CHAPTER FIFTEEN

The next morning was Jonah’s honest-to-gosh, real-life funeral. I probably should have been more focused on that, but my head was still in the events of the previous day. Don’t laugh, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that someone had left that job-fair note just for me—which I know sounds like crazy paranoia. And yet. Did I have some fairy godmother who was trying to find me a job? If so, she should have shown up several months earlier, when my life was falling apart. Why now, when I actually sort of, kind of had something going? I wasn’t just being paranoid, was I? It was weird. I mean, who distributes flyers late on a weeknight at a custard joint? To a single car? Still, maybe it was paranoia, because Anson Shuler, Interrupted Cop, didn’t think it worth commenting on. Maybe he had left the flyer for me.

That little mystery was troubling enough. I didn’t even know what to say about the slightly cheeky vibe I had picked up around Anson. It was like the pseudo-flirting you can do around gay guys: fun and brazen and, because you know there’s zero chance of a relationship starting, totally risk-free. I was doing it around Shuler, without the fail-safe. Dangerous waters, Dahlia. Canceled? GLECAD’s cast was expanding like it was working toward a spin-off.

I found myself wishing that I had asked more questions of Shuler when he had made his vague little proclamation. Which friends? I should have asked him. Biology friends? Gamer friends? Nathan and company? Technically speaking, Jonah was someone who didn’t really have friends. He had people, acquaintances of varying degrees, whom he probably referred to as friends. But they weren’t friends, at least not as I understood the word. They were, well, a politician’s idea of friends. People who Jonah had a little history with, and who perhaps might prove useful down the road, career-wise, or for tanking aggro off a raid boss. If he had lived, he’d probably be describing me as one of his “friends,” eventually.

The trick was, with Jonah’s broad definition of friendship, an edict to avoid friends of Jonah Long was not practical. Jonah was one of those souls who just went around collecting people. He wasn’t the head of the Event Horizons, he wasn’t the heart of the Horizons, but he was definitely its fingers. More than half the guild seemed to know him personally. He interacted with everyone, however facilely. So the question of avoiding his friends was not very constructive. Doing it properly would probably entail avoiding wide swaths of Saint Louis.

Of course, Charice was nowhere to be found. I took this to mean that she went home with one of the actors, which was a very safe bet. My money was on the half-naked man I saw who was playing Jesus. From what I saw, Jesus had abs. Plus, it would play to Charice’s sense of the grand.

But it was just like her to not be around when I actually wanted to speak to her. Hot and cold, that Charice. Instead, I spent the rest of the morning in solitude. A quick trip to the library, a little mulling around the mall. I took Shuler’s advice, but that meant making no progress on the case at all. It worried me that this was perhaps the intended result of his warning.

I still hadn’t told Charice about the spear. By the time I made it to Jonah’s funeral, I was ready to shout it from the rooftops. If Jehovah’s Witnesses had wanted to enter my home to go over the wonderful appeal of eternal life, I would have more than happily entertained them, provided I also got to bounce off my own exploits.

It was certainly not the attitude I should have entered the scene with. I should have been solemn, respectful, and most of all observant. I was none of these. “Peevish” was a good word to describe my mood. And the only person I was looking for was Charice, who, goddamn it, really should sit and listen to how amazing I was for a minute. Or so I felt at the time.

I didn’t have a lot of experience with funerals. The only one I had ever attended, at least that I was old enough to remember, was for my uncle Kyle’s grandmother, who died at 103. The entire family went, because my aunt Lorraine had been cheating on Kyle for some time, which my parents knew about, and they felt guilty. So we went to the funeral of this strange unknown woman to compensate. I realize that doesn’t make any sense, but it’s how we Mosses operate.

It was basically a kind of nightmare. Kyle cried constantly. Lorraine glowered at us for coming. Alden hit on a pallbearer and disappeared with him behind the church while the rest of us sang “Amazing Grace.” Me, I just sat there and squirmed. At fourteen, I could notice the details, but I didn’t have any of the subtext. The only clue I had was what all fourteen-year-olds have: Grown-ups are weird.

It was an insight that, while still true, didn’t help me now. Surely this funeral would go better. Even if I didn’t get any clues, it had to go better. Right?

I got there early for the purpose of speaking to Charice before the funeral began and because I took a chance and drove my jalopy, which you always need to allot extra time for. But she was not there, still. My other purpose was to figure out where these alleged photographers were, which I found was not hard at all. There were just photographers around, taking pictures of things. They made no particular effort to hide themselves. It looked like three people to me. But they weren’t being a burden—it wasn’t as if they had flashbulbs that they were irritating everyone with or were forcing people to stand awkwardly together.

The funeral was taking place outdoors, at a cemetery I had never visited or even heard of. This was probably because it was not a cemetery for poor people. It was very old—at least for Saint Louis—and had the lavish sort of mausoleums that one expects in the Northeast. Jonah’s gravestone, by contrast, was pretty modest. A crowd, smaller than I would have guessed—perhaps sixty people or so—sort of muddled about in folding chairs, most of them not sitting down just yet, as if they weren’t ready to commit to the thing. From the uneasiness and uncertainty in the air, I guessed that Jonah’s parents hadn’t shown up yet. Perhaps they were making an entrance with the priest. The thing wasn’t going to start without them.

I was scanning the crowd for Charice but instead found Jennifer Ebel. She was dressed as soberly as she had been when we first met, but then it struck me that she was probably perpetually dressed for a funeral. She took my polite nod for a suggestion to come over and talk; that, or she was bored. I couldn’t blame her—for someone so young, it seemed that most of the mourners here were rather advanced in age. It was hard to guess how they could have known Jonah, except for the obvious guess that they were all friends of his parents.

Jennifer was upon me faster than one would have thought possible to move in a getup as highly starched as the one she was wearing. As she got near to me, I realized that she was also wearing tiny skull earrings, which, while subtle, had to be said to be unspeakably tacky. At least it answered my earlier question about her. Jennifer was a humorless girl who had somehow acquired an inexplicable penchant for novelty jewelry. No one, as Christopher Durang says, is all one thing.

“How’s your case coming?” asked Jennifer.

Had I said that I would have confessed details of my case to Jehovah’s Witnesses earlier? I meant it then, and damn if I didn’t want to spill the beans now, but there was something in Jennifer’s fake casualness that made the hair on my not-recently-enough-shaved legs stand on end. Who did she think she was fooling?

“So far,” I told her, “he’s still dead. Nothing I’ve accomplished seems to have brought him back.”

As comments go, this was a little like fetid air. It meant nothing, signified nothing, and was vaguely distasteful. It was just the first thing I had thought to say. It did not deter Jennifer in the slightest, however. Why would it? She was wearing skull earrings to a funeral.

“I heard that Jonah was murdered,” she told me. She could not have achieved a more fake version of a casually lobbed-off comment if she worked on it. Maybe if she had thrown in a “girlfriend” to preface the phrase—as in “Girlfriend, I heard that Jonah was murdered.” Maybe then. But then again, it was all so forced and fake that I’m not sure it would have made a difference. This second query didn’t irritate me as much as the first. Mostly it just left me embarrassed at Jennifer’s terrible social skills.

“I don’t know that a funeral service is the best place to discuss this, Jennifer.”

“That’s why I thought I’d ask you before it starts. You’re the detective. Who do you think killed him?”

At least she had had the good graces to keep her voice low, although apparently the gentleman behind me had heard her mindless theory-mongering, because he was graceful enough to give me a chance to escape.

“A detective?” he said, in a faux British-y voice that I realized instantly had to be Threadwork’s. “You must be the unstoppable Dahlia Moss. A pleasure to meet you.”

I don’t know why I was so shocked to see a Horizon at Jonah’s funeral. I suppose I thought of Zoth, however irrationally, as a distant land only reachable by modem. Of course, it wasn’t. And here was living proof.

“Good grief,” I said. “I didn’t realize you were a local.”

“I’m not a local,” said Threadwork, just as puffily as you would imagine it. “I hail from the fabled city of Baltimore, glimmering city of glassphalt.”

It was a ridiculous delivery of what was already a very silly line, and I regarded the man in front of me with what must have been too long a stare. Jennifer seemed to be doing it too. It was just that I was checking to see if he were some sort of hologram or ventriloquist’s doll. The voice that was emanating from him—this fey, wispy British thing—seemed to belong in a completely different body.

The gentleman—Threadwork—was African American (or I supposed, possibly African English—but really, who in Britain actually spoke like that?) and must have been close to seven feet tall. Or would have been, if he were standing. But he wasn’t standing—he was sitting in a wheelchair. Despite this, he seemed to sort of loom over me and Jennifer both. I’d generally never describe someone in a wheelchair as being menacing, but I had to admit that Threadwork was indeed very large. His muscles had muscles. If his legs were inoperable, it seemed as though his arms and chest were going to pick up the slack. And when they were done picking up slack, they might just rip a tree out of the ground and throw it.

It was not the man I had imagined, to say the least.

But it was definitely Threadwork—you could tell that from how he expanded to fill the conversation.

“There’s no good weather for a funeral, don’t you think? Either it’s dreary and cold, and makes everyone miserable, or it’s sunny and beautiful and seems as though God isn’t actually all that sad about you being dead.”

He looked up at the sky, which was indeed sunny and beautiful. “Still, I suppose. Better this than hail.”

Threadwork went on for a bit more while I gaped at him, and Jennifer quickly made her escape.

“What a detestable woman,” he said after she left. “Asking you who you thought murdered Jonah. Oh, by the way, I’m Threadwork.”

Incidentally, just so he doesn’t come off as a complete crazy person—Threadwork did tell me his real name. But to keep things simpler, I’m sticking with Threadwork. It suits him better anyway. And less hyphens.

“Yes,” I said. “I gleaned that. Thank you for driving her off. Although I don’t think that she’s detestable so much as awkward.”

“Awkward or not, there are things that we do not do.”

It was such a puffy thing to say that it prompted my next question with almost no thought at all.

“Is that your real voice?”

“Not in the slightest, no. But I’ve decided that I’m going to use it for my adventures today, and at the convention. Are you going, by the way?”

“I hadn’t planned on it.”

“You should. You’d have a lovely time, and perhaps you would solve your case. Besides, I’m going to go, and you would be another interesting person to talk with.”

Crowds were beginning to gather, and I found myself thinking that we should move toward the chairs. But I was still slightly hypnotized by the improbable figure in front of me.

“Why don’t you use your real voice?”

Threadwork paused for a moment, as if deciding to answer my question cleverly or truthfully. “I don’t much care for the way people react to me when I use my ‘real voice.’”

“Is this some kind of race thing?” I asked him. Apparently the wake of Jennifer had left me with a surprising directness.

“Partially,” he said. “But mostly it’s that when I speak in my regular voice, people regard me as some sort of walking tragedy. ‘That poor man.’ I’ve actually heard someone say that when they thought I was out of earshot. But when I’m Threadwork, they regard me as a curiosity. Have you met that strange fellow in the wheelchair? What a curious gentleman he is.”

I wasn’t sure what to make of any of this. Frankly, I thought using a false voice all the time seemed a little tragic myself. But it was as if Threadwork had read my mind and answered this unspoken thought at once.

“I don’t use this voice in my regular life, please understand. It was just for the character. Just for Threadwork. But now that I’m being dragged into the light, as it were, I don’t want to be recontextualized. I am not a tragedy.”

“Do you want to tell me your story?”

“Most definitely not, no. Although I fear you’ll just look it up anyway.”

“Probably so. I’m not very good at leaving unanswered mysteries alone.”

“I’ll give it to you in six words, then. I played college basketball,” said Threadwork, then gestured at his legs. “Very briefly.”

“Car crash?”

“A horse.”

“It’s nice to meet you, Threadwork. I’m sorry to force you out of your comfort zone.”

“Well, you didn’t murder Jonah Long and steal the Bejeweled Spear of Infinite Piercing. You’re not the cause of any of this, just another thing to be endured.”

And his tone had gotten shorter with me. It was a mistake to force the story out of him. It wasn’t relevant to the case; it wasn’t relevant to anything. Being a detective, if you’re not careful, can give you false license to get into everyone’s business. Like one of those horrible people at dinner parties who consider themselves “truth tellers”—and yet only seem to offer truths that are critical. Any virtue can be taken too far.

“Did Clemency come with you?”

It was an unjustified question, honestly—but something about Clem and Threadwork struck me as a pairing. Not a romantic pairing, just a pairing. Like Laurel and Hardy, or Tycho and Gabe.

“I met her at the airport. She’s with Jonah’s parents now, I believe. I assume they’re going to all arrive together.”

This surprised me more than Threadwork’s backstory. “How does she know Jonah’s parents?”

“I don’t believe she does. But she went to meet them this morning with food she had made, and I haven’t heard from her since. But you know Clemency. She’s so good at feelings.”

The funeral started late, because no one was willing to begin without Jonah’s parents there, although at twenty minutes after its start time, doubts began to foment that they were going to make the event at all. On the one hand, it should be inexcusable to miss the funeral of your son, but on the other, it really feels like an event that you shouldn’t witness. Getting there very late, and looking dazed and beleaguered, as Sylvia and Harvey Long did, was perhaps the most socially acceptable way to deal with the situation.

The funeral was more secular than I had imagined. The priest spoke only in generalities and never mentioned God or any particular religion. Rather, he focused on how much Jonah would be missed, all the holes he would leave behind, and how it was up to us to honor his memory.

It was depressing as hell.

After the funeral, I had had a vague hope of speaking with Sylvia or Harvey Long, but they were swarmed with well-wishers, and they clearly didn’t want to deal with the ones they had. Sylvia, it had to be said, looked remarkably like her son. Same facial structure, same body type. Harvey, on the other hand… If I had to describe him quickly on a Ouija board, I’d go with LLWBRIMLEY. Regardless, they bolted out of the funeral as if they expected the coffin to explode in a rain of fire, mowing through friends and family as they headed toward the limo that had brought them here. Stopping them would have required an elemental force, such as lightning, or a wall of plague rats. And frankly, I wasn’t sure the rats would do it.

I still hadn’t seen Charice, but I could just feel that she was here. She was waiting for me to let down my guard so she could pop out at me from behind a tombstone, or leap out from a casket. I was not having it.

I made small talk, but it was clear that this was a work obligation, not some terrarium of suspects, which was what Charice had hoped for. I did notice the pretty brunette that was talking to Threadwork. She was as unsurprising as he had been revelatory. Clemency was exactly as I had imagined she might look.

She looked to be about thirty, with the short, straight plain hair that one expects a kindergarten teacher to have. Her face was small but expressive, and she had—I could tell, even from a distance—a teacher’s way of talking with her hands. When she spotted me, she brightened visibly.

“Dahlia!” she said, hugging me. “Thank you for coming out for this.”

At least from outward appearances, Clemency had the sort of pregnancy that women’s magazines yearn for. She was pregnant but otherwise rail thin, a cute little baby bump showing at her waist, while the rest of her looked ready for a trip to the beach. “Glowing” is the word my mother likes to use for the phenomenon.

“It’s nothing,” I said. “How are Jonah’s parents?”

“As well as can be expected. So, lousy, really. They’re very impressed with you—I guess their lawyer is sending them good reports.”

I think I preened a bit at the line, which probably wasn’t wise or appropriate given that Clemency was a suspect herself. Perhaps not a very likely suspect, but a suspect nonetheless—and I should accept her secondhand assessments of me with Bogart indifference. That’s in retrospect, however. In the moment, I preened. I don’t even think she noticed, though—she had her own problems on her mind.

“I went over to see them this morning with cinnamon buns. Which seems like a ridiculous offering, I know. Your son was murdered, here are some cinnamon buns. But you know, people die and you bring food. That’s what you do.”

“You came with them, so I guess the cinnamon buns worked out.”

“I suppose,” she said, looking sad and far away. “They were all alone. I had expected that there would be family and well-wishers, but it was just them, hanging around in their son’s apartment. I barely explained who I was before they just sort of melted into me. I think it might have been the first food they have had in days.”

And now I felt guilty. Clemency was worried about their well-being. I had been worried about my prime position as fake detective, and evidence. Touchy-feely bits weren’t really part of my wheelhouse.

“So, Dahlia,” said Clemency in a tone of voice that suggested she was putting the unpleasantness of the morning behind her. “What would you recommend one do with two days in Saint Louis?”

“Keeping ADA compliance in mind,” added Threadwork.

It was, of course, at this point that Charice popped out from behind a tombstone. Well, not exactly. More that she just came into my field of view—she had been sitting modestly in the back, mostly out of sight. Probably she had been supervising the photographers, which is why I hadn’t noticed her before. The other reason I might not have noticed her was that she was wearing a disguise. Charice was standing there in a little gray hat, with luxurious brown curls coming down her shoulders. I realized, with dawning horror as she drew closer, that this had been Jesus’s hair.

Her sudden appearance shouldn’t have surprised me, at any rate. The question “What would you recommend to do in Saint Louis?” was practically an invocation of Charice—the way saying “Bloody Mary” three times in the mirror brings forth evil spirits.

“Dahlia,” she said, smiling broadly, all but daring me to ask about the wig. “Are these friends of yours looking for a diversion?”

It had barely been twelve hours since Detective Shuler had given me explicit instructions not to hang around with Jonah’s friends, and so I started to say, no, Charice, let’s let them find their own way. But I stopped myself because I was momentarily confused if I should call her Charice or not. Given her getup, she may have already introduced herself as Dorothy von Higgenbottom, and I would be giving her away.

Charice took my confusion and ran off with it. Also, she ran off with the suspects, telling them, “I’m Dahlia’s roommate. I’d be happy to show you around town. How do you feel about cheap sushi?”

I would have been irritated, but I had business inside.

I knew what William Chetwood looked like from the funeral home’s website. He wasn’t quite the man I would have imagined for the job—that guy would have been tall, thin, and cadaverous. A nice character-actor type. Actual William Chetwood was more of a fuddy-duddy; bald and pear-shaped, always futzing with his bifocals. Still sort of a character actor, but less Hitchock and more Dickensian countinghouse. Probably it was the suit.

“Mr. Chetwood!” I said, drawing his attention as he headed back toward his car.

He turned to look at me, and his face lit up with a kind of illumination. It was exceedingly grandfatherly, and despite not knowing him, I felt an unexpected rush of warmness toward the man. I presumed it was this sort of thing that made him good at dealing with the bereaved.

The illumination wasn’t an affect, though. He recognized me.

“Dahlia Moss, isn’t it? Are you Dahlia Moss?”

Jesus, had I applied for a job at a funeral home in the past thirteen months? I couldn’t remember doing so, but it wasn’t strictly impossible.

“Yes, that’s me. How do you know who I am?”

“I didn’t,” said Mr. Chetwood with a lot of cheer for a funeral director. “I was just sort of hoping.”

The obvious question to ask was: Why would you hope this? But I felt this all had the influence of Charice about it, and so I saved the question for the end of the conversation. I never liked giving Charice her treats right away, even if she wasn’t around. Besides, she was probably listening in.

Instead I got to my point: “You didn’t make my announcement.”

“Announcement?”

“For a funeral for Jonah Long?”

Mr. Chetwood smacked his lips in a gesture of confusion.

“We just had the funeral for Mr. Long. You missed it, my dear. Dead and buried.”

“No,” I said. “For another one. An online funeral.”

“Another funeral? No, I don’t think so. Usually our patrons die just the one time.”

I think perhaps this was a joke, but it was very dry.

“An online funeral. More a remembrance, really.”

Mr. Chetwood looked at me with confusion. “Online? Like Facebook?”

“This is to be in the online world of Zoth. In the Sunsalt Marshes?”

And his face lit right up again. Clowns had less buoyant smiles.

“Oh yes, right! I do remember that now. No, I didn’t announce it. I thought that was a joke.” Then he seemed to suddenly realize that this was some sort of faux pas, and his face transformed into the very picture of contrition. He was good at faces; he seemed to have quite a tableau of them.

“I’m quite sorry.”

I frowned. “It wasn’t a joke. I really wanted to invite everyone to Zoth.”

“Is that a bar?”

“No, an online world. With dragons, and ogres, and there’s this talking crab that wants you to kill fish for him.”

Mr. Chetwood gave me an appraising look. He may have been slightly bumbling, but the guy oozed empathy. Mentioning the talking crab wasn’t the smartest thing to say, and there were plenty of openings for snark. He avoided them all. “I apologize, Miss Moss. I’m really not very up-to-date on the hobbies of young people. I gave up somewhere around Go-bots. I thought it was a joke. Mea culpa.”

“Is there some way to get the announcement out after the fact?”

Mr. Chetwood made a sort of a thoughtful clucking noise. “Tell me. Do you think that very many of those people who attended the funeral today will visit an online world with dragons and ogres and a talking crab? I’m not up-to-date, but I do have a good sense for people. The crowd I saw looked a bit on the, hmm, august side. I don’t they would be interested in talking crustaceans, unless they were mascots for a seafood restaurant. Even then, many of them would have questions about heartburn.”

“That’s not the point.”

“What was the point?”

I suppose the point was to show Jonah’s parents that I had been trying. Then again, based on their dazed and beleaguered (and entirely natural) behavior at the funeral, they probably wouldn’t have noticed anyway. Easy come, easy go? But I suddenly had a second thought.

“I don’t suppose I could pick your brain about a slightly related matter?”

“My brain, my dear,” fluttered Mr. Chetwood, “is always ripe for picking. Even for matters less than slightly related. Sometimes ideas fall out of it without any picking at all.”

“If you had to deliver a eulogy for someone you didn’t know,” I began. “Let’s say, in a fantasy world. How would you go about it?”

Mr. Chetwood rapped his fingers along his face. “I would avoid doing that. And not just the fantasy world. A eulogy ought to be personal. If you really must have it delivered by someone who didn’t know the deceased, you should get a priest.”

My face must have sagged, because Chetwood instantly asked, “Can’t find a priest?”

“I can, but he’s a war-priest, and I don’t think it means the same thing. Any other advice?”

“Platitudes and quotes from the Bible. Shakespeare, if they’re not religious.”

This was less encouraging than I might have hoped. Sensible, but not encouraging.

“Thank you. Incidentally, why did you hope I was Dahlia Moss?”

Mr. Chetwood looked at me blankly, as if he had forgotten this portion of the conversation, then lit up again with recognition. It was like dealing with Kurt Campell’s senile grandfather. “Right, oh yes,” said Chetwood, fishing into his pocket for a plain white envelope. “I was supposed to give this to you.”

I looked at the envelope, which had my name on it.

“Who is this from?”

“From?”

“Yes, who gave it to you?”

“Samantha?” suggested Chetwood with very little commitment.

“I don’t know anyone named Samantha.”

“Perhaps it was a Julie. Or a Linda?”

“I don’t know anyone with any of those names.” And they aren’t even related names, I thought, although I wasn’t going to badger Chetwood on this point. He obviously dealt with a lot of names and faces. “What did she look like?”

Chetwood was giving me a face—a tableaued one this time, from his bank of expressions—that quite clearly said: I’m very busy and why don’t you just take your envelope and leave? With his lips, however, he said: “I must confess that I’m not entirely sure. Someone tallish? Or perhaps medium height. Definitely not short.”

“White? Black?”

“Probably one of those, yes. But not short.”

“How are you sure not short?”

“I have a smallish coffin I’m trying to get rid of. So short people are on my brain.”

There was a little more small talk, and I thanked Chetwood again for his advice. I was back in my jalopy when I opened the envelope, which was white, and unassuming, and unlabeled. It was an article, clipped from the Cadenza, about gaming addiction. The headline read: “How I Overcame My Gaming Addiction and Found My Life.” I didn’t read it because even starting the article made my blood boil. I did see one passage that had been helpfully highlighted for me: “Players of MMORPGS are three times more likely to be unemployed than nonplayers.” Very helpfully highlighted. At the bottom of the article, written in the same block-lettered handwriting from the job-fair flyer were the words: “Just worried about you, Dahlia.—An anonymous friend.”

I wanted to storm away, but my car wouldn’t start. It’d been doing this thing where its anti-theft mechanism randomly kicks in, so I had to wait a half hour in my car, reading the article over and over and considering: Who is this really from? I don’t have any friends.