by Tess Lake
“What?”
“You were called today to go to the Harlot Bay police station, where you were interviewed regarding the two murder victims who were found in the trench on Truer Island. Is that true or not?”
“Are you serious with this?”
“The people have the right to know. Especially after that whole Zero Bend fiasco. What, precisely, are your connections with the Harlot Bay police force and Sheriff Hardy?”
“Get away from me,” I said and swiped him like he was an annoying fly. He ducked out of the way and took a step back before bringing the recorder up to his mouth.
“Harlow Torrent took a swing at me, obviously trying to stop the truth from getting out.” Carter looked down at his recorder. The blinking red light was now dull. “You broke my recorder. This was expensive.”
“I didn’t touch you or your recorder. I also was not interviewed regarding the human remains that were found out on Truer Island, and I have no idea about any of the other questions you asked. Now go away before I get my recorder out and follow you around asking questions. Who does your eyebrows? Have you considered getting a hedge cutter in?”
I could feel myself growing angrier. I fumbled in my bag and found my recorder at the bottom. I pulled it out and turned it on.
“Actually, that’s a great idea. How is the Harlot Bay Times going? I hear it’s on the brink of bankruptcy.”
Carter fumbled with his recorder and somehow got it working again.
“Why does Sheriff Hardy keep meeting with you?”
“Have you considered donating your eyebrows to needy bald men?”
“Where is the Torrent family getting the money to renovate the mansion?”
“How many sticks do you have up your butt?”
That’s how Jack found Carter and me, holding our recorders out at each other like we were sword fighting.
“Hey, everyone, what’s happening here?” he asked.
“The truth being denied,” Carter said and stormed away. I turned my recorder off and slipped it back in my bag.
“Carter Wilkins is such a pompous, stuck-up, frustrating busybody, and I wish I had something solid to hit him with,” I said in frustration.
“Fair enough. Like a hot dog?”
I looked at him and realized he was holding a tray of four hot dogs in one hand and a tray of four cups of beer in the other. He was wearing the same bone-colored shorts from earlier in the day but had changed his shirt to something with a collar. I took a breath and let it out and made myself focus on the situation. Jack was here. It was kind of a date. Maybe. There were hot dogs and beer, and my mother and meddling aunts were far away on the other side of the soundstage.
“That would be lovely,” I said, smiling at him. For the first time I managed to get out a whole sentence without anything awkward happening. He had a picnic blanket folded up under one arm. When I stepped close to him to take it, I caught that scent again. Aftershave or just him – whatever it was, it was delicious. I flattened out the green plaid picnic blanket on the ground, and he passed me the tray of hot dogs so we could both sit down.
By now the sun had set and the lights were glowing around the park. Here and there were giant papier-mâché fish lit up from within. They looked spectacular and as the night grew darker they would look even better. Jack took the hot dogs and then passed me a cup of beer. He held his up to toast.
“Here’s to… hot dogs and beer in the park by the seaside. What a wonderful life to live.”
We touched our plastic cups together and for a moment my knuckles touched his. I think I drank half my beer in about one gulp. It was cool and refreshing and delicious.
“These hot dogs may not be as delicious as French cuisine, but I still think they’re going to be fairly good,” Jack said, holding one out to me. I took it and was about to say something witty and charming back when a balding man rushed through the crowd and stepped on my leg.
“Ow!” I called out. I leapt up but the man didn’t stop. He rushed through the crowd around the back of the soundstage and disappeared.
“Hey!” Jack called out. He turned to me. “Are you okay?”
I looked at my leg. I had an imprint of a shoe on it now. It was hurting but I would be fine.
“Must’ve been in a hurry to get somewhere,” I said.
Jack sat down on the picnic blanket again. Somehow we’d both managed to leap up with a beer in one hand and a hot dog in the other.
“So… first date is going well. Hot dogs, beer, and someone standing on your leg. Sounds like the perfect night to me.”
“Who said this was a date? I was going to be here already. You happened to show up with beer and hot dogs.”
I took a bite of my hot dog. It had ketchup and mustard and in that moment was possibly one of the most delicious things I’d ever eaten. I was on a date! And apart from someone standing in my leg it was going well! I couldn’t believe it.
Just then the mayor bounded up on the stage and the crowd erupted in cheering.
Since I’d last seen him, the mayor had dyed his hair in streaks of blue, black and orange and his Mohawk had drifted from the center of his head to now sit on an angle. He was dressed in a glittering silver suit that was covered in sequins, like a disco ball. Beams of light shot off in all directions as the spotlights hit him.
“Harlot Bay!” he called out. The crowd cheered like crazy and so did we. I couldn’t help myself. The mayor’s enthusiasm for our town was infectious.
“We have already raised twenty thousand dollars for the Harlot Bay Hospital, and the night is still young! Buy food, buy drinks, buy souvenirs and donate!” The crowd went really crazy then. I even saw Carter Wilkins smiling as he shuffled through the crowd in front of me. He was walking around past the soundstage and around the back, where that careless other man had gone.
“Now it’s time for some music. Our local band, Flying Pizza, who have recently signed a record deal, will be on first and then we’ll get to the parade of lights.”
The crowd cheered again and the mayor waved and made his way off. The crowd sat down. A band of four men and one girl on a violin took the stage. The lead singer was introducing himself when someone screamed from behind the stage. I was on my feet in an instant, despite my leg hurting. I rushed around the back of the stage along with everyone else. I heard Jack shout something and then he took off running.
There wasn’t much light behind the stage, but what there was revealed a terrible sight. The bald man who had stepped on my leg was lying unconscious on the ground with blood all over the back of his head. Not far away was Carter Wilkins. He didn’t have any blood on him but he was unconscious as well.
The woman who had screamed was there, crying and babbling.
“It was a monster,” she said, her hands over her face.
Chapter 8
Aunt Cass was scowling at her favorite TV detective when I went in to talk to her.
“The case not going well?” I said, still chewing on a piece of my breakfast toast.
“I don’t know, I don’t know,” Aunt Cass muttered.
She was always generally a bit grouchy in the mornings, but this was even extreme for her. I’d come to ask her about Holly and the possibility of using a spell to work out what had happened to them and I also needed to talk about Hattie Stern but now I wasn’t so sure I wanted to get into that while she was in a bad mood.
“Something wrong?” I said, taking a seat.
“Give them an inch and they take a mile,” Aunt Cass said. She was still glaring daggers at her favorite TV detective.
“Who has taken a mile?”
“One of the apprentices quit. I say, if you can’t take the heat, you should stay out of the kitchen.”
Oh. Aunt Cass had been unofficially overseeing the builders and their apprentices who were helping restore rooms in Torrent Mansion so they could be rented out. My mother and two aunts had been periodically coming home on a rotating basis to act as a buffer between Aunt Cass
and the builders. Evidently something had gone a little too far.
“So one of the apprentices quit?”
Aunt Cass sighed and turned the television off.
“He wasn’t beveling edges properly. We’re not paying for shoddy work. Anyway, what was it you wanted?”
I wasn’t really sure if I wanted to get into it, not with her glaring at me.
“I dunno. Maybe I was too hard on the boy,” she said after a moment.
This was another amazing shocking change that I didn’t really feel like dealing with right now. Aunt Cass actually admitting that she was wrong about something? Unbelievable! This would have been the perfect time to gloat, except of course she had a habit of cursing people who annoyed her and I definitely didn’t want to end up on that list. I decided the safest topic of all was Holly. Then I’d see whether I went on to Hattie Stern’s offer.
“Sheriff Hardy was hinting that he needed help with those two skeletons they found out on Truer Island. Is there any magic that could show us who did it or how to find them?”
“Nothing we want to get involved with. There are spells that show you the past, but you need the location and you need to know the date, and they can still be very dangerous. I say let the police handle it and see if they can find the answer.”
“Every time the ghost – Holly, I mean – is around, the feeling of sadness is getting stronger. It feels like I’m breathing ice.”
“That’s unusual. Well, not unusual for a Slip. Do you think you’ve Slipped?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t really noticed anything that different from normal.”
I quickly thought back over the last week or so. I really hadn’t experienced anything that unusual (for a witch, I mean). I had seen Holly patting Adams and his fur was moving, but Adams was an entirely different story. That cat operated on his own set of rules.
“Well, they found their bones, so there’s a very good chance she might move on by herself. A lot of ghosts go that way. Although, I get the feeling that might not be the case here.”
So that was a dead end. I guess there was magic I could use but it sounded like it was very dangerous and after experiencing pulling heat out of the cup of coffee and how that had felt, I certainly didn’t want to get involved in anything like that. Aunt Cass seemed to have calmed down a bit, if she could ever really be called calm, so I decided to plunge on.
“I pulled some heat out of a coffee cup yesterday and –”
“Hattie already told me. You should train with her.”
I stuttered to a stop. What? Aunt Cass was fine with this? Her so-called mortal enemy who she crossed the street to avoid walking past, and she was okay with it?
“Do I have to?” I said, sounding far whinier than I intended.
“Well, it’s either me or her, and I’d prefer her,” Aunt Cass said. “You don’t listen.”
“I do so!”
“I told you very explicitly not to do that magic again. I warned you very clearly not to do it and you still did it. I also told you if you felt like you had to do it, then you should come to see me immediately. But you didn’t. You don’t listen.”
“So why shouldn’t you teach me how to control it now? You’re the one who got me involved in the first place.”
Aunt Cass crossed her arms across her chest and put on a look I knew well. She was digging her heels in. But then she surprised me.
“Hattie is better than me in that area. She was always good with that type of magic. So you should go with her.”
I swear I saw a little burst of stars across my vision as something fritzed out in my brain. Aunt Cass had admitted fault in an apprentice quitting and now she was admitting that someone else was better than her at magic? I had no words.
“Stop gawking at me like that. See Hattie later today. But first you need to go to the hospital and see what happened to that man.”
I had no idea how Aunt Cass knew about that. Maybe she’d talked to my mother and aunts last night.
I stood up to leave, still somewhat stunned at the turn of events, when Aunt Cass lunged forward and grabbed me by the arm.
Her eyes were black. It was a prophecy.
“The dead are becoming restless on Truer Island. You must be wary.”
It wasn’t her usual voice. It was deeper and stronger. Her grip felt like steel.
“Okay, I will,” I said.
“Walk, don’t run,” Aunt Cass intoned. Then she let go of my arm and started blinking in confusion.
“What was that? What did I say?” She rubbed her face. “Actually, I don’t want to know. Don’t tell me. Get out of here.”
I left the mansion unsure of what to think or what to do about what had happened. Very few witches had the power of prophecy, and honestly, it wasn’t that great a power. It was virtually useless because by the time the prophesied moment arrived, you were already in it. Sometimes you knew what you’d said and other times you had no idea. Mom had told me that when Aunt Cass was younger, the power had been much stronger but it had faded as she aged.
I was sitting in my car getting ready to drive to work when Mom called. As usual she was in the middle of a conversation already.
“… too many of them. Oh, Harlow, good. Mindy is sick today and I have a replacement but they can only stay until lunch. I need you to come here at eleven thirty to help with the lunch rush into the afternoon. Can you do that?”
I internally groaned. When the moms needed help at Big Pie they usually rotated through me, Molly and Luce. Now that Traveler was starting to go well and Molly and Luce were busy, it seemed they were calling on me more and more. My feeble protests that I had an online newspaper to run weren’t cutting it either. They paid two bucks an hour above minimum wage and I could use the money, so I gave in.
“Okay, fine, I’ll be there at eleven thirty.”
“Don’t be late!” Mom said and hung up before I could protest that I’d never been late in the history of time.
I drove to the hospital, wondering whether I would be able to get in to interview the unknown man who had been attacked. Carter would probably still be at the hospital, but I wasn’t going to ask him a thing. I’m sure he wouldn’t tell me anything anyway, and I was thinking I wouldn’t even bother giving him the satisfaction of turning me down. Now that he had been intimately involved in some kind of attack, he was sure to write about it and put himself at the center of every story.
As I drove through Harlot Bay I thought about last night. It had been a fiasco of the highest degree. Jack and I had barely said anything to each other and then the unknown man had been attacked, along with Carter. Jack had bolted off somewhere. It wasn’t long before the police were there and the ambulance on-site took both men off to hospital. The woman babbling about how it was a monster had promptly thrown up. She was a tourist who’d clearly been drinking heavily, so her “monster” claim was in serious doubt. Holly said she’d been killed by a monster, and now a drunken tourist had said the same, but she’d also smelled like a brewery. Perhaps there was a connection I could investigate.
Eventually, the crowd had settled down and the musicians started playing, but everyone knew that two people had been attacked behind the stage. A lot of the families had left shortly after that, causing bit of gridlock around the park. I went over to hang out at the Big Pie stand, which was still doing a fairly brisk business from the remaining customers.
I was hoping Jack would return but once it was clear he wasn’t, I didn’t really want to wait around so I arranged with Molly to take her car so I could drive myself home. I’d ended my “date” sitting on the sofa drinking a cup of decaf coffee before taking myself to bed.
I hadn’t slept well – the images of two men sprawled on the ground would not leave my mind. Sometimes I saw bones and the engraved watch.
Frankly, I wasn’t sure I was cut out to be a crime reporter. At least not reporting on violent crimes. I was fine writing about theft and burglary and had really enjoyed writing about the
embezzling claims six months ago around real estate developer Dominic Gresso’s business partner (he had left town, no charges brought, and Dominic sailed on without him).
My not developing the hardened shell of a reporter didn’t bode well for the Harlot Bay Reader. Articles about foreshore rejuvenation, local school fetes and the city installing new stop signs were all well and good, but it was the darker things in life that attracted readers and therefore helped me make money.
I arrived at the hospital and was walking up the front steps when Sheriff Hardy emerged.
“Harlow, can we talk a minute?” He motioned me over to the side of the steps. “How are you doing today? That must have been shocking to see that last night.”
“I’m okay. It was… I mean, not good, but I will be fine.”
He was giving me his kindly grandfather face and I realized I really would be fine. It wasn’t just words.
After a moment of silence, he cleared his throat.
“Well, the unidentified man has been identified. His name is Franklin Cordella, age forty-five, resident of the great city of New York. We only know this because he had his license with him. He’s not answering any questions that we or the medical staff ask him. They don’t think it’s the head injury stopping him from talking.”
“Strange. But he’s okay, then? What about Carter?”
“They’re both fine. Mr. Cordella is going to be in the hospital for a day or two. Someone hit him over the back of the head with something heavy. They hit Carter, too, although not as hard. He’ll be out today.”
“How wonderful for Carter. This is probably the best thing that ever happened to him,” I said dryly.
“Possibly. I’m sure we’ll be reading about it,” Sheriff Hardy chuckled. “Anyway, you can’t see Mr. Cordella, if that’s why you’re here. The hospital isn’t allowing any visitors. So you wasted a trip – unless of course you want to talk to Carter.”
“No, I think I’ll give that a pass. What about that tourist who said she saw a monster?”