by Tess Lake
“We’re desperate, Harlow. If they want to mess with our love lives, we have to mess with theirs. If we have some law enforcement there, maybe we can stop this whole fiasco from getting out of control.”
“Or maybe Aunt Ro isn’t going out with Sheriff Hardy, and it’s just all weird and awkward, and then they still act crazy. They try to set us up, but now we have law enforcement watching,” I said.
“I’ll take weird and awkward any day of the week so long as the weird isn’t focused on us,” Luce said.
I crossed my arms.
“No, I’m not doing it.”
“Please, you have to! It’s for the good of the family. Call Sheriff Hardy and tell him to come tonight,” Luce begged.
“Please, Harlow, you have to do it. He’s our only hope. And if it’s not this, we might have to take drastic measures,” Molly said.
“And what might they be?”
“I don’t know. Some sort of spell to make everyone eat faster or something, so it’s over quicker? Does that sort of thing exist?”
“I don’t think so.”
Both of them stared at me with pleading eyes until I finally cracked.
“Okay, fine, I’ll invite him. But that doesn’t mean he’s going to accept.”
I called the police station and got through immediately.
“Sheriff Hardy,” he answered.
“Hi, Sheriff, it’s Harlow Torrent again.”
“Did something happen? Do you have more evidence?”
“Um . . . no. This isn’t about the case.”
I felt myself turning crimson, as though I was asking Sheriff Hardy out on a date.
“I would like to invite you to come by for dinner tonight. Our mothers are making a big dinner and have invited some people, and we’ve known you for lots of years, so we thought you might like to come.”
I sounded so awkward I wanted to die.
“Oh. Um . . . okay. That would be . . . good? Yes. At what time?”
“Six thirty.”
“Should I bring anything? A bottle of wine, perhaps?”
“A bottle of wine would be perfect. You know where we live. See you then.” I ended the call and then slumped back on the sofa, feeling like I was about to burst into flames.
“Good job. Got our first diversionary tactic in place. What else can we do?” Molly said, rubbing her hands together.
My stomach grumbled at that moment to remind me that it was lunchtime. We stopped plotting for two minutes to order toasted ham, cheese and tomato sandwiches from the deli around the corner. Because Harlot Bay is so small, they deliver. About five minutes later, Jeff the delivery boy dropped off the sandwiches, refused our tip, and went on his way.
Over lunch we continued plotting, but it seemed we’d had our one and only good idea—if it was a good idea—in bringing Sheriff Hardy to dinner. Magic was out. Given that we were up against three far more experienced witches, they’d probably be able to outmaneuver us. Generally, in these situations, we try to stir Aunt Cass up a bit and get her to direct her attention toward our mothers. But given that Luce and Molly were deep in debt to her, and also because she suspected them of snitching on her, they didn’t want to.
I couldn’t use what I knew either. After all, Aunt Cass was doing something to help me, even if it did look like she was brewing very illegal drugs under the house.
There was the brief idea that we could contact William and Oliver and warn them off from coming to dinner, but then we realized that wouldn’t work either. Molly and Luce liked both of them, and suddenly turning down a dinner invitation they’d already accepted certainly wouldn’t play well in the future.
All out of ideas, I left my cousins with their giant Italian coffee machine and made my way back to the office.
Great, just what I needed: a family dinner.
Chapter 19
Back at my office, I realized I was late for John’s therapy session. There was a fresh twenty sitting on the desk but no John. I turned on my laptop and reread my article while I waited. I had just decided to publish it when John appeared in the doorway looking very annoyed.
“Hattie Stern is such a busybody!” he declared. He walked across to the sofa and lay down on it, Freud psychology style.
I twisted the egg timer to one hour and turned to him.
“Do you know Hattie Stern?”
“I think so. I was waiting for you and I saw her walk by on the street. I know I don’t like her, so I decided to follow.”
This was a breakthrough of sorts. He knew Hattie Stern on sight—that might mean that she knew him. It also pinned him to a particular period of time. Hattie was in her late sixties, and that suddenly narrowed the time window we were looking at considerably. I just had to lead him and not get in the way.
“What did you see?”
John stood up from the sofa and started pacing the room. It was the most animated I’d ever seen him.
“She went to the council to try to get the name of the town changed again! When is she going to give that up? She’s been trying to do that for . . . for . . . I don’t know! I don’t know exactly, but it has been a very long time. She could never help herself meddling.”
“Why do you think she’s a meddler?”
“I know she’s a meddler the same way I know a fish is slippery or a dog barks. It’s her nature. She’s always been about control.”
“Do you remember anything specific?”
John frowned at me as if suddenly realizing I was there. The expression of frustration and anger on his face faded away.
“I think she . . . ah, it’s gone.”
He sat down on the sofa and shook his head.
“What were we talking about?”
Damn, he’d lost it. But this was still great news. Maybe all I had to do was get him around Hattie Stern and see if anything else came out.
“We were talking about Hattie Stern. She runs a small lemon orchard and makes various lemon-based products.”
“I don’t remember her. Should I?”
“Maybe,” I said.
I spent the rest of the hour talking with John about any event I could remember in the last fifty years. Part of my website is historical, and in doing that research, I’ve learned a bit about Harlot Bay’s past. I really needed to do more on that side, though—there had been fires, murders, kidnappings and all sorts of things that I barely knew anything about.
Sadly, as usual, John came up with nothing. At the end of the session, I directed him back to Hattie Stern again, but again he couldn’t remember her and, in fact, he couldn’t remember me asking about her at the beginning of the session. His ghostly short-term memory was shot.
We reached the end of the session, and he thanked me and then walked through the wall to fall onto the sidewalk below. After he was gone I returned to my article again. I was fairly sure by now that I wasn’t going to be sued. If I published it, perhaps I could talk to Fusion Swan or Preston Jacobs again. Maybe get more information out of them. I checked the clock and then remembered I had intended to visit Zero Bend today, but there wasn’t enough time. I’d have to stake out his house tomorrow and wait for him to come home. Hopefully he’d be alone, and who knew how much of an interview I could get in before Fusion Swan possibly turned up, perhaps with a handful of drugs?
After a tiny moment of trepidation, I published the article and then sat there looking at it, hoping I hadn’t done something incredibly stupid.
I was sort of sitting there staring into nothing and thinking about things when Molly turned up at the office and let herself in.
She slumped down on the sofa.
“John here?” she asked.
“Nope.”
“Luce is staying back to figure out the coffee machine. That thing is mental.”
She turned sideways on the sofa and put a cushion over her face.
“Wake me when it’s next year,” she said.
“Sure,” I replied.
I had to get a few more pu
ff pieces about the Butter Festival out of the way. I found one photograph that didn’t have a person in it surrounded by a glowing aura. Unfortunately, it was of the butter shark. It didn’t look very good, but it was the best image I had. As I wrote all the puff pieces, my mind drifted away to the problem of feuding sculptors, a sleazy agent, groupies, murder, graffiti . . .
It was a story about manufactured conflict that perhaps spilled over into real-life murder and missing blood. Sheriff Hardy only had part of it. The missing part was something very magical and very dangerous.
As I wrote, I realized the Butter Festival murder had really pushed me off my game. There was a lot of other news in Harlot Bay that I was missing. Yes, it was fairly boring, but, hey, small town. The city was looking at renovating the very old and rickety boardwalk and also extending it along Scarness Beach. There was a committee discussion about restoring the old lighthouse. Yet another petition was circulating from Hattie Stern to change the name of Harlot Bay to Calmwater Bay. The owner of the skating rink had applied for a permit to demolish and rebuild.
I wrote and published three articles in record time and made a few notes about all the day-to-day news. Hopefully I’d make time tomorrow to write about them. I returned to the world and saw that the day was coming to an end. It was time to stop working so we could get home to shower and dress in our “nice clothes” for the dinner tonight.
“Hey, you awake?”
“Yes, unfortunately,” Molly said from under the pillow. She sat up on the sofa and looked at me with worried eyes. “If this doesn’t go well tonight, I’m moving out. I swear.”
I nodded at her, even though we both knew it wasn’t true. Sadly, moving requires money, and that was a resource that we were all lacking. Molly’s phone chimed a message. She read it and let me know that Luce was staying back at Traveler to work more on the coffee machine. She’d come home on her own.
“You don’t think she’s bailing, do you?”
“I hope not. Although that’s not a bad idea.”
I really couldn’t argue with that.
Chapter 20
After we showered and changed, we trudged up to the main house in “nice” clothes. I’d chosen a demure black dress. Okay, not that demure. A slight, tiny, practically hardly any, really, touch of cleavage. Molly was wearing a red dress that was far more busty than mine.
We went into the house and parked ourselves in the main lounge, just off the dining room. Our mothers were cooking up a storm in the kitchen by the sound of things.
“I swear if they put love potion in any of the food . . . ,” Molly muttered.
We heard the front door bang open and Luce appeared in the lounge soon after. She was wearing a blue dress, much like Molly’s, and a baseball cap.
“You guys need to help me,” she hissed.
Freya walked in to the lounge and looked the three of us up and down.
“Hmm,” she said. Was that good? Bad? Approval or not?
“Why are you wearing that ridiculous hat?” she asked. Luce ducked but she wasn’t quick enough. Freya pulled it off her head.
Luce was missing half of her left eyebrow.
“What happened to your eyebrow?” Freya asked.
“Nothing. What? It has always been like that.”
“Nothing? You left home this morning with two perfectly good eyebrows, if a little scraggly, and now you are missing half of one, and you tell me nothing happened? You didn’t realize you lost half an eyebrow?”
“It’s fashion,” Luce sniffed. “You wouldn’t understand. It’s a young person thing. And they weren’t scraggly!”
“You’d better not get one of those piercings that stretch your earlobes out. It’s a slippery slope,” Freya said, pointing at Luce.
She just rolled her eyes. Freya has a tiny obsession with watching all those shows with “Extreme” in the title. Extreme Piercings, Extreme Tattoos, Extreme Hair Styles. Luce came home with a tiny stud in her nose once and Freya acted like she’d slipped into some dark world of extreme body modification. A tiny nose stud today, two goat horns tomorrow, full-body reptile-skin tattoos the next.
Freya bustled away to the kitchen, but not before throwing a final disapproving sniff in Luce’s direction.
“Coffee machine?”
“El Diablo Cafe? I’ve nearly worked out how to use it. Hit button sixteen at the wrong moment is all.”
“Isn’t that Spanish?”
Luce pointed at her half eyebrow. “Do you think I care what language it is? If I hadn’t ducked at the right time, I’d be bald now.”
“Okay, sorry.”
“That devil machine is not going to beat me,” she said, touching her remaining good eyebrow.
Aunt Cass stomped into the room, took one look at Luce, smirked, and then sat down in her recliner without a word.
“I need ideas. What can I do? This is a good enough excuse not to come to dinner, right?”
“I guess so, but then you know our mothers,” I said.
“Okay, I have your backing. I’m going to the other end of the house. I’m not coming to dinner.”
Just then we heard the distant sound of a car. It was definitely coming up the road toward our mansion.
“Oh no, they’re coming. What can I do? They’re going to see me,” Luce said, panicking.
“Don’t say I never help you.” Aunt Cass waved her hand and muttered under her breath. We all felt the wash of magic, like a puff of air.
Luce’s remaining one-point-five eyebrows drifted to the ground.
“Now just draw them on with makeup,” Aunt Cass said.
Luce put her hands to her face.
“This is your solution? No eyebrows at all! ARGH!”
Right at that moment, Freya walked into the dining room and saw her daughter.
“What are you doing? Is this some new fashion? Because I don’t like it. You look weird.”
“She magicked off my eyebrows!” Luce said, pointing at Aunt Cass.
“So she can draw them back on. Better than dinner with half an eyebrow. If you don’t like it, then do a growth spell. You can handle that.”
Car lights flashed up on the front of the house. Someone was here!
“Okay, come with us,” Molly said. She grabbed a nearly hyperventilating Luce and signaled me to take her other arm. We rushed out through the kitchen and into the bathroom at the back of the house. There was makeup aplenty scattered around.
Our first attempt was . . . not good.
“I look like an insane clown!” Luce squealed.
We wiped it off and tried again.
“Argh! Why am I frowning so much? That’s it, I’m leaving. I’m not coming to dinner.”
“The window is too small to climb out,” Molly gently reminded her. The back of this area had actually been sealed off from the rest of the mansion behind it. The only way in and out was through the dining room, unless she wanted to risk traversing the under-mansion. With all the flooding in the past and rotting wood, it really wasn’t safe.
“Okay, okay, okay,” Luce whispered to herself. She wiped off the angry eyebrows and faced herself in the mirror.
“One of you has to do a growth spell on me.”
“Not me,” Molly said immediately.
“Let’s try drawing them on again, it’s probably safer.”
“It’s not working. You have to help me,” Luce said.
I sighed and tried to ignore the rising apprehension. Growth spells are tricky. Cast them on a garden bed to make a single plant grow, and the entire area goes crazy. It’s all too easy for a nudge to become a shove.
“Fine, I’ll do it, but I accept no responsibility for the consequences.”
Luce turned to face me and I took a few deep breaths to clear my mind. Well, I tried to. I could hear more than one male voice from the direction of the dining room. What if it was Jack? Could they have tracked him down too?
I couldn’t focus on that now. Growth spell, slight nudge, careful. Precisi
on.
I took another breath and felt the magic moving around me like I was standing in the ocean. Cold currents near my feet, a burst of warmth at my knees. As I connected with it, I felt the magic inside me respond. It moved up my body and then down my arm. I pushed it to my fingertip.
“Grow,” I whispered, drawing my finger across the bald spots where Luce’s eyebrows used to be.
I let go of the magic and felt it wisp away.
“Thanks,” Luce said and touched me on the arm. She turned back to the mirror in time to see tiny hairs sprout. Within ten seconds her eyebrows were back.
We waited another ten seconds to see if they’d go crazy and keep growing, but it looked like I’d nailed it.
We heard a voice we all recognized. It was Sheriff Hardy. A moment later Aunt Freya called out to us.
“Girls? Our guests are here!”
“Everything is going to be fine, everything is going to be fine,” Luce chanted. She touched her newly regrown eyebrows and smiled at us in the mirror.
“Moving out, I swear,” Molly said.
With that bolstering speech, we took ourselves back through the kitchen and into the dining room.
Chapter 21
Three men were gathered at the end of the table, awkwardly making conversation. I knew Sheriff Hardy and also William the landscaper from sight. The other dark-haired man must be Oliver, Molly’s librarian. He certainly didn’t look like any librarian I’d ever seen. He was dressed in jeans and a casual shirt, but he had green eyes that were vivid like a beetle’s wing. Like William, his black hair was somewhat shaggy. He looked more like a rock star dressing down than a librarian dressing up.
The relief on the three men’s faces was evident when they saw us.
“Harlow, so good to see you,” Sheriff Hardy said. Oliver smiled at Molly and William at Luce. I never actually inquired whether William and Luce had officially met each other. We walked over to them and Sheriff Hardy passed me a bottle of wine.
My cousins seemed to have been dumbstruck, so it fell on me to make the introductions.
“Hi, I’m Harlow.”