Holiday Witch (Torrent Witches Cozy Mysteries Book 5)

by Tess Lake

  “I don’t have any clues on that yet. I have some names of some particularly dodgy teenagers in town that need investigating, but there’s something else as well.”

  Up until this moment, I hadn’t been intending to tell him about the thefts forty years ago, the two deaths, the fire that had killed two teenager boys and the girl, and then all the stolen goods that had been found. But Jack had been living in Harlot Bay long enough now to know that there were some weird things that went on. I don’t know, perhaps in some part of my mind I was starting to ease him into the idea of the strange and odd, so I could eventually tell him all about myself.

  And so I told him. I even had the articles still in my bag to show him, which meant on some level, I must have known that I was going to tell him. He read them and noted that the old man who had died had the same last name as the one who had died forty years ago.

  “It’s weird, right?” I asked him.

  “It’s definitely weird, but then Harlot Bay is a place where some weird things happen. I mean, I’ve seen this kind of thing before. You won’t believe the strange things people do. Someone will find some old crime and read about it and then reenact it for no reason at all. These people can seem completely normal and then they’re committing a crime you’d think they would never ever commit, and their only excuse is they read about it and got interested. There’s also a lot of coincidences that don’t end up meaning anything. I’ll bet you that this guy who died was related to the one who died forty years ago and then that will be it. There will be absolutely no other connection, yet both of them died in exactly the same way. Do you want me to look into it?”

  “I already have Ollie working for me, looking into the past, so why not you as well? Molly and Luce have lost their coffee machine, Luce’s catapult is gone, and I think a lot of other stuff has been stolen across Harlot Bay that people haven’t realized is missing yet. If some crazy person is following a pattern, then doesn’t that mean that someone might be hung soon?”

  “It’s definitely a possibility,” Jack murmured, studying the articles again. He read through them again as we finished our lunch, and I looked out the front window of Hoodoo Voodoo.

  It was turning much colder as we raced toward Christmas. There were only a few tourists out and about at the moment. Crimes like theft were always a problem in small seaside towns. There were always local criminals who waited for tourist season and broke into accommodations so they could steal watches and cameras and unattended wallets. Most of the local police knew them by sight, though, and some of them were practically banned from the beach areas. This might have been one of the reasons why some of the thefts had gone unnoticed for such a long time. People might have assumed it was a tourist doing it or someone preying on tourists.

  “So you and your cousins went out to an underage party to see whether you could track down some of these teenagers?” Jack finally asked.

  “We used to go to these parties all the time when we were teenagers. Clearly, we thought it’d be a lot easier than it actually was. We were wearing all these ridiculous revealing outfits, too, so we were freezing,” I said as I sipped my coffee.

  “Perhaps next time you’re going to wear something revealing, you could just come over to my house instead?” Jack said, laughing. Then he leaned across the table and kissed me.

  Chapter 14

  After lunch, Jack went back to his new home to continue his renovations. I almost went with him. The idea of swinging a hammer and smashing down some walls seemed far more enjoyable than the alternative, which was finding out why Hattie had been in my office this morning. So I very reluctantly said goodbye to him, but told him I would meet him tonight and stay over at his house.

  We parted ways and then I went to my car and wondered whether I should simply drive straight out to Stern Farms to confront Hattie directly. I decided against it because ultimately Hattie was an incredibly powerful witch. She might be an buttoned-down, stuck-up, iron corset witch, but behind that was an immense power, and for all I knew I’d go out there to confront her and then wake back up in my car sitting outside my office with absolutely no memory of anything that had happened. That also meant I couldn’t go to my office either. She might have cast a spell in there and if I went in, perhaps my memory would be wiped out or something else would happen. It didn’t really seem Hattie’s style, but I wasn’t going to risk it, so I finally decided to drive home to talk to Aunt Cass. I had some questions for her anyway, particularly about what Hattie had said about Aunt Cass showing her the past. But also, I could use some advice, and given that Aunt Cass and Hattie were pretty much mortal enemies, I thought Aunt Cass would love to get involved in finding out whatever Hattie had been doing in my office.

  I pulled up outside the main part of the mansion and stepped out of the car to hear a chorus of frogs croaking from the bushes all around me. There were a few of them sitting up against the front door waiting to get in, and others still hopping across the grass, trying to get closer.

  Aunt Cass’s slip witch power was really getting out of control. Mom opened the front door and used a big straw broom to sweep the frogs away from the mansion. She gave me a look that very much said I was still on probation. I didn’t want to get into it with her again, so I simply pretended nothing was wrong, smiled and said hi, and then went inside, leaving her out in front, sweeping away frogs.

  As soon as I stepped inside, I felt the small tug of magic from beneath my feet. Aunt Cass was under the house doing something. Aunt Freya and Aunt Ro were nowhere to be seen, so I went through the empty kitchen and downstairs into the basement, said hello to Grandma, told her I would explain what was happening later on, and then went into the corridors under the mansion to see whether I could find Aunt Cass.

  “Aunt Cass, I need to talk with you!”

  I summoned a light, which I inadvertently made so powerful it lit up the entire corridor as bright as day. My own slip witch powers were on some sort of sliding scale and it seemed that I could conceal myself and summon lights with no effort. I wondered if any of my other powers had become stronger.

  I followed the small pools of magic until I came to a door, but before I could open it, Aunt Cass pushed it outwards and stepped out in front of me, holding what looked like a small wooden pyramid in her hands. I caught a glimpse of the room behind her—it was definitely her lair, the walls covered in bits of paper, a map, pins everywhere, bits of string, newspaper clippings—before she closed the door.

  I knew then that she had allowed me to find it, because, honestly, all I’d done was walk down a corridor and take one turn and there it was. I also knew if I came back by myself I’d never find it again.

  “Ta-da! I give you the Frog Barrier 5000,” Aunt Cass said, pretending to be one of those TV infomercial hosts.

  “And what does it do, apart from the clue in its name?” I asked.

  “Come with me, and forget trying to get into my room—it’s locked,” she said.

  I followed her away from her underground lair, back up through the basement and into the main part of the house, then we went up the stairs until we reached a door that Aunt Cass unlocked with a wave of her hand. The renovations of Torrent Mansion had only gone so far and were just enough so we could provide rooms for the guests who came to stay. Outside of that, the rest of the mansion was still run-down and possibly quite dangerous to traverse. Some of the floorboards were literally rotting away, and plenty of the witches who had lived here in the past had left their own signatures behind. There were a few rooms that felt very odd indeed, and down on one end there were a whole lot of carvings that were certainly very unsettling.

  “Is this a good idea?” I asked as I followed her out the door and into the ruined part of the mansion.

  “It’s the best idea because it’s my idea,” Aunt Cass said. I followed her up another set of stairs, which were creaking alarmingly, and then she found a string, which she pulled down from the ceiling to reveal a small ladder that led up to an attic. I
’d lived in this house practically my entire life, and as kids, Molly, Luce and I had explored every nook and cranny, but I was absolutely sure I’d never been up into this room. Aunt Cass scurried up the ladder as though she wasn’t a somewhere-around-eighty-year-old-woman but a spry teenager. I followed her, feeling the ladder creaking under my feet. The attic was layered in dust and there were old boxes stacked around the walls. Aunt Cass pulled one of them across into the middle of the room and then set the pyramid on it.

  “Have a look out the window at the frogs,” she said and directed me to the small dusty window that led to the outside.

  I walked over to it and looked down at the grounds below. It really was quite a spectacular view from up here. I could see Harlot Bay stretched out below us, wrapping around the bay, Truer Island across the water, and even a streak of the beach. Down below I could also see my mother with a red face, looking increasingly frustrated as she tried to push frogs away from the mansion.

  “And we are a go,” Aunt Cass said and touched her hand to the pyramid. It flashed gold and I felt the magic push out through me, expanding. A faint gold shimmer spread out of the room to cover the entire house and then some of the grounds. The effect on the frogs was immediate. They were no longer trying to get to Aunt Cass as fast as possible, but trying to get away. They all started hopping and croaking as though they were incredibly uncomfortable. Within a few moments, the grounds were empty and the frogs were a great distance away. As soon as they left the slight gold shimmer, they turned around and sat there croaking, as though they wanted to come back.

  “So this is a frog barrier to stop the frogs until the slip magic wears off?” I asked.

  “Got it in one. Let’s get out of here,” Aunt Cass said. I followed her downstairs again, back into the main part of the house and into the kitchen.

  “Make me coffee,” she commanded.

  I rolled my eyes to myself. I don’t know at what point Aunt Cass had decided that people making her drinks or food became a test of their loyalty, but it was something she frequently demanded from us. “Make me a coffee. Make me a sandwich. Get me a biscuit. Take this cup away.” I wanted her in a good mood, so I made a coffee for her and one for myself too. I decided to dive right in.

  “Hattie was in my office this morning. Adams saw her. I think she must’ve been snooping for something,” I told Aunt Cass.

  Aunt Cass took a sip of coffee and then shook her head.

  “Probably there to complain about the name of the town again. I wouldn’t worry about it,” she said.

  What? She was defending Hattie?

  “It’s Saturday, and she would know I’m not there on a Saturday. Besides, the office would have been locked and she was inside the office. That means she would have had to unlock the door,” I said.

  “Probably had an elder moment. She is getting on in age, you know.”

  “You’re twenty years older than her! I can’t believe this. I thought if I told you she was snooping in my office, you’d want to find out why.”

  “I’m full of surprises,” Aunt Cass said in a level tone.

  This was definitely not going the way I’d planned, but I decided to play along regardless.

  “I talked to Hattie recently. After she, by the way, dropped off a bewitched book to Ollie to try to convince him that her ancestor Juliet was not running a brothel, and she told me that Grandma had shown her the past. That she had seen the Merchant Arms and seen Juliet out in front. She then told me that you had shown her the past too. Why would you do that?”

  “I don’t like her, so I was being mean, showing her that her relative wasn’t as pure as she thought,” Aunt Cass said, a little too quickly for my liking.

  Here’s something you need to know about Aunt Cass. She can be mean, she can be crotchety, she can be sneaky, she can be full of pride, but she would never in a million years admit any of those things. In her world, if she did something to you it was probably because you deserved it, and she was always in the right. I had never—and I do mean never—heard her admit that she had been mean at any point in her life. So the fact that she had said it right now sent metaphorical alarm bells ringing.

  “Okay, so you were being mean, but why would Grandma show her the past, then?”

  Aunt Cass finished her coffee and put the cup down on the counter.

  “She was being kind,” she said, then turned on the spot and marched out of the kitchen. I stared at the door after she left and took a few deep breaths, willing myself to calm down. Aunt Cass was quickly moving into the top three of my most infuriating people, closely tying with my cousins and my diabolical cat.

  So she didn’t want to tell the truth? That was okay. I had Ollie on the case, and now also Jack. He was looking into the thefts and the names, and once I got a handle on all of this, I was going to get Ollie looking into my aunt’s past as well. There was definitely something she wasn’t telling me, and I knew the answer lay back in time.

  I took myself out of the kitchen and back down to our end of the mansion, feeling the cold biting into my bones. By the time I got back there, a few flakes of snow had started to drift down from the sky. I hoped, perhaps channeling Luce a bit, that the frogs would be okay. I looked around the empty end of the mansion and saw Adams was gone, and I decided I wouldn’t wait for this evening to see Jack. I grabbed some of my old clothes that I wouldn’t mind getting ruined with house renovations, packed up a bag to stay the night, and went back out into the cold winter wind.

  Chapter 15

  “The plan is simple: if there is a problem—more wine. We don’t want a repeat of last year, okay?” Molly said, pointing a finger at each of our boyfriends in turn.

  “Is it really going to be that bad?” Ollie asked.

  “The tips of my fingers still go numb sometimes,” Luce muttered to herself.

  Christmas Day had crept up with uncommon speed. The weather had dropped to utterly freezing. Every morning we woke up with a layer of frost covering everything outside. Sometimes it actually snowed. As far as we knew, in the last week there hadn’t been any more thefts, but also no new clues. Ollie was still researching anything he could find about Harold Jackson and the deaths forty years ago; Jack was still looking into the teenagers; and as for me, I pretty much focused on working at the library, begrudgingly writing a few articles for the Harlot Bay Reader, and exercising with Kaylee and Aunt Cass on the beach. It was now Christmas morning, and we were shortly going to go to the epic Christmas lunch that the moms had been preparing. We were waiting for Peta to arrive (she’d rolled into Harlot Bay late last night and stayed at her dad’s, and I was incredibly excited to see her). In the meantime, we were making sure to alert our boyfriends to the proper procedure, more wine, should things go a little off the rails at lunch.

  “Are you serious? I’m sure it will be fine,” Will said.

  Luce whirled around from where she was putting a Christmas bow tie on Adams and pointed a finger at her boyfriend.

  “That’s what they want you to think. When I was seventeen, my boyfriend came to Christmas dinner. He still walks with a limp today.”

  Okay, so we were exaggerating a little, but there had been more than one Torrent family Christmas that had descended into madness. We were all being particularly cautious as well because at the last big gathering, Aunt Cass had talked most of us into competing in the chili challenge, which had resulted in Aunt Cass passing out and landing in a bowl of chorizos, Molly passing out, and our guest at the time, Bella Bing, movie star and highly annoying person, passing out and landing on the floor as well. This had been in the midst of me suffering from a slip witch power that had affected the storms, and when a lightning bolt had hit the mansion, the power had gone out.

  “More wine, I think we got it,” Jack said and gave me a wink.

  We had all exchanged Christmas gifts already. Jack had given me a beautiful hand-carved wooden butterfly that he had made himself. It was simply exquisite and looked incredibly lifelike, and I wa
s absolutely smitten. In return I’d given him a handmade (by someone else, not me, my gosh) chopping board and a ridiculously sharp chef’s knife that I had bought off the same website Molly and Luce had purchased their coffee machine from. I told Jack it was a gift for his new house and his new kitchen, which was currently mostly rubble.

  It was about then that a car pulled up out in front of our end of the house and we all saw Peta get out. She’s the same age as me, about two inches taller, and has long blond hair. Despite the freezing weather outside, she was wearing a dress and some knee-high boots. I rushed over to the door to let her in, quickly pulling it closed behind her to keep out the cold.

  “Peta, so good to see you,” I squealed and grabbed her in a hug.

  “You too, Torrent, you too,” Peta said in a muffled voice. Molly and Luce raced over and nearly hugged Peta to death as well. Eventually she pulled herself out of the hugs and we introduced her to Will, Ollie, and Jack. She looked down the line of our boyfriends and gave all of us a wicked smile.

  “My, my, my, the Torrent cousins have been busy. What have you all been doing here and how did you all end up with such handsome men?” she asked.

  “Jack’s brother Jonas is coming to Christmas lunch as well,” I said and gave her a wink.

  “Oh really? That should be nice,” Peta said, slightly adjusting the gold necklace she was wearing around her neck.

  “Question for you, Peta—they’re all trying to tell us that the Torrent family Christmas is something dangerous. Is that true?” Ollie asked.

  My goddess, that girl did not miss a beat.

  Peta held up her arm and showed Ollie a faint scar near her elbow.

  “See this scar? That was from a Torrent Christmas about ten years ago,” she said.

  (It wasn’t. She’d fallen out of Duncan McKinley’s tree house after he’d tried to kiss her.)

  Before we could catch up and talk more about what Peta had been doing all these years living out of Harlot Bay, all three of our phones chimed at once.