Holiday Witch (Torrent Witches Cozy Mysteries Book 5)

by Tess Lake

  Chapter 19

  “I had to leave poor Ollie alone! Alone! And he just saw a dead body!” Molly complained, stomping her feet and waving her arms around.

  “I was there too! What about me?” I said.

  Molly turned to face me and put her hands on her hips. She gave me a withering look.

  “You’re a journalist, and you’ve seen plenty of dead bodies.”

  “Not on purpose! It’s always when there’s some kind of creepy magical thing going on.”

  “I should be with Ollie, not waiting to get yelled at,” Molly said and resumed her pacing.

  “Why are we going to get yelled at? We didn’t do anything,” Luce said from behind the kitchen counter, where she was making a cup of coffee.

  After the ambulance had come, Ryan Layton had been pronounced dead on the scene and taken away, then Ollie and I had been interviewed for a few hours. Both of us had told the truth about why we were at Ryan’s house, although it sounded incredibly flimsy: I had thought there was some connection between the current crime wave and the deaths forty years ago and had searched for any relatives who might be living today. I’d enlisted Ollie’s help, and when we’d found a living relative, we’d gone to see him. The coincidence of the dark-haired woman jumping out the window and Ryan Layton being found hung by the neck from his back porch didn’t look good at all, but Sheriff Hardy accepted it.

  Toward the end of the interview I’d received a message from Mom telling me to get home immediately under threat of dire consequences. Ollie had driven us back to the library, where I’d picked up my car and come home to find Molly and Luce waiting for me, having both received the same message. Apparently Molly had spent all of two minutes with Ollie before having to leave him to come home. Now we were waiting for whatever it was that was going to happen. It surely wasn’t going to be good.

  “I don’t see why I need to wait around here. We were at work, and I need to be with my boyfriend,” Molly said, working herself up to storming back out again.

  “Don’t do it,” I warned.

  There had been an idea gliding around somewhere in the back of my mind since Peta had told me she had seen Aunt Ro and Sheriff Hardy out late at night. Between that and the tracking crystals going missing, I was starting to suspect that Aunt Ro was perhaps trying to track down the thieves and whatever supernatural thing might be driving them. It was entirely possible that Mom might be involved too, given she had severely warned me off investigating. Before I could give voice to this idea and construct a battle plan with my cousins, the front door slammed open and in rushed the moms, each with a head full of steam. Aunt Cass came in closely behind them and slammed the door shut to keep out the frogs that were following her.

  “I told you to stay out of it!” Mom said, pointing a finger at me as though she was pulling down judgment from on high.

  “I was doing my journalism job! It’s not my fault I happened to come across a murder!” I retorted, falling back on an old excuse.

  But Mom wasn’t having any of it. Since the Harlot Bay Reader had collapsed, she had been very aware that I’d been drifting away from it, trying to figure out what else I could do with my life and generally only writing articles for it because I hadn’t come up a plan yet. I wasn’t going to remind her of this, though, and I was going to stick to my story no matter what.

  “I told you to stay out of it!” she repeated, her voice growing angrier.

  “And what were you two doing?” Aunt Freya said to Molly and Luce in an accusing tone.

  “We weren’t even there! We were at work doing our jobs,” Luce said.

  “Yeah, that’s right, doing our jobs,” Molly added, the pair of them obviously deciding to throw me to the wolves.

  “We don’t believe that for one minute. We know the three of you went out to Truer Island. What was that about?” Aunt Ro snapped.

  I was about to throw back at her that Peta had seen her and Sheriff Hardy sitting in a police car, obviously watching a house in the middle of the night, but Luce cut me off.

  “You want to know what we were doing out there? We found a hidden room under the mansion, a weird room that was new until we touched it and it became old, and in it was a diary that disappeared into ashes and a leather map that Harlow has. It had directions on it, so we followed them, because we thought it might help in finding out what had happened to Grandma, because it seems like we’re the only ones who care about that,” she said.

  There was a moment of uncomfortable silence until Aunt Cass broke it.

  “What did you find out there?” she asked.

  “There was this creepy mansion that looked like ours,” Luce said, declining to add more detail that could possibly get us into even deeper trouble.

  “Go on,” Aunt Freya said in a level tone that carried many promises of consequences if Luce didn’t tell the truth.

  Luce looked at me, and I gave a slight nod to say, “Tell them everything.”

  “We went inside and there was a big dining table where someone had laid out dishes for three people and a bag of food with a packed lunch, and then out past the kitchen there were these stairs that we were going to go down but then Harlow grabbed us and dragged us out. There was some kind of creepy honeypot spiderweb spell or something on it. Then we ran and the whole thing vanished and we couldn’t find it again,” Luce said.

  We heard the moms each take in a deep breath, obviously getting ready to yell, but Aunt Cass got there first. She stepped into the middle of the room with her hands on her hips and glared at everybody.

  “Harlow, get me that map right now. Girls, that was ridiculously dangerous and you should never do anything like that again. I have never seen such stupidity,” she said.

  I scurried off to my bedroom, grabbed the map and returned to the living room, where everyone was quailing under Aunt Cass’s glare. I gave her the map and she stuffed it in her pocket without even looking at it. The moment might have stretched out even longer, but then a frog came jumping out of nowhere, closely pursued by Adams. There was a sudden scurrying of witches and cat and frog as we tried to pull the cat away and get the frog outside without letting any more in. We finally managed to deport the frog and close the door with Adams on our side of it, and for a moment it felt like the angry tenseness had passed. Then the moms turned around and faced all three of us.

  “Stay out of it! All you three should be doing is going to work, doing your job and focusing on getting married and having babies,” Mom said.

  “Time is slipping away, so hurry up!” Aunt Ro snapped.

  “Those looks aren’t going to last forever!” Aunt Freya said.

  “You do realize that by telling us to have babies, you’re actually telling us to have se—” Luce said in a snarky tone, but didn’t get to finish because the moms turned away as one and stormed out of our end of the house, slamming the door behind them.

  That left us with Aunt Cass and a chorus of frogs croaking from outside the door.

  Now it was my turn to be upset. I turned on her and gave her a glare of my own.

  “You told me to look into the descendants of those who died forty years ago. Well, I did, and it turned out one of them was hung until he was dead and I came upon it. Did you know that would happen? Why didn’t you do anything to stop it?”

  “I thought there was a connection but I wasn’t sure. I have the few crystals I had left still up around town, but none of them went off. Whoever murdered that man did it without the help of magic at all,” Aunt Cass said.

  She took the map out of her pocket and took a quick look at it before stuffing it away again.

  “Did you see anything else unusual out there?” she asked in a much softer tone.

  There was something else that we hadn’t told the moms. I actually hadn’t told Luce or Molly either.

  “For a moment when were in the house, I saw red around their heads like a crown made of rubies. I figured it was the spell,” I told her.

  Aunt Cass nodded an
d then ducked out of there before we could ask her any more questions. The sound of croaking frogs receded as they followed her away up behind the mansion and out into the forest.

  “You saw some kind of magical spell thing around our heads and didn’t tell us?” Molly asked.

  “In the rush of it all, I forgot,” I said. Just then Jack called and I was incredibly grateful to have this moment interrupted.

  “Hey, Jack,” I said.

  “I was talking to Ollie. Are you okay? Can you come over or should I come to you?”

  He was concerned, but under that there was a tone I hadn’t heard before—one of fear.

  “I’ll come to you. I don’t really feel like sleeping at the house tonight,” I said.

  “I’ll see you soon, be safe,” Jack said.

  By the time I ended the call, Luce and Molly had also made plans with Will and Ollie. After getting yelled at by our mothers, none of us had any desire to stay at the mansion whatsoever.

  “Doesn’t anyone find it funny that when we were teenagers they were always warning us off boys and telling us not to get pregnant and things like that?” Luce said as we all got ready to leave.

  “If I get married to Jack, it’s because I want to get married to him, not because the three of them want me to,” I said somewhat petulantly.

  “I wonder who will get married first out of all of us,” Molly mused as we all walked out the door.

  We said goodbye to each other without answering that question, then went our separate ways. I pondered over it as I drove over to Jack’s house. The Torrent witches didn’t have a great track record with relationships. Our three mothers had married our three fathers all within roughly the same time period and had Molly, Luce and me, and then a couple of years later, all three of those relationships had broken down in quick succession and the fathers had disappeared. I didn’t really feel any pain as I thought about this. It was a hurt from a deep distant past. I hadn’t seen my father in I think more than twenty years, and now he was little more than a blurry memory, and thinking about him was like being told you had some ancestor five generations ago who did X, Y, and Z. It was a fact without any emotion attached whatsoever. I hadn’t really asked Mom about why my father had left. I guess that was part of not caring about it either. My personal hypothesis was that it was difficult for witches to have relationships because eventually living with someone who could cast spells drove a wedge somehow.

  Or perhaps it was the lying witches habitually engaged in. I supposed I could lie right now and tell myself it was always with the best of intentions, all those little white lies that piled up. But the truth was that it was something about the nature of being a witch. We delighted in secrets and gathering information and not sharing it with anyone.

  A recent example was me knowing about Aunt Ro and Sheriff Hardy and declining to tell anyone.

  I arrived at Jack’s and stepped out of my car into a blistering cold wind that had a few snowflakes in it. In the warmth of my car, I’d almost decided that I should tell Jack the truth right now and reveal I was a witch and vow never to lie about or hide anything ever again. But somehow, stepping out into the cold wind blew away that resolve, and instead I marched up to the front door and let myself in to find Jack cooking in the kitchen, the warm glow of the oven filling the space. He rushed out to meet me and took me into his arms. He smelled of wood shavings and flour. It looked like he was making pizzas again.

  “Want to have some pizza and talk about it?” Jack said.

  I mumbled something that possibly could have been a yes from somewhere in the vicinity of his chest and felt the weight of the day slip away from me.

  Chapter 20

  I woke up with Adams’s paw in my mouth, which was a somewhat common occurrence. But what wasn’t common about it was that Jack was sleeping beside me.

  “Your mother is sneaking out to see her old boyfriend,” Adams whispered to me in the dark.

  I went from warm, relaxed sleep to wide-awake terror in one second flat.

  “Go to the other end of the house,” I whispered as quietly as I could and then slipped out of bed. I grabbed my things and then crept out of the bedroom and right down to the far end of the house, which was actually a small study nook area that was still piled up with boxes Jack hadn’t bothered to unpack. Adams was sitting atop one of them, licking his paw and wiping it over his ears.

  “What are you doing here? Are you crazy? Jack could’ve woken up!” I hissed at my cat, standing there in my underwear holding my clothes against my chest.

  “So? He’s going to find out you’re a witch eventually,” Adams said, quite unconcerned.

  I sighed the same sigh I had sighed a hundred times before. It was a mixture of I know you’re right and but my goddess are you being annoying about it.

  “What did you say about Mom and her old boyfriend?” I asked him.

  “She’s getting ready to sneak out to see him. You should follow her so we can find the thing that’s been stealing all my stuff so I can kill it.”

  “How do you know she’s going to see her old boyfriend?”

  “I’ve been doing reconnaissance work,” Adams said and started washing his other ear.

  I found my phone amongst my bundle of clothes and saw it was one a.m. Did I have enough time to sneak out to find out whatever Mom was doing and then get back before Jack woke up? For a moment, I seriously considered going back to bed, but then I decided I couldn’t. Ollie had given me the names and addresses of two men. The first had been found hung to death, and the second was Mom’s old boyfriend, the one who was in the photograph with the teenagers who died all those years ago. I had no doubt in my mind that she was going to see him.

  My decision made, I quickly dressed and then told Adams to meet me in the car. He jumped off the box into the darkness and I didn’t hear him land.

  I crept out of the house, feeling a kind of aching guilt slithering its way up my spine, tensing every muscle as it went. I felt like I was lying, lying in every action, lying in every step, lying to Jack by the simple act of sneaking out in the middle of the night. I could only hope he didn’t wake up and discover me gone.

  When I went outside, the cold hit me like a slap to the face. It was snowing now and the wind was blowing in bursts, pushing the delicate flakes sideways for a moment before letting them resume their trip to the icy ground. I rushed over to my car and hopped inside to find Adams waiting in the passenger seat. I then started it, praying to the goddess that it wouldn’t make too much noise and I could get out of here. Despite the extreme cold, which was definitely not good for my car, the engine started on the first try and I drove away. I fumbled for my bag and found the piece of paper Ollie had given me with Arnie’s address on it. It was over on the other side of Harlot Bay, but at this time of night it would only take a few minutes to get there, since the streets were empty.

  “Why were you doing reconnaissance work?” I asked Adams as I drove through the falling snow.

  “My partner has been somewhat indisposed because of the frogs, so I have to pick up the load,” Adams replied.

  He gave an enormous stretch and then started scratching his claws at the car seat.

  “Stop that! You’re going to wreck it. Or make it worse than it already is,” I said.

  “I need to keep my claws sharp so I can kill that thief,” Adams said and gave a few more scratches before sitting down again. It didn’t take long before I found Arnie’s address. Down at the end of the street, I saw Mom’s car parked in a clear spot under a tree. That meant she was already here.

  I got out of the car into the freezing cold and Adams followed me. With my magical black cat padding behind me, I made my way over to the house, looking to see if I could find Mom. I crept through the front gate and then saw a shape moving along the side of the house. I hurried down there, my feet crunching the snow, and then the shape turned toward me and I saw a glint of silver.

  “Harlow? What are you doing here?” Mom whispered.r />
  “What am I doing here? What are you doing breaking into your old boyfriend’s house?” I whispered back.

  Mom stepped out of the darkness, and I saw it was the small crowbar she had in her hands that had been glinting silver. It had Cassandra Torrent inscribed down the side of it.

  “Is that Aunt Cass’s crowbar?” I asked.

  “It’s a family crowbar! Just because she inscribed her name on it doesn’t make it hers,” Mom said.

  We stood there for a moment until Adams declared he was going back to the car because it was cold.

  “Are you going to tell me what you’re doing here?” I asked Mom again in a whisper.

  She gave a sigh and glanced up at the sliver of moon high above, as though looking for guidance.

  “Someone killed Ryan Layton, and I think Arnie is in danger. He might know something about all the thefts too. So I’m going to break in to see if I can find anything, and if I can’t, I’m going to question him. You can come along if you follow my lead,” Mom said.

  “All the times you tell me not to do something dangerous and here you are doing something dangerous!” I hissed back at her, unable to stop myself.

  She rolled her eyes at me.

  “Oh no, sometimes the Torrent witches are hypocrites, what a big surprise,” she whispered in a mocking tone.

  “Fine, I’ll come along,” I said. I followed her along the side of the house until she found a window and quickly used Aunt Cass’s—or actually the family—crowbar to jimmy it open. She climbed through and I quickly followed. Inside the house it was dark and warm and I immediately felt that relief that you get when you step out of the freezing cold wind into a warm house.

  “Close the window—you’re letting the cold in,” Mom whispered.

  “But what if we need to escape?”

  “Harlow, we’re witches, it’ll be fine.”

  I closed the window behind us as quietly as I could, but still it squeaked a little in its frame. It was then that both of us heard a loud snoring noise from the other room as though someone had been disturbed by the sound of the window. Mom made a shushing gesture at me and then waved the crowbar for me to follow her. We left the room, which now that my eyes had adjusted I saw was a bedroom that was not kept in a very clean state, and went out into a corridor that connected to a living room. Sitting next to a small heater was a disheveled man in his fifties, asleep in a ratty armchair, snoring with his mouth open. Sitting in his lap was a very deadly-looking shotgun.