by Nic Saint
We stared at Ernestine, always the voice of reason—or, like in this case, doom and gloom.
“Well, that’s just a chance we have to take,” said Estrella finally.
I darted nervous glances at Sam, who was checking his watch impatiently. He was right, of course. We needed to do this quickly so we could get back to the more important task of finding Susan Gnash before she turned into an ancient mummy instead of the lively young teenager she was.
So we raised our hands, as we were getting used to by now, and watched as tiny sparks flew from our fingers and jumped and cavorted through the air in the direction of the giant block of steel, glass and concrete that was Falcone Tower, the monstrosity now blocking the sun from the Oval Office.
“Don’t look, you guys,” Estrella whispered happily, “but the President and the First Lady are watching!”
Of course we had to look, and I saw that inside the Oval Office President Jack Gnash and his wife Catherine were, indeed, watching our every move.
“Oh, no,” I groaned. “I can’t work like this. I can’t do this with the whole world watching!” I indicated the camera crews.
“Just… pretend they’re not there,” advised Ernestine.
“And how am I supposed to do that?” I asked, perspiration starting to cover my neck. I’ve never been able to perform well in front of an audience, and definitely not an audience of millions, possibly even billions!
“Just picture them all naked,” said Estrella. “Always works for me.”
I glanced over at Sam, who now stood watching with a stony-faced expression, his arms folded across his chest. So I did as Estrella said and pictured Sam naked. It did manage to distract me from the leader of the free world and his wife staring at us from inside the Oval Office, but the distraction proved so great that I momentarily forgot what we were doing here in the first place.
“Edie!” hissed Ernestine. “Focus already, will you?!”
“Oh, right,” I mumbled, tearing my gaze away from Sam, raising my hands again and adding my own trademark stream of red sparks to the mix.
We watched as our magic combined and formed a golden stream of light, and I could hear Sam’s hushed, “I’ll be damned,” and Pierre’s happy cry as the stream magnified both in strength and size, the golden sparks now pretty much resembling the slipstream of Santa’s sleigh when he comes riding into town. And then I decided to close my eyes, not wanting to see the reporters staring at me, or the other onlookers. And so I pretended I was all alone with just my sisters present, and we were doing a simple little thing, like making some evil warlock disappear or something. No pressure!
And then we silently muttered, “Otarappasid,” over and over again, and when I opened my eyes to tiny slits, I saw that our stream of magic was enveloping the entire Falcone Tower, wrapping it in a blanket of shimmering stars, as if Christmas had come early this year.
I knew that inside the building probably lots of people were looking down anxiously, hoping we weren’t going to plant their home on Mars or Venus this time. And then, before our very eyes, the building slowly became more and more hazy, the solid structure quickly fading from view, just like it had the first time. And then, suddenly, the entire tower was gone! And we lowered our arms, glancing at the spot where just before a giant monstrosity had been the latest blight on the Washington DC skyline. It was gone!
“I think we did it,” said Estrella, sounding as surprised as I was feeling.
“You think so?” asked Ernestine suspiciously.
“Where did it go?” I asked, and looked at Sam for an answer.
He was on the phone, checking where Falcone Tower had popped up this time. I just hoped it wasn’t on the steps of Buckingham Palace, or toppling the Eiffel tower, or straddling the Great Wall of China or something.
But then he gave us a huge thumbs-up. “It worked!” he cried. “It’s back where it was before!” Then he frowned. Uh-oh. “You planted it backward!”
“Just a minor detail,” Pierre assured us placidly.
Sam shrugged. “They’ll just have to do some restructuring.”
“Phew,” I said, and my sisters held up their hands for a happy high five.
“We did it!” cried Estrella. “We actually managed to do something right for a change!”
“Well, almost right,” corrected Ernestine. “We should have put the building back the way it was supposed to be.”
“Well, at least we didn’t plant it on the moon,” I said.
Estrella laughed. “You know? I was thinking the same thing!”
“We’ll put it back the way it was,” Ernestine promised Sam, but he held up his hand.
“That’s not important right now. What’s important is saving Susan Gnash’s life, not whether a bunch of fat cats can or can’t enter or exit their fat-cat building.” He quickly led the way across the lawn to the White House. As we passed what was left of the Rose Garden, we saw that there was a huge indention where the heavy structure had stood.
“They’re going to need a landscape artist,” muttered Estrella as she took in the sunken patch of lawn and the flattened flowers.
“Gran would hate this,” I added. She loved flowers.
“Details, details,” muttered Sam as he led the way, and then we were entering the White House proper, and moments later found ourselves inside the Oval Office, being greeted by President Jack Gnash, First Lady Catherine Gnash, and a disgruntled-looking sort of man Sam introduced as Mike Bunion, head of the Secret Service, on whose watch Susan had gone missing. He looked like he hadn’t slept in days, which probably he hadn’t.
Chapter 28
“Thank you so much for coming,” said the First Lady, as she shook our hands warmly.
“Sorry about… that,” muttered Ernestine, pointing at the spot where Falcone Tower had been until moments ago.
“Oh, that’s all right,” said the President, who was an amiable man who looked even more handsome in person than on TV. “We all make mistakes,” he added warmly. “I lost my reading glasses last week, didn’t I, Cathy?”
I wanted to point out that misplacing a few thousand tons of building was something else than losing your glasses but wisely kept this to myself. This was, after all, the man we depended on to keep us out of prison, so whatever he said was fine by me.
“We heard about your daughter,” I said instead, “and we’re very sorry.”
Catherine nodded grimly, and I could see the strain the disappearance of her daughter had caused on her face. She was a beautiful woman in her mid-fifties, with golden hair and the noble features of a classical beauty, but now she looked positively puffy-eyed and haggard, and so did her husband. They weren’t the leaders of the free world now, but simply two parents worried sick about their missing child.
“I want you to do whatever you can to find Susan,” said Catherine, pressing my hands.
“I don’t care what laws you have to break or what you have to do,” added the president, which was a bit odd coming from him, “just do it, as long as you find Susan and bring her back to us safe and sound.”
“Has she ever run away before?” asked Estrella.
Catherine answered the question truthfully. “There have been a few occasions where she tried to evade the scrutiny of her Secret Service detail,” she said, darting a glance at the stocky man, who stood staring at us as if plagued by constipation. He probably hadn’t agreed with the president when he decided to give us a shot at finding Susan.
“Susan is a fun-loving teenager,” Mike Bunion said now, speaking in the graveled voice of one who gargles broken glass and downs a bottle of gasoline for breakfast every morning. “She’s headstrong—pardon me—”
“Not at all,” said Catherine with a wistful smile. “Susan is headstrong.”
“And she likes to have her freedom,” said Bunion. “Which is why at first we simply figured she’d run off with a friend. Perhaps to go shopping at the mall, or maybe even to see a movie without a bunch of chaperones aroun
d.”
“We think she might have a boyfriend,” said her father gravely, furrowing his brow with the bewilderment any father feels whose daughter suddenly turns into a teenager and stops being a child from one moment to the next.
“So we thought she must have arranged to meet this boy,” continued Catherine, placing a hand on her husband’s arm. “But when she didn’t answer my texts, and then my calls, we knew something was terribly wrong.” She shook her head. “Susan would never ignore me, even if she’s doing something she’s not allowed to. We…” She bit her lip. “We fear the worst. Especially since she disappeared in an area where three women have been kidnapped and m…” She swallowed with difficulty, tearing up. “And…”
“And murdered,” her husband supplied, clasping a supporting arm around his wife’s shoulder.
“We’ll find her,” I assured the couple, deeply touched. And I knew that we were going to do just that. I didn’t care that we’d never worked a police investigation before, or that we had zero experience finding missing persons. I knew that if we put our minds to it, we were going to save Susan Gnash.
“Yes,” agreed Ernestine earnestly. “We’ll do whatever it takes, sir, ma’am.”
“If she’s still alive, we’ll find her and bring her back,” promised Estrella, and I winced, and so did the First Couple. Estrella sometimes lacks empathy.
“Whatever you need,” said the president, “just say the word. This is now your priority number one, Sam. Drop everything else. And you have the full support of the FBI, the CIA, the DHS, the NSA, hell, you can even rope in the FDA and the IRS for all I care. Just get her home safely, will you?”
“I will, sir,” said Sam, making a promise that probably he himself had no idea how to fulfill. But then such was the power of Jack Gnash’s personality and the warmth and gentleness of Catherine Gnash that they just made you do your utmost for them, even lay your life on the line if need be.
When we finally left the White House we all felt pumped to take this thing by the horns, find the Mummifier and give him a taste of his own medicine.
“I’ll get us back to New York ASAP, and then I’m going to place you on the scene where Susan was last seen,” Sam said. He eyed us uncertainly for a moment. “Please tell me you can do this.”
“We can do this,” said Estrella cheerfully, and I, too, nodded with more confidence than I was actually feeling. Perhaps we had absolutely no experience, but at least we were extremely motivated, and three motivated witches are a force to be reckoned with under any circumstances, and most certainly when a young woman’s life was on the line, and our own future hung in the balance. I so didn’t want to meet Terry Hodge again…
Chapter 29
Chazz Falcone took a bite from his apple crumble cake and closed his eyes with relish. Now this was the good stuff, he thought. Then he looked up at the expectant faces, and answered the question his son had just asked. “No,” he said. “I’m not running for president again. That’s all over.”
Rick nodded. “I think it’s for the best, Dad.”
Chazz didn’t know whether it was for the best or not. It was simple logic.
After briefly becoming one of the most hated men in the country, and arrested and thrown in jail on charges of terrorism, he was smart enough to know when he was beat. This was not something he could bounce back from, and he would simply have to drop his political ambitions for now, or forever.
He glanced at his small staff who were gathered here, in Bell’s Bakery in Happy Bays, and saw nothing but sadness on the faces of Johnny Carew, who sat hugging Spot 2, and Jerry Vale, who sat hugging himself.
And then there was Skip Brown, of course, the latest addition to his team, who sat hugging a cup of hot cocoa and staring dreamily into space, probably wishing he’d joined the team sooner. Oh, well. Such was life.
Chazz felt that now was the time to place a few well-chosen words. Thank his campaign manager and his team for all their hard work, but the words were snatched from his lips by his son, who clapped a hand on his shoulder. “You fought hard, Dad, and I’m proud of you. You ran a great campaign.”
“I don’t like losing,” he said. “In fact I hate it, but what can you do?”
“There will be other campaigns, Chazz,” Felicity Bell said. She was a round-faced young beauty of cheerful aspect, her flaming red hair burning brightly in the sunlight streaming in through the bakery window.
Bell’s Bakery & Tea Room was by way of being Happy Bays’s landmark, the small town that was Chazz’s second home, and he, like many of the locals, liked to gather at the bakery at momentous occasions like these.
Also present were Alice Whitehouse, Felicity’s best friend and associate, a petite blonde with vivacious personality, and Reece Hudson, Alice’s fiancé and a well-known movie star. And then there were Bianca and Bettina Bell, of course, Fee’s mom and aunt, who ran the bakery with their husbands.
They’d all gathered here when the events began to unfold in New York, and now were still darting anxious glances at the TV screen suspended in a corner of the tea room, where they’d just watched Falcone Tower being restored in its original place. Only those three witches had put it ass backward, of course, as was to be expected. They were doing it on purpose! Now no one could get in or out of the building, and already the fire department was cutting a hole and creating a temporary entrance.
This was just too much! He’d had such a great lobby built, the greatest lobby in the world, and now they were going to have to redo the damn thing.
But that was the least of his worries. His dwindling popularity was going to reflect badly on the Falcone Group. Who wanted to stay in one of his hotels now? Or play golf at one of his golf resorts? Nobody, that’s who! He might be a billionaire, but a lot of his money was tied up in real estate, and if the value of his properties dropped, he might be in big trouble before long.
He shook his head sadly and stared before him, nursing a cup of coffee and his piece of apple crumble. At least he still had his friends and family.
“So those are my cousins,” said Felicity as she watched the screen, where images of those three wenches who’d destroyed his life had appeared. They were showing the same images over and over again. The video Ricky had shot on his smartphone, of the girls making his tower disappear, and now as they performed some new magic trick to put it back in its place.
“Yes, honey, those are your three cousins,” said Bianca.
“But why didn’t you tell me?” asked Felicity, turning to her mother now.
Bianca, who was the spitting image of her daughter, only a few years older and with blue hair, shrugged. “We didn’t want to have anything to do with Merrill, honey. The man was a thief and a scoundrel.”
“Merrill was a very bad influence,” Bettina chimed in. She looked like her sister, only her hair was gunmetal gray for some reason. “We didn’t want a thief in the family, and most certainly not one who was in and out of prison the whole time. Our brother was a dreadful cad, Fee. Really dreadful.”
“Did you ever reach out to his daughters?” asked Felicity.
“No, we never even met them,” said Bianca. “Actually it was Merrill who broke off all relations after we told him what we thought of his thieving ways. After that we never heard from him again. Not even a Christmas card.”
“I don’t think thieves send Christmas cards, Bianca,” said Bettina primly.
“He didn’t even invite us to his wedding. We had to read about it in the newspaper,” continued Bianca with her lips tightly pressed together.
“And then we heard through the grapevine he’d fathered triplets,” said Bettina, “so we sent a fruit basket, but he sent it right back! Adding a message that he didn’t want to have anything more to do with us!”
“The cheek,” muttered Bianca, obviously still upset.
“And then he went and died on us,” said Bettina, as if this was his biggest crime. “We went to the funeral, obviously, but the girls were still babies.�
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“We did meet Cassandra Beadsmore, Abra’s mother,” said Bianca.
“She said she’d take good care of the triplets. Raise them as her own.”
“And now they’re world-famous,” marveled Felicity, staring up at the screen where the three so-called witches were now shown again.
“They’re nice,” said Skip, still that dreamy look on his dumb mug. When they all turned to him, he added, “Well, they are, aren’t they, Mr. Falcone?”
Chazz merely grumbled. ‘Nice’ wasn’t a term he associated with the trio, though he had to admit they’d been more than courteous when trying to bust them from prison. They certainly had gumption and chutzpah, he had to give them that. But he merely had to look at the images of those New York firemen cutting a hole in his building to lapse into a murderous silence again.
“Well, I thought they were very nice,” insisted Skip stubbornly, his eyes sparkling when Estrella Flummox’s pixie face appeared on the screen.
“I’m so sorry, honey,” said Rick, addressing his future wife.
“Why?” asked Fee.
“If I’d known they were your cousins, I would never have written that article, or posted that video of them spiriting away Falcone Tower.”
She shrugged. “If you hadn’t posted that video, someone else would have. They practically broke the internet this morning, Ricky, so don’t worry about it. You just did what any conscientious reporter would have done.”
Alice now looked up from her phone. “You guys?” she asked excitedly. “Do you remember the old Hartford Manor? Just outside of town?”
“What about it?” asked Felicity.
Alice looked up with sparkling eyes. “Someone just bought it. At least according to Mabel Stokely, and she should know, because she works at Town Hall. She’s meeting the new owner right now, sorting everything out.”
“And why is that important?” asked Chazz acerbically. He didn’t like it when the attention strayed too far away from his own person.