by Tess Lake
“It felt like we fought forever, and then I was trying to hold it but I realized I couldn’t, it was too strong, and so I tried to destroy it, to go on the attack. I remember rumbling and then there was an explosion and I had to freeze myself to survive it. I knew I would stay concealed until one of you came to find me. I used the last tiny drop of magic to pull you to me,” she said.
“I came to find you. It was me and Aunt Freya, and there’s a whopping great hole out on Truer Island, and all the trees have been flattened, plus there was what felt like bits of old magic scattered around,” I said.
“It really was the strangest thing,” Aunt Cass murmured and then went back to her laptop. I was about to say goodbye, to leave it at that, when I heard that small voice again.
You’ve been distracted, go back to look at the problem. A spell has been cast on you.
I tried to remember what it was that Hattie had told me, but it seemed vague, as though I hadn’t been paying attention. I did remember that she’d told me to get a room, a place I could go to write down notes and to find the holes. A piece of the puzzle twisted and fell into place.
“Do you ever feel the urge not to examine things, not to look closely at them? Like you’re being pushed away?” I asked softly, feeling in an absurd way that if I didn’t raise my voice, perhaps I wouldn’t be found.
“I’m kind of busy here, so, unless you’ve got a serious question about serious things, maybe you can go,” Aunt Cass snapped, her fingers doubling in speed on the laptop.
“Your room underground with the papers pinned on the walls—you’ve been looking for a hole somewhere, haven’t you? You’re trying to find the gaps,” I said. I was starting to get a weird taste in my mouth like metal and salt mixed together.
Aunt Cass didn’t even glance up at me. “You always were a clever one,” she murmured.
“Is that a yes?”
“Maybe, but it doesn’t mean you’re getting into my lair, though,” she said. The urge to leave was immense, to escape, to forget, to ignore.
“But why not? Tell me!”
“I already lost my sister, frozen for more than twenty years. I’m not losing a grandniece too, so put it down as a harmless eccentricity and leave me be,” Aunt Cass said. She was gritting her teeth as though she was holding back from shouting at me.
“If you tell me, I can help,” I said.
Aunt Cass finally stopped typing and looked up at me.
“Fine, I’ll tell you. There’s something strange in Harlot Bay.”
“We know that. All kinds of weird things happen here because of the magical confluence. Is that the big secret?”
I felt myself starting to get sarcastic as well, a taste of anger taking hold that if I didn’t get control of it would lead to me walking out and slamming the door like a petulant teenager.
“No, not the magical confluence. There is something else, but I don’t know what it is. I’ve only ever seen hints, and even then I’m not sure, but strange things happen and I can’t tell you anything else.”
I shot up from the chair and banged my hands on the desk.
“Why not?” I said, nearly shouting.
Aunt Cass shot up from her chair as well, glaring at me.
“Because then you become a piece on the board, Harlow! I already feel shoved around against my will, something pushing me every minute of the day for years on end. I don’t know if I’m going crazy or if it’s real. I want my sister back, but—” Aunt Cass abruptly shut up and sat down. She let out a breath and then, incredibly, returned to typing.
I wanted to yell at her, to shake her, to grab that laptop and hurl it out the window and hope to see it get run over by a passing bus full of tourists on the way to Traveler. Perhaps some lesson from Hattie in the past about getting control of myself when I wanted to cast magic stepped in to save me, because I managed to let out a breath and tell Aunt Cass politely that I would see her later, and then I left her there.
Chapter 20
Time flies when you’re having fun, according to the saying, but really I think time flies no matter how you feel. A week slipped as quickly as two breaths. Our world, which had been somewhat off-kilter since Aunt Cass had vanished out on Truer Island, was now slowly fitting back into its well-worn groove. She was at the head of our dinner table, liberally handing out snark, but also pouring bottles of wine.
Hilda was still missing, and the wheels of the police force were turning slowly because Sheriff Hardy didn’t want to close the case and declare her lost, a possible suicide swimming into the ocean. I hadn’t spoken with Eve since I’d told her that Hilda’s clothes had been found on the beach. She’d gone incommunicado, and I’d called her a few times throughout the week, but she’d never picked up.
Jack was working, Molly and Luce were taking it easy as the part for their coffee machine was apparently delayed thanks to Sergei, Aunt Cass was back running the Chili Challenge, dealing with the backlog of invoices and paying people (which coincidentally included me—hey, it was only minimum wage, but it was a chunk of cash that I very much needed in my bank account).
With the Big Pie reopened, it almost felt like we’d gone back in time to when we knew the patterns of our lives and they made sense. The moms were working hard baking and the money was beginning to flow, the rooms in the Torrent Mansion were occasionally being booked out, and as for me? I was back to my customary loose end.
I’d spent the week drifting into my office, digging around Coldwell and Sunny Days Manor, but doing less and less of that every day. Aunt Freya had even raised the possibility that perhaps the witch who was stealing bodies, if that’s what it even was, had left Harlot Bay, and so the urgency to break in to have a look at those videotapes was decreasing.
It felt distinctly unsatisfying, but the longer Hilda was gone and Harlot Bay seemed to return to normality, the more I began to believe that we’d reached some kind of ending, albeit a flat one. It was last night that Jack had finally come up with something new, uncovering Merilee Rosenthal, who was one of the family who were the silent partners who owned the Sunny Days Manor. That led to me, Harlow Torrent, slip witch and I guess former journalist and now possibly unemployed person, driving my way up into the rich district at ten in the morning to visit Merilee.
My car chugged and groaned as we weaved our way up into the hills above Harlot Bay until we were traveling down Barnes Boulevard. It was only when I arrived at Merilee’s address that I realized exactly where it was. Next door was the mansion that Zero Bend, butter carver extraordinaire, had rented long ago during the butter-carving festival that had taken place in Harlot Bay. I’d gone there to visit him, had been accidentally drugged by some milk in tea and then gone wandering out on an adventure that had only been recounted to me through what others had seen (including at some point renting a sunflower costume and putting it on and then stripping down naked and getting in the fountain).
I was both surprised and not surprised at the coincidence that Merilee lived next door to the mansion Zero Bend had rented. If this was a big city, it would be a bizarre coincidence, but in small towns this kind of thing happens all the time. People seem amazed that their very best friends in the world are the same kids they happen to be in school with, or that they meet the love of their life and they lived two streets away the whole time without them knowing. My answer to that is it’s a small town. Of course the love of your life only lived two streets away.
I parked my car and got out, looking down to the end of Barnes Boulevard where Stern Street branched off it. If you followed that long enough, you eventually got to Torrent Way, which was named after my family and is actually a fairly awesome street given that there are huge trees lining both sides of it and it ends in a beautiful park that has a small lake with ducks in it.
A musical chime played when I pressed my finger to the doorbell, and after a moment I heard footsteps approach before a woman in her fifties opened the door. She was dressed in far finer clothing than you would expect for s
omeone who was just home on a random weekday, and as she opened the door, I saw the obvious signs of wealth, including a gigantic vase that was easily as tall as she was, patterned and inlaid with sparkling bits of jade.
“Merilee Rosenthal?” I asked.
“Yes, that’s right,” she said, looking me up and down, not unkindly.
“My name is Harlow Torrent and I’m a journalist. I’ve been investigating some complaints at the Sunny Days Manor, and I wondered if I could talk with you about them?”
“Complaints? What’s happening?” Merilee said in alarm. Then she seemed to remember herself and waved me inside to follow her. Inside the house was pure luxury, with more expensive things per square inch than I’d seen collected in one place before. I followed her through an exquisite lounge and out into a kitchen where there sat an enormous raw wood table with a dark brown knot in the middle.
“Please take a seat,” Merilee said. As I sat down, she fetched me an expensive bottle of water from the refrigerator and passed me an equally expensive-looking glass that seemed so thin and fine it was more like a soap bubble. I felt like if I touched it I would accidentally crush it to pieces in my hands. I opened the water bottle and poured it into the glass, praying that I wouldn’t accidentally drop it on the floor.
“Please forgive my surprise, but my family owns Sunny Days Manor as silent partners and we entrust Mr. Coldwell with the responsibility of running it for us. He’s done that very successfully for a number of years, so I’m very surprised to hear there are any problems over there,” she said.
“Perhaps you should sit down, because there are problems,” I began. I couldn’t tell her, of course, that I’d been hired by Hilda’s granddaughter Eve to find out what was happening with Hilda, so I just pitched it as me being a reporter who had been given an anonymous tip that there were problems at Sunny Days Manor. I told her about the residents receiving moldy bread and how the place had been left to become run-down. I told her about how some of the residents had gone missing at a much higher rate than one would expect. And I told her about the cameras that were everywhere and the feeling I’d had when speaking to the old man who had been throwing the bread out for the birds and seemed suddenly panicked, as though he was being watched. While I was talking, Merilee had fetched a piece of paper and a pen and had written down what I’d said. By the time I was finished, she was frowning.
“This seems very serious indeed. Are you going to publish an article about it?” she asked.
The question caught me by surprise, because honestly I hadn’t planned to at all, although I’d thought I might tell Carter but had had absolutely zero desire in the last week to track him down. I supposed a small part of me also had some trepidation that if I told Carter, he would publish something ridiculous and then Coldwell would hide all the evidence before action could be taken.
“I won’t be publishing anything at the moment. Perhaps you could look into the claims and talk with your family. You may want to consider removing Mr. Coldwell from his position,” I said.
Merilee thanked me for my time and then showed me out. I wasn’t quite rushed out, but it was clear she was extremely concerned and also didn’t know exactly what my position was on it. Was I going to publish an article attacking her and her family? It was clear they had extreme wealth. I went back to my car, feeling as though I’d done about as much as I could on the issue of Sylvester Coldwell. If Merilee and the board of directors, being the rest of her family, couldn’t look into the problems and then change them, well, there wasn’t much else I could do perhaps except hand over everything to Carter to see if he could apply pressure through the media.
I drove back into town and parked a few spots down from Five Slices, the pizza shop I’d be meeting Molly and Luce at for lunch. I hadn’t been there in quite a while. Their gimmick was simple: five types of pizza sold by the slice. Again, it was probably not the type of thing that we should be eating, but all three of us were still training with Kaylee out on the beach, and it was all too easy to justify eating some cheesy carbs at lunch. I checked my watch and saw I was a little early, so I thought I’d get out and wander around first. I wasn’t out of my car more than five seconds when Carter and his eyebrows emerged from a nearby shop and came walking over.
I prepared myself for him to whip out that digital recorder of his and thrust it in my face demanding answers, but instead he merely nodded to me.
“How’s it going, Harlow?” he said.
“It’s going… fine,” I said.
I hadn’t bothered to read the Harlot Bay Times this week, but I figured Carter must have reported on Hilda being missing considering a police report would have shown up at some point.
“Sylvester Coldwell is trying to get me evicted again,” he said and then gave a sigh as he looked down the street.
“What? I thought you found a new place to rent.”
“He bought it. He is my new landlord, and already I have piles of garbage outside the building.”
I shook my head in disgust and then just decided to hand over everything I knew to Carter. Well, everything not magical at least. I told him about the moldy bread out at Sunny Days; the run-down environment; and the weird security cameras everywhere; the feeling of oppression. I also told him about Merilee Rosenthal, the silent partners, and that she lived up on Barnes Boulevard. Carter appeared somewhat depressed when I first started talking, but by the end he was almost vibrating with a radiant anger mixed with joy at the idea he’d finally have something over Sylvester Coldwell.
“I’m going to publish this and we can finally run him out of town forever!” Carter said. He turned to me, beaming. “Do you want a byline? We can do this together?” he asked.
“You can take it. I’m not sure I’m going to be a journalist anymore,” I said, surprising even myself. It had been a long time coming, but the moment I said the words, I felt a pressure lift off me. Although I loved to investigate and I did love to write, there was simply no future for that kind of career in Harlot Bay. Carter must’ve said goodbye, because I mumbled something and then he was gone and then I stood there in the street, half-stunned by the decision I’d apparently made and told to someone who I wouldn’t consider a friend in the best of times.
I checked my watch again and wandered down the street, finally going into the Book Bank, which used to be an old bank a long time ago and still had a gigantic steel vault in the back which was now permanently open and lined with books. I was browsing through books when I got a message from Molly telling me they were on their way to Five Slices. I put the book I was looking at down and wandered out of there, feeling somewhere at the back of my mind that it was great that I’d decided that I was no longer going to be a journalist, but now I had to really make a decision about what I was going to do.
Soon my cousins arrived and we went into Five Slices and ordered lunch. We sat in a booth and I drank my chilled lemonade while Molly and Luce discussed Sergei and what they might do about the situation.
“All I’m saying is we should talk to Aunt Cass about some kind of long-distance curse and then hint to him that we did it,” Luce said.
“But he’s the only guy we know who can get us parts. Those other people I tried to track down kept trying to sell me really illegal stuff. I’m scared some law enforcement’s going to come and kick the door down and cart me away to a jail somewhere,” Molly said.
“Aunt Cass says you need to be firm with suppliers,” Luce said.
“Aunt Cass says a lot of things,” Molly retorted.
Our pizza arrived and we got to talking. I told them I’d visited Merilee and how she’d said she was going to look into what was happening at Sunny Days Manor.
“Well, that’s good, isn’t it? Maybe she can get rid of Coldwell and then all of this will end up getting put behind us,” Molly said.
“I still think we should go and get those recordings,” Luce said. On this, Molly and Luce were definitely on two opposite sides. Luce thought we should sneak i
nto Sunny Days and steal the recordings to find out exactly what was going on. Molly (and coincidentally also Aunt Freya) thought that perhaps the witch or whatever it was had gone, and at best we’d see some old people wandering around, but it wouldn’t ultimately lead us to anything.
It was hard to know where I landed on it. The moms now had Big Pie up and running and it wouldn’t be long before Traveler was open again. Aunt Cass had the Chili Challenge, and for the first time in a very long time, it felt like almost everything was starting to line up so our lives would get better. I mean, apart from me, obviously. I had a wonderful boyfriend but no money, and as I’d learned just half an hour ago, I wasn’t going to be a journalist anymore.
“It’s that guy again, the one who was watching us last time,” Luce hissed.
Molly immediately turned her head to look out the window and I did the same.
“Don’t look, don’t look! Okay, look, but don’t be obvious about it,” Luce urged.
Across the road was a tourist wearing a bright shirt and holding a camera. He was taking photographs of the front of the building.
“I think that’s just a tourist,” Molly said.
“No, don’t you remember? The last time we were here, ages ago, when there were all those fires around town. We came here and that guy was standing over there taking photographs. It’s definitely him,” Luce said.
I studied him, and I hated to say it, but I thought she was right. I was fairly sure it was the same man we’d seen a very long time ago. He took a few more pictures and then started wandering down the street, occasionally looking back at Five Slices.
“I say we question him, right now,” Luce said, standing up from the booth. “Are you in, Harlow?”
“Um, sure, but let’s follow him at a distance and see where he goes first,” I said.
“Or we could eat some apple pie and drink our drinks and enjoy the day,” Molly said.
“Two against one. You’re coming, let’s go,” Luce said. She walked out of Five Slices, and after I gave an apologetic look to Molly, I followed too. It wasn’t long before she came scurrying up behind us as we walked down the street.
