by Tess Lake
“He’s sabotaging them,” Jack whispered. I reached into my pocket to pull out my phone, but there was no signal. The magical confluence messed around with telecommunications on an average day, but with my feeling tense and affecting the storm clouds above Harlot Bay, it had wiped out all telecommunications in this area entirely.
“We’ll have to follow him,” I whispered to Jack as the man finished whatever he was doing and scurried away into the darkness, heading for one of the exits.
We crept out of the house and kept to the shadows until we reached the exit. Peering out through the small window, we saw there wasn’t anyone in sight, so we crept outside.
Whoever the man was, he was gone. Jack relocked the door and then we got out of there as fast as we could. On the way back to his house, we talked over what we had seen. It was clearly sabotage. The big question that neither of us could answer was, why?
Chapter 17
In the morning, I was standing with the director, Cyro, the safety supervisor, Benton, and Tobin Hemming, who kept moving from foot to foot and alternately frowning and then smiling with his exaggerated comical expressions. At this point, I was very much regretting going along with the plan of “tell them someone has sabotaged the scuba equipment.” Jack had wanted tell them as an anonymous tip, but I’d felt like it was too much of a risk. No one at the film studios answered the phone, and what if the person we told was somehow involved with it? I’d checked the call sheet, and today Bella was supposed to be filming an underwater scene as she swam down to recover a long-lost locket hidden in a treasure chest.
No matter how much of a pain in the backside she was, I couldn’t risk her life because I was fearful.
So, early in the morning I’d come on set, grabbed Benton and told him that someone had sabotaged the scuba equipment. Benton had immediately summoned the director and Tobin after he’d examined the equipment and discovered that someone had damaged a small but critical part.
“After twenty minutes, it would’ve stopped working and Bella would have drowned?” Cyro said, tugging at his hair in a stress move.
“If not her, one of the safety divers. Whoever did it managed to damage every set of gear. We can’t go diving today,” Benton said.
Tobin took a step towards me. It wasn’t much, but I involuntarily took a step away from him. It felt too aggressive, too intimate, too overwhelming. In response to my sudden feeling, the sky above grumbled once more to itself. Tobin glanced up at it and bared his teeth.
“I hate this weather. We should have never come here,” he said. Then he looked back at me. “Explain to me how you knew the scuba gear had been damaged,” he said.
After reluctantly agreeing that the best course of action was to simply talk about the sabotage as fast as possible, Jack and I had worked on various lies to explain how exactly I knew that the scuba gear had been sabotaged. Sadly, the best we could come up with was that after our dinner at the Curry Cauldron, Jack and I had been walking through town and happened to see someone sneaking into the warehouse. Curious, we’d gone over and looked through the window in time to see them doing something to the scuba gear.
It really wasn’t the best of lies, but given the circumstances, it was the closest thing that matched reality. After all, people had seen us at the Curry Cauldron, and if we ended up being questioned by the police, it had to sound realistic.
So I told my lie. Cyro kept tugging at his hair, Benton nodded, and Tobin started looking around at the doors and windows, I think checking to see whether I could have even seen the scuba gear if I stood at a window.
“Okay, fine,” Tobin snapped finally. He looked to Cyro. “We need to talk now,” he said and marched off without waiting to see whether Cyro would follow him.
Cyro scowled in his direction.
“Find more scuba gear, I want this scene done today,” he instructed Benton and then walked off in the same direction as Tobin, with one of his many assistants scurrying along behind him.
The moment we were alone, Benton looked at me with a calculating eye.
“You were here being a journalist, weren’t you?” Benton said, not unkindly.
I bit my lip and kind of looked away. I didn’t want to repeat my lie again and I didn’t want to expand on it.
“Forget I asked. I’m glad you saw it, whatever way you came about seeing it. We check all the gear, of course, before we go out, but I am the most skilled in the underwater filming and today I’d planned to have my assistants check the gear. It is possible they would have missed it, and even if they hadn’t, the fact that the scuba gear had been damaged would be enough to slow the film.”
“Well, I’m glad that everyone’s going to be okay,” I said. The sky above us grumbled again in line with my swirling emotions. Benton said he’d see me later and then rushed off to start giving instructions to his men to take the damaged scuba gear away and work on finding new gear within the hour. Given that we’re a seaside town, there was more than one scuba rental place available, and I was sure the movie people could throw enough money at it to get what they wanted.
I wandered away out of the warehouse, and when I emerged outside, I saw there was a group of people gathered outside Mattias’s trailer. Everyone was talking, some people had their hands over their mouths as though in shock, and generally people were moving around in that aimless sort of way they do when something bad has happened and no one is quite sure what to do. Feeling a churning in my stomach and remembering how angry Mattias had appeared yesterday, I walked over, dreading what I would see. As I arrived at the trailer, the crowd parted as though by magic and I saw in through the door to the interior. Tyson’s dead eyes stared back at me from where he was lying on the floor. There were vivid red and purple marks around his neck where someone had strangled him.
“Everyone, please step aside,” I heard Sheriff Hardy say from behind me. I moved with everyone else to make way for the police. Sheriff Hardy barely glanced at me as he walked by, but for a moment, that stone cop look he had broke and I saw a look of worry on his face.
With the sky grumbling above me and threatening to turn into a storm that would probably strike down lightning everywhere again, I moved out of the crowd and walked away, intent on getting to my car and driving as far away from here as possible. As I passed Tobin’s opulent trailer, I heard him and Cyro inside yelling at each other.
“We need to shut the production down!” Tobin yelled.
“Never!” Cyro yelled back at him. Cyro’s assistant, Lisa, was standing outside the door, chewing her nails down to the quick and jumping with every word. It was all too much for me. I heard something crash from inside Tobin’s trailer – it sounded like someone had thrown a coffee cup at the wall – and the sky above responded by opening up and pouring down cold rain. I ran for my car.
Chapter 18
I almost didn’t see Aunt Freya in the pouring rain. I slammed on the brakes and the car skidded, yes, actually skidded, before finally lurching to a stop only inches away from mowing down my aunt.
I was in town, not far from where the bakery used to stand, and the howling storm was growing stronger by the minute. I saw Aunt Freya’s shocked face before she came around to the passenger side and got in the car.
“Park there,” she instructed, pointing out into the rain.
I complied, pulling the car over and then turning it off.
She was carrying a box full of pastries wrapped in multiple paper bags to protect them against the weather. Even so, the water was soaking through. She took one out and gave it to me.
“Eat this,” she said in a tone that brooked no argument. I bit into the custard-filled pastry, the outer shell flaking away and tiny pieces of icing sugar dropping off to land on my wet clothing. Aunt Freya looked up at the sky and then back at me.
“I don’t know if this is going to work, because these storms have been affecting our magic lately,” she said. She grabbed my arm and I felt the faintest tingle of a spell. It was the same calming one
I’d used on Molly. Due to the storm’s interference, though, it barely worked and soon she removed her hand.
“It’s okay, I’m feeling better already,” I lied, biting into my custard pastry again. The dessert was helping a lot more than the spell.
“Can you tell me why you’re driving like a maniac? And why the storm is so strong?” she asked.
I told her pretty much everything. The only thing I held back was how Jack and I had really seen the scuba gear being sabotaged; I told her the same lie I’d told earlier. By the time I told her about Aunt Cass advising Mattias that his widow was having an affair with a new man, Aunt Freya was frowning slightly. When I got to the part where Tyson was found dead in Mattias’s trailer with vivid marks around his neck, her brow furrowed even further.
“Get out. We’re going to swap positions and go to see Aunt Cass,” she said. I got out into the rain and swapped positions, hopping in the passenger-side door. Aunt Freya gave me the box of custard cream pastries to hold, and then she started the car and slowly drove through rain the few streets around to my office, where I explained Aunt Cass would probably be.
“Have another custard cream and then let’s go,” Aunt Freya said. I took another pastry, then followed my aunt out into the storm and inside the office. Aunt Freya pounded her fist on Jonas’s office door, but there was no one in, so she waved at me to follow her up the stairs. When we went into the office, we found Aunt Cass sitting back in my chair with her feet up on the desk (as usual), tapping away on a phone in her hand.
“Ready to solve the storm problem yet?” Aunt Cass said, not bothering to look up at us.
“We’re not here for that. Where are the ghost’s things?” Aunt Freya said. Aunt Cass pointed to the box of stuff that we had stolen back from Tyson and Liberty.
“What’s the problem, exactly?” Aunt Cass said, finishing whatever she was doing and then slipping the phone back into her pocket.
“That man, Tyson, who we followed – he’s dead. Looks like he’s been strangled by someone and dumped in Mattias’s trailer,” I said.
“It wasn’t Mattias,” Aunt Cass said.
“How do you know?” I remembered the somewhat soggy pastry in my hand and took a bite, but the water hadn’t done it any favors. I threw the rest of it in the small trash can by the side of my desk.
“If he’d turned, I’d know,” Aunt Cass said. She looked over at Aunt Freya, who was pulling objects from the box one by one and then holding her hand over them before discarding them.
“I already tried that,” Aunt Cass commented.
“How could you be so reckless?” Aunt Freya said, discarding the script.
“Everything is under control,” Aunt Cass snapped back.
“Found it,” Aunt Freya said. She brought over a ring carved out of wood. It was smooth and brown with two colors of wood running through it. She held it up to us between her fingers.
“He’s tied to this. Be ready when I bring him here,” she said.
Aunt Cass shook her head and stood up from the chair, only to walk across the room, slump down on the sofa and cross her arms.
“I tell you he hasn’t turned,” she said.
“How do you know?” I asked.
“I just do,” Aunt Cass said, emphasizing every word.
Aunt Freya turned to me and touched me on the arm.
“Watch carefully. This is how you summon a ghost,” she said. She held the ring up in front of her and took a deep breath. Here’s the funny thing about spells: some of them are pretty much what you’d expect, a cliché almost. They require some chanting and moving your hands in a certain way and, yes, some of them even require eye of newt. Others, though, are more like mental patterns. You simply imagine a few different things, pull the magic in and let it out, and the spell is complete. This spell was one of those. With Aunt Freya holding me by the arm, I could see it as she worked her way through it. It was like learning the directions to a new part of town. The magic around us was swirling like crazy thanks to the storm, but she still pulled some of it out and directed it down her arm and into the wooden ring.
“Be ready,” Aunt Freya whispered to me when she let go of my arm.
She put the wooden ring on the floor and then stepped back. I heard a slight crackling noise as tiny sparks of light began to move between her fingers.
Between one blink and the next, Mattias appeared directly above the wooden ring. He was in his adventurer costume still, complete with gun belt. He looked pretty much the same as when I’d last seen him, except now he had a thick black outline as though someone had colored around him in heavy marker. He didn’t look happy to see us.
“What is the meaning of this? I was haunting that hack Hemingway,” he said.
“Did you murder a man yesterday or this morning?” Aunt Freya said. Mattias turned to look at her and then noticed the sparks of lightning between her fingers.
“Of course not, I’m an actor, not a murderer,” he said. I couldn’t help but notice that the black outline darkened and the temperature in the room dropped.
“She thinks you murdered Tyson, your widow’s lover,” Aunt Cass said from the sofa.
“Why would I do that? I don’t care about that,” Mattias said.
“Do you know who murdered him?” I asked.
“No,” Mattias said.
“Where were you last night?” Aunt Freya asked.
I saw Mattias look at Aunt Cass, and although it was only for an instant, I saw her look back at him and a silent message passed between them.
“I was following Hemingway around,” Mattias said, clearly lying.
“Is that true, Aunt Cass?” I asked.
“How would I know?”
“I’m going to go now,” Mattias declared. He vanished and Aunt Freya put down her hands, the electrical sparks disappearing. She picked up the wooden ring and gave it to me.
“He’s tied to this, so if things get bad and you can’t control him, you need to throw it as far away into the ocean as you can,” she said to me.
“I told you he hadn’t turned,” Aunt Cass said.
Aunt Freya glared at her. “No, he hasn’t turned, but he’s close,” she said.
“Turned into what?” I asked.
“Something bad,” Aunt Freya said. She bit her lip, appearing so much like Luce for a moment that it was incredible, and looked at the two of us before appearing to make a decision.
“Harlow, I’m not going to tell your mother about this unless you want me to. I do strongly suggest you tell her, though. Between this storm and that ghost and whatever else is happening on that movie set, the best thing might be for you to go as far away as possible.”
With that, she gave me a quick hug and a kiss on the cheek and vanished out of the office. When she was gone, Aunt Cass sighed with relief and uncrossed her arms.
“Okay, take me through what happened exactly, and tell me the truth,” Aunt Cass said. I sat down in my office chair, adjusted it from where Aunt Cass had moved it (which was leaning so far back that she would have been practically horizontal), and told the whole story, including how Jack and I had crept into the warehouse to see the sets. By the time I’d finished, I had calmed somewhat and the storm outside had responded, weakening to a drizzle and a few gusts of wind.
“I could say to you to stop working on the film and take the ferry across to Truer Island and hang out in that cave for a couple of days after making your excuses with your builder boyfriend, but I think both you and I know that’s not going to happen,” Aunt Cass said.
“Why not? Sounds like a good idea to me. It’s not safe for me to be around other people with this storm,” I said, the sky above us grumbling almost in time with my bitter sentences.
“Because if you go, Bella is probably going to die and you know that. So use whatever you can to discover who murdered Mattias and who sabotaged the set and who killed Tyson.”
“So you think Mattias was murdered?”
“No doubt about it,”
Aunt Cass said, then refused to elaborate. I left her there in the office to return to her chili sauce business and went back outside to my car to drive home. Aunt Freya had left the box of somewhat damp custard cream pastries in my car, so I munched on a few of them on the way home. On the way out of town, I drove past the Hardy Arms and saw a gathering of paparazzi out front with cameras in hand. There was a long black Mercedes parked in front of the Hardy Arms, and as I drove past, I saw a young man practically come running out of the hotel to dive into the car with the paparazzi taking photos of him all along the way. In all of the events of today, I’d forgotten that Finley Watergate, a very handsome actor, was in town. He was playing Ivy Spark’s love interest in the film, a character named Jack Arlington. It seemed a very common name for handsome love interests.
I drove home and went down to our end of the mansion. No one was there except for Adams, who was curled up on the sofa sleeping soundly. He had placed his mice in a semicircle around the refrigerator as if they were guarding it. The catalog of security equipment he wanted was back on the counter again and open, showing micro spy cameras that could record hundreds of hours of footage. I browsed through it as I made myself a hot drink before I turned my laptop on and sat down on the sofa.
Aunt Cass was absolutely right about me. Although I owned an absolutely failing journalism business, the truth was I was a journalist at heart. I wanted to uncover the secret mysteries of the world. I loved to write about all the things that occurred around me, to draw out what was interesting about them for all my readers. I didn’t want to go back to set today, so I indulged in a little journalism.
I started with Cyro Nash and read every single thing about him – his crazy stunts to promote films, the time he’d locked those actresses in a shipping container with rotten meat to get a good performance out of them, the other time he’d left some actors chained up out on a farm overnight. He’d been sued multiple times, but for some reason actors continued working with him and then agreeing to his crazy demands to put them in extreme situations of stress so he could get the best performance out of them. It was during this investigation that I came across all of the pop trash websites that were ninety-nine percent speculation and maybe one percent fact, if that. It didn’t take me long before I was reading the Harlot Bay Times and, oh boy, had Carter gone off the deep end. There was an article about Cyro Nash being in debt to foreign gangsters. There was another about Mattias’s wife Liberty being cut out of the will via a prenup. Given Mattias had seven previous wives and about fifteen children, there was a lot of speculation about who exactly would inherit his fortune. I found some articles featuring blurry photos of Liberty sitting at blackjack tables where it was claimed that she was sometimes gambling two hundred thousand dollars a night until Mattias had cut her off.
