The narrator needs to look into the death of the actor Cyn Stryker, whose partner is not an actor. I needed to assign her a job. I knew Narrator would need a way in to speaking with her, and I remembered that I’d given Narrator’s friend Dahlia a job working for a talent agency. It’s always helpful for characters to play multiple roles in a ms (as long as it doesn’t seem overly convenient or implausible) so I went that way.

I don’t remember if Anita Davenport is the name I gave Cyn’s partner earlier (or even if I gave her a name at all) but I’m running with it for now instead of stopping to go back and look to see what I previously wrote (if I previously wrote anything). I’ll clean it up in revision.

Not in evidence in this version are all my attempts to spell the word “superb.”

Here’s this weeks’ entry:

Always looking for the bright side, that was Nikki, I bet.

“Three?” I said again. I couldn’t seem to get past that. “Then why do you keep advertising? I mean, obviously the role is cursed or something—”

“They’re not dying because we have a Meetup announcement,” Serena said, her tone very snide. “They would feel, and have, their power whether they joined us or not.”

“In fact, the first one didn’t actually join us,” Nikki said. “I found her later, a week or so after Cyn died. She’d called me but hadn’t shown up to the meeting. She had the same magical aura Cyn had; I could sense it.”

“How?” I demanded.

Serena said, “After Cyn died, I was afraid Nikki and I might be next so I asked Nikki to make an amulet that would warn us when disordered magic appeared near us.”

Nikki touched the brooch on her shirt while Serena fiddled with the ring on her pointer finger.

“I want one of those,” I said, even though I had serious doubts about this whole enterprise.

“Yes, of course,” Nikki said. “Tell me what kind of stone—”

“Can we leave the ordering for later?” Serena demanded.

“Okay, okay.” I held up my hands in surrender. “I’m just starting to believe you and I’m getting scared.”

“Oh, don’t be scared,” Nikki said.

“You should be scared,” Serena said.

“Right, I’ll just rotate between tranquility and terror,” I said. “That’s my life lately anyway so it works out nicely. So, you have these alarm, basically, that detect—what did you call it, disordered magic?”

“Yes,” Nikki said and touched the brooch again. “If there’s disordered magic—that is, magic not intended for a benign purpose—anywhere near by, the amulet makes you aware of it. The drawback is that if the magic is directed at you, it will be detected and strike at basically the same time, so….”

“So it has limited utility.”

“Yes, exactly. I’ve been working on an early-warning system but that would have to be based on someone’s intentions rather than their actions, and that’s much harder to divine.”

“I see. Then I guess my next question is, why are they—whoever they are—why are they killing off the third witch and not you two? I’m assuming the goal is to kill witches, since they’ve killed more than one. It could have been just a personal gripe against Cyn but not if they’ve also murdered her replacements.”

“That’s what we’ve been trying to tell you,” Nikki said. “The reason we haven’t been targeted, I think, is because we’re stronger witches. We were stronger than Cynthia—”

“She never developed the craft,” Serena explained.

“And also I suspect they may have tried but it’s harder to hurt an experienced witch. We develop a kind of … immunity to spell damage. We can shake it off, so to speak. Not all the time, of course, but especially if the attacker is working from a distance.”

“Which we expect they are,” Serena said, “because we haven’t been hurt. They seem a little fearful about coming into the open with this. But if the idea is to kill witches they will. Eventually, they’ll work up to it.”

I thought about what I knew of crime and how criminals escalated, particularly when they didn’t experience consequences and apparently this person (or people) hadn’t experienced any such repercussions, not if their victims were assumed to have died of natural causes.

“Okay,” I said, after mulling it over. “You couldn’t realistically investigate Cyn’s heart attack. I guess that would be too difficult. But there are three other witches who died and if the murderer is the same—and I think for simplicity’s sake we ought to assume that—then why haven’t you looked in to any of those deaths?”

The two exchanged another glance. I was getting tired of the glances.

“Well, of course we have,” Serena said. “But we barely know these women. As Nikki said, one of them we didn’t even meet. How do you go about investigating people you barely know when you’re not the police and everyone thinks they’ve died naturally? ‘Hello, Mrs. Simpson’s son, I met your mother for half an hour last Tuesday and I’m sorry to hear she died on Thursday. My colleague and I think it was a magical death and not a stroke, as the doctors insist. Do you mind talking with us about her friends, enemies, and recent activities? May we go through her personal belongings and leaf through her bank statements in order to find a clue? We’re not law enforcement or even private investigators, we’re just—’”

“Okay, okay,” I said. “I get it. I’m used to investigating public figures, which is a little easier.”

“Imagine trying to investigate my death,” Nikki said. “You only know my first name and what I look like. But maybe I lied about my name—”

“Or took on a nom de guerre,” Serena said. “This isn’t exactly guerre but many witches adopt a witch name for use in the magical community.”

Which suggested to me that the magical community was about as trustworthy as the non-magical one.

“Understood,” I said. “No shade, really. But we have to figure out who’s killing the witches—”

“Oh, we already know that,” Nikki said, giving me a gentle smile. “It’s a wizard, who else? But which wizard, and where do we find him?”

“Or them,” Serena added grimly.

*

It’s a wizard, who else.

I parked the Charger in the garage, Nikki’s word echoing in my mind. Whenever a woman, or women, was murdered the murderer was, indeed, almost always a man, and frequently, though not always someone the victim knew well.

If I were to investigate, and I fully planned on it, I didn’t want to be Victim #5, I would begin with Cynthia, since she was a public figure and I knew better how to investigate public figures than I knew how to investigate private ones. And now that Mickey had hightailed it to Las Vegas, I didn’t know a private eye I could count on to look at the private lives of the three other dead women.

I pushed through the pedestrian gate to get out of the garage and walked up to my apartment which was stifling hot because I’d been trying to squeak by without turning on the A/C. The electricity bills in summer can be brutal.

So I succumbed to late-stage capitalism and turned on the A/C and sat under the nearest vent and drank water for a few minutes before I could rouse myself to take a shower.

As I got to my feet, a movement in the shadows grabbed my attention and I spun, holding out my hands in an automatic gesture of protection.

Useless, as it turned out, because the shadow was just the grim, settling down on the floor near the sofa. He crossed his front paws and looked at me.

“Fuck off,” I said but of course it didn’t speak English so it didn’t leave.

*

After my shower, I sat down at my laptop and began the preliminary research I would need to look more closely into Cyn’s death. I was mindful of my contract to investigate Hugh Smalls but I was already making progress on that—and I was more concerned about a murderer being on the loose, truth be told. I personally did not want to be the next one to croak and neither did I want Serena or Nikki to get it.

I didn’t know them very well and wasn’t sure how much I liked either one of them but I didn’t want to wake up tomorrow to learn that one of them had died of an aneurysm.

The basic review took me to Wikipedia and IMDb, and I refreshed my memory of Cyn’s career and her personal life—what she’d shared of it with the world, anyway.

She’d had two heterosexual marriages, each one lasting fewer than five years, no children, and then after her sexy siren days were over, she’d uncloseted herself and said she was bisexual and started dating women. She married one who was her partner for about fifteen years, still together, at the time of her death. I flagged that as a possibility. Though men are usually involved when women are murdered, lovers and spouses were, too, regardless of gender. Jealousy was like a lit fuse, you never knew when someone experiencing it might blow up.

Greedy fucks are at least predictable. But jealous people? They can blow up out of nowhere, with no real cause except whatever is happening in the jealous one’s own mind, and that made them deeply frightening to me.

I also put a faint check mark next to the ex-husbands; exes can do a lot of damage, too, even if the relationship has been over for years. If there were feelings of betrayal or entitlement, they could simmer for a long time and drive unexpected actions.

Before her most recent long-term relationship, Cyn had been in a serious one with a daytime talk show host who herself had remarried about seven years back. Marriage has a calming effect on some of the more outrageous feelings of ownership that some people have but that doesn’t guarantee than an ex won’t target someone from their past.

Sometimes I think love is really not worth it—romantic love, anyway. Sometimes I see things that give me hope—the younger generation being taught explicitly about consent, for example—and then I see the reality (the manosphere) and I get cynical again.

As I read, I scratched out notes in my private shorthand, reminders of people to look at, information to explore further, questions to ask.

My first question was, had Cynthia really been a witch and had Nikki and Serena really been her buddies? I couldn’t find any information that specifically tied Cyn to witchery, or even anything that we might call New Age—like an interest in chakras. Nothing like that turned up.

I watched one clip of Cyn one a talk show about eight years ago saying that she was more attuned to the natural world than she’d been before, but celebrities and the environment were like Oreo cookies and the cream inside: they went together and that was that.

The rest of the interview was more directly connected to concerns about climate change, and she’d made a little pitch at the end: vote for Gerald Newcomb, who’d been running for governor at the time.

He was in fact the current lame duck, who couldn’t run again because of term limits and that made me think of Hugh Smalls. I wondered if he and Cyn had crossed paths. They were on opposite ends of the political spectrum, but as they say, politics makes strange bedfellows.

My curiosity had me combing their names in search, and then I hit on it.

Then I decided to go down the Reddit rabbit hole. Reddit had its share of conspiracy theories and that was what I wanted, but the tamer end of things, conspiracies that might actually have happened and if not conspiracies per se then speculations of any kind that suggested Cyn hadn’t died of a heart attack.

A couple were out-and-out crazy—aliens had experimented on her, for example—though admittedly I was still assimilating the fact that I was a witch and that magic existed, and so did mythological creatures that I’d always assumed were, well, mythological, so maybe aliens also existed. How would I know? But I wasn’t prepared to go down the alien abduction path so I clicked away to another thread.

There weren’t as many as you would have expected or at least as I expected, and I reached the end of them without coming up with any names, which was what I really wanted. Reddit didn’t want any defamation lawsuits, I guess, so moderators were pretty trigger-happy about zapping posts that ventured into that territory. But I’d been hoping for something.

The only glimmer I could get was a reporter who’d spoken with Cyn’s spouse, Anita Davenport and reported her as saying, “I can’t believe it. I don’t. Cyn was in superb health.” But there wasn’t any follow-up or suggestion that she really didn’t buy the heart attack diagnosis. It was likely grief talking, that was all.

Still, I wondered if there were something there, a wedge I could use to find out more. I knew I couldn’t just call up and expect Ms. Davenport to answer her phone but I suspected not being a celebrity herself, she would be easier to track down than Cyn would have been.

I turned my attention to searching for information about Ms. Davenport, and then I had a lively aha! moment. I found out where she worked.

~~~

Jennifer Lawler has been a writer-editor for more than twenty-five years and has published more than forty novels and nonfiction books. She is the founder of the online education company Club Ed LLC.