by Tess Lake
“There, quick, she’s turning,” Luce said, pointing. By the time we reached the same corner and turned around it, Ro’s car was gone. Molly pulled to a stop at the curb and turned off the headlights.
“Don’t move,” she whispered.
“Why?” I whispered back.
“She might have seen us. She stopped so she can catch us.”
“Shouldn’t we get out of here, then, so that doesn’t happen?”
“No, that’ll look even more suspicious.”
“But if she catches us, won’t that look suspicious?” I asked.
Right that moment there was an enormous thud from the trunk of the car. We all screamed and turned around, but there was no one there.
“What was that?” Luce said. She reached under the front seat where Molly was sitting and pulled out a short baseball bat.
“What’s that for?”
“In case there’s some monster out there about to get us. It could be the soul sucker.”
I hadn’t thought of that. Although, what were the chances? We’re driving around following our aunt and the soul sucker just happens to stumble across us?
There was another thud from the trunk.
“Okay, we have to get out and see what that is. We’re witches; we can do this,” I said.
“Or we could just drive away,” Molly said.
“What if the soul sucker is in the trunk? Then we take it home and there’s just the three of us a mile from town.”
This was getting really bad. If we kept talking, we were going to scare ourselves stupid. I jumped out of the car.
“Let’s go.”
Molly and Luce reluctantly followed. Molly forced Luce out in front of her, holding the bat. We crept around the back of the car. I was ready to cast a spell if I had to. Molly mouthed I’m going to open it and pointed at Luce to get into position. I stood on the other side of her so I wouldn’t get hit by the bat and got ready to cast a binding spell. I could feel my heart thudding, and my breath in my lungs seemed to rasp abnormally loud. Everything around us had gone quiet and it seemed the night itself was closing in. Molly reached forward and slipped the key into the lock incredibly slowly.
A silent countdown.
3 . . . 2 . . . 1 . . .
The trunk sprung open and the interior light glared out. Something rose up like a viper.
“Argh!” Luce shouted with her eyes closed and swung like crazy.
There was a flash of light and the bat broke apart in her hands.
“You stop that right now.”
The monster in the trunk was . . . Aunt Cass.
“Someone help me out.”
I let the binding spell slip away. I held out my hand and helped Cass out of the trunk. As she climbed out, I saw that she wasn’t alone in there. There was also a box that contained glass test tubes and flasks and what was clearly a Bunsen burner.
“Is that yours?” I asked.
Cass turned around and slammed the trunk shut.
“None of your business. What are you doing out here?”
“What are we doing here? Why were you in Molly’s trunk?”
“I asked you first.”
“So? We’re out for a drive and that’s perfectly normal. An old lady hiding in the trunk is definitely not. So you can’t use the ‘I asked you first’ defense.”
“Who are you following?”
“Aunt Ro,” Luce said. “We think she’s having a love affair with Sheriff Hardy.”
Aunt Cass just looked at the three of us and then shook her head.
“Taking your snitching to a whole new level, I see. Now you’re out collecting evidence of things people are doing.”
“It’s not like that. We just think that Ro and the sheriff might be together and we were curious,” I said.
“It doesn’t matter, Harlow. Let’s just go back home,” Molly said.
Aunt Cass stomped away to sit in the front seat.
“What you mean, it doesn’t matter? Are you not the least bit curious what Aunt Cass was doing hiding in the trunk?”
“Does it matter? Do you think she’s really going to tell us? We’ve lost Mom. Let’s just go home before this gets any worse.”
“I agree with Molly. If Ro caught us now, we would have to explain what we were doing here with Aunt Cass.”
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Normally my cousins would be first in line to ask Aunt Cass what exactly she was doing. And now they were backing away? Something was going on.
“Fine, we’ll go home. But I’m going to find out what that Bunsen burner is about.”
“She’s not going to tell you,” Luce said. We gathered the shattered pieces of baseball bat and then drove home in silence. We all knew if we started talking, the conversation would merely turn to why we were snitching and snooping. We arrived at the front door and Aunt Cass went inside without a word, taking her box of glassware with her. Then we drove down to our end of the house.
I turned on my cousins as soon as we were indoors.
“Seriously, what has gotten into the two of you? We just had an old lady in our trunk and some highly suspicious glassware which she just took inside, and there’s not a single question?”
“It’s our new strategy. She always lies to us anyway and so do our mothers, so why fight it? I think half the time she gets involved in things just so she could possibly get caught. It’s kind of fun for her,” Molly said.
I hadn’t considered that, but still this was weird.
“You should stop reading those war books. You’re getting all kinds of crazy ideas.”
I made us all hot cocoa and tried to get a bit more out of them, but they foiled me at every turn. By the end of my drink, I was convinced there was definitely something going on. I was going to figure out what it was.
I went to bed and started listing the mysteries that had piled up on top of me: a dead sculptor, possible murderous competitors, a drug-dealing agent who was profiting from this, and Jack, who I’d seen meeting with someone I was fairly sure was a drug dealer. And now this? My aunt hiding in the trunk of a car and refusing to tell us why. It was no small wonder that I didn’t go completely mad sometimes.
Chapter 16
In the morning I had breakfast with Luce and Molly, who were very excited about the new coffee machine being delivered today. I decided not to reopen the case of the Old Lady in the Trunk with the Mysterious Glassware for the time being. They were hiding something, but I knew I’d eventually find out what it was. Keeping secrets isn’t a strong suit for the Torrent witches. After they left, I got myself ready and went down to the main house to see Aunt Cass. I wanted to show her the photos I had taken of Fusion Swan and Zero Bend together. I also needed to talk to her about what Hattie Stern had said to me about a magical immune response. But Aunt Cass was nowhere to be found. Most days she was in the lounge in her recliner watching television. The pile of books was still there, but no Aunt Cass.
“Hello? Aunt Cass, are you here?”
All I heard was my own voice echoing through the mansion.
She definitely hadn’t left with my mom and aunts, and unless she had been hiding in Luce and Molly’s trunk again, she had to be around somewhere. I went through the kitchen and downstairs to the lower floor. I said good morning to Grandma and then opened the flaking old door that led to the rest of the mansion. I took the flashlight that we kept hanging by the door and turned it on.
Under the house it’s basically pitch dark. When our ancestors built it, they dug down at least two entire levels. That meant there was an entire level below me, and the wooden floors were old and rotting in places. I turned on my flashlight and crept through the dark, carefully testing each step. I didn’t want to fall through the floor to end up in the rooms below.
I walked down a long corridor, feeling the warm dark pressing on me from all sides. You’d think I’d be scared under a mansion in the dark, but I grew up here. When we were kids, we used to come into the mansion all the time
and run around through the lower floors finding all sorts of hiding places. On the next level down, there’s even a hidden door behind a bookcase that swings open. There is also one of those dumbwaiters that, if it were functioning, would allow us to lift food up and down from the basement kitchen. It has been broken for decades. I passed under one or two skylights that let very thin beams of light in from above. Because this house was built pre-electricity, they used a lot of reflected and borrowed light. Subsequent generations of witches had carpeted over the skylights and plunged the rooms below into darkness.
I reached an intersection and turned left, heading roughly south. I knew Aunt Cass had a room for herself somewhere over here. We always tried to find it when we were kids but never succeeded. Eventually we’d stopped looking. I was fairly convinced she must’ve had a misdirection spell running, keeping it hidden from us. But after all these years, had she remembered to keep it going?
I walked down the corridor, and over the sound of my own footsteps and breath, I heard a clinking noise. Glass touching glass. Perhaps highly suspicious glassware touching other highly suspicious glassware. Convinced I was on the right track, I continued down the corridor, took another left, and saw a room at the far end with the door ajar. Light was streaming out of the doorway and the sound of someone working inside was very clear. I turned off the flashlight, the click of the button very loud in the darkness, and crept down the corridor. It’s never a good idea to surprise a witch, but if Aunt Cass heard me she might slam the door and I’d never see what she was up to. I held my breath and crept up to the door. Inside I could hear Aunt Cass humming. She sounded cheerful.
“Stop snooping and just come in.”
Okay, she knew I was there. I pushed open the door and stepped into the room. It was lit up by a large skylight. On three sides of the room were large wooden tables, and on each table, a lot of complicated chemistry equipment was set up. There were beakers of bubbling blue liquid, smaller ones of red and green, and a Bunsen burner boiling something in a large wide-bottomed flask.
I looked at Aunt Cass, who at that very moment was chopping a fine white powder with a credit card on an electronic kitchen scale.
“Please tell me this isn’t meth.”
“It’s not meth. Pass me that stirring rod, the glass one over there.”
I retrieved the glass stirring rod and gave it to Cass. She took the white powder over to a bubbling flask of green liquid and carefully dropped it in. After a moment the liquid turned black.
“If it’s not meth, what is it?”
“It’s something to help with the soul sucker. It won’t be ready for two more days, so hopefully it won’t strike before then.”
I looked around the room at the complicated twirls of plastic hose, bottles and titration equipment. Stick a slab in the middle of this room with a monster on it, and add someone cackling at the lightning, and you’d have your very own mad scientist laboratory. Aunt Cass saw me looking around.
“Do not snitch about this. Your mothers would lose their minds about it. I’m making a type of protective balm and that’s it.”
I didn’t really know what to say. I knew Aunt Cass was good with potions, but I had no idea she had a setup like this. There were boxes of all kinds of equipment and bags of various unidentified powders sitting on the bench. If I had to guess, I would say some of the ingredients were super illegal.
I got my bearings, making a new area in my mind to hold the fact that my elderly aunt had a fully functioning laboratory hidden in the bottom of our house, and then pushed that aside. There was no way I’d tell anyone about it, not even Molly and Luce, who would be sure to spill the beans.
I took the photo of Fusion Swan and Zero Bend out of my bag and passed it to Aunt Cass. She looked at it for a moment and then passed it back to me.
“The tall one has power over the punk one. See how their auras are mingling? That’s what domination looks like.”
“The tall one is Fusion Swan, Zero Bend’s agent. I’m pretty sure I saw him buying drugs yesterday and taking them over there.”
“That would do it.”
“Could Fusion Swan be the soul sucker?”
“Maybe. I think you’ll be very lucky if you manage to see it in an aura.”
“Yesterday I shook hands with Fusion Swan and Preston Jacobs and then soon after that I started overheating like I was boiling alive. I had to practically douse myself in the fountain to cool down. I thought I was Slipping, but then Hattie Stern saw me and she said it was a magical immune response.”
“Hattie was always good with things like that, so if she says that’s what happened, then that’s the truth.”
I was a bit surprised to hear Aunt Cass agree with Hattie Stern. If they ever saw each other in public, they made very clear and obvious steps to stay out of each other’s way. That included crossing to the other side of the street, leaving restaurants, and generally making it obviously known that they did not want to be anywhere near the other. Aunt Cass did not approve of Hattie Stern’s push to have Harlot Bay renamed and had on many occasions called her a stuck-up prude with nothing better to do.
“So does that mean that Preston Jacobs or Fusion Swan could be the soul sucker?”
“It’s highly likely. It’s too bad you touched both of them yesterday. That type of response only works once.”
Aunt Cass took out another sachet of powder from a drawer. This one was also a highly suspicious pure white. She measured it out on the scale and then reached under the bench and took out a packet of green herb that anyone who has watched any kind of crime show would recognize. I didn’t step closer to check precisely which illegal herb it was. The less I knew the better.
“What does the balm do?”
“You smear a little on your skin. It makes you taste disgusting to the soul sucker. It can’t drink your blood.”
That sounded useful, but there were two days until it was ready.
“You know of any other way I can determine if Fusion or Preston is infected by a soul sucker?”
Aunt Cass shook her head.
“There are as many different types of soul sucker as there are beetles in the world. If it was one particular species, he could be poisoned by black tea. Another one makes its host permanently cold, so they will always be wearing extra clothing inappropriate to the weather. Another will make a bald man’s hair grow back for the year before it gives them a fatal heart attack. All you can do is observe and see if you can pick up on anything unusual. Just make sure that neither of them gets you alone. Now get out of here. This balm is particularly tricky, and I can’t have you standing there yammering at me. Don’t tell anyone about this.”
“My lips are sealed.”
I turned to go, but a thought struck me.
“You were hiding in the trunk to protect us, weren’t you?”
“Ridiculous idea.”
“You’re not really going to curse Molly and Luce because you know they didn’t do it deliberately.”
“We’ll see about that. Now go!”
I left Aunt Cass in her mad scientist laboratory and walked carefully up the creaking corridors, back through the basement room, where I said goodbye to Grandma, and up through the kitchen. I’m not even sure how I would tell anyone about what Aunt Cass was doing.
“Hey, Mom, did you know Aunt Cass has a crazy laboratory under the house?”
Aunt Cass would curse me back to the Stone Age.
I got into my car, intending to go to work, but then I changed my mind. Sheriff Hardy had asked me for my help in a roundabout way, and so far I hadn’t given him anything useful. Now I had two suspects, both of whom profited somewhat from Holt Everand’s death. It wasn’t much, but it might be enough.
I started my car and it shuddered and groaned like it was going to die on me. While I waited for it to recover, I smiled and shook my head at the idea of Aunt Cass underground in her laboratory. Even witches have to keep up with the times, and ye olde cauldron had been replace
d with the ye olde Bunsen burner and a warming flask, a retort stand and test tubes.
Now I had another secret to add to a very long list of information I was keeping to myself. So long as Aunt Cass didn’t burn the mansion down or blow anything up, hopefully it would be okay. Although I wasn’t sure quite what she would do once the mothers started having the mansion renovated.
Chapter 17
I drove to the police station, said good morning to Mary, and then sat in the waiting room until Sheriff Hardy came out. I followed him back to his office.
I sat down on a squeaking brown leather chair and Sheriff Hardy looked at me from across mounds of paperwork. His desk was piled high with folders and stacks of paper. I saw at least four inboxes stuffed to the gills. There were two desks against one wall, and they were piled up with assorted files that threatened to topple at any moment. He saw me looking around.
“As you can see, everything is very neat and well organized,” he said, gesturing at the controlled chaos.
“It looks like my office. Any empty spot automatically attracts a piece of paper or a coffee mug or a loose pen.”
“This isn’t even the half of it. There’s an entire warehouse of police records downtown. They’re all in paper and we simply don’t have the time or the money to digitize them. The only way to find anything is by using an ancient card catalog system. It’s a nightmare when you’re trying to look up similar crimes from the past.”
“Speaking of similar crimes from the past . . .”
I told him what I’d discovered about Preston Jacobs and Fusion Swan. The deaths of all the various artists that Fusion had represented, the various crimes and murders that had occurred that centered around competitions Preston had been sponsoring, and my suspicion that somehow one of them had been involved in the murder, possibly for some sort of gain. I finished off by telling him about the red-haired weasel man and how I was fairly sure he was a drug dealer. I really wasn’t sure about discussing that piece of information—having seen Jack talk to the same man just a few days ago—but I decided I couldn’t keep it to myself. If he really was a drug dealer and Jack had in fact been buying drugs, then it didn’t matter how handsome he was. He was trouble and not the good sort of trouble. I decided to tell Sheriff Hardy and let the chips fall where they may.
