by Mara Webb
“Bye?” I laughed.
“I’m so glad you came to get me, I didn’t know that you knew we were into this sort of thing,” Effie grinned.
“Have I hit my head? Or have neither of you made a lick of sense since you opened your mouths today?” I asked.
There was another knock on the front door; it was Miller this time. He pushed the door open and stopped to see if it was okay to enter. The look on Effie’s face must have given him the impression that he was intruding.
“Sorry, I can wait in another room if you like,” he said. “It’s just baking hot out there, and I know you’ve got AC so…”
“Come on it. Maybe you can decipher whatever Effie is trying to tell me,” I teased.
“Miller, you knew about this peridot thing, right? Didn’t you tell her about the treasure legend?” Effie said.
“Err… I figured it was probably not a great time to bring up a bunch of random Hallow Haven mythology given that we were dealing with a dead b—” he began.
“Yeah yeah,” Effie interrupted. “I don’t want to hear about a death right now, I’m on cloud nine!” It made sense that Effie knew we’d found a body, it seemed to happen everywhere I went.
“You knew about this?” I asked Miller.
“You’re a witch! I figured that maybe you just summoned the stone from someplace, I don’t know. Effie is getting in a flap because if this part of the legend is true then maybe some of the other stuff is true too,” he sighed.
“What other stuff?” I said.
“Water monster!” Effie shrieked. “The physical embodiment of the dangers of the sea! Some people say it might be a giant snake, or a dog with three heads or even just a fat seal. The point is something freaky lives in the waters around Green Holt and it was one of my favorite stories as a kid. It can change the tides and bring ships down to the murky depths and it eats… a lot of fish? I can’t remember all of it.”
“Me having found this mystery green gem is now leading you to believe that there is a giant snake-dog in the water?” I said, my face screwed up in disbelief. “I can’t tell if you’re joking or not.”
“People love a legend, Sadie. How many people go out every year trying to catch a Yeti?” she asked.
“I dunno, two?” I guessed.
“Ha! Try doubling that number,” she scoffed. “I’m talking Loch Ness Monster, I’m talking Big Foot, I’m talking the Kraken, I’m talking Shania Twain,” she said, counting on her fingers as she listed them.
“I’m fairly confident that Shania Twain is real,” I replied.
“Oh yeah? Have you ever seen her in the flesh?” she asked.
“Well, no, but—”
“Exactly!” she declared triumphantly. “If we can get a picture of the creature that lurks in the waters around Green Holt then we could blow people’s minds. We’d have scientists descending on this place in a heartbeat. And what do scientists love? Sandwiches! We sell sandwiches in the café! We’d be millionaires!”
I tried to think if I knew of any millionaires that had made their fortune from sandwiches, but I was struggling. If I was to ignore all the insanity of what Effie was saying, I could just focus on the fact that she and Kate would be going back to Green Holt with us and that we’d all be safer for it. I know I’d feel better knowing they were there.
“This all sounds wonderful, truly, but Miller and I have something to take care of real quick first. Meet us back at the dock and we’ll head over together,” I suggested.
“Oh man, this is like all my birthdays rolled into one!” Effie shrieked before disappearing through the door towards the café.
“They are your second-cousins, so I am holding you responsible for their shenanigans,” I grumbled at Miller.
“I want no part of it,” he laughed.
“Sadie!” a voice called out. I recognized it as my familiar, Fitz. He was winding his little cat body around my legs and purring loudly. “I just heard someone shouting about eating a lot of fish, was that you? I normally don’t indulge in all that much sea food, but I’ll take whatever you’ve got!”
“Fitz, that was Effie. She was talking about the sea monster myth from Green Holt,” I explained.
“Myth? Wash your mouth out young lady,” Fitz gasped. “It is as real as I am.”
“You are a talking cat, Fitz. A cat that can shift into a human. I have very serious doubts about how real you are,” I teased.
“So rude!” he complained.
“We are off to find the mailman,” Miller informed him. “Are you gracing us with your presence today?”
“Yes I am,” Fitz purred. “At least someone recognizes that having me around is a delight.” I shot Miller a look of faux-annoyance and then we left the house, mailman bound.
Frustratingly, the rainstorm hadn’t taken much of the humidity out of the air. I had been hoping for a bit of relief from the weather, but it looked like I was going to be disappointed. Fitz spent the walk from the house whittering about anything and everything as if he didn’t need to pause for air.
“The thing that I don’t like about disaster movies is that it really plays into my pre-existing anxieties about the terrifying power of nature,” Fitz ranted. “You see, I don’t like cold weather, but a lot of them suggest that some big event might lead to the whole hemisphere freezing over. What do I do then?”
“You can stay in cat form and live in your fur coat,” I grumbled.
“So can your boyfriend, but that doesn’t make it any less scary!” Fitz yelled. He had a habit of bringing up the ‘werewolf issue’ more times than anybody else. He even mentioned it more often than Ryder did, which was almost impressive.
“Don’t drag me into this,” Miller laughed. “I like disaster movies. I like the ones with the big meteorites that are charging down at the planet, so the military sends up a big missile.”
“That’s awfully specific,” I smiled. “Do either of you like holiday-based comedy?”
“What?” Fitz scoffed.
“You know the ones, it’s like two random people end up at an office Christmas party or a Thanksgiving parade and fall in love for some reason, but there are a ton of shenanigans. That’s what I’m into,” I explained.
“I’d love to get into that more, but we’re here,” Miller said. We had walked the length of the high street and down towards the lower ground. Now we were faced with our very own, very real disaster.
The main issue with the lower ground was that it flooded when it rained. For some reason this was also the location of the cemetery on the main island, which was why people were now buried in above-ground tombs. Nobody wanted the flood waters to unearth more coffins.
Effie and Kate’s house was also in the lower ground, but it was raised high off the ground on enormous stilts. Something I hadn’t considered asking them was how they got to their house when the surrounding area was underwater, as it currently was.
“Are we supposed to swim to this guy’s place?” I asked. “Or just walk-through rainwater up to our necks?”
I remembered that Kate had built a portal from Pete’s Za, the pizza place she worked at part time, and her house. Maybe the mailman had done something similar? But that had to be a long shot, he might not have any magic at all.
“Looking for a boat?”
I turned to see a familiar face driving down the hill towards us. Wes Conerty. He had driven the bus that had brought me from the island airport to the beach, and also drove a taxi around town. It was as if he had a monopoly on all forms of land transport in Hallow Haven.
“Do you have a boat, Wes?” I asked. His sun-kissed hair fell in curls to his shoulders, one arm hanging out of the window as if he didn’t have a care in the world. He didn’t appear to have a boat with him either.
“You’re looking at it!” he laughed.
“The taxi?” I said, raising an eyebrow suspiciously. He had to be joking, right?
9
I was surprised that Miller had so few questions abo
ut what Wes had just said. I heard one muttering of ‘are you sure?’ before he got into the back seat, Fitz jumping in after him. I was still standing on the sidewalk looking down at the flood waters.
“Guys be serious. That is a car and over there…” I pointed down the hill, “is at least five feet of water! Look at the top of that fence, the whole rest of that fence is submerged. Is that not giving anyone else a good enough reason to think that this car won’t make it? It’s not like driving through a deep puddle, Wes.”
“Come on, Sadie. Have I ever steered you wrong?” Wes smiled. Dang. He had such a quiet confidence about himself that it made it difficult to argue with. He was almost too relaxed.
“No,” I agreed. “But I feel as though you are about to steer us all into a dangerous situation.”
“Sadie, get in the car!” Fitz yelled. “Come on, we don’t have all day! Do you honestly think that Wes hasn’t got a magic car? What planet are you on?” Magic car?
I had to admit that it seemed obvious now Fitz had said it out loud. Wes was from a family of magic, so it made sense that he would have given his taxi a little boost. Despite my initial reservations, I got into the car and closed the door.
“There you go,” Wes smiled. I watched him reach over to the passenger seat and pick up a cassette tape with the words ‘Wet Taxi Jamz’ written on with a permanent marker. I looked over to see if Miller had noticed, he had. The two of us widened our eyes and smiled as the sound of Wes singing began to play over the car stereo.
“Is this one of your mixtapes?” Fitz asked.
“Yeah, man!” Wes grinned. “Do you like it? I play all the instruments myself you know. There’s just something about a kazoo that adds a touch of class to a record, know what I mean?”
“Mmhmm,” I nodded, forcing a smile. The car rumbled beneath us as he began to roll along down the hill towards the edge of the flood water. The front wheels would be swallowed, I was sure of it. With Wes still having the windows open I braced myself for the water to start pouring in, but it didn’t.
We were no longer driving downhill. The car had leveled out and we appeared to be driving across the surface of the water as if it were a solid road.
“Wh—?” I stuttered.
“Sadie, you gotta trust and believe!” Wes smiled. “There are a whole bunch of folks that need to get from A to B around here and they pay me good money for the privilege. Of course I put a little magic on the car, no other taxi on the whole island can handle the lower ground. Just me!”
I was about to reply, but Wes immediately began harmonizing with the recording of his own voice and I didn’t want to interrupt. Miller leaned forward enough to point Wes in the direction that we wanted to go, and Wes steered the car accordingly.
With so many witches living in Hallow Haven, I wondered why none of them had used their magic to solve the flooding problem. Wes held down the rewind button on his stereo so that the song would play again and began to sing along louder than he had the first time. Fitz, now knowing the words, also joined in. I started to consider climbing out of the open window and swimming the rest of the way.
“Here you are!” Wes said, bringing the car to a gentle stop. Miller dug into his pocket looking for cash and Wes batted a hand at him. “No charge today, call this a little promotional offer. If the peacekeeper wants to tell a few people that she took a float through the lower ground in my cab, then I’d be super grateful.”
“I’ll see what I can do,” I smiled. I opened the car door and blindly stepped out of the vehicle, immediately plummeting into the water that the car was floating on. My arms and legs flailed as I tried to swim upwards, scrambling for the surface. A hand grabbed mine and pulled me up, it was Miller.
“This is the second time you’ve tried to drown in front of me, do you want to get away from me that badly?” he smiled. He had grabbed my left hand and the peridot ring was glowing wildly as the little blue lightning bolts raced over my skin towards it.
“Oh yeah, I should have mentioned the one flaw in my business model, Sadie,” Wes called from the driver’s seat. “The car can drive over the water, but the whole place is still flooded. I haven’t figured out a way for my passengers to get out of the car without getting wet. It’s a real problem, man!”
“Thanks for the heads up, Wes,” I gasped.
“Where are you guys heading after this?” Fitz asked.
“The marina, heading back over to Green Holt,” Miller replied.
“I’ll meet you there, no use me getting soaked through to my little cat bones now is there?” he purred. Miller lowered himself into the water next to me. Fitz wiggled his nose and used his magic to shut the door behind him and we watched as the floating car turned and began to drive away.
“I can’t decide if I love or hate living here,” I said. I was treading water and making large figures of eight with my arms, looking at the house in front of us. It was up on stilts just like Kate and Effie’s place.
“At least we don’t have water snakes here,” Miller laughed. “Or…” He stopped laughing and thought for a moment. “Or we have a lot of water snakes here. I can’t remember which.”
“It feels like something you should know about,” I shrieked. I don’t scare all that easily, which is obviously great now that I live in a place with witches and werewolves, but snakes are the worst, and I couldn’t handle the idea that a bunch of them were swimming around my legs.
“It’s probably fine, do water snakes even bite?” he laughed.
“Are you joking? Why wouldn’t they bite? They still have fangs, don’t they? I don’t like it; I don’t like it!” I panicked.
“It’s okay,” he said, realizing that it wasn’t a good topic to joke about with me. “Let’s get up the steps of the house and we can figure it out from there.
He swam ahead of me a few feet and pushed open the gate. Just like Effie and Kate, the mailman had lined the fence of his yard with sandbags, but not the gate area. This meant that the water still rushed in just like it would have done if he hadn’t bothered with the sand at all. As soon as the gate was open, I began swimming like an Olympic athlete towards the steps the climbed up to the front door of the house.
Can you out-swim a water snake? I had no idea, but I was hoping so. I was almost all the way to the top of the stairs before Miller had even gotten out of the water.
“Jeez, remind me not to mention snakes again,” he smiled.
“I don’t think you’ll need reminding,” I teased. Miller jogged up the steps, his clothes once again clinging to his frame, and knocked on the door. I thought briefly about how I would react to two dripping wet strangers knocking on my door, although this place flooded so often that it probably wasn’t all that weird.
I looked back at the flooded area and thought I saw something moving in the distance as if it were swimming away. Was it actually a water snake? My whole body shuddered at the thought and I quickly looked back at the door.
Miller knocked again, but this time the force of his hand nudged the front door open. Makes sense that you wouldn’t lock it in a flood, I guess. What kind of burglar would swim away with a TV?
“Hello? Jeff? Are you in there?” Miller called out.
“Is it normal to know the mail guy’s name?” I asked. Miller scrunched his face up at me as he tried to work out if I was serious. “I mean, before I moved here, I was pretty much always working. When the mail was delivered, I wasn’t even at home, so I didn’t even know what the delivery person looked like, let alone their name.”
“It’s normal in a small community,” Miller replied. “Jeff is a good guy, for the most part. The idea that he has been taking bribes to shuttle paperwork around the islands, I mean… that’s not great, obviously.”
“Yeah,” I agreed. “But the point was that he was getting passports for people that wanted them. I guess he could have done that without the pay off.”
“Exactly. As soon as secret money starts changing hands things can get messy fast,
” Miller said. “I’m surprised a scheme like that has been running for so long without someone letting it slip to the wrong person. The more people involved, the harder it is to keep it under the radar.”
Miller pushed the door open a little wider and we were able to see into the house. The place was a mess, but not the type of mess that someone makes through neglect. This place had been ransacked. Drawers had been pulled out, pictures pulled off the walls and sofa cushions slashed open. It didn’t look good.
Miller reached back to keep me from coming in any further, but I pushed against him. I wanted to get in there to see exactly what was going on. A groaning sound from inside caused us both to flinch. It sounded like someone was in pain. We stepped into the living room and tried to follow the sound.
The house was in a bigger mess than it had first appeared. There was a space where a picture frame had been on the wall, the paint behind it was a different color where the sun had been unable to bleach it. In the center of that space was a small wall safe that was hanging open. What had been taken?
There were wet footprints on the other side of the living room, wet handprints on the walls and pools of water in various other places where someone had stood for too long with their clothes dripping onto the floorboards. Someone else had travelled through the flood water and come into this house.
It was a modest home, nothing seemed particularly expensive, but it looked like Jeff lived a comfortable life. Perhaps the bribery money was a nice little boost to his mailman salary, and he was using it to buy himself his creature comforts. The TV looked pretty old though, as did the sofa. Despite the slashes through the cushions, I could see that the fabric was faded and dusty.
“If he was taking bribes, where did all the money go?” I whispered.
“If he was keeping it in that safe,” Miller said, pointing over to the wall, “then it’s gone.”
The smell of freshly poured coffee caught my attention. “Kitchen,” I whispered. Miller nodded and we quietly crept through the living room and through the door into a small, country style room with pine cabinets and floral wallpaper. I almost slipped through the doorway on something and looked down to see that I had stepped onto a drop of blood.
