CHAPTER NINETEEN

When I got home, Charice was being fitted for what seemed to be a hoop skirt that was covered in skulls. So, a typical evening in my apartment.

“Bad news about the case?”

“Not at all,” I told her. My face must have been grim, though, and I was truthfully in a brooding mood. I had told Emily and Shuler both that I had a plan, and this wasn’t true. I didn’t have a plan; I had an idea of a plan. A vague sort of outline whose details needed to be filled in, and fast.

“What’s with the hoop skirt?” I asked.

“We have to dress for the convention, obviously. I’m going to be Griselda, the Auctioneer.”

I had no idea who this was.

“It will be amazing,” said Charice, and this was probably true.

It would help that Charice had filled our apartment with flouncy gay men. The boys—three of them—were from the Fontbonne Drama Department—and while I did not know them, officially, to be gay, they were flouncy enough to make the question moot. They seemed to be making a dress for Charice that was constructed largely from bone.

There was also a man there named Syd, who, in contrast, I knew was gay and yet could be described as resolutely unflouncy. Syd was possibly the least gay gay person I had ever met, and this came on top of his being a hairdresser. He was old, and exceedingly thin, and looked much like Keith Richards would awaking from a nap. He had a gruff, perpetually irritated manner about him that had suggested that he had spent some time—a bad time from the looks of it—in the military.

“All right, Princess,” he said to me in a voice that made it seem like he was insulting me, “Charice has paid for the works, so just lie back and I’ll work some goddamned miracles on you.”

In my usual mood and demeanor, I would not surrender my hair over to an agent of Charice, even if it were Syd, who was pretty good with hair. What alarmed me was the phrase “the works”—Syd was the kind of hairdresser who would push to make a simple trim a little avant-garde, so when he was paid for “the works,” it ought to at least give you pause.

But it didn’t. I was tired, and I felt weird and guilty, and so I just sat down at our kitchen sink with him.

“Do you ever think you should do something sensible?”

“With hair? Not when I can help it.”

“I meant more in life, really.”

Syd regarded me cooly with the sort of savage stare down that I would expect from a DEA agent.

“Every day of my life, cupcake. But this is the only thing that I’m good at. And I’m very good.” Syd’s face clamped shut to suggest he was done with the sharing part of our conversation. “Now how do you think you’ll look with pink hair?”

Why this didn’t send me screaming from the sink, I’ll never know. Instead I asked, “Neon pink or cotton candy?”

Syd showed me a picture that Charice had taken of RedRasish. Her cute little cotton-candy, apostrophe-shaped hair would have looked lovely on a very young drag queen. It was hard to imagine on my face, which was markedly rounder than the fairy’s. I did not have a tiny nose or enormous eyes. And while it was fetching on her, it seemed a fair guess that it was going to be considerably less flattering on me. Requiring even more consideration was the alchemy involved in transmuting my hair into it. My hair, which was basically a tangled nest of brown straw, was a long way from my best feature. The best that could be said for it was that it was abundant.

But I didn’t fight it. I was apparently giving up a real, normal-person job for what was basically an insane whim, and if that meant having the hair of a Manic Pixie Dream Girl, so be it.

Four hours later, Charice was being wired with neon lights, and I was RedRasish. It wasn’t quite as bad as I had feared—oh, I looked like a crazy person, perhaps a cross between vintage Susan Powter and a trained yet rabid pink poodle—but it could have been worse. I guess what I’m saying is that while I looked ridiculous, neither was I ugly. In some culture, somewhere, I probably looked sexy. The culture was probably the outer boroughs of the Lollipop Guild, but what can you do?

The Fontbonne boys had made an outfit for me that I was politely praising while privately acknowledging that I would never wear anywhere. It was ugly. RedRasish was a level-two fairy, and let’s face it, her starting digs were nothing to write home about. Orange gauze. I was not wrapping myself in orange gauze. It just was not going to happen.

But the hair I could live with.

Charice was terrifying, by the way. She was now a harpy—probably approaching seven feet tall with those platform heels of hers, and she had enormous black wings that were realistic enough to be a little alarming. No detail was overlooked; her fingers were now claws, she was wearing contacts that made her eyes into dead black orbs. But the killer was those neon lights. Floating above her head, just like it would have in Zoth, was her name: “Griselda the Auctioneer.”

“Who is Griselda, anyway?” I asked her. Syd had set off, giving me a curt nod when the job was over. But the Fontbonne boys remained, futzing over Charice, adjusting bits of fabric and feather here and there.

“Beats me,” said Charice, “but a straw poll of my geek friends told me that this would be received as a cool choice.”

I was surprised when one of the Fontbonners answered the question. It was a bit like a mime speaking.

“She’s an auctioneer at the Harpy Outpost. She’s not really very interesting in herself—like, she doesn’t have a backstory or anything—but everyone sees her a lot when they’re level ten or so. So there’s this kind of nostalgia for her. It’s a very cool choice.”

Charice gestured to the Fontebonne geek that she bowed to his superior knowledge.

“You’ve outdone yourself, Charice.”

This was the sort of sentence that Charice liked to hear best. She liked it even when it was negative—I had said it the time that a poisonous Gila monster had been released in our apartment, and she basked then as well. And she basked now.

“You and I are going to be the queens of Zoth at this convention.”

I somehow doubted this. Our costumes were pretty good, but cosplayers don’t mess around. We might be a princess or a duchess, but queens we were not. But my answer was more practical.

“Where’s my harp, by the way?”

“What harp?”

“RedRasish’s harp. I’m a priestess of Usune.”

“Forget it. You don’t need it.”

“I’m. A. Priestess. Of. Usune,” I repeated, but the emphasis was entirely lost on her. She didn’t even know who Usune was.

“You’ll look great without it.”

I had clearly passed over completely into a crazy woman, because it was clear to me that I did need it, especially since I wasn’t wrapping myself in orange gauze.

I made a quick phone call to Stephen, who was an old friend of mine who worked at Gaylord Music Library. I had not spoken to him in two years, but he was still in my iPhone contacts list.

“Stephen, it’s Dahlia Moss. I need a harp.”

I expect that Stephen was a little surprised by the phone call. It would have made sense for him to be spending a few moments in confusion as to who I was. He didn’t do that, however, but just responded as though I had been calling him all this time making requests of musical instruments.

“No one needs a harp. Just spend the money on an ice sculpture.”

“How are those things equivalent?”

“Your guests will be equally happy. I assume this is a wedding we’re talking about.”

“What? No. I’m not getting married.”

“Well, I haven’t seen you in a while, and it’s not as if it’s a crazy thought. You’re not getting any younger—”

“I don’t need a harpist, I just need a harp.”

“Well, that’s good because the harpists I know hate doing weddings. Loathe them. Three hours of ‘Ave Maria’ while people get drunk and hit on the bridesmaids. What kind of harp do you need?”

“What? There are different kinds?”

“Lever, pedestal, hand. Why do you need the harp if you’re not going to play it? And I assume you’re not playing it, since you don’t know the three kinds of harps.”

I thought about RedRasish’s harp. “Umm… what kind of a harp does an angel have?”

Stephen sighed. “Is this for a costume?” The question was petulant.

“Yes?”

“First, that’s a lyre. And second, I’m not going to help you get a musical instrument for a Halloween costume. Just go to Amazon or something.”

“I need it by tomorrow. Please, Stephen, I’ll get you those coffee beans you like. With the maple syrup?”

“I haven’t had a cup of coffee in over a year.”

There was an awkward silence, in which it suddenly seemed that we were no longer talking about lyres and coffee habits. Stephen broke the silence.

“Where have you been for the past year?”

“Here, in Saint Louis,” I answered meekly.

“I realize that, Dahlia. I mean, why have you been ignoring everyone?”

Why had I been ignoring everyone? No one had ever put the question to me before.

“Things have been a little shitty lately. Everyone’s just been so successful, and I thought I’d just lay low a little until I got a job, and then months went by and I still didn’t have a job, and it just sort of became this cycle of, I don’t know, seclusion. Misery? Broad shittiness?”

“So you’ve found a job and you’re just trying to return to your old haunts, is that it?”

“Um, no. I still haven’t found a job. Well, sort of. My job vaguely involves dressing up as a fairy with a harp.”

“A lyre.”

“Right. So, I’ll tell you all about it if you can bring me a lyre? Pretty please.”

Forty-five minutes later, Stephen came in just as the Fontbonne boys were leaving, which was serendipity to him, undoubtedly. He gave me the lyre in a deadly earnest voice:

“Don’t break this.”

Stephen took a moment before commenting on my hair. As far as he knew, I had been wearing it like this for years. Maybe he thought this was why my job interviews weren’t going well.

“You look like a cross-stitch sampler.”

It was the orange gauze. You could see the stitchwork in it. Honestly, the whole effect made me look like a demented Raggedy Ann doll. I wasn’t going to admit my discomfort in front of the Fontbonners though. “Embroidery is a luxury,” I said. “And I’m nothing if not luxurious.”

“Embroidery in childhood is a luxury,” said Stephen. “Of Idleness.” Stephen had a schoolmarmish tone in his voice, as though he were correcting me.

“Are you quoting from something?”

“Yes,” said Stephen. “Benjamin Britten. I wrote my senior thesis on Benjamin Britten. I thought you were sucking up to me by quoting him.”

“Is that an opera singer?”

“He’s a composer,” said Stephen with a sigh. “It’s from Peter Grimes.”

“Is he an opera singer?”

Basically all I could remember about Stephen’s senior year was that he talked a lot about opera singers.

“Peter Grimes is an opera. There was a local production of it like two weeks ago.”

“Sure,” I said. I had learned long ago to switch to monosyllabic responses when Stephen started talking about opera. Any additional responses could send him into full-fledged lecture mode.

“I was in the production. I’ve been posting about it on Facebook for weeks. How can you not know this?”

I gave Stephen my best aw, shucks smile. “I missed you too.”

And he was off. Maybe the Fontbonne boys were serendipitous for me too, because clearly I had some extra sucking up to do. Why had I written everyone off? Was it because I was just embarrassed? Depressed?

Seeking clarity for those kinds of questions can haunt you, and I was being haunted with enough already. I wasn’t going to invest mind space in whatever the hell had been wrong with me months earlier. Because what did it matter, really? And Stephen was, well, still Stephen. Apparently less caffeinated now, but behind his crusty layer of tut-tutting, he was still happy to see me. I thought, possibly, that we were still friends, even. He gave me a harp, which had to stand for something.

There wasn’t time to worry. I had things to do.

My transformation into crazy woman was complete when I awoke at three AM with a burning idea. I should speak to Aishwarya Patel. She was a real person, Emily had mentioned. Just not a person at the address provided. So my question—the question that woke me up in the middle of the night—was: Why the address change? And why fake having received a copy of the spear? Was Aishwarya on the move for some reason? Did she have something to hide?

There I was, pink-haired in the moonlight, googling Aishwarya’s whereabouts. You might think that Aishwarya Patel is very particular name—Ophelia Odom revisited—but this is a decidedly American perspective. There were scads of Aishwarya Patels, most of them in India. The first name was slightly unusual, but the last name was common. The English equivalent would be googling “Ruby Jones.”

The truth is that I couldn’t rule out the Indian Aishwaryas. All I really knew about her is that she didn’t know anyone in Saint Louis, which is probably true of a plurality of people in the Western Hemisphere. If she did live in India her–ping would be high, which I suppose would have been a useful thing to check if I had thought about it earlier. Which I hadn’t.

It was 3:07 in the morning, however, and this was a time to simply play the odds. Let’s assume that Aishwarya lived in the United States. That narrowed it down to five people. If you took out the folks who seemed too old, I was left with two ladies. One of them had an open Facebook page, and I could see that she was studying at Duke. She was pretty, with long black hair, and she was improbably wearing an old-time country-western outfit. It was pretty silly—pink suede with a cowboy hat and actual rope for fringe. Probably a Halloween costume, but who knew?

The other Aishwarya was on Twitter. No picture (of herself) but she was a different person because she lived in San Antonio, which was a helluva commute to Duke. She tweeted a lot, but only about Shonda Rhimes. I sent a private Facebook message to Dukewarya and tweeted directly at Shonda/warya, in full view of anyone following me.

“Do you play Zoth? Pls respond. I am a private detective investigating a murder and this is improbably important.”

I probably shouldn’t have done that. In addition to potentially tipping off the spear thief, there was a distinct chance that Grandma Moss was going to spot that tweet and query me about it later. Six years earlier, Grandma found the online detritus of an aborted booty call, and I’d been getting grief about it ever since.

But I’d risk Grandma’s wrath for this. I wanted answers.