Unsung Heroine

by Sarah Kuhn

  Rose’s dedication to preparedness was another one of the four thousand and fifty-two things I found incredibly appealing about her.

  “Lucy,” she said, giving me a nod as I approached. “Are you all right? You hit that stage pretty hard.” Her gaze flickered up and down my body, her eyes filled with concern.

  “Of course,” I demurred, waving a hand. “All part of the job.”

  She pushed off from the bar and stepped closer to me, her brow furrowing. “Are you sure? I know we’ve got stuff going on here . . .” She waved a hand at the Gutter stage. “But if something’s really wrong—”

  “Darling, I’m fine. Truly.”

  I met her eyes and gave her what I hoped was a reassuring smile—and swiftly realized that perhaps approaching her for this friendly good-bye was a mistake. Every time I got close to her was another chance to inhale her sweet vanilla-citrus scent, to gaze at her gorgeous neck . . . and to remember that I really needed to stop doing such things.

  “Are you all right, Rose?” I said, taking in the slight weariness around her eyes, the way her shoulders drooped. “You look spent, love.”

  “Yeah, I just . . .” She shook her head. “The team’s been pulling doubles lately and this was supposed to be a night off. I wish they could’ve just had fun, you know?”

  “You deserve a bit of fun, too,” I said, patting her shoulder. “Please don’t forget that part. And please take care of yourself. Do I need to come over to your place again with some of those herbal remedies I got from my mama? They really do work wonders—”

  “That last one did not work wonders,” she said, giving me a look—which I didn’t mind, since it seemed to sweep her weariness away. “It made me feel like I was, I don’t know what the word is—tripping?”

  “Aw, look at you, trying to be all hip with the lingo,” I said, chuckling and giving her a playful nudge. “Were you tripping balls, even?”

  “You laugh, but whatever was in that stuff made me feel like I’d ascended to another plane where the first beauty pass of the Enterprise in Star Trek: The Motion Picture is about a billion times longer,” she said, giving me a faux-stern look.

  “Oh, but it is actually that long,” I retorted. “There are multiple orchestral key changes, darling! I was right there, trying to watch it with you—remember?”

  “I remember.” Her voice had suddenly gone all soft, and she was studying me intently, her face very serious. I shifted uncomfortably. I’d been trying to make her . . . well, laugh. To forget about being tired and overworked and enjoy the moment.

  “Then you must remember what happened next,” I said, tearing my gaze from hers and examining my nails. “Your dear cat Calliope accidentally ingested some of the herbal brew and tossed her cookies on my shoes.”

  “Ahhh, yes.” She shook her head and slumped against the bar again. “My life is all work, Trek marathons, and cat vomit. No wonder I can’t get a date.”

  I froze, my eyes glued to my nails. I don’t know why her bringing up dating gave me such pause. Perhaps because bringing it up in the context of cat vomit surely meant she did not see me as a prospect. Friendlandia to the extreme.

  “Oh my, look at the time,” I said, making my voice overly cheery. “I really should go save Evie from Kevin. And head home.”

  “See you tomorrow,” she called after me.

  As I scurried back to Evie, trying to squelch the flush rising in my cheeks, I realized that I hadn’t been merely trying to get Rose to laugh—I’d been trying to get her to smile.

  You know, like she had when Celine had been onstage, hitting that high G-sharp.

  And I’d failed. Utterly and completely.

  * * *

  • • •

  After Evie and I headed back to Tanaka/Jupiter HQ—a crumbling Victorian in the Mission where the team worked and lived—I settled in for the night, incessantly replaying Rose’s smile from earlier in the evening (and my failure to make her smile later on) and trying not to mope.

  I have never been a wallower. If something’s bothering me, I have a fairly reliable list of tasks I can cycle through to pull myself out of it. I’ve always been this way, going back to my days as a little one growing up in the city with a hardworking—but very harried—single mother.

  I love my mama to bits and still call her at least three times a week just to hear the gentle lilt of her voice. But we definitely struggled back in the day. She was a disappointment to her parents, both fancy professors of literature with lingering ex-Catholic guilt, who kicked her out and cut her off when she got pregnant at seventeen (and by a white man, which made everything even worse in their eyes). She eventually became a middle school English teacher, and we toughed it out through lean paychecks, third-hand clothes, and holidays that were usually just the two of us hunkered over microwave meals.

  Both of us developed our coping mechanisms. Mama would weave wild, intricate stories that she told me every night—something to satisfy the frustrated aspiring novelist inside of her who wasn’t getting a chance to shine. And I would soothe her by singing a repertoire of songs by her favorite, Ana Gabriel. Ana Gabriel is a brilliant Mexican singer-songwriter and a true prodigy: she first sang onstage at the age of six! She has a dramatic, husky voice made of unicorns and whiskey, and she deserves to be counted among the great divas of the world. Naturally, I consider her a personal role model. Many of her songs are in Spanish, and I learned them mostly phonetically as I am not entirely fluent—but even if I didn’t understand all the words, I always felt the emotions of her singing deep in my soul.

  “That’s so beautiful, mija,” Mama would say, her face lighting up after a hard day. That was my first taste of that magical connection between performer and audience. I vowed to make her smile as much as I could.

  My childhood also taught me how to dissipate my own bad feelings by mimicking moves from the martial arts movies on local TV (we did not have anything so luxurious as cable). Or what I thought were the moves, anyway. One day, Sensei Ron, the owner of a local mixed martial arts studio, saw my goofy eleven-year-old self attempting to kick the air as I made my way down the street. He invited me in and showed me a few actual fight moves. As it turned out, I had a natural talent for that sort of thing, and Sensei Ron took me under his wing, giving me lessons in exchange for help cleaning up around the studio and doing the occasional odd job.

  “That’s my Lucia,” my mother sighed happily when I showed her some of my moves. “So adept at learning new skills.”

  (By the way, my name isn’t Lucia—it’s Lucy on my birth certificate. My mother’s excellence when it comes to spinning fantasy sometimes spills over into real life.)

  My list of soothing tasks had evolved since I was a wee child, but it was still something I returned to regularly. So when Evie and I got home, I immediately started my regimen to fix my twitchiness.

  I went for a run—yes, I adore my weapons, but when it comes to sweating out bad feelings, I prefer the simplicity of my feet against the pavement, my breath huffing in and out of my body.

  I called my mom—I love my friends, but hearing Mama’s voice always provides a whole different level of comfort.

  I sorted through possible new karaoke songs to add to my repertoire—nothing cheers me like imagining myself onstage, belting out an impressive new run of crowd-pleasing notes.

  None of this, however, did the trick, and looking through songs actually made me feel more twitchy, more out of sorts with life. And that simply would not do at all.

  The other item on my list—shopping for frilly vintage treasures at my friend Shruti’s boutique—wasn’t really an option this late at night. So I changed into my Victorian nightgown—a voluminous concoction of creamy lace and chiffon that was very beautiful and altogether ridiculous—and resorted to the very last thing on my list, the thing I only pulled out in an emergency, as it tended to be too mope-adjacent.


  I flopped on my bed, pulled out my iPad, and booted up an app that exclusively streamed British murder shows.

  Darling, let me tell you about the British murder shows.

  1. There’s one centered on every profession and livelihood you can imagine, from cops to vicars to senior citizens who love gardening.

  2. They really shine a light on just how crime-infested so many small villages in the quaint, pastoral environs of the English countryside are.

  3. They are quite possibly the most soothing thing ever invented.

  British murder shows were another part of my childhood. I first became obsessed after my mother explained to me that my father was a debonair spy from England—a sort of kinder, gentler, more feminist James Bond—who had romanced her during a top secret mission to the Bay Area and fallen madly in love, only to be forced to return to his home country by the unsympathetic, unromantic powers that be. I would never meet him, Mama explained. But I should know that he had loved us both very much.

  These fairy tale trappings—and my mother’s love of things that were not exactly the truth—should have probably made me suspicious, but what can I say? I desperately wanted to believe. And since I could never meet this dashing figure who had sired me, I did the next best thing: I became hooked on the stories of his people, the British murder shows that aired every Sunday on PBS. As grisly as the crimes sometimes were, I loved how fancy everyone was, how the investigations were so often punctuated by people having tea in delicate cups with roses painted on them or, in the case of the period pieces, women wearing impossibly gorgeous dresses made of lace and ruffles. And I adored the sense of resolution at the end of every episode—how the crimes were wrapped up so neatly, the fiendish perpetrators brought to justice.

  When I was younger, many of the justice-seekers themselves were old white men and women, which was not ideal for a tiny mixed brown girl trying to forge her own unique sense of identity. But at least now that’s starting to change thanks to British murder goddesses of color like Indira Varma and Freema Agyeman. I worship the ground they walk on.

  I watched these shows so constantly, a slight British accent started to affect my speech. It wasn’t a real accent, of course, but a mish-mash of words and speech patterns I’d seen on TV. And even though it got me teased incessantly on the playground, I loved it—it gave me a tiny bit of connection to the father I would never know. Of course, many years later, when I did come to know him . . . well, that is a story for another time.

  I scrolled through the selections in the streaming app, finally settling on an old episode of Midsomer Murders I’d watched a million times before. Then I realized I could simultaneously indulge in another soothing task, and I pulled up an additional window on the iPad to browse Etsy for vintage finds.

  I settled into a rhythm, watching and clicking around, and while I wouldn’t exactly consider myself soothed, I was at least able to banish my twitchiness and Rose’s unexpected smile to the back of my mind.

  DCI Tom Barnaby had just successfully avoided another round of his wife’s terrible cooking—and I had just clicked over to a particularly delightful Gunne Sax creation involving several different kinds of lace—when I heard a sharp knock on my door.

  I thought it was Evie, coming around to discuss the plan for tomorrow’s supernatural check at The Gutter or to badger me once more about my unwillingness to catapult myself out of Rose’s friend zone. So imagine my surprise when one Aveda Jupiter flounced through the door.

  “Oh . . . hello,” I said, looking up from Midsomer and arching a puzzled eyebrow.

  “Hi,” she said. Now that she’d completed her purposeful Aveda Jupiter stride into the room, she seemed at a loss for what to do. She settled for putting her hands on her hips and gazing at me with her usual imperious demeanor, tossing her mane of long black hair over her shoulder. “I came to check on you.”

  My eyebrow retreated farther up my forehead. “Why?”

  Aveda and I didn’t really have that kind of relationship. She was my boss. She’d originated the superheroing enterprise that had evolved into Team Tanaka/Jupiter. She’d hired me because she wanted the best and I was the best. Simple as that. And while we’d developed a certain sisters-in-arms type of camaraderie and respect over the years, we weren’t exactly what you would call friends. Things had actually gotten rather tense during preparations for Evie’s wedding six months ago. Aveda had taken it upon herself to be the most extra maid of honor ever and many of her decisions had been less about what Evie wanted and more about what would prove that she, Aveda Jupiter, was the best friend of all time.

  Everything had gotten resolved swimmingly after a run-in with an army of Bridezillas in possessed wedding dresses, an overly dramatic reconciliation between Evie and Aveda (truly, those two didn’t know how to do things any other way), and a wedding for the ages.

  But still. It was unusual for her to just show up while I was watching my British murder shows.

  “I make it my business to check on all of my team,” Aveda declared, drawing herself up tall. “To make sure they are all in the best possible shape to take on any supernatural oddities that might come our way—”

  “Aveda. You never just ‘check on’ me. What’s going on?”

  “Evie said you seemed out of sorts,” Aveda admitted, falling out of her power pose. “And it sounded like the kind of thing I was better suited to help with.”

  “I don’t know why you two have to share everything,” I muttered, clicking back to my prospective purchase. Was a three-tiered skirt too much?

  “She didn’t share willingly, I kind of got it out of her,” Aveda said. “And then I convinced her it would be best if I tried to help you. Because this is the kind of thing I’m good at.”

  I blew out a long breath but didn’t protest as she strode over to my bed and plonked herself down next to me. Maybe if I continued about my business, she’d go away. Or get sucked into Midsomer Murders and be quiet.

  “What are you watching?” she asked, peering over my shoulder. “Why are there so many old white men?”

  I let out an even longer, more exasperated sigh and set the iPad to the side. I should have known better. Aveda Jupiter has many talents, but being quiet is not one of them. “Darling, I sense you are not going to leave until I agree to talk to you about my out-of-sortsness, are you?”

  She gave me a triumphant smile. “No.”

  I crossed my arms over my chest and met her eyes. “Well. There was a lot happening tonight at The Gutter. What with the possible demon antics and the chandelier destruction and the introduction of a new superstar and then Rose smiled—”

  “Wait.” Aveda held up a hand. “Rose Rorick smiled? What does that look like?”

  “It happened,” I insisted. “She was looking at . . .” I trailed off and bit my lip, my eyes going to my abandoned iPad. Oh, to get back to the simpler world of DCI Tom Barnaby and all the murders.

  “A-ha!” Aveda nodded, her dark eyes turning shrewd. “I see. She was looking at something—or someone—that’s not you.”

  “She was,” I confirmed. “The Great Celine—the new superstar, the one who was almost a victim of the rogue chandelier—”

  “A-double-ha!” Aveda exclaimed. “And Rose was checking out your new competitor—the first person maybe ever who can match you in karaoke. Which is also contributing to your general malaise.”

  “But none of this should matter,” I insisted. “Because as I was telling Evie, Rose and I have established ourselves as friends, and I’ve decided there’s no going back from that. It shouldn’t matter to me who she’s smiling at.”

  “Except it does,” Aveda said. “Look, Lucy: I tried to be ‘friends’ with Scott, too. It did not work out.”

  During the planning of Evie’s infamous wedding, Aveda had finally gotten together with Team Tanaka/Jupiter’s resident mage, Scott Cameron—the m
an she’d been in love with for at least a decade. From what I’d heard, their consummation had taken place on the floor of a possibly demon-infested bridal gown salon, which didn’t sound like a recipe for romance to me. But there was no denying the way they looked at each other.

  “Rose and I are not meant to be,” I insisted. “We talked after all the chaos and it mostly involved cat vomit, and despite my best efforts, she did not smile, which means I simply do not excite her in that way, and I want her to be happy, she deserves it more than anyone I know—”

  “Lucy.” Aveda cut me off, her gaze boring into me. “Stop. This isn’t you. You don’t pine. You do. Be the badass Lucy Valdez we all know and love.”

  “But . . . but my underwear,” I muttered, thinking back to my regrettably candid text.

  “I’m sure you have very nice underwear,” Aveda said, looking puzzled. She reached over and gave me an awkward tap on the shoulder. “Nothing to worry about.”

  I frowned down at my lap, toying with my iPad.

  “Treat it like one of the cases these old white men are trying to solve,” Aveda said, waving a hand at the iPad. “They, like, never give up until they get their man, right? Or something?”

  “Have you ever even seen Midsomer Murders?” I groaned, rolling my eyes.

  “Show me,” she said, waving at the iPad more insistently. “Maybe they can help you in your quest.”

  I restarted the show, but I couldn’t quite give my full attention to DCI Tom Barnaby’s investigation. As ridiculous as Aveda could be, her words stirred certain feelings I couldn’t deny.

  Be the badass Lucy Valdez we all know and love.

  Aveda was right. I did not pine. I liked to step up and get things done. And I liked to do whatever was in my power to chase my bad feelings away.

  My possible jealousy of Celine was another unfortunate component of my current bad-feelings cocktail. It was true, I’d never had a karaoke rival as talented and flat-out dazzling as she was. But I also didn’t believe in competitive cattiness between women. I wanted to boost someone like her up, not shove her down so I could be number one as usual.