by Tess Lake
Hattie had been right. The magic had left a mark, which meant Wolfram had been under some kind of spell, and it appeared that it eventually killed him. Arlan had been under a spell as well and he’d leaped from the lighthouse. I knew that meant I should probably go straight to Sunny Days Manor, find Hilda and figure out a way I could look at her skin to see if there was a mark on it, but I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. That sensation of being watched was too much, and since I’d left the Sunny Days Manor, I’d felt it on and off every now and again. Even now, standing on the corner feeling that gentle joy, there was that tiny pressure on the back of my head that said, “You are being watched.” I looked around, but I couldn’t see anyone who was in particular watching me.
Once I was feeling better, I got out of there and drove over to Mr. McGregor’s Herbology, figuring that doing something reasonably normal might bring me back to some normality.
Mr. McGregor wasn’t there, but his wife, Carla, was. She seemed to float between two modes, one being a very serious businesswoman who wore suits to work, and the other being a nature-loving herbologist who believed that all the plants of the world could cure every illness and fix every sadness. In that second mode, she wore a lot of flowing silks and bright colors and jangly bracelets. That was the mode she was in today when I walked in. She was standing behind the counter with a set of scales, separating out some dried herbs and packing them into bags. It looked super illegal, but I’m sure they were just standard herbs.
I got out Mom’s list, grabbed a basket, and filled it up. They had about ninety percent of what she needed. The last few things I’d have to go exploring to find, including a particular flower that I think mainly grew out on Truer Island. I took the herbs to the counter, Carla rang them up and I retrieved the money Mom had given me to pay for it.
“You Torrent girls are certainly buying a lot of herbs. I had your cousins in here yesterday,” Carla commented.
“We do love our herbs,” I quipped. Honestly, if you got down to it, you’d think that she and her husband might have realized at some point that the same people came in to buy herbs from her. We weren’t selling poultices or making steeped teas to cure headaches or anything like that. Considering all the odd things that went on in Harlot Bay, I wondered if she suspected anything of us.
“Oh, it’s a very popular time for herbs. Just this morning, I had Hilda Osborne in here buying exactly what you are. Are you making a recipe or something?” she asked. That slight feeling of joy I had from standing on that corner sizzled away.
“Hilda was here buying the same herbs as me?” I croaked.
“She sure was,” Carla said, the very essence of chirpy.
I thanked Carla and said goodbye, and then sort of staggered outside with my herbs in a large paper bag. I knew the reason we were buying those herbs, and it was for a spell, a very powerful one so we could unfreeze Aunt Cass. I also knew that Hilda was no witch, so what was she doing in there buying those herbs? Was there a witch controlling her? Making her do her bidding?
I made my way back to my car and slumped into the driver’s seat. I’d awoken with fire in my belly and a renewed sense of purpose, but now I felt off-balance, toppling over about to fall off the cliff. Should I go to see Hilda right now? I doubted I’d find anything. Whatever was controlling her wouldn’t be so stupid as to just stuff the herbs in the top cupboard where Hilda would find them. Argh, what could I do?
In that moment, my phone chimed again: Jack asking me if I knew anything about what tonight’s family dinner was about. I’d honestly forgotten it was happening, and although such things were oftentimes fraught and prone to chaos, I felt a small amount of hope. If there was time, perhaps I could talk to my family, because right now I was so far out of my depth, so far from the shore, that all I could see around me were giant waves and I could feel myself tiring.
Chapter 15
I kissed Jack on the cheek and slipped into my chair, avoiding Mom’s very pointed look, which, if I had to guess from the angle of her eyebrows, said: You’re late!
Her eyebrows were right, of course. I was late. After leaving Mr. McGregor’s Herbology and sitting in my car for a while, I’d finally taken myself back to my office, figuring the quiet and the familiar environment would give me some time to think. I’d made myself a list, which included Hilda buying herb ingredients, Arlan’s magic mark and Wolfram’s down in the morgue, John Smith with his straw boater and costume, Coldwell possibly running Sunny Days Manor into the ground, and a whole lot more. Many of these things were definitely on the witchy side of the line, and I decided to talk to the moms, given that Aunt Cass was still frozen and unavailable. In the meantime, I’d decided to look into Coldwell and Sunny Days a bit more to see if perhaps I could track down any Rosenthals.
The time had slipped away from me, and before I realized it, the glow of my laptop screen was brighter than the glow outside. I snapped out of my research and realized the sun was nearly down. That meant I was about to be late for dinner. I rushed to my car, and I’d like to say I roared up the hill, making it just in time, but the truth is I chugged up the hill and was very lucky a couple of the lights went my way.
There would be no discussion of witchy matters tonight. Will, Ollie and Sheriff Hardy were at dinner, and even though I had a million things on my mind, I probably wouldn’t be able to discuss non-witchy matters like Coldwell trying to ruin Sunny Days Manor either. I honestly didn’t have a good reason I could give for why I was even investigating such a thing. Everyone in the family knew that my paper was nearly dead and that I was considering a career change, although I had no idea what it was I was going to do. So despite all the swirling questions in my mind, I sat down beside Jack and prepared to eat and forget them all.
“For those who’ve just arrived, as I was saying, we have a very special announcement tonight,” Mom said. Molly filled my wineglass and I took a grateful gulp. “Our new location for Big Pie Bakery is now ready, so we will be reopening tomorrow!”
We all cheered and clinked our glasses together. In that moment I felt a pang of loss and glanced towards Aunt Cass’s empty chair at the head of the dining table. It must’ve been a mutual feeling amongst all of us, because I saw the moms and my cousins do the same. There was a moment of sad silence after that outburst of joy.
“So when will Aunt Cass be coming back?” Ollie asked in a hesitant voice.
“We’re hoping it won’t be long,” Aunt Freya said.
“Although if it was another month, that would be okay,” Molly murmured.
“I mean, would it be the worst thing in the world?” Luce murmured back and then they snickered together. I saw Sheriff Hardy suppress a smile.
The moms must’ve heard them, because suddenly there were glares coming from the other side of the table. But they couldn’t keep it up for too long because Ollie, Will and Jack were there. The moms served out a delicious dinner. There was a triple-layer beef lasagna covered in crispy melting cheese and served with a delicious side salad, bread and plenty of wine. I took about half the amount I normally do, given that it made little sense to be exercising so much and still eating gigantic pieces of lasagna. Beside me, Jack had a whopping piece served to him by Mom that I swear must’ve been about three thousand calories. He plowed into it with gusto.
The conversation floated around a few topics, and mostly we talked about the reopening of Big Pie Bakery. It was an incredibly exciting moment for the moms and our family in general. Since the original Big Pie Bakery had been burnt down, the moms’ bakery business had been in a steady decline. They’d started up home deliveries cooking out of our kitchen, but that only catered to the locals, and eventually the number of them getting their baked goods delivered decreased. None of the tourists knew about it either, and although the moms had done their best to expand their business, for example by supplying bread to one of the local motels, it had been shrinking month by month.
“Do you think you can, Harlow?” Mom asked.
&n
bsp; “What?”
I must’ve been more worn out than I’d realized, because I’d zoned out and was focusing on eating my lasagna and drinking my wine.
“If we need you to do a few shifts, do you think you can help us?”
“Sure, absolutely,” I said.
The moms were well aware of my return to poverty. The movie money I’d received from working on the set of Bella Bing’s film was now a distant memory, the Harlot Bay Reader was bringing in exactly zero dollars a day, and working for the frozen Aunt Cass in the Chili Challenge business was an unpaid position. I was reaching that embarrassing point in my life where I was having to borrow money off the moms just to put gas in my car. You might say at this point that perhaps I should focus on getting a job, but this was Harlot Bay and jobs were hard to come by. Many of the locals lived on that fine line between extreme poverty and slightly less extreme poverty. Tourist season brought in a lot of money, but then you had to carefully hoard it to tide you over for the low season. Mom throwing me a few shifts at the Big Pie Bakery would be her way of giving me some money and also a little dignity too.
Dinner finished up soon enough, the moms bringing out a cake that they had baked in the shape of their new bakery. It was extraordinary, and I took a couple of photos of it with my phone. After eating it, we all went our separate ways, Sheriff Hardy giving Aunt Ro a kiss goodbye and then me, Molly and Luce and our respective boyfriends walking down to our end of the mansion.
I’m just going to come out and say it: a dinner without Aunt Cass was certainly less exciting, but also certainly less prone to turn out to be a catastrophe.
I wisely kept these thoughts to myself. Tonight Molly and Luce would be going with their boyfriends, so Jack, Will and Ollie and I sat in the living room while they grabbed their stuff from their rooms. I was snuggled into Jack, feeling the carbs and cheese in my stomach, and the wine working its magic on me.
Just as Molly and Luce returned, Ollie sort of awkwardly cleared his throat and looked at me.
“Um, Harlow, can I tell you something? It’s about those files,” he said.
I was very sleepy and relaxed, but still, I felt that distant tingle of anxiety.
“Sure, you can tell me now or at work, whatever you prefer,” I said.
“Okay, well, I didn’t want to mention it at dinner in case it upset your moms and the sheriff. The box of files that Sheriff Hardy found were burial records for the Harlot Bay cemetery. There’s a whole section where there are bodies buried but there are no headstones, and we only have the general locations. I’ve seen other records like this in the past. There was a caretaker who was very meticulous. He always used the same method to label his files to distinguish which bodies were where. So when I was looking through the files, it was easy for me to see what was missing,” Ollie said.
“Tell us, darling, because we need to go,” Molly said sweetly.
“The missing files are Torrent and Stern. They’re burial records for your family and also the Stern family. They would tell you where the bodies of some of your ancestors were buried,” he said.
Let’s just pause for a moment to quickly discuss what happens when a witch dies. Most of the time, witches prefer to be put into the ground, no coffin, so we can dissolve back into the earth. This is the way it’s been for many years, and up around the back of Torrent Mansion, in the forest, there are the remnants of a small cemetery. Despite witches being very prideful, we’re not much interested in headstones, and so although there are graves back there, there are no markers to indicate who is in them. At some point in the past, however, we stopped being able to bury our family members on our own land, and so reluctantly witches have been buried in the local cemetery.
I’d sort of known in a vague way in the back of my mind that there were distant family members buried in the local cemetery in town, but it was one of those things you know but never really had anything to do with the information. Now that it appeared someone had stolen the files specifically related to where Torrent and Stern witches were buried, I was getting a very uneasy feeling indeed. I do say someone, because I’d come to believe that the image on the footage Sheriff Hardy had caught in his office was of someone else pretending to be Aunt Cass. There was no way I could believe that our frozen aunt would be stealing a file at the same moment that Arlan jumped off the tower of the lighthouse.
“That’s unusual,” I finally managed to say, lacking anything else I could put into words.
I kind of hoped that that would put an end to it; that Molly and Luce would take their boyfriends away and I could spend the rest of the night with Jack, unloading everything I knew. But Luce was always ready to jump into the deep end.
“I bet you it’s grave robbers,” she said. Molly and I both gave her a look, but she was already too far gone.
“Someone stole those files so they could find the bodies and dig them up for some nefarious purpose,” Luce said.
“But why would anyone dig up bodies?” I asked.
That snapped her out of it. Will and Ollie still didn’t know that we were witches, and there was certainly no explanation she could give for why she would leap immediately to grave robbers.
“It’s a hypothesis. Okay, let’s go, honey,” Luce said. She grabbed Will and hauled him out of there.
“It is very mysterious. I’m definitely sure something odd is happening,” Ollie murmured. Molly looked alarmed, but she followed Luce, grabbing Ollie and hauling him out of there.
Soon Jack and I were alone. I nestled into him, enjoying the silence. It was then that Adams came sauntering in and jumped up on an empty chair.
“Can you turn the television on? There’s a documentary about lions,” he asked.
I saw Jack give a double blink. Although Adams had spoken to him many times, it was obviously still incredibly unusual that a cat would suddenly start talking. I turned the television on and put the volume down and Adams settled in to watch his documentary. Jack turned to me and leaned in closer.
“You seem like you have a lot on your mind,” he said in a low tone.
“More than you can imagine,” I sighed. Jack leaned in closer and planted a kiss on my neck just below my ear. I felt heat pluming out from the spot, running down my neck, spreading out to my arms and legs, and down my body.
“Do you want to talk about it, or should we go to bed?” he asked in a whisper, his stubble brushing against me.
I mumbled something, which I guess Jack translated as “Let’s go to bed,” because he pulled me up off the sofa, flung me over his shoulder and carried me out. We went into my room and he closed the door, cutting off the sound of the documentary explaining how lionesses hunt down their prey.
“We can talk if you want,” Jack said, giving me another soft kiss.
“It can wait,” I said dreamily.
Chapter 16
I sat in my car down the road from the Sunny Days Manor for a good half hour, daring myself to go in to see Hilda. That morning over a very slow breakfast, I’d told Jack almost everything. I told him about Hilda buying herbs and finding magical marks on a body. Believe me, it took a lot of bravery to admit to my boyfriend that I’d crept into the morgue under the Harlot Bay Hospital. Every time I introduced another weird and witchy thing, I felt my trepidation growing, but then Jack would just smile and urge me to continue.
Since Christmas, I’d often thought of that moment at the house he’d bought and was renovating. He’d seen extraordinary things, like me throwing a fireball and some black ink monster appearing to him as his half brother Jonas. He’d seen me pull the heat out of the fire, and then beyond that he’d seen a cackling of witches surrounding us, slip witches who had fallen sometime in the past. I’d found him at his house, smashing down walls and renovating, and I’d confessed my true nature to him. And then, in that exquisite moment when I’d thought my life with him was over, he’d made a joke about needing extra space for a cauldron and then he’d kissed me. This moment had come to my mind a few times
this morning, and I knew on a deep-down level that I’d found a very good man indeed.
Despite him being a good man and also wanting to help, he also had a job, and so, although he offered to put it off for a day to come with me, I insisted he go back to work and that I could handle it. Jack told me he was still looking into Coldwell but hadn’t as yet come up with anything new. After he left, I’d gone down to the other end of the mansion to check if any of the moms were around, but given that today was the grand reopening of Big Pie, the house was empty, with only Grandma and Aunt Cass frozen in the basement. So I’d steeled myself to go and check on Hilda to see if she was marked by magic.
I had some vague plan after that to go to the cemetery to see if I could find anything interesting about where the Torrent and Stern witches had been buried. After that I planned to go to the Big Pie Bakery to see if I could catch the moms in a moment where they had any time to talk with me. There were too many magical witchy things going on. Besides that, I had most of the ingredients I needed for Aunt Cass’s spell, including the jar of silvery liquid that Hattie had given me.
Despite the fact I had a list and a plan, none of that helped in the face of the creepy feeling that I was being watched. I was down the road from Sunny Days Manor, hopefully out of view of any cameras that might be set up there. There was a dread in the back of my mind that Coldwell would know that I was snooping around. When Carter Wilkins had been investigating Coldwell in regard to the fires around town, someone had broken into his office and stolen computers. I think that was about the least that Coldwell would do. I shuddered to think what the most was, but I was starting to suspect the man would stop at nothing.