by Tess Lake
“This sounds really bad,” Luce said.
“Hey, it’s being a journalist, this kind of thing happens,” I said.
“If you’re a journalist making a lot of money, then I might be able to agree with you. But for the kind of cash you’re pulling in, it’s just not worth it.”
It was so true that it didn’t even sting, not even a little.
We were coming up on a family dinner that Molly had gotten out of so Luce went to the bathroom to get ready. I spend the rest of the time looking through the papers Carter had given me. In amongst the property transfer documents, I found a list of fires and whether there were any victims. One caught my eye – about ten years ago, a house had burned down and a woman had been killed. I actually remembered that happening. I think the only reason it wasn’t big news for the town was that the same day, a tourist had fallen down the cliffs and broken both his legs and a hip.
Luce emerged from the bathroom, sitting next to me on the sofa to put her shoes on.
“Did you borrow my blue cardigan?” she asked.
“I don’t think so.”
“Do you know the one I mean? It has a rose stitched on the front.”
“I know it. I haven’t seen it.”
“Maybe I left it at Will’s house… I feel like half my clothes are missing. Can’t seem to find anything,” Luce mumbled to herself.
Once she was ready, we all walked down to the main house. Aunt Cass, who was usually in her chair watching police shows, was nowhere to be seen. In the kitchen the moms were laughing and chatting as they made dinner. We took our places and talked a bit with Luce about the renovations at Traveler while we waited.
“I’m thinking we all go to the beach when we have to shut down,” Luce said.
“That could be good,” I said.
“I love the beach,” Kira added.
I had no doubt that she loved the beach. I’d been letting her off to go there rather than work and I was sure that Luce’s teasing had some truth: Kira probably did have a secret boyfriend.
Aunt Ro came rushing out of the kitchen, her cheeks glowing and wearing a wide smile. She placed a silver platter in the center of the table and beamed at us.
“Dinner is ready,” she trilled.
I tried to hold it in, and I guess Luce and Kira did too, but we all failed. I started giggling and so did they. Obviously Aunt Ro had a secret someone on the side and clearly had met up with them last night. I wondered who was the mysterious man?
“You seem very happy today,” Luce said.
“Yes, you seem incredibly relaxed,” Kira added, deadpan.
I couldn’t take it any longer. I broke out laughing.
“What are you talking about? You girls…” Aunt Ro said. She practically danced her way back to the kitchen. If she’d done a pirouette it wouldn’t have been out of place.
“I can’t wait to tell Molly about this,” Luce said.
It felt good to laugh in spite of all the terrible things that had happened around us recently. Aunt Ro having a possible new boyfriend meant we could sneak around to find him, tease her about it, and if it came to it, throw her to the wolves (also known as the rest of the family) in case the other moms turned on us. It was perfect.
Aunt Cass emerged from the lounge room and grumpily stomped her way to her position at the head of the table. She hadn’t been in there before – did she have a secret door out there?
“Whattup, C-Money?” Kira said and held up a hand.
Aunt Cass glanced at her and then reluctantly gave her the high five she was waiting for. She turned to Luce.
“Where’s the wine?” she said, picking up an empty glass.
Luce rushed off and returned with two bottles a moment later.
“Red or white?”
“Alcohol, lots of it, now,” Aunt Cass said. Luce filled her glass with white wine, which Aunt Cass downed almost instantly. She then shook the glass for Luce to fill again.
“Are you okay?” I asked. Yes, I was the one who was going to be the sacrificial lamb in case Aunt Cass exploded.
“I can’t work out what is starting the fires in town. The beacons aren’t working properly and it’s incredibly frustrating.”
“Can we help you at all?” Luce asked.
“You can help me by keeping that wine flowing,” Aunt Cass said, taking another gulp.
“You told me the most important thing for a Slip Witch is to maintain equilibrium,” Kira said.
“I know I said that. But someone died in one of those fires, and unless we work out how to stop it I think someone is going to die again. I don’t want to talk about it.”
The tone in her voice was enough to make us all stop asking questions immediately.
Aunt Ro and the moms emerged from the kitchen, laughing and chatting, carrying silver platters with them. They put them down on the table and then revealed glistening roast lamb, thyme-roasted potatoes, honey carrots, green beans and a bacon, garlic and spring onion gravy.
We all dug in and for a change no one sniped at each other. I was happy about that, given this was probably one of the few remaining family dinners that we would have without any guests present. Now that the website was working properly, bookings had come rushing in, and in a few days the Torrent Mansion Bed-and-Breakfast would be full.
It seemed that Aunt Ro’s happiness was infectious and we were talking and laughing through dinner. All except Aunt Cass, of course, who’d retreated to single grunts and then not even that. She soon stopped eating food and stuck to drinking wine.
Just as we were getting to the end of dinner, Aunt Freya pointed her finger at me and said, “You need to keep your little black cat out of our kitchen.”
“Oh no, what has he done now?”
“What hasn’t he done? An entire loaf of bread went missing. Also, cheese, fruit, biscuits from the pantry. I swear he should be the size of the house. He’s eating enough for a whole person.”
“You have no idea,” I said. I told them all about “Rodrigo” and his visits, where he slept on a white sofa and was fed blocks of cheese, apparently.
“I would bet he’s visiting a lot more families as well. Probably operating under multiple aliases.”
“Give that little guy a break. He is very adorable, and what does it matter if he visits lots of families? Cats are wonderful and they bring a lot of joy to a lot of people. He shouldn’t eat all the food, but it’s still a good thing that he’s doing,” Aunt Ro said.
Luce and I exchanged a glance and I giggled again before clearing my throat.
“Are you talking about the same little black cat that only a few days ago you said was going to be made into a bathmat if you caught him in the pizza oven again? The same little black cat that you once threatened to turn into an oven mitt?”
“Well, I wasn’t feeling very good then, but I’m feeling much happier now,” Aunt Ro said.
That was it. Luce, Kira and I burst out into laughter and couldn’t stop ourselves. The moms just looked at us, puzzled. We couldn’t tell them what we knew.
“You should tell other people the joke,” Mom said, pointing her butter knife at me.
“I will, I will, one day,” I gasped, my stomach hurting from laughing too much.
After dinner we returned to our end of the mansion and I told Adams he had to cut back on his food theft from the main kitchen. He denied everything, of course.
“Hey, I’m just passing the message along. If you don’t get turned into a bathmat, maybe you should not eat all the biscuits in the cupboard.”
Adams jumped up on Kira’s lap and started kneading at her T-shirt.
“Can you write an email to PETA for me?” he asked, starting to dribble already. Kira laughed and scratched him behind the ears.
Chapter 16
In the morning I was feeling pretty good. It wasn’t official or anything, but I kinda had a boyfriend. Happy dance!
So did Luce and Molly, and so did Aunt Ro, it seemed. Yes, there were still ple
nty of things wrong, like Aunt Cass not being able to track down the source of the fires and also me possibly being a suspect, but right now, after a good dinner last night and an even better night of sleep, I was feeling pretty great.
That feeling barely lasted past breakfast, when Detective Moreland pulled up at the front of the house. I debated hiding in my bedroom, but he’d seen me through the front window, so I reluctantly went to the front door.
Detective Moreland was still wearing his standard-issue police uniform and had that notebook out again.
“Can you tell me where you were last night?” he asked.
Despite my own warnings to myself about never ever talking to the police, I was certain I had a foolproof alibi this time.
“I had dinner with my family and then came back here and went to bed.”
“You didn’t go anywhere last night?”
“No, why?”
“Did you go to an address on Anderson Lane yesterday?”
“Um…” I said, trying to remember. Before I could say anything more and possibly land myself in jail, Jack came driving up the hill and parked his truck next to Detective Moreland’s car.
He got out of the car and called out, “Don’t answer any more questions!” before walking over.
“Jack Bishop. Have you decided to answer some questions for me?” Detective Moreland said.
“No comment.”
“What’s this about?” I asked. We were interrupted again by Molly racing up the driveway and pulling to a stop next to Jack’s truck. She was going somewhat faster than he had been. Pieces of gravel scattered across the road and a cloud of dust rose up.
“What’s going on here?” Molly said when she reached the front door.
“Last night a house on Anderson Lane was mostly destroyed by a fire. It started in the kitchen and then engulfed the library and most of the bedrooms. You know the house I’m talking about, don’t you, Jack?” Detective Moreland said.
It felt like the world had stopped spinning. Another fire? Another fire at a place I’d just been? And now Jack was involved as well? I felt like being sick.
“In case it’s not in your records, I only recently got back to town and Harlot Bay’s been having fires for a number of weeks now. Perhaps you should look into that and who might benefit from such fires,” Jack said. “I think we should all go inside now and let Detective Moreland leave to do some work.”
“Good idea,” Molly said with a lot of bravado in her voice. Jack came inside and Molly followed, closing the door gently in Detective Moreland’s face. He got back in his car and drove away.
As soon as he was gone. Molly turned to me.
“What was he talking about? Were you at a place that burnt down again?”
“I think so. Yesterday Jack took me to see that library I told you about. Last night most of the house burned down.”
Jack quickly confirmed that this was the case. Sometime after midnight a fire had started in the kitchen and then spread. The fire brigade had come as fast as possible, but due to the high number of flammable objects in the house, they’d been barely able to contain it.
At the end of Jack’s explanation, Luce surprisingly clapped her hands and directed us all to the kitchen table.
“Family conference,” she said. “Everyone sit down.”
We all sat down, me and Molly feeling a bit mystified. It wasn’t really like Luce to take charge like this.
“So someone is targeting Harlow and burning down houses in Harlot Bay. Obviously they started burning down houses first and now that she’s gotten involved they’re targeting her. It’s the same situation that happened back in the 1980s, and that resulted in a lot of houses burnt down and two journalists dead. We don’t want that to happen, so let’s figure out what to do,” Luce said.
“How do you know all this?” Molly asked. “I mean, I know Ollie told you yesterday, but have you found out more since then?”
“He sent me some links to look at, so I was doing research all last night. That’s not the point, though. Whoever it is obviously followed Harlow and Jack to that house and then set it on fire that night to make it appear they’re involved. Now, I want to hear hypotheses. You first, Scruffy McGreen-BlueEyes,” she said, pointing a finger directly at Jack.
I could tell he thought this was weird, but he went with it anyway.
“I think you might be right about someone targeting Harlow. I was looking into some of the fires that that happened in the past, and there does seem to be a connection between fires and then journalists being killed. This is going to sound like a big leap, but I think it’s the same person or group of people operating over a number of decades. I think the best place to look is where the money goes,” Jack said.
“Okay, now you,” Luce said, pointing a finger at Kira.
Kira put her hands over her mouth, shocked.
“I don’t know anything. I have no idea why the fires are starting. Why are you asking me?” With that, Kira rushed off into her room and slammed the door behind her.
“Teenagers,” Molly muttered.
It might be teenagers, but also it was witches, and a Slip Witch in particular. In front of Jack, we couldn’t reveal that Kira was a Slip Witch who had set napkins on fire with her mind. So we just had to cover it by her being a Moody Teenager.
Luce went around the table, and we each threw in what we knew, what we suspected and wild random guesses.
“How about a traveling band of arsonists who come back to the same town every twenty years?” Luce said.
“You mean like that really dodgy horror movie The Fire Dwellers?” Molly asked. “The movie that we watched three weeks ago and you got really scared at?”
“You know fiction mirrors reality. It could be happening here,” Luce said.
Molly glanced at her phone and suddenly jumped up from the table.
“We’re going to be late,” she said to Luce.
She checked the time and followed Molly, bolting away. Within two minutes Jack and I were left facing each other over the kitchen table.
“I know with the journalist murders, you’re probably going to say that I should get out of town –” I began. Jack cut me off, shaking his head.
“No, you need to stay here. Someone is doing this and we need to stop them. You’re a journalist and you should be able to do your job in safety. I’m going to make sure this person is caught.”
I know we’d hardly been dating, but there was a tone in his voice that sent a little thrill through me. It was something along the lines of a man going out to fight a lion to protect his girl.
“You’re right,” I said, not really sure which part he was right about. Given that I’d been on the brink of closing down the Harlot Bay Reader multiple times this month, it was flattering to be called a journalist.
“I’m going to look into Sylvester Coldwell. If don’t find anything there, I’m going to move on to Dominic Gresso and then to any other real estate agents and developers I can find in town. I think there’s a strong case that one of them is involved. Problem is that we have to stay apart. I’m going to see if I can catch someone following you. We’ll have to stay in message contact only.”
I don’t know what it was… perhaps seeing him so serious? Perhaps that he was looking extra scruffy this morning, but I wanted to leap across the kitchen table and kiss him. I had to stifle that impulse when Kira emerged from her room and went to the kitchen.
“I’m going to work on investigating the agents too. I’ll message you,” I said.
Then, folks, we did it. A big leap forward. We exchanged phone numbers.
We had a brief kiss then Jack said goodbye to Kira, who just turned red and mumbled something in reply.
Despite what I’d said about not leaving town, it wasn’t actually such a bad idea. One thing I was definitely sure of was that Kira and I could not follow any more of those red lines to any addresses. I definitely wasn’t going to any house if I didn’t have a non-magical reason to be
there.
I was putting on my boots (knee-high, it’s summer, I don’t care) and getting ready to leave for work when Aunt Cass burst into the house.
The grumpy, sullen wine-drinking Aunt Cass from yesterday was gone.
“It’s a witch!” she shouted out.
“A witch?”
“She’s causing the fires. She’s in pain and somewhere in Harlot Bay. She might not be the sole cause, but she is definitely one of them. That’s why the beacons weren’t working properly,” Aunt Cass said triumphantly.
Kira frowned and bit her lip.
“You don’t think it’s…”
“It’s not you. I checked. You’re clean, well, as clean as a teenager can be,” Aunt Cass said.
Kira let out a sigh of relief.
“If it’s a witch, do you know any way we can find her?” I asked.
“I’m going to make a different kind of beacon. One that I think will only find the witch and not get messed up by anything else. It’s going to take a few days, though, because I need to wait on delivery of a different type of crystal. Hold tight, keep your eyes open. I think this is going to be over soon.”
Aunt Cass zipped out, definitely not looking like a woman in her eighties.
I took Kira to the office with me and set her to work organizing all the property transfer papers into chronological order. She actually did that amazingly quickly and then slumped down on the sofa to spend some quality time with her phone. I dug into Sylvester Coldwell and tried to work out how I could get to speak with anyone he worked with at his office without it being suspicious. It wasn’t long, though, before Kira’s frequent sighs and fidgeting on the sofa started to get on my nerves.
“Maybe you should work at the bakery today,” I said to her.
“Okay, I’ll go,” Kira said.
“They’ll happily feed you, but just in case you don’t want delicious carbs, I might have some money,” I said, opening my desk drawer. I usually drop the cash that John gives me in there. I was very sure that there was at least sixty dollars the last time I looked, but I couldn’t seem to find it. There was nothing more than a few loose coins.
“Sorry, thought I had some cash with me. Eat at the bakery or ask one of the moms for money,” I said.