by Tess Lake
We moved through the center of town at an incredibly slow pace, Red now tapping away at her phone like Kira did, and me musing over what it was exactly this group of writers were doing.
I couldn’t blame Red for being a little secretive, after all that was practically a witch’s middle name. But if she and the other authors were going to go investigating, I needed to be on the inside of that and not the outside, especially if they got themselves involved in something dangerous. Unfortunately, at the moment I had no idea how I could do that.
Eventually, we reached the center of town and it wasn’t long after that that we were parking at the location of the first session. Red was almost late due to how long it had taken us to get through the hordes of vampires crossing the roads. We locked up the sports car and went rushing inside, Red handing me a huge sheaf of notes and other materials that I was to hand out to the participants in my role as personal assistant. I slipped into the flow of helping her but in the back of my mind I was thinking of the first break I would have and whether I should go straight to see Aunt Cass or track down Ollie.
Chapter Ten
Finally, after lunch, I was able to get away. Red was doing a two-hour in-depth cozy mystery writing session. I decided to walk to Aunt Cass’s to avoid the ridiculously slow traffic. The moment I stepped outside I realized this was a colossal mistake but for some reason I kept scurrying down the street, moving to any spot of shade I could find, and by the time I came to my senses I was already too far gone to go back.
Despite the blistering sun overhead the streets were crowded, packed with tourists, most of whom were eating ice creams and drinking bottles of cold water. I kept rushing down the street, dodging tourists as I went. I passed Traveler, which was packed with tourists. Molly and Luce didn’t see me. They were standing red-faced behind the counter and the door was wide open. It looked like the air conditioning wasn’t working again. I looked through the front window of the Cozy Cat Café next door and saw Peta, who was serving customers. She waved me in and then gave me an ice-cold can of lemonade from the refrigerator. I took it gratefully and continued on my way, gulping down the sweet chilled liquid as I went. By the time I reached Aunt Cass’s it looked like I had swum there. I was dripping with sweat and I wasn’t quite sure what I was going to do to clean up given I had no spare clothes. Oh well, that was a future problem.
Inside the Chili Challenge offices it felt like a meat locker compared to the temperature outside. I swear the sweat on my skin almost froze instantly as I walked into a blast of cold air. Aunt Cass’s three staff members were working hard, packing boxes to send chili sauces cowboy hats, nappy wipes and stopwatches all over the country.
I waved hello to them and went into the small office where Aunt Cass was sitting with her feet up on the desk, a laptop perched on her lap and a pair of headphones on. She waved me into the seat across the desk but didn’t say anything else. I sat there in the cool of her office for a few minutes recovering until finally Aunt Cass closed the laptop and took the headphones off.
“So the Mysterious Mysteries are faking scratches around the town are they? Very interesting,” she said, a sort of mad gleam in her eye.
“Why is it interesting? What are you planning?” I asked.
“I’m not planning anything. I think it’s very interesting, that’s all,” Aunt Cass said, clearly lying.
“The writers seem to think that the man who was attacked was a publicity stunt. Is it possible there’s something magical going on in town and someone could be coincidentally attacked as part of a publicity stunt?”
Aunt Cass opened up her laptop, tapped away for a moment and then turned it around to face me. She showed me the symbol that I had discovered on Ollie’s website. The one that had been around the town back when the attacks had happened a century ago.
“Do you think the Mysterious Mysteries know about this?” Aunt Cass asked me.
“They seem like they’ve done their research on a few things.”
“Very interesting,” Aunt Cass murmured.
Oh Goddess, she was doing it again, being mysterious and refusing to answer questions. I didn’t have the time for it. I needed to know whether there was something truly dangerous in the town otherwise Red and the other writers could get seriously hurt. But instead of saying this to Aunt Cass, something else entirely came out of my mouth. “What was in that package you gave Hattie this morning?”
“It was a protective charm. Half of it’s an amulet, the other half is a potion that you drink to protect you.”
“But why would you need to give Hattie that? Where is she going? What is she doing that’s so dangerous?”
“She didn’t tell me. She said she needed it and it was important, and so I gave it to her.”
I shook my head. For as long as I’ve known, Aunt Cass and Hattie have been pretty much mortal enemies. I don’t know why Aunt Cass would be helping Hattie Stern do anything.
“She didn’t tell you what she was doing?” I said.
“Nope,” Aunt Cass said, a challenging note in her voice.
“Okay, fine, you don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to. But seriously, what are we meant to do? I don’t want Red or the other authors to get hurt if there is something magical in town. I did feel the magic turn gritty–what do you think that was?”
“My guess is that whatever monster it was I fought out on Truer Island has a relative or something similar. Perhaps it escaped, attacked one man, and now maybe it has returned to the island.”
“Is there any way we can find out what happened, though? Should we go to the island?”
“As it turns out, I have a plan,” Aunt Cass said templing her fingers like a supervillain.
I groaned. “This isn’t going to be one of those plans where I end up having to travel all over town setting up beacons is it? I don’t want to go down into the sewerage system to collect water samples again.”
“Even better, we’re going to go monster hunting,” Aunt Cass said.
“Gah?”
“You, me, Kira, your cousins. We’ll head out at night and track it down.”
I couldn’t believe what she was saying. Had she completely lost her mind?
“But there are tourists everywhere! Even late at night.”
“It already attacked one man, what if it strikes again?”
I shook my head not believing what I was hearing and then I saw the cheeky twinkle in Aunt Cass’s eye.
“You’re not serious are you? You’re toying with me because you’re bored,” I said.
“A little,” she admitted.
“Okay, but do you have a plan?”
“We’ll go out and see what happens. We’ll start in the alleyway with the claw marks and then walk around to see if we can sense anywhere the magic has gone gritty. That’s the best I have right now. Given that it’s going to be all of us together it’s not like we’re going to be in any danger.”
“Great, more wandering around the town in the middle of the night. I do have a job, you know.”
Aunt Cass waved her arm around, indicating the office and warehouse. “What do you think this is? We all have jobs. I’ll let you know when I’ve decided on what night we’ll start,” she said. Then she dismissed me with a wave of her hand, returning to her laptop.
I left her office slightly disgruntled at being dismissed so abruptly, unhappy about the idea of trekking all over town in the middle of the night. However, part of me was thinking that maybe it wasn’t the worst idea in the world. Aunt Cass was right: with me, Molly, Luce, Kira and her together, what could go wrong?
I came walking out of the Chili Challenge building and got punched in the face by the heat. After the meat locker temperature inside, I wasn’t prepared for it and felt myself sway on my feet. I had a quick look around, seeing that the streets were still clogged with cars and tourists and knew that calling a taxi would be out of the question. Besides, I didn’t have the money. I bolted away from the Chili Challenge, heading do
wn the street, darting from shadow to shadow and dodging tourists. I think in my heat-fuelled daze I was heading to my office thinking that perhaps I had some spare clothes there. I was rushing down the street in that direction when I felt a hand grab me by the elbow. It was Carter Wilkins and his face was bright red from the heat.
“Didn’t you hear me calling you? I need to talk,” he said.
“What?”
“I’ve been following you for a whole street now. Can we go to your office and talk?”
I mumbled something that Carter took as a yes, and then he followed me down the street to my office building. The front door was unlocked and as I passed by Jonas’s office, I could hear him inside talking with another man. Carter followed me up the stairs. With each step we ascended the temperature jumped. I found the keys to my office, fumbled them into the door and unlocked it. I opened the door to the oven that was now my office to find John Smith sitting on the sofa watching the television.
I walked in, trying not to look at the dust that was covering every surface. My poor neglected office was well on its way to being abandoned.
“Why is the TV on if there’s no one here?” Carter asked.
Oh yeah, he couldn’t see John.
“I think it’s faulty. Turns itself on and off sometimes. Maybe it’s the heat,” I said. I headed for the television looking at John and trying to convey with my eyes that I was very sorry, but I had to turn the television off now.
But I don’t think John saw me, he was so intently focused on the television.
I flicked the switch to turn the television off (it was showing a terrible infomercial about some exercise equipment that wouldn’t have looked out of place in a bondage dungeon) and only then did John look up at me.
“Oh, Harlow, you’re here, is it time for our appointment?” he asked.
I couldn’t answer him, of course, not with Carter there, so I was stuck trying to make faces, winking and nodding my head in his direction. John frowned and then looked over at Carter.
“Oh, it’s the one who writes that trashy newspaper. He was a little snot when he was a teenager and he’s a little snot now.”
“You know, you need to use your office if you want to stay in the free rent program. If someone came up here they would see that this place is clearly abandoned,” Carter said.
“I know that. But I also need money and if it comes down to it I’ll choose having money and no office over having an office and no money,” I said, snapping a little.
“Why did you leave those twenty dollar bills on the desk?”
I had no good explanation for them. John had left them, of course, as payment for his sessions with me that I had abandoned but he still kept turning up and bringing money even when the office was empty. The last time I’d seen him I had told him to stop bringing money but due to John’s memory problem he’d clearly forgotten this.
“I must’ve left it there,” I lied.
Carter swiped his finger across the desk and lifted it up. It was covered in settled dust.
“It’s weird that everything is covered in dust except the note on the top is clean, like it’s new and only recently been placed there,” he said.
“Did you come up here to do some Sherlock Holmes-style investigation about why there’s a clean twenty dollar bill sitting on my desk?” I said.
I could feel my anger rising along with the temperature. I turned away from Carter and rushed over to the window, opening it up. It spoke to how hot it was up in my small office that the blistering heat outside felt like a relief. I turned around to see Carter take a seat on the sofa. He always carried a satchel bag which he dropped down, raising a cloud of dust. John was still standing there, glaring at him but not saying anything.
“Would you like a drink of cold water?” I asked, heading for the refrigerator.
“Yes, thank you,” Carter said, opening his satchel and beginning to pull out papers.
“I don’t trust him,” John growled in an undertone.
I said nothing as I walked by him. What could I say? I didn’t trust Carter either. But he was in my office and it felt somewhat rude to throw him out so abruptly. I opened the refrigerator and found that past Harlow had left two large glass bottles of water in there. I had no idea how old they were but they were chilled and that was enough. I cleaned two dusty glasses and then filled them with the water, handing one to Carter. I sipped mine, which tasted a little stale, but the chill of it more than made up for the flavor. As soon as the cold water plumed down into my stomach I felt my senses returning. What had I come up here for again? Ah, that was it, to see if I had some spare clothes.
I went to my desk, opened a drawer, and found some clothes inside. But they weren’t mine. One was a miniskirt that would only fit me if I went on in intense dieting regime, and the other piece of clothing was a small top, the type of thing a teenage girl might wear. I turned the clothes over in my hands going through the very short list of suspects as to who these might belong to. The first name on the list was Kira. The second was Sophira, her friend. Oh no, had the local teenagers been using my abandoned office for their romantic dalliances?
“Whose clothes are those?” Carter asked.
I stuffed them back into the drawer and closed it before turning around. John was still standing there, glaring at Carter.
“You should ask if those are his real eyebrows,” John said.
I stifled a laugh but couldn’t escape a smirk making its way onto my face.
“Something funny?” Carter said, those eyebrows of his moving up and down, almost causing me to burst out in laughter.
“No, it’s nothing. What did you want to talk to me about that was so urgent?” I finished my glass of cold water and went to the refrigerator and refilled it again. It felt like I could drink all of the water in the world at the moment.
“I think those scratches in the alleyway were faked by the Mysterious Mysteries. I wanted your help to investigate them,” Carter said.
I gulped down some cold water and then opened the refrigerator door again to luxuriate in the cool air streaming out from it.
“Are you offering me a job?” I asked.
Carter shuffled through his papers for a moment before giving a half nod. “I can’t keep writing the paper all by myself. I need help and I can pay you,” he said, not looking me in the eye.
Perhaps with the crazy heat I was feeling a little crazy, but it didn’t sound like the worst idea. Carter and I had clashed many times in the past. He’d in fact written a few lies about my family and me in his paper. The Harlot Bay Times had started off as a credible source of news and then slipped in the direction of tabloid garbage. I had understood why Carter had done it–after all, my own online newspaper was dead and buried. There was only so much attention you could get writing about foreshore restoration and council matters and whether the potholes in the main street were going to be filled.
As a result, Carter had turned to scandal and making up things to keep his newspaper going.
Was I considering working for him? How financially desperate would I have to be that I would call him my boss? In an instant I decided that there was no way he was going to be my boss… but perhaps I did need the money. Once Writerpalooza was over I was looking at a nice stretch of unemployment again, perhaps broken up with a few shifts at the bakery or working as a waitress at the Cozy Cat Café. Although I was sure there would be a lot of work for the Summer at the café, eventually the seasons would turn again, the entire town would shut down and I would be back to unemployment and writing my ghost story up in my lair behind the mansion.
“I need to think about it. But I would never be your employee, it would have to be a partnership,” I said.
Carter nodded and then picked up one of the pieces of paper. He stood up to pass it to me and walked straight into John who bounced off him like he was made of rubber. John went shooting straight through the wall, letting out a surprised yelp that made me jump.
“Yo
u okay? You’re not dehydrated or something are you?” Carter said, handing me the paper.
“Just a cold chill from the water,” I said. John walked back through the door looking positively furious.
“Push me around, will you,” he thundered and took a swing at Carter. I flinched again as John’s fist connected and then he went shooting off, flying off in the other direction through the front window and down into the street below.
“Maybe you should see someone if you keep having shakes like that,” Carter murmured.
To hide my shock I looked down at the paper he’d given me. It was a police record from a little town called Walkerville down in the Mississippi. I had to read through it a few times before I understood what it was saying. It seemed to be a report of Rufus and Dawn of Mysterious Mysteries fame being questioned for trespassing after being caught on private land. The interesting part of the report indicated that they’d been setting up a trap of some kind, described as a “modified bear trap”.
Carter tapped his finger on the paper.
“I think they’d planned to trap someone. They were going to fake a monster and then have that person get terribly injured which they would claim was the real monster attacking,” Carter said. I passed him back the piece of paper and closed the refrigerator door and went back to my desk with my cool glass of water. I took a seat in my dusty chair and Carter returned to the sofa.
“So do you think Carl Stern being attacked was these two?” I said.
I was feeling that familiar journalistic tingle. Honestly, I had missed it. I loved being a journalist and going around collecting stories, trying to hunt down the truth, and it had been a great pain in my heart to abandon that career.
“I think that’s exactly what happened. It’s possible they’re working with one of the authors too. I found one of them who sets up stunts in all the towns on his book tours. Maybe they’re in cahoots or perhaps Rufus and Dawn were taking advantage of that, of him setting up some publicity and trying to make it real. I’m thinking one of them attacked Carl Stern,” Carter said.
