I left Scarness Park telling myself I did not, did not need to be spending time talking with a tourist. I arrived at the Harlot Bay police station to find Carter Wilkins sitting in the waiting area. His already-sour face creased up when I walked in and his eyebrows started that twitchy Morse code thing again. I decided to annoy him.
“Hi, Mr. Wilkins! How are you today?” I said, beaming at him like he was my long-lost best friend.
I saw the internal battle cross his face. He actually was a decent reporter, and therefore he surely knew I’d been the one to discover the body. His archrival was also the main primary source. How delicious.
“Good afternoon, Harlow,” he finally ground out.
The receptionist, Mary, nodded at me as I took a seat.
“What’s new?” I asked Carter.
He bit his lip and then blew air out between his lips before summoning up . . . was that his attempt at a smile? He ended up looking like a nervous dog.
“I could ask you the same thing. I understand you found the body of Holt Everand this morning?”
I let him hang for a moment. He only held his fake smile for a few more seconds before being forced to let it go.
“I did.”
“Could you tell me what time that was? What did you find?”
He flipped open a notebook and clicked his pen.
“Oh, in the morning I found Holt Everand dead. You’ll be able to read all about it online shortly.”
I don’t know what message his eyebrows were sending out, but I bet it had a lot of cursing in it.
I saw him try to push out another smile, but clearly those rarely used muscles had exhausted themselves. He settled for flat with a slight frown.
“I’d love to interview you for my paper,” he said. “Care to give a comment?”
I’m not malicious, not really, but sometimes perfect moments arrive, and if you don’t take advantage of them, how can you look at yourself in the mirror in the morning? This was one of those perfect moments. I could almost hear Aunt Cass’s sarcastic voice in my mind.
“Well, I think—”
My perfect moment was obliterated by a tall blond man wearing an immaculate black suit sweeping into the police station and demanding to see Sheriff Hardy immediately.
“What is it regarding?” Mary asked.
“My client, Zero Bend, and Mr. Holt Everand!”
I noticed he had a single fingernail painted red on his right hand. The middle one.
Carter leapt out of his chair like a sprinter off the blocks. He practically teleported to the man’s side.
“You’re Zero Bend’s agent? Do you have any comment on the graffiti featuring his name through our town?”
I fumbled my recorder out of my bag and joined Carter. I was still stinging a little at missing my perfect comeback, but my reporter instincts were kicking in.
Before the man could answer, Sheriff Hardy appeared with a folder in his hand.
“Carter, Harlow, this is Mr. Swan,” Sheriff Hardy said.
“Fusion Swan, artist agent,” he corrected, holding out his hand to me. “And you two are Harlot Bay’s media! Print and digital working side by side, I love it.”
I shook his hand. It was cold and dry.
“We don’t work together,” Carter said sourly.
I’m pretty sure he would have despised me simply for competing with him, but there was also history there. When I’d returned to Harlot Bay, I’d gone for a job interview at his one-man paper. The interview was going fine until I asked if he was planning to move to an online edition at all. You would have thought I’d handed him one of Hattie Stern’s lemons to suck on the way his face contorted. The interview went downhill quickly after that, and I decided I didn’t want to work there as much as he didn’t want me either.
Then I started up the Harlot Bay Reader and from some of the comments Carter has thrown my way, he apparently believes my job interview was actually a spying mission. I extracted valuable business intelligence, and essentially any good ideas behind my online newspaper were stolen from him. Or something like that. When we do cross paths, he hardly speaks to me, as though I’m going to steal every golden sentence right out of his mouth. I’m very fine with this arrangement and wish he’d go the whole way to the complete silence package.
“Competition! Excellent idea. Sharpen your weapons against each other. The struggle for dominance makes us all better. I love it.”
He turned to Sheriff Hardy. “I need to speak with you urgently.”
“Yes, your multiple phone messages told me that.”
Sheriff Hardy looked over the three of us before letting out a sigh.
“Okay, we’ll all go down here. Get this done in one go. Follow me.”
We went down to a medium-sized conference room. The Harlot Bay police department isn’t very big, despite some of the weird crimes that go on here, so the room felt very unused. There was dust on the table in the middle of the room.
Once we all sat down, with Fusion, me and Carter on one side of the table, Sheriff Hardy cleared his throat and began.
“Holt Everand was found dead this morning by a local news reporter taking photos for the Butter Festival. We are treating the case as a homicide. Mr. Holt suffered a head wound from a single strike to the back of his skull and appears to have died due to blood loss. We believe the crime took place last night, but due to the chilled environment, we cannot pinpoint a time. Workers delivering butter were last in the warehouse a day earlier, so that is our timeline. We currently have no suspects, but we are actively pursuing leads. That’s all I can tell you.”
He pointed a finger at Fusion.
“Go.”
“Mr. Everand was a client of my agency, and we’re willing to provide any help we can to solve this. You are aware a number of people were feuding with him, correct?”
“We are. We’d like a list from you, if possible. Anyone you think might have a motive here.”
“Motive? How about five hundred thousand dollars in prize money? The prestige and sponsorships that will come from winning the butter-carving championship? Want a list of suspects? Here they are.”
He slipped the Butter Festival flyer out of his pocket and slid it across the table to Sheriff Hardy.
“You represent Mr. Bend also? We’d like him to come down for an interview.”
Fusion leaned back and shrugged. “He’s an artist—very temperamental. I will ask him, but he traditionally doesn’t get along well with law enforcement.”
“Did Zero Bend graffiti his name everywhere for publicity?” Carter blurted out.
“We don’t know who did that. He is incredibly popular. I suspect someone who loves his bad boy style got a little excited. There are a group of fans who follow him around the world, you know. They call themselves the Ice Queens, but they are definitely not cold, if you get my drift.”
Fusion said that last bit to me and even winked. Yuck. With every word out of his mouth he was transitioning from a real person to a fake one. It was like watching a bad play.
Now the very underdressed girls at the Butter Festival’s opening made sense.
“Mr. Swan, the Harlot Bay Times would like an exclusive interview with you,” Carter said.
“Exclusive? I’ll tell you what: I’ll send both of you fine journalists a press release and see how you report on it tomorrow. Whoever does the best job will receive the exclusive interview. Fair?”
I mumbled something that could have possibly been yes. My reporter side was telling me to get that interview for the story. My witch side was bugs-crawling-on-my-skin itchy and didn’t want to spend any more time with this guy at all.
Carter turned to Sheriff Hardy.
“Do you have any clues as to the identity of the vandal?”
“We’re looking into it. Due to the popularity of the festival, we have a lot of tourists in town, and we are aware this has occurred at other locations Mr. Bend has traveled. As Mr. Swan said, there may be some excited fans out there. We’re going to find the culprit and anyone who directed their actions and pursue them with the full force of the law. Let’s just hope no one is stupid enough to do it again.”
The way Sheriff Hardy said it, I knew he didn’t believe for one second that it was some random groupie or crazy fan. And that last bit? A clear warning to Fusion Swan.
Sheriff Hardy pointed at me.
“Harlow?”
Oh, what questions did I have? Um . . . none, really. I’d found the body, and so I had known most of what he’d said already. I reached into my bag and pulled out the memory stick with the photos on it. I slid it across the table.
“Here are the photos I took this morning before I found Mr. Everand,” I said.
“I want a copy of those!” Carter said quickly.
“These are crime scene photos and I’ll decide if we release them, if at all.”
“It’s not fair! She’s going to report on this murder, and she has the crime scene photos and I don’t?”
I turned to Carter, my mouth hanging open in disbelief.
“Are you kidding? I was there, that’s why I have the photos. And I’ll tell you this: there’s nothing in them. It’s all just butter, piles and piles of butter.”
I left out my final photo of the gaping black hole in reality where Holt Everand had been.
“It’s bias and I won’t stand for it,” Carter sniped.
Sheriff Hardy sighed and rubbed his face. Last year Carter had written an article that strongly hinted at some sort of corruption “high up” in the Harlot Bay police force. The evidence to base this vague attack on? An “unnamed source” within the department had advised that local businesses provided generous benefits to the police. Big Pie Bakery was named as one of these businesses, and when my mother and aunts marched down to Carter’s office, he accused them of giving the police seven donuts when they only ordered six.
Yup, corruption from up on high.
I’ll say this for Carter: he has some guts to face down three angry witches.
The craziest thing that happened after that was while the aforementioned three angry witches were cooking up a revenge plot, Aunt Cass told them to stop being babies and said that any publicity was good publicity. She pretty much banned them from fighting back, and she was probably right. Sales at the bakery increased after that.
“I will look at the photographs, and if they do not contain anything we wish to keep to ourselves for the moment, I will have Mary send you a copy. I suspect you will have to ask Harlow’s permission to publish them, however, as she is the one who owns the copyright.”
“I do not give my permission to publish,” I said to Carter sweetly.
“Bias,” he muttered to himself.
Sheriff Hardy stood up. The meeting was over.
“Unless there is anything else, I need to get back to work. Mr. Swan, if you could arrange with your client to come down here, I would appreciate it. Harlow, may I talk with you a moment about a different matter?”
“Looking forward to those articles,” Fusion said, pointing at me and Carter before leaving.
Carter stopped in the doorway. “I’m not going to put up with bias,” he declared before marching away, his eyebrows twitching like crazy.
Sheriff Hardy waited until they were gone before sitting down again. He reached over and turned off my recorder.
“This is not for print. Holt was drained of blood, and I mean almost completely. He had some other kind of liquid in his veins, which we’ve yet to identify.”
“He was sitting in a frozen puddle of blood.”
“A little bit of blood goes a long way. The rest of it was gone. Take a look at this.”
Sheriff Hardy opened the folder he’d brought in and slid a photo across to me. It was the back of Holt Everand’s neck, the photo taken on the autopsy room table. He had a huge bruise in the shape of a handprint across his neck. You could clearly see the finger marks.
“What do you make of that?”
I examined the photo for a moment but didn’t get more out of it than I’d already seen.
“That’s a bruise in the shape of a hand.”
“A bruise is blood that has been drawn to the surface of the skin. Do you know . . . anything . . . that might cause such an injury?”
Sheriff Hardy looked at me, and I suddenly understood he was talking about witch-related matters. There are rumors aplenty about our family, and the way our decrepit mansion looms over the town certainly doesn’t help, nor do the various shenanigans/possible crimes Aunt Cass has pulled over the years. Sheriff Hardy’s family has lived in Harlot Bay as long as ours has, and he knows all the stories. He also knows that sometimes our family can help when traditional methods of investigation have failed. I’m not sure of all the details, but I know Aunt Cass has helped him out in exchange for him overlooking certain events the police might otherwise be interested in (such as her illegal fireworks business she was running for a while and sometimes starts up again when she feels like it).
It’s one of those “he knows, we know, he knows we know, we know he knows” situations. He’ll never come right out and say it, so this is where we end up: an online journalist being asked questions outside her official circle of knowledge.
“I . . . may be able to find out something about that. I’ll check with some of my sources,” I told him.
He nodded and slipped the photo back into the folder.
“Thanks, Harlow. Hey, I hear the sisters are possibly renovating the mansion to start a bed-and-breakfast?”
How did he know that? I’d only heard about it last night.
“Um . . . yeah. My mom seems pretty excited about it. They baked a cake in the shape of the house to break the news.”
“Well, it sounds great. We definitely need good business development in this town.”
I felt a whoosh as my stomach dropped. I’d heard Ro make that exact statement just last night. Not sorta-that-statement. The exact statement.
“Have you been talking with my aunts about this?” I asked.
“Down at the bakery; I go in there a lot. We get to talking,” Sheriff Hardy said a little too quickly.
I regarded him with my patented I-know-you’re-lying-to-me face, but Sheriff Hardy is a pro. He wasn’t going to crack anytime soon.
Our three fathers had all left our mothers within the same year, and Molly, Luce and I make it a point not to know anything about the moms’ respective love lives if we can help it. All three of them have only two settings: sneaking around or too-much-information. An innocent question about a strange car parked outside the house might lead to a conversation you really didn’t want to be in.
Aunt Ro and Sheriff Hardy?
I’ve known him forever. He is a good man through and through, but in my mind he was always the friendly police officer. I’d never imagined him out on a date, and fitting Aunt Ro into that scenario seemed very strange.
Imagine if they got married! We had a hard enough time keeping our witchiness suppressed and under the radar. I wonder how that conversation between them would go.
“They do make good baked goods,” I said finally. This wasn’t over, and I just couldn’t wait to tell Molly and Luce. Turning the romantic meddling powers of my mom and Aunt Freya on Ro might get them off our collective backs.
Sheriff Hardy stood up and cleared his throat. Standing up was a really effective way to end a meeting. I needed to remember that.
“Well, thanks for coming in and supplying the photographs. Let me know if your sources have any information they’d like to share.”
“I’ll do that,” I said and winked for some reason and then nearly combusted in embarrassment before scurrying out of there.