making such a big deal about it, I feel like it should be something dramatic. That, or a corpse.”

Masako was joking, but Kurt still was earnest. “The corpse would have to be folded,” he said. “Or cut up.”

“It could be a baby,” offered Masako.

“But why would the box be so long?”

“Maybe it’s three babies, head to toe.”

“Just open the box,” I told them.

And despite all this tomfoolery, the Bejeweled Spear of Infinite Piercing was just gaudy and awesome enough to still make an impressive reveal. Light shot in through the window and onto the box, so when Kurt finally opened the damned thing, part of the room actually glimmered with refracted light.

“Golly,” said Masako.

“It’s not the spear that stabbed Jonah to death?” asked Kurt, unwilling to handle it, either because of fingerprints or superstition.

“No,” I said. “The police have that one. This is just a copy.”

“Well,” said Kurt, now touching it, “it’s very shiny.”

It was very shiny. It continued to be shiny. Its shininess is a point that possibly cannot be overstated. And yet I wasn’t as drawn to it on this second viewing—maybe my detective was kicking in and I was watching Kurt’s face, which seemed to be lost in a sort of private reverie. In retrospect, though, I think it was because it didn’t stand out as much in Nathan’s apartment. Nathan and Masako and Kurt too were strange and frivolous people (and I say that with esteem and admiration) and the Bejeweled Spear of Infinite Piercing—or even its replica—belonged in a place like their apartment. It should exist in a world of spontaneous alfalfa sprouts and terrifying sofa sectionals. It did not belong downstairs, in the empty apartment of a dead man.

“There’s a note,” I said, handing him the envelope Emily had given me.

“‘This level life too has its summit,’” I told him. “You don’t know what that means, do you?”

Kurt didn’t respond to me until he had opened the envelope and read it himself, three times. I know it was three times because his mouth moved as he read. Whether he thought I was going to lie to him about the contents or he just couldn’t handle the multitasking, I’m still not sure.

At any rate, when he was done reading it, he gave me a puzzled look that was so extreme, so goofily confused, that you could have snapped his picture, written something snarky in Impact, and started a meme right then and there. I resisted this impulse and instead asked:

“So you don’t know what it means?”

“No…,” said Kurt with exceeding slowness. But his face was slowly transforming from utter confusion to creeping suspicion. It was like watching a glacier move.

“Hang on,” he said, suddenly standing. “I need to check my email.”

Then he left, going into Nathan’s room. That left just me and Masako, whom I had never wanted to meet, much less be left alone with.

She must have sensed this, because after a long and uncomfortable silence, she tried comforting me. “Please don’t feel threatened by me,” she said. “I abdicated any claims on Nathan months ago.”

I was trying to seem smooth, and so I laughed. I was shooting for cool hip girl in a vodka commercial. But the laughing lasted a beat or two too long, and I ended up landing closer to not-hip girl who was on her fourth shot.

I had reason to be nervous. Masako Ueda was not the half-Japanese girlfriend that I had imagined. If you will forgive my slight racism and massive paranoia, I had taken Nathan’s ex to be a giggling pixie girl, slight, wispy, perhaps with imaginatively colored hair and one of those thin, delicate frames that sets boys to searching the Internet one-handed. I had prepared for that. But Masako was none of these things. For one, she was built like a truck. It wasn’t unattractive, but she wasn’t wispy, and any protracted conversation with her compelled one to look into doing sit-ups. She also, despite wearing a pastel yellow sundress, managed to seem kind of Goth-y. I guess what bothered me was that Masako seemed less like an idea and more like an actual person. Troublesome and contradictory and, goddamn it, sort of likable.

“You know, maybe the message is an anagram,” said Masako, looking for solid ground for conversation. “I think I’ve got an app for that.”

Masako started fiddling with her phone—and I just dropped the subtext and let her have it.

“Why did you break up with Nathan?”

I sort of winced as I asked this. It was a tacky question, but I wanted to know. I couldn’t tell you why I was worried about her answer, given that Nathan was supine in the other room, still chortling about my apparent concern that he might murder me.

“It’s somewhat complicated,” said Masako, in a completely uncomplicated voice, “but the gist of it is that I left him for my sister-in-law’s midwife.”

“And that would be a woman?” As relationship-threatening answers go, switching to the other team was as good as I could hope for.

“It would.”

“So you’re a lesbian.”

And Masako half smiled, which is as close as she gets to smiling most of the time, I would later learn. “It would seem not, no. But at the time, it seemed very reasonable to double-check.”

This answer was less reassuring. Masako could read my face—I might be good at making guesses and deductions, but I did not have a private eye’s inscrutable face. When I tried to look inscrutable, mostly I gave the impression of mild constipation. And even this required an embarrassing amount of concentration to maintain.

Masako had the opposite problem—her face would have been great for police interviews. Squeezing an emotional response out of her face was like trying to get the last bit of toothpaste out of a tube. It was as if she had been born Botoxed, and frowning, to boot. She was trying, mostly unsuccessfully, I should note, to look friendly now.

“I am not interested in Nathan, so you should not worry about it. I am emphatically so not interested in Nathan that it was completely unnecessary to move out.”

“I can still hear you,” shouted Nathan from the other room.

Masako said loudly, “He is very handsome, however.” Then silently mimed the words to me, Not. To. Me.

And there you have it. I decided to trust her. At least about that. I wasn’t ruling out that she hadn’t gone downstairs and speared Jonah to death, just on principle, but when two people emphatically insist that they’re not interested in each other, sometimes it’s best to just let go.

I sat down on the sofa and asked, “What do you do for fun around here?”

“Anything that does not involve model trains,” Masako said.

At which point, Nathan entered the room and collapsed into the armchair across from us, in a clear rebuke to the yardage of sofa. He did not sit in the chair like a normal person but instead draped his legs over the side of it, affecting a pose of amused decadence.

“Do you have an anagram?” he asked.

“Hmm,” said Masako, poring over her phone. “Foist themselves a lithium Stoli?”

There was a silence as we all considered the ramifications of this.

“You’ve cracked this case wide open,” I told Masako.

“I don’t know. I think it’s very practical,” said Nathan. “I believe that foisting a little Stoli on ourselves is exactly what we need.”

“If it has lithium in it, I’ll pass.”

“There’s always wine, if you want a softer approach,” offered Nathan.

And suddenly we were all sitting on the floor, drinking a rosé. For detecting, it was probably not helpful. But it was sweet and good, and I realized that I had not sat on a floor and had wine with friends in entirely too long.

Kurt stumbled back into the room. He hadn’t had any wine yet; he just stumbled.

And he sat down, on the floor too. We were all on the floor now. Fields of sofa, and we just sat on the floor. But it felt right somehow.

“Your email?” I asked. “You thought you would find something in your email?”

“You were very dramatic about it,” noted Masako, pleased.

“I didn’t,” said Kurt. “But I think I know what it’s about. It’s the Left Field Games Summit. He wants me to go to the Left Field Games Summit.”

Left Field Games was the company that made Kingdoms of Zoth. I knew this because every time you logged in to the game, you had to watch their silly little three-second logo of a baseball landing in grass. Sort of a gaming equivalent of the Columbia Pictures woman holding the torch. But markedly less grand.

“So this was an apology,” I asked. Nathan poured another mug of rosé. No fancy wineglasses here. Mugs. I think Nathan’s had the molecular structure of caffeine on it.

“That’s how Jonah did apologies,” said Kurt. “He could never manage them head-on.”

“This level life too has its summit. The Games Summit. Why are you frowning? I think it’s cute.”

I had taken that Kurt wasn’t fond of wordplay. He frowned even more deeply now and said, “I’m not going. It’ll be terrible.”

“Have you ever been before?”

“No, it’s in Phoenix. Who goes to Phoenix?”

“How do you know it’s terrible if you’ve never been?” I asked him.

Nathan was still lounging on the chair. “This is why I said you have an interrogative manner.”

“I’ve been to things like it. One con is like any other. Probably.”

“Do what you want. It’s your theory, after all. But it sounds like Jonah intended for you to have a good time on his behalf.”

Kurt’s frown grew deeper still. I wasn’t sure why the idea troubled him, but it apparently did. “Yes, you’re probably right. That’s just the kind of big gesture that Jonah was fond of.”

“So… yay?” I hadn’t intended it as a question. I wasn’t sure what was so horrible about the notion of going to the Games Summit. I wasn’t even particularly into Zoth, but conventions were fun. People in costumes, visiting a new city, and late-night drinking with cute nerds. Or, at least, alcohol could make them seem so.

“It’s just such a burden. It’s exactly like Jonah. It’s a big gesture, but with very little thinking behind it. The Games Summit is this weekend. Do you have any idea how much money it will cost to buy a ticket to Phoenix on such short notice?”

Masako said, “You’re not working, you’re not in school. You could take a road trip.”

“Not in my car,” said Kurt, which was a notion I could identify with.

“It’s the last request of a dead man,” said Nathan with the carelessness and the caprice of someone who would not have to fly to Arizona. The comment deflated Kurt, however.

“Right, then. Well, time to go to Zoth.”