by Tess Lake
So there I sat for half an hour, urging myself to go in but not moving a muscle. I might have sat there for another hour, but then I saw a car driving down the street towards me, and as it approached and passed I saw Hilda behind the wheel.
The car was certainly new looking, very shiny and black. I tried to start my car and it grumbled and groaned. I knew that Hilda must be under the control of a spell and slipping into a fugue state.
It took a few minutes for my car to get going and by the time it did, Hilda was a distant dot down at the end of the street. Thankfully, she was traveling rather slowly, so by the time I got going, I managed to catch her just as she turned the corner. We drove into town as I fumbled for my phone and then managed to call Sheriff Hardy. I got Mary instead. I guess he’d diverted my call from him to her so it looked a lot more official.
“Tell Sheriff Hardy that Hilda Osborne has stolen a car from Sunny Days Manor. I’m currently following her. We’re in the middle of town at the moment, passing the end of Main Street,” I told Mary. Mary told me to hold on, but a moment later the phone cut out as the signal dropped.
I followed Hilda around another corner and this time I called Eve.
“Hello?”
“Eve, your grandmother has stolen a car and she’s in the middle of town. I’m following her right now,” I blurted out.
“Is she okay?” Eve said.
“So far she is. She’s driving very slow.”
“I’m driving into town, stay on the line,” Eve said.
But it was not to be so—the temperamental telecommunications of Harlot Bay cut off that call too. We turned another corner, and suddenly the black car shot away from me as though it was attached to a rocket. I hit the accelerator, but my car was no match for the one Hilda was driving. She hit the end of the street, and in the distance I saw her skid around it, black smoke rising up from the tires as she took the corner at high speed. By the time I got there, all I could hear was the fading sound of a high-performance engine echoing. I had no idea which direction she’d gone.
I pulled over and checked to be sure no one was watching before casting a finding spell. Finding spells work best when you have something the person owned, or a photograph. I didn’t have either of those. So I just concentrated on my memory of Hilda, seeing the lines of her face, the color of her eyes, the way she moved around her kitchen.
A golden ball of light appeared in my hand as I whispered, “Find.” The tug of it was strong, like I’d suddenly hauled incredibly heavy luggage up three flights of stairs. But then the ball of light just sat in my palm. I let it go, trying to get it to drift up in the air to follow Hilda, but it just hung there like a decoration on a Christmas tree. I let the spell go and the light dissipated harmlessly. So that was a dead end. Whatever was happening with Hilda was also preventing me from finding her. I racked my brains trying to think where Hilda would go. Out to the old lighthouse? I thought not. We were on the wrong side of town for that.
If she’d gone off to collect some more spell ingredients, then I had no idea where she was going.
“The cemetery,” I whispered to myself as a sudden idea struck me. Lacking any better leads, I drove over to the Harlot Bay cemetery, missing a call from Eve on my way. She called me, but then I fumbled the phone and it fell to the floor and slid under the passenger seat. I stopped outside the cemetery and got out, finding that Eve had left me a message. I went to call her back, but again telecommunications weren’t cooperating.
When I got out of my car, I looked around to see if I could spot the black car Hilda had stolen. It was nowhere in sight. The day was growing warmer, the sky blue and the sun shining down, and as I walked up through the cemetery gates, birds chirped to themselves in the trees. The Harlot Bay cemetery is quite large, with neat lines of graves, some with tiny headstones weathered away and others that are tombs decorated with photographs of the deceased and piles of flowers.
I made my way through the cemetery, hearing the gravel crunch under my feet, heading towards the direction of the unmarked graves in the back corner. I expected I’d feel sadness walking through the cemetery, the sadness of others who had come to bury their loved ones, but there was mostly a kind of peace here. I soon left the marked graves and found the rows upon rows of unmarked graves. Somewhere in here were Torrent witches and also Stern witches, buried long ago. Here and there, there was actually the odd marker, small steel plaques where people trawling through historical records had found somebody and marked the spot where they were buried. It was a comforting idea at least that even if we couldn’t recover the files that had been stolen, there must be other ones out there somewhere. Although I still had no idea what anyone would want with the graves.
I don’t know what I was expecting, perhaps to find Hilda with a blank stare, a magic mark on her, and a shovel digging into the dirt. But that certainly wasn’t the case. I was alone at the cemetery. I wandered down the aisles looking around, seeing if by chance I would feel something in the magic, perhaps to indicate where a witch was buried. Once I finished marching the rows, I started walking back out of the cemetery. My phone rang when I was at the gate. It was Sheriff Hardy.
“We found the car, Harlow, but we can’t locate Hilda,” he said.
“Where was it? Are there abandoned houses over there? Maybe she’s in one of them.”
“It was out at the lighthouse parking lot. But we haven’t—” Someone interrupted Sheriff Hardy, and I heard muffling as he put his hand over the phone to talk with them. He was back a moment later and gave a weary sigh.
“We just found her clothing on the beach. We think she may have gone into the ocean,” he said.
I felt sick, first at the idea that some witch had done this to Hilda, and then next that I’d dismissed the lighthouse so quickly. If I’d gone out there, I would have found her and perhaps I could’ve stopped her from going into the ocean.
“You need to talk to your family about this because it’s getting out of hand,” Sheriff Hardy said.
“I will. I’m sure we’ll find her,” I said, although I knew no such thing. Sheriff Hardy hung up and I was left standing there at the entrance of the Harlot Bay cemetery, somewhat in shock.
My phone rang in my hand. It was Eve. I took a deep breath and prepared myself for a very bad conversation.
Chapter 17
Big Pie Bakery was packed with customers, mostly locals celebrating the reopening. This was an incredibly good sign, and under other circumstances I would have been ecstatically happy, but all I could imagine was Hilda taking slow strokes as she swam out into the ocean, moving even farther from the shore. The moms were cooking like crazy in the kitchen and then rushing out to help at the front counter. It was blazing hot in the back room, the air-conditioning unit up on the wall apparently not working on day one, and the moms were all red-faced and sweating.
“Okay, good, Harlow, you’re here, you can help us,” Mom said.
“I need to talk to you guys for a minute, it’s really serious,” I said.
“And we have a lot of customers to serve, so could we do that first?” Aunt Ro said without looking at me. Then she turned and must have seen my face. She put down the tray of cookies on the counter and rushed over to give me a hug. Mom and Aunt Freya stopped what they were doing and joined Aunt Ro. For a moment we stood there in the blazing-hot kitchen, me being hugged by the moms.
“Let’s go into the pantry, it’s cooler,” Mom said in a soft voice.
We went out to the pantry, and Aunt Freya closed the door, shutting off the noise of the customers out in front. Inside it was somewhat cooler, but it was a bit smaller than the old pantry at the original Big Pie Bakery, so we were somewhat crowded.
Mom sat me down on a stack of sacks of flour.
“What happened, darling?” Mom asked.
I could hear the hubbub of customers waiting for their food, so I went through it as quickly as I could. Hilda buying spell ingredients, Hilda going missing, her clothes found on the be
ach, me finding the magic marks on Wolfram Dole and Arlan who had leaped from the lighthouse.
“There’s also a whole heap of stuff going on with Sylvester Coldwell, and I think he’s trying to run the Sunny Days Manor into the ground, but I think that might be a completely separate thing,” I finished with.
There was a moment of silence before Aunt Freya touched me on the arm.
“Some witches don’t want to go when it’s their time. It sounds to me like it’s a witch trying to find a new body,” she said.
“Hilda is probably still alive,” Aunt Ro said.
“Why do you think that?” I asked.
“She’s been collecting spell ingredients, and witches who do this sort of thing like to keep using the same person as much as possible. It gets easier every time. So I doubt she swam her into the ocean just to get rid of her.”
“Do you think we could track her?” Mom asked.
“Harlow’s finding spell didn’t work, and if she’s powerful enough to influence multiple people, then I don’t think we’re going to be able to find her. We need Aunt Cass,” Aunt Ro said.
“Witches can take over bodies?” I asked.
“Of course they can, Harlow. How have you been doing with your ingredient collection?” Mom asked.
“I bought a lot yesterday, and Hattie gave me this jar of stuff as well.” Luckily I had all the ingredients still sitting in my car, so the moms instructed me to go out and get them. I saw the two counter staff give me a desperate look as they saw me coming back in, but the moms were still standing in the pantry talking amongst themselves. I handed over the bag of herbs and then the jar that Hattie had given me. Then I got to see three witches looking very surprised.
“Hattie gave you this?” Aunt Ro said after a moment.
“Yes, I went to visit her. She said I should give it to you.”
“This is the hardest part of the spell. You have to brew up this and it takes about three weeks. Now that it’s done, we could probably cast the spell tonight,” Mom said.
Aunt Freya and Aunt Ro were looking through the bags of herbs.
“We still need the flower out on Truer Island, the blue one with the white dots,” Aunt Freya said.
Aunt Ro immediately called Molly to ask where she and Luce were and then hung up just as quick.
“They’re at Traveler doing nothing, so you need to go there, grab your cousins and go to Truer Island. In any large field where there’s a lot of grass, look around for a blue flower with four petals, a white dot on each one. We need at least ten flowers, so collect a lot more than that and then come home,” Aunt Ro said.
“Um, okay,” I said, still feeling somewhat stunned at the idea that a witch could take someone’s body. I don’t know what I was expecting, exactly. I thought at least if I told the moms I would feel better, and perhaps they might have some ideas, but it seemed they knew exactly what the problem might be, and now that we had the silver liquid from Hattie, we could move up the timetable for unfreezing Aunt Cass to tonight. I’d come in shocked and off-balance, feeling lost, but now it looked like, if everything went according to plan, I might actually be able to talk to Aunt Cass about this soon. The moms packed away the spell ingredients into an empty flour sack and then shooed me out of there, telling me to get going because time was of the essence.
I drove over to Traveler to find the door locked with the closed sign up. I rapped on it, and then Molly came and opened the door for me. I stepped inside the cool dark to find my cousins playing yet another game of Monopoly against Kira Stern, who was thus far the reigning champion.
“What’s up, H-bomb?” Kira said. She had a slim booklet in her hands which she was paging through.
“About a million things,” I said.
“Do any of them have to do with why my mom called to ask me where we were and then hung up without saying goodbye?” Molly asked.
I’d just given the summarized version to the moms, so I went and grabbed a large drink of cold water and laid out the story again for Molly, Luce and Kira. I’m pretty sure Kira was listening, but she didn’t take her eyes off the booklet in her hands as she read through it. By the time I reached the end, my cousins were sitting there in the booth, their eyes wide open, somewhat stunned.
“A witch can take someone’s body?” Luce stammered.
“You went into the morgue by yourself?” Molly said.
“Don’t worry about that. We need to get out to Truer Island pronto,” Kira said. She rushed us out of Traveler, and soon we were down at the pier, making it to the ferry a few minutes before it took off for its quick trip across to Truer Island. Molly and Luce were talking in the front seat, both of them far off the deep end, and I was in the back with Kira. She was absorbed in the small booklet again.
“What is that you’re reading? I didn’t know the kids of today were aware of what a ‘book’ is.”
“Word on the street is that there’s a production of The Taming of the Shrew coming up. I’m thinking of auditioning,” Kira said.
“Where’d that word on the street come from?” I asked.
“My tongue will tell the anger of my heart, or else my heart concealing it will break,” Kira said, reading a line from the play.
“Translation?”
“I think they’re saying they need to say what they are angry about because if they keep hiding it, it’s gonna break their heart,” Kira said.
There was something comforting about the trip out to Truer Island, even hearing my cousins in the front seat going over a thousand crazy hypotheses. I looked out the window of the car a few times, out into the ocean, wondering what I would do if I saw Hilda swimming around.
We drove off the ferry with the meager gathering of tourists who were around at this time of year and out onto Truer Island. We had no precise location to go to, so we just drove around the island until we spotted a large green field of grass with flowers and weeds everywhere. It wasn’t long before the four of us were slowly walking around, trying to find a small blue flower with a white dot on the petal.
“I think I’m going to have to tell Ollie soon,” Molly said out of nowhere.
“Marry, peace it bodes, and love, and quiet life, and awful rule and right supremacy, and, to be short, what not that’s sweet and happy?” Kira called out from a slight distance away.
“Yeah, I get the feeling that he’s discovered some strange things in his research,” I said.
“Does that mean if Ollie found something in those records, we should probably tell the moms that?” Luce said.
“We might have to,” I said, a new problem suddenly appearing.
I hadn’t considered how easy it had been for me to discover the hidden story behind Jake Gottlieb’s life. I’d seen the occasional reference to a Torrent in the papers, but it was always innocuous, such as some land being bought or a business opening. But all those papers were being scanned, and Ollie was reading them a lot more closely than I was. It was entirely possible that someone else might be able to put together a story, and this time they would have it backed up by fact. Even Carter had said to me one time that the papers under the library held every secret Harlot Bay had to tell. I pushed that problem away for the time being and focused on trying to find the flower.
“I guess if you’re going to tell Ollie, I should probably tell Will,” Luce said.
“He is going to propose, so it might be a good idea,” Molly teased.
“Shush on that!” Luce said and stuck her fingers in her ears for a moment.
“Well, you know what they say,” Kira said. “Too much sadness hath congealed your blood, and melancholy is the nurse of frenzy.”
“So helpful,” Luce said and poked Kira in the side.
“The flowers are over here,” Adams said suddenly from behind us.
All four of us squealed in shock and whirled around to find Adams sitting there primly with his tail wrapped around his front paws, looking like a statue from ancient Egypt.
“Adams, what a
re you doing here?” I called out.
“I went to the bakery to get some food, and then your mothers gave me a job,” Adams said with disgust. “The flower is over here, so I’m done now, and I expect to be paid in tuna,” he said.
We rushed over to where he was sitting and found a small plant that had white flowers with blue dots on it. Adams rubbed himself between my legs, but the moment my back was turned, he vanished. We carefully gathered the flowers while Kira continued reading out lines from The Taming of the Shrew. I was feeling pretty good about things once we’d gathered the flowers, the sun shining down on us, when I felt a crackle of magic rush through my body so sudden and sharp I fell over. I sat up tasting stone or dirt in my mouth.
My cousins and Kira gathered around me.
“What happened? Are you okay?” Luce said, reaching out to haul me up off the ground.
Magic was still sizzling in my arms and legs.
“I think I just Slipped,” I said, taking a few deep breaths.
“It’ll be okay, Harlow, you can handle it,” Kira said and grabbed me in a sudden hug. Kira was a slip witch too, one who was still coming to terms with her powers, but unlike me, she’d somewhat embraced her nature and had been training with Aunt Cass to master it. Kira finally let me go, and I looked warily around, seeing if there was any sign of what the slip may have done.
“Is there anything?” Molly asked. I was about to say no, but in the distance I suddenly saw two women on horseback flash into existence.
They were galloping, riding white horses, and even from where we were, I could hear their high-pitched laughter. They thundered along for a few steps before vanishing again.
I groaned to myself and put my hands over my face.
“I think I’m seeing the past again,” I said.
“It’ll be okay, Harlow, because ’tis a very excellent piece of work, Madam Lady. Would it were done,” Kira quoted.