Torrent Witches Box Set #1 Books 1-3 (Butter Witch, Treasure Witch, Hidden Witch)

by Tess Lake

  “Define a sneaky aura.”

  “I don’t know . . . one that looks suspicious. One that looks like it’s hiding something.”

  I sighed and turned the camera off.

  “Too bad she’s already three steps ahead of us. When I was talking with her this morning she told me not to take a photo of her.”

  “How does she know?” Molly mused.

  “Ooh, you should take a photo of Jack-scruffy-and-handsome.”

  I opened my mouth to protest but then closed it again. It wasn’t a bad idea.

  “Why are you damp?” Molly asked, reaching out to touch my top.

  “I was at the Butter Festival’s first-round carve when I started to seriously overheat. Had to run outside and splash myself in the fountain to cool down.”

  “Ew, the fountain? Birds poop in there.”

  “That’s just a myth your mother made up to stop us from drinking from it as kids.”

  “Why did you overheat?”

  “Hattie Stern said it was an immune response. I thought I was Slipping.”

  I updated them on what Aunt Cass had told me about soul suckers. Then I told them about Hattie Stern and her “immune response” claim.

  “So, what, Lemon Face is helping you now? That’s weird,” Molly said.

  “I’d be more worried about the fever. You shook hands with the rich sandcastle guy and this sleazy agent, and no one else?”

  “Just them, I’m sure.”

  “Could one of them be the murderer? Maybe a soul sucker?”

  Luce glanced out the front window as though there’d be a hideous monster standing there watching us. I looked too. The street was empty. Not even an old lady and her dog this time.

  If I had to pick one of the men to be a soul sucker, it would be that sleazeball, Fusion Swan. He made my skin crawl just being near him. Very easy to dislike. On the other hand, Preston Jacobs was crazy fit and healthy for someone his age. Was being incredibly fit a sign of some dark entity? If it was, then there were some people down at the Harlot Bay Fitness Center who needed investigating.

  “Maybe I should go back to the town hall and touch just one of them. See if it happens again.”

  “And if one of them is infested with some kind of spiritual leech?” Molly asked.

  “Tell Sheriff Hardy, I guess. Maybe he could investigate, see if they were connected to the murder.”

  Even as I said it I could tell it was a long shot. I already had an answer for him as to missing blood, but I couldn’t tell him it was probably some kind of magical entity. What would he even do with that information?

  “Could be dangerous,” Molly said, heading off to the back room.

  I started flipping through the photography book while Luce neatened up the shop. Tourists like to touch everything but not buy much.

  Aura photos: riding that thin line between pseudoscience and magic. Being that I was a Slip witch, this new power was likely to vanish at any random moment. If I wanted to use it, the clock was ticking.

  I closed the book with an idea about following and photographing Preston and Fusion hovering on the edge of my mind, and I stared at nothing for a moment. That nothing became the Harlot Bay Library barcode on the back of the book.

  “I see you’ve been to the library,” I called out to Molly.

  She appeared in the entrance to the back room, her hands full of fridge magnets.

  “Thanks for helping us, Molly and Luce. Thanks for figuring out my weird Slip power thing. Oh, that’s okay Harlow, any time,” she said.

  “What is his name?”

  “Whose name?”

  “You know who.”

  “It’s Oliver,” Luce said from the sofa. “But she calls him Ollie.”

  “Nicknames? How cute. A spring wedding, then?”

  Molly stuck her tongue out at me and returned to the back room.

  I looked over at Luce, who was tapping away on her phone.

  “Going to the gardens today?” I asked.

  “Maybe. It’s warm, so the outlook calls for shirts off.”

  “What are you going to do about the mothers calling up the landscaper?”

  “We’re going to ignore them.”

  “Since when has that worked?”

  Luce shrugged.

  Molly came in from the back room and dropped more magnets on the counter.

  “It’s a new strategy. I’ve been reading Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, and then I read Carl von Clausewitz. ‘Never engage the same enemy for too long or he will adapt to your tactics.’ Our mothers keep snooping, we keep fighting them, and they learn our tactics. This time we’re ignoring. They can prod and poke, but they won’t get far because we won’t give them anything.”

  I took a moment to digest this new bit of information.

  “Why are you reading war strategy books?”

  “She wants to appear smart to Ollie von Tight Pants,” Luce said with a devious smirk.

  “Let your plans be dark and impenetrable as night, and when you move, fall like a thunderbolt,” Molly intoned.

  “He is so into her. And there are a lot of girls at the library these days asking him for help.”

  “The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting,” Molly said and bowed to us both.

  “So where does that leave us on following Ro tonight?”

  “Oh no, that’s still on. Intelligence gathering is essential,” Molly said. She started sorting the magnets.

  I pointed at Molly. “The man who carries a toaster will often ask you for bread.”

  “So useful,” she said.

  “A cat cannot be trusted to look after your fish.”

  “True.”

  I grabbed my bag and headed for the door.

  “A beer in the hand is worth two in the fridge.”

  “Thank you, Harlow, nice to see you, goodbye now.”

  Molly came around the counter and shooed me outside. The door closed in my face.

  “Do not drink and wax lest you lose more than you bargained for!” I called out, grinning.

  Chapter 13

  I walked back to my office to swap the camera battery out. I didn’t want it dying in the middle of photographing possibly bad people. When I got there, John was sitting on the sofa, not watching an infomercial for some kind of amazing stone-based cookware. He was normally entranced by the technological marvels of the home shopping network. As I watched, they threw plastic into a blazing hot frying pan and melted it down. A moment later they scraped it off with no problem. I swapped my camera battery and then looked at John. He was staring into nothing with a glazed look on his face.

  “Hey, John, how are you?”

  He looked at me as though he’d just woken up. “Good morning, Harlow. Why can’t I die?”

  Oh boy.

  “What happened?”

  “I threw myself in the grinder at Mahalo Seeds. It didn’t do anything. So then I thought, why not get out of town? I hitched a ride in the back of some tourist’s car, and just when we went outside the city limits, I suddenly found myself on the ground. I can’t leave.”

  I nodded, not quite sure what to say. Some ghosts are free-ranging and can go where they like, but most of them end up fixed in one spot. John was one of the lucky ones. He could go anywhere in Harlot Bay. Some ghosts end up trapped in a single room or tied to an object. If that object goes to the bottom of the ocean, so do they.

  “We’ll figure out why you’re stuck here, I promise.”

  John tried to smile at me, but I could tell his heart wasn’t in it.

  “Hey, I have an idea. Could you stand up so I can take a photo of you?”

  “You can take photos of ghosts?”

  “I can take photos of auras. Maybe I can see yours and it can give us some useful information.”

  I didn’t know what useful information, really; I was just trying anything to get him to cheer up. It was bad enough being dead, bad enough being a ghost, bad enough being trapped in one town for en
dless years, and I was the only person he got to talk to? It was rough. I mean, I’m great company if I do so say myself, but people need people, even dead people.

  John stood up and clasped his hands in front of himself.

  I stepped back and knelt down so I could get his full body in the picture.

  “Say cheese,” I said.

  “Hippopotamus!” John said.

  I hit the button, the flash burst out, and I took his photo.

  John came over and stood beside me while I waited for the camera to process the image. As I’ve mentioned, it’s as slow as a wet week sometimes, and right then it was being particularly slow. John got as close as possible, but he was careful not to touch me. Unlike in the movies, ghosts don’t go through living things. All they do is bounce off like they’re tennis balls. You ever want to get rid of a ghost? Just swipe at it.

  John’s photo finally appeared in the viewfinder. John wasn’t in it, but his aura was. It was bright blue, almost iridescent, like the wings of a butterfly. There were deep blue lines running through it like cracks. Up on his chest, near where his heart would be, there was a red mark like a wound. Running from it were strands of deep red. They crept up his neck and encircled his head like a crown. The entire top of his head was glowing in red, the blue completely pushed away.

  “Does that mean I suffered a head injury?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe. There’s something around your heart as well. That might give me a clue for where to start looking.”

  John frowned and lifted his ghostly hands up to his head. He felt over his skull, checking for any wounds. Then he pulled his ghostly shirt aside and looked down at his chest. There was nothing there, no injury.

  He sighed and slumped back down on the sofa, focusing his attention on the Flavorstone 3000 frying pan. The people on the screen were laying it on the train track, proving that it was the strongest frying pan in existence. The train hit it and the frying pan survived. Then they cooked an egg in it.

  “That’s pretty amazing,” John said. He seemed to be feeling better, so I took that as my cue to get out of there.

  I collected my gear, told John I would see him later, and then left. I got in the car and turned the air conditioning up to high. Because it was sitting on a flat surface, the air conditioning actually worked and kicked in. It was quite refreshing. I looked at myself in the rearview mirror for a pep talk.

  “Okay, Harlow, you’re going to go back to the Butter Festival to take a photo of Fusion Swan and Preston Jacobs. Maybe Zero Bend, if he is there. And then hopefully, one of those photos will tell you something.”

  My own dubious face in the mirror told me I didn’t believe myself. What else could I do, though? Someone had killed Holt Everand, and for all I knew they might kill again. They might have seen me at the warehouse, so I had a strong incentive to discover who it was before they decided to solve the problem of the snooping reporter.

  I drove back to the Butter Festival, paid again—they didn’t believe that I had already been there that morning—and went in, only to find that Zero Bend was already gone. He had left an exquisite carving of an angry man holding up the head of a monster. I couldn’t help noticing that the monster looked a little like Fusion Swan. Coincidence? I looked around, but I couldn’t spot Preston Jacobs anywhere. Fusion Swan was also absent. The Butter Festival still had another half hour of carving left, and some of the other competitors were still working furiously. Glancing around, it was clear that Zero Bend was the best sculptor there.

  I was in the midst of doing another lap when I looked out the door and saw Fusion Swan getting behind the wheel of an expensive car. I rushed out, but he was at the end of the street by the time I got there. I jumped into my car, prayed to the gods of mechanics, and started the engine before pulling out into the traffic and following Fusion Swan. Normally there is hardly any traffic in Harlot Bay, but perhaps because of the Butter Festival, there were tourists everywhere, and I managed to drive behind Fusion with two cars in between us. He was headed toward the rich end of town. Like most small towns, the rich had staked out their spot and then congregated there. All the houses over there were on a bit of a rise, fighting with each other for the ultimate sea view.

  We only drove a few minutes before he suddenly turned onto a side street. No one was going that way, so if I followed him, the chance of him catching me was greatly increased. I decided it was worth the risk. If it got really bad, I could just take his photo and then drive away. I crept around the corner and saw that he had parked at the end of the street. I parked as well and got out of the car. I saw Fusion walk across the road and up to the front of a house that definitely didn’t suit this area. Most of the houses around it were fairly well maintained. This one was looking a little run-down. The grass was overgrown and the paint was flaking. It was very much the worst house on the best street. I moved closer, camera in hand, ducking behind trees. If Fusion turned around, I didn’t want him to catch me. He knocked on the door of the run-down house. A moment later, a weaselly red-haired man opened the door.

  The possible drug dealer. It was definitely him. The man was so ugly he looked like a weasel’s face had literally been transplanted onto a human body. Standing there in full view of everyone, Fusion pulled out a roll of money from his pocket, passed it to the man, and received something in return.

  Another blindingly obvious drug deal? Where were the cops when you needed them? I debated filming it, but the entire thing was over too quickly. Fusion said something to the man and then did an about-face, walking quickly back to his car. I saw him stuff a small package into his pocket.

  I waited behind the tree until Fusion got to his car and drove away before running back to mine and following him. It was a short trip. We drove up the hill into the rich area of Harlot Bay. Here, the houses were more correctly called villas or mansions. Think white marble, lots of glass and a mixture of styles, some places Spanish, others Greek, and there was one that looked like a Turkish minaret.

  Fusion pulled into the driveway of the luxurious three-story mansion. I parked and crept up the street, hiding behind another convenient tree just in time to see Zero Bend open the front door. Fusion greeted him. I hit the button on my camera and took the best photo I could. A moment later and they were inside.

  Chapter 14

  I didn’t hang around. One thing these rich old retired people are known for is being stickybeak busybodies. Despite the fact that most of them probably knew me by sight, they would still happily call the police and report an anonymous girl stalking the streets, probably looking to break into houses. I drove back to the office, pondering what I’d just witnessed. Clearly a drug deal. That wasn’t unusual. Most of Zero Bend’s stories involved drugs and alcohol. The fact that his agent was procuring them for him was about on par with what I knew about agents. I’d also discovered where Zero Bend lived. It must be a vacation rental; he was probably paying $5000 a week. All I had to do to get my interview was wait until Zero Bend was alone at his house. Then I could ask him some questions about Fusion Swan and Preston Jacobs.

  I pulled up outside my office and quickly checked the photo on the small viewfinder. Zero Bend was outlined in yellow, glowing like the sun. Fusion Swan’s aura was more of a sick green with streaks of red through it. I closed the viewfinder and went inside to my office so I could upload the photo to my computer and take a closer look. The TV was off and John Smith was nowhere to be seen. While I waited for my very slow computer and very slow camera to do their work, I thought about whether I should tell Sheriff Hardy what I’d seen. I knew the address of the probable drug dealer, and I could also send the police to Zero Bend’s right now and they would find drugs. Would that reveal a murderer?

  I wasn’t really sure it was a good idea for me to visit Zero Bend, even under the guise of getting an interview. Aunt Cass had warned me about anyone who tried to get me alone. My going to visit a possible murderer just seemed like the bait putting itself in the lion’s mouth. There was also
the problem of Jack Bishop. I’d seen him meet with the redheaded weasel man just two days ago. Did that mean that Jack was on drugs? Was he a supplier? Could there be an innocent explanation for why someone would pay a drug dealer out on a public street and receive a package in return?

  I realized I was searching for excuses. I’d been teasing Molly about the librarian and Luce about the landscaper, but the truth was I was a little jealous. As I’d said before, good men are hard to find in Harlot Bay. Most of the ones with any brains had taken those brains elsewhere. Who voluntarily decides to stay behind and live in a dying seaside town? I could see my own reflection in the computer screen. Exhibit number one right there.

  My computer finally finished uploading the image, so I pushed aside my dark thoughts of accidental apartment fires and what they might mean, or people who returned to their small country towns and what that might mean, and focused on deciphering the auras. In a larger view, I could see that Fusion Swan’s aura had touched Zero Bend’s. Tendrils of green had stabbed into the gold. I shivered in my seat although the day was warm. It looked like one of those creepy nature documentaries where you see a spider eat a lizard. It’s nature and wonderful and circle of life and all that, but at the same time it’s creepy and gross and weird.

  Did this mean that Fusion Swan was a soul sucker? Maybe that’s just what auras did when two people got close together. I’d have to take a photo of Molly and Luce standing side by side before I could make a judgment.

  I decided to hit the Internet once more. No throbbing soundtrack this time, just a few cups of coffee and me clicking at high speed as I read all kinds of websites.

  Preston Jacobs had asked me who benefited from Holt’s death. As Fusion had pointed out in the police station, the list of suspects were the competitors on the Butter Festival flyer. Any one of them would benefit from a top competitor being knocked out. Although after seeing Zero Bend’s sculpture, it seemed that they’d clearly killed the wrong man.

  I dug into Fusion Swan and his business, the Swan Agency, and very quickly discovered that he represented many crazy people. He’s actually somewhat known for representing the crazed and drug affected. Some of his clients had even died in the past. I found a famous singer who died by drowning in his own pool after too much alcohol, a child actor on the rebound trail seeking to make good before he hung himself, and a few other artists and musicians who had all died in tragic ways. It was very clear by reading through all the sites that much of the material had come directly from the Swan Agency. There was just something about the way it was written—it so closely resembled the press releases that had been emailed to me by the agency.