“So this was definitely his plan all along?” I say. “So what? It was hijacked somehow?”
“The bad news is that your father was definitely involved. The good news is that we are crossing things off as far as where his plans started and where this Game Master has taken over. I am assuming that your father was in charge of the budget and possibly procuring the technology, but not necessarily in charge of the execution of his plan. This makes sense, right? Your father would be dead when the game would begin. He would need somebody he trusts to set everything up and make sure that they couldn’t be bribed or threatened by one of you. Somebody he trusted but that none of you knew about.”
I think about this. Faces of strangers loom up over the years, people hanging out with my father in the booths of dark bars, cronies with whom he gamed, business buddies, short-term and long-term love affairs ended by his short attention span and long memory.
“So where does all of this leave us?” I ask.
“Listen, like I said, we do have one good lead. These affable, basic, boring Midwesterners. I know where they are staying in the city. The best way to be certain that they have nothing to do with the murder of your brother is to confront them.”
“So when are you planning on doing that?” I ask.
“Actually,” he says. “It won’t work unless you do it. But I’ll go with you. I am willing to do that for you.”
21
I make Pez wait while I call Alistair. I ask him if he has cracked the riddle yet. He hasn’t. We talk about it for a little bit, trying to puzzle out our memories of our mother and Sea Farmers and the sea, but neither of us have any flashes of insight. I call Bernard but he doesn’t pick up. I call Gabriella but she hangs up on me as soon as she hears my voice.
“Would it be possible to have their regular phones traced?” I ask Pez. “I want to know where they are at all times.”
“So you can follow them? And cheat?”
“Can you do it or not?” I push. “There aren’t any rules to this game, evidently. I might as well try to chisel any advantage that I can.”
“If anybody can do it, it’s Alistair,” says Pez. “Which means he probably already has.”
“He’s too sweet-natured for that,” I say. “He wouldn’t even dream of it.”
“In my experience, nobody enjoys losing if they don’t have to lose,” says Pez. “A good and gentle nature is its own kind of moral deformity. It is one of the things I love most about humans. The way we hide ourselves. The way we are constantly flowing to fit our circumstances. We are all terrifying creatures of dark intelligence and twisted imagination. Even your brother. He is a creative man. He will compete creatively.”
“I don’t think he will cheat,” I say.
“You just said it wasn’t cheating,” Pez counters. “Don’t you think he will be capable of the same moral contortions?”
“Are you going to help me trace the phones or not?”
“Of course I will help you,” says Pez. “But part of helping you is getting you to realize that your siblings are fully human and will want the same things that you want. They will be keeping their own tabs on you. They have their own access to boffins and detectives.”
I chew on this for a while.
“So where are we going then?” I ask. “Where are these Midwesterners holed up?”
“They are in K-Town,” says Pez. “Staying in one of those pod hotels. They spend all night getting coked up and doing karaoke and eating Korean barbecue.”
“Will they be there now?” I ask.
“Not yet,” he says. “Not until the sun goes down.”
“You knew my mother,” I say. “Any insights into today’s clue?”
“Well, there are a lot of places where you can stand and see the ocean in this town,” says Pez. “But I think we can rule out Manhattan, since it is technically bounded by rivers. Unless she liked to hang out in Battery Park.”
“She hated the beach,” I say. “She got seasick on boats.”
“What about Coney Island?” asks Pez. “It is technically the beach. Did she like rollercoasters and freak shows and parades and all that?”
“No,” I say. “She hated Coney Island. She hated amusement parks of all kinds.”
“Did she like seafood?” asks Pez. “Some of these restaurants have fairly spectacular aquariums inside them.”
Aquariums! I nearly fall out of my chair, the memory comes on so sudden and bright. I instantly understand why only Gabriella and Bernard have figured out the clue.
Alistair and I weren’t there when our mother dragged our two youngest siblings to the Coney Island Aquarium at two in the morning to go see the jellyfish. We only heard about it later, after our father called the cops. It was the incident that got her sent away for a few months to a treatment facility. She returned to us just as listless and moody as before, but more subdued.
The whole episode must have been seared into their minds. Alistair, Henley, and I were already in school. The three of us had gone to bed just as we would on a normal night, exhausted by our studies, but Gabriella and Bernard were notoriously bad sleepers and our mother was often indulgent about their bedtimes. Our father was still at work, which I resented back then but which I understand all too well now.
Our mother was up reading Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea to the smaller children, surely swilling a gin and tonic, wrapped in her robe, alternating between maudlin and angry in a way that was always captivating and seductive and scary. Bernard and Gabriella were mesmerized by her descriptions of ocean life, and they kept turning to the big Encyclopedia Britannica in our library
