by Tess Lake
For the record: I am not planning to hold the sun hostage . . . probably.
Why don’t I magic up some gold? Yeah, it doesn’t work like that.
Back to the droning councilwoman. So there I was in job #3 of many at the time, trying to stay awake. The good stuff was coming—the mayor was waiting to the side, looking like a Japanese punk/cowboy hybrid with an extreme love of hair dye.
Greco Romano is his name, but everyone just calls him the mayor. He’s in his early forties, always seems to be lightly sunburned, and has been mayor for twelve years.
He’s totally, absolutely, one hundred percent nutbar.
But he also has this crazy magnetism, so he can bring in crazy ideas and sell them to the citizens. Anything to keep Harlot Bay running and making money. And I do mean anything. He once tried to get Harlot Bay branded as “The Spanking Capital of the USA.”
Droney McDronerson finished whatever it was she was seeping and then the performance began. Right on cue, about twenty more people turned up to see the fireworks—no, seriously, the mayor once set off fireworks in the chambers because he had this crazy idea about Harlot Bay hosting a fireworks festival. The roof caught fire and one of the counselors was “severely singed,” according to the Harlot Bay Times.
The mayor waved to his assistant, a pale, nervous girl named Elise, and she hit the lights. Complete blackout.
“Sorry.”
She fumbled a few times and then a spotlight came up on Greco. He was now in the center of the room in front of us. He leaned over his podium—where the hell did that come from? Did he just drag that in?—and tilted his head down. That week his hair was blond with vivid pink streaks running through it. It was kinda mohawk-y but only on one side. He had a diamond nose piercing that glimmered in the light.
“Butter.”
An eyebrow flicker. He moved his gaze across the room, bringing everyone in on his secret. It was working. I leaned forward in my seat, finding myself transfixed. I wanted to know about butter!
He snapped his fingers, a sharp crack that echoed through the room. Elise got the timing right, and behind him, a huge yellow statue appeared.
It was a man and a woman.
Naked.
Highly detailed.
Amorous.
Made of butter.
“Zero Bend.”
Another raspy whisper and a snap of his fingers, and the giant, throbbing . . . butter . . . was replaced with a young guy with spiky black hair and crazy mirror goggles. He was hanging from a harness, upside down, tied to the underside of the Sydney Harbor Bridge in Australia. He was using a chainsaw to carve something out of a massive block of ice that was suspended next to him. Some of the crowd gasped. It was in its early stages, but the emerging statue was even more explicit than the butter guy and girl.
“In two days, Harlot Bay will be hosting the International Butter Carving Festival. Competitors from all over the world will come here to compete for money and fame! With them will come tourists and spectators.”
He snapped his fingers again and the spotlight narrowed and brightened until it was just his face.
“Butter,” he whispered into the mic.
Then the spotlight winked out. Another moment of darkness and then the lights gently rose up before going too far. The mayor was gone, along with his podium. The council members and everyone else were left squinting in the harsh light. Elise mumbled an apology, fumbled at the buttons, blacked out the room again, and was rescued by one of the junior staffers, who got things working again. She escaped out the side door. As it swung open, I caught a glimpse of the mayor lugging his podium away to his waiting van.
There was a pile of flyers sitting at the front of the room. Droney banged a gavel like it was a court session and declared the meeting over. I scurried to the front to grab a flyer before Carter Wilkins stole them all—he’d done it before. He took all the flyers on the Great Jelly Riot from last year.
As I left, I saw Hattie Stern pursing her lips at me in the same code Wilkins used. I get it, Hattie. I’m a lemon, and you don’t enjoy the taste of lemon despite running a lemon-based business (Stern Lemons). Whatever.
She’s a witch too. A buttoned-up, clamped-down, iron-corset witch. She’s about sixty and does not like me or my family. To her, the Torrent clan is wild, reckless, mischievous, weird, diabolical, crazy, wicked and pretty much all bad.
We take great offense at this characterization.
We’re not all bad.
Chapter 3
After lunch and writing a few scintillating articles for my website—a cake recipe, information about a local flower, and a note about the tides—I walked down to Traveler, Molly and Luce’s shop. It’s a tourist trap in the finest sense of the word. They sell T-shirts, stickers, key rings, bobbleheads of the pirates who used to roam the Atlantic, maps to local attractions, tickets to go out to Truer Island, and basically all of those little knickknacky things that people buy on vacation and then immediately forget about once they get home. The thing about Harlot Bay and Hattie Stern was . . . we didn’t actually disagree with her about the Harlot Bay name. Unfortunately, it had stuck long ago, been codified (i.e., put on a map), and now everyone was too far down the path to reverse it. Sadly, we had to embrace it. So they had T-shirts that said things like I went all the way at Harlot Bay. Hey, we do what we have to do.
If Hattie Stern ever got her way, we’d become Generic Dying Seaside Town #23. At least now we can play on the pirates who sailed the coast, the murders, the ghost stories, the buried treasure and the wicked women who allegedly lived in Harlot Bay.
There are actually quite a few cool things about the place. Some of the houses have tunnels and secret rooms under them, which were used for smuggling and hiding from pirates come to loot everything. They were useful during Prohibition. There are deep caves with gleaming stalactites. Over on Truer Island, there are wild horses descended from Spanish horses who escaped shipwrecks, buried treasure, and a small freshwater lake right in the middle.
I suppose there is the other side of it, though. People stay here for generations. Kids you go to school with have the same last names as streets around town. Pick up the paper from 1923 and the town drunk has the same name as today’s town drunk. People don’t change, the cycle starts anew and we all continue the pattern.
Wow, that was really depressing. I’m sorry. It is a wonderful place, mostly. Promise.
When I got to Traveler, Molly and Luce were arguing, which is the way they are about half the time. They didn’t even look up when I walked through the door, the bell jingling.
Molly is short, but don’t ever say that to her. She’s brunette, a bit curvy like her mom—but definitely don’t say that to her—and has green eyes that go well with her smatter of freckles.
Luce is taller than Molly and will never let her forget it, with lighter hair than both of us that seems to look blond in one light and tinged with red in another. When she was fifteen, she got a little obsessed about fantasy books and ended up building a life-size catapult, which is kept under a tarp in the woods behind our house. I’m not kidding—an actual catapult.
“No, no, no, you don’t start at the Pie Barons and then go to the Brewery and then go to Hoodoo Voodoo. You have to go in the reverse way and then finish at the Pie Barons so you have lunch, and that’s the end of the tour,” Luce said.
“What are you, crazy? You think people are really going on to the House of Toffee before they’ve seen the miniature golf course? That’s not gonna work. We’re trying to make sure they finish at our shop with spending money. How about they go this way?”
Molly drew a pen around the map, crossing over many of Harlot Bay’s famous landmarks and other associated tourist traps. Luce immediately snorted, took the pen from her and drew an alternate route. I wandered over to the table and they both finally looked up.
“Hey, Harlow, you can settle this. You think you should go to Mr. McGregor’s Herbology before or after you’ve been to Turkey Hu
t?”
Oh boy, I did not want to get into the middle of this. I hedged my bets.
“Well, I guess that could be a good idea, but I’m sure there’s many other great ways to travel around Harlot Bay.”
“Chicken,” Molly muttered, shooting me a dark look.
“She’s not chicken, she just knows an excellent travel plan when she sees it and doesn’t want to crush you into the ground right now.”
I left the table and flopped down on the sofa that sat against the wall. I was staring out the window, absently listening to Luce and Molly bicker behind me, when I saw a man appear across the street. He was tall, with broad shoulders and wild black hair. Probably a tourist, here today, gone tomorrow. That didn’t mean I couldn’t enjoy watching him walk around. Pacing is the word I’m looking for. He was pacing up and down, and I was very much enjoying his fine form. He was dressed in dark blue jeans and wore a black t-shirt. Scruffy and handsome. Hot, maybe.
Another man joined him who did not look scruffy and handsome. He was thin and weaselly looking, with pinched features and thinning red hair. He said something to Scruffy and then passed him something, all the while looking around.
Were they serious? Could you make a drug deal look any more obvious?
Weasel Man scurried away. Scruff put whatever it was in his pocket before he looked left and right and then crossed the empty road. Harlot Bay wasn’t busy at the best of times; that late in the afternoon you could virtually set up a tent in the main street to sleep in if you wanted. It wasn’t until he’d crossed the road and was coming toward the store that I realized I’d been pretty much staring at him the whole way and he had been staring directly at me! I sat up in alarm as he pushed the door to the shop open, the bell jingling. I glanced toward my cousins. Somehow they were still so deep in figuring out the order of their new tour that they ignored the man standing in the doorway.
Whatever part of me had enjoyed watching him run across the street had been absolutely, totally, one hundred percent correct. He was tall and broad, with strong hands and eyes that bordered on blue and green at the same time. He had a light dusting of stubble and a nose that would have looked too dominating on someone else’s face, but for him it just seemed to fit perfectly. For the briefest moment, I wondered what it would be like to run my hands through his hair.
What was wrong with me? I had a rule: no drinking before noon. Wait, that’s not it. No tourists. It only leads to trouble. But he was handsome . . .
“Are you the owners?” he asked.
Molly and Luce whirled around as one at the sound of his deep voice.
“I am,” Molly said, jumping forward. Luce joined her approximately point one seconds later, hustling around from behind the counter. I noticed her adjusting her top. Typical.
“Me too—I am owner. I mean I’m the owner. One of the owners.” She turned red in embarrassment at losing her words. It was unfortunately a family trait around gorgeous men.
“How can we help you?” Molly asked. She pointed at one of the T-shirts. “Did you want to go all the way in Harlot Bay?”
The stranger smiled, his eyes twinkling as a glanced at Luce’s red face and Molly standing there with her hand on her hip. He looked across at me and I felt myself involuntarily flush.
“I do want to go all the way in Harlot Bay, but right now I was wondering if you could direct me to the owner of the Harlot Bay Reader.”
Luce pointed at me.
“Her over there. She one. She is the one, she’s the one who does it!” She had a finger pointing at me like she was picking a witch out of the crowd, making an accusation rather than being helpful.
I somehow remembered that I had legs—what was wrong with me?—and pulled myself up from the sofa.
“I can help you with that. I’m the owner of the Harlot Bay Reader. Harlow Torrent.”
“Jack Bishop.”
He held out his hand and I shook it. His palm was rough, like he spent a lot of time working with his hands. I let go when I realized I’d been holding on just a moment too long.
“How can I help you, Jack?”
My voice cracked at the end all by itself.
“I wanted to ask you about what your angle was on the Butter Festival. How are you covering it and all that? Have you dug into the history of all the competitors?”
The truth was that I had hardly done any work at all on it, even though I’d known about it for at least a month. So far I knew famous punk sculptor Zero Bend was coming and they were carving butter, but that was about it. Many years of training in lying to Mom kicked in smoothly.
“I’ll be doing backgrounds on all the competitors and then following all the events during the week. Why do you ask?”
“I wanted to know if you’d done any background research on the competitors specifically. Preston Jacobs lived in Harlot Bay about thirty years ago.”
“Preston . . . ?”
“He’s one of the sponsors of the tour. Made his millions selling plastic buckets and shovels for sandcastle building.”
“Why is he important to you?”
“Oh, I’m just interested.”
Just interested? He was walking around town looking for the owner of the local newspaper just because he was interested in how they were going to be covering the Butter Festival? Then he happened to be involved in what appeared to be a drug deal? He was lying about something.
“Are you a reporter?” Luce asked.
“That is an excellent question,” Jack said, not bothering to answer it. He turned back to me.
Those eyes, my gosh.
He lowered his voice and it felt like he was looking directly into my soul.
“I think you and I should get together . . . ,” he said.
My cousins breathed in so sharply my ears almost popped.
“. . . if you dig up anything interesting about Preston Jacobs. Here’s my card.”
He handed me a white card that had Jack Bishop printed on the front and then a phone number on the back.
In my peripheral vision I saw Luce grab Molly’s arm. If Jack didn’t leave soon, one of them was going to make that squeee noise.
“Who was that man you met across the street?” I blurted out.
“Were you watching me?”
“I was looking out the window. It’s not my fault you happened to walk into where I was looking.”
I crossed my arms, noticed it was pushing cleavage up, and then dropped them to my sides.
“He’s a source.”
“So you are a reporter?”
“I’d love to stay, but I have work to do. I’m at the Hardy Arms Hotel.”
He turned and smiled at Molly and Luce, who were on the verge of collapsing in an oh-my-heart’s-a-flutter.
“Ladies,” he said.
Before he walked out, he winked at me.
A wink. At me.
The moment he was gone, Luce and Molly let out sighs.
“Oh my gosh, how hot was he?” Molly said.
“Very hot,” Luce agreed, fanning herself.
“I’m pretty sure he did a drug deal just across the street,” I said. “And he’s a tourist.”
“Even better. A few nights of passion and then he’s gone in the wind,” Luce said.
Molly turned to her.
“Oh really, that’s what you want? A quick fling with an anonymous tourist?”
“Maybe. I could be interested in that. Why not?”
“Oh yeah, what about William? Have you forgotten all about him?”
There is a somewhat severe lack of good men in Harlot Bay, so a love interest was hot news.
“Who is William?”
“He’s nobody. Nothing. Is it time for us to go to dinner yet?”
There was no way I was gonna let this go. I only directly knew two Williams in town—one was the butcher, and he was sixty-five and happily married, and the other one was a statue in the center of town. William somebody, one of the old governors who had actually been somewhat
successful in fighting off the pirates who plagued this part of the US. I’m sure he was a good man in his time, but he’d been dead for about two hundred years, and I know Luce doesn’t like zombies.
Molly turned to me with a triumphant grin.
“William is a landscape gardener. He is very good with his hands, and in this type of weather he very often takes his shirt off. He is currently working down at the gardens on the restoration project. Luce has been down there three times this week.”
“I’ve just been walking in the park for the sunshine,” she protested, turning red again.
“Vitamin D is very important,” I said, deadpan.
“I think it is time to close shop. I don’t think anyone else is coming today!”
“You want to marry him and have little landscaper babies,” Molly teased.
“Oh yeah? You want to explain why you’ve been spending so much time in the library? A certain new librarian? Perhaps one who looks amazing in a vest? And probably even better out of it?”
Best day ever. Ooh, this was getting juicy. I turned to Molly.
“So who have you been going to see at the library?”
“No one. I’ve been doing research on . . . pirates. I’ve been thinking of doing a pirate tour.”
“More like thinking of doing a librarian,” Luce muttered.
“Is he hunky? Is he one of those guys who looks all nerdy in his vest and his glasses and then suddenly takes his glasses and his vest off and he’s fighting bad guys and discovering ancient cursed treasure?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Molly said. She looked around the store. “I think it’s time we closed up. I don’t think anyone else is coming. I’m locking up now!”
With that she rushed out to the back room, leaving us laughing.
I collapsed back onto the sofa. What a day full of surprises. Molly likes a librarian and Luce likes a landscaper and I like a . . . liar.
What?
I shook my head, trying to dislodge the thought, but Jack Bishop seemed to be stuck in my mind like glue.
No matter. A few days, maybe a week, and he’d be gone and I wouldn’t have to worry about him.