CHAPTER TWENTY

Gary’s wife was named Adalbjorg, which emphatically does not rhyme with or even resemble Laura, Cora, or Maura. This is the quality of information I’m working with. I learned this by asking Gary before I made the call, which perhaps wasn’t terribly artful, but there’s nothing wrong with the occasional direct approach.

I was not keen on this conversation, even before I knew about the wrong name, because it felt like a shakedown, and while I was getting shakedown money from Emily, I was not getting it from Vanetta. Also, I find that I like a little more time to gear up for a shakedown. It’s the sort of thing that you want to mentally prep for. You can’t just show up and threaten someone. You’ve got to psych yourself up, maybe listen to an appropriately violent playlist.

I just went and called Gary’s wife.

“Hello,” I said. “Is this Ms. Bright?”

“Yes,” said a voice, which I will note was youthful and unaccented, because these might not be the associations you form for the name Adalbjorg. “Who is this?”

“This is Dahlia—I’m the new receptionist over at Cahaba Apps.”

“Oh,” said Adalbjorg, concerned, “everything okay over there? Lawrence hasn’t drugged my husband again, has he?”

“Wait, what?”

“If he has, just let him sleep it off like last time.”

“No one has drugged your husband.”

“Oh, well, good. Everything else fine?”

“Yes,” I said. “Twenty-four hours without a murder. Longer probably.”

Adalbjorg laughed at my joke—not uproariously—but a light chuckle of the perfect length. “You can only go up from there.”

This was not wholly true. I’d already been worried at various points that Archie, Lawrence, and improbably, Morgan Freeman had somehow gotten murdered this morning, and so I certainly did not think that upward progress was an inevitability. Although I went along with the idea.

“Why did Lawrence drug your husband?” I asked.

“Oh, it was just some mix-up. You know Lawrence.”

I did not know Lawrence, apparently. I would want to follow up on this.

“So,” said Adalbjorg, “What’s going on?”

I wasn’t sure exactly how I wanted to play this conversation. I’d had some ideas, but it had depended upon what kind of Adalbjorg had picked up the receiver:

Nervous, anxious Adalbjorg, at which point I would assume her guilt and press hard.

Indignant, irritated Adalbjorg, at which point I would tread softly.

Swedish Chef Adalbjorg, who would speak with an indecipherably thick Icelandic accent and periodically say things like “bjork, bjork, bjork.” At which point I would question mark, question mark, question mark.

But I had gotten a friendly “Is my husband drugged again Adalbjorg,” which certainly wasn’t one of my initial sketches. So I settled on a new angle.

“Listen,” I said, using my most earnest voice while also lying through my teeth. “I’m not supposed to be calling you, but I wanted to give you a heads-up.”

“A heads-up about what?”

“There was a new whistle-blower’s letter this morning. It just came out. And apparently, the top brass think that it’s you.”

“Why would they think that?” Adalbjorg sounded more bewildered than indignant or suspicious.

“This new letter definitely came from our office. And it’s from a spouse,” I said—which wasn’t exactly true—“and you’re the only spouse. Everyone else is single.”

“What about Jason’s wife, Carla?”

“Jason got fired,” I said.

“What about that accounts guy—what was his name—Derek? Didn’t he have a live-in boyfriend?”

I had never even heard of Derek, or his alleged live-in boyfriend. “He doesn’t work here anymore either.”

“Jesus, they cut Derek?” said Adalbjorg. “I didn’t realize how cleared out that place had gotten.”

“So, did you send it?” I asked.

“No,” said Adalbjorg. “I try to make nice with everyone. At the Christmas party I spent the whole time talking to Derek. He’s really gone?”

Fuck Derek. He was a dead end.

“I guess so,” I said, trying to figure out a way to get this conversation back on track.

“I liked him,” said Adalbjorg. “But he didn’t get along with Lawrence, I suppose.”

“You didn’t write the whistle-blower’s letter?” I asked again. I had expected more of a vociferous denial, but I got the impression that Adalbjorg regarded Cahaba as a place that was only mostly real. Maybe that sounds silly, typed out, but it’s a thing that happens. Occasionally, my brother, Alden, will try telling me about TA’ing at the University of Maine, and while I’m willing to listen, the stories come infrequently enough that they feel vaguely fable-like. It’s hard to take them seriously, and I love my brother, obviously.

“Of course not,” said Adalbjorg. “If Gary lost that job, it’d be a real inconvenience.”

“A real inconvenience” was her word choice. She did not sound like someone on the brink of financial ruin.

“You’re not upset about him working so much?” I asked.

“He’s more upset about it than I am,” said Adalbjorg. “I mean, I love my husband, of course, but since Pieter was born everything’s been kind of surreal anyway. My mother says I’m nesting. It’s almost sort of nice to have the time alone with the baby. I think he’s more upset about it than I am, always going on about ‘Cat’s in the Cradle.’ The song. Not the string. Gary sings a lot, you know.”

This did not need to be said.

“What were you doing at 10:43 this morning?” I asked.

“Eating a mango-lassi parfait. Why, what happened at 10:43?”

I thought this question would have been self-evident, but I wasn’t sure if Adalbjorg was playing dumb or just genuinely didn’t understand what I was getting at.

“I’m checking to see if you had the opportunity,” I said honestly.

“Oh!” said Adalbjorg. “Like an alibi! Aren’t you industrious? Well, I would think so. I mean, it’s just yogurt with oats on it, really. And mango. And some cardamom. You make it the night before and leave it in fridge.”

While this sounded delicious, it was once again not what I wanted to pursue.

“So you can’t prove you didn’t send it?”

“I guess the biggest obstacle is that there’s no Internet here.”

“You mean it’s down?”

“No, I mean we don’t have Internet.”

…

“You mean it’s down?”

“No,” said Adalbjorg, now moving slowly as if I were the stupid one, “I mean we don’t have Internet access here.”

“But like on a cell phone,” I said.

“I don’t have a cell phone. We have no Internet.”

I’d been shot at by trees, knocked off a steamboat, and been hired as industrial spy, and yet this was the least believable thing I had ever heard.

“How old are you?” I asked.

“Thirty-six,” said Adalbjorg. “Gary’s got a few years on me.”

“How do you live?” I asked. “And wait—your husband develops games. He’s a programmer!”

“We started doing it during the election—I just got so tense, I didn’t want to follow it anymore. So we started cutting cords. We said we were going to go back after November, but then you get used to it. Then I got pregnant, and I’m kind of a hypochondriac anyway; it just seemed that my life was easier without WebMD in it.”

“How does Gary work from home?”

“He doesn’t,” said Adalbjorg. “And why should he?”

“Right,” I said, a bit shaken. “Well, I just wanted to give you the heads-up.”

“Thanks, I suppose,” said Adalbjorg. “But I’m not too worried. I’m sure they’ll figure out who the culprit really is. And if you could send Derek’s contact information home with Gary, I’d love to catch up with him.”

If I had determined anything from talking to Adalbjorg, it was that this was a wild-goose chase. No one had reacted in a suspicious way, and there was no smoking gun. Moreover, it was entirely possible that the letter writer was a former employee that I had never met—or worse, the spouse of a former employee I had never met—who was just trolling the company because they were pissed off about being fired. This seemed entirely reasonable. And I didn’t have the time, or frankly interest, to hunt down and interview Derek’s live-in boyfriend, whether Adalbjorg liked him or not.

So, I decided, in lieu of any other productive course of action, to go back to the source.

I read the letter again, this time with the benefit of not being shocked, to try to suss out some sort of clue that would indict someone. Turns out, clues abounded.

Two days ago, a DE employee was murdered—straight-up murdered—on-site at their offices. Police came, coroners arrived, autopsies apparently done. While this poor woman’s body was rotting away in the storeroom, staff were expected to stay and program. Even as the police arrived, even as the situation became increasingly and apparently wrong—stay and code, because the company demands.

There were a few things wrong to wonder about here. First of all, it was awfully definitive about there being a murder. It was a drug overdose, which was probably a murder as far as the police thought. But it could have been a suicide, potentially. The lead suspect had been released, after all. “Straight-up murdered” felt curiously confident and made me wonder, briefly, if the letter writer was the person who killed Joyce. How else could they be so sure about it?

Second, it alluded to the fact that Joyce wasn’t an employee of Cahaba, which was not a piece of information everyone had. It made it much more likely that the writer was still working here, or was at least keeping very well-informed.

Lastly, and most oddly, the staff didn’t stay in all day. Vanetta had let people go home. Some people had chosen to stay, but it wasn’t mandatory, and she didn’t stay herself. That was the oddest and strangest bit about this bit of whistle-blowing. It was whistle-blowing on a thing that didn’t exactly happen.

Of course, this last bit could have been written just to make DE look bad, and it was certainly arguable that any time spent in an office with a corpse is too much time. But it was an awful lot of wrong data.

It definitely started to lend credence to the idea that the whistle-blower was someone who wasn’t directly in contact with the company—perhaps an old employee. But of course, even an old employee had to have a source on the inside for all this stuff. Someone had to be spilling out information.

Everyone was working so hard at this point that it felt challenging to interrupt anyone for the purposes of my investigation, but I managed to catch Gary as he was exiting the men’s restroom and thus completely not working.

“Did Lawrence drug you?” I asked.

“Where’d you hear that?” he asked.

“Your wife,” I said.

“Honey Badger don’t care,” he said, not to me so much as to the air around me.

“What happened?” I asked.

Gary looked embarrassed by the question. “It’s really not a big deal, and you don’t need to worry about it. It’s not like he’s going to drug you,” Gary said. “It was just a prank that got out of hand.”

“Your wife said it was a mix-up,” I said.

“Yes,” said Gary. “The mix-up was that I started ever working here.”

The rest of the day went on in a relatively ordered way, if that phrase has any more meaning at this point. Archie came in and finally started working. Gary and Quintrell seemed to get something up and going, although I didn’t know what. Vanetta appeared to be hard at work in her office—certainly she was typing prodigiously, but I wasn’t exactly sure as to the nature of her work either. Despite the alleged lack of general deadlines, when five o’clock hit, and the day was ostensibly over, no one seemed to head for the doors. Not even Tyler, who had spent the morning shopping for David Bowie paraphernalia.

I had still hoped to ask Quintrell a few questions, but it seemed wrong to bother him, since he and Gary appeared to be on the edge of a breakthrough. “It’s finally working!” I could hear them saying—then backtracking, “It’s finally mostly working.”

And besides which, I had made arrangements for the evening. Unwise arrangements.

I had been struck in the head and was obviously not in my right mind when I had suggested meeting Detective Anson Shuler in Forest Park for a roller-skating excursion. I specifically use the word “excursion” here, because I did not and do not want to use the word “date,” although that is probably a fair approximation of the event.

It was a stupid thing to do, given that I had a boyfriend, of sorts, and that I wasn’t even really sure I wanted to be in a relationship with Anson Shuler. But when you get hit in the head, you make rash decisions. Perhaps those decisions are more indicative of your true nature than the one your non-concussed self would make, but who knows. I was going skating.

I needed to get out of Cahaba quickly, because the sun wasn’t going to stay up forever, and I wasn’t that keen on hanging around Forest Park in the dark; although, if you had to do it, a police officer is your best possible choice of companion. As I drove there I naturally got a phone call from Nathan.

The whole situation made me feel like I was a suspect in the sort of ridiculous case that I would ordinarily be employed to investigate. Dahlia has a boyfriend, yes, but is off having secret meetings with another fellow! What does this mean? (Actually this is a fair question. I ought to hire myself to find out.)

But I was feeling duplicitous and guilty, and even though I hadn’t, technically, done anything terribly wrong yet, it all made me feel sort of awful.

I had to answer the phone, even though it was terrible, because the prospect of not answering the phone was even more terrible.

“Hey, Dahlia,” said Nathan. “You have a sec?”

“Well,” I told Nathan, “I’m driving right now. What’s up?”

“I just wanted to touch base with you before you met up with Shuler,” said Nathan. He said this casually, very casually, and I nearly ran off the road.

“How did you hear about that?” I asked.

“Shuler mentioned it to me,” said Nathan. “It was really awkward because he seemed to think that I already knew about it, except that I didn’t know about it. You forgot to mention it to me, I guess,” said Nathan.

“Well, we’re just skating,” I said. “And I was going to talk with him about the case.”

“Masako seems to think that you have a crush on Shuler,” said Nathan.

I will crush Masako with my bare hands.

“I wouldn’t say that necessarily,” I said. And I wouldn’t necessarily.

“I feel like we need to have a relationship conversation,” said Nathan.

I really do like Nathan, but when I die and go to hell, Satan will greet me at the fiery gates with the phrase “we need to have a relationship conversation.” I’m not good at relationships or conversations, and when you put them together, I do even worse.

“Yes,” I said. “A relationship conversation. You start.”

“I just don’t want to be weird about this,” said Nathan. “Is this weird?”

“Yes,” I said honestly. “It’s a little weird.”

“Well, we never said that we were exclusive,” said Nathan. “I guess I just sort of took that as written. So: Are we exclusive?”

“Maybe?”

“I don’t want to be someone in a love triangle,” said Nathan. This could very reasonably have been a prelude for the next sentence of: “And so I’m breaking up with you,” but it wasn’t. It was its own declarative sentence, to which I had to respond.

“Listen,” I said. “I don’t know what this thing with Shuler is tonight. I agreed to it when I had a head wound.”

“Well, it would appear to be a date, Dahlia.”

“Yes,” I said.

“No polyamory. I’m just not into that.”

“What?”

“I mean, not with another guy,” Nathan said, then paused, as if contemplating other possible permutations. “Nah, no polyamory—it’s just not my scene.”

“What made you think this was an option on the table in the first place?”

“I didn’t say that it was,” said Nathan. “I just wanted to make clear that it wasn’t.”

“Well, we’re on the same page. So this is not a ‘you’re dead to me’ phone call?” I asked.

“No,” said Nathan. “But just so you know, I’m also going out with a beautiful model this evening.”

“Seriously?”

“Well,” said Nathan. “She’s a hand model. It’s not like you said we couldn’t see other people.”

“I guess,” I said. “That seems fair.”

Although, it didn’t seem fair. It seemed like a massive misstep.

“Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do,” said Nathan.