by Ruby Loren
Heck… I wasn’t even sure how I’d managed to do it.
“I can handle it,” I said, taking reassurance from my aunts’ words.
“Great. Whilst you’re at it, handle the clean up on aisle three that needs mopping up,” Hemlock said, bringing me back to reality with a bump. “Hey, if you got a dog, I hear they eat anything. It could save you doing jobs like this.” He bared his small white teeth at me. “Or… you could just let me try out some new spells and I’ll beat your pooch into the ground. Just call me the Lord Protector of the Wormwood Vale.”
I looked sideways at my cat. I wasn’t sure when he was watching it, or even how, but we needed to discuss his television watching choices for the hundredth time. A not-quite one-year-old should definitely not be watching Game of Thrones.
It was when I was cleaning up the spidery mess that Hemlock had made, not on the kitchen floor, but inside my best pair of trainers, that I reflected being a witch was definitely over-glamourised in fiction.
Sean Admiral was the first person to walk into the shop the next day. Even though he usually didn’t come bearing good news, I was pleased to see him. My aunts had only been gone since the evening before, but I already missed having someone to talk to over coffee or, when Linda was around, watching the pair of them bicker. Hemlock was fine in small doses, but when he became the only intelligent conversation available, I probably only had a week before I went loopy.
“Good to see you! Happy Easter!” I greeted the detective when he entered the apothecary, looking just as uncomfortable as he always did when he was in the shop.
I released my mobile phone and let the number on screen remain un-dialled. It was probably for the best. Now that I knew what Jesse truly was, I doubted that favours would come for free. Especially favours involving cleaning up the mess there would have undoubtedly been if the Council, or the Salems, dropped by to visit. Judging by the conspicuous absence of both parties, my aunts had been right that the Council was seeking to punish them above all else. It felt ominously like they had other plans for me. I fully expected my part in Aunt Linda’s rescue to be used as blackmail against me at some future date.
“I was wondering if you might be available to go somewhere with me?” Sean asked.
I blinked in surprise for a few seconds. Was he asking me out… on a date?
13
Between the Pages
“I wouldn’t ask normally, but I think it’s important and… I need you,” he added.
That was more confusing, but the end part was nice. All of a sudden, I felt the ball of feelings I’d hidden inside me long ago start to stir again. I shut my mind to them. With everything that was currently going on, I hardly needed another distraction.
“I’d be happy to close the shop. I only kept it open for last minute Easter present buying. But it can’t be for too long,” I told him, thinking that semi-enthusiasm was the way to go. “My aunts have left town,” I explained when he looked curious.
“Oh,” was all he said and then, bless him, he didn’t ask anything else. Instead, I called (jokingly) to Hemlock and told him to keep an eye on things, and then I shut up the shop and left with the detective.
The warm breeze and smell of pollen in the air was a reminder that summer was not too far away. We walked through the town making some idle talk about how the weather was nice and how my business was going, before I figured out where we were heading. By the time we arrived outside of Helen Regal’s house, I knew for sure that this definitely wasn’t the detective asking me out on a date… unless he had some really strange ideas about what passed as romantic.
“What are we doing here?” I asked him. The house was still the residence of Helen’s partner and daughter and was surely no longer classified a crime scene.
“After we discovered that there had been evidence overlooked in the Sarah May disappearance case, which is now being treated as a murder investigation, we came to the conclusion that we need to search this house again,” he explained.
I tilted my head. “Okay, but doesn’t that usually mean you’d come here with a team of police officers and go over everything again? Why am I here?”
Sean wriggled uncomfortably. “There might have been certain issues getting a warrant. The missing woman’s partner, Daryl Hex, is not pleased with the way we’ve handled the case. Turning up here with a warrant and a battalion of officers probably wouldn’t improve his attitude towards the force. I thought if we kept things casual, and I brought a local face with me…”
“Oh, I see. I’m your saleswoman!” I couldn’t believe the detective had tried to push me into this without warning me of his intentions beforehand. I felt just as peeved as I was sure Daryl Hex would when he saw Sean Admiral standing on his doorstep.
I recklessly rang the bell, still uncertain what I was going to say to the man who would open the door.
It was probably dodging a bullet when Hannah Regal answered the door, dressed in a flowery skater dress. “Hi Hazel!” she said brightly, beaming at me. I was apparently still flavour of the month for letting her join the Wormwood Coven. “Detective.” She added a cursory nod in Sean’s direction.
I looked across at him and he made his grey eyes wide and pleaded. He knew I had the upper hand.
“Hannah, would you mind if the detective and I took a look around the house? He thinks that we might find something that will help us to locate your mum,” I said, sensitive to the fact that she was probably still upset by it. Who wouldn’t be distraught if their mother went missing?
To my surprise, Hannah shrugged. “Sure. If you shut the door on the way out, it will lock behind you,” she said, before slipping past us. “Dad’s out working today. I’ve gotta get going. I’m meeting friends. See you at the next meeting, Hazel!” She dropped me a wink that, if the detective hadn’t known the truth about magic, would probably have landed me in a whole lot of trouble.
“How have you been doing?” I asked her, finding it strange that she was so blasé about all of this.
She looked thoughtful. “It’s sad that Helen has gone missing,” she said, using her first name. “But Daryl needs me to stay cheerful, so I’m doing it. Everything’s going to work out okay. He’ll get us through it. He’s a really good dad!” She smiled at me. I managed to answer it with one of my own, before moving to let her pass.
“That was easy,” Sean said once we were in the house and had closed the door behind us.
I nodded. “But I wouldn’t want to still be in the house when Daryl comes back for lunch.” I raised my eyebrows at my partner in crime. I didn’t know Daryl personally, but I’d met his older brother, Elliot, and he’d seemed… spiky to say the least. I knew from the town’s gossipers that Elliot had been the star of the illustrious Hex family, but magic had failed to materialise in Daryl’s case. Instead, he’d turned to doing odd jobs around the town and getting by without magic in a town that glorified it. I could definitely sympathise.
“How about we take a look down the hallway where she was dragged?” Sean suggested.
I nodded my agreement and then looked questioningly at him when he made no move in that direction.
“I was wondering… if you could maybe take a look using, uh…”
…magic?” I completed for him. “I already did the first time around. I couldn’t see any evidence of spell work that pertained to her disappearance. There are just the standard protection charms that may, or may not, be effective,” I said out of habit from working at the apothecary and selling such things without guarantees. It was easy enough to see whether or not something was bewitched with magic, but a lot harder to see what that magic actually did… and how effectively it did it.
“I guess we’ll do this the old fashioned way,” Sean muttered, looking less pleased that he’d brought me along for the ride.
I wasn’t too thrilled myself after his doorstep revelation.
I left him to search the hallway inch by inch, paying special attention to the area near the stairs, an
d stepped into the front room to see what I could see.
On the day of her disappearance, I’d been too surprised to take much notice of the house itself, but Helen had kept everything tidy and homely looking. The television was small, and the bookshelves large. Her armchairs were that tasteful beige shade that no one was crazy about, but everyone agreed you couldn’t dislike, and the wallpaper was a bland sort of magnolia with a half-hearted pattern of leaves on it that again, utterly failed to offend. It would be a perfect show home if it weren’t for the damp patches that were creeping through the wallpaper on the wall behind the TV, making it bubble up - probably courtesy of the cold winter we’d been through - and the cracked windowsills, that showed the age of the period property, no matter how many times you tried to cover them up with gloss paint. It was kind of ironic, I supposed, that the man who was responsible for fixing up so many places around Wormwood had yet to turn his hand to his own.
I smiled when I walked over to the bookshelves and noticed the occult books dotted in-between paperback romances, thrillers, and true crime novels - the kind you can buy at the airport. I ran a finger along the spines, finding them dust free, until I came to a row of blank leather-bound books. When I touched one of them, I felt a little tingle of magic run up my finger.
Someone had put some sort of charm on it to warn the owner that the book was being touched, I was sure of it… and they’d also done a decent job of concealing the spell from prying witch or magician eyes. The surprise made me pull back quickly enough that I dislodged the book. It fell to the floor, its pages falling open.
When I bent down and lifted it, it became clear that the spell had belonged to Helen Regal. I was looking at her diary.
It wasn’t even the interesting sort of diary - where you wrote down convenient clues, like your innermost feelings and the identity of your kidnapper. It was the kind that contained pages of upcoming dates - like ‘parent’s evening at school’ and ‘Hannah’s cello lesson’.
I was about to close it when I noticed one of the pages was dog-eared. I flicked through the book and realised that it was rather more damaged than that - someone had torn part of the page out. I ran a finger across the ragged edge and wondered if Helen had needed to give someone a note and had used the paper from the diary, but something about that made me balk. Helen was nit picky in the extreme. She’d even gone to the trouble to bewitch a diary of dates. I thought it was unlikely that she would be so precious about all of that and then vandalise the pages.
What exactly was torn out? I wondered. I already had my suspicions that I recognised the paper, but I wanted to be sure… and I thought I had a way to do it.
I walked through to the hall and took a thin piece of notepaper from the table next to the telephone. The next thing I needed stumped me for a while, until I wandered into the kitchen and found a drawer filled with coloured candles, meant for spell work. I passed the detective, who was still poking around in this house’s cupboard under the stairs, toyed with the idea of locking him in for a moment, and then returned to the front room with the diary.
Ten seconds later, I’d managed to make a fairly decent wax rubbing of the page beneath the torn one. The diary had been used a lot, and there were a lot of impressions to sort through, but one stood out clearer than the rest.
Jen made a mistake on the school reports. Check the forms before filling out!
I looked down at the mundane message which someone had used as Helen Regal’s note of farewell to her family - sparking the theory that her disappearance may be a hoax.
I called Sean into the room and showed him what I’d found.
“We need to talk to Helen’s family again,” he said before his forehead creased. I knew what was bothering him. He’d just said ‘we’ instead of ‘I’. My sleuthing skills must finally be growing on him.
“You know… I was thinking about bringing you on as part of the force,” he said, probably to cover up his moment of embarrassment.
“You want me to join the police?” This was a startling new development I had not, in any way, seen coming.
“No! Of course not,” he said, looking so amused that I was left feeling offended. “I meant as a consultant. We’d have to come up with an official title, like ‘police informant’ but really, I’d want you to look into any of the local cases that might have some kind of magical element. I think it might be a big help in future investigations.”
“You’re going to tell people I’m a snitch?!”
Sean sighed. “That’s the part you pick up on? It doesn’t have to be ‘informant’. It could be anything. You could be our chief cat communicator, for example.”
I shot him a withering look. “Thanks for the offer. I’m definitely going to consider it.” I ladled on the sarcasm.
“You’d be paid!” Sean said, like this fixed everything he’d just said.
Once upon a time, it might have done, but the growing success of the apothecary and the extra ads businesses had taken out in Tales from Wormwood had made it so that I wasn’t down to the last can of baked beans at the end of every month. I could afford to be more discerning when it came to employment… and who I was employed by.
“I’ll think about it,” I said, a little less sarcastically than I had the first time - but only a little.
The detective sighed again and bagged the diary. “I wish you hadn’t touched it,” he muttered, which was apparently all the thanks I was going to get.
I looked at the book in the see-through plastic bag and wondered about that spell. I knew magic could sometimes last, even after the one who’d cast it had died, but I couldn’t help wondering if Helen had felt the little ping when I’d touched her diary. Was she wondering, even now, who was going through her stuff and hoping that they were closer to finding her, wherever she was?
I tried to put thoughts of Sarah May’s more fatal fate out of my mind, and I hoped for the best for Helen Regal and her family.
“…in the bakery,” Sean finished saying and looked expectantly at me.
I realised I hadn’t listened to a word he’d said. My expression apparently said as much because he frowned even more deeply, before repeating himself.
“I’ve contacted Melissa about this new development. She suggested we meet in the bakery to review the evidence.” He looked around the front room with a blank expression. “I just hope we’re not missing anything. We sent in a clean-up team to help the family out after we’d finished investigating the scene. It would appear that they did a first class job, because I can’t find anything.”
“At least someone is,” I said without thinking. Or perhaps with thinking.
I earned a searing look. All things considered, it was probably for the best that this hadn’t been a date. What had I been thinking? The most Sean Admiral wanted from me was to be his magical snitch. And I was not okay with that.
“Shouldn’t you contact Helen’s partner and let him know you’ve found something?” I asked when we were back out in the sunshine, walking across to the bakery.
“I’ll be contacting him with questions once we know more, but this is an ongoing investigation and everyone is being treated as suspicious right now,” he said, stiffly.
We conducted the rest of the walk in silence.
The Bread Cauldron Bakery was in full coffee-time swing when we walked in. Melissa sat at one of the tables with the best view of the counter and Tristan, I observed, when she waved us over. It wasn’t long before the redheaded man in charge of the entire operation came over to our table to take our order personally. Table service was not something the Bread Cauldron offered, but I appreciated the gesture from my pretend boyfriend.
I appreciated it less when he beamed at Melissa.
Wait… was I really getting jealous over our fake relationship?
I shook the concerning thought from my head and listened to the discussion about the diary and the rubbing I’d taken of the original message. A quick examination of the photos Melissa had on her phone of t
he original note were enough to confirm that the note matched the paper torn from the diary. Melissa explained, quite unnecessarily, that the culprit had probably torn out the whole page, so it wouldn’t be so obvious what they’d done.
“It feels like someone set this up to make her disappearance seem like a hoax. Why would someone want to do that to Helen?” I mused out loud.
“That is something we will be investigating very carefully,” Melissa said with an insincere smile directed my way, before shooting a more pointed look at the detective.
I got the message loud and clear. She didn’t think they should be having this discussion with me present.
“I should go say hello to Tristan,” I said, figuring I’d save her the trouble and excuse myself. “I shouldn’t ignore my boyfriend for too long, or the vultures will start moving in.” I gifted Melissa an equally insincere smile, before stalking into the backrooms of the bakery.
As soon as I was out of the main shop I regretted my words. Hadn’t I been thinking just a few days earlier that Tristan would benefit from a relationship with someone who wasn’t trying to love spell him into having feelings? And here I was putting my great big foot in it!
“Oh! I thought you were out front, Hazel,” Tristan said, rounding the corner and seeing me standing there like a lemon.
“No, I, hmmm… came to find you.”
Tristan nodded like I’d just said something meaningful and important. “I was thinking we should talk, too… about us.”
“You want to end our fake relationship,” I said with the best smile I could muster. “I completely understand.”
For the briefest of moments he looked startled, before smiling. “How did you…?”
“I’ve heard rumours that Melissa’s had her eye on you ever since she came to town. She seems like a really intelligent woman. She’d be a great match for you,” I said, compensating for my earlier meanness to Melissa by singing her praises now.
