by Lysa Daley
I grabbed my phone and pulled up my calendar app. Morty’s brother had disappeared on the 26th of December. Sure enough, the 26th had been a full moon.
Bingo!
Morty may have suspected that his brother had been lured away by a siren. And weirder yet, why did he have this stack of love letters? Who wrote them? Morty? Or his brother? Had the letters been delivered and then stolen away somehow? Or, perhaps, the letters had been intercepted before they reached the hand of “The Enchantress.”
Had Mr. Morty gone to find her in Malibu and befallen the same terrible fate as his brother? Or had he also been enchanted by a siren?
This new information made me wonder. I checked the calendar to find the date of the December full moon, then I cross referenced that date with police reports. Low and behold, a man from Thousand Oaks went missing on the day. I went back farther and farther in time, and I was shocked at what I discovered.
I got up to leave. "Thanks, Headie. I think we're onto something."
Clutching a printout, I hurried through the halls of the Society. I still didn’t know my way around very well, and I’d never been down to the third floor before. It was nearly 9pm, and the office was quiet as I navigated the maze of hallways.
The second floor was home to the seeker agents’ offices. The big open area contained individual desks, along with a communal area for printers, copier, coffee station and a fridge always stocked with fruit, expensive European sodas and bottles of French water that promised they were better than anyone else’s water.
Stryker wasn’t at his desk. I grabbed a bottle of water and a green apple as I whizzed past.
“Stryker’s still here,” Davos, half-giant security guard, told me from the front desk near the elevators. “He’s probably in the gym.”
“Thanks. If you see him, tell him I swung by with some information on the beach thing we did today.”
“Okay,” he replied, scribbling a note while talking aloud. “Library girl came by.”
Giants were more known for their brawn than their brains. Just guessing, but I suspected interpersonal skills weren’t Davos’ strong suit.
“Thanks,” I said, taking a sip of my French water. Hmm. It really was better.
I headed toward the gym. I still hadn’t had time to come by to work out, but I intended to. It was the most amazing gym I’d ever seen. They had daily classes in martial arts, cross-training, and yoga. The high-tech exercise machines recorded and analyzed everything you did.
I knew Stryker liked the virtual reality treadmill. Apparently, it displayed a VR zombie chase that he found inspirational.
I glanced at the paper in my hand. I was excited that I’d made some progress on the case, and eager to share it with Stryker. I discovered that over the last several months a handful of men, all non-magicals, had disappeared from in and around Malibu on the eve of the full moon.
Coincidence?
Perhaps. Perhaps not.
I spotted Stryker leaning against the doorway. I waved, but he didn’t see me. I quickened my pace as my excitement grew. Right before I called out to him, he stepped forward, almost out of my line of sight, to hug someone.
Karolina.
I froze. My initial instinct was to turn and walk away. Why? What did I care that he was hugging another agent?
Except it was that bitchy agent.
Her sports bra looked like it might pop open from the strain and her short spandex left nothing to the imagination. I didn’t like her. I didn’t trust her. But I had to admit, she looked pretty good in her workout clothes.
“Hey babe. You were bad ass in kung fu class,” Stryker said.
Instead of leaving, I slipped into the shadows of a half open door to listen. I wasn't proud of myself for eavesdropping, but I still did it.
“Yeah, well, you know how much I love kicking butt,” she cooed. “Hey, I got that thing you asked for on the old librarian guy.”
Suddenly, someone turned up the music playing in the gym, drowning out their voices. No!
What was she going to tell him? I made a split second decision. Right or wrong, I closed my eyes and transformed down, down, down to the carpet. I’d become a small but nimble cricket. Maybe it was inappropriate that I’d transformed in order to eavesdrop on two colleagues. But it was too late now.
“Whoa! How many volts is this thing?” I heard Stryker asked.
“Enough to stun half a dozen merfolk long enough to get them out of the water,” she replied.
I used my long powerful legs to leap closer, scuttling to a safe place between the door and the back wall of the gym.
"Where you'd get this? It’s very illegal."
“I used some of my less reputable contacts to get my hands on an electrified Neptune’s staff.”
Stryker held out a thin pole, like an electrified underwater cattle prod. The very idea of these highly illegal and horrific weapons made me cringe.
“Awesome, let’s go catch us a few mermaids. A nice little above ground interrogation will get us the answers we want.”
“Great, let me shower quick, and we can go,” Karolina said, smiling like the teacher had just given her a gold star sticker.
It was bad enough that he was still stuck on the mermaid angle, but his tactics made it even worse. I would have still intervened, if for no other reason than to spare the mermaids, but then I heard him say, “Oh, and, by the way…There’s a reward for Mr. Morty’s rescue. Nearly ten grand. The Paranormal Society for Boring Librarians or some dumb group put it up. You and I can split it.”
“I like the way you think.”
Why hadn’t I heard of the reward? And he was sharing it with her? Sure, the money would be nice. But did they really need a financial reward to try to help poor Mr. Morty?
Stryker continued, “Hey listen, Karolina, you’re doing a great job. You are by far the best — and prettiest — young investigator that I’ve worked with in years. To be honest, you may be the most amazing and natural seeker I’ve ever encountered.”
“Really?” she gushed. “I can’t tell you how much that means to me.”
My heart sank at hearing the exact words Stryker had said to me. And I’d been stupid enough to fall for it. I couldn’t believe I’d been so naive. He obviously said this to all the female agents.
Stryker was a creep.
But I already knew this. I knew it when he stole a bounty right out from under me. He’d acted like he did it to teach me an important lesson, but the truth was he just did it to collect the bounty for himself. Even though he knew I needed the money for tuition and living expenses.
Stryker was a total jerk, and I was an idiot for trusting him again.
Change of plans. There was no way I was going to share my research with him. Or her.
As they continued to scheme, I backed away, into the safety of the dark little corner. I knew what I should do.
Chapter Fifteen
“There’s at least three missing.” I handed over the police reports I’d copied in the library. “Three we didn’t already know about.”
Mr. Stroud leaned back in his big leather chair and looked at me with something of a skeptical expression. “Three what?”
“Husbands. At three husbands have gone missing near Malibu in the last year.”
He’d been unfazed when I barged into his office. He was probably used to it. But it was after 9pm, and I hadn’t been sure that I’d find him still here.
He raised a skeptical eyebrow. “I suspect husbands actually go missing every day.”
He had a point. But I explained my theory. “Yes, no… I mean, yes of course husbands go missing every day. They run off with the secretaries or their wife’s yoga teacher or whatever.” I pointed to the police reports on his desk. “But these three husbands, who lived close to Malibu, appeared to have gone missing around the time Mr. Morty’s brother vanished.”
“Okay…” he replied, still unsure what I was getting at.
“Two are still missing. But o
ne partial body was found dead.”
“Partial?” He scooted forward in his chair.
This is the information I’d been planning to tell Stryker before my encounter with him and Karolina at the gym. Instead, I’d decided to see if Mr. Stroud would let me handle the situation alone.
“His heart was missing,” I explained.
“How inconvenient.”
“The police ruled it suicide.”
“They think he tore out his own heart?” Mr. Stroud squinted.
“They think an animal, maybe a shark, got to the body before it washed ashore,” I said. “But it’s unlikely a shark, or any other animal, would only eat the heart.”
He nodded grimly. I sat silently as he scanned the three reports.
“And how did you come by this information?” he asked.
“I did a little research on my own and looked up recent missing persons. I found a Mr. David Larson from Woodland Hills also disappeared in Malibu back in August. A week later, half of his body washed up on shore.”
“Where was his heart?” Mr. Stroud asked.
“In the part that didn’t wash up,” I explained as Mr. Stroud grimaced. “I spent the next hour searching through the computer files and discovered that in the last six months five middle-age men—three white, one Hispanic and one Asian guy—disappeared in or around Malibu. Maybe this isn't unusual. Maybe guys go missing near Malibu all the time, what do I know? I'm new here. But there is one similarity.”
“Do tell.” Mr. Stroud put his pen down.
“They all went missing on the full moon.”
Any supernatural understood the power of the full moon. It had the power to change men into werewolves. It weakened the veil between worlds. Ghosts moved more freely. Demons were harder to control.
He asked, “Any other connection to Mr. Morty or his brother?”
“There doesn’t seem to be a direct connection between them. They didn’t work in the same place, or grow up together, or anything like that. Two of them were surfers, but I don’t know about the others.”
Mr. Stroud nodded. “I can confidently advise you that Mr. Morty didn’t surf.”
“I’d like to go talk to their families. If they’ll talk to me,” I said. “Maybe I can find a link we don’t see.”
“Really?” He nodded. “For someone who said they didn’t want any fieldwork, you’re volunteering for an awful lot of it.”
I didn’t have a snappy response. He was right again. To be honest, I was a little bored in the library. Especially after I’d tangled with a troll, tracked down an invisibility helmet, and flown on the back of a gargoyle.
All I could say was, “It’s for Mr. Morty.”
That was true. I liked the little old elf and didn’t want anything bad to happen to him. But I could also use the reward money.
He nodded. “Okay. See what you can dig up.”
I felt like my hunch was right. There had to have been a connection between these missing men and Mr. Morty. Even if no one else believed me.
Then he added, “If you think you discover who’s behind these disappearances, you need to immediately stop and call me. I don’t want you going after whoever’s behind this.”
“But —” I started to protest.
“No, Lacey.” He held up a hand. “There’s a big difference between collecting a necklace from a troll and confronting a potential murderer.”
“Okay.” I nodded begrudgingly.
“Let me know what you find,” he said as I turned and walked out. “Oh, and Lacey…”
“Yes?”
“You have the wand I sent you?”
“Yes, but I don’t really like it,” I shook my head. “And I’m not sure I really need to be fully armed to talk to a few suburban wives.”
He frowned at me. “In my experience, that’s exactly when you need to be fully armed.”
Calabasas seemed like a nice place to live. The upscale suburb sat about thirty minutes outside of Los Angeles. It was the American Dream meets California Cowboy chic, all with a hefty price tag.
My little car wound through the verdant lawns of a planned housing development called Old Oak Trails, past the community swimming pool and the impressive playground. The houses were mainly Mediterranean or faux-barn style McMansions, ranging in size from big to ginormous to palatial. Squeaky clean kids zoomed down the wide gently sloping lanes on bikes and skateboards, followed by power-walking trophy moms wearing expensive yoga clothes.
I knew, as a future highly-educated academic, I was supposed to look down my nose at this cookie-cutter suburban existence with its nice helping of conspicuous consumer consumption, but to be honest, this did not look like such a bad place to live. Maybe I could find myself a nice upwardly mobile husband and settle down out here with squeaky clean kids of my own.
Hey, I could learn to power-walk
Nineteen Old Oak Trails was the home of one Mr. Jason Saperstein, who had disappeared in November. He was one of three missing men who lived within a ten mile radius of each other in the suburbs. This neighborhood sat just on the other side of the canyons from Malibu. It was a quick drive across to Malibu and the ocean.
The first house I stopped at today had been in Thousand Oaks, but the woman wouldn't speak to me. It was the home of the dead man found heartless on the beach. Considering her husband’s horrible death, I wasn’t surprised that she didn’t want to talk about it.
The house on Old Oak Trail was my second attempt. I hoped that Mrs. Saperstein would at least hear me out.
Unfortunately, that warm fuzzy suburb vibe evaporated two minutes after I started talking to Megan Saperstein, the wife of Jason Saperstein.
“Malibu?” She sneered. The same sneer seemed to appear whenever she spoke about her missing husband.
“Yes, did Jason ever have any reason to spend time in Malibu?”
“Gosh, no one ever asked me that before, but yeah, he surfed in Malibu a couple times a week, at least. During the summer, he’d go nearly every day.”
“Do you know where he surfed? What beach did he prefer?” I asked because Malibu ran twenty-five miles long and one mile wide, sporting dozens of sandy beaches.
“How the hell should I know which beach that bozo surfed at?” She puffed on her vape pen as she turned toward the pool.
We’d been sitting under a covered awning on a stone patio while her two chubby and generally unpleasant children splashed in their kidney-shaped swimming pool, loudly bickering over the ownership of an oversized pink flamingo floaty.
She yelled to the kids, “You two knock it off before I go in the kitchen to get a butcher’s knife to stab that stupid bird in the neck, and then neither of you will get it.”
“Moooommmm!” whined the boy.
“How would you like that? Huh?” Megan barked. The kids were, apparently, on her very last nerve.
Threat of harm to the floating flamingo temporarily shut them up.
“Did the police ever look into his surfing habits?” I tried to steer the conversation back to her husband, so I could get the info I needed then get out of here and away from the weird cherry-vanilla smelling smoke drifting out of her vape pen. It was making me light-headed.
“The dumbass police didn’t ask me shit. One cop stopped by, for like, two minutes, but when they figured out that he just skipped town, I never heard from them again.”
“You think he skipped town?”
“Obviously. Why are you asking me about Jason?” she snapped. “He ain’t coming back. And I say good riddance. ”
She was definitely not the heartbroken wife.
I cautiously floated an idea. “We think the surfing, and the beach, might have something to do with his disappearance.”
“You wanna know what I think?” She leaned forward, the corners of her mouth turning down in an unattractive way. “I think he’s in Vegas or Reno or something like that.”
“Was he a gambler?”
“Ha! That’s an understatement.” She l
aughed. “Of course, I didn’t know how bad he’d gotten us in debt until he ran off.”
I blinked, then tentatively asked, “Do you think he’s dead?”
“What? Honey, I’d be relieved if I thought he was dead. I could cash in the life insurance. No, he’s out there. Somewhere. And I’m here, stuck with all of this.”
Before I left, she let me look through Jason’s old pickup truck, parked nicely out of sight next to the house. Only shiny new cars were allowed to be seen on the street of Old Oak Trail.
Megan informed me that his Lexus had been repossessed months ago. But he had used the old truck for surfing. I found several parking passes for the lot at Zuma Beach in Malibu. That was several miles up the road from the Seahorse Inn.
I wanted to broach the subject of “the Enchantress” with her, but I was honestly afraid of her reaction, until she gave me the perfect segue.
“May he and whatever floozy he’s with rot in hell for all I care.”
“You think there might be another woman?” I asked, trying to sound like I was shocked by the idea that he might have any interest in someone other than her.
“Oh, for sure there’s some other bitch.”
“What makes you say that?”
She looked at me like I was an idiot. “A wife just knows.”
“Was his behavior before he left different?” I asked, treading carefully.
“Why do you care? Who do you work for again?”
“Mrs. Saperstein, another man has gone missing under similar circumstances,” I began. “In fact, we believe several men may have disappeared in this area.”
As I spoke, her face changed. It went from self-righteous anger to one of surprise and concern. She had convinced herself that he’d run off with another woman, abandoning her and her kids. She hadn’t taken the idea seriously that perhaps something much worse had happened to her husband.
“You think someone hurt him?” she asked weakly.
“We don’t know.”
“Maybe killed him?”
“I’m investigating the case, trying to determine just that. So anything you can tell me might be useful.”