Torrent Witches Box Set #1 Books 1-3 (Butter Witch, Treasure Witch, Hidden Witch)

by Tess Lake

“Visited her this morning. Has the world’s worst hangover, can’t remember anything she said last night, and between her multiple visits to drive the porcelain bus told me all she saw was a black shape. She probably saw the attacker but has nothing useful to tell us.”

  Well, there goes that.

  “Okay, thanks for letting me know.”

  “I’ll see you around,” Sheriff Hardy said and left.

  I returned to my car somewhat defeated, but a little glad about it. I really don’t like going into the hospital. Like the corner that feels amazing because something good happened there, there are spots in the hospital that feel terrible. There are also other spots where you can feel love and caring, and that’s wonderful, but it’s more like wading in the ocean and you hit a spot of freezing water and then a spot of warm. It’s not necessarily pleasant.

  I went back to my office and threw myself into work. The Gold Mud Run was starting soon and I hadn’t written nearly enough about it. Because our trip had been cut short I only had a limited number of photographs. I still had to write a longer article about the human remains and how they might affect the Gold Mud Run.

  But I couldn’t get myself to think about it. They weren’t just bones – they were Holly and her father.

  So I left the grim present and went into the slightly less grim past to write about the mysterious lost treasure of Truer Island.

  Like anyone who’d grown up in this area, I’d heard most of the myths and stories about it. There were so many conflicting tales it seemed that there must be a hundred lost treasures.

  One story was that the dread pirate Captain Cassoway had been murdered by his crew. They’d then buried a chest of treasure in a cave before turning on each other. Another told the tale of a local fisherman who had witnessed pirates climbing into the hills, marking trees as they went. The Truer family was closely linked with some of these stories (there being some controversy about how exactly they’d obtained possession of the island in the first place).

  I wrote an article about the various stories, the treasure hunters who’d visited the island over the decades and the tiny bits of treasure they found that kept drawing them back. The most recent find was half a gold coin found six years ago by a tourist with a metal detector. According to my Internet research this was still getting treasure hunters excited.

  I published my story and found I still had a little time before I had to go to the bakery. Somehow, writing about the past allowed me to take a more distant view of the attack on Carter and Franklin last night. I wrote a quick article detailing the basic facts and published it.

  Then I was out of time. I closed up my office to go to work at Big Pie.

  Chapter 9

  Today the bakery was cinnamon sugar. Sweet and delicious. I swear I was gaining weight just by breathing. Big Pie was reasonably busy – as we headed through summer, more tourists would be arriving and the moms would be rushed off their feet. They were going to have to work out something soon, though, because they’d already received a few more bookings for the Torrent Mansion Bed and Breakfast and that meant at least one of them had to stay home in the morning to provide said breakfast (and also to check visitors in).

  Right now Aunt Cass was the only one home and no one wanted to risk putting her behind a reception desk.

  The lunch rush hit but even in the blur of it, I managed to chat with a few customers. It’s the good side of a small town – you know a lot of people. Aveline Hardy came in to stock up on donuts and told me in a conspiratorial whisper that “the man who was attacked last night is staying at the Hardy Arms!” She also told me he seemed very strange and didn’t talk to anyone, not even when he was checking in.

  Ah, gossip – the unofficial small-town currency.

  It was nearly one (the lunch rush still in full swing) and I was handing a six-pack of cinnamon donuts over the counter when Holly suddenly appeared. She was still in her jeans and yellow T-shirt with Sunshine! printed on it, but it was like someone had turned the color up on her. She seemed more solid, more real.

  “Harlow, I found where me and my dad were killed!” she said.

  “Hold the fort for a minute, can you?” I asked Anne-Marie, one of the counter staff. She nodded without answering. I motioned Holly to follow me out through the kitchen, where my mothers were cooking furiously, and into the pantry so we could get some privacy.

  “No one else can see you. So we have to come out here to talk. You found the place…”

  “… where me and my dad were killed.”

  Ghosts and their memories were notoriously tricky. If I didn’t take this opportunity now, then Holly might forget everything.

  “Can you tell me where it is?”

  “It’s on Truer Island. I can take you there.”

  I couldn’t push her or she very easily might forget. There was only one thing to do – get out there as fast as possible. I couldn’t even risk asking her about the initials K.M. yet.

  “Okay, I’ll come with you. One second.”

  I took off my serving apron and left it on a shelf before rushing out to the kitchen.

  “Mom, I’m really sorry but I have to go right now. It’s an emergency.”

  “What emergency? We need you!”

  “I’m sorry, I can’t talk about it right now.”

  I bolted out of there with Holly hot on my heels and jumped in my car. The ferry to Truer Island ran on a set schedule and if I rushed we could make the next boat. I drove to the pier as fast as my car would go (which isn’t very fast) and made it in time. Lee, the ticket seller, held the gate open for me.

  We jumped on the ferry and Lee closed the gate behind us and then yelled out, “Ready!” The ferry was full at this time of day with various tourist couples and Gold Mud Run competitors. Down at the end of the boat, there was a man dressed in all black who kept glancing at me (probably because I’d run onto the ferry). He’d made the same typical tourist mistake that many did and dressed inappropriately for the weather. After I saw him look at me a few times, I stared back at him until he got the message and walked around to the other side of the ferry.

  I whispered to Holly that we couldn’t talk until we reached the island and she nodded at me. We stood at the railing and watched the slight waves as we sailed across to Truer Island. The entire trip was less than ten minutes.

  When we disembarked I rented one of Truer Island’s famous tricycles. The tourists love them. They’re basically a pedal-powered car that you can trundle around the island in.

  Holly pointed the way and I started pedaling.

  “Did you come out here all on your own?” I asked Holly, feeling my thighs already starting to burn.

  “I got hit by another car. It bounced me down the street and then I hit another car and that bounced me into the fountain. But it didn’t hurt! So I realized nothing can really hurt me. My dad might be a ghost out here, walking around, and he would be sad without me, so I decided to see if I could find him.”

  “That’s very brave of you,” I said between breaths. The long, winding track around Truer Island is mostly flat but does have some hills and dips. Right now we were climbing a hill. We finally reached the top and I saw some of the flags and markers for the upcoming Gold Mud Run were already in place.

  “It’s not much further. Then we have to walk,” Holly said.

  We crested the hill and started rolling down the other side, to my great relief. You sometimes don’t realize how unfit you are until you try to do something where you have to move your limbs. It’s a hazard of my job – which is to sit down, essentially – and I again resolved to exercise more.

  We reached the bottom, and Holly soon waved me over to a small dirt path that led off the main road. We left the tricycle by the road and walked into the thick forest, following the dirt path.

  “I saw a horse out here and there was a lizard and there were also bees. Lots of bees,” Holly said.

  “Did you see a beehive?” I asked, a little worried. The invulnerable
ghost girl would be fine, but I didn’t feel like running into a beehive.

  “I think they were living in a tree.”

  The dirt track narrowed until it disappeared and soon we were walking through the forest, stepping over logs and crunching dried leaves. It was when Holly jumped over a fallen log and landed on the other side, the leaves cracking under her feet, that I suddenly realized something very strange was happening. Ghosts simply don’t interact with the real world like that! They’re not solid, they’re not real. I couldn’t stop to ask Holly about it or to get her to demonstrate that she could step on a leaf because for all I knew it might make her memory fade away and then I would be standing out in the forest on Truer Island for no reason.

  My ability to see ghosts has always strengthened and weakened without any pattern. Sometimes John Smith is see-through, like a very faint watercolor of himself. Sometimes he looks virtually solid. But I know that’s just my ability to see them – they’re not changing, my ability to perceive them is. Whatever was happening here was something new.

  “Look there!” Holly said, pointing at one of the nearby trees. Etched into the bark, obviously a number of years ago, was: KM + HM.

  “My dad did that,” Holly said.

  KM. Those was the initials engraved on the back of the watch. I guessed that meant HM could be Holly. In making up her name, had she in fact given her real name? I might have to tell the sheriff to look for any missing girls with the name of Holly. It was a long shot, but it might help narrow the search. Although… I did blurt it out in his office. Great, now I was going to have to lie about being psychic or something.

  I followed Holly through the forest, watching the leaves and branches crack under her feet. We passed another tree with KM + HM engraved in it and then another. Soon we reached a small clearing. One of the trees on the far side of the clearing had the initials engraved on it.

  “This is the place we were camping when it happened,” Holly said.

  “I’ll have a look around,” I said.

  “Can’t you cast a spell?”

  “Sorry, magic can be no help sometimes. I’ll look around and then call the police to come out here, though.”

  Thinking of the police, I took out my phone, but as I expected there was no signal whatsoever. I put my phone away and walked around the clearing, but I didn’t find anything unusual. There was just dirt and leaves and the quiet sounds of the forest around us. There weren’t even signs that there had been a campfire here at any point. It was no wonder, though. This wasn’t an official campsite. Most of the tourists who came to Truer Island camped only in the permitted zones that were somewhat protected against the wild horses who liked to steal any food they could find. Only a few people went out onto the island itself and into the forest.

  “Something is coming!” Holly said suddenly. I saw her shocked face before she suddenly vanished. I was standing in the middle of the clearing, too far away from the trees to reach them quickly. It wasn’t too bad – if someone had been following me, they’d have to come into the clearing where I could see them.

  I took a breath and let it out, feeling the magic that swirled in the area. If someone did try something, they were going to get a very bad surprise.

  Some branches broke in the forest with a loud crack. Whatever it was, it was big. Holly had said she’d been killed by a monster. The woman who had seen Franklin and Carter being attacked had said it was a monster too. Could that be the truth?

  I stood still, feeling my heart thudding, trying to stay relaxed but ready as whatever it was moved slowly through the forest, branches cracking under its feet. A cloud moved over the sun, briefly darkening the clearing before passing by. Every leaf lit up like it was glowing.

  What the hell was happening? A tree shimmered into existence in front of me in the middle of the clearing. It was faint like ghosts were and then it vanished. A moment later the faint echo of a bird hopped across the clearing in front of me. It was picking at the leaf litter. Unlike Holly, it wasn’t having any effect on the real world at all. I swallowed, my mouth suddenly dry, and tried to take another deep breath but my lungs felt constricted. I was heading for a full-on freak-out. Before I could lose it completely, a horse stepped out of the forest and stopped at the edge of the clearing. It was a gigantic wild stallion. It was a deep chestnut brown and its mane was shaggy and matted and hanging in knots. It looked at me and then blew out air from between its lips in a way that sounded like a greeting.

  “Hi,” I said, my voice sounding very small. The horse blew out air from between its lips again and then stomped its hoof on the dirt.

  “I don’t have any food, sorry,” I said.

  The horse stood there looking at me warily for about a minute before it turned around and slowly walked away into the forest. As its heavy tread vanished into the distance I managed to relax. That was, until Holly reappeared beside me with an audible pop and then crunch of leaves as she landed, scaring me half to death.

  “That was the horse I saw!”

  “It’s a big horse,” I managed to say, my heart still thudding.

  “What are you doing out here?”

  Had she forgotten?

  “Look, Holly, someone carved letters into the tree.”

  Holly walked over and looked at the letters.

  “Oh, okay,” she said before wandering off to look at a patch of flowers.

  She had forgotten, but she’d led me to where she was murdered. As soon as I got back into cell phone range, I would call Sheriff Hardy.

  We walked back to the main road and I made a big pile of branches at the start of the small dirt path. It was pretty much a straight line from the end of the dirt path until the clearing if Sheriff Hardy and his men followed the initials carved in the trees. They should hopefully find it easily. My phone stubbornly refused to work even when I got back to the ferry (which had completed a trip back and forth from the mainland and was getting ready to leave again).

  Standing at the pier with a few tourists looking at the seaside, I saw the faint image of a turtle climbing up the beach. It was all of twenty seconds before it vanished. What was this? Some sort of super ghost power? I hoped not. I didn’t really want to see the ghost of every living thing that ever existed, including trees and animals. While we were standing at the pier waiting for the ferry to open the gates, Holly wandered around, obviously getting bored. Eventually she told me that she was going to go, but she would see me later. I whispered goodbye to her and then she vanished.

  It wasn’t until I was back on the mainland that my phone started working again. As soon as I had a signal I called Sheriff Hardy and told him he should go to Truer Island and gave him instructions to find the dirt path, initials carved in trees and the clearing. I told him to search there, although I didn’t know what he would find.

  As I was explaining it to him, I was expecting at any moment for him to ask, “How do you know this?” But he didn’t. He simply thanked me for the information and said he already had men out on Truer Island who he would send over immediately.

  I drove back to my office to find a very solid-looking John Smith sitting on my sofa watching an infomercial about the greatest toaster ever developed.

  “Hey, John,” I said as I entered (not too loud in case Jonas downstairs could hear me).

  “This toaster not only toasts your bread perfectly, but it prints one of ten thousand daily quotes on the toast. Can you believe it?”

  “That’s pretty amazing,” I said, walking over to open the window to let out some of the heat.

  I hadn’t taken the opportunity to quiz Holly on her newfound solidity, but I had another ghost right here.

  “Hey, John, are you feeling any more solid than usual? Do you feel any different?”

  John creased his brow as he tried to remember and then his face cleared and he smiled.

  “Why, yes, Harlow! It was a lot easier to turn on the television today.”

  In a moment of sudden inspiration I went to my d
esk and tore off a piece of scrap paper from a pad and held it out to John.

  “Can you take this?” I asked.

  John reached out and grabbed the paper. I felt it tugging as I let it go and for a moment he held it between his fingers. Then it slipped through him and fell to the floor.

  “That was a lot easier than usual. At least I think so. I don’t really remember.”

  “It’s really weird,” I murmured. It was still too hot in my office, so I poured myself a glass of tap water (only the finest) and walked over to the window to enjoy the light breeze. Outside there were a few people walking around the streets – locals on their daily errands and tourists strolling around. It was closing on four in the afternoon. I didn’t have long before I had to drive out to Stern Farms for my training with Hattie. I was so not looking forward to it.

  I stood at the window, drinking my water and letting my mind drift over the various mysteries that seemed to surround me. I had no reason to think that Franklin, the man attacked last night, had anything to do with Holly and her father, but for some reason my intuition was telling me that it was connected. I kept telling my intuition that it was being ridiculous but it wouldn’t budge. There was a connection there and I had to find out what it was.

  I was sure that soon Sheriff Hardy would be back in contact. They would probably find something in the clearing, but I didn’t know really where it would lead. As I said before, it’s not cut and dried with ghosts. Even if they caught whoever had killed Holly and her father, it didn’t mean Holly would suddenly move on to some better place. For all I knew she might haunt Harlot Bay for the next two hundred years.

  I was standing at the window watching tourists when I suddenly got that tingle on the back of my neck that meant someone was watching me. I turned around to see Jonas from downstairs pop his head in through the open door.

  “Hi, I’m Jonas Bishop. Downstairs neighbor. Are you busy right now? I thought I’d come and introduce myself, properly.”

  “Harlow Torrent. Sure, come in, I have to go to an appointment soon, but I have a few minutes.”