by Tess Lake
“That’s a great idea, Aunt Cass,” Luce said. “What kind of business where you thinking of running?”
“I heard you snickering before, missy, so don’t think you can sweet-talk me now by pretending to be on my side.” Luce looked at her plate as though it was suddenly the most interesting thing in the room.
“I want to know about these boys,” Mom said.
“It is very important to run a good business,” I said, trying to cool things off and change the topic.
“Oh, is it? You have a spelling mistake on your website. You left a letter off a word,” Aunt Cass said.
She’s reading my Harlot Bay Reader website?
“Where?”
“I’m not being paid to be your editor.”
I looked down at my food and focused on getting as much of it into my mouth as I could, as fast as possible. There probably was no mistake and she was just sending me off on a wild goose chase for her own amusement. Still, it had gotten us off the topic of any men we might be interested in, although I knew our mothers wouldn’t forget it. I also knew that as soon as we got out of there, Molly and Luce were probably going to kill me for even bringing it up.
Right at that moment, I felt Adams rub himself against my leg. Before I could even reach to break off a piece of cheesy crust from the lasagna to feed him, Mom snapped, “No feeding the cat under the table.”
“Who made that rule?” Adams said from somewhere near my feet.
“Stop getting inside the pizza oven.”
I heard Adams grumble something, and he wandered further up the table to sit under Aunt Cass’s chair. With Mom watching, Aunt Cass very deliberately cut off a piece of her lasagna, took it off her plate with their fingers, and put her hand under the dinner table. She stared at Mom, daring her to say something.
“Cats shouldn’t eat human food,” Mom finally said, looking away first. By this time we had finished our main course, which meant we only had dessert to get through before we could bail out of there.
Mom picked up her half-full glass of wine. She took a gulp before raising the rest of it up into the air.
“Tonight is one year since Harlow returned to us. We’re so delighted you came home, darling. Because this is what family means. They stay together and treat each other with respect. Cheers.”
We all lifted our glasses and mumbled cheers. You could practically hear everyone’s sarcastic remarks crackling in the air. There was Mom’s dig at our absent fathers, who were all long gone. And respect? Was that the same as sticking your nose into everything?
With the main meal over, Mom, Ro and Freya quickly gathered up the plates and took them away.
While they were gone, Molly whispered to me, “You are so dead.” She pinched me on the arm.
“Ow, leave me alone. That hurts.”
“Why did you snitch on us?” Luce whispered from the other side. She didn’t pinch me, but she had a crazy look in her eye that suggested she might do something else.
“I didn’t snitch, I just thought it would be interesting dinner conversation.”
“Snitch,” Molly said. She tried to pinch me again, but I smacked her hand away.
“Stop it. You need to protect each other. Stop fighting,” Aunt Cass commanded.
“She snitched on us,” Molly said.
“So what? The three of you have been snitches ever since you said your first words. Tattletales who snitch on family to save your own skin. It’s about time you learned a little something about being there for your family and keeping their secrets.”
This didn’t sound good.
“We’re not snitches,” Molly protested.
“Oh no? I wonder how it was that your mothers found out about my online business. Were they perhaps searching for some male erection treatments? Did they happen to stumble upon it and then order some treatments and discover that I was the one who was sending them? Or did someone who is a snitch somehow figure out what I was doing and tell them?”
Aunt Cass’s every sentence dripped with sarcasm. She looked from Molly to Luce and back again.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Luce said. When in trouble, it was best to deny everything. She might still get you for it, but if there was something Aunt Cass admired, it was a good lie.
So Molly and Luce had evidently been the ones to uncover Aunt Cass’s drug empire. I’d have to ask about that after dinner and perhaps keep it as ammunition for when they came after me for revealing the men they were interested in.
“Dessert!” Mom announced. Ro pushed the door open and Freya came through with a bowl of whipped cream.
Mom carried in our mansion in cake form on a giant silver platter.
It was spectacular. It wasn’t our mansion as it was at the moment—dilapidated, falling down around our ears, and liable to collapse at any moment. It was restored, beautiful and new.
Our mothers are amazing witches, but they especially have an affinity for cooking and kitchen witchery. Every year they enter into cake competitions, pie competitions and generally any cooking challenge where they can compete against each other. The three of them are so good that the competition organizers often have to award joint first place.
“Wow,” I breathed, looking at the cake. I didn’t know how they’d managed to keep this a secret.
“We have some news,” Freya began.
“What news?” Aunt Cass demanded.
The three older women shared the look. We all knew it well. It was the we have something to tell you, but you’re probably going to go crazy, so we’re going to try to do it very gently, but please don’t go crazy look. With Aunt Cass already worked up about the end of her business, they’d have to tread carefully.
“Well, Big Pie is going well enough that we’ve been able to get a little bit of money out of it. We’re thinking of transforming this place into a bed-and-breakfast that we’re going to call Torrent Mansion,” Mom said.
There was a moment of silence as we digested this news.
“How are you going to make this into a bed-and-breakfast? There are about a million rooms and the whole place is falling apart. Did someone die and we inherited a lot of money that I don’t know about?” Molly asked.
“Don’t be sarcastic. This town definitely needs good business development,” Ro snapped.
“We’re going to build from the center out. We’ve already renovated this part, and we can do the rooms around it and block off the rest of the house. As we make money, we can continue to expand until the entire mansion has been renovated from top to bottom.”
“But what about Grandma?” Luce asked. “And what about all the other witchy things around this place? You want to have workmen in here seeing the hex symbol carvings in that bottom room?”
“What about that weird feeling you get down in the other end of the house that might be some kind of spirit?” Molly added.
“It’s fine. We can move your grandmother and keep her safe. Besides, most of the workmen know about our family stories already, so it’s not any surprise for them if they find some strange carvings or markings on the wall. We might play on it, a sort of witch-based bed-and-breakfast. Guests will find it charming,” Freya said.
“Or find a dead body buried under the floorboards,” Molly muttered under her breath. We all looked at Aunt Cass, waiting to see what she would say. She rarely takes news well. She seems to believe that the moment you know something, she should know immediately or you should have discussed it beforehand with her, and of course you were trying to spring it on her just so you would get your own way.
“What are you looking at me like that for? I think it’s a good idea. This place has been falling down for years, and if the bakery is making enough money to renovate, then we should.”
This was certainly a new development. Normally Aunt Cass would kick up a big stink about something, which was generally a ploy just so she could get her own way on something else. I was surprised they’d spring something this big on her, honest
ly. On the other hand, they probably didn’t want to give her time to think up a long list of demands.
“Is the bakery really making that much money?” I asked.
“It’s making enough money that we can get a loan against it. We can use that loan to renovate enough of the mansion for us to open a bed-and-breakfast and block off the rest. We’re going to advertise it as a historical heirloom coming back to life. There are a lot of people who are very interested in old houses.”
“There were a lot of people interested in taking ghost tours through old houses too until you shut me down,” Aunt Cass said.
“We can discuss ghost tours if you want,” Mom said diplomatically.
I took a quick photo of the cake mansion with my phone and then Ro cut into it. Inside, it was a chocolate-and-vanilla marble cake with a chocolate filling that ran through it in stripes. It was absolutely delicious, and for a short while there was mostly the sound of seven witches eating and not sniping at each other.
I wasn’t sure how I felt about this new idea. One thing Harlot Bay is known for, at least locally, is all the businesses that open and then shut down within six months to a year. It’s basically a plague. Someone, usually not from here, has the idea of opening up a shop on the seaside that, say, sells flowers, and they don’t understand the realities of running a business in a tourist town. The mayor’s initiative helps by giving free rent, but that really just seems to increase the number of failing businesses. Honestly, the ones that succeed are always weird. I assume it’s the magical confluence in this area and the strange people it attracts. They don’t start normal businesses. It’s pretty odd, actually. There is a Viking-themed bar called Valhalla Viking that is successful, and so virtually every year someone tries to open a pirate-themed bar. You’d think it would succeed given all the crazy pirate activity up and down the coast in the past. But inevitably, people go to Valhalla Viking and the pirate bar closes down until someone else comes along to try again.
There were already bed-and-breakfasts in Harlot Bay, but there was definitely nothing like Torrent Mansion. I could see where there might be some attraction to it, although I didn’t know who would want to stay overnight at a place that would be constantly undergoing renovations. Taking a loan out against the bakery didn’t sound like such a great idea. We were barely hanging on as it was, and too much debt could go bad very quickly.
I gulped down my cake and refilled my glass of wine, topping up Molly and Luce also. I noticed that Aunt Cass was most of the way through her bottle herself.
I shook the negative thoughts out of my head. While the Torrent family is wild and sometimes crazy, and has possibly been wicked in the past and on other occasions, we also don’t give up. Every one of us was trying as hard as we could to pull our entire family out of the borderline poverty we’d fallen into. Maybe this would be just the thing to turn our fortunes around. I raised my glass in the air.
“To new endeavors!” We clinked our glasses together and drank.
Then we got out of there as fast as we could and rushed back to our end of the mansion, Adams trotting along behind us. Luce and Molly seemed to have forgotten my hauling our possible romantic lives out at dinner in the face of the threat of Aunt Cass blaming them for Dalila, Ro and Freya discovering and subsequently shutting down her online business.
“She blames us! She’s gonna curse us, I just know it.”
“We drive through the night and by morning, we’re Canadian,” Molly said.
“I love maple syrup,” Luce said.
“No, we go south and cross into Mexico. She’ll never find us.”
“Ooh, guacamole!”
Molly turned on Luce. “What is it with you and food right now? Are you pregnant or something?”
“For me to be pregnant, I’d have to . . . shut up.”
“Why does Cass think you snitched on her?”
Molly raised a hand to her forehead—perhaps wiping away panic sweat or maybe checking for warts or goat horns that were going to erupt at any moment.
“Mom had something strange on her credit card and wanted to know if it was me. It was a shipping company charging small amounts of money to her. I asked Luce, and she checked Freya’s statement and found similar charges. We told them to dispute them with the bank and then it turned out it was Aunt Cass buying supplies online! She thinks we snitched on her!”
As Molly said snitched she suddenly remembered my traitorous behavior at dinner.
“You! What are you, mental? Those witches are going to be out looking for every librarian and landscape gardener in town now! I’m going to get you for that.”
I rubbed my arm, pretending it hurt a lot more than it did.
“You already got me. Besides, I outed myself too.”
“Oh, so you do like Mr. Tall, Dark and Touristy?”
“Um, no, I mean . . . just that they’ll be picking on me. I don’t like him.”
“Yes, you do,” Luce and Molly teased in unison.
“You want some of that scruffy tourist coming through town. Here today, gone tomorrow, no names, just a night of passion,” Molly said.
“I do not!”
“I really enjoy not falling over,” Luce said.
Years ago, when Aunt Cass suspected the three of us of stealing her wine, she’d cursed us with being clumsy for a good three months until we came clean. We could hardly walk more than three steps down the block without falling over, banging our elbows and knees, or bruising ourselves on low tree branches. It got so bad that the school nurse suspected we were all being beaten at home. Only when we confessed to Aunt Cass did the curse lift—although she denied she’d ever cursed us in the first place and insisted we were all simply clumsy.
“If I fall over because that old lady curses me, it’s gonna be war,” Molly said.
Luce put her hands on her hips. “Oh please, what are you going to do to her?”
“I don’t know, but it’s going to be effective. She’s the one committing credit card fraud, and we end up cursed because she gets caught? What are we supposed to do, check with her first if we discover a crime in progress? Make sure she’s not involved?”
“Wouldn’t be a bad idea,” I said. Aunt Cass considered the law a loose set of guidelines when it came to her—unless she was trying to use it against you, in which case they were iron.
“I have to go to bed. I start reporting on the Butter Festival tomorrow,” I said with a yawn.
“I only just got my eyebrows back,” Luce said, brushing her fingers across them.
I left Molly and Luce plotting revenge in the kitchen and took myself off to bed. Adams curled himself up at the foot of my bed. A year ago minus one day, I’d gone to bed with him sleeping at my feet and we’d been awoken by fire alarms. Thankfully, that hadn’t come up at dinner. Last time I’d talked about it, Aunt Cass had whacked me with her cane that she sometimes carried (mostly when she was trying to get out of something using the “I’m Old” excuse) and told me it wasn’t my fault and to stop being such a “moany moaner.”
As I drifted off to sleep, the past and present mixed together. My ex-boyfriend appeared, and just as I was about to kiss him, he transformed into the handsome stranger. I tried to push him out of my mind, but to no avail.
He was a tourist, and I didn’t get involved with tourists, I told myself.
Chapter 5
The next morning I got up and had a very quick breakfast while Luce and Molly very sleepily discussed the idea of getting a coffee machine for Traveler. They’d obviously stayed up late fretting over what Aunt Cass might do to them or plotting revenge for when she did do whatever she was going to do. I got out of there before they could wake up too much and remember I had thrown their romantic lives out onto the table. I patted Adams and headed out the door.
I drove to work and got there just at eight o’clock. When you’re self-employed, it’s very important that you treat your job as though it were a real job, as though there is a boss watching you come and go.
Otherwise, it’s very easy to start sleeping late and leaving early, and pretty soon you’re only working maybe one hour a day. I honestly had no idea if the Harlot Bay Reader was ever going to become successful enough to pay me like a regular business, but I was trying as hard as I could to make it so. The problem with Harlot Bay is not very much happens here. Sure, there are crimes, and the magical confluence in the area certainly causes a few weird things to hit the front page, but it’s hardly enough to sustain everyone’s interest and certainly not enough to generate advertising dollars.
I walked up the steps to my office and went inside and up the stairs. John was sitting on the sofa watching the television. Two very excited, tanned people were discussing the benefits of a truly amazing blender that could make fruit juices in under half a second.
“Hey, John,” I said, making myself a quick coffee and gulping it down.
“Good morning. Did you know you can get this blender for only three easy payments of $59.95?”
“Is it a good deal?”
“Of course it is. This blender has eighty-five separate functions.”
“Sounds nice,” I said, thinking about other things.
“Are you going to be reporting on the graffiti?”
That caught my attention. Graffiti?
“What graffiti are you talking about?”
“Someone sprayed paint on the front of a few shops this morning. Unbelievable.”
“I’ll check it out,” I said, shuffling through my papers. I finally found the Butter Festival flyer that I’d picked up at yesterday’s council meeting.
“Okay, gotta go out, see you later,” I said, checking that my camera battery was fully charged.
“It does crinkle-cut potato chips. Can you believe it?” John said, his attention back on the television.
I left him there, watching the marvels of modern engineering, and walked down the street heading for the town hall where the Butter Festival would take place. As I walked along I browsed through the flyer. There were a series of competition butter carvings running through the week and also some display events. The lead competitor, Zero Bend, was scheduled to do an ice carving at the Festival’s Grand Opening later today. There was a photo next to his name. He had spiky punk hair, dyed black, pink, green and red, which stuck out everywhere. He was wearing a thick pair of black goggles and had a snarl on his face. Black tattooed lines crept up his neck. The small bio about him called him “the bad boy of sculpture.” Below him was Holt Everand, his closest competitor. He wasn’t as punk looking as Zero Bend, but he did look just as crazy, with spiky blond hair so light it practically glowed. There were a few more competitors who’d be there, all with weird names. Harmonious Twang. The Slice. Jim Fire. It was all proudly sponsored by Preston Jacobs, referred to as the Sandcastle King.
