by Tess Lake
The conversation this morning had gone all over the place, ranging from the map of Truer Island we’d found under the house to the supernatural teenagers to Aunt Cass and Kira and what we should do about any of these problems, if anything. I was still very much in a “don’t get involved” frame of mind. I decided that going out to Truer Island to find the spot on the map might be something worthwhile, or it could be nothing. For all we knew, some witch in the past had buried something precious to her and we’d get out there simply to find an old locket or a bracelet or something like that.
The thing I was concerned about was whether we could retrieve Molly and Luce’s stolen coffee machine. For a brief period of time, they’d been making money hand over fist, and that was exactly what they and this family needed. If we could recover their coffee machine, it would go a long way to helping the family out of the collective poverty that we’d slipped into. It was especially important now during the town’s off-season. With the bakery burned down and home deliveries dropping to a trickle, the moms’ only source of money was the Torrent Mansion bed and breakfast, but thus far, guests had been scarce. Although it was somewhat warmer in Harlot Bay than other places in the country, and tourists did come here during winter, the fact was that this part of the year was mostly a dead spot and you had to hope you had enough money saved up from the summer and fall to get you through.
So, despite my desire not to get involved, I was definitely going to get involved in this.
“And how exactly are we going to infiltrate teenage culture?” I asked.
“We’ll find a party out on Truer Island. I’m sure we can find it ourselves, and if we can’t, Kira can help us,” Luce said.
“Okay, but… I’m still going to tell Sheriff Hardy that I think it’s teenagers stealing all the stuff. Maybe he can arrest them and we’ll get all our stuff back,” I said.
Molly and Luce didn’t necessarily agree, but they understood my reasons for wanting to tell Sheriff Hardy. As far as we knew, Aunt Ro hadn’t revealed to him that she was a witch or that she was from a family of witches. There were a lot of rumors around town, and we were fairly sure he thought there was something strange about our family. For a long time, we’d been playing the he-knows-we-know game, and Sheriff Hardy often called me to consult on some of the stranger cases. Since my online newspaper, the Harlot Bay Reader, had been shrinking down to nothing, it seemed he had less and less reason to call me as simply a member of the press that he was talking with.
We discussed our plans a bit longer as Molly and Luce got ready to head into Traveler for the day. Luce was going to sound Kira out to find out where the parties were being held closer to the weekend. With Christmas approaching in under two weeks, we had to pick a date when we would travel out to Truer Island to check the map location, but it would be heavily dependent on the weather. Thanks to the magical confluence above Harlot Bay, the weather was a little bit screwy and that meant in all directions all at once. It could be warm over on the Harlot Bay side of the water, but then you’d get to Truer Island and it could be snowing. So we put the trip to Truer Island on the back burner for the time being.
Soon Molly and Luce headed off to work and I got myself ready for my day as well. I was starting work with Ollie today under the library, sorting and cataloging papers, so it meant I had a little time in the morning to see Sheriff Hardy. I fed Adams and then went outside into the cold grey day and drove into town. It was kind of nice driving through Harlot Bay in the middle of winter. All the tourist traffic was gone and the streets felt empty and clean. Most of the locals stayed home during this kind of cold weather. I did see Hattie Stern marching along one of the streets, wrapped in a thick coat and gritting her teeth as the cold wind cut into her. She didn’t even glance up as I drove by, and I was happy to ignore her too.
I arrived at the police station and went inside. Immediately I had to strip off my coat because someone inside had turned the thermostat up to extremely high. I greeted Mary, the receptionist, and she told me to wait a moment before Sheriff Hardy appeared and nodded at me to follow him back to his office.
It had been a while since I’d been to his office, and it looked like change was still sweeping through the police department. Last time I’d been here, practically every surface had been piled high with bits of paper, and he’d had at least three or four inboxes overflowing. Now he was down to a much more manageable amount. Sheriff Hardy sat down behind his desk and then indicated the chair on the other side. I sat down and smiled at him.
“So, how can I help you, Harlow?” Sheriff Hardy said and then rubbed his eyes as though he was tired.
“I think I have a lead on all the thefts around town,” I told him.
“You mean thefts and murder, don’t you?” he said.
“Murder? Are you talking about the old man who died?”
Sheriff Hardy nodded and then rubbed his face again, trying to wake himself up.
“The deceased’s name was Harold Jackson. He was eighty-one years old, and it appears he surprised some intruders in his home. At first it appeared that the shock caused him to have a heart attack, but since then, the coroner has found some bruising on his body, which indicates he may have been struck, so it has been upgraded to a murder,” Sheriff Hardy said.
Harold Jackson was the man Aunt Cass had said had been scared to death by something that had leapt out of the wall at him. Could it have been the teenagers I had seen? After all, they seemed to be able to open a hole in reality and step through to another location. And the two I’d overheard had discussed murdering an innocent old man in his bed before deciding no, apparently on a whim. I couldn’t tell Sheriff Hardy any of this, though. And I certainly couldn’t explain where Aunt Cass got her information from, so I crafted what I thought was a fairly good lie to explain my source. I slipped into journalist mode.
“That’s terrible news. My source tells me there are at least two teenagers who have been breaking into people’s homes to steal valuables, and they’re not above murdering anyone they find to get what they want,” I said.
“Care to tell me who this source is? So I can speak to them directly?” Sheriff Hardy said out of habit.
“Sorry, I can’t reveal my source. They told me, though, that one of the thefts had taken place over on Palm Tree Way,” I said, skirting possibly a little too close to what happened yesterday.
“Palm Tree Way? We had a report this morning of a break-in over there. Some of the officers are out there investigating right now. Your source seems very well informed,” Sheriff Hardy said.
Normally the sheriff had a bit of a twinkle in his eye, but today he seemed tired and worn out. He rubbed his face again and then pulled open a drawer in his desk and retrieved three pieces of paper. He passed them over the desk to me. The first was a photocopy of an old newspaper clipping from about forty years ago. An old man had been robbed and had died in the process. I shuffled to the next clipping. A man had been found hung from his back porch, things missing from his home. The final clipping detailed an inferno at a house in Harlot Bay where a few young men and a woman had died. The property had burned to the ground, but it appeared that they had been holding a lot of stolen objects in the house before it had been consumed.
I could feel Sheriff Hardy watching me as I read through the articles. What I really wanted to say was: holy cow that’s some kind of supernatural entity! But I couldn’t say that, not at least until Aunt Ro had revealed the truth to him.
“Do you think it’s a copycat?” I said lamely.
“I don’t think it’s natural, and I don’t think you do either. Take the clippings and see what you can find,” Sheriff Hardy said and then stood up. I automatically followed him, now that the meeting was over. He saw me out and then walked back to his office, yawning and rubbing his face. Why was he so tired? Had he been up on all-night surveillance?
The meeting with Sheriff Hardy had taken a little longer than I’d thought and I didn’t want to be late on my first day, so
I quickly drove across to the library, parked across the street and got out of my car in time to find Carter Wilkins in my face, holding a recorder out at me.
“A secret meeting with the sheriff. Harlow, can you tell me what that was about?” he demanded.
Without thinking, and I really do mean I absolutely was not using my brain, I waved my hand at him as though I was swatting a fly, and the recorder died in his hand, the power light blinking out.
“You need to stop doing that, Carter. I’m a journalist, like you, so I go to the police station to get information, to get facts. You remember facts, don’t you?”
“The Harlot Bay Reader is barely a newspaper, and that means you’re barely a journalist,” Carter said, whacking the recorder in his hand, trying to figure out what was wrong with it.
I shook my head at him and started to cross the street before Carter called out to me.
“The thefts have all happened before, you know! I think there’s a serial killer!” he said.
I almost kept walking, very content not to have to look Carter in the face, but if he was investigating, that meant he might have some information that would be useful to me. I had sworn I wasn’t going to get involved, but I couldn’t help myself; I turned around and marched back to where he was standing next to my car.
“Thefts have happened before and some deaths, but why do you think there’s a serial killer?” I asked.
Carter opened his satchel and rummaged around inside until he pulled out three pieces of paper. He handed them to me and I saw they were the three photocopied articles that Sheriff Hardy had given me.
“I’ve already read these,” I said.
“I gave them to the sheriff, and he said he’d look into it, but I’m not sure he’s going to,” Carter said. I handed the papers back to him and he stuffed them into his satchel again.
“Where did you find those, anyway?” I asked.
Carter nodded toward the library.
“The new librarian’s been doing a great job a cataloging all those old papers under the library. I think every secret this town has ever had might be hidden in there,” he said. I checked the time and saw I only had a few minutes until I would definitely be late.
“Well, thanks for the chitchat, but I’ve got to go to work now,” I said.
“You’re working at the library? Is it going to be with all the papers?” Carter asked.
“Yeah, and so what?” I snapped back at him.
“Remember, those papers are all public property. You can’t keep anything for yourself,” Carter warned. I shook my head at him again and resisted the urge to throttle him there in the street.
“Look, I know you made the Harlot Bay Times into what it is now so you could survive, but seriously all of these conspiracy things you’re writing are starting to affect your brain. There are no grand conspiracies, no one is hiding anything from you, and there is virtually no corruption in Harlot Bay, okay?”
“We’ll see about that,” Carter mumbled and walked away, tapping his dead recorder in his hand.
I headed across the street and into the library to find Ollie. One of the librarians directed me downstairs, where I found Ollie covered head to foot in dust and grime, looking like a nineteenth-century chimney sweep, surrounded by mounds of paper.
“Are you ready to get to work, Harlow?” he asked, a happy grin on his face.
“Sure thing, boss,” I said and smiled back at him.
Chapter 8
My new job was dusty and dirty and I absolutely loved it. It was so different from writing articles for the Harlot Bay Reader website. Typing away and then creating a digital article… it didn’t seem as real as what I was doing now. Working under the library it was easy to see progress. Start with a giant stack of papers, end when the stack of papers was gone, sorted into new stacks of papers. It was after lunch and Ollie and I were still going strong sorting papers and making new sub-piles on the fly. We’d found a stack of old land transfer and sale documents that also had birth and death records attached. Ollie was practically jumping for joy when we found this.
“Now we can link a piece of land to the owner!” Ollie said and hugged himself in happiness. I took a break from sorting and opened my drink bottle to wash away some of the dust I had breathed in. I was aware this was only the first day, so maybe I had a biased view of what this job would be like, and perhaps after a month or two of sorting papers I’d be well and truly sick of it, but today it was pretty good.
I’d finished gulping down my water and was about to get back to work when there came the sounds of a commotion up in the library. Someone was arguing at high volume with one of the librarians. It only took me a moment to place the voice. I’d heard it plenty of times at town council meetings—it was Hattie Stern and she was extremely annoyed. The moment I realized it was her, I knew why she was at the library—Ollie’s blog post: ‘Juliet Stern: The Original Harlot of Harlot Bay?’ I turned to Ollie; his hair was sticking up in spikes like he’d been electrocuted, his face covered in grime, as were his clothes.
“Hattie Stern is here because you wrote an article about Juliet Stern, the original harlot. That was her ancestor, and she is going to be very upset with you, so be prepared,” I said in one rush.
“But it’s an ancestor. One of my relatives in the past was a pig thief. He then went to jail for stealing ladies’ underwear. It’s the same with everyone,” Ollie said.
The sounds of commotion came closer, and then Hattie shoved the door open and strode in, her eyes blazing.
“You!” she said, pointing her finger at Ollie.
“Me?” Ollie asked.
To give him credit, he was either incredibly brave or incredibly stupid, because he didn’t flinch one bit. I mean, I guess he didn’t know that Hattie Stern was a powerful witch who could probably curse him five ways from Sunday if she wanted to.
“You will take down that libelous article immediately!” Hattie said, still pointing at Ollie. She hadn’t even looked at me and was clearly pretending I wasn’t even there.
“No, I won’t. It’s a historical fact and I have the proof to back it up,” Ollie replied.
“Lies! It’s all lies. Juliet was slandered by people who hated her and this has slipped into the historical record. But it was a lie then and it’s a lie now,” Hattie said. She finally stopped pointing at Ollie, but you could still feel the waves of anger coming off her.
“But you know it’s true, Hattie,” I said, speaking up and surprising even myself.
Hattie glared at me, and for the first time I felt a ripple in the magic around her. She was incredibly angry and the magic was responding, but she was holding it back behind a wall of iron six feet thick.
“And how do you know it’s the truth? Are you down here digging into the past so the Torrent family can get back at me?” she asked.
Get back at her? What was she talking about?
“Today is my first day on the job. We all know that Juliet Stern was running the Merchant Arms, which was not a drinking establishment. I think you know that too,” I said, trying to transmit information with my gaze such as: you’re a witch, I’m a witch, we know she was a witch, and we know more about her than Ollie does.
But Hattie wasn’t going to let it go.
“It will not stand to have the good name of my ancestor stained this way. I’m going to prove you wrong and then you’re going to retract that article and issue an apology,” Hattie said.
“If there’s more evidence that proves me wrong, then of course I’ll publish it. I only care about the truth. It’s deep in the past. How could it possibly hurt anyone now?” Ollie said, running his grimy fingers through his hair.
“The past can hurt plenty,” Hattie said and then stormed out of there.
“Wow, that was…” Ollie said, trailing off.
“She’s been petitioning to change the name of the town since forever. I guess she always knew that one of her relatives was the original harlot of Harlot Bay, but you’re
the first one ever to put it into print.”
“What did she mean by ‘the past can hurt plenty’?” Ollie asked.
I shrugged and wiped some dirt off the back of my hand. “A lot of the families in Harlot Bay have been here for a very long time. Read enough of the old newspaper clippings and you’ll see the same names popping up over and over again. Kids you go to school with and the names of streets in the town. Have you driven down Torrent Way? I think some people have a lot of pride in their heritage, and to them it’s exciting that they might be related to a pirate or a murderer. But other people take it far too seriously and think that their ancestors say something about them.”
Ollie blew air out between his lips and then looked around the room, which was stacked high with papers and files that stretched back well over a hundred years.
“Well, we’re going be digging up every single piece of paper down here and the next floor below, and I think the people of Harlot Bay need to get ready for that, because there’s a lot of stuff that we’re going to find,” Ollie declared. I looked across the piles of paper and wondered if there was anything in there about the Torrents.
“Don’t worry about Hattie—she is far more bark than bite,” I said. I was betting on Hattie Stern’s nature that she wouldn’t cast a spell on Ollie or do something crazy. But I’d never seen her like that before, not even when she was arguing passionately for changing the name of the town. She seemed truly angry and I hoped it wouldn’t come back on Ollie.
Chapter 9
“I knew you were going to get involved—you couldn’t resist, could you?” Aunt Cass said as she jogged alongside me.
Legs burning, I want to die.
“I’m not getting involved,” I puffed, focusing on the pier in the distance that appeared stuck in place about a million light years away. Ahead of us, Kaylee waved her arms to encourage us to continue following her. If she was to get hit by a meteorite right now, I didn’t think I would mind.