“Well, it’s a nice gesture just the same,” I lie.
Peter shows up and gives me a weary but sympathetic look. I have been trying to keep a firewall between my business and personal lives. Of course, that means I’ve been keeping him in the dark about the game, not letting him help me.
“I brought what you asked for,” he says, shrugging a cooler off his shoulder. “I packed the cooler full. The bottles were just where you said they would be.”
I take the cooler and open it up. Should I make an announcement? Should I tell the bar what this means to me, sharing from my personal stash?
His whole life, Henley bugged me for a taste and I always denied him. My White Coke was the one vice that I refused to share with him. Now, perhaps by filling his friends and lovers with White Coke, some of it will spiritually reach his spectral essence. I tell myself that ghosts surely attend their own funerals.
I decide that the people here will not enjoy the White Coke as much if they realize how precious it is. It must be a quiet novelty, something fun and frivolous.
I grab a bucket of ice from the bar and fill it up with clear bottles sporting red stars. Peter looks at me plaintively, like a kicked puppy. I nod at the bottles in the bucket and smile at him. He eagerly reaches out and takes one. He cracks it open and takes a long, luxurious sip.
“Tastes like freedom,” he says with a happy sigh.
I grab a bottle of my own and tap it with a spoon to get everyone’s attention and then I deliver Bernard’s short speech about Henley. It is all wooden pleasantries, the kind of eulogy that you would write after Googling “how to write a eulogy.” It is well-received. The gathered throng claps at the end. A few people make themselves cry.
Alistair enters the bar just as I am finishing. His face is gray. He is wearing the official Nylo Family Scavenger Hunt T-shirt that came with the phone in the steel suitcase. He is followed by Gabriella, wearing a pink tube top and fishnets. She looks like she has been out all night carousing. We make eye contact across the bar. What is this? An armistice?
I check my game phone. It is fifteen minutes until we get the next clue. At least we will all be together this time.
Alistair approaches me first. But he is interrupted by one of the Midwesterners, who claps me on the back, tears streaming down his beefy face.
“He was the best,” the huge man gushes. “The best there ever was.”
“There will never be another like him,” I say.
“I heard your other brother was tragically and accidentally killed as well,” he says. “Oh my god. How are you holding up? How are you bearing it?”
“I am not handling it particularly well,” I say. “In fact, I am choosing not to really think about it yet. I am choosing not to process anything at all for the time being. I just want to do right by them the best I can. To do right by their memories.”
“Hey, did you know that those bottles on the table aren’t vodka? They taste like Coke—Crystal Coke! Isn’t that crazy? Do you think the bar knows? Do you think they got swindled?”
“I’m sure I don’t know,” I say, smiling.
Alistair cuts in. He stands awkwardly in front of me for a moment and then hugs me. Gabriella follows behind him, embracing both of us in one of her too-warm, too-sexual hugs.
“We can’t fight each other anymore,” she says. “We have to all work together now. The stakes are too high. I know I am in the lead right now, but any one of us could be next.”
“We talked it over,” Alistair says to me. “We’ll do whatever you want. You’re in charge, sis. We are in your hands.”
My eyes flash and I see a vision of both of their dead bodies, broken and bleeding. Even though Gabriella has two lives left, I know that Alistair is really my last rival here. If I can just beat him, I will win everything.
I chase the thought out of my head. The only rival I have is the game itself. We all have to work together if the three of us hope to survive and to catch whoever is doing this to us.
“It’s almost time for the next clue,” says Gabriella. “May I?”
She points to the bottles of White Coke on the food table. She certainly knows what they are. I nod.
“For Henley,” I say. “And for Bernard.”
Gabriella gets a bottle for herself and one for Alistair, and we clink in camaraderie. It feels good to share this with them. Almost as good as it has felt denying it to them all these years.
34
Everybody shares their final thoughts about Henley. It is fairly cathartic, and I know that all of these people will be drinking and partying here all day and all night, involving any strangers who wander into the bar in this celebration of my dead brother. But the three of us have other plans.
At noon, Pez, the detectives, my brother, my sister, and I gather in a quiet corner.
“It’s time,” says Gabriella.
“The two of you still have your superpowers,” I say, just remembering.
“They haven’t helped us out at all,” says Alistair. “I can open any lock. Great.”
“Yeah, and I am impervious to bullets,” says Gabriella. “I put a gun in my mouth and tried to blow my brains out last night but nothing happened.”
“Did you really?” I ask, ready to believe anything at this point.
“No,” says Gabriella, shaking her head. “Not really.”
The Nylo Corporation theme song starts to play. Here we go. The three of us hold up
