“How much of that did you overhear?” I asked Extraordinaire.

Extraordinaire wasn’t the one I was worried about, though. And she seemed to pick up on that, somehow. Maybe my eye contact wavered for a moment, or something. Whatever mannerisms or tells I had wouldn’t just disappear from a little shapeshifting.

“What was the first part of the conversation we heard?” Extraordinaire asked, turning to Jade.

“Uh. Something about taking risks to get evidence. ‘Safety doesn’t buy us any clues,’ was it?”

“I said fretting over safety,” I said, feeling some of the panic melt out of my shoulders. “That’s not a suggestion to be reckless. I was just- Hey, why are you back here, exactly?”

“Oh, hi again. We met at your table. Well, sort of met. I’m Jade Driscoll. Big fan. I mean, of superheroes, generally. I don’t know you, yet, and I’m guessing that means you’re not high-profile or local, because… oh, not, uh. No offense! That’s- Sorry. I’m rambling.”

I nodded. “I’m local-ish. New, though. You were right before.”

I stuck out a hand, and Jade awkwardly shook it.

“Yeah, of course,” Jade said. “I mean, you’re friends with Clara, you’d have to be local enough, but I try to keep up with the news about this sort of thing, and all.”

“This was kind of a debut. I wouldn’t be in the news yet.”

At the mention of Clara, I had an excuse to glance over my shoulder and check on her. She was stock-still, clearly trying not to give any key info away by accident and opting to include silence among the tactics that advanced that goal.

“Oh, you asked why I was back here,” Jade recalled. “Lost track of Clara, I saw that you were missing, I remembered you two being friends, figured you were catching up, and tried to ask the event organizers where you might have gone. That got me, uh. Aheh.”

“A supervised trip behind the curtain, so to speak,” Extraordinaire picked up the thread of the explanation.

“Didn’t mean to interrupt,” Jade said. “Um, I can just go wait-“

“It’s fine,” I said. “I know I sort of dodged your questions, earlier. Not used to the whole… well, any of this. Sorry for trying to convince you that I was handing out nuclear breakfasts instead of… magic breakfasts, or whatever.”

“Or whatever,” she echoed. “Do you not know how your powers work?”

“Not yet. Being able to manipulate reality on a fundamental level has a bit of a learning curve.”

Jade laughed.

“So, what are we investigating, Lucy?” Extraordinaire asked. She’d picked up my alias, apparently. Probably from Jade.

“Right. Um. Clara and I were thinking that… it might be nice to know who killed me, I guess.”

“You guess?” Clara scoffed.

I shrugged.

“When did the crime occur?” Extraordinaire asked, striding past me while typing away on her little keyboard. She took a spot on the couch.

I didn’t sit back down for the interview. “Overnight on Thursday. It could’ve counted as Friday morning, maybe, but hours before dawn.”

“And where were you on the night of the murder?” Extraordinaire asked, with a sly grin. A funny question to ask the victim, rather than any of the suspects.

“After-the-fact, I was on the riverbank. Dumped there, or upstream from there. Before that, I was…”

I stopped myself from glancing at Jade.

“…Ronnie Sutton’s house. There was a party.”

“Holy shit, no way,” Jade said, more talking to herself than entering the conversation. “I was there. Someone at that party died? That’s… Fuck.”

Clara made a pointed coughing noise.

“Uh, I mean- My… condolences? Is that- I don’t think that’s right. Sorry.”

“It’s fine,” I said, looking at Clara instead of Jade.

“What led up to the incident?” Extraordinaire asked.

“My head’s a bit fuzzy on the whole thing,” I admitted. “I think a combination of… I think I died of head trauma, and that’s messing up my memory of the night.”

“I’m not going to bust you for underage drinking,” Extraordinaire said. “I suspect you’ve learned your lesson already.”

“Right. So, a combination of that and the head trauma. I really don’t know what happened.”

“Tell me what you do remember.”

I tried. “We showed up, place was already crowded. After a while, I lost track of Ja- ake. He and I got separated, and, um. It’s a blur from there to the river, sorry.”

“Is this Jake on our suspect list?”

“Ha. No, no way.” I shook my head for further emphasis.

“Do we have any other leads at all?”

“I probably found the murder weapon,” I said. “A baseball bat washed up on the same shore as me. It had blood on it. I can’t imagine it was someone else’s. But I wasn’t really thinking straight, not all the way. I cleaned the bat so I could carry it, just in case I got attacked again. In hindsight, I could’ve made a weapon from scratch, so destroying evidence was stupid.”

“What’s done is done,” Extraordinaire said. “Do you still have it?”

“The bat? It’s in my room. Why?”

“It’s still a clue,” Clara said. “Less useful than it was, but….”

“Were any of your personal effects missing after the murder?” Extraordinaire asked. “Perhaps a pickpocket got very overzealous?”

“No pickpocketing,” I said. I tapped my neck with two fingers. “But I did lose something.”

My scarf, I willed her to deduce.

“Your life, yes. I see,” Extraordinaire said.

I really hope that’s just her making a joke to cover for me.

I’d already almost accidentally said I was with Jade at the party. My friends weren’t stupid. If I let too many of the details line up, my cover would be blown again. I had no idea if priorities that complicated could be picked up from body language alone, but if anyone had the people skills to do it….

“The motive wasn’t robbery, then?” Jade asked. “Why do you think they did it?”

“Your guess is as good as mine,” I said.

“I can’t tell if the bat is a good sign or a bad sign,” Clara chimed in. “If it was just the nearest weapon on hand, then it points to a spur of the moment decision, like you’ve been saying. But I’m not sure where you’d even keep a baseball bat, so I’m having a hard time picturing that.”

“You’re suggesting they picked out a weapon on purpose?” I asked.

“Premeditation,” Jade gasped.

Clara shook her head. “Or the killer made that spur of the moment decision, left to get a weapon, and didn’t change their mind on the way back. That’s what worries me.”

“What else do we know from the murder weapon?” Extraordinaire prompted. She hadn’t interrupted us until we got into the weeds of speculating beyond what we could refer to real evidence for.

“Did it belong to the attacker?” Clara asked.

“I have no idea,” I said. “They tried to dispose of it instead of cleaning and keeping it, so it couldn’t be that important to them.”

“Is there any chance the bat is a red herring?” Jade asked. “Some kind of freak coincidence?”

“This isn’t a puzzle,” Clara said. “A red herring implies that it’s misleading us on purpose. How would a bloody bat and a dead body wash up on the same shore on the same night, if they weren’t related?”

“Right, sorry.”

Extraordinaire kept typing on the keyboard at her hip. “So, we don’t know if the bat belonged to the killer, but we do know they had access to it, and we can assume they thought they could — and should — throw it away. The bloodstains have been removed, and I wouldn’t count on fingerprints, but it’s a key piece of the not-puzzle.”

“Was the killer at the party?” Jade asked. I wasn’t used to hearing fear in her voice.

“That’s a good question,” I said. “There’s no way I was killed there. Somebody would’ve known.”

“Any violence should’ve caused a commotion,” Extraordinaire agreed. “Jade, was there any disturbance in the crowd that you can remember?”

Jade shook her head. “If there was a fight and I didn’t see it, I would’ve heard about it afterward.”

“Then I would be surprised to find out Lucy was taken from the Sutton house by force.”

“I left on my own?” I asked. “That’s not a very helpful clue.”

“Perhaps not,” Extraordinaire said.

I turned to Jade. “Was that party open-invite, or would Ronnie have a guest list?”

“No list, sorry.”

“If you can name as many guests as possible, asking each of them the same thing would slowly improvise as complete of a list as possible,” Extraordinaire suggested.

“Aw, hell. That’s a lot of pressure. Let me think.”

“Of course. Lucy, any more information to go off?”

“I really couldn’t say,” I said. “I wasn’t in a very observant mindset. I went from insensate to more preoccupied with my new power than what had happened. I didn’t think it was something I could figure out, to be honest.”

“There’s not enough leads,” Clara sighed, reaching the same point I started from.

“I disagree,” Extraordinaire said. “Our list of potential witnesses will start with whoever Jade can recall seeing that night, and each of those people can lead to a new list of witnesses. Most probably aren’t even aware that someone died, but whatever they can tell us will help pave the way regardless. It comes down to timing.”

“Timing?” I asked.

“Our target was in a rush to destroy evidence, right? The longer they’re left undiscovered, the higher the chance gets that they manage to cover all their bases,” she explained. “We’re already in a tricky spot. The murder weapon was tampered with, we don’t know the crime scene, we don’t have an autopsy, and it’s already been two days.”

“We’re trying to solve a murder without any real proof, after the culprit has had time to get their story straight,” Clara lamented.

“Yes. I think it’s fair to set a deadline, under the circumstances.”

“We can’t keep you from more important hero business for too long,” I agreed.

“I’m not one to say that priorities are as cut and dry as you’d think,” Extraordinaire pushed back. “However, I’m only human. If it’s solvable at all, it should be solvable in… a week. Give or take, depending on if it seems like we’re making progress. But that’s my current instinct on when to throw in the towel.”

If we were going to solve this, it would have to be during Spring Break.

“Okay,” I said. “Let’s do our best.”

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