CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Oh my God,” I said to Nathan. “Jennifer Ebel is in the building.”

“I didn’t realize that she played Zoth,” said Nathan. “That’s a little strange, I suppose.”

Strange? It was beyond strange. But then again, this was coming from the man who faked the death of his ex-girlfriend on Skype with a pool noodle. I suppose that I should bow to him as the master purveyor of strangeness. But it isn’t the word I would have used. Fishy, perhaps? Suspicious? Concerning? Jennifer had told me outright that she did not play Zoth. And now, here she was in a tree costume that must have taken weeks to build.

Between the fake murder and Lurleen’s emotional takedown on me, I had clearly lost my mind, because I had a plan. A terrible, terrible plan.

“I don’t want her to get away,” I told Nathan. “I’m going to track her.”

“Like a park ranger?”

“No, I’m going to sneak up to her and plant my iPhone on her. It’s light enough that I think I can squeeze it into her costume without her noticing.”

From the blank look I was getting from Nathan on FaceTime, it was clear that he did not see the value of my scheme.

“She’s dressed as a giant tree, right? How hard can it be to lose her?”

“It shouldn’t be hard while she’s here.” Although when I considered it, there were four floors, which meant that I shouldn’t be too cavalier about tailing her. “But what do I do if she leaves? If she hops in a cab, it’s game over.”

“Why would she do that?”

“Maybe she gets spooked. Or maybe she just gets tired of the costume and wants to go to her hotel to change,” I said while scratching at my orange gauze.

“I think if she leaves that you should get into the subsequent cab and say, ‘Driver, follow that birch!’”

“That probably sounds a lot more fun than it would work out to be in real life,” I told Nathan, who regarded this idea with a lot of skepticism. “I need you to go to my apartment and get my iPad. I want you to use the ‘Find My iPhone’ app, and we can keep nice and close tabs on Jennifer. You can call Charice and give us updates on her whereabouts if she bolts.”

“Isn’t your place locked? Don’t I need a password for your iPad? What’s Charice’s phone number?”

I gave Nathan instructions to get a key, explained that Charice’s phone number is visible from her public Facebook page, because she is insane, and told him my password, which I was embarrassed to explain was “NathanWilling<3<3<3.” He, of course, had follow-up questions only for the last bit.

“What was that password?”

I repeated the password for him.

“With three hearts?”

I told him with three hearts.

“Any exclamation points?” he asked.

“Go,” I told him. “While I still like you.”

Looking back, I suppose it’s important to note that I didn’t actually know that the treant was Jennifer. I couldn’t see her face, which was obscured underneath layers of bark and lichen. But there was something about the cosplay—not just the earrings—that made me think it was her. She had enormous apples all over her, and she had positioned two of them so that they functioned as kind of arboreal earrings. One yellow and unripe, the other bloodred. Maybe it was optimism on my part, but damn if she didn’t look like Orchardary and Jennifer both.

It was a reasonable guess—although one that could have cost me a $400 iPhone if I had been wrong, but desperate times call for desperate measures.

The nice thing about tracking a treant is that they are a giant fucking tree. The treant costume was seven feet tall, and it was as wide as a truck. I might have been a lousy private eye, but even in a crowded show floor with people dressed in glittering costumes of genies and harpies and elves, you’re not going to lose a giant tree.

I came down the escalator and tried to track Jennifer, while keeping a respectful distance. I wasn’t sure if the iPhone plan was going to work, despite my confidence on the phone with Nathan earlier. It would have been much easier if she had been carrying a bag that I could have just dropped the phone in. It was crazy that she wasn’t—everyone here was carrying bags; they came free with your ticket. But not the tree. Perhaps she had felt that it would distract from her costume.

She was waiting in line to get something signed by a shaggy-haired voice actor, and I took a spot a few people behind her. Looking at it up close, I could see that I had a problem. The costume looked to be entirely made of wood—or maybe some sort of polyurethane that was made to look like wood. It was astonishingly detailed—there were even little sprouts growing out of the legs in places. But I was less impressed than flummoxed. There were no pockets, no crevasses, nowhere obvious to squeeze an iPhone.

Of course, I could only see the costume from the back. I was wary of getting much closer, because I did not want to be seen, and I wasn’t entirely sure where the eyeholes were on that thing. Still, there were some flyers you could take on a red table nearby, and so I zipped out of line, and pretended to be very interested in them. It was apparently a design document for a zone called “The Hive,” and I looked at it intently despite the fact that I could not imagine a zone less interesting. I was in front of the treant now, and I had this awful feeling that Jennifer was boring eyes in my back. Paranoia, surely. When I turned around, I would be able to get a good glimpse of the front of the costume, possibly being able to confirm my suspicion that it was indeed Jennifer Ebel, and maybe—maybe—plant my extremely expensive bug on her?

Having stared at the Hive flyer well beyond any credible length, I decided to take my chance. The front of the costume gave me no clues to its inhabitant, but there on the treant’s shoulder was my opportunity. She had carved a knoll into her shoulder, and a terrifyingly realistic squirrel peered out. But there was no realistic way that I could shove my phone down the burrow of a tree in front of everyone. Besides which, it would surely rattle around when she walked, giving up the game.

I needed to prep.

What follows is the most pissant episode of MacGyver you have ever seen. I acquired, on the floor of the Left Field Games Summit, a cheap paper Princess Penelope mask, a gray “Visit the Sundered Lands” T-shirt—which cost thirty dollars—and three packs of chewing gum, which was another nine dollars. This bug was getting more and more expensive. I chewed the gum, wrapped my phone inside the T-shirt, and tried to affix as much chewy gum to the outside of the shirt as possible. The effort was barely passable. Laughable, maybe, but passable. If I could find the right moment, I could probably shove the squirrel out of the way and wedge the sticky T-shirt down her hallow. The right moment would be something like an earthquake, but there you have it.

I put on the cheap mask and I tailed the tree for another few minutes. Clearly, I had gone insane. This was what it was like to lose your mind. Probably what was going to happen was that I would going to molest this tree with my sticky gum and discover that it was not Jennifer Ebel at all but an angry Hells Angels biker. That was undoubtedly it.

A moment came. Music swelled over the loudspeaker and someone announced that designers of the spider goddess Zxlyphxix would be answering questions on level two. I don’t even know what this meant, but there was actually an “Ooh!” that went over the crowd, and I took my chance. My heart was racing, my palms were sweating. But I did it. I scampered up to the side of the tree—all fairy-like—and pushed the ruined T-shirt down into her crevice. I tried frolicking away—difficult when you are on the verge of a heart attack—and saw a slightly tubby mummy staring at me, clearly having watched the whole exchange. I lifted my mask and winked at him and tried to make a silent hand gesture that suggested this was good clean fairy fun. The mummy sighed at me but shuffled away.

I couldn’t bring myself to look back at the tree. I just picked an arbitrary direction and kept walking toward it. Fifteen seconds later, I looked back and the treant was gone.

I was frayed at this point, seriously frayed. I waited in line nervously at a hamburger place—thirteen dollars!—and tried to calm my nerves with food. Maybe it was just the butterflies in my stomach, but the sandwich I got seemed more than worth every penny. I really wanted to speak to Charice now, but of course I couldn’t call her. Hopefully she would respond to my text soon—I wasn’t sure why she hadn’t shown up already. This was exactly the kind of thing that would draw her out.

I retreated to the safety of the women’s restroom. I’m embarrassed to say that I didn’t need to actually pee. I sort of thought I might sneak into a stall and cry for just a bit—but when I got in there, I suddenly found that I wasn’t stressed or even sad anymore. I felt amazing. This could be my moment; I could catch the killer, return the spear, make peace with my ex-boyfriend, and in one stroke make right everything that had gone wrong in the past two years. That looks a little melodramatic when I type it out now, but I told you already that I had lost my mind.

I left the stall, washed my hands, and stepped out of the restroom to find an enormous tree waiting patiently for me.

“I noticed you’ve been following me,” said the tree in a thick Indian American accent. “Do I know you?”

I wasn’t wearing that stupid cardboard mask anymore, and I would have killed to have had it on right then. There was nothing to do but lay my cards on the table.

“Oh, yes,” I said, shooting for casual friendliness. “I’m sorry. You look like a friend of mine in-game. Your name isn’t, by any chance, Orchardary, is it?”

As the tree’s eyes were unmoving lumps of wood, it was hard to read the face for a reaction, but if I had to guess by her voice, I would have said that she was as nervous as a cat.

“No,” said the tree. “Although I think I know the person you mean. People keep mistaking me for her.”

“Oh, I’m sorry,” I said amiably. “I suppose I could see why. Two female treants with Indian accents.”

“What are the odds?” said the treant.

And that was my chance to leave, safely and without incident. She didn’t seem to know about the iPhone, as far as I could tell, so I could have just walked away and kept tabs on her from a distance. But I just couldn’t resist pressing my luck.

“I love your accent,” I told her. “What province of India are you from?”

There was a pause that was just one beat too long.

“The Marhashi province. You probably haven’t heard of it.”

I had not heard of it, no, although to be fair I couldn’t name a single province of India. I wasn’t even 100 percent sure that India had provinces—maybe they had states or counties or something? But I had googled my line days ago, and I tried it now.

Jennifer might have sensibly responded with confusion. Or laughed at my terrible accent. I was speaking from a memorized version of a speech learned from Google Translate, so even if my pronunciation was close (and I can assure you that it was not), there was no telling if the construction was correct.

Instead Jennifer took an intuitive leap of her own—a brilliant one, a leap that could have secured her own success in her deceit, had it only been right. When Jennifer went in, she went all in. What’s the one phrase that everyone learns to say in a language?

“I believe,” said Jennifer, with false certainty, “the bathroom is right behind you.”

But as soon as she said it, she knew the gig was up. My face is entirely too expressive for detective work. I was thrilled to catch her out, and I must have lit up like a candle. So much for bluffing.