Holiday Witch

by Tess Lake

  “Hey, watch it!” Molly said.

  It was the photo of the rowing team, and there on the side was Arnie with his arm around Mom.

  “I called Dalila for an interview, but she won’t talk to me, so I went out to the mansion, but she must’ve hid somewhere. Did you know she went out with someone who was connected to the deaths and thefts forty years ago?” he said, looking at me, but then also Molly and Luce and, for some reason, Kira.

  “If she doesn’t want to talk to you, I’m sure she has a very good reason,” I said and then immediately regretted speaking because I knew that Carter would somehow twist that to claim that I had said my mother was scared to talk to the press, or some garbage like that.

  “Wait a minute, aren’t you that journalist who came out to our farm last year and my grandma had to throw you out?” Kira asked.

  Carter picked up the article and stuffed it back in his satchel.

  “I did go to ask your grandmother some questions and then I left of my own accord,” Carter sniffed.

  “Is that what you call getting kicked in the backside?”

  “Hattie actually kicked him in the backside?” Luce asked.

  “Like she was trying for the winning points at the Super Bowl,” Kira said. I felt a tiny tingle of magic then, so subtle that it could almost be mistaken for the general background swirling of the magical confluence that was centered over Harlot Bay. I would have dismissed it as nothing had Carter suddenly not started sneezing and then, a moment later, scratching his neck.

  “That’s not … achoo! That’s not what … achoo… happened,” Carter said.

  “What’s the matter? Are you allergic to Monopoly?” Kira said in a sly tone.

  “Do you have flowers in here? What is that?” Carter said, looking around Traveler, his eyes watering and his nose already red.

  “Somewhere in back we do. Maybe the pollen has affected you and you should get out of here,” Molly said in the same sly tone.

  “I’m not leaving until … achoo! I mean… achoo!” Carter said and then started scratching under his arms as though he was covered in fleas.

  “Is this place infested?” he yelled and then ran for the door, leaving the four of us laughing. A few moments later, I felt the very subtle touch of magic as Kira undid the spell, and presumably somewhere down the street Carter stopped itching and sneezing.

  “That was some good magic right there,” I said to her.

  “Your aunt’s a good teacher,” Kira said lightly.

  “Aunt Cass? A teacher?” Luce asked. Kira shrugged and went back to counting her money. It wouldn’t be long before she’d bankrupted both Molly and Luce.

  “If Carter knows about Arnie, it’s not going to be long before he starts writing about it. I’m going to have to tell Mom he was here,” I said after a while.

  “Maybe it’s good news? If there’s some kind of connection with all those deaths back then and the one now and all the thefts, then maybe Carter can find it out so none of us end up running through some burning house with some crazy magical entity after us,” Luce said with a shrug.

  I frowned at her: the girl had too much imagination by half.

  Chapter 18

  “We were drinking out of those Viking horn things and eating and having a great time, and then I noticed these three girls come in and they sit at this booth across from us, and they’re all giving me the death stare,” Peta said and then took a bite of her sandwich.

  “Fans of Jonas?” I said. I bit into my own sandwich, which today was roast beef with a hint of English mustard.

  “Yup. It got super awkward and we tried to ignore them, but it’s kind of hard to ignore three girls who are trying to burn you to death with their invisible heat-ray vision.”

  A week had slipped by without any deaths in Harlot Bay, which was a good thing, but the thefts had resumed. Now the whole town was on edge. I knew the thefts had some kind of supernatural origin, but part of me had definitely hoped that Carter’s snooping around the whole thing, or perhaps even the police investigating, might’ve caught the thieves by now and sorted the whole thing out without my having to be involved. I think another part of me was hoping that Aunt Cass had solved it. Through the week I’d been researching teenagers on and off, and looking into the past without much luck. Today I’d left my office and gone to have lunch with Peta down at the park to catch up on her first date with Jonas. It was good to be talking about something that wasn’t murders or thefts or supernatural or witchy. We were having another unseasonably warm day, so we wanted to enjoy it.

  “So what happened?” I asked.

  “We canceled dessert and got out of there, and you know what, they followed us! We were walking down Main Street and I’m about to get ready to fight them when Jonas pulls me into that ice cream place and then the three of them go walking away like they weren’t actually following us.”

  “See? You can take the girl out of Harlot Bay but you can’t take Harlot Bay out of the girl,” I said and poked her in the ribs.

  “I may be a charming Southern belle, but anyone tries to mess with me and my man, they’re gonna hear about it,” Peta said in her best strong Southern accent.

  “Is he your man?”

  “Um… I guess not. It was a first date. There’s potential that he could become my man,” Peta said.

  “Did you kiss him?”

  “A respectable Southern lady does not reveal such things,” Peta said.

  “You kissed him!”

  “Of course I kissed him! Have you seen him! My goddess…” Peta said and fanned herself with her hand. I laughed, and with the sun shining down and my lunch half-finished, it felt like nothing bad would ever happen in the world again. We’d moved off chatting about Jonas and Peta (they were going out again later in the week) and talked about this and that, until Peta mentioned that she thought the movers might have lost one of her boxes or that perhaps one of them had had light fingers. I felt that small flicker of tension down in the pit of my stomach again.

  “So you’re missing things?” I asked.

  “A bracelet, a few rings. I’m sure I packed them, but now they’re gone,” Peta said.

  “Do you think they could have been stolen?”

  “Maybe… I hadn’t really considered that. I thought all that stuff in the paper about the so-called crime spree was just Wilkins exaggerating.”

  “No, it’s true, and there’s some kind of weird magical thing behind it, I think.”

  I told her about the teenagers I’d seen breaking into the old man’s house and stealing his jewelry and valuables and the feeling of magic as they’d cut a hole in reality and stepped away to somewhere else. Outside my family, Peta is the one and only person who knows that I am a witch, and it felt good to unload. Well, at least for a while. After telling her, the day didn’t seem so sunny and great any more. It was the dead of winter after all, but the unusual weather of Harlot Bay had delivered a day that fit more in spring or fall.

  As if in time with my story turning dark, the clouds had started gathering and a chill wind began to blow. I looked toward the beach and gave a shiver. I wasn’t looking forward to my personal training tomorrow. Although she was highly annoying, it turned out Aunt Cass was also highly motivating, but she’d had to bow out of training with Kaylee because of the frog problem, which was getting out of control. Aunt Cass was no longer sleeping in the mansion but staying in one of the old abandoned cottages up in the forest behind the house.

  “Looks like rain. Maybe we should go,” Peta said, looking up at the sky.

  “A storm is coming…” I said in my best movie trailer voice, trying to lighten the mood, but Peta wasn’t buying it.

  “Are you deeply involved with this?” Peta asked as we started heading back in the direction of the library.

  “I was trying not to be. I was taking a holiday. No investigating, no doing anything crazy or dangerous. Just having a boyfriend, having a new job, exercising and that’s it. But it seems like I
keep getting pulled in even though I don’t want to.”

  “Well, maybe I shouldn’t tell you this, then…,” Peta began.

  “Well, you have to tell me now.”

  “I saw your Aunt Ro and her boyfriend, Sheriff Hardy, out the other night very late, probably two in the morning, sitting in a car in the dark with the lights off. I think they were watching a house,” she said.

  “Where was this?”

  “Over on Spinnaker. I got hit with this crazy insomnia for some reason, so I got up and went out into the freezing cold and thought I’d walk around the block, and then I saw them sitting in the car.”

  “Are you sure it was them?”

  “Please, Harlow. I know what your aunt and her boyfriend look like, even if it was super late and I was cold and tired. It was definitely them.”

  “I saw Sheriff Hardy a while ago and he was yawning. I wonder if that’s because he’s out at night trying to find the source of the thefts,” I said.

  “Well, if the sheriff’s involved in it and your aunt as well, maybe you can take a break this time. Actually focus on having a boyfriend and going out to dinners with your friend and her gorgeous new boyfriend.”

  “Oooh, so he is your boyfriend now?” I said, teasing her and poking her in the ribs again.

  “Maybe. He’s my possibly-could-be-a-boyfriend, I guess,” Peta said with a smile. She walked me back to the library and we said goodbye.

  I went inside, chewing over what she had told me. Because the moms were still cooking out of their home kitchen and trying to operate their bakery business, they’d been up at crazy hours in the morning. So it was not unusual to see a car leaving at two a.m. The fact is, most of the time we sleep right through it. It was entirely possible that Aunt Ro had been going out with Sheriff Hardy to investigate crimes, or whatever it was they were doing, without any of us knowing. It was strange, though. Had Aunt Ro told Sheriff Hardy that she was a witch, and by extension so were we? Could she have been the one who’d stolen the tracking crystals from Kira and Aunt Cass? I was mulling this over when I almost walked straight into Ollie.

  “Oh, Harlow, sorry, didn’t see you there,” Ollie said in somewhat of a morose tone.

  It was the first time I’d seen him today. That morning I had been working alone sorting through the papers with no idea where Ollie was. He must have only shown up at the library during my lunch break.

  Whatever he’d been doing, he certainly didn’t look very happy about it.

  “Why the long face, Ollie?”

  “Oh, that. I’ve been reading that journal that Ms. Stern gave me, and it looks like I’ve made a big mistake and besmirched her relative’s reputation. I feel terrible about it, and I’m going to have to do a full apology and retraction,” he said.

  “Probably a retraction will do. I don’t think you need to go the whole way and do an apology,” I said. I still wasn’t entirely sure what to do about the whole magical journal situation. I could understand why Hattie had done it. Her prudish nature simply did not allow her to believe that one of her relatives had run a house of pleasure, but then I wasn’t really quite sure what I could do about it. I certainly couldn’t tell Ollie that he was possibly the victim of a magic spell. Maybe I should confront Hattie and tell her to reverse it and reveal the journal was a forgery or something like that? But, on the other hand, in the end who really cared? If Ollie took down his website post and didn’t mention it again, then Hattie would be happy and everything would be resolved, even if it wasn’t the truth.

  “These things are important, Harlow. History matters and history is important and it’s important that the truth is what we report, and I feel terrible that I may have reported something untrue.”

  “Well, remember that the journal is only another piece of source material and it may not be entirely true either,” I said.

  “Anyway, I was off this morning, researching those names you gave me. I had to go to another archive, and I found some names and addresses of current relatives of the victims.”

  Ollie handed me a piece of paper. On it was written Ryan Layton’s name and his address. Next was written Arnold Harrison’s name and an address in town. I sort of gave a double blink of surprise. I hadn’t expected Ollie’s searching to come to much, given that I hadn’t been able to find anything, but obviously this librarian had skills. He’d even found some recent photos of Ryan Layton.

  I was doubly surprised to see Arnie’s name on there, given that, as far as I knew, he hadn’t been connected to the deaths and fire back in the past except through being in that photo with Mom when she was young.

  “So what can you tell me about these guys?” I asked Ollie.

  “Well, the top one is a direct descendant of Reginald Layton, who was hung. That was suspected to actually be a murder but it was never proven. You seem to think that there was some connection, particularly given that the man who was scared to death was related to the original man as well. The second man, Arnold, came up as I was doing research on the names. He was their friend, and it appears he was dating your mom at the time. Through what I’ve been able to find, it seems that this group of boys were closely connected somehow to all the thefts forty years ago. Given that everyone else in that photo except for your mom is dead, I thought that perhaps interviewing Arnold might yield some useful information.”

  I looked down at my clothes, which were still reasonably clean despite spending the entire morning in the archives.

  “What do you say we go now and see Ryan Layton?”

  “You want me to come with you?” Ollie asked.

  “Yeah, you found the name, you deserve to be there. I’ll be the journalist. You will be my assistant and we’ll see what information we can find. Come on, it’ll be fun,” I said, perhaps overselling it a little.

  “Okay, why not?” Ollie said. He told one of the other staff members that we’d be leaving and then we went outside and got into his car. It was much newer than mine, so it started on the first turn. The rain began to drizzle down as the coldness of winter slowly reasserted itself. I was feeling that journalistic buzz again and checked to make sure I still had my old, but still functional, handheld recorder in my bag. First we’d visit Ryan and see what we could find. Depending on what he said, I might take Ollie along with me to interview Arnie, although given that he was Mom’s ex-boyfriend from when she was young, perhaps there were some things that I wanted to keep secret from Ollie.

  We drove across Harlot Bay, Ollie telling me about what he’d gone through to track down the names and growing more excited as he talked. It was mostly a quite boring story about opening boxes and finding pieces of paper, but to a librarian it was pure thrill, and I, as a sometimes part-time journalist, could see the excitement to it as well. The rain increased in strength as we drove across Harlot Bay. As we went, it was as though we were racing the edge of a storm cloud. Eventually we pulled up on that street across from the address and peered out through the window at it. It was an average-looking house on an average-looking street. Nothing special about it whatsoever.

  “So what are going to say when we knock on the door?” Ollie asked.

  “I’ll say I’m a journalist from the Harlot Bay Reader and I’ve got some questions about what happened forty years ago to his grandfather.”

  Ollie frowned and then wiped his hand across the passenger-side window where it had started to fog up from us sitting inside the car.

  “Did you see that? A woman with black hair jumped out the side window of the house and climbed over the fence!”

  My journalistic buzz fizzled and that cold chill took its place.

  “Let’s go,” I said and leapt out of his car without bothering to see whether he was going to follow me. I practically hurdled the low front fence and ran up to the front door, banging on it as hard as I could.

  “Hello, Mr. Layton, it’s Harlow Torrent—are you there? I need to speak with you!” I said, hearing my voice echo through the house. I heard a noise inside, the so
und of something being knocked over, and I knew with absolute certainty that something terrible was happening. Ollie arrived behind me, slightly damp, with his hair sticking up like he’d been electrocuted.

  “We either have to break the door down or go around the side,” I said.

  “Why do we need to break the door down?” Ollie asked.

  “I think something bad is happening,” I said. I didn’t think I’d be able to work him up to helping me break the front door open in the time we had, so I took off around the side of the house, calling back over my shoulder, “I heard the sounds of a struggle. Call the sheriff.”

  I heard Ollie racing after me, and in the back of my mind I realized he was doing that so he could help protect me from whatever might be in the house.

  As I reached the side of the house and the open window where Ollie had seen a dark-haired woman jumping out, I heard another thudding noise from somewhere around the back of the house. I continued moving, stepping over an old garden rake that had been left in the grass. Coming around the corner, all of my momentum suddenly stilled. A man was hanging by the neck from the back porch of his house, and from the color of his face I knew he was dead. No matter what, though, we still had to try to save him if we could.

  I’d only seen a small photo, but I knew he was Ryan Layton.

  “We need a knife,” I yelled to Ollie as he skidded around the corner. The back door was open, so I ran inside the house and found myself fumbling in a kitchen drawer until I found a sharp knife, and then the scene flashed forward to where I was outside hacking at the rope, Ollie trying to hold Ryan up. I got him free and we crashed to the ground in a heap. We cut the noose from around his neck, and then everything was a blur as Ollie and I tried to give him CPR in a frenzy of panic and fear.