Fabulous Witch

by Tess Lake

  Molly stepped as close to the counter as she dared (the coffee machine had quite a reach and she didn’t want to be injured) and examined the machine closely. It swore in Italian and beeped a few more times before it made a clunking noise and a hopper opened on the top of it. The woman grabbed a bag of coffee beans and tipped them into the top as we watched. Then Luce turned to Molly and me.

  “This isn’t Stefano,” she said.

  “But it looks like him,” Molly said. Her voice was starting to get some life in it, so I assumed the spell was starting to wear off. Luce took her by the arm, and we went outside and started walking towards Traveler. Before we were halfway there, the spell had evaporated and Molly returned to her usual self. We stopped in front of a small bookshop called Book Bank. (It had been an old bank years ago before being transformed into a bookshop. There was still a giant heavy vault somewhere in the back of it.)

  “Are you absolutely sure that’s not our coffee machine?” Molly asked.

  “It’s definitely not. It sounds different, and I bet if I used it, I would know instantly.”

  “Could they have done something to it? Changed the sounds or something like that?”

  “It’s not our machine, Molly. I know they wanted to buy Stefano, so that makes them look like they would be the culprits, but that is definitely not him,” Luce said.

  “If they found another one online, then maybe you can too,” I offered.

  “We don’t have any money,” Molly said.

  “I’m gonna have some money after this movie job ends,” I said.

  “And you’ll be unemployed, is the rest of that sentence. Thanks, but we’re going have to figure this one out ourselves,” Molly said.

  We continued on our way back to Traveler, with Molly now guessing that perhaps the owners of Magic Bean might have arranged to have their coffee machine stolen so as to crush any competition. That meant the plan to dose the various carpenters and workers who had transformed Traveler with truth serum was still viable. After all, it might have been one of them who’d arranged it, or who had perhaps at least been approached. We went back to Traveler, and Luce opened the blinds again before we all sat down in the booth. There was still dirt scattered across the counter from when the plant had broken out of its pot, but no one bothered to clean it up. There were no customers, so there’d be no one to offend.

  “I say we help Aunt Cass with whatever it is she wants and get that truth serum,” Molly said.

  “I thought you said you’d sooner trust a frog in a fly factory, which by the way was a really weird thing to say,” Luce said.

  “I was a little scattered and didn’t have my analogy, metaphor, whatever-it-is thing right. But we need that truth serum, and none of us have any idea how to make it.”

  “I heard Aunt Cass talking to someone about a waiver over the phone the other day. She has a new laptop and I guess she’s running some kind of new business. She wouldn’t tell me what it was, though,” I said.

  “She’s working out of the office, right? Why don’t you go up there and find out what it is, if you can, so we don’t end up doing something completely insane?” Molly said. My cousins clearly saw the look of concern on my face at this idea. Aunt Cass was not to be trifled with and was very willing to curse anyone who got in the way. Since she had cursed Molly to say only good things about her and nearly driven her mad, Molly had been apparently working on a plan to get back at her, apparently taking the position that the longer the revenge took, the more satisfying it would be when it took place.

  “Don’t be a chicken,” Luce said.

  “I’m not a chicken. I like my eyebrows where they are and not growing out of the backs of my hands,” I said.

  “Does she have the power to do that?” Luce mused.

  “We need your help, Harlow. In return we’ll help you with that ghost,” Molly said.

  “I doubt anyone can help with that ghost,” I said. I’d suspected that Mattias might’ve been behind the car accident, but when I’d talked to Aunt Cass about it she’d said it was highly unlikely. A ghost might be able to break a coffee cup or even the lens of the camera, but the only way Mattias would have been able to sabotage a car would be if he’d transformed into pretty much a pure force of malevolent energy. And if that had happened, we would definitely have noticed. Still, I couldn’t let go of the idea that perhaps he was somehow responsible.

  “Okay, fine, I’ll have a look, but I’m not gonna snoop if there’s a chance of getting caught,” I said. That was good enough for Molly and Luce, who returned to planning how they could get all the builders and carpenters together to dose them. I went outside and drove myself over to my office, only to find a pretty brunette in a short skirt and a low-cut top loitering out front.

  I walked up to her and looked her up and down.

  “Are you waiting to see Jonas?” I asked.

  “No, I’m… waiting for a friend,” the girl said. She pulled out a phone and looked at it as though she could will me away by not looking at me.

  “It’s okay, you can go in and ask him out if you want,” I said.

  “Do you know him?”

  “I work upstairs.”

  She stepped forward and grabbed my arm, beaming at me.

  “Could you introduce us?” she asked. This close up, her perfume was almost overwhelming.

  “I’m sorry, I’m busy right now. But seriously, if you want to talk to him, go in,” I said. I disentangled myself and went through the front door and up the stairs to my office.

  Aunt Cass wasn’t in my office, but clearly something had been afoot. There were boxes piled up all over the floors and on every available surface. Some of the boxes had Arabic writing printed all over them and what were clearly severe warning signs.

  I knew there were spells you could cast that would alert you if someone broke into your house or touched something you owned. They were virtually undetectable, so I wouldn’t be able to be sure if Aunt Cass had cast any such spell on these boxes. I decided to risk it and open a few. She was one of the biggest snoops in our family, and although she might get annoyed at me, she also admired people who took the initiative and did whatever they wanted.

  I opened the box and discovered it was full of bottles of chili pepper hot sauce. The label featured a red-faced man wearing a turban with steam coming out of his ears and fire coming out of his mouth. There was no English on the label. Another box contained baby wipes, the type you use when changing a diaper. I kept searching until I eventually came upon a box full of cowboy hats. I picked one up and felt the comforting weight of it. The label on the inside said Made in China. I dropped it back in the box and closed it up again before continuing to open boxes. I eventually found another box that was full of stopwatches.

  Okay, so this was getting weird. What kind of business was Aunt Cass running? Was it a business at all? She had hot sauce, baby wipes, cowboy hats and… stopwatches.

  I was starting to form a mental image that was very strange indeed. Still, as far as I could tell she wasn’t doing anything illegal.

  I messaged Molly and Luce that I’d found chili sauce, baby wipes, stopwatches and cowboy hats but nothing else.

  Molly called me a minute later to ask if I was joking, but I swore I was telling the truth.

  “Okay, well, I guess we’re gonna find out what it is once we get into it,” Molly said before hanging up. I made sure to seal up all the boxes and move everything back into place before locking up my office and leaving. Filming was resuming today, and I wanted to talk to some of the safety guys on set if I could. Although it was highly unlikely that Mattias had anything to do with the car crashing, I had to know for myself.

  Chapter 8

  “It looks deliberate to me,” Benton said.

  “What?” I said.

  Benton, one of the set’s main safety advisors, had pulled me into a small unoccupied office on set the moment I’d asked him about Kaylee and the car accident, closing the door behind us. I’d expect
ed him to give me an update on her and maybe tell me something like they weren’t quite sure how the accident had occurred or give some other reasonable explanation, so I was surprised to find him outright saying that the crash had been deliberate.

  “There was damage to the brake lines, so fluid drained out. No one noticed because we pushed the car into position rather than drove it. If you were feeling charitable, you would say that the damage to the brake lines may have occurred during transit, but I don’t think so. There’s a saboteur on set.”

  “But… but… have you reported it to the police? Kaylee could have been killed.”

  “This kind of thing has happened before. Sometimes the fights between these movie studios can go way off the deep end. We can’t call the police in because then we risk the shoot being closed down while they investigate. The way this whole thing works is that it’s like a balancing act, riding on the edge of a knife blade. Too many delays, too many breaks in production, and the whole thing will collapse.”

  I really couldn’t believe what I was hearing. The safety advisor suspected sabotage, but they weren’t going to get the police to investigate? I guessed I could understand the logic that any delay would risk the entire production, but given that Kaylee could’ve been killed, it seemed a terrible risk to take.

  “Mattias Matterhorn died a few days ago, though. And now this? Doesn’t that seem a little suspicious to you?” I asked.

  “I thought that was natural causes. You know he was an overweight guy with a drinking problem. This sounds really serious, but you need to trust me, I’m on top of it. I’m personally inspecting every single stunt and every piece of equipment myself before anything happens. I’ve made sure that the report records the damage to the brake lines as accidental so the saboteur has no idea that we’re onto them. If we can catch them in the act, then we can get them arrested and sent to jail for the rest of their life.”

  All I could do was shake my head in dismay. Benton seemed so calm and unruffled it was hard to believe we were talking about the literal sabotage of a car’s brake lines that had resulted in a stuntwoman driving it directly into a brick wall.

  “How is Kaylee, anyway?”

  “Broken arm, broken collarbone, broken nose, two black eyes, plenty of scratches and bruises, but she’s fine. She’s a stuntwoman, so she’s already had something like twenty surgeries in her life.”

  Although Benton seemed convinced it was sabotage, I had to get more information to find out whether the ghost of Mattias Matterhorn could be behind it.

  “Can you describe the damage to the brake lines?” I asked.

  Benton sort of half-smiled at me and then shook his head.

  “I like you, Harlow, and I know you’re a journalist in your real life, but I can’t really tell you much more, and I definitely can’t go on the record about this. I know to people on the outside of film, this sounds insane. You think we should call the police immediately, get a full investigation done, get to the bottom of it, but that’s not how the movie business works. There are a thousand egos competing on this film, each with their own agenda. It’s not outside the realm of possibility that the sabotage was caused by one of them, perhaps to get extra attention for the film or for some other reason. Trust me, I’m not going to let anyone else get injured or killed. I have to ask you not to interfere, and don’t talk to anyone about it. If whoever it is does it again, I want to have a chance at catching them.”

  I mumbled agreement, and then the radio on Benton’s hip crackled something at him and he had to go. He left me alone in the small office, trying to gather my thoughts. All I had to go on so far was seeing Mattias standing across from me at the site of the car accident, looking gleeful. If it was him who’d caused it, I would have to step up my game to make him move on or get Aunt Cass and the moms involved to see if we could find some way to move Mattias as far away from the film set as possible.

  Today, filming was mostly going on inside the warehouses where various sets had been constructed. That meant apart from the security guards, most people would be inside. It gave me the perfect opportunity to sneak into Mattias’s trailer and see if I could find him or the object that he was bound to.

  I stretched, loosening myself up. Before I could go snooping, I had to make sure that I could cast a conceal spell if I needed to. After knocking Molly into sleep earlier today, I had a feeling that when I’d slipped, some other things had changed too. That was one of the main problems of being a slip witch – sometimes even if you knew the right spell to cast, you might not be able to cast it. It could fail entirely, be ten times as strong, or malfunction and do something else. I took a deep breath and then cast a concealment spell. The magic responded, but only weakly, and I let it go.

  Oh, great, I had about five seconds of concealment before I’d become exhausted. After I let the spell go, I felt the currents high above me swirl around. It seemed my ability to influence the weather was becoming stronger. That didn’t bode well for the film or me. If I started causing storms everywhere I went, I might have to quit my job on set and stay at home until it passed.

  I was about to head out for some snooping when Mom called.

  “Making cowboy hats, I don’t know why it’s on there. Oh, Harlow, about time you answered,” she said.

  As usual, she was already in the middle of a conversation when she called me. My ears pricked up at the mention of cowboy hats. Had Aunt Cass been using someone else’s credit card again?

  “Why are you talking about cowboy hats?” I asked.

  “Some business has been calling us, trying to bid for a contract or something. They were from France and I couldn’t understand what they wanted.”

  Hmm… so Aunt Cass was requesting companies to bid for the contract to supply a large number of cowboy hats? What could she possibly be up to?

  “I can’t talk about that now. We’re having a family dinner tonight and I want you to bring Jack, okay?” she said.

  We hadn’t had a family dinner in quite a while due to the guests staying in Torrent Mansion. Although it was supposed to be a bed-and-breakfast, it had somehow transformed into dinner, bed and breakfast. Guests would come down from their rooms to join us for dinner, which meant that most of the time people were on their best behavior and sniping and snarking was kept to a minimum. Given that the guests were our main source of income, even Aunt Cass had changed her tune, although she still treated every traveler as though they were a potential serial killer stopping over between murders. Despite the fact that there would be guests there and everyone would probably be on somewhat good behavior, though, I wasn’t ready to bring Jack along to a family dinner as my somewhat official boyfriend.

  “Can’t do it, already have plans,” I lied.

  “Can do it, your plans are coming to dinner, see you there,” Mom said.

  “You can’t spring these things on me! I need some warning!”

  “We have an amazing surprise, and I guarantee you’re going to like it. So make sure you’re at dinner and bring Jack,” Mom said and then hung up.

  I scowled with frustration at my phone. Last time there had been a big surprise, it had been the announcement that we were all going into the pirate parade in the middle of summer. Sure, that one had worked out well, Jack arranging with the moms to swing down off the back of the pirate ship dressed as Blackbeard, but previous surprises have been somewhat extreme. The moms had once enrolled us to compete in the Gold Mud Run, a serious endurance event out on Truer Island.

  I racked my brains to remember if there were any marathons, beach walks, pie-eating competitions, or anything else going on in Harlot Bay that they might have roped us into. I knew there was an upcoming baking competition, but I was fairly sure that wasn’t the big surprise. I gave Luce a call, but when she answered the phone she was whispering.

  “Have you been invited to dinner tonight?” I asked.

  “Yes,” Luce whispered.

  “What’s going on?” I asked.

  “We’r
e doing surveillance, can’t talk, I’ll tell you about it later,” Luce said so softly I could barely hear her.

  “Please tell me it’s not surveillance on the people Molly thinks stole the coffee machine,” I said.

  There was silence. Although all three of us were accomplished liars, there were times Luce couldn’t do it, and when that happened, she would go silent.

  “I knew it! Don’t do anything crazy,” I said.

  “It’s only crazy if you get caught,” Molly whispered over the phone. Then they hung up on me.

  I closed my eyes and took another deep breath, willing a calmness that seemed out of reach to come over me. I fully accepted that Molly and Luce had every right to try to track down their stolen coffee machine, and honestly, giving a truth serum to the people who had renovated Traveler wasn’t the worst idea in the world. But Molly had a tendency to go crazy sometimes and then Luce would follow right along. One time in high school, Molly thought a girl was after her boyfriend, so she convinced Luce to help her cast a spell on the girl. They hit her with explosive diarrhea right in the middle of our high school talent show. It had been an incredible disaster of epic proportions and then the spell had expanded outwards, hitting other members of the band sitting around her. Within a few seconds, ten kids onstage had explosive diarrhea.

  They had to have the stage steam-cleaned after that, but it never did quite smell right up there ever again.

  Later on, Molly found out that the girl wasn’t after her boyfriend, but it was him who was interested in her.

  I could only hope that Molly and Luce weren’t going to hit anyone else with a spell that went out of control. Given what had happened to the plant yesterday, I was sure something bad was going to happen.

  After a few minutes of breathing and feeling the air currents high above me swirling around, threatening to pull a storm into existence, I managed to center myself. Whatever Molly and Luce did was their business, and I didn’t have to worry about it. If there was an actual saboteur on set, Benton was looking into it. My only worry right now was dealing with Mattias Matterhorn. He’d said that he’d studied his script intensively, so that seemed a good place to look for the object that he was tied to. Hopefully while I was looking in his trailer, I might come across the ghost himself.