by Tess Lake
I held my breath and silently counted to myself, hoping that Mattias would, at the very worst, stand and watch the scene. It wasn’t to be. About halfway through, he waved his hand at the rack of dishes and knocked one of them over. Cyro immediately yelled cut and the scene had to be reset.
They went again. This time Mattias waited until the scene was three quarters done before pushing a cup off the sink and onto the floor.
Cyro leapt out of his seat and strode onto the scene.
“What halfwit set this up! If one more cup falls, I’m going to fire the entire set decoration department!” he yelled, his face turning red. Then he stood there glaring as Harriet, the set decorator, came on, cleaned up the broken cup and replaced it. Cyro went back to lurk in his chair as Harriet waved some of the on-set builders across to have a look at the sink to see if there was something causing the dishes to slip.
I could already feel the first edges of the storm forming high above me as the small kernel of tension that I was carrying around permanently these days started to grow. I stood up from my chair and motioned to Mattias as best I could to come over to where I was, hopefully without looking like too much of a crazy person. I walked towards the back of the warehouse and Mattias reluctantly followed me. I found a secluded corner and then turned on the troublesome ghost.
“You need to stop ruining this! Go somewhere else right now or I’m not going to help you,” I whispered to him, keeping an eye out for anyone else who might see me.
“I don’t think it works that way. You will help me or I’ll follow you around for the rest of your life yelling at you,” Mattias said back to me, crossing his arms across his ample stomach.
There was no one in sight, so I conjured the image of a flame in my hand for a moment and then let it go.
“Don’t mess with me Mattias. Me and my entire family are witches and we have plenty of ways to get rid of ghosts. If you don’t behave, I’ll find what you’re tied to, get on a sailboat, go out to the middle of the ocean, and drop it down into the deepest trench I can find. Do you fancy spending the rest of eternity on the ocean floor?”
“You can’t do that,” Mattias retorted.
He was sort of right. I mean, I could if I found whatever it was he was tied to, but I probably wouldn’t do something as mean as that. The truth is, I didn’t know really any other ways to get rid of a ghost apart from helping them move on. Although if Mattias didn’t behave, I might have to talk to Aunt Cass to find out if she knew anything else we could do. I wasn’t about to let him know this, though.
“Try me. Now get out of here before you find yourself with only fish for company,” I hissed at him.
Mattias looked like he was about to say something else but then evidently decided against it. His appearance changed and he shrank back down to that little six-year-old boy wearing pajamas before vanishing. I made my way back to set, Cyro called action, and this time the scene went off without a hitch. There was another half hour of wasting time as they checked what they’d caught before they called an end to that scene and then went to go and set up the next one. I checked the time and found I had already missed the time when Cyro’s assistant had demanded I be outside his trailer. I made my way there, and based on the look of relief on her face, you would have thought I was bringing a heart for her emergency heart transplant.
“Don’t ever do that to me again!” she wailed.
I noticed that her hands were shaking.
“You okay?” I asked.
“Mr. Nash is on a very tight schedule,” she said, and then her face blanched so fast it was like she’d been dusted in flour.
She pushed me to the side and opened the door of the trailer, squeezing herself behind it. Cyro strode by me, a long, lanky streak of black, and went inside without a word.
His assistant, whose name I still hadn’t obtained, appeared from behind the trailer door and waved at me urgently to follow her. I was expecting the trailer to be decked out like Mattias’s or the producer Tobin’s, but the inside of this one was rather simple. There was still a sofa and a television and a bed, but it looked more like an average hotel room than some luxury pad. There was a large wooden dining table, and across the top of it was spread multiple script pages, clipboards, pens, and markers. On one wall there was a whiteboard that had a complicated story structure breakdown drawn on it. There were lines and dots and dashes going everywhere. It sort of looked like Aunt Cass’s underground fire tracking map that she’d constructed, with all the strings and newspaper articles stuck up like she was a mad serial killer.
Cyro was standing at the sink, gripping it with both his hands, as a steady stream of water ran out of the faucet and down the drain.
“Your drink, sir. And I have Harlow Torrent, she is here to—”
“The journalist,” Cyro said into the sink.
“I’ll be right outside,” his assistant squeaked and vanished out of there so fast it was almost like she teleported. She closed the trailer door behind her, leaving me standing in the middle of the room with the director still leaning over the sink with the faucet running.
After about ten seconds of this and me wondering what I should do, I finally decided I should stop being scared and simply pretend I was interviewing a standard person. So I walked over to the dining table, pulled out one of the wooden chairs and sat down. Despite my newfound burst of bravery, I wasn’t quite so brave as to move any of the papers out of the way. Most of them were upside down from where I was sitting, but I have one spectacularly useless skill where I can read upside down quite well. I saw that, mixed in with the script pages and other notes, there were invoices and overdue notices. One was for the rental of a mansion down in Australia – a bill for sixty thousand dollars. The date on it was from about two months ago.
I took out the sheet of pathetic interview questions and my recorder. At the rustling of my papers, Cyro finally shut the faucet off and turned around to face me.
“Those are the questions the studio sent you?” he asked. “What you think of them?”
My first impulse was simply to say, “They’re fine, they’re great, let’s get this interview done,” but I sensed if I did that, Cyro would immediately shut down or yell at me to get out. I’d done a little bit more research on him in the last couple of days, and essentially I could sum up his whole position as “be authentic.” So I decided to be authentic. I put the recorder down so he could see it wasn’t running.
“They’re a load of vapid garbage,” I replied and held his gaze.
It felt like an eternity that we were sitting there staring at each other, but in reality it was probably only five to ten seconds before Cyro raised his eyebrows and moved away from the sink. He started pacing in the middle of the room.
“So ask the questions you want to ask,” he said.
Immediately, the journalist part of my brain served up a bunch of questions for me.
I spent a tiny flicker of time considering whether I should ask them in a soft way, but then decided against it. So I turned the recorder on and dived right in.
“You used to direct cutting-edge controversial films, and now you’re making a cozy witch movie. How did that happen?”
“Well, you can see the overdue invoices sitting on the table. I’m in debt and this film will get me out of it. But there’s more to it than that,” he said. He paced a bit more, stuffing his hands into his pockets and walking in smaller circles until he was almost twirling on the spot.
When he turned to face me, his eyes were alight with an inner fire.
“An athlete can do anything. They can run, they can swim, they can throw a javelin – this is what the Olympic athletes used to be before we specialized them. I am an Olympic athlete of filmmaking. I did Dark Energy at the start of my career, because that’s what I wanted to do, but do you know I also filmed a period piece under an assumed name? It was set in 1900s Boston, about a love triangle between a schoolteacher, the police chief and the local priest.”
�
��I think I saw that,” I said, vaguely remembering something I’d watched about a year ago.
“Now I’m making this witch movie and it’s going to be funny and tense and quick and heartbreaking and everything all at once. Some people sneer at this kind of thing, look down on it, but that’s because they don’t understand the subtleties or understand how difficult it is to make something light, interesting and fun. Anyone can film darkness, but it takes a true expert to play in the light,” he said.
“Good answer,” I said.
Cyro took his hands from his pockets and bowed at me before continuing his pacing around the middle of the room.
“You went to school with Bella Bing, didn’t you?” Cyro said to me.
“Back when she was Susan Smith.”
“She demanded I give you, your aunt, and your cousins minor roles in the film and hinted she would walk off if I didn’t comply. I think she’s desperate to impress you all. I think inside, she is sad and broken, and not having the approval of your family is for some reason painful to her,” he said.
I was taken aback for a moment and didn’t quite know what to say. Every time we’d seen Bella, it had come with a whole lot of those insults that sound like compliments on first glance. Things like “I love how you don’t care what you wear,” and “Wow, you look so good today.”
Why would Bella care about our approval? She’d left Harlot Bay years ago.
“That’s news to me,” I said finally. I looked down at the sheet of prepared questions and saw that it must’ve been created before Mattias died. One of them was “What is it like working with multiple-award-winning actor Mattias Matterhorn?”
I felt a prickle of magic around me, brushing up my arms and my legs as a question formulated itself and came out my mouth almost without my intervention.
“Do you think someone murdered Mattias?” I asked.
Cyro froze on the spot and then slowly turned towards me, his face dark. He rushed over, turned the digital recorder off and pressed buttons until he erased the recording entirely. He dropped the recorder back on the table amongst the papers without turning it back on. I was sitting in the chair and he was sort of looming over me, looking about as crazy as he had when Mattias kept breaking the plates and cups earlier.
“Don’t say that to anyone again unless you don’t value your life,” he growled at me. He walked back to the middle of the room, but now his pacing looked frustrated and angry. He kept running his hands through his black hair, making it stick up like a mad professor’s. Despite the sudden change in atmosphere, I was still feeling quite calm. I could feel tiny prickles of magic running up and down my arms and legs and almost sense the connection between me and the quasi-storm that seemed permanently gathered over Harlot Bay these days. Was this a spell? Had the moms or Aunt Cass or maybe my cousins cast some sort of calming spell on me until I got through whatever this latest bout of slip witch power was? I knew without it, I probably would’ve backed down and started asking questions off the sheet, or simply bolted out of there as soon as I could. But given Mattias was convinced he was murdered, and Benton the safety supervisor had outright admitted that he thought someone was sabotaging the set, I wasn’t going to let this go.
“I think someone is trying to sabotage your film,” I said.
“Who cares! They can’t stop me!” Cyro said, raising his voice and waving his arms.
“So you know about the brakes being tampered with on the stunt car?” I challenged.
“Of course I know, I am the director. I know everything that is happening on this set. This movie is getting made, no matter how many people try to stop it.” I looked down at the table, and the dollar amount from another very much overdue final demand resolved itself. A hundred and twenty thousand dollars for therapy services rendered. A tiny thought whispered about money, debt and insurance, and the question nearly jumped out of my mouth, but I managed to stop it in time.
I was about to take another leap into bravery and end the interview right then and there, but I was saved from having to do that when Cyro’s assistant timidly knocked on the trailer door.
“What!” Cyro roared.
“We are ready to go again,” his assistant said through the door. I couldn’t see her, but I knew she was cringing out there.
Cyro strode across the room, opened the door and walked out without another word or look at me. His assistant came into the trailer a moment later and hurried me out before I could get a more thorough look through the papers sitting on the table.
Once I was outside and Cyro’s assistant had locked the trailer, she scurried off, leaving me to my own devices. I started heading back to set, feeling the small idea I had about money, debt, insurance and sabotage start to percolate in the back of my mind. As I passed Bella’s enormous trailer, I heard a man inside talking in a raised tone of voice. At first I assumed it was Cyro, given I’d caught him and Bella fighting at the house she was renting off set. As I was right outside the front door of the trailer, it swung open with such force that it almost bounced closed again. A tall blond man with pale stubble, a row of earrings shining from his ear, and tattoos running up his neck shoved the door open again and came rushing out of the trailer.
“Get out of my way,” he muttered as he passed by me. I managed to dodge out of his path, but only just. I had no doubt that, if I hadn’t moved out of the way, he would have knocked me over and continued walking.
I looked in the trailer and saw Bella staring back at me, her eyes red from crying. I only caught this glimpse of her, staring at me with silent desperation, before Ru stepped across and closed the door in my face. Whatever calmness I’d managed to summon inside Cyro’s trailer was now gone, and the sky far above me rumbled its disapproval.
Chapter 12
“You’re investigating something,” Jack said, dropping some chopped olives into the eggplant risoni that he was making.
I came out of the daydream that I’d slipped into and focused on the here and now.
“What? What am I doing?” I said.
I was at Jack’s for dinner, having to spend a cozy night indoors along with the rest of Harlot Bay as yet another storm lashed the town, courtesy of the slip witch power that seemed to be growing in strength day by day.
Since the afternoon interview with Cyro and then seeing Bella fighting with some unknown man, I could feel some idea forming in the back of my mind, not quite ready to enter the world.
“You’re investigating something. I’ve met enough journalists in my time as a cop to know when they’re thinking about a story. Also, I used to do that too – drift off into daydreams in the middle of conversations,” Jack said.
“Did I drift off in the middle of a conversation?” I asked.
“I asked you how your day was, you said it was good, and then you didn’t say anything else for about the next three minutes,” Jack replied with a smile. “So spill it, what has you so preoccupied?”
I had a first impulse, which I’m very ashamed to admit was to lie. Say it was nothing or make up some story about being concerned about Molly and Luce and their stolen coffee machine. Inside our family, there is so much meddling and poking and prodding that lying is almost our second nature. I don’t know, maybe it’s a witch thing too. On the whole, witches are somewhat secretive in nature even when there’s no real reason to be.
I’d thought about Jack and the Truth with a capital T, if we stayed together. Eventually I would have to tell him I was a witch. Some witches never bothered, keeping their partners blissfully unaware of their true nature. But the Torrents weren’t like that. My understanding of our history was that whenever a Torrent witch found a man, she eventually told him about her true nature.
It was a hard thing, though – after all, all the moms were single, and Luce, Molly and I were fatherless. Knowing that might be the future, that I might tell Jack I was a witch and he would accept it for a while until he left me, made it all the harder to decide to tell him the truth in other matters.
But at some point, perhaps without even knowing it myself, I’d decided I would try to be honest with him as much as I could.
“I think Mattias Matterhorn was murdered,” I said. Jack raised his eyebrows and for a moment stopped grating cheese.
“Why do you think that?” he asked.
Okay, so my desire to tell him the truth came to an abrupt end at that point. I couldn’t tell him it was because the ghost of Mattias himself thought he’d been murdered and was demanding I help him. I also couldn’t tell him that I had a tingle of witchy intuition that something strange was going on. So unfortunately I had to tell a small white lie.
“I’ve never been on a film set before, but I think there’s a lot of strange stuff going on. After Mattias died, I saw a man taking clothes from his trailer and taking them out to his car. I’m pretty sure he was stealing them, and he may have stolen other stuff from his trailer as well. Then there’s the whole thing with Kaylee and the car accident. I think the safety director suspects that someone messed with the brakes. And then there’s Cyro Nash,” I said.
“He’s in a lot of debt,” Jack said and resumed grating his cheese.
“How do you know that?”
“One of the set designers asked me to help deliver some plans to his trailer a week or so ago. I saw some overdue bills for quite a lot of money, so I got a bit curious. I can’t entirely stop being a police officer. I did a bit of investigating, public sources only, and it looks like Cyro is a few million in debt. His directing fee from this film will barely pay off his debts,” Jack said.
