by Willow Mason
A single frame caught the pair, then they both disappeared in a wave of light.
“I don’t know what you think we’re going to find here,” I said to Beezley as we approached Brianna’s house. “Whatever happened in the bar, I doubt it was organised to transport her three blocks home.”
We’d taken a copy of the camera footage and with my adrenaline in overflow, I wanted to run after someone or, better still, speed after them in a car. Instead, we were going to a suburban home. My thrill of the hunt dwindled with every second.
“The first rule of policing is to check the obvious places first, so you know for sure. When you have a missing person, you don’t start searching the country from top to bottom until you’ve checked their house.”
“But we just saw her dissolve into a beam of light in a bar!”
“Something that’s just as likely to send her home as anywhere else.”
I could fault Beezley’s logic, but I couldn’t persuade him any different. And, to be perfectly fair, I didn’t really know what else to do. Tell Glynda and make it her problem was top of my list but that might lead straight to a reversal of charges on my bank account. I should also do some research on magic powers and reappearing legs at the occult library but reading my way to a victory left me feeling cold.
“If I lift you over the gate, can you check out the back of the property to see if there’s a doggie door?”
Beezley snuffled at the doormat, trying to paw it aside. “Does Brianna have a dog?”
“No, but you didn’t either until…”
“Why don’t we try the door key first?” He nudged it out from its inadequate hiding place beneath the welcome mat and stood back, tail wagging.
“If you ever get back to being a policeman, I hope you run some community sessions on how not to invite burglars into your home,” I grumbled, embarrassed I hadn’t thought to look there first.
“Yeah. It’ll be my top priority. That way no unqualified private investigators can search and resolve petty crimes, leaving my department to spend their time on more important matters.”
“Don’t you think a missing person is important?” I slotted the key into the door and braced myself for the shrill cry of an alarm. But Brianna disappointed me again.
“It’s ten-a-penny down at the station. Most people turn up later the same day they’re reported.”
“And the others…?”
Beezley barked and trotted inside the house, his nails clicking on the marble tiles.
That didn’t bode well.
Inside, half the house appeared to have dust sitting in it from when Brianna had bought the place while the other half was a pigsty. Food containers sat on the bench and the floor, while the bin was empty. The microwave oven had a thick crust of splatter on the door. Whatever the liquid had been when it exploded inside, it had been left to harden.
I kicked an empty pizza box away and dislodged an army of flies from the half-eaten remains. Where was pizza rat when you needed him?
“I suppose I should think about how difficult it is for a girl without legs to move around,” I grumbled, lifting my foot out of something congealing on the floor. “But I can’t help but think of… Oh, what’s the phrase? Hiring a maid?”
“She could be an intensely private individual.”
“Brianna goes out drinking every night at the pub when she could just stay here and get plastered for less. That’s not the MO of someone who guards their privacy.”
“How about we try outside?”
A fantastic idea and one my nose and lungs appreciated. After a deep breath of what I expected to be fresh air, my stomach revolted, sending a spurt of burning acid up the back of my throat. “Ugh. What is that stench? How can Bri have contaminated the entire outside world with her grunge?”
“It’s the pool.” Beezley didn’t appear nearly as upset by the smell as I was. In fact, he danced in a circle in excitement.
I tentatively took another sniff. “It smells like rotting fish and garbage.” For a second, I thought of calling the police and reporting the mess. If Brianna had died in the pool—and that was the highest probability in my mind—then they could take care of it.
But Glynda had hired me. More importantly, she’d paid me well. I edged closer to the pool, holding my nose when the foul odour tried to jam into it again.
“It’s just fish,” Beezley said, scampering around the edge, his tail wagging a mile a minute. “I think they’re all dead.”
“They smell like they died inside something bigger that also died.” I left my eyes unfocused as I drew closer, not wanting to scar my retinas with whatever horrors were making the Frenchie so happy. But when I finally focused on the scene, there was nothing there to frighten me. Except for the depths some people could sink.
A raft of dead fish corpses floated on the surface; their bellies grotesquely swollen by the heat of the summer sun. Others were further along in the process of putrefaction and had sunk to the bottom in a cloud of murky goo.
It was a distressing sight but there was no witch, half fish, or mermaid tangled up amongst the piscine dead.
“What do you think killed them?” Beezley placed his paws on the very edge of the pool, inhaling deeply. “There’s a weird chemical tang to the water.”
“Chlorine, I hope. And what makes you think they died here? Bri could more easily have bought or caught them and dumped them into the pool, already dead.”
“It’s a saltwater pool.”
“So? They still use chlorine.”
“This is ocean saltwater.” Beezley stuck his nose so close to the surface, it rippled when he breathed in. “Not normal pool saltwater. I guess Bri was trying to have a controllable sea environment at home.” He stepped back from the edge, allowing my anxiety levels to sink. “There isn’t a filtration system or anything. Goodness knows how she got the water here, to begin with.”
“Remember she’s a witch. Water’s easy to move even if her magic’s on a low power setting. If not her, then Lucinda could’ve done the job, although…” I stared back at the house, the mess inside not as scented as the pool but still as disgusting.
“Although what?”
“It doesn’t look like the kind of place that’s seen a mother’s touch. Brianna mightn’t value her privacy enough to stay away from the local pub, but I doubt her mother’s seen the state of her home.” I put my hands on my hips, feeling something else out of place but not immediately able to put my finger on it. Then Beezley tiptoed forward to the edge again, and it clicked. “This pool should be fenced off. That means the council hasn’t been around here either. They’d never sign off on something this dangerous.”
“Dangerous to whom?”
“You, for a start.” Above his protests, I picked up Beezley and headed back to the house. “And it’s law. If some human kid drowned in there, she’d be up on manslaughter charges.”
“I’m aware of what the law is,” Beezley grumbled, shoving his paws into my chest until I set him back on the grass. “Don’t witches have some ways to get around council restrictions? If she can transport a pool’s worth of seawater with ease, how hard can it be to hoodwink a building inspector?”
Good point. I stared into the distance rather than concede.
“And she wouldn’t be able to get her chair through a fence.”
“They can—”
“Brianna? Is that you?”
Lucinda Hawick stood at the entrance with a nose wrinkled in disgust. Her eyebrows pulled together as she stared at me and Beezley, turned mute with surprise.
“What on earth are you doing in my daughter’s house?”
Chapter Four
“Hey, Mrs Hawick,” I managed after a tight swallow. “Brianna isn’t here, I’m afraid. Glynda asked me and Beezley to investigate her disappearance.”
The woman sagged, placing a hand against the doorway for support. “I’d hoped…”
She trailed off, and I felt like an intruder in her grief. Before th
e woman understood I actually was an intruder, I went over and offered her my arm. “Why don’t we sit in the front room?” I suggested, picking dust over filth. “We just have a few questions for you.”
As I assisted her into a chair, Lucinda’s face aged a decade. For somebody who must already be in their seventies, nudging eighty, it was a devastating advance. The wattle underneath her chin wobbled as she fought back tears, then her mouth curled. “There’s dust everywhere!”
Given the immaculate nature of her dark emerald suit, I understood the concern. In a split second, the woman went from weak to strong as she wiped the worst of the grime off the chair fabric before she dared to sit.
“You’re private investigators, then?” When I nodded, she continued, “What do you know so far?”
“Your daughter was—”
Beezley bustled forward, cutting me off. “Has your daughter ever disappeared before?”
Lucinda raised one shoulder while she turned her face away. “As a teenager, she’d sometimes leave for a few days without telling anyone. Not since then.”
“And you’re in regular contact?”
The woman fumbled with her purse, pulling out an embroidered handkerchief which she pressed to her eyes. “We phone each other occasionally, but probably not as often as we should. You know how it is when you both live busy lives.”
“When was the last time you saw your daughter?”
“Well, I—” Lucinda stared at me with a slight frown. “Is this how it goes? You just sit there while this small dog barks questions at me?”
“Pretty much.” I moved to the window, staring into the back yard. No birds were landing near the pool to feast on all the dead fish. An absence that made Beezley’s suggestion of chemicals more likely. “The house doesn’t look the way it would if I was expecting my mother to visit.” I turned back to her. “Or anyone.”
“Brianna always suffered a problem with cleanliness. After her accident, it became more noticeable.”
“And that was?” Beezley sat back, stamping his front paw when Lucinda didn’t answer him immediately.
“Twenty-seven years ago. I’ll never forget the day.”
“Brianna?” a voice shouted from the front door. “You’ll never guess what—”
The new arrival was a fairy who gasped when she saw us gathered in the room. Her small wings were see-through, like cellophane with a faint pink tinge. Completely inadequate for lifting her chubby body off the ground.
“Who’re you?” Lucinda snarled. “And how dare you walk into my daughter’s house, uninvited?”
After a moment to regain her composure, the fairy jingled a set of keys. “I have Bri’s permission to be here. Something I don’t think any of you can say.”
“We’re investigating your friend’s disappearance,” I said, leaping over with my hand outstretched. “Have you seen her recently?”
“Yesterday.” The fairy’s face collapsed into confusion as she registered what I’d said. “What do you mean, disappeared? She’s at the mermaid parade if she’s not here.”
“No, she’s not.” Lucinda pressed the hanky to her eyes again, a delicate gesture. “For the first time in twenty-two years, she skipped the event. Who are you?”
“I’m Delia Morrow, her best friend.” The fairy turned her back on us as she whipped her phone out and started scrolling. “There’s no message here, telling me what she’s up to. Are you sure she’s not out in the harbour? Sometimes she likes to rest on the pontoon in the next bay, especially if she tied one on last night.”
“We’re sure. She disappeared from The Rusty Nail, yesterday evening,” I said, earning myself a reproachful glare from Beezley. “Are we able to read through your last few messages? It might help us work out who she’s met lately.”
“I can do better than that,” Delia said. She curled her finger at me and Beezley, walking through into the kitchen. Without a second glance at the mess about her, she sat at the dining table, removed a laptop from under a bundle of laundry—clean or dirty, I couldn’t tell—and tapped on the keyboard. “There you go,” she announced triumphantly. “Her dating profile.”
“What’s happened in here?” Lucinda asked with the horror I expected from a normal person. “There’s rubbish everywhere.”
“Bri liked to keep it smelly,” Delia said. “It attracts bugs.”
Unfortunately, she didn’t offer any reason why someone might enjoy that feature. Having already acclimated to the pigsty, I sat and nosed about the dating site while Lucinda stood very still at the edge of the room.
“This says she was going to meet someone last night,” I told Beezley, then turned to Delia. “Did she always meet her prospective dates at The Rusty Nail?”
“Yeah. It’s the closest place that she didn’t have trouble getting to in her chair.” Delia squinted over my shoulder. “Although her standards have gone downhill if she’s picking men who don’t even have a real photo.”
The profile of Brianna’s date only showed a cartoon figure, featureless enough to conclude it’d been built from an app.
“Brianna told me about a case a few years back. A coven up north was convinced the bones dug up from an old riverbed belonged to a mermaid rather than the Taniwha they were labelled as.”
I swivelled the chair around to face Delia. “Why did it matter what they were labelled?”
“It didn’t, but the group believed mermaid bones were infused with magical powers, even after death.” She scrunched up her face and glanced up at the ceiling. “I don’t think they got far. From memory, the council intervened while they were still mid-conspiracy.”
“Fascinating,” said Beezley.
I frowned at him before nodding to Delia. “So, you’re saying if an entire coven could believe mermaids were powerful, someone else might now think the same?”
“I don’t know what I’m saying. It mightn’t be relevant at all.”
While Beezley rolled his eyes, I sent a text to Harriet at the occult library, asking her to pull any volumes that dealt with mermaids and their magic abilities. “It’s worth following up on. Thanks for sharing.”
Speaking of sharing…
“Can I show you something?” I ignored Beezley’s glare as I pulled a flash drive from my pocket and slotted it into the computer. “This is footage we got from the bar.”
Delia gasped as the room exploded in white. “Where’d she go?”
“Kind of what we’re trying to figure out.” Lucinda picked her way across the carpet to stand behind me and I closed the window and reselected the file. “I’ll play it again.”
The older woman gave an indrawn breath as the man appeared onscreen and I paused the recording. “Do you know him?”
Lucinda nodded, then tilted her head to one side. “I thought so at first, but it’s hard to tell from just his back. Do you have a better view of him?”
I wish. “No, just this. He stood at an awkward angle for the other cameras.” I set the video playing again, repeating the entire recording once it reached the finish, this time at a much slower rate.
“Her legs came back,” Lucinda and Delia said in unison. The fairy sounded close to tears, and I turned to look at her. “It’s just…” She pulled at a wing with her fingertips. “Bri and I were kind of in the same boat. She was half fish, and I was half insect.”
“What kind of insect?” Lucinda sniffed. “An overweight housefly?”
Delia glared daggers at the older woman. “A butterfly,” she spat out from between thin lips.
Lucinda said nothing but raised her eyebrows and I had to agree with her. I’d never seen a butterfly with clear wings but a fly? Yep.
“Were you able to recognise him this time through?” I asked, getting the conversation back on track. “We’d really like to chase him down.”
She tapped a finger against her cheek while pursing her lips. “Maybe. I’ll have to look through some old photographs to be sure.”
“You don’t have to be sure,” Beezl
ey said. “Just give us what you’ve got, and we’ll start from there. If you’re wrong, we can rule them out fairly quickly and that’s just as important.”
For a moment, I thought Lucinda would say more, then she gave a quick shake of her head. “Just leave it with me. Even if it is the same guy, I don’t remember his name.”
“It looks like black magic to me,” Delia said, replaying the footage again. “Aren’t there a group of black magic practitioners up the coast? It’s the kind of awful thing one of that lot would do. You can’t trust anyone who’d use black magic over white.”
I stared very hard at the ground in front of me.
“I think you’re right,” Lucinda said. “Those low-lives wouldn’t think twice about doing all sorts of terrible things to my daughter. Remember earlier this year when they caught that bloke who was killing witches before they could even be inducted into the coven? Evil, that’s all black magic users are. Pure evil.”
Beezley cleared his throat while I closed my eyes and wished for the conversation to be over. When I opened them again, I caught the dog mouthing a phrase at the other two, but I was too late to see what.
Lucinda touched the back of my elbow. “Except for you, dear,” she said in a stilted voice. The awkwardness of her smile forced me to look away. “You’re fine just as you are.”
“Is there any way we can get into his dating profile and find out where this guy lives?” I asked, desperate to change the subject. “The website must collect that data, right?”
“Don’t look at me.” Delia held her hands up. “I can use a computer but I’m no hacker.”
“And I can barely use a computer,” Lucinda said. “That’s what staff are for.”
“The police digital unit would be able to access the information but we’d have to give more evidence than we have before DI Jonson would log it for us.”
“What? Telling him the areas only mermaid has gone missing isn’t good enough?”
Beezley gave his strange choking laugh. “Not when he won’t be able to see it, even when the video’s right in front of his eyes.”
