After lunch and writing a few scintillating articles for my website—a cake recipe, information about a local flower, and a note about the tides—I walked down to Traveler, Molly and Luce’s shop. It’s a tourist trap in the finest sense of the word. They sell T-shirts, stickers, key rings, bobbleheads of the pirates who used to roam the Atlantic, maps to local attractions, tickets to go out to Truer Island, and basically all of those little knickknacky things that people buy on vacation and then immediately forget about once they get home. The thing about Harlot Bay and Hattie Stern was . . . we didn’t actually disagree with her about the Harlot Bay name. Unfortunately, it had stuck long ago, been codified (i.e., put on a map), and now everyone was too far down the path to reverse it. Sadly, we had to embrace it. So they had T-shirts that said things like I went all the way at Harlot Bay. Hey, we do what we have to do.
If Hattie Stern ever got her way, we’d become Generic Dying Seaside Town #23. At least now we can play on the pirates who sailed the coast, the murders, the ghost stories, the buried treasure and the wicked women who allegedly lived in Harlot Bay.
There are actually quite a few cool things about the place. Some of the houses have tunnels and secret rooms under them, which were used for smuggling and hiding from pirates come to loot everything. They were useful during Prohibition. There are deep caves with gleaming stalactites. Over on Truer Island, there are wild horses descended from Spanish horses who escaped shipwrecks, buried treasure, and a small freshwater lake right in the middle.
I suppose there is the other side of it, though. People stay here for generations. Kids you go to school with have the same last names as streets around town. Pick up the paper from 1923 and the town drunk has the same name as today’s town drunk. People don’t change, the cycle starts anew and we all continue the pattern.
Wow, that was really depressing. I’m sorry. It is a wonderful place, mostly. Promise.
When I got to Traveler, Molly and Luce were arguing, which is the way they are about half the time. They didn’t even look up when I walked through the door, the bell jingling.
Molly is short, but don’t ever say that to her. She’s brunette, a bit curvy like her mom—but definitely don’t say that to her—and has green eyes that go well with her smatter of freckles.
Luce is taller than Molly and will never let her forget it, with lighter hair than both of us that seems to look blond in one light and tinged with red in another. When she was fifteen, she got a little obsessed about fantasy books and ended up building a life-size catapult, which is kept under a tarp in the woods behind our house. I’m not kidding—an actual catapult.
“No, no, no, you don’t start at the Pie Barons and then go to the Brewery and then go to Hoodoo Voodoo. You have to go in the reverse way and then finish at the Pie Barons so you have lunch, and that’s the end of the tour,” Luce said.
“What are you, crazy? You think people are really going on to the House of Toffee before they’ve seen the miniature golf course? That’s not gonna work. We’re trying to make sure they finish at our shop with spending money. How about they go this way?”
Molly drew a pen around the map, crossing over many of Harlot Bay’s famous landmarks and other associated tourist traps. Luce immediately snorted, took the pen from her and drew an alternate route. I wandered over to the table and they both finally looked up.
“Hey, Harlow, you can settle this. You think you should go to Mr. McGregor’s Herbology before or after you’ve been to Turkey Hut?”
Oh boy, I did not want to get into the middle of this. I hedged my bets.
“Well, I guess that could be a good idea, but I’m sure there’s many other great ways to travel around Harlot Bay.”
“Chicken,” Molly muttered, shooting me a dark look.
“She’s not chicken, she just knows an excellent travel plan when she sees it and doesn’t want to crush you into the ground right now.”
I left the table and flopped down on the sofa that sat against the wall. I was staring out the window, absently listening to Luce and Molly bicker behind me, when I saw a man appear across the street. He was tall, with broad shoulders and wild black hair. Probably a tourist, here today, gone tomorrow. That didn’t mean I couldn’t enjoy watching him walk around. Pacing is the word I’m looking for. He was pacing up and down, and I was very much enjoying his fine form. He was dressed in dark blue jeans and wore a black t-shirt. Scruffy and handsome. Hot, maybe.
Another man joined him who did not look scruffy and handsome. He was thin and weaselly looking, with pinched features and thinning red hair. He said something to Scruffy and then passed him something, all the while looking around.
Were they serious? Could you make a drug deal look any more obvious?
Weasel Man scurried away. Scruff put whatever it was in his pocket before he looked left and right and then crossed the empty road. Harlot Bay wasn’t busy at the best of times; that late in the afternoon you could virtually set up a tent in the main street to sleep in if you wanted. It wasn’t until he’d crossed the road and was coming toward the store that I realized I’d been pretty much staring at him the whole way and he had been staring directly at me! I sat up in alarm as he pushed the door to the shop open, the bell jingling. I glanced toward my cousins. Somehow they were still so deep in figuring out the order of their new tour that they ignored the man standing in the doorway.
Whatever part of me had enjoyed watching him run across the street had been absolutely, totally, one hundred percent correct. He was tall and broad, with strong hands and eyes that bordered on blue and green at the same time. He had a light dusting of stubble and a nose that would have looked too dominating on someone else’s face, but for him it just seemed to fit perfectly. For the briefest moment, I wondered what it would be like to run my hands through his hair.
What was wrong with me? I had a rule: no drinking before noon. Wait, that’s not it. No tourists. It only leads to trouble. But he was handsome . . .
“Are you the owners?” he asked.
Molly and Luce whirled around as one at the sound of his deep voice.
“I am,” Molly said, jumping forward. Luce joined her approximately point one seconds later, hustling around from behind the counter. I noticed her adjusting her top. Typical.
“Me too—I am owner. I mean I’m the owner. One of the owners.” She turned red in embarrassment at losing her words. It was unfortunately a family trait around gorgeous men.
“How can we help you?” Molly asked. She pointed at one of the T-shirts. “Did you want to go all the way in Harlot Bay?”
The stranger smiled, his eyes twinkling as a glanced at Luce’s red face and Molly standing there with her hand on her hip. He looked across at me and I felt myself involuntarily flush.
“I do want to go all the way in Harlot Bay, but right now I was wondering if you could direct me to the owner of the Harlot Bay Reader.”
Luce pointed at me.
“Her over there. She one. She is the one, she’s the one who does it!” She had a finger pointing at me like she was picking a witch out of the crowd, making an accusation rather than being helpful.
I somehow remembered that I had legs—what was wrong with me?—and pulled myself up from the sofa.
“I can help you with that. I’m the owner of the Harlot Bay Reader. Harlow Torrent.”
“Jack Bishop.”
He held out his hand and I shook it. His palm was rough, like he spent a lot of time working with his hands. I let go when I realized I’d been holding on just a moment too long.
“How can I help you, Jack?”
My voice cracked at the end all by itself.
“I wanted to ask you about what your angle was on the Butter Festival. How are you covering it and all that? Have you dug into the history of all the competitors?”
The truth was that I had hardly done any work at all on it, even though I’d known about it for at least a month. So far I knew famous punk sculptor Zero Bend was coming and they were carving butter, but that was about it. Many years of training in lying to Mom kicked in smoothly.
“I’ll be doing backgrounds on all the competitors and then following all the events during the week. Why do you ask?”
“I wanted to know if you’d done any background research on the competitors specifically. Preston Jacobs lived in Harlot Bay about thirty years ago.”
“Preston . . . ?”
“He’s one of the sponsors of the tour. Made his millions selling plastic buckets and shovels for sandcastle building.”
“Why is he important to you?”
“Oh, I’m just interested.”
Just interested? He was walking around town looking for the owner of the local newspaper just because he was interested in how they were going to be covering the Butter Festival? Then he happened to be involved in what appeared to be a drug deal? He was lying about something.
“Are you a reporter?” Luce asked.
“That is an excellent question,” Jack said, not bothering to answer it. He turned back to me.
Those eyes, my gosh.
He lowered his voice and it felt like he was looking directly into my soul.
“I think you and I should get together . . . ,” he said.
My cousins breathed in so sharply my ears almost popped.
“. . . if you dig up anything interesting about Preston Jacobs. Here’s my card.”
He handed me a white card that had Jack Bishop printed on the front and then a phone number on the back.
In my peripheral vision I saw Luce grab Molly’s arm. If Jack didn’t leave soon, one of them was going to make that squeee noise.
“Who was that man you met across the street?” I blurted out.
“Were you watching me?”
“I was looking out the window. It’s not my fault you happened to walk into where I was looking.”
I crossed my arms, noticed it was pushing cleavage up, and then dropped them to my sides.
“He’s a source.”
“So you are a reporter?”
“I’d love to stay, but I have work to do. I’m at the Hardy Arms Hotel.”
He turned and smiled at Molly and Luce, who were on the verge of collapsing in an oh-my-heart’s-a-flutter.
“Ladies,” he said.
Before he walked out, he winked at me.
A wink. At me.
The moment he was gone, Luce and Molly let out sighs.
“Oh my gosh, how hot was he?” Molly said.
“Very hot,” Luce agreed, fanning herself.
“I’m pretty sure he did a drug deal just across the street,” I said. “And he’s a tourist.”
“Even better. A few nights of passion and then he’s gone in the wind,” Luce said.
Molly turned to her.
“Oh really, that’s what you want? A quick fling with an anonymous tourist?”
“Maybe. I could be interested in that. Why not?”
“Oh yeah, what about William? Have you forgotten all about him?”
There is a somewhat severe lack of good men in Harlot Bay, so a love interest was hot news.
“Who is William?”
“He’s nobody. Nothing. Is it time for us to go to dinner yet?”
There was no way I was gonna let this go. I only directly knew two Williams in town—one was the butcher, and he was sixty-five and happily married, and the other one was a statue in the center of town. William somebody, one of the old governors who had actually been somewhat successful in fighting off the pirates who plagued this part of the US. I’m sure he was a good man in his time, but he’d been dead for about two hundred years, and I know Luce doesn’t like zombies.
Molly turned to me with a triumphant grin.
“William is a landscape gardener. He is very good with his hands, and in this type of weather he very often takes his shirt off. He is currently working down at the gardens on the restoration project. Luce has been down there three times this week.”
“I’ve just been walking in the park for the sunshine,” she protested, turning red again.
“Vitamin D is very important,” I said, deadpan.
“I think it is time to close shop. I don’t think anyone else is coming today!”
“You want to marry him and have little landscaper babies,” Molly teased.
“Oh yeah? You want to explain why you’ve been spending so much time in the library? A certain new librarian? Perhaps one who looks amazing in a vest? And probably even better out of it?”
Best day ever. Ooh, this was getting juicy. I turned to Molly.
“So who have you been going to see at the library?”
“No one. I’ve been doing research on . . . pirates. I’ve been thinking of doing a pirate tour.”
“More like thinking of doing a librarian,” Luce muttered.
“Is he hunky? Is he one of those guys who looks all nerdy in his vest and his glasses and then suddenly takes his glasses and his vest off and he’s fighting bad guys and discovering ancient cursed treasure?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Molly said. She looked around the store. “I think it’s time we closed up. I don’t think anyone else is coming. I’m locking up now!”
With that she rushed out to the back room, leaving us laughing.
I collapsed back onto the sofa. What a day full of surprises. Molly likes a librarian and Luce likes a landscaper and I like a . . . liar.
What?
I shook my head, trying to dislodge the thought, but Jack Bishop seemed to be stuck in my mind like glue.
No matter. A few days, maybe a week, and he’d be gone and I wouldn’t have to worry about him.
I put his card in my pocket anyway.
Luce and I walked back to my office to pick up my car and then drove home, catching up to Molly. The topic of possible new love interests was firmly off the table—at least for the moment, and as long as nobody annoyed anyone else too much. We loved our mothers and aunts, but we had a pact to continue lying to them as much as possible when it came to matters of our love lives. Unless, of course, someone threw you under the bus, in which case you tried to haul them under with you. The last time Molly had mentioned a boy she was interested in, the mothers had gone down to his place of work with a cake that they had also conveniently dosed with a mild love potion! It was too bad it was only a passing attraction—he was a picky eater and refused to have dessert on their one and only date, and who wants to be with a man who doesn’t eat dessert? He kept sending her terrible love poetry for the next few weeks until the potion wore off.
He sent her:
I’m blue
because I’m not with you
and I don’t know what to do
Our Aunt Cass read it and suggested he go ride a kangaroo until he came to his senses.
We drove up the hill, the sun rushing down to the horizon behind us. The fading light lit up Torrent Mansion, hiding its flaws from view.
The mansion is gigantic, with a stupid number of rooms, three stories up and at least two stories underground. It was built a long time ago, and every generation of Torrent witches had added their own touch. Molly, Luce and I lived in what you’d technically call the East Wing.
You think mansion and you think wealth, right? Old money, servants to clean all the windows, perhaps even a butler.
The Torrent Mansion is falling to pieces. The floorboards are old, there is water damage, and we can’t actually walk from our end of the house to the middle because the floors aren’t safe. The mansion started falling apart decades ago, so my great-grandmother’s family built a new guest house on the property that simply became the house after a while. With a severe lack of funds to rebuild the mansion, they just moved out. We were all living in the guest house up to a year ago, and . . .
I took a deep breath as we pulled up to our front door, feeling a sudden prickle of tears.
It wasn’t my fault. A sleepwalker isn’t responsible for what they do, and neither is a Slip witch. It was a little hard to convince myself even now. A fire had sent me back home, and there had been another only a few days after I’d returned.
After the fire, our mothers had gone deep into debt to renovate the middle of the mansion, where they lived along with Aunt Cass, and the East Wing, where Luce, Molly and I lived.
We stopped out front and let ourselves in. The main entrance leads to stairs, which are unsafe, the dining room, which is renovated and okay, and the kitchen, which is the heart of the house.
Bickering voices rose up from that direction.
“Oh boy,” Luce said.
“Get in, get out, it will all be okay,” Molly said.
We could all hear Aunt Cass’s raised voice. The chances of it all being okay were not good.
We went in through the dining room and into the kitchen.
“What’s happening, family?” I asked.
“Nothing,” Aunt Cass snapped.
I glanced at mom and my two aunts. They were all busy cooking or pretending to fuss around. Molly and Luce took up spots near their respective mothers.
The family:
Aunt Cass is short and wrinkled, somewhere over eighty, and takes special pleasure in tormenting her family. Imagine a lemon that someone left out in the sun so it dried up like a sultana, and then give that lemon magical powers and an attitude you couldn’t knock over with a bulldozer.
My mom, Aunt Freya and Aunt Ro are nonidentical triplets in their fifties. My mom is blonde with blue eyes and seriously looks like she should be on a Scandinavian cereal box or something. She even has red cheeks! She is also the tallest of the sisters—another gene that missed me. Freya has dark hair and dark eyes much like me, is in the middle for height, and is somewhat curvier than both her sisters, though not by much—they run a bakery and delight in sampling their own product. Ro is the shortest sister and also the youngest by about three minutes. She has pitch-black hair and a slightly olive complexion, a gene that missed Molly by a country mile.
The main words that should spring to mind are bustling and busybodies.
We love them, but sometimes . . . ugh, it’s too much. Still, we never miss the opportunity for a little stirring.
“Why the raised voices?”
“I caught her giving a haunted ghost tour through the mansion this afternoon,” Mom said.
Aunt Cass snorted.
“Caught me? You can’t catch me doing something in my own house! What’s next? You’re going to catch me making a piece of toast?”
“One of the tourists fell through the floor. Luckily there was a very old bed in the room below.”
“He’s fine. It was exciting for them.”
“He nearly broke his leg. If that bed hadn’t been there—”
“Money is money, and I need to make a living now that the Feds have shut me down,” Aunt Cass said, crossing her arms.
Mom shook her head behind Aunt Cass’s back and continued chopping tomatoes.
I knew this wasn’t a good idea, but I couldn’t help myself.
“The Feds?”
“The man, Uncle Sam, the government that has nothing better to do than to stomp on the small businesswomen.”
“How did they stomp on you?”
“They shut down my online healing shop!”
“They were placebos,” Mom blurted out.
“If they work, they’re not placebos.”
With that, Aunt Cass stormed out of the kitchen. Mom waited until her footsteps had faded.
“She was selling sugar pills to treat certain . . . male conditions,” she whispered.
Ah, right. Suddenly a lot of things fell into place. About a month back, Aunt Cass had started insisting on being taken to town with us when we went to work. Normally she stayed at home. We’d drop her off at the post office and then pick her up at the library. No doubt she’d been using their computers to run her burgeoning drug empire.
“She even had a website,” Ro whispered.
“What was it?”
“I can’t tell you,” she replied quickly.
“Why not?”
“Forget it, it’s closed down now,” Mom said.
“I want to know what it was called!”
“It had some very suggestive words in it. That’s the end of it. We’re not discussing it.”
She pointed her finger at me. “Don’t you bring it up with her. Oh, and tell your cat to stay out of our pizza oven. He was in there again today.”
I raised my hands in protest.
“I’m not his boss. I can ask him to stay out, but he does his own thing.”
“The day a customer gets cat hair on his pizza, then maybe you’ll take it seriously. He’s downstairs, go tell him now while we get dinner ready. That pizza oven is helping keep our family afloat. Do you want to bankrupt us?”
Ouch, that turned quickly.
“You two scoot out of here and stop stealing food,” she added, pointing her knife at my cousins, who were, in fact, stealing food at that very moment.
“We’re not stealing food!” Molly protested through a mouthful of croutons.
I trotted off downstairs to say hi to Grandma before the battle hit me.
Grandma is April Torrent, Aunt Cass’s twin sister and my mom and aunts’ mother. Adams was curled up at her feet. He stood up and yawned, showing me a mouthful of sharp white teeth.
“Is it dinner yet?” he asked.
I picked him up and he snuggled into me. He smelled like pizza.
“Good to see you too, Adams. I had a wonderful day, thanks for asking,” I said.
“Mmf,” Adams said, starting to purr.
“Why do you smell like pizza?” I asked, although I already knew the answer.
“I don’t know.”
A month ago, my mom and aunts had a pizza oven installed at Big Pie. It was a somewhat costly improvement that allowed them to add pizzas to their menu. It was also Adams’s new favorite place to sleep.
Not behind it, on top of it, or near it, an adorable little black cat basking in the warmth.
Nope, Adams preferred inside it, up the back. The thing ran at a few hundred degrees, and he’d be in there snoring away.
“Please try to stay out of the pizza oven when they’re making food for customers.”
“Mmf,” Adams said, rubbing his head against me.
I carried him over to Grandma.
My grandma April is Cass’s identical twin, except she is frozen in time. She looks to be in her sixties, whereas Aunt Cass is now in her eighties. It won’t be long before our moms will look the same age as her.
She has been frozen since I was seven—twenty years ago now. My memories from back then are all a bit of a blur, but I remember she was kind and loving, certainly nothing like her sister. She always had a cookie somewhere and would sweep us up in these big hugs.
She’s still alive but . . . frozen. A living statue. She has her hands out in front of her like she’s holding an invisible basketball and has a look of intense concentration on her face with just the hint of a smile like she’s happy with whatever she’s doing. Only Aunt Cass knows what happened to her, and the only thing she ever says about it is that Grandma bit off more than she could chew.
Not surprising for a Torrent witch. Biting off more than we can chew is practically our family motto.
Actually, she does say something else. We can’t undo what has been done, so don’t bother trying.
“Hey, Grandma, how are you today?” I asked. “Oh, that’s good. Me? Just a normal day. Still working with John and reporting. The Butter Festival is on this week . . .”
I told her about what I’d been doing, receiving only comforting silence in reply. Our whole family does it—comes down here to chat and spill our hearts out to her. Sometimes even Aunt Cass comes down and locks the door to spend some private time with her frozen sister.
It wasn’t long before Adams got tired of my holding him—typical finicky cat—and fidgeted for me to let him go. Soon after that, Mom called down the stairs that dinner was ready.
I took a deep breath and looked at Grandma.
“Well, let’s get this fiasco started,” I said.