Curse of the Kissing Cousins

by Kelner, Toni, L. P.

  Tilda hadn’t speculated much about either death at the time. For one, she’d been on deadline, and for another, the facts as they were known were perfect for making her point about the difficulty actors had making the transition from teen star to anonymous adult. But with Vincent’s ominous theories fresh in her mind, she started considering other possibilities.

  When Tilda had spoken to the police detective investigating Bonnier’s overdose, he’d stressed that there’d been no sign of foul play and no note to suggest suicide, so the official conclusion was accidental overdose. But he’d also mentioned that somebody might have been with Bonnier that evening, because he wasn’t known for partying alone. Could that somebody have waited until the actor was passed out from the booze and then administered a fatal overdose?

  Then there was the unknown driver of the car that hit Johnson. With hit-and-runs unpleasantly common, there was no reason to think this one was anything but another statistic, but the police had never found the driver, and there were no witnesses. Somebody could have waited for an opportunity to run the biker off the road and leave him to die.

  Tilda made a face and took another drink of coffee, wondering if it was Vincent’s craziness or her own urge to make splashy headlines that was making her imagination spin out of control. Then again, the story of Sherri’s death—or, rather, Holly Kendricks’s—was lurid enough without any embellishment from her.

  After spending a couple of years failing to build an acting career post-Kissing Cousins, Holly had moved back to her hometown of Weldon, Connecticut, and started a real estate business. She’d used her history to help move property—there was a certain cachet in buying your house from a former TV star, even a little-known one like Holly—so she’d been happy to talk to Tilda for whatever publicity she could get. With a pang, Tilda remembered the husband and kids Holly had spoken about so proudly.

  According to Vincent, the former actress had been found shot in a vacant house, and Tilda guessed it was one she’d been trying to sell. Hadn’t she heard of other real estate agents being lured to vacant houses to be raped and killed? It could be a dangerous job, especially for a pretty woman like Holly, who’d kept her figure trim and dye job fresh.

  Three deaths of three costars in three months was a wicked big coincidence, even without Vincent’s paranoia. Tilda tried to decide if the renewed curse business would make it easier or harder to find Mercy. Then she pulled the brake on that line of thought, disgusted with herself.

  Some reporter she was. She’d barely started the assignment and already she’d committed the fangirl’s most egregious sin—she’d confused the actor with the role. Of course, the actress had actually been named Mercy. According to Kissing Cousins lore, the character had originally been named Letitia, but after casting Mercy Ashford, the producer decided he preferred that name and made the change. But Tilda couldn’t pretend she’d been referring to the actress—she’d been thinking about the character.

  Tilda had met or spoken to the other cast members after they’d moved on to other roles, either in other TV shows or in some semblance of real life. That had never happened with Mercy, so it was the TV character who was stuck in Tilda’s mind. The only cure for that was to find out what had happened to the woman.

  First, there were two surviving cast members she did know how to find. Noel Clark, who’d played the mad-scientist-in-training Elbert, was still in show business, with a long-running, albeit small, role on a soap opera. Katie Langevoort, who’d played the cloyingly sweet youngest Cousin, Felicia, was now a gospel singer. Though neither of them had been able to help Tilda before, it wouldn’t hurt to talk to them again. The same went for the show’s creator, Irv Munch.

  She pulled out her Palm to start a “to-do” file for the story. Then she checked e-mail again, and found more messages waiting. The first was from Nicole, and she took a moment to read, laugh at, and delete the demand for more info about Sherri/ Holly and Kissing Cousins. Then she turned her attention to Vincent’s new messages, each subsequent one giving more details about Holly’s death, and each sounding more and more desperate in his pleas for Tilda to do something. Unfortunately, he was vague about what exactly she was supposed to do.

  Tilda sighed. She liked Vincent. Sure he was the biggest fanboy she’d ever met, but he was so incredibly sincere and enthusiastic about the many books, TV shows, and movies he was attached to. Moreover, he lacked the all-too-common snobbery of fans who wouldn’t deign to explain the significance of Spock’s heritage or the intricacies of Middle-earth culture to an outsider—he wanted to share his passions, which made him an invaluable source of information and kind of sweet.

  As well as being a fan ambassador to the unwashed, Vincent considered himself an activist. Unfortunately, his usual brand of activism involved sending fervent e-mails around the country that would result in online petitions destined to be ignored by Washington, New York, or Hollywood, depending on the topic. Tilda didn’t think that approach would be any more successful this time, but she did send him a note asking him to marshal his resources toward finding Mercy. That would keep him occupied while she started her own search.

  After reading the data Vincent had sent about Holly Kendricks’s death, Tilda was sure he had to have a contact in the Weldon police department because he’d sent her the text of the preliminary police investigation. The report said that Holly had left at noon to show a house to a male caller. Normally she met with clients before she showed them a property, but in this case the caller said he was in town for a business meeting and had seen the property while driving by. He had only a short window of time before he had to head back to New York and wondered if she could show it to him. Since the property had been vacant for several months, Holly had agreed.

  According to the secretary at Holly’s realty office, Holly thought she had met the man somewhere, because he clearly knew who she was. Since Holly had a habit of handing out business cards at social gatherings, this wasn’t all that unusual.

  At any rate, Holly went to meet the man at noon. She had an appointment at the office at two-thirty, and when she didn’t show, the secretary called her cell phone. There was no response.

  The secretary was alarmed, because Holly was conscientious both about keeping her schedule and answering her phone, so she got somebody else at the office to go to the house in question. That agent had been the one to find Holly dead from a gunshot wound, with no sign of the client. He called the police, and after they arrived and confirmed that she was dead, they started their investigation.

  Vincent’s last message, which had been sent only minutes before Tilda opened it, said that while it appeared Holly had been beaten before her death, there was no sign of sexual assault. They weren’t sure about robbery. Holly’s briefcase and purse were left beside the body, and both appeared to have been rifled. There was no cash in her wallet, but the credit cards were all accounted for, which would have been unusual for a pro.

  The police had no specific motive in mind, but were planning to speak to Holly’s husband, who was described as a local businessman. Tilda thought she remembered him being in banking. The file also listed assignments for officers to check to see if any other attractive women real estate agents had died in similar circumstances anywhere around Weldon.

  Vincent pooh-poohed those lines of investigation, infuriated that the police couldn’t recognize what he thought was obvious—that the deaths of the three former costars had to be connected. That meant it couldn’t have been Holly’s husband—why would he have killed Jim Bonnier and Alex Johnson? The same went for the proposed serial killer. That meant there had to be a deranged celebrity stalker lurking, a Kissing Cousins fan gone bad.

  Tilda appreciated the wealth of information Vincent was providing, and had to admit that there were some odd coincidences—the actors dying in the order of their characters’ ages and the apparent pattern in the dates of death. But while this was more than enough to throw Vincent into a frenzy of fear, she wasn’t ready to acce
pt his conclusions, despite the striking PowerPoint presentation he’d sent, complete with a death’s head border.

  Three more messages had come in while Tilda read Vincent’s ramblings, but two were spam and the third was an even more irate note from Nicole. Tilda deleted them all. Then she reached for her coffee, took a swallow, and grimaced because it had cooled to lukewarm. It was time to stretch and use the microwave for reheating. She was in the kitchen trying to decide if the corn muffin would be enough food for dinner when her roommate, Heather, came into the apartment.

  Even before she got the door closed, the curly-haired blonde said, “Can you turn that down?”

  “Sure,” Tilda said, resisting an aggrieved sigh because Heather’s aggrieved sighs were so much better than hers. She stepped into her bedroom to shut off the stereo, then went back to the kitchen, where Heather was already peering into the Dunkin’ Donuts bag.

  “Is that the last one?” Heather asked.

  “Afraid so,” Tilda said with a certain amount of satisfaction, even if it did give Heather an excuse to use her aggrieved sigh. “I thought you were going to go to the grocery store.”

  Heather kicked her shoes off. “I just couldn’t handle shopping today. The boss kept me running all day, and I’m exhausted. Are you going to call for pizza?”

  If she’d said, “Do you want to split a pizza?” Tilda would have gone for it, but what Heather wanted was to swipe half of whatever pizza Tilda ordered and paid for. So she said, “Actually, it’s such a nice day, I think I’ll go out.” Before Heather could try to talk her into bringing back a doggy bag, Tilda grabbed her satchel, making sure her cell phone and Palm were inside.

  Just before she opened the apartment door, she said, “Heather, who was your favorite of the Kissing Cousins?”

  “Brad, of course,” Heather said. “But Sherri was cool too. Why?”

  “Just curious,” Tilda said, already making plans to start the hunt for a new roommate.

  Chapter 4

  Everyone’s a geek about something.

  —MIKE LUCE, ARTIST AND COMIC BOOK SHOP MANAGER

  THE next morning, Tilda woke to the sound of Heather’s usual morning frenzy, which climaxed with the slam of the front door as she made a mad dash for the subway in a probably vain attempt to make it to work on time. Tilda took a moment to gloat about being a freelancer before getting up, even though she knew the glow would last only until the day’s mail arrived, with its allotment of bills that wouldn’t wait until this or that magazine got around to dealing with accounts payable.

  Until then, she would continue to revel in the joy of working at home by going to the computer without stopping to shower or change out of the T-shirt and the penguin-patterned pajama pants she’d slept in, pausing only long enough to fix a cup of coffee and eat her corn muffin.

  With her stereo playing Green Day’s album Dookie loudly, she fired up her laptop and zipped through the morning’s crop of e-mail: an info recap from Vincent, one last appeal from Nicole, Cooper’s hilarious description of Nicole’s temper tantrum as she tried to find information about Holly Kendricks’s death with so little to go on, notes from a couple of friends, a request for an article from a low-paying but entertaining magazine dedicated to sixties pop bands, and the inevitable batch of spam advertising Viagra, ersatz Rolex watches, and various miraculous methods for penis enlargement.

  Once that detritus was cleared away, Tilda was ready to get to work. The first step was to go over her notes from when she’d hunted for Mercy before so she could figure out what it was she hadn’t tried yet.

  Despite the sob stories she told editors when fishing for an assignment, it usually wasn’t that hard to track down former television stars. For one, actors almost always had agents. Not that an agent would give just anybody the contact info for their clients, but Tilda had enough clippings and references to loosen even the tightest grips on PDAs and Rolodexes.

  Going through an agent worked just as well for nonworking actors because most of them wanted either to become working actors or to at least receive whatever residuals were owed them for previous work.

  Of course Tilda had to find out who an actor’s agent was, but that wasn’t hard either. It wasn’t as though they didn’t want to be found, at least by people who could give their clients publicity. Twenty minutes on the Web or half an hour on the phone would do for sixty to seventy percent of the people she was looking for.

  For the rest, she had an arsenal of other tricks. If an actor was working regularly on a series, in films, or in the theater, she could track down publicists who would nearly orgasm at the chance to get publicity without having to work for it. Then there were casting people, who had enormous databases—one of her favorite sources was a former casting agent turned mystery bookseller. Next were actors’ organizations and unions, all of which would forward messages.

  Sometimes it was even easier to find people who’d severed all formal ties with the entertainment industry but were hanging on to their bit of fame with both fists. Many maintained their own Web sites or frequented fan sites. They sold their own T-shirts and screen-printed pillowcases. Some hit the convention circuit, traveling all over the country to sign memorabilia and sell photos of themselves. They were happy to be found.

  If those methods didn’t work, Tilda had nurtured a web of contacts, fans and pros alike, who would help her track down all kinds of performers. She haunted user groups, Listservs, and online bulletin boards to find those people and cultivate them. That’s how she’d met Vincent, and eventually she’d started to consider him a friend as well as a source.

  The problem, Tilda realized as she went through her notes, was that she’d tried all those tricks before, some of them twice.

  The woman who’d been Mercy’s agent was dead, and while the agency was still collecting the actress’s residual checks and taking their cut, they’d made only the most perfunctory efforts to track her down to pay her. After all, it wasn’t their job to make people accept money. Ditto for the organizations and unions—Mercy had let her memberships lapse shortly after Kissing Cousins was canceled, and hadn’t left a forwarding address or phone number. Ditto again for casting people—apparently Mercy didn’t want acting work.

  As for the fans, there were a number of Web sites and Listservs devoted to Kissing Cousins and to Mercy in particular, but there was no evidence that she’d so much as lurked on any of them. A couple of times people had claimed online to be Mercy, but had had their claims debunked. Not only had they been thoroughly flamed in retaliation, but Tilda wouldn’t have been surprised to find out that they’d been infected with every virus known to the computer world too—she herself knew better than to ever tick off a really good hacker.

  Tilda had at least managed to track down Mercy’s old address, where she’d lived during the filming of the show, but the neighborhood had gone through several renaissances since then. Mercy’s house was gone, and none of the neighbors even knew who she was, let alone where she was.

  Tilda had even gone to a private eye. Not that she’d been able to pay him, but she knew one who was an ardent admirer of seventies TV detectives like Mannix, Barnaby Jones, and Banacek, so she’d traded signed cast photos for a few hours of his time. The detective had tried the usual routes—getting Mercy’s Social Security number and checking for records, digging up her automobile registration and using that, checking police files for arrests. Nada. He’d even checked death records, but there was nothing there either.

  Tilda leaned back in her chair, drumming her fingers on her desk. If there was anything she’d missed, she was still missing it. So until something smart occurred to her, she was going to try something dumb, which was to do all the usual things again. She pulled up the old e-mails she’d sent to everybody she’d thought of before, updated them, and sent them again. Maybe something would come from it.

  That done, she took a break for showering and dressing, hoping something else would occur to her. It didn’t. Then she checked e-m
ail again, hoping some new lead had arrived. It hadn’t. So she spent the rest of the morning polishing her witch article for Entertain Me!, tracking down the art she needed, and zapping it off to the magazine.

  After lunch and another quick e-mail check, she rewrote the witch article, this time exploring how the television witches she’d interviewed compared to actual Wiccan practitioners, and sent it to a small Wiccan magazine. Another rewrite, and the article compared glamorous TV witches to far less attractive historical witches. That one went to a retirees’ magazine that liked popular history articles. She then simplified that version for a teen magazine. Next she cut the article into individual profiles of each of the interviewees and added information that hadn’t fit in the previous articles. Those went to fan magazines focusing on the shows the actresses starred in. She did draw the line at writing about how television witches subverted children’s morals, though she knew of a fundamentalist newsletter that would have grabbed it in a heartbeat.

  Not all of those secondary markets would buy the articles, of course, but they were worth a shot. Tilda had long ago learned that the key to survival as a freelancer was not to research and write lots of different articles, but to rewrite the same article for as many different markets as she could finagle. While the various versions started with the same basic information, each one was slanted in a way that allowed the readers to see what they wanted to see.