by Tess Lake
It was Aunt Cass.
“That’s impossible!” I blurted out.
I watched as Aunt Cass looked around the office for a moment, the expression on her face sharp and mean and somewhat calculating. Sheriff Hardy paused the video and then pointed to the time signature. “That was near the time that Arlan leaped off the lighthouse.” He pressed play again. The video finished a few moments later, when Aunt Cass shuffled out of view.
There was always this odd game we played where he asked me to look into something because he knew my family and I could discover strange and odd things that no one else could, but that was back before he knew we were all witches. Sheriff Hardy seemed to be thinking the same thing as I was, because he eventually gave me a half smile and shook his head.
“Okay… let’s get it out of the way that it’s very strange between us and move on. That’s Aunt Cass, and what she stole were some burial records. I’d only brought them up from the archives yesterday when I stumbled across them. They’re not supposed to be here, and I only brought them out so I could deliver them to Ollie over at the library. I hadn’t even bothered to look through them. She clearly knew what she was searching for and stole something out of the box. It has also not escaped my attention that this was the exact time that Arlan leaped off the roof of the lighthouse and we took the entire police force with us. Mary says she didn’t see anyone and she was sitting right at the reception desk. To add onto this, I have become aware of a problem of some of our elderly residents wandering around Harlot Bay, doing unusual things and waking up in strange places and not knowing how they got there,” he said.
I took a breath to calm myself and tried to stop the world from spinning.
“Did Aunt Ro tell you we found Aunt Cass?” I managed to say.
“She did, and apparently your aunt is frozen down in the basement, so it’s very strange that she would be breaking into our police station and stealing files. What’s even stranger is that she’s moving like an old lady,” Sheriff Hardy said.
He played the video again and I saw what he meant. Although Aunt Cass is somewhere in her eighties, she is quite spry (except of course if she is trying to get out of doing some kind of labor). In the video, however, she was shuffling around like someone weighed down with age, moving gingerly as though her body hurt and she wasn’t confident of her movements and surroundings.
“This is too weird,” I muttered to myself.
“I think something supernatural is clearly happening,” Sheriff Hardy said to me.
“There is definitely something happening,” I said. I’d had a moment of hesitation about whether I should give him the papers that Hilda had given me. Even though I knew that he knew that we were witches and involved in supernatural things, I still had that urge to keep everything secret. I had a five-second battle with myself before I got them out of my bag and gave them to him. He had a quick look through them, his eyebrows inching higher with each page, before he went off to photocopy them and bring me back the originals. I told him how Eve had come to me on someone’s recommendation to help her grandmother and that I’d decided to help. At this, Sheriff Hardy nodded and continued reading through Hilda’s notes.
“Fugue states are incredibly rare, and if there was even one person at Sunny Days Manor experiencing it, that would be a high number. The fact that it happened to Hilda and possibly Arlan, and now it appears your aunt is out walking around when she’s supposed to be frozen in the basement, is so incredibly unlikely that it cannot be a coincidence,” Sheriff Hardy said.
He turned Hilda’s notes over again, looking through her list of hypotheses.
“Do you think there could be anything to this psychotropic substance idea?” he asked, indicating the paper.
“I guess that’s something the coroner might want to look into if they take a blood sample from Wolfram Dole. He’s the man who jumped the fence a few days ago and then died a few days later. You could also take a blood sample from Arlan,” I said. The image of the lighthouse suddenly shot through my mind again. Arlan standing on the wrong side of the railing, waving his hand, looking down at us, and then vanishing over the side. It flashed through in an instant and left me gasping.
“I’m sorry, Harlow, I think sometimes I shouldn’t ask you about any of these things,” Sheriff Hardy said.
“No, it’s okay,” I said, wiping away tears.
“I can’t tell Ro this at the moment, it’s… complicated,” Sheriff Hardy said.
“I understand,” I said, although I didn’t understand at all. Sheriff Hardy got me a glass of water. Once I gulped it down, I began to regain my composure.
“We’re going to be doing a standard police investigation, and yes, we will test Arlan’s blood and I’ll see if they found anything in Wolfram’s blood too. But I think I need you or your family to help me out,” Sheriff Hardy said. I felt that desire for secrecy in my mind again. A lifetime of the habit of keeping witchy things hidden away was a difficult thing to overcome. But Sheriff Hardy knew, and that meant Aunt Ro trusted him, and I trusted him too. He wasn’t quite family yet, but all of us could see that that would happen one day. And I simply couldn’t have my possible future uncle investigating weird events that might put him in magical danger.
“There was something else,” I said. I explained to him very haltingly the scent that I’d caught, the magic of another witch, how it had been clouded around Arlan, and that meant that someone had possibly cast a spell on him.
“You should test his blood, but I’m not really sure they’re going to find anything,” I said.
“Right,” Sheriff Hardy said and started gnawing his lip, which was an unusual move for him. Most of the time he seemed so calm and collected and in control. But now he just looked so far out of his depth it wasn’t funny.
“Do you need me to take you home so you can check if Aunt Cass is where she is supposed to be?” Sheriff Hardy said after a moment.
“No, it’s okay. I’ll go now and I’ll check on her and I’ll talk to my family,” I said.
I had a bone-deep weariness running through me and my shoulder was aching again, and I really wanted nothing more than to go home, have a shower, and sleep for a thousand years, but I knew that time was of the essence. Whoever or whatever had caused Arlan to jump off the lighthouse seemed to be acting with purpose. Short of recruiting Hattie to look into it, it would possibly fall to me and my family to work out what was going on.
Sheriff Hardy spent a moment copying the video of Aunt Cass onto a memory stick that he gave it to me.
“This is going to stay private, and I’m not going to tell anyone about the stolen file, and it won’t show up in any official report whatsoever. But we need to find out what she took and where it went,” Sheriff Hardy said. “There’s one more thing. Now that you’re not writing the Harlot Bay Reader anymore, there are really fewer and fewer reasons for me to be able to call you in here without other people getting suspicious. This might have to be our last official face-to-face for a while, okay?”
“Okay. I’ll let you know if Aunt Cass is still at the mansion,” I said and then shuffled out of the office, feeling about as old as Aunt Cass looked on that video.
Chapter 7
“Three more laps!” Kaylee called out from somewhere far ahead of us.
The morning was cold, but Molly, Luce and I were sweating like crazy as we plodded our way up the beach.
“Just a little curse,” Luce gasped.
“No curses, it’s good for you,” Molly gasped back. We were running, exercising with a personal trainer this morning because that was normal and at the moment the Torrent witches were clinging to normal like a piece of debris out in the ocean. To say that we were in turmoil was an understatement.
Last night I’d come home, and after confirming that Aunt Cass was still in the basement next to Grandma, still frozen, I’d waited for the rest of the family to come home before sitting them down in the living room and taking them through my day. I decided not to
hold anything back, so I told them about how Eve had come to ask me for help with her grandma and how I’d gone to visit her at Sunny Days Manor with Jack. I went through the race out to the lighthouse and then Arlan jumping off, breaking his leg, and me passing out. I told them about the faint scent of rotten meat. There were plenty of interruptions from the moms and my cousins, but then, when I showed them the video of Aunt Cass stealing files from Sheriff Hardy’s office, there was nothing but stunned silence.
The moms had gone downstairs to check on Aunt Cass and then returned, talking amongst themselves in low tones. I was honestly expecting Mom to tell me to stop investigating, to not get involved, to really put the thumbscrews on me, but surprisingly, none of that happened. She told me to be careful, but to keep investigating. Mom then went back downstairs and cast a spell on the basement. If anyone went in or out, she’d know. She returned to us, yawning into the back of her hand, tired from the exertion of casting the spell. We didn’t chew over the problem for much longer after that. The moms were working all hours at the moment, trying to get the new bakery location up and running and trying to keep the Torrent Mansion Bed and Breakfast going. I think they were getting about three hours’ sleep between the three of them. And so our small meeting had ended without us really having a plan to do anything. Aunt Ro had become uncharacteristically quiet and then eventually had left without saying a word to go and see Sheriff Hardy.
“Now we’re going to do some push-ups!” Kaylee trilled.
We staggered up the edge of the beach to where there were some round log barriers that had been put in place to try to stop the sand dune erosion. We started doing push-ups in time with Kaylee. I had to stop halfway because my shoulder was still aching from where I’d been flung into the mud a few days earlier. We eventually finished up, Kaylee looking so bright and fresh it appeared as though she’d just stepped off a page of a magazine from a photo shoot. The three of us looked like we’d been soaked in water, wrung out to dry, and then soaked again.
Being that it was still somewhat the off-season for tourists, we decided to go to a small café that sat out near the beach. It was empty at this time of the morning, which was good because we were all quite sweaty and smelly. We ordered our breakfast: scrambled eggs with salmon and Hollandaise sauce served with whole wheat toast and buttered spinach and cups of delicious coffee.
“Isn’t this completely negating our exercise with overindulgence?” Molly asked before taking a big gulp of water.
“Good,” Luce said, tying her hair back again. She’d been in somewhat of a mood since yesterday, when she’d discovered that the police force wouldn’t be returning her catapult to her. They’d recovered it from under the house, where the thieves had taken it, and it was hers and they acknowledged that, but at the same time, it was siege weaponry.
“They’re going to give it to the Harlot Bay Museum. Apparently they’re going to make a whole exhibition around it,” Luce said.
“Probably better there where people can get some enjoyment out of it, rather than sitting out under a tarp around the back of the mansion,” Molly said.
“But it’s my catapult,” Luce complained.
“Any more news on Will and the great engagement scenario?” I asked.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Luce said quickly.
“She’s pretending he never sent that text so then she doesn’t have to think about it,” Molly said, raising her eyebrows to indicate she thought this was highly unlikely.
Our breakfast arrived and we ate it quickly, barely talking, still quite exhausted from the morning’s exercise. We finished and then were sipping our coffees, looking out at the still water and across at Truer Island.
“I bet you Aunt Cass was fighting some kind of crazy monster out there,” Luce said yet again, repeating her favorite hypothesis of what had happened out on Truer Island.
“Fighting monsters and now stealing from the police department, sounds a lot like Aunt Cass,” Molly said.
I gave voice to an idea that had been hovering at the back of my mind since yesterday when I’d first seen the video.
“I’m not sure that it is Aunt Cass. Did you see how slowly she was moving? It’s like she really was eighty years old,” I said.
“But Aunt Cass is in her eighties,” Molly said.
“I know the moms didn’t say you should stop, but I dunno, maybe that would be a good idea,” Luce said.
“I’ve considered it,” I said.
Although I’d been exhausted, last night I’d spent a little time lying in bed tossing and turning, feeling quite strange about the fact that the moms hadn’t attempted to stop me from investigating what was going on. It was a little unsettling that the pattern had changed: that they were—gasp!—treating me like an adult who was perfectly capable of making her own decisions. I’d been left with the strange realization that had they tried to stop me from investigating, it would have just hardened my resolve to do so. But by giving me implied permission and not trying to stop me at all, I was only left with my own doubt and fears: worried about magic; worried about a witch trying to get an old man to jump off a lighthouse; worried about old people wandering the town, losing their memories and doing strange things.
The moms hadn’t had any idea of what the source of all these strange happenings could be. The three of them had shown in the past that they had more power than I’d ever known, but the truth was, it was always Aunt Cass we turned to as our source of knowledge. Now that she was frozen solid, we were adrift. It suddenly crossed my mind that one day Aunt Cass would be gone, and then what would we do without her?
“Do you ever think we should try to learn more spells? Have the moms teach us, and Aunt Cass if we can manage to wake her up?”
“Because of all the super dangerous things we keep getting involved in? No, I’m sure our limited knowledge of spells will always be fine,” Luce said, somewhat sarcastically.
“It might be an idea to learn more…” Molly said.
We sat there in silence as we finished our coffees. The truth of it was that I was a slip witch, and for my entire life my magic had been a hazard and a problem. I’d sometimes missed weeks at school when I’d Slipped. Molly and Luce had had a slightly better experience, being that they weren’t slip witches, but still the teenage years aren’t kind to anyone with magical powers. They had cast spells in their sleep and struggled with their nature. So it was no surprise that, growing up, the three of us had somewhat shied away from what we truly were. Although none of us would say it out loud, the truth of it was that we behaved most of the time as though we weren’t witches at all. Molly and Luce just wanted to be coffee shop owners with handsome boyfriends, and I’d wanted to be a journalist with my builder boyfriend. The magic that flowed around us and within us often felt like a curse.
We drove back to the mansion after that, had showers and then rushed back out to the Chili Challenge warehouse. Molly and Luce had a little time before they had to go to work at Traveler. Since their business had come back, they had managed to rehire Alex, Isabella and Julie, their three teenage staff members who had unfortunately, after the coffee machine had been stolen, lost their jobs.
“There are only twenty bottles of this Death Tombstone sauce left,” Luce said, yelling out across the warehouse.
“We’re down to sixteen cowboy hats now,” Molly said.
I grabbed the clipboard and made a note. We’d been packing orders as fast as we could, and to me it looked like we had about three more days before we’d run completely out of ingredients and the whole thing would have to be shut down.
Luce’s phone rang and she answered it.
“What happened? Oh my goddess, is he okay?” she asked.
Whoever it was shouted something and then Luce hung up.
“We need to go. Alex just lost an eyebrow. I told him to watch it when he’s making a macchiato,” she said.
“We really need to stop selling those,” Molly said.
; They said goodbye and left quickly, heading off to Traveler to assess the damage. I continued packing orders alone, feeling my legs and knees protesting somewhat from the exercise in the morning and my shoulder still slightly aching. I got another hour done before Adams turned up out of nowhere and started rolling around in the dust on the warehouse floor.
“Do you think I could have some more tuna? You know, considering how I saved everyone’s lives?” he asked.
I took a break to scratch him under the chin and ruffle up his fur. Since Adams had torn Slink, the magical entity who was behind all the thefts around Harlot Bay, to pieces, we’d gone through a period where we’d all been very grateful and had rewarded him with excessive amounts of tuna and cheese, and also that special milk that’s designed for cats that has no lactose in it. Then, of course, we’d exited that afterglow, but he’d kept reminding us that he’d saved our lives and surely that was worth many cans of tuna.
“There’s only so long that you can ride that train, you know,” I reminded him.
“I’m thinking twenty years,” Adams murmured, purring and rolling over again in the dust.
“I’ll get you another can when we get home,” I said.
“Do you think I’m going to be able to get a security camera soon?” he asked. I felt a tiny sinking feeling in my stomach. Back when all the thefts were happening, Adams had told me repeatedly that things he’d loved had been stolen, but I hadn’t really believed him, thinking it was just a game or him playing around. He’d eventually requested a security camera, and in a moment of weakness I had shaken his paw, agreeing to get it for him. Then I’d realized it wasn’t really a good idea to put a security camera up in a house where witches lived. I was suddenly feeling like I had a child I’d made a promise to but now I couldn’t keep that promise because it had been a bad idea.