At this point I was going to have the narrator discover a connection between Cyn and Hugh Smalls, but I realized I was making it too easy, so I backtracked and decided to make it harder. I’ll make some additional changes in revision.

Also, it’s not July. I’ll fix this in revision.

I’m pondering the nature of magic in this ms. Before her death, Cyn used it for glamor, Serena uses it for manipulating emotion, Nikki for detecting the presence of magic. I realized that I have a pattern here, that magic is different for everyone.

So, I decided that Narrator uses energy against people – just as she uses their past actions (secrets) against them, she can use their energy against them, as in Aikido.

Here’s this week’s installment:

“So what do you want?” Dahlia asked, peering over the top of her red-framed glasses as she sipped her spicy margarita.

We were sitting outside at Madre, a Oaxacan restaurant that was her favorite spot not only but mostly because it was close enough for her to walk home after a margarita or two. The food was also good but a little pricy, and she said, “You never buy me drinks unless you want something.”

“That’s not true. Once a year I buy you a drink on your birthday.”

She took another sip. “It’s not my birthday, so … what do you want?”

“A favor.”

“Uh huh.” She leaned across the table to scoop salsa on a chip. “I remember when they gave these away free. Now they’re like ten bucks. You must want a really big favor.”

She looked elegant even in sweltering heat of July. My T-shirt was plastered to my body and sweat dripped from my hairline into the corner of my eye, leaving me with a kind of permanent blink.

I used to think people like Dahlia had a secret that could be emulated but over the years I realized it was the kind of characteristic you’re born with. You either have the cool-and-collected vibe or you don’t, and I didn’t, simple as that.

“I’m not sure how big it is,” I said. “You decide.”

“That big, huh?”

“Maybe, maybe not. You can say no—”

“I know I can say no,” she said, her mouth tilting up at one corner. “That’s the good thing about having had to learn how to set boundaries over the years.”

“I’m just saying I won’t whine about it if you do say no.”

“Got it. No whining. What’s the ask?”

I quit dancing around it and said, “I need to talk to Anita Davenport. I need to ask her something about Cyn Stryker, and I just found out that Ms. Davenport works for your talent agency.”

“So far I don’t hear a favor,” Dahlia said, without giving any evidence of what she was thinking.

“Well, you can extrapolate, I’m sure. I want you to arrange a meeting between me and Ms. Davenport.”

Dahlia sipped her drink. Ate a chip. “What am I supposed to say?” she asked eventually. “’I’d like you to consider my friend for a role in the movie you’re currently casting?’ Then you ambush her with your questions about Cyn?”

“No, no, I think that would just piss her off. Do you know her?”

“Sure, I know her.”

“You never said so.”

“There are a lot of things I’ve never said. I’m sure there are a lot of things you’ve never said. But Anita’s kind of humorless and boring so there isn’t much to tell.”

“Seems like that’s common for celebrities. Like they don’t want anyone else vying for center stage.” I took a sip of my own drink, trying to hide my disappointment. I had promised I wouldn’t whine and know I kinda wished I hadn’t made that promise.

“Why do you want to talk to her about Cyn?” Dahlia asked, reaching for another chip and breaking it in half. It’s what I do when I know I should stop eating but don’t want to.

“It’s to do with … well, my new situation.”

“You mean being a witch. Or at least thinking you are.”

“Not so loud!” I lowered my voice. “But that, yes.”

“Do you think Anita’s a witch?”

“I think Cyn was.”

Dahlia chewed the first half of the chip, then pointed the second half at me. “That would explain a few things, I guess.”

“Yeah, well, I’ve got these two mentors, I’ve told you about them—”

“Ms. Boil and Ms. Bubble,” she agreed and that was a fairly accurate summary of them, so I tipped my head and said, “I like to think of them as the Weird Sisters.”

“There’s three of them in Shakespeare,” she said, showing she’d paid attention in high school.

“And number three is me,” I said, raising my hand.

“Ms. Trouble.” She gave a smile.

That also suited, oddly enough.

“But I still don’t see why you need to talk to Anita,” she said.

“The Weird Sisters—my Weird Sisters, not Shakespeare’s—think she was killed by magical means.”

“Oho,” Dahlia said. “That solve your problem right there.”

“It does?”

Dahlia nodded. “Anita’s been talking about how Cyn couldn’t have died of a heart attack from the day she died of a heart attack.”

“Did she say she thought it was a magical cause?”

“No, she thinks it’s something like poison. A Taser that no one will admit to using or something like that. She’ll be happy to tell you allllll about it.” She gave me a considering look. “Can you call yourself an independent reporter without feeling like you’re lying?”

“I can indeed,” I said and reached for the last chip before she took it.

*

It took Dahlia a few days to set up the meeting with Anita, so in the meantime, I focused on what I was supposed to be doing for my client—that is, investigating Hugh Smalls and getting the goods on him.

I spent a little time in Mar Vista, where he and his family lived. It’s not exclusive like Brentwood or Beverly Hills and it’s not as ridiculously expense as Venice or Santa Monica, but it’s a little nicer than my neck of the woods, though, as I discovered on a walk in their neighborhood, a lot higher in dog excrement.

I have a theory that the richer the neighborhood, the more excrement on the sidewalks because everyone is too entitled to pick up after their own damned dogs.

I wiped my shoes on the nearest patch of grass and continued my stroll. Like most neighborhoods on the Westside, this one had a lot of fences and gates but the buildings were crammed together cheek-by-jowl and none of the residences were what you would call estates—but most of the single-family homes probably cost between two and three million dollars, little two- and three-bedroom ranches, nothing special. The sunshine tax, I guess. Though I only rented and didn’t own, I paid it, too.

These were the ideas that were idly moving through my mind when I heard the sound of panting behind me. I glanced over my shoulder. The grim, of course. He gave me a little doggy smile.

“Shoo,” I said and the doggy smile got bigger. I shook my head and continued my stroll, the grim dogging (sorry) my footsteps the entire time.

Then came the sound of running. That usually meant a jogger but sometimes a mugger, even here in a nice, quiet neighborhood. I stepped a little aside so she could pass, her high ponytail bouncing and swinging with each step, the blonde-highlighted-brown hair that every white brunette woman adopts immediately upon arrival in LA. You go to a stylist with your dark brown hair, ask for a cut, come out with sunstreaked hair. In my case, I have a lot of gray to cover and I keep planning to stop bothering but the stylists won’t let you. You go in for a cut and you come out with streaky highlights, that’s the immutable law.

She jogged right past the grim, who was sitting politely on the verge. The grim looked at me as if waiting for a signal about what I was planning to do.

I said, “I think it’s the house with the black wrought-iron fence there,” because the address ended in 37 and I was standing in front of 33.

The grim did not nod or anything like that, but it did get to its feet and started ambling away in the direction of the black wrought-iron fence.

The streets were packed full of parked cars but other than the jogger, who had already turn the corner and was lost to sight, I was the only pedestrian. I guess unless you count the grim.

He—it, I should say, I don’t think omens can be said to possess a gender—stopped in front of the wrought-iron fence and looked at me.

“That’s the one,” I said.

The grim seemed unimpressed. I was underwhelmed myself, I admit. You’d think a successful businessman would at get a lawn service if he couldn’t be bothered to mow the lawn himself.

The house beyond the fence was also showing unmistakable signs of neglect: a succulent in an enormous pot by the front door was brown and withered, and a gutter was sagging along the roofline. Wood framing the front windows was splintered as if it hadn’t been sealed properly and had begun to rot.

But he had the money to maintain the place, or at least he ought to, considering what he raked in from the laundromats. Maybe he was spending personal money on his campaign. But some of the neglect—like the window frames—hadn’t happened in just a few months since his campaign had started. The neglect had begun a lot longer ago than that.

Well, a cheater. You start cheating and home stops being anything you care about, or at least that had been my observation.

I glanced at my watch and moved along because people did notice loitering and they did call the police and on occasion, when they could be bothered, the police responded.

No one usually hassled middle-aged women unless they had a knife actually in hand and were dripping blood, but even then there was a not insignificant possibility that they wouldn’t be noticed. Especially in LA.

I had just reached the corner when a woman with a stroller whammed into my shin and I yelped. She said, “Oh, sorry,” focusing on me for the first time. She’d been talking on the phone using her ear buds and hadn’t paid the slightest bit of attention to me.

I thought about flopping onto the sidewalk in agonized pain; I have a thing about people rudely using strollers as battering rams but then a dog started barking and distracted me.

I’m still foreign enough to LA to forget that Westsiders walk their dogs in strollers, so it took me a second to realize where the barking was coming from and then another second to realize the dog wasn’t barking at me. It was standing fully upright in the basket of the stroller, body rigid, hair on the back of its neck ruffed up.

It was barking at the grim.

“Gotta go,” the woman said, and then, “Bleach! You stop that right now!”

The dog did not stop that right now and the woman came around to the front of the stroller to repeat the command. That did not stop the deranged barking, either. The woman gave me an apologetic glance and I said, “Bleach?”

She rolled her eyes. “That was my husband’s idea” and I knew that meant she lived in the house with the wrought-iron fence. Only a laundromat owner would call a white dog Bleach. Or at least I felt comfortable coming to that conclusion.

“I swear I don’t know what’s gotten into him,” she continued. “He usually only does that when he sees other dogs.”

“No worries,” I said over the racket.

“Gotta run,” she said again, addressing me this time, and maneuvered the stroller around me without whamming it into any of my body parts.

I sighed. She seemed nice and I was sorry that I was going to have to ruin her life.