CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

It was in this doldrums that Chtusk found me. I was only drinking water—four-dollar water, mind you—but I was sitting alone at the bar with a facial expression that suggested that it was vodka.

“I’m sorry I keep running from you. It’s really not very like me at all.”

Chtusk was stammering and embarrassed. She wasn’t very buglike at all, I realized. More like a rabbit. And running did seem like her. She looked like she wanted to run now.

But I was suddenly tired and didn’t feel like talking to her. “What do we need to talk about?”

She was probably too self-absorbed to tell, but my heart was not remotely in the question. I had the spear, I had the thief—what did I care about what Bug Girl had to say to me?

“I’m Lurleen.”

I blinked at her.

“That’s why I wanted to avoid you. I’m Lurleen. The Lurleen.” She looked down at the floor.

I knew two people in this life named Lurleen. One was a former governor of Alabama, who ran for office with the slogan “Vote for Lurleen, but Let George Do It!” George being her husband, who had been governor for so long that he had run into term limits. The other was Lurleen Rice, the dental hygienist that Erik, my ex, had cheated on me with for at least eight months. I should have guessed something was going on from his biweekly cleanings.

Truth be told, I wasn’t fond of either Lurleen, but at least Lurleen Wallace was a product of her time. Lurleen Rice was just a whore.

I think her next line was something about wanting to come clean and make amends. I don’t completely know because I couldn’t hear her over the sudden rage that was overpowering me. Flames on the side of my face, as Madeline Kahn said. I also kept looking at her, my detective’s eye suddenly coming out when I would have preferred it to sit this round out, and it asked, “Erik left you for her?”

Not that I’m that great shakes. I could stand to lose a few pounds, and mostly in my face. But Lurleen. She was older than me. And she was so plain-looking. With that oversized T-shirt hanging off her thin, shapeless body, she looked like she could be wearing the uniform of a particularly unimaginative cult. I had imagined “the hygienist”—as I preferred to call her—as a shapely blonde, with oversized boobs and maybe a sexy gap in her middle teeth, like Lauren Hutton. Somehow that was better.

“I got dumped for this?” I thought—or I thought I thought. Apparently, I said it aloud. Again, flames, nostrils, heaving.

“I don’t want to focus on the past,” said Lurleen. “I just feel really badly for the way Erik and I took advantage of you. I just want to make sure you’re okay.”

If Chtusk had kept talking, I swear to God that there might have been a catfight. Possibly with actual cats. If one had been nearby, I certainly would have thrown it at her. Check to make sure that I’m okay? I was an inch away from yelling for Tambras and punching her in the gut, but suddenly my detective bits just started taking over. I was asking questions that I hadn’t really even intended to ask.

“Everyone else got spears,” I told her. “Orchardary’s was sent back, because she is not a real person. Or at least, not the person she claimed. But you got none at all.”

This question disarmed her a little. “What? That’s not really important,” she said. “The important thing is that I give you the apology that you deserve. I behaved abominably.”

“Why did Jonah not give you a spear? Because you were too new? Did that make you angry?” Angry enough to kill? I wondered, then instantly put the question out of my head. Lurleen was a wallflower obsessed with getting my forgiveness. Whatever she was, she wasn’t Jonah’s murderer.

“It’s not like that at all,” said Lurleen.

“What was it like, then?” I asked. “Why did Jonah send a spear to everyone else in the guild but you?”

“Because I told him not to,” said Lurleen, who was visibly deflated by the question. “I was his dental hygienist—that’s where he had talked me into joining the Horizons in the first place, and the last time he came in was right after he had won the spear. He felt guilty about rolling for it and told me about his plan to buy one for everyone in the guild. I told him that I thought it was a good idea but that I didn’t want a two-thousand-dollar spear.” Chtusk looked really embarrassed now. “I suggested that he give my two thousand dollars to charity.”

I wasn’t a perfect judge of character—by now I’m sure that’s perfectly clear to you—but it was obvious that Lurleen was hiding something from me, so I pressed. “And what charity was that?”

Lurleen sighed. “You. I had him hire you as a detective.”

My initial response to this was to be too overwhelmed to actually be upset. “What the hell are you saying?”

In retrospect, I found myself wondering if Lurleen had been enjoying all of this—pretending to be a naive and helpful little waif while she twisted the dagger into my heart—but looking back, nope. The girl is just that naive. She’s perfect for Erik, really.

“I told him that I didn’t want a two-thousand-dollar spear lying around my apartment. He came up with the idea right there during the dental cleaning, and I couldn’t put him off of it. I seriously didn’t want one, though, and so he insisted that I name a charity. And I thought about the ASPCA, but then I settled on you.”

Yup, Lurleen was the kind of gal who would not realize that a comparison to the ASPCA, especially one that in the mold of “I found you more in need of charity than the ASPCA,” could, in certain lights, seem an awful lot like an insult. By now, though, my mortification had rendered me mute, and so I just stared at her while she kept talking.

“Erik was so worried about you, and truthfully, I was too. You had just gone so long without a job that you were starting to seem like a different person. And I felt badly about stealing your boyfriend, which is the kind of thing that should only happen in eighth grade. And so Jonah and I put together this plan. We’d hire you with my spear money to investigate the spear theft. And when Jonah heard about the dire straits you’d been having with work and your love life, he thought he’d try to set you up with Kurt.”

I remembered now that the outfit I had been sent to see Kurt in was quite specifically requested by Jonah. It looked like the sort of thing that, well, like the sort of thing that Ophelia was wearing today. Starchy funereal garb with just a hint of dominatrix.

The whole thing—my entire detective career—was the dumb setup for a blind date. And even that failed; Kurt hadn’t given me a second glance.

“And you sent me those notes about gaming addiction,” I said, practically choking on the idea.

“What?” said Lurleen.

“You were worried about me spending too much time in Zoth.”

“What?” repeated Lurleen. “I didn’t do that. I think Zoth has been good for you. I’m sorry I’ve been so evasive. I didn’t know what to say, and I didn’t think I could make it through you asking me questions about the spear without laughing a little. I mean, I know you’re not a real detective.”

At this point, I was surprised that tears were not welling up in my eyes. I’d been floating over all of this awfulness that I had been purposefully ignoring for the past half year. Erik, joblessness, and the increasing certainty that I was somehow destined for failure. And this Zoth business had distracted me very effectively from it. Maybe that was why people played. But now there was Lurleen, and suddenly I was back where I had started, drowning in my successive failures.

But not quite exactly. My little detective brain was spinning just as quickly as my heart was despooling.

“And neither you nor Jonah realized that Kurt and Ophelia were already dating.”

“Kurt and Ophelia? No, I didn’t realize.”

“I wouldn’t have expected you to, no. The relationship was a secret. But it’s still surprising that Jonah didn’t know.”

“I suppose,” said Lurleen, who didn’t seem to know what to talk about when she wasn’t on her script about apologizing to me.

“It’s ironic, though, because even though Jonah was just trying to fob me off on his wingman, it ended up leading to the stolen spear anyway. Ophelia took it, and I found Ophelia from Kurt.”

“Ophelia wouldn’t take the spear,” said Lurleen, somewhat uncertain. “Jonah said a Chinese gold farmer took it. You said that too, just now.”

If Jonah thought it was a Chinese gold farmer, then that meant that he must have written the “What comes around goes around” note himself. It was just plot thickener, all along.

“Nope,” I told her. “It was Ophelia.”

“Are you going to get it back from her?”

“I already have. I did that days ago.”

Lurleen still didn’t have a bit of malice in her. She just kept looking me, and I could tell that she was trying to think, which was perhaps not her strongest suit. But when she got out her question, it was pretty fair.

“Then why are you here?”

That horrible “heart and soul” part of me just started silently burbling with awful responses—I’m trying to forget, I’m trying to bury my problems in an imaginary world, I’m spending money on imaginary hair because my own is so dreadful—but before those parts could put things together enough to actually speak something aloud, the detective part of me was answering the question.

“I’m here to catch Jonah’s murderer.”

And although I hadn’t planned on saying it, and although I had never admitted to myself that this was the game I was after, the moment it came out of my lips I realized that it was true.

Lurleen was almost in a whisper now.

“Do you know who it is?”

“I’m getting closer,” I told her.

“Are we good, then?”

“About the murder? You’re not a suspect, even if you do have the means.”

“No, about Erik.”

I thought about Erik. I had liked Erik. Loved, perhaps not. But liked an awful lot. But my relationship with him had been like my New Yorker subscription. I liked it in the abstract, but I never seemed to care enough to make the time for it, and issues kept piling up in the bedroom. Charice was right. It was time to forget about Erik. And if I couldn’t be with him, then he may as well go with someone who will ensure that he has clean teeth.

“We’re good,” I told Lurleen. “And don’t mention that bit about Ophelia to anyone just yet.”

I was feeling frayed now. Jonah had played me for a chump. I can just remember his face, smug, sitting there drinking my alcohol while he hired me. Well, technically it was Charice’s alcohol, but my point is the same.

I desperately wanted to speak to Charice, but I couldn’t figure out where on earth she had run off to. I even ran up to an Auctioneer Griselda and started bawling at her before I realized that this was a different Auctioneer Griselda and that Charice was elsewhere. Some detective I was.

I tried calling Nathan. I even tried calling Masako. No dice. I don’t know how to describe how I was feeling at the moment—I’ll go for the word “deflated.” I felt I was just disappearing, and not just in an emotional sense. I needed to sit down; I didn’t think there was enough air left in me to stay upright.

My cheeks were flushed and my eyes were stinging, and the whole world seemed to playing by me in some awful blur. Like wearing the One Ring in the Lord of the Rings movies, only much weepier. But I managed to make it to the glass wall that overlooked the floor show, and as there were no open chairs nearby, I just collapsed on the floor. It was a good thing to do—just sit and watch all of the people in their colorful costumes go by. I found myself looking at them and wondering about the lives of the people underneath the outfits. Was the enormous djinn with the floating cloud an unhappy mother of three? Was the lanky redhead in the peeling mummy costume secretly lonely? I admit this exercise might have veered toward the morbid. But there are times in your life where you just want to imagine that there are people sadder than you.

After a few minutes of this, I started to pick myself up a little and began thinking about the case again. Someone murdered Jonah Long. Maybe I was a fraud of a detective, but that didn’t make the murderer any less real. Who was the culprit? Was it someone here? It had to be. I needed it to be.

Detective Shuler had gone out of his way to give me a warning: Be careful around Jonah’s friends. He’d said that, presumably, because I was spending time with—or about to spend time with—someone that he thought was dangerous. Shuler surely would never have guessed I’d fly out to Phoenix in a fairy costume, so that meant that all of these extra Horizons. Oroava, Oatcake, Lurleen—they were all out of the picture. Not that I had ever considered them much in the way of suspects, but it was nice to have that confirmed.

Who had I met? Kurt, Clemency, and Threadwork.

One of these three people had to have been Jonah’s murderer. Kurt had the motivation, certainly, as well as the means. Plus I had been hanging around him before Shuler made his warning to me. On paper, he seemed like the most obvious candidate. On the negative side of the column was… what? The fact that he looked a little bit like Snorlax? Fine, he wasn’t pinging my murderer spider senses, but what did I know?

Clemency was almost impossible to imagine as the murderer. She had such a fundamental niceness to her—but then there was that strange backstory between her and Jonah and his parents, a backstory that I still wasn’t sure that I believed in its entirety. I didn’t think that Clemency had lied to me, but I was willing to bet there were bits she was leaving out.

Finally there was Threadwork, if that was his real name. It seemed frankly impossible for him to have committed the crime, at least without help. He lived in Baltimore, seemed to loathe travel (and rightfully so—wheelchair accessibility is terrible), and short of him having faked paralysis could not possibly have done it.

Still, of the three, I somehow picked Threadwork. It’s hard to trust someone who is so committed to talking in a fake voice all the time.

I was pulled out of this theorizing by my iPhone, which was ringing. Someone with an unfamiliar number was calling me. On FaceTime. I would have no qualms with answering an unknown caller; what’s the worst that could happen? But FaceTime, I maintain, is an app that was designed by extremely photogenic people. I did not like chatting face-to-face on my phone with strangers. I didn’t like it with family or friends. For one, it meant that I had to look at myself, which I generally avoid. And besides which, if I looked anything like what I felt like, I would have been a veritable pity magnet.

But I answered; I was apparently lonely enough that I could put up with looking at a one-inch reflection of my face if it meant human contact.

It was Masako, who looked as wild and frantic as I’d ever seen her.

“Dahlia,” she said in what I would later regard as a stage whisper. “Thank God you’re there. I’ve just discovered something vital about your case.”

I should have said “What case?” But as gullible as ever, I said, “Yes?”

“It’s Nathan! He’s—he’s—”

And after a slightly awkward pause I heard Nathan’s booming voice from outside the frame.

“Silence! My secrets are tantamount! Tantamount!”

And then I watched a pink pool noodle whack Masako in the head. Repeatedly.

“Aarrgggh! I’m being murdered!” said Masako, who, it had to be said, was a terrible actress, gesticulating her death wildly. “Despite the relative softness of this flotational device, I am somehow being bludgeoned to death.”

Blood, or rather fake blood, was now running down Masako’s head in gory rivulets. When Nathan held the bat still enough—which was rare, he really seemed to be into the spirit of the thing—you could see that he had duct-taped packets of fake blood to it.

This was the man who was becoming my next boyfriend.

After a rustling and awkward pause that suggested Masako had missed a cue, she suddenly closed her eyes and plopped her head on the table, all but screaming her final words: “Pool Noodle’d!” I later—much, much later—concluded that this was her Strong Bad impression, which, given its gross inadequacy, was the scariest thing on display yet.

Nathan came into frame, moving the camera so that Masako’s obviously still-breathing corpse could not be seen. He looked about as happy as I had ever seen him.

“Oh, hello there!” he said, preening. “Why, I didn’t know that you were around! How is your trip coming?”

I don’t think that there is a word for wanting to simultaneously hug someone while you whack them to death with their own pool noodle, but if there was, I would employ it here now. If you are aware of such a word, please feel free to write it in the margin and underline it. Thrice.

“It’s been a horrible trip,” I told him.

“Could you not figure out who stole the spear?”

Well, I had done that. “No,” I told Nathan. “That wasn’t actually that big a deal.”

“Well then, victory!” Then Nathan looked at me, with those adorable little eyes of his, and he could see that I was not joining his celebration.

“I’m a fraud,” I told him. “It’s official. Everyone will find out eventually.”

“You’re not a fraud.”

“Jonah hired me because I was not a detective, and he dressed me in a sexy outfit to go interview a sad sack.”

“How much do you charge to wear this sexy outfit?”

“This is no time for flattery, Nathan.”

When someone tells you that there is no time for flattery, what they generally mean is that there is a little time for flattery, but you should do it quickly. Nathan, literal fellow that he is, dispensed with the flattery altogether.

“Listen, it’s like that bit in Breakfast at Tiffany’s—they were trying to hire a fake, and they accidentally got a fake that’s real.”

“Have you even seen Breakfast at Tiffany’s?”

“I’ve seen parts of it.”

And I would have argued with Nathan, then and there, over the merits of dispensing advice from movies you have not seen—and this quite possibly would have cheered me up—but I was distracted by the sight of a treant on the convention floor below me. A treant with mismatched earrings.