by Tess Lake
Standing on the far side of the set, Cyro was watching the contractor being arrested with no expression on his face. Tobin stood nearby doing that grimace, smile, eyebrows up, eyebrows down thing that he did. He kept frowning at the contractor and then relaxing his face before frowning again. Standing behind them, hiding her face with a clipboard, was Cyro’s assistant, Lisa, the nervous girl. She was as white as a sheet of paper. Benton, the safety supervisor, came rushing across and had a quick conference with Cyro. The director and Tobin then walked off, Lisa scurrying behind Tobin. Benton turned on a megaphone.
“Set builders, come with me back to work. Everyone else, we’re closing down for the day, resuming tomorrow at six a.m.,” he said, his voice echoing across the lot.
“Okay, well, that’s me,” Jack said.
“Aww, I was hoping we could have a day off together,” I said and grabbed his arm. Jack turned towards me and then stepped closer and gave me a kiss that nearly floated me off the ground.
“Filming is over soon and we’re both going to be unemployed, so let’s take a few days off then, okay?” Jack said. I mumbled something in agreement before he went off, me watching him go all the way. With the set closed for the day and my plans seemingly having yielded an incredible result incredibly quickly, I didn’t have much else to do right now.
I pulled my list out of my pocket. Figure out who’s sabotaging the film – done. Find out who killed Mattias – well, maybe done. It might turn out to be the contractor, but somehow I doubted it. I knew, however, that Sheriff Hardy would question him and he would probably talk. On the subject of Adams and his cameras – once I was paid, I could buy him a cheap one so we could find out who was eating all the cheese and hiding his toys.
Help Mattias move on. I reached into my pocket and felt the wooden ring was still there. I hadn’t seen Mattias in a day or two, although I knew he was still around somewhere. I hadn’t quite gotten to the bottom of why Aunt Cass was so frustrated and annoyed with him, but the glance between them the other day when I’d asked where Mattias had been had spoken volumes, and they were volumes that I had no desire to open.
As for the rest of the list, for the time being, it appeared Mattias wasn’t sabotaging things on set and probably hadn’t been involved in killing anyone. Molly’s love life was going well and on the topic of being happy – well, I was getting there.
The slip witch storm power was growing stronger by the day. The clouds above us were almost constantly grumbling and groaning and there were frequent rainstorms whenever I would do something as minor as stub my toe. I definitely wasn’t going to go out to Truer Island, not unless there was some giant catastrophe. So my best plan at the moment was to spend as much time with Jack as possible and, when I had time, go out behind the mansion and boil some ponds and float rocks around (or at least attempt to). I looked through my list one more time and realized there were still a few loose ends. One was Liberty, Mattias’s widow. I’d spoken briefly with the sheriff this morning when he arrived on set and he’d told me they’d been unable to locate her. Maybe that was something my witchy cousins and I could look into.
I drove over to Traveler, feeling the storm follow me all the way. I parked outside and went in to find Molly and Luce conspiring over a pile of paper. Yes, that’s right, conspiring – that was definitely what they were doing. Some kind of sneaky plan was in progress.
“What’s up, family?” I asked and then snatched the top piece of paper before either of them could move it. On it was a list of names, which I recognized to be some of the builders and carpenters who had helped with the renovation.
“You’re still going down this path? That one of them stole the coffee machine?” I asked.
Molly snatched the piece of paper back from me.
“You notice how this place is completely empty? We have nothing better to do than to solve the mystery of where our coffee machine went. Seeing as magic hasn’t really helped us, we’re going to do it the old-fashioned way and investigate every single person we think is slightly suspicious. Are you going to help us or not?”
I sat down in the booth beside Luce and let out a sigh.
“Well, I guess since I’m solving mysteries all over the place, maybe I can help you sometime,” I said. Then I told them about the arrest that had happened this morning on set.
“Really? Some electrical guy was the saboteur? I told you to remember it’s always the ones you least suspect,” Luce said, pointing a very dramatic hand out the front shop window. We all looked out there and incredibly, again, old Mrs. Osterman was shuffling along behind her terrier, Rum Tum, who today was wearing a green plaid coat.
“She sure looks like a master criminal,” Molly commented.
“So what are you thinking? Finding spell?” Luce said after she had looked Mrs. Osterman up and down for a moment to make sure she wasn’t going to do anything highly criminal.
“I have come prepared,” I said, pulling a magazine article out of my pocket that showed a close-up picture of Liberty.
“Your slip witch power isn’t going to, like, explode us or anything, is it?” Molly asked.
“I don’t think so. It’s either going to be really powerful and we’ll find Liberty within a second, or I’ll pass out and hit my head on the table,” I said.
“Well, at least something fun might happen this morning, then,” Luce said. I poked my tongue out at her and then flattened out the picture and set it on the table in front of us. We all joined hands.
A finding spell is simple. You need to look at a picture of something or even just think of it really hard, let the magic flow and whisper, “Find.” With the three of us connected together, I was hoping that, if I was in fact going to pass out, at least Molly and Luce would get some sort of result and we might be able to track down Liberty. If she’d left Harlot Bay, then when we followed the glowing ball of light, it would reach the edge of town and then vanish off into the distance.
“Find,” I whispered in time with Molly and Luce. The magic pulled and a ball of golden light formed above the photograph. Thankfully I didn’t pass out. I also didn’t explode us, so it looked like today was turning out to be a pretty good day after all.
The ball of golden light rose up and then floated towards the front of the store.
“Quick, follow it!” Molly shouted. We rushed after it as it went out the front window of Traveler and started bobbing down the street. Luce locked up Traveler and we jumped into my car. It made a few grumbling noises that kind of sounded like a rhinoceros with its foot stuck in something, but then the engine finally started and we caught up to the golden light. It was floating out of town, heading in the direction of the lighthouse.
“What are you doing?” Adams said, pulling himself out from underneath the passenger seat.
The three of us screamed in unison.
“What are you doing under there?” Molly said.
“I’m looking for my friends,” Adams said. “Have you seen them?”
“Aww,” I heard Luce say from the backseat. No matter how annoyed she got with Adams, she had a soft spot for the furry little menace. The fact that he was out looking for his friends? That was like, well, catnip to a cat, I guess.
“We’re trying to find someone,” I said.
“Mr. Stretchy?” Adams said and jumped up on Molly’s lap to look out the window.
“Not Mr. Stretchy. A human, a person.”
“Mr. Stretchy is a person,” Adams said. He leapt off Molly’s lap and dived back under the passenger seat. Adams being a magical cat, I knew that if we bothered to look under the passenger seat, he wouldn’t be there. He was probably back home now. We followed the light out until it did in fact reach the lighthouse, then went out over the cliff and began to descend towards the beach. We parked the car and ran as fast as we could down the crumbling steps until we got down onto the sand. It was just in time, too. We saw the golden light disappear into one of the many caves that sat along this part of the coast. We jogged d
own to the cave and then stopped in front of it. Although it was broad daylight, the cave was pretty much pitch black as soon as you went a few feet into it.
“Are we going to go into that death, murder, creepy cave?” Luce asked, hands on her hips.
“What if someone killed her? I don’t want to see a dead body,” Molly said.
I was about to retort with some answer that involved calling both of them chickens when we heard a noise from inside the cave. It was a woman crying.
“That’s Liberty, let’s go,” I said. I went to summon up a light to hold in my hand so it looked like a flashlight, but as soon as I did, the effort nearly made me black out. I stumbled for a second and heard the clouds above me grumbling and moaning before I got my balance.
“Molly, can you make a light?” I asked, feeling like I’d run ten miles.
“Sure, let’s go,” Molly said and summoned up a gleaming light in her hand. We carefully entered the cave with Molly in the lead, clambering over rocks set at odd angles. There were holes everywhere between them and one misstep could easily mean a broken leg. We got past the barrier of rocks fairly soon and then the ground leveled out. As we crept forward, the sound of the sobbing increased in volume. Then it abruptly stopped.
“Who’s there?” I heard Liberty call out. There was no mistaking her voice.
“I’m Harlow and I’m with my cousins Luce and Molly. We were…” I had to come up with a quick lie because I realized we would call Sheriff Hardy and then he would be involved. “We were going for a walk on the beach and we heard you crying. Are you okay?”
I heard footsteps and then Liberty emerged from around the corner. She had a gigantic black eye, and she was covered in dirt, tears streaked down her face.
“No, I’m not,” she said sobbing and fell into my arms.
Chapter 23
I was sitting in my office, feeling pretty pleased with myself, when the world collapsed around me. After getting Liberty out of the cave, we’d called Sheriff Hardy, who had immediately rushed over there and put her in the back of a police car. He’d taken our statement that we happened to be walking along the beach when we’d heard a woman crying and then immediately decided that we would become anonymous passersby who hadn’t stuck around after calling the police. Given that Liberty was tangled up in the celebrity world and also the film, we didn’t want to get our names mixed up in anything. So he’d put her in the car and driven away, leaving us out at the lighthouse. We’d gone back to town, where I dropped my cousins off at Traveler, and then I had driven back to my office to bask in the glory of doing amazing things. Only a few days ago I’d felt like a leaf being blown about on the breeze. But now, despite the storm continuously grumbling above Harlot Bay, I felt like I was in control. I was in charge of my destiny, heading in the direction of my own choosing. That feeling lasted approximately half an hour until Sheriff Hardy called and advised me that the electrical contractor had been found dead in his cell.
“It looks like a heart attack, and given the color around his lips, I’d say he was poisoned.”
I felt my stomach do that elevator drop thing. The storm above me responded with a crackle of lightning that was shortly followed by some thunder.
“Did you… did you get to interview him before that happened?” I asked.
“He refused to say anything. He only had a few visitors, people from the set, and we thought they would set up a lawyer for him. I know you’re investigating this, Harlow, but I need to warn you that I think whoever killed him appear to be very dangerous people and there could be deadly consequences if you go too far,” Sheriff Hardy said.
“Okay,” I said.
“Is that a promise that you’ll back away and not do anything crazy?” Sheriff Hardy asked me.
“Uh, sure,” I said. Sheriff Hardy ended the call, leaving me sitting there in front of my laptop, staring into nothing.
This was getting really serious now, and I was regretting my decision to act like a tiger. Everyone on set had known that Jack and I had been the ones to see the scuba tanks sabotaged. That meant that whoever was behind the sabotage and the murders knew about us. If they had somehow gotten to an electrical contractor in a safe police cell, what would happen next? In a panic, I remembered that Jack was still working on set. I called him, but he didn’t pick up. It took all of my energy not to run out of there, jump in the car and drive back over to the set to make sure he was okay.
He was a grown man, an ex-police officer, an ex-private detective, a very strong carpenter, and I was sure he could handle himself.
I was sitting there in front of my laptop, biting my nails down to the quick and feeling the storm grumble above me, trying to figure out whether I should drive across town, grab Jack, and then leave Harlot Bay until the film was completed, when Bella Bing came walking into my office. She was alone, no Ru to guard her. She had on her typical giant actress sunglasses and hat, which she took off when she slumped down on the sofa and looked at me.
“Do you think I should quit the film, Harlow?” she said by way of opening. Considering I’d been thinking about fleeing Harlot Bay myself, it didn’t sound like such a bad idea.
“I think that whoever is trying sabotage this film will do whatever they can to shut it down, and I think they’re becoming increasingly desperate. It really might be a good idea to leave,” I said.
Bella ran her hands through her hair and then bit her lip before looking back up at me.
“Can I say something movie star and dumb?” she asked me.
“Sure, you can,” I said.
“I want to make amazing things. This film is going to be a beautiful piece of art, and even though it’s kind of silly, I think it’s still important. The world needs silly, funny things where cakes explode and you end up naked in a fountain,” she said.
Naked in a fountain? I hadn’t read the book that the film was based on, so I wasn’t sure whether there was a naked-in-the-fountain scene or whether she was talking about me and my past. A long time ago, I’d been accidentally drugged and in my hallucinating state had taken myself off to the town fountain and then splashed around in there, completely naked, in an effort to cool myself down. Most of the town had let it go, except Carter Wilkins, who had reported on it as “Local Reporter Goes on Drug Rampage!”
I decided not to dig into this. I didn’t particularly want to find out Bella was being snarky when she was sitting there appearing to be so honest.
“I don’t really know what to say, then. They arrested the guy who was sabotaging the set, but it looks like someone killed him,” I said.
Normally I wouldn’t spread Sheriff Hardy’s inside word around, but there was no way I could keep this from Bella. Her life was very likely at risk.
“I already heard about him,” Bella said in a soft voice. When she looked at me, I saw tears glimmering in the corners of her eyes.
“Why were you and Cyro fighting? Who threw the globe out the window?” I blurted out.
“I already have one bodyguard I can never get away from. I had to trick her so I could get up here alone! He wanted me to have another and I refused. It doesn’t matter who threw the globe.”
I got the very strong impression that she was the one who’d done it.
“Another bodyguard might be a good idea,” I said.
“I want to do something good, something useful, something wonderful. I don’t care if someone is going to try to kill me because I’m not going to stop,” Bella replied.
I sat there, stunned. She put her giant movie star sunglasses and hat back on and then left my office after patting me on the shoulder.
After a while, I took my list out of my pocket, picked up my pen and added another line: Do something useful, do something good, do something wonderful. I had no idea how I’d achieve that, but in my brief talk with Bella, my fear had disappeared and been replaced with a quiet resolve. If someone was out there who intended to harm me or Jack or Bella or anyone else, then I was going to do everything I
could to stop them.
Chapter 24
I’m not reckless, I swear, and I’m not wild either, but right now with the storm centered above Harlot Bay I was feeling the teensiest bit wild. I’d come home as the sun was setting, feeling full of fire and energy, but then I didn’t have anywhere really to put it. The moms weren’t at home, nor was Aunt Cass or my cousins. I fed Adams, but then he vanished off somewhere, talking about finding his lost friend. I finally managed to speak with Jack and warned him that someone might possibly be coming to kill us. Let me tell you, that was a fun conversation. He told me he would keep an eye out and that he would be over soon but first he had to go and visit Jonas, who was in the hospital.
What had happened exactly? Jonas had gotten in the middle of a fight between two mothers and been hit with a glass dish full of brownies. He was fine, but Jack needed to go and check on him. I told Jack to be careful and that I would see him soon.
Now I was at home, pacing in my living room, feeling like I had ants under my skin. The storm that had been centered over Harlot Bay had finally attracted the interest of the rest of the nation, meteorologists calling it a freak weather event. I tried to settle down in front of the television to watch them discuss it, but I couldn’t sit still. It felt like I had a direct connection to the storm high above Harlot Bay and I was thrumming with electricity. Finally, feeling extremely twitchy indeed, I left the mansion, went around the side and up into the forests behind it. There were still a few final rays of sunlight, but I brought a flashlight since I wouldn’t be able to summon any light (most likely). As I marched up into the trees, I couldn’t keep my mind from straying back to whoever it was who had killed Mattias and possibly two other people, Tyson and the electrical contractor, and who had been behind sabotaging a movie. This person, this evil person, was going to come after Jack and me? Or even Bella? Ha! They’d be sorry if they did!
“Don’t you dare!” I said out loud, pretending an old dead tree stump was the bad guy. I dramatically pointed my finger at it, and then the magic responded and a lightning bolt came down out of nowhere and exploded that tree stump into a million pieces.
