by Tess Lake
“Told ya you wouldn’t find it,” imaginary Aunt Cass said.
“You’re right, but I found something even better—a great idea.”
“What idea? Tell me now.”
I mimed zipping my lips and throwing away the key to my frozen aunt, and then, after batting some more dust off my clothing, I made my way up the stairs back to the kitchen. It was there I found Mom stirring away at some scrambled eggs, preparing breakfast for the guests I could hear murmuring in the dining room. I heard Aunt Freya and Aunt Ro out there talking to them for a moment before hearing them say goodbye and then the front door opening and closing. No doubt they were off to the new location of Big Pie to continue getting it ready for the grand reopening.
“Oh, Harlow, good, you’re finally here. Get me some of the double-cream brie out of the refrigerator,” Mom instructed.
“What do you mean, finally here?” I grumbled, although I made my way to the refrigerator.
“I need you to cut off some slices I’m going to serve with breakfast,” Mom said. Then she turned to look at me, and her eyes widened.
“Why are you covered in dirt and dust? Were you rolling around on the floor down there?”
“No, I was just having a look around, that’s all,” I said, opening up the cheese and starting to slice it.
“Well, you need to be careful… I mean—” Mom let out a sigh and then went back to stirring the scrambled eggs, which were almost ready.
Had I suffered a head injury, or had my mother just stopped herself from telling me what to do?
I’m normally one just to take good fortune and run with it, but in this instance, I just had to test it out.
“I was thinking of going down to the old mill, maybe meeting a source there. At midnight,” I said, constructing the optimal sentence to start a classic mom barrage about safety and what it is young witches should be doing.
“I don’t believe that one bit. But if I did, I would say be careful and that’s all,” Mom said.
“Then I was thinking of getting a tattoo. Maybe some piercings too.”
I saw a muscle start to twitch in Mom’s jaw. She served up the scrambled eggs onto a plate and then told me to add the cheese to it.
“If you feel that’s the thing you want to do, darling, then go right ahead. Now can you please take these breakfasts out to our guests?” she asked.
She returned to dicing up some onions while I picked up the plates with a very odd feeling that perhaps I’d stepped into some kind of parallel dimension after coming back up the stairs. Had my real mother been replaced by a body-snatching alien? And if she had, would I actually be happier with this new replacement?
Shaking my head to myself, I went out to the main dining room to find a very odd couple waiting for me. The man was wearing a big black hat with a large flat brim. It looked like someone had attempted to make a cowboy hat but had gotten lost halfway on the way to Amishtown. He was wearing ridiculously thick glasses and a bright plaid coat over a Hawaiian T-shirt. He smiled at me and I saw his teeth were yellow and oversized. The woman beside him was certainly no better. She had an inordinate amount of hair, blond heading to white, stuck up in a pile on her head, looking so heavy it was lucky she didn’t break her neck. She too was wearing incredibly thick glasses. At least when she smiled at me, her teeth weren’t as yellow as the man’s, I presume her husband, were. She was wearing a blue trenchcoat over a plaid shirt as though she was a lumberjack trying to go undercover.
“Harjo Torrent?” the man lisped, sending a fine mist of spit out across the table. I saw the woman pinch the back of his hand quite sharply as though she was telling him to shut up.
“Please excuse my husband. My, that looks delicious,” the woman said. I put the plates down in front of them and saw that someone had already handed out the cutlery.
Standing so close, I got the sudden impression that the woman was wearing a wig. There was no way anyone’s real hair could look like that.
I smiled at them and made my way back around to the safety of the other side of the table.
“I hope you enjoy your breakfast,” I said, preparing to scuttle out of there.
“But you are Harlow Torrent, aren’t you?” the woman asked.
“The one and only. And you are?”
“My name is Mavis and this is my husband, Anthony. We’re on vacation and will be staying here for a few days. Your mother has been telling me all about your journalism business,” Mavis said.
I knew immediately that she’d given me a fake name, or at least I strongly suspected so. The longer I stood there, the more it appeared the two of them were in costume, trying to play the role of a married couple but doing an absurdly bad job of it. Since opening up the Torrent Mansion to become the Torrent Mansion Bed and Breakfast, we’d met our fair share of weird and wild travelers. It took a certain type of person to want to stay in the haunted-looking mansion up on the hill.
“We’re here traveling around interesting sites that are connected to the deep parts of the past. Do you have any recommendations? We’re thinking possibly the governor’s mansion,” Mavis said.
“Truer Island has many interesting things like that. There is no official tour of the governor’s mansion, but you can certainly go there. There’s the lighthouse, which has a nice view out over the rocks and the bluffs, and there are a lot of restaurants and a museum and a whole heap of things. You can even go and visit my cousins Molly and Luce at Traveler, where you can buy amazing coffee,” I said, smoothly rattling off the spiel as though I’d practiced it.
“Wash ish—” Anthony tried to say again but got another pinch from Mavis on the back of his hand.
I was just about to bolt out of there when I heard Mom call me from the kitchen, so I reversed course and went out that way, feeling Mavis and Anthony watching me.
Mom handed me a slip of paper. On it were written a variety of strange things.
“Spell ingredients. Some of them you can buy but others you’re going to have to find. Make sure you get your cousins to help you,” Mom instructed.
I looked down the list of ingredients. Some of them were quite strange (“a flower picked on a Tuesday”), but there were some that seemed they were only on the list as a joke.
“The tears of a child under the age of ten?” I queried, giving Mom a look.
“I actually think it could be anyone’s tears, but the spell as we know it has that requirement, and I don’t want to go to all this effort to and fail only to discover all we had to do was make a ten-year-old cry,” Mom said. She gave me some cash and a small paper bag that had a few vials and other things in it that appeared to have been lifted from Aunt Cass’s underground lab. Then she shooed me out of the kitchen. I rushed my way out through the dining room like a comet shooting through the sky, saying a hasty goodbye to the two weirdos who were now sitting eating their breakfast. As I made my way back to our end of the mansion, I read down the list and decided I’d hand the particular task of gathering a child’s tears over to Molly and Luce.
Chapter 9
“Found another Jake Gottlieb!” I called out to Ollie.
“What is it this time? Stealing apples again?”
“Another trespassing charge at the Rosenthal Orchard.”
“Stick it in crime,” Ollie said, wiping some dust off his forehead, or really just redistributing it.
We were approaching lunch and had been hard at work under the library, sorting the endless piles of paper so they could be made ready to be fed into the scanner and digitized. There was only a limited amount of money available for digitization, and that meant a limited amount of time, so we had to sort all the papers beforehand so Ollie could prioritize certain things ahead of others. He was trying to focus on genealogy records and crime because we figured people looking up their family tree or looking up juicy crimes from the past would attract the most interest and then hopefully we’d get more money to finish digitizing the entire collection.
The job was stil
l going okay. It was no longer new, so that initial excitement of doing something different had definitely faded away, but it wasn’t a bad job. It was a very methodical repetitive job. Pick up a piece of paper, look at it, work out which new pile it should go into, move it over there, rinse and repeat. Start with a big pile, end with that pile distributed to other piles.
In the beginning, I’d spent much more time looking over every piece of paper, reading the names and dates, interested in what they had to say. Now it was just glance and decide, but even so, the facts of what I was looking at had seeped into my mind.
A week ago, we’d come across Jake Gottlieb, who had been arrested yet again for stealing apples from the Rosenthal Orchard. Then we’d found a birth notice for his son, August Gottlieb. A week later we’d found a marriage notice and this is where things started to get juicy. He’d married the orchard keeper’s daughter, Hannah Rosenthal. We kept sorting through the papers, and more traces of Jake, Hannah and their son August showed up. We eventually found Jake’s birth notice, and a few more criminal charge sheets, and then recently another trespassing charge.
The facts were dry, and they hid a fascinating story. When you put it in chronological order, Jake Gottlieb was found many times trespassing at the Rosenthal Orchard. The gap between his final trespassing charge and then his marriage to Hannah Rosenthal was just one month. Then just seven months later there was a birth notice for when their very healthy baby boy August was delivered. When you put all the dates together, it was clear he wasn’t trespassing on the Rosenthal Orchard to steal apples. It was very clear that he and Hannah being married was certainly a rushed affair, unless of course August just happened to turn up at the seven-month mark and be perfectly healthy.
We eventually found death records for Jake and Hannah as well. Both had died in their eighties, within six months of each other, Hannah going first and then Jake after her. They’d only had one son, but then he’d married and had thirteen children of his own, so both Jake and Hannah’s funerals were attended by a huge number of grandchildren and great-grandchildren. I’m sure that at the time, Jake would have been considered a ne’er-do-well sneaking onto the orchard grounds. But what could you say? It was true love. He’d been sneaking in to see Hannah, who had then fallen pregnant and they had married; then they’d had a son and stayed together for the rest of their lives. We’d even found a few other mentions of Jake and Hannah. By the time they had reached their fifties, they had taken over the orchard and were winning local prizes for the jams they’d begun producing.
All in all, it was a beautiful story so long as you didn’t follow the timeline to now. Their son had taken over the orchard but eventually had sold it off after a fire had destroyed a barn and processing plant. It was with no surprise whatsoever that I saw that Sylvester Coldwell’s great-grandfather had been the one to buy the orchard. He eventually sold it many years later for a huge profit and increased the wealth of the Coldwell family, which subsequent generations had then used as a springboard for their own real estate dealings.
There were many beautiful stories hidden in the papers, but just as many crimes and horrific things.
Ollie sneezed and had a drink of water from his bottle. I saw him look around the room, which honestly didn’t look much different from this morning when we’d arrived. A few stacks of paper had gone from here to there.
“Oh, Harlow, Sheriff Hardy delivered me that box that he’d found, the one that apparently is missing files that may have been stolen? I’ll be having a look at it tonight and seeing if I can find anything,” Ollie said.
I wasn’t entirely sure what Sheriff Hardy had told Ollie—I mean, I knew he wouldn’t have told him that it was Aunt Cass who had stolen the files—so I just nodded and smiled at him. I took a quick break myself, gulping down some cool water and wondering just how much dust someone could breathe in before it became a problem. I was stretching a bit of stiffness out of my back when Eve called me.
“Harlow? Grandma crept out last night! She took someone’s car and went into town. We only found her at three in the morning.”
Eve was babbling in a panic and it took a minute or two for me to calm her down.
“I’m looking into it, Eve. I’m going to find out what’s happening. Don’t tell your grandmother this, but I’m going to come to watch Sunny Days Manor and see if I can track her if she leaves again at night. I’ll be watching so she’ll be safe,” I said.
“Oh, okay,” Eve said, sounding somewhat defeated. She’d gone from frantic to flat and I certainly knew the feeling myself. I hung up and took another drink of water.
“Everything okay?” Ollie asked.
“Probably not. Some of the elderly residents of Sunny Days Manor have been found wandering out into the streets without any memory of what they’re doing. I don’t really know why it’s happening, but it could possibly have dangerous consequences, considering that man Arlan jumped off the top of the lighthouse in such a state,” I said.
“It was a miracle he didn’t die. I have no idea how he only broke a leg,” Ollie said, shaking his head.
“Yeah, it was astounding,” I said. Now that I was taking the path of trying not to lie, I was starting to feel a bit awkward when I was forced to. Molly hadn’t told Ollie that we were witches, so I simply had to agree that strange things were strange on their own merits and pretend they had nothing to do with me.
“Oh, I have something for you,” Ollie said. He’d thrown his satchel over in the corner of the room. He opened it and retrieved Juliet Stern’s journal. Hattie Stern had given it to Ollie some months back, claiming it was proof that her ancestor had been smeared unfairly by locals after Ollie had written an article: “Juliet Stern: The Original Harlot of Harlot Bay?” His article had come from historical records that he’d found.
After Hattie had delivered the journal, which was imbued with a magical scent because Juliet had been a witch, Ollie had been devastated to find pages in it suggesting that it was, in fact, true that Juliet had been smeared unfairly. I’d suspected that Hattie had cast a spell on the journal to lie to Ollie, but then she’d told me that she would not do such a thing, and I’d reluctantly accepted the truth. Ollie had eventually taken his article down and was still researching the matter, trying to get to the truth. I, and Hattie, and some members of my family knew it already: Juliet had run a business called The Merchant Arms, and it had not been a simple drinking establishment. Some time ago I’d Slipped and had gained the ability to see into the past. I’d seen The Merchant Arms, and Juliet Stern coming out its front door dressed in some very revealing clothing for someone who was apparently simply working behind a bar. It seemed that Hattie was the only one who couldn’t accept the truth about her relative, and as for why the journal didn’t mention it, I wasn’t sure.
Ollie gave me the journal, and I felt a small tingle of magic as I touched my hand to it.
“I asked Hattie if she wanted it back, but she said to give it to you,” Ollie explained.
“What am I supposed to do with it?” I asked, running my fingers over the front cover.
“I’m really not sure. Maybe you can see if there’s anything interesting?”
I took a quick flick through the pages, looking at Juliet’s swirling handwriting. It was slightly difficult to read, with all the curls and hooks, but after a page, you started to get used to it and it became clear what she was writing about.
I quickly flipped through the pages until something caught my eye. It was a single diary entry, and it said:
“Me and Torrent hunt tonight!”
That was it; the rest of the page was blank. The next entry was a rather boring one detailing a shopping list of flour and eggs and other ingredients used for making beer. I flicked forward a few more pages but they were all mundane.
“Thanks for this. I will read it and get back to you,” I said. I put the journal in my bag, wondering who exactly “Torrent” was. One of our ancestors, clearly, but who?
Chapter 1
0
My double-shot cappuccino was delicious, and as I sipped it, I could feel the caffeine fighting a losing battle with my tiredness from staying up virtually all night watching the Sunny Days Manor to see if Hilda would go wandering again.
She hadn’t, so I’d spent the entire night in my car, mostly on my phone and sometimes trying to read Juliet Stern’s journal to keep myself awake.
“Two big fat caps!” Molly called out to Luce, who was working the coffee machine like a madwoman.
Molly took the money from the customer and very soon after delivered him two cappuccinos. She followed him to the door, waved goodbye and then closed and locked it behind him before coming over to slump down beside me on the sofa.
Luce came and sat down in the booth opposite us, her face red, hair sticking out and with a slight bruise forming above one eyebrow from a mishap with Stefano earlier.
“I am so very much enjoying the money and the customers who bring the money, but at the same time, these coffee sprints are killing me,” Molly groaned.
“Yeah, it was kinda better when it was just us and it was frantic with no break. All this running like crazy to make coffees and then an hour of almost nothing is way harder to take,” Luce said.
I drank some more of my cappuccino, feeling the hot coffee plume down into my stomach and the caffeine tingle out to the ends of my fingertips. I knew I’d told Eve that I would watch over her grandmother to see where she was going, but now, in the light of day, I was realizing just what a stupid move that was. I was still working at the library, trying to keep Aunt Cass’s Chili Challenge running, trying to figure out what to do with my life, spend time with my adorable boyfriend, and generally live my life, and the fact was that staying up virtually all night sitting outside a nursing home was definitely not compatible with that. I was going to have to cancel stakeouts and come at the problem another way.
“So was there anything interesting in Juliet’s journal?” Luce asked.
I’d shown both of them the journal last night, which had produced a little bit of excitement, especially the page about going hunting with Torrent, but that excitement had faded away when it appeared that the remainder of the journal was pretty much a diary of deliveries and other mundane matters. It was hard to tell entirely, though. Given the state of Juliet’s handwriting, it was difficult to read through it quickly and easy to skip over things.
