by Tess Lake
I put his card in my pocket anyway.
Luce and I walked back to my office to pick up my car and then drove home, catching up to Molly. The topic of possible new love interests was firmly off the table—at least for the moment, and as long as nobody annoyed anyone else too much. We loved our mothers and aunts, but we had a pact to continue lying to them as much as possible when it came to matters of our love lives. Unless, of course, someone threw you under the bus, in which case you tried to haul them under with you. The last time Molly had mentioned a boy she was interested in, the mothers had gone down to his place of work with a cake that they had also conveniently dosed with a mild love potion! It was too bad it was only a passing attraction—he was a picky eater and refused to have dessert on their one and only date, and who wants to be with a man who doesn’t eat dessert? He kept sending her terrible love poetry for the next few weeks until the potion wore off.
He sent her:
I’m blue
because I’m not with you
and I don’t know what to do
Our Aunt Cass read it and suggested he go ride a kangaroo until he came to his senses.
We drove up the hill, the sun rushing down to the horizon behind us. The fading light lit up Torrent Mansion, hiding its flaws from view.
The mansion is gigantic, with a stupid number of rooms, three stories up and at least two stories underground. It was built a long time ago, and every generation of Torrent witches had added their own touch. Molly, Luce and I lived in what you’d technically call the East Wing.
You think mansion and you think wealth, right? Old money, servants to clean all the windows, perhaps even a butler.
The Torrent Mansion is falling to pieces. The floorboards are old, there is water damage, and we can’t actually walk from our end of the house to the middle because the floors aren’t safe. The mansion started falling apart decades ago, so my great-grandmother’s family built a new guest house on the property that simply became the house after a while. With a severe lack of funds to rebuild the mansion, they just moved out. We were all living in the guest house up to a year ago, and . . .
I took a deep breath as we pulled up to our front door, feeling a sudden prickle of tears.
It wasn’t my fault. A sleepwalker isn’t responsible for what they do, and neither is a Slip witch. It was a little hard to convince myself even now. A fire had sent me back home, and there had been another only a few days after I’d returned.
After the fire, our mothers had gone deep into debt to renovate the middle of the mansion, where they lived along with Aunt Cass, and the East Wing, where Luce, Molly and I lived.
We stopped out front and let ourselves in. The main entrance leads to stairs, which are unsafe, the dining room, which is renovated and okay, and the kitchen, which is the heart of the house.
Bickering voices rose up from that direction.
“Oh boy,” Luce said.
“Get in, get out, it will all be okay,” Molly said.
We could all hear Aunt Cass’s raised voice. The chances of it all being okay were not good.
We went in through the dining room and into the kitchen.
“What’s happening, family?” I asked.
“Nothing,” Aunt Cass snapped.
I glanced at mom and my two aunts. They were all busy cooking or pretending to fuss around. Molly and Luce took up spots near their respective mothers.
The family:
Aunt Cass is short and wrinkled, somewhere over eighty, and takes special pleasure in tormenting her family. Imagine a lemon that someone left out in the sun so it dried up like a sultana, and then give that lemon magical powers and an attitude you couldn’t knock over with a bulldozer.
My mom, Aunt Freya and Aunt Ro are nonidentical triplets in their fifties. My mom is blonde with blue eyes and seriously looks like she should be on a Scandinavian cereal box or something. She even has red cheeks! She is also the tallest of the sisters—another gene that missed me. Freya has dark hair and dark eyes much like me, is in the middle for height, and is somewhat curvier than both her sisters, though not by much—they run a bakery and delight in sampling their own product. Ro is the shortest sister and also the youngest by about three minutes. She has pitch-black hair and a slightly olive complexion, a gene that missed Molly by a country mile.
The main words that should spring to mind are bustling and busybodies.
We love them, but sometimes . . . ugh, it’s too much. Still, we never miss the opportunity for a little stirring.
“Why the raised voices?”
“I caught her giving a haunted ghost tour through the mansion this afternoon,” Mom said.
Aunt Cass snorted.
“Caught me? You can’t catch me doing something in my own house! What’s next? You’re going to catch me making a piece of toast?”
“One of the tourists fell through the floor. Luckily there was a very old bed in the room below.”
“He’s fine. It was exciting for them.”
“He nearly broke his leg. If that bed hadn’t been there—”
“Money is money, and I need to make a living now that the Feds have shut me down,” Aunt Cass said, crossing her arms.
Mom shook her head behind Aunt Cass’s back and continued chopping tomatoes.
I knew this wasn’t a good idea, but I couldn’t help myself.
“The Feds?”
“The man, Uncle Sam, the government that has nothing better to do than to stomp on the small businesswomen.”
“How did they stomp on you?”
“They shut down my online healing shop!”
“They were placebos,” Mom blurted out.
“If they work, they’re not placebos.”
With that, Aunt Cass stormed out of the kitchen. Mom waited until her footsteps had faded.
“She was selling sugar pills to treat certain . . . male conditions,” she whispered.
Ah, right. Suddenly a lot of things fell into place. About a month back, Cass had started insisting on being taken to town with us when we went to work. Normally she stayed at home. We’d drop her off at the post office and then pick her up at the library. No doubt she’d been using their computers to run her burgeoning drug empire.
“She even had a website,” Ro whispered.
“What was it?”
“I can’t tell you,” she replied quickly.
“Why not?”
“Forget it, it’s closed down now,” Mom said.
“I want to know what it was called!”
“It had some very suggestive words in it. That’s the end of it. We’re not discussing it.”
She pointed her finger at me. “Don’t you bring it up with her. Oh, and tell your cat to stay out of our pizza oven. He was in there again today.”
I raised my hands in protest.
“I’m not his boss. I can ask him to stay out, but he does his own thing.”
“The day a customer gets cat hair on his pizza, then maybe you’ll take it seriously. He’s downstairs, go tell him now while we get dinner ready. That pizza oven is helping keep our family afloat. Do you want to bankrupt us?”
Ouch, that turned quickly.
“You two scoot out of here and stop stealing food,” she added, pointing her knife at my cousins, who were, in fact, stealing food at that very moment.
“We’re not stealing food!” Molly protested through a mouthful of croutons.
I trotted off downstairs to say hi to Grandma before the battle hit me.
Grandma is April Torrent, Aunt Cass’s twin sister and my mom and aunts’ mother. Adams was curled up at her feet. He stood up and yawned, showing me a mouthful of sharp white teeth.
“Is it dinner yet?” he asked.
I picked him up and he snuggled into me. He smelled like pizza.
“Good to see you too, Adams. I had a wonderful day, thanks for asking,” I said.
“Mmf,” Adams said, starting to purr.
“Why do you smell like pizza?”
I asked, although I already knew the answer.
“I don’t know.”
A month ago, my mom and aunts had a pizza oven installed at Big Pie. It was a somewhat costly improvement that allowed them to add pizzas to their menu. It was also Adams’s new favorite place to sleep.
Not behind it, on top of it, or near it, an adorable little black cat basking in the warmth.
Nope, Adams preferred inside it, up the back. The thing ran at a few hundred degrees, and he’d be in there snoring away.
“Please try to stay out of the pizza oven when they’re making food for customers.”
“Mmf,” Adams said, rubbing his head against me.
I carried him over to Grandma.
My grandma April is Cass’s identical twin, except she is frozen in time. She looks to be in her sixties, whereas Cass is now in her eighties. It won’t be long before our moms will look the same age as her.
She has been frozen since I was seven—twenty years ago now. My memories from back then are all a bit of a blur, but I remember she was kind and loving, certainly nothing like her sister. She always had a cookie somewhere and would sweep us up in these big hugs.
She’s still alive but . . . frozen. A living statue. She has her hands out in front of her like she’s holding an invisible basketball and has a look of intense concentration on her face with just the hint of a smile like she’s happy with whatever she’s doing. Only Aunt Cass knows what happened to her, and the only thing she ever says about it is that Grandma bit off more than she could chew.
Not surprising for a Torrent witch. Biting off more than we can chew is practically our family motto.
Actually, she does say something else. We can’t undo what has been done, so don’t bother trying.
“Hey, Grandma, how are you today?” I asked. “Oh, that’s good. Me? Just a normal day. Still working with John and reporting. The Butter Festival is on this week . . .”
I told her about what I’d been doing, receiving only comforting silence in reply. Our whole family does it—comes down here to chat and spill our hearts out to her. Sometimes even Aunt Cass comes down and locks the door to spend some private time with her frozen sister.
It wasn’t long before Adams got tired of my holding him—typical finicky cat—and fidgeted for me to let him go. Soon after that, Mom called down the stairs that dinner was ready.
I took a deep breath and looked at Grandma.
“Well, let’s get this fiasco started,” I said.
Chapter 4
Dinner at the Torrent Mansion is not so much a meal with good conversation as food served alongside a free-for-all verbal sparring tournament as seven witches poke, prod, snark, mock and generally dig their noses into everyone else’s business.
I could practically hear the announcer as I walked up the stairs.
“In the red corner with oh so many wins, most obtained by sneaky, underhanded moves and very few losses, is Aunt Caaaaaassss! Her special move is: Strike Fear! In three separate corners we have Ro, Freya and Dalila, who will be tag-teaming tonight using moves such as Don’t Argue With Your Mother, I Told You So, and the always popular Divide and Conquer! Entering the ring now, with no corner to stand in, are Molly, Luce and Harlow. Special moves include Working as a Team Until You Annoy Me, The Lie Sandwich (lie, tiny bit of truth, lie) and Oh I’m Sleepy Need to Go to Bed. How will the battle go tonight, folks? It’s sure to be bloody!”
I was the last to arrive in the dining room, which is usually not the position you want to be. In the middle of the room is a beautiful large, polished oak dining table that is about as old as the house. It’s big, heavy and wide, which is actually quite handy when someone attempts to lunge across it. It’s too far to make it across easily—not that it ever stopped anyone from trying.
We usually cluster down on one end. Aunt Cass sits at the head of the table, the moms on one side and Luce, Molly and I the other. Whoever turns up last has to sit near Aunt Cass and is assigned the role of partially being her handler and partially being her first target. When I walked in, Luce was in that position, rubbing an angry red mark on her arm with a pained expression. Molly quickly patted the chair that sat between them. Evidently, they’d saved the middle seat for me—being that it was my unofficial one-year celebration—but then had to fight it out as to who sat next to Aunt Cass. Clearly, Molly and her superior pinching prowess had won.
“Oh, you’re here. I thought I was going to starve to death,” Aunt Cass said.
Unofficial celebration or not, she wasn’t going to let anything change the way she treated us.
I ignored her and took my seat. Spread out before me was a selection of my favorite foods. There was a gigantic pan of lasagna with a crisp, cheesy top, and next to it was a bowl of leafy green salad. On the side there were cheesy, bacon-smothered potatoes, garlic croutons, and a mixed assortment of roasted root vegetables. Delicious cheesy carbs served with a side of carbs and accompanied by more carbs. I silently sent my apologies to my thighs. I saw that Molly had already poured us glasses of red wine, and the moms had stocked up too. Cass had a bottle to herself.
We served ourselves, quickly filling our plates. This was the calmest part of the meal, before the real show began. I’d just put a piece of delicious lasagna in my mouth when Ro fired off the first salvo.
“So, how is Traveler going this week?”
“It’s fine,” Molly said quickly. She picked up a glass of red wine and took a gulp.
“Making plenty of sales?”
“About in line with this time of year,” Molly said. She took another gulp of wine.
“I saw a very good coffee machine online—high-quality and makes incredible espressos and cappuccinos. They even send you a book written by an Australian barista, and you know they’re the best. I was thinking it might be good for Traveler. Sell someone a coffee while they’re buying fridge magnets and T-shirts. Maybe get a cold drink fridge as well?”
“We are fine with the business how it is,” Molly said. She viciously stabbed her lasagna.
Traveler and its success or lack thereof was somewhat of a touchy subject with Molly and Luce. Just like me, they were operating their business rent-free thanks to the mayor’s initiative. If they had to pay rent, their business wouldn’t survive. Not that Big Pie Bakery was a roaring success, but the moms made just enough money to keep us all afloat, so that translated into them being business geniuses who could liberally give out advice on anything. The thing was . . . a coffee machine wasn’t such a bad idea. Tourists who came to Traveler had often just arrived in town or were about to leave. In either case, a hot cup of coffee or a cold drink would probably sell well.
So why was Molly resisting it? General principle. If Ro was right about this, then perhaps she was right about lots of other things too. You never wanted to give a meddling mother any more ammunition than she already had.
“I don’t want to serve coffee or cakes or cookies. It’s not a cafe. It’s a tourist shop. I’m happy with the way it is.”
“I agree with her. A small businesswoman should be allowed to run her business in whatever way she sees fit,” Aunt Cass said, very pointedly looking at the moms. She was clearly still annoyed that her growing drug empire had been shut down.
I took a gulp of red wine and it must have gone instantly to my head.
“Do you have any ideas of something else they should sell in that shop?”
“What you mean?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Perhaps there are other products that would be good to sell to tourists, perhaps who are coming to Harlot Bay to have a good time . . .”
Cass pointed a finger at me. “Don’t think I don’t know what you’re doing, young lady.”
The instant flood of alcohol vanished, leaving just the sound of me digging my own grave. It wasn’t a good idea to pick on Aunt Cass. She didn’t worry too much about the general opposition witches had to cursing other witches. In fact, she considered cursing just another way to make sure people respecte
d her and also to get her own way.
“Yes, what do you mean?” Mom said, giving me a glare.
Oh no. Had I suffered a head injury of some type? What kind of fool threw themselves into the deep end in the first five minutes of dinner? I panicked.
“There’s a new librarian in town. He is very cute.”
Molly and Luce turned to me, both their faces pale. Was I insane to bring up possible romantic partners? Maybe, but I didn’t want to get blamed for starting a conversation about placebos and the male conditions they were supposed to solve. The moms leapt on the news of a new handsome librarian like lionesses taking down an antelope.
“Is he single?” Ro asked.
“Have you talked to him?” Freya said.
“I haven’t met him; Molly mentioned him today.”
“I did not! Luce was the one who started talking about him, and that’s only because I was teasing her about the landscape gardener she is in love with, which only happened because we were teasing you about the tall, scruffy and dangerous man who came into the shop today.”
Molly put a hand over her mouth as if in a desperate attempt to literally hold her lips shut and stop spilling all our secrets.
“A landscape gardener? What landscape gardener? Where does he work?” Ro asked.
“Who was this boy who came into the shop today? What do you mean he’s scruffy and dangerous?” Mom said.
“There are no boys, there is no one; we’re not having this conversation, our love lives are out of bounds.” Luce waved her hands as though to push the conversation away from us, but the jackals on the other side of the table weren’t so easily dissuaded.
“I’m never going to get grandchildren,” Mom said.
“Probably die alone,” Ro added.
“These are your best years. You need to find a man before your looks go, which isn’t that far away,” Freya said, looking us up and down.
“Pish posh! There’s plenty of time for them to get pregnant and have babies. What we need first in this family is economic security, and the only way we’re going to get that is if we allow the entrepreneur, the small businesswoman, to make a go at it.”
Aunt Cass thumped a fist on the table. We all knew a lifeline when we saw it, even if it was one that would possibly lead to conversations we really didn’t want to have with our mothers and very elderly aunt.