by Tess Lake
“You are doing an excellent job girl,” I heard a familiar voice say as I put down two plates.
I focused and pulled myself out of the waitressing blur to realize that Henry G and Olivia were sitting at a table.
“Oh, hey, thanks, we try our best,” I said.
“This place is kinda nice, like a fifties-style diner, that's the feel,” Henry G said, smiling at me. I saw that Olivia was looking at him again with those puppy dog eyes. Was this a date? Why were they out together now?
“I hope you enjoy it. I have to go. Lots of orders,” I said. They both said goodbye to me as I rushed off to continue delivering food.
Time blurred on and I didn't see them leave, only realizing they were gone when I was wiping up their table for the next set of customers. I saw a few familiar faces from town, a couple of the shop owners and other people we knew but we didn't have any time to talk, not with all the orders that we had to fill.
Eventually we reached five o'clock and that was when Molly took off her apron and declared they were going be closing. She sent Isabella to the door to turn any more customers away. We finished up making all the orders and then waited for people to finish their meals. We cleaned as the last stragglers ate their food and drank the coffees before departing. The place went from half full to empty in about ten minutes, there being some tipping point as people realized that we were closing up. Molly sent Isabella home and also Julie from next door, before locking both the doors. Molly, Peta and I dragged our exhausted selves through the open archway into Traveler. Luce was standing behind the counter, her hair a mess and her face sweaty. At some point there must've an incident with the coffee machine because her face and neck were covered in coffee grinds. She had splattered milk all over her clothing and looked like she had lost a fight with the coffee machine.
We trudged in and the three of us sat down at one of the booths.
“Well there goes day one,” Luce murmured.
“You guys made some money but you're going to need some more staff if it keeps up like that,” Peta said.
My feet were throbbing, aching like crazy from standing up and rushing around all day and now that I was sitting every muscle in my body was making its protests known. I looked down at myself and realized that I was covered in bits of food as well. At some point I must've been squirted with yellow mustard which had made a streak right down the leg of my black pants. We sat there in silence, all four of us decompressing from the day. Behind Luce the coffee machine muttered to itself in Italian. Who knew what it wanted? Maybe more water or to be cleaned or something else? All four of us were in a stupor quietly staring when there was a bang on the front door of Traveler that jolted us awake.
“We're closed,” Molly yelled without looking.
“It's me, open up.”
All four of us went from half asleep to wide awake. It was Will on the other side of the door. Molly rushed over and unlocked it and Will walked in. He was wearing his landscaping clothes and he looked almost as bad as Luce did. He had dirt under his fingernails, bits of grass all over him and spread up his neck and in his hair, and from the state of his pants it looked he'd fallen in every mud puddle in Harlot Bay. His boots were caked with dirt and his hands had black streaks on them.
Will stopped in the middle of the room and looked at Peta and me sitting in the booth. Molly was frozen by the door watching him.
“Does she know?” Will asked in a low tone.
“She knows,” I said. Will looked back at Luce who was standing behind the counter, her face dark with the coffee grinds, biting her lip anxiously.
“I know I went silent last night. I know you think I'm angry or mad because I went silent and then I left. I don't know why I did that. I think maybe it's something my dad does, so I do it too,” Will said.
“It's okay,” Luce whispered. Will rushed around the counter and grabbed Luce in a tremendous hug. She started crying and then so was he, tears streaking down his dirty face.
“I'm sorry Luce, I'm sorry I left,” he said.
Molly, Peta and I were frozen, stuck in our places. I felt like I was completely still like a statue, only my heart beating wildly.
“There's no space here and that thing's dangerous. Come out here,” he said. He led Luce out from behind the counter around to the front of it.
“I've been carrying this for weeks, planning it for even longer and I don't know, maybe this isn't the ideal place to ask, and perhaps we should both have showers and be somewhere nice like a beach or a garden, but I was out working today and mowing lawns and I couldn't stop thinking about you, couldn't stop thinking about us, and couldn't stop thinking about our future. I'm covered in grass and dirt because I came straight here as soon as I realized what I wanted. What I wanted to ask you,” he said. I heard Molly gasp from behind me. Luce had gone from crying and half smiling to now standing with a shocked look on her face. Her eyes only grew wider as Will knelt down on one knee and reached into the pocket of his coveralls.
“You're kneeling, you're kneeling down,” Luce babbled.
“Well, that's what you do when you ask,” Will said.
“Oh my goddess,” I whispered under my breath.
“Shush over there,” Will said with a cheeky smile. He took a ring out of his pocket and clasped Luce's hand, one that was covered in coffee grinds from the day's hard labor.
“You're a witch and I love you. Marry me,” he said.
It was one of those moments again where all the world seemed to stop and then it jolted forward with tremendous speed. One of those moments where you became aware of gravity, the fact that the planet was spinning and the universe with it, that everything had come perfectly together, falling precisely in order, just for this instant.
“Yes, I'll marry you,” Luce said. Will slipped the ring onto her finger and then stood up and kissed her. It was only when they broke apart and he looked towards us that the three of us unfroze, and then the poor boy was nearly crushed to death as we hugged the two of them, squealing and jumping around.
“Oh my goddess, oh my goddess, oh my goddess,” Molly said, grinning from ear to ear.
We pulled apart and I found myself covered with not only the food of the day but now coffee grinds from Luce and bits of grass from Will. The moment was intensely happy but as I stood there, seeing Molly hugging Luce again and babbling away, I couldn't help but remember what I'd heard when I'd touched Ollie on the hand yesterday. The sounds of shouting, the sounds of ending. This moment was happy and the future would be too, but I could only hope that what I'd heard was simply a bad moment and that Molly would get to be as happy as Luce was now.
Luce showed me the ring and grinned at me.
“I'm getting married, Harlow. I'm getting married!”
Chapter 12
The library was quiet and calming which was exactly what I needed after the past few noisy days. I had about an hour to go before I was finished my late night shift and I would drive around to see Jack. I was exhausted and on a break so I took a sip of water and leaned against the wall, idly flicking through Hans's autobiography. The quiet was sublime and in strict contrast to the many noisy places I'd been recently. Noisy place number one was of course the night Will had proposed to Luce. Eventually we'd all driven back up to the mansion where they told the moms and Aunt Cass their news. This resulted in much squealing and hugging. Will, who was a fairly solid boy from lifting heavy logs and bags of potting mix, was almost crushed to death by three excited witch mothers, and also to my surprise Aunt Cass. She wasn't quite as giddy as the moms, but she did grab Luce in an enormous hug and then Will before kissing him on the cheek and saying “I'm sure you'll scrub up fine for the wedding.” It had taken all of a minute flat for the moms to turn to us and ask what our marriage plans were?
I owed Molly ten bucks over that one. I’d bet it would be at least five minutes before that particular topic came up. She’d bet one minute.
We’d promptly ignored the moms and taken ourselves b
ack off to our end of the mansion. This was especially also because the protesters were still staying at the Torrent mansion and so all that cheering and squealing had been watched by faces pressed up against windows from above us.
The second noisy place in the list of course, was the theater. Rehearsals had now grown louder, but also tenser. We were now getting down to the sharp and pointy end of it. Previously when someone dropped a line they might laugh and there were plenty of jokes around the rehearsal space. Now everyone was growing more serious. A dropped line was a moment of panic and no one laughed. We were starting to get through entire soliloquies without any problems and you could dimly see that we might actually have a play. But at times it felt as though we were on Truer Island, looking back at the shore and contemplating a long swim.
At rehearsals there was a constant hubbub, people rehearsing and then when dropped lines occurred, people panicking. There were now even more guards looming about the place. It wouldn't be long before we opened and then it would only run for a week before it closed, and everyone was hoping that there would be no more terrible incidents.
The noisy third place would be the Traveler Cafe, opened up next to Traveler. Magic Bean had reopened after beefing up their security which as far as we could tell was small, non-descript security cameras all over the place, and that had taken away some of the business that had flooded Molly and Luce on their very first day of opening. The coffee side of the business was still okay. Luce was working that coffee machine like a mad woman. It was the café side of things that was struggling. It was still Molly, Luce and their three employees, but it simply wasn't enough. I was more than willing to help out but because I was working on the play and then at the library I was exhausted or not available. The same went for Peta. She was still working on the play and promised Molly and Luce that once it was over she would help them out. Although both Molly and Luce were still ecstatically happy, riding that glowing wave of Luce getting engaged, they were returning home completely exhausted and covered in bits of food. They needed to hire more qualified staff and soon, but they were having a little bit of trouble finding anyone who knew how to cook or wait tables properly. There was no shortage of teenagers and unemployed in Harlot Bay but they simply didn't even have the time to train anyone to do the jobs. They needed someone who could land on their feet immediately.
I pulled myself away from the recollection of all the noisy places I was frequenting, took another sip of water and breathed in the delicious silence of the library. It was just me and the papers, and I guess the dust. I turned back to Hans's autobiography and kept idly flicking through it. I honestly don't know why I was bothering to continue reading it. I hadn't finished it by any means, but I thought the chances of finding any clues as to who might have poisoned him were incredibly slim. It turned out I'd been slightly wrong about the autobiography too. At first glance it had been pure ego, stories designed to paint Hans in the most positive light of all. But somehow mixed in there were other tidbits that showed that at one time in his life he'd been a fairly normal and probably, dare say it, good person. I flicked to a page that showed black and white photos from thirty years ago. It was a production of Much Ado About Nothing and Hans was the assistant to the director, Viola. This was the show that ended with an explosion and death. Hans and the rest of the cast and crew had taken one serious photo, their faces solemn, and then in the next they'd all pulled ridiculous expressions, sticking out their tongues.
Underneath they listed all of their names but also had made up a variety of fake professions for themselves. Hans was listed as chief snackologist, chips and beer division. Another cast member was listed as a sandwich rustler. The director was junior assistant to the junior herpetologist, and an enormous man with a giant beard was listed as chief lupineologist, which I guess was a joke about the fact that he looked like the Wolf Man. It was hard to see looking at the photo of Hans looking so young and happy that he would turn into the horrible man that I knew, shouting and abusive, short-tempered and cruel.
I checked the time and saw I should be about to get back to work, so I thought I might call Jack but the man obviously knew my break times as well and my phone rang in my hand.
“Hey Jack,” I said, waiting for it.
“Harlow Torrent,” Jack began, his voice low, his tone serious. “Harlow Torrent, slip witch will you mar-” He paused for comedic effect and then continued. “Make me the happiest man alive by coming around for a very late dinner?”
“Oh shut up, ha, ha, ha,” I said.
Both Ollie and Jack were very well aware of the consequences of Will asking Luce to marry him. It had turned out that the three of them had had many conversations privately and knew that as soon as one of them took the leap, the thumbscrews would be on for the other two to do the same. So what had these two boys decided to do? Make a hilarious joke about it. Ollie had taken Molly for a walk up into the forest and then had been talking about how much he loved her before suddenly kneeling down. Molly had gasped and then Ollie had merely tied his shoelaces and stood up and said “Shall we continue walking?” Molly had walloped him across the head and then he had laughed like a crazy person. Jack had done similar things to me, dropping his fork deliberately on the ground and then kneeling down, taking my hand and asking could I help him back up?
Very funny these two boys of ours thought they were.
“So how's the library, how's the quiet?” he asked.
“It's delectable. I think I might get a couple of stacks of paper and just sleep here,” I said.
We chatted away for a couple of minutes before Jack's tone really did turn serious this time, and not to make a joke about getting married.
“I have some news on Coldwell and that mall approval that was rushed through. One of the council members rents a home and Coldwell is the landlord. I looked it up and you know what's strange? He's paying far less rent than he normally would for a house like that. It's practically a mansion. The council member and his family only moved in last month. It looks to me that there's some bribery of some kind going on via under market rents but it's going be fairly hard to prove or to get much on it.”
“Oh yeah, Coldwell. I'd forgotten about him,” I muttered.
“I thought I might secretly pass the information to Carter. I'm going to see if I can gather anything else first. Someone getting a good deal on rent isn't exactly the crazy story of corruption that will bust this thing wide open,” Jack said.
We chatted a bit more, talking mostly about Coldwell and Carter, before we finally said goodbye and I returned to the quiet silence of the library.
With everything going on in my life, ranging from the possibility I had a spell cast on me to the fact that we still hadn't caught the magical salamander, my aunt getting married, my cousin getting engaged, and everything that was happening with the play, I honestly didn't care about Sylvester Coldwell or anything that he was doing. Let other people solve how he'd corrupted council members. Maybe when I talked to Jack later, I would suggest he stop chasing it although he probably wouldn't given that although he was no longer a policeman, he still had that instinct to track down bad guys.
I got myself up from the floor, feeling my bones creaking and my muscles aching slightly and returned to my sorting but my mind kept straying. I kept thinking about Coldwell, and then Coldwell's father and his father before him. A while ago we had discovered that Coldwell's great grandfather had bought an orchard after part of it had burned down and then sold it later for a fabulous profit which had helped set the family on their way to fortune and their current real estate dealings. This was a potential crime hidden in the very, very deep past but one that Ollie and I had uncovered through examining property transaction records and newspaper articles.
I guess if we had the time to dig through all these papers we might find other things that could incriminate Sylvester Coldwell himself.
At that thought I remembered the papers that Ollie had been stacking that had been driving him slig
htly mad. The ones showing a building had been constructed out on Truer Island that apparently didn't exist. The article showing Grandma, Aunt Cass and Hattie all the same age together. In the rush of everything I'd forgotten to take a copy of the article. Even as I realized that, it occurred to me it was very strange that I'd forgotten to take such an obvious thing. I heard that small voice in the back of my mind again.
It's the spell.
I dropped my current task which was sorting school records for two different schools sixty years ago and went to find the piles Ollie had been working on. After a few fruitless minutes of searching I had to conclude that they were no longer there. I quickly rang Ollie.
“Ollie, it's Harlow. Where are all those papers you were working on, the one with that article showing my Grandma, Hattie Stern and Aunt Cass in the ocean swimming? Where is the pile of pay slips for that building out on Truer Island?”
“Oh, they're not there? I didn't move them. Can't you find them?” Ollie said.
The underground room was messy I admit but there was no way Ollie's piles were sitting somewhere that I just happened to glance over and miss.
“Nope, they're not here,” I said with a sinking feeling in my stomach.
“I'll have a look tomorrow. They probably were moved, although I don't know who would have done that,” Ollie said. I said goodbye and then spent the next ten minutes or so walking around, checking every pile I could find but my first instincts had been right. The papers were gone and I'm sure we wouldn't be seeing them again. I sat back down on the ground and had a drink of water, feeling a sensation that was becoming most unwelcome. It felt like a cold hand on the back of my neck or a fog across my mind. Something was opposing me, something was pushing me and I didn't know what.
I checked my watch and saw that somehow I still had half an hour to go, but I made a slightly sneaky executive decision: I was done for the night. I dusted myself off somewhat, locked up the library and then went out to my car, which took a few tries to get started. I was sitting there waiting for it to warm up when I saw a tall lanky familiar figure rushing across the end of the street carrying a large black garbage bag. It was Marcus Fyfe, the music director. He vanished around the corner.