CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
The next day passed without much interest, these things being relative, of course. Clemency and Threadwork woke up from their slumber perfectly fine and did not ask any probing questions about how they had gotten to be so very and suddenly tired after Charice gave them some herbal tea. Threadwork did remark a few times that “travel can take it out of you,” but aside from that, it all passed without comment.
Clemency and Threadwork cleared out of the apartment by midmorning and were going on to Phoenix early, because they had not imagined that they would have Charice to guide them around the city. Charice could make Detroit compelling. There was some talk about trying to shift around their travel arrangements to stay an extra day in Saint Louis—the cost in airfare would be balanced by their free lodgings, so they reasoned—but nothing came of it. And of course, Charice had told them—before she had told me, even, that we were going on to the Left Field Games Summit. So they cleared out their things, were trundled to the airport by Charice, and that was that.
I spent the morning in solitude, sipping what I hoped was non-drugged tea and trying to make sense of everything that had happened so far. I had left a message with Emily to call me as soon as I’d woken up, but there was still no response. Charice and I were only a day away from flying out to Phoenix ourselves—and I felt like I was suddenly left with a very awkward unit of time. I wanted to chase down Chtusk, and I wanted to chase down Orchardary, but there wasn’t much to do until then.
I was trying to avoid Nathan as well, mostly because I was thinking about him much more frequently than I should, and I had learned from my lost years with Erik that this was a Very Bad Thing. My relationship with boys ought to be more like Charice’s—things that just happen around you. Instead, I brood over them and relive conversations and basically reengineer myself into an awkward, pouting mess. Because, clearly, that’s what fellas want. I probably should have just called him or texted him, but I could feel myself shifting into “nervous Dahlia,” which is a version of me that pores over word choices in texts with a dangerous and laser-like acuity. “What does it mean that he thought I looked ‘cute’? Cute like a dog? Cute like a little girl? Is this some kind of fetish? Merriam-Webster ’s third definition for cute is ‘obviously straining for effect.’” Is that what he meant?
This ultra-neurotic version of me doesn’t show up frequently, thankfully, and her appearance generally coincides with periods of too much coffee. But I could tell that Neurotic Dahlia was thinking of swinging by the sanctum sanctorum herself, and so I decided it would be best to meet with Nathan in person. It left less evidence that way.
By the time I had hoofed it over to the apartment building, I regretted the idea, but having made the walk I was unwilling to turn back.
Nathan answered the door with wet hair.
“The detective reappears,” he said. “Has the plot thickened?”
“It has,” I told him. “Next I’m going to knead it into a nice dough and bake it.”
“Sounds delicious. As it happens, I’m going to have lunch now anyway. Would you like to join me? How do you feel about swordfish with a red-wine-reduction butter?”
I told him I felt quite fine about it.
“Well, tough, because I don’t have that. I have cucumbers.”
Nathan looked extremely pleased with himself. I was beginning to feel that I should keep him away from Charice, not because I was worried that they would date each other but more that they might create some sort of self-amusedness singularity that could destroy the world with its terrible smugness. Although this was a meeting I could forestall for only so long.
“You’re making cucumber sandwiches?” I asked. As with Charice, the trick was to never acknowledge the joke.
“If you like.”
Which is what we did. If Nathan had noticed that I had avoided him, he didn’t say. To be fair, it had been only a day since I had seen him last. It just felt like longer.
“You weren’t at Jonah’s funeral.”
“What, online?”
“At either of them.”
“I had a class to teach, and I find funerals uncomfortable.”
“Anyway, here’s my thing,” I said. “The police have told me not to spend time with his friends.”
“I was never exactly his friend.”
“I’m not going to debate you on that point. I think it’s probably pretty unlikely that you had anything to do with it, but you know, I do what the police tell me.”
“I just think that we should not hang out until the case is solved.”
“Oh,” said Nathan, brightening, “then you just need to solve the case.”
Yes, that was all I needed to do. Child’s play.
“If I tell you something, can you promise that you absolutely will not, absolutely will not tell anyone?”
“Hmm,” said Nathan. “It would depend upon what it is.”
“Just say yes.”
“No. What if it makes me an accessory to a crime? What if you tell me that you’ve kidnapped an eight-year-old and are feeding him cheese and Shiraz in your basement until his parents pay your ransom?”
“Is this about my ‘you killing me’ theory?”
And then Nathan just started laughing again, just at the memory of it. “Ho, ho, ho.” He actually laughed like that. He said “ho, ho, ho” like Santa Claus, except that his voice was very different, because he did not have a belly like a bowlful of jelly, but a tiny waist that was sustained seemingly only by unpopular vegetables.
“I’m sorry I thought you were going to murder me.”
“Meh. Let me guess. You found the spear.”
I just looked at him. My secrets always get away from me like this. I will go to the grave with nothing to hide.
“What else could it be? So who’s the guilty party?”
I explained that I hadn’t exactly recovered the spear, more that it had been mailed to me, probably the result of a guilty conscious crumbling at Jonah’s posthumous largesse. I considered this to be something of an admission of failure, but Nathan, as with Charice, regarded the news with excitement.
“So you plan to tell no one, and you figure that the guilty party will get irritated at you and reveal themselves.”
“That’s the plan. I don’t know if it will work. But it’s something.”
“You should do something to twist the knife.”
“That’s what Masako said.”
I expected him to look shocked or surprised that I had told Masako about it, but he did not. Perhaps she kept counsel with everyone. Perhaps world leaders visited her with secrets of state, which she addressed with her special brand of emotionless candor. She was like a Japanese Angela Merkel.
“Anyway,” I said after the lack of a visible response, “I’m going off to Phoenix for a few days, to spend time with more of Jonah’s friends the police warned me to avoid.”
“Well,” said Nathan, smirking. “Try not to get murdered.”
I left Nathan’s apartment in a chipper mood—as long as he hadn’t murdered anyone, I seemed to be acquiring a sort of proto-boyfriend. And that was good, wasn’t it? (That’s not a rhetorical question. I really would appreciate a second opinion. Tweet at me.)
As I was walking out, I got a FaceTime message from Emily Swenson. She was wearing black, which called into question every idea I had ever had about her.
“So, Dahlia,” she said, after I answered, “I’ve got an update for you.”
As a rule of thumb, I’m wary of Lawyers with Updates, but something about Emily’s creeping smile told me that this was going to be good news.
“What do you have for me?”
“Get this: A spear came back. Another one.”
“What do you mean ‘came back’?”
For something as supposedly unique as the Bejeweled Spear of Infinite Piercing, it certainly seemed to keep cropping up in unexpected places.
“Jonah shipped one to a fake address.”
“To who?” I asked. This was a big deal. Every Horizon had a received a spear, or at least claimed to, and all the spears had been accounted for. So if one of them “bounced,” then a Horizon was lying. But why?
“Aishwarya Patel. Her address is real, but no one by that name lives there. It came back to Jonah marked ‘Return to Sender.’“
It wasn’t hard to figure out who Aishwarya Patel was—the name was pretty obviously Indian and there was one heavily accented tree in the group. What was hard to figure out was why Orchardary would have told everyone she got a spear when she hadn’t. Was she embarrassed about being left out?
“I’ve also got a complete list of names and addresses for all the guild members who were sent spears. I thought you’d appreciate that.”
“I do.” And I did, although I was still trying to wrap my mind around the last piece of information. Orchardary, huh?
“Check your email.”
And here was my own bombshell.
“Some news from my end: I’ve been emailed my own copy of the spear. The digital one.”
“The original? Who was the thief?”
Emily was not nearly as gobsmacked as Detective Shuler had been. She honestly didn’t seem surprised at all, which managed to be simultaneously rewarding and deeply disappointing. I was glad she’d had the confidence in me, but there’s something to be said for getting a visible reaction.
“I’m still working on that. It was mailed to me from a new account. I think the account was created because the thief wanted to hide his identity.”
“Guilty conscience, you think?”
“Probably. What do you want me do with the thing, what is it, Spear Number Four now?”
“It’s the original, Dahlia. It’s Spear Number One. Email it to Jonah.” And she smiled at me. It was a smile that was worth the entirety of having a iPhone contract with AT&T. So, a lot. “Good work.”
I hadn’t exactly done anything to get the spear back, but I preened at the good work anyway. “Incidentally, don’t tell anyone that you’ve got the spear back. I’ve kind of got a plan to smoke the thief out.”
Emily raised an eyebrow at me.
“You’re full of surprises, Miss Moss.”
True to her word, Emily had forwarded me the billing and shipping info for the spears. Each one cost $2,000 dollars, which I found somewhat mind-blowing. It put Jonah’s hiring me as a detective into a kind of perspective. I’d been second-guessing his motivations for that ever since it had happened, and judging from the invoice, it would seem I had given the matter way, way, way more thought than he had. Jonah was a filthy-rich person masquerading as someone in the upper-middle class.
Once I got past the sticker shock, I settled on the information that was actually useful. For one, there were names and addresses for everyone. Aishwarya Patel of 100 Ladybug Lane, Akron, Ohio, did not exist. Some google-searching revealed that there was such a place, but it was not a house; it was an outlet mall. Aishwarya was not a real person. It had crossed my mind that she was not even Indian—that accent sounded perfectly acceptable to me when I thought it was genuine—but now it seemed a little overdone. It was like a carefully executed joke.
Of even more interest was that there were only nine spears mailed out. Which meant that one person didn’t get one at all. Matching names to what I knew of folks did a pretty good job of determining who the spearless Horizon had to be. The one mailed to Canada was Oatcake. Boston was Tambras. Kurt’s was mailed here. The one to Madison was harder—but that was where Jonah did his undergraduate work, so it probably meant that drunken fire mage, who had told me he was an old college friend of Jonah’s. The fictional address was Ochardary’s. Everyone else, save for our bug-person, matched up.
This meant that Chtusk had never gotten a spear at all.
Later, when I thought about the conversations the Horizons were having when they had all gotten Jonah’s early Christmas present, I would remember that Chtusk had never actually professed to receiving one, much less to copping, as Orchardary did, as to how breathtaking it was. She was just quiet, taking it all in, and keeping to herself.
But at the moment, I was thinking, You skittering little bug. You’re about to get squashed.