In the morning I woke up refreshed and energetic. Obviously I’d needed an early night. Today there was only one thing on my mind: talking to Zero Bend. Molly and Luce were up fairly early also, still riding the wave of excitement that comes when you have a date with someone cute coming up. They were happily chatting away and even seemed to think that their insanely complex coffee machine would be fine if they only learned how to use it.
I said my goodbyes and drove to the office. My stories were still going well, and the number of people visiting had drastically increased. As they say in the news business, if it bleeds it leads. After making myself a cup of coffee, I quickly got busy finishing up all my puff pieces and local general news. I managed to churn out articles about the new boardwalk and the possible lighthouse rejuvenation.
Although Harlot Bay is a dying seaside town, we aren’t going down without a fight. The city was working on rejuvenating parts of the town that had fallen into disrepair. Currently, there was a discussion about demolishing the old ice-skating rink and building a new one. The owner had even applied for a demolition permit. No matter how crazy the mayor seemed, he actually had a fairly solid vision for Harlot Bay.
Soon it was midmorning, and I knew the Butter Festival carve for the day would be underway. It was down to four people, and only two would go on to compete in the Grand Finale the next day. I was sure one of them would be Zero Bend.
After publishing eight—yes, eight!—articles, I quickly packed up my bag and drove over to the Butter Festival. I didn’t go in, but I looked in through the door to see that Zero Bend was still carving. I couldn’t tell exactly what he was doing, but it looked like a giant human heart. I wouldn’t put it past him for it to be anatomically correct. I ducked out of there, went back to my car, and quickly drove over to Barnes Boulevard. I found a spot just down from Zero Bend’s vacation rental where I could watch the house and sit in the shade. With any luck, Zero Bend would finish carving soon and then come home so I could speak to him before Fusion Swan got to him.
I sat in the car with the window open, enjoying a gentle, warm breeze. The sky was blue with a few puffs of cloud, and it was a lovely, sunny day. We were heading toward summer and every day was getting warmer. Soon we would have another burst of tourists arriving as those from cold states came to visit our wonderful beaches. As I sat there in my car in the warm sun, I felt myself relaxing.
Harlot Bay has its problems, just like any small seaside town. There’s not much for teenagers to do here, not many jobs, and it has various other small-town problems, but it is beautiful. The weather is lovely, if sometimes a little unsettled and out of season due to the magic in the area. Truer Island is wild, and there is a lookout you can stand on where you can see the horses running around. The mayor is doing his best to bring us back from the brink, so we always have plenty of festivals and farmers’ markets and charity walks on the beach. When the tourists are here, it’s busy and thriving. Everyone is happy because they’re making money. When they’re gone, it’s peaceful and quiet and you can walk on the beach and feel like you’re the only person in existence. It’s wonderful and calm, and being a Slip witch, that’s something I definitely need.
I was sitting there thinking about my mother and aunts’ plan to renovate Torrent Mansion and turn it into a bed-and-breakfast when a sleek, shiny car pulled into Zero Bend’s driveway. A slender blonde girl got out and went up to the house and let herself in. Even from a distance, I could see she was wearing designer clothes, and I would have happily bet she was a model.
I got my camera out, zoomed in on the front door and waited. About five minutes later, she came out of the house and I snapped a series of photos as she walked back to her car. She got in and drove away. It took about ten minutes this time for my camera to finally deliver the photographs because I’d taken six of them. The girl was surrounded by a glowing orange aura that had dark, jagged green spikes stuck all through it. It looked like Zero Bend’s aura. Did that girl work for Fusion Swan? Was she Zero Bend’s girlfriend? It seemed the evidence was mounting that Fusion Swan was possibly a soul sucker.
I spent the next ten minutes flicking through the photographs and looking at auras. I went back into the photos I’d taken yesterday at the Butter Festival. All of them had been unusable for my website, given they were stained with people’s auras. I was looking at one of the photos, a carving of a baby wearing a bowler hat, and my eyes shifted focus. Jack had been standing on the other side of the glass enclosure. He was looking right at me with a slight smile on his lips. His aura was a deep green, almost emerald, and there were streaks of brown in it, dark like wood or maybe chocolate. The edge of his aura was clearly defined—almost a straight line with very little fuzzing. I wasn’t sure exactly what that meant. He was closed off? Or maybe it meant he was just very well-defined? As I was looking at the photo, vaguely thinking about the color of his eyes, another car pulled into Zero Bend’s driveway and the man himself got out. He was alone. He went inside.
I locked my car and walked up to the house to knock on the door.
“Mr. Bend? Harlow Torrent from the Harlot Bay Reader. May I speak with you?”
“Piss off!” I heard him snarl from inside. It was the first time I’d heard him speak. It was very much angry New Yorker.
“I’m the one who found Holt Everand! I need to talk to you!”
I heard footsteps inside and then Zero Bend opened the door. He was dressed in his full punk gear: black tattooed lines up his neck, multiple piercings, and giant black sunglasses with diamonds glittering on the rims.
“You’re the one who found him?”
“My name is Harlow. I went to the warehouse to take photographs that morning. I need to talk to you about some of the deaths that have been happening on the carving circuit.”
“You’d better come in, then,” he said.
I followed him inside and closed the door behind me. The house was spectacular. There was a winding wooden staircase that went up to the second floor, lots of marble, a plush rug, and dark wood furniture. There was a bookcase set against the far wall that I’m fairly sure cost more than everything I owned put together.
“This way,” Zero said. I followed him past the stairs and out into a spectacular kitchen. There was a kettle heating on the stovetop.
He turned to me. “Time for some truth, I believe.”
He took off his glasses. His eyes were a startling green. Then he reached a finger in and removed two contact lenses, revealing brown eyes beneath. He slipped them into a protective case, which he stuffed in his coat pocket.
“Hi, I’m Hamish Reynard. Would you like some tea?” he asked in a flawless British accent.
I shook his offered hand and tried to work up a sentence that didn’t sound completely stupid. Contenders included:
You’re British?
So, British, huh?
You drink tea; you must be British?
He must have seen the look on my face, because he gave me a gentle smile and patted me on the back of the hand before going over to the kettle. It was starting to whistle.
“Don’t worry, you’ll get over it in a moment,” he said.
I took a deep breath and let the world move into a new position. Zero Bend, crazed American punk artist, was Hamish Reynard, quiet British . . . tea-maker. Or something.
“You’re British?”
Oh, well done, Harlow. Cutting-edge investigator skills there.
Hamish took the whistling kettle off the heat and poured it into two cups.
“It’s important to warm the cups first,” he replied.
“You’re not American.”
“The water needs to boil when it hits the leaves. Very important for flavor. Some argue that there are actually three teas in every brew: the initial burst, the two-minute tea, and the long soak. I prefer the simple method: boiling water, loose tea in a tea-ball, dunked a few times and then removed before too much bitterness can form. Milk?”
I managed to nod.
“I really don’t understand. You’re not American?”
Hamish handed me a cup of tea and then placed a bowl of sugar cubes on the table.
“I think sugar ruins the taste, but tea is a very democratic drink. Have it any way you like. I prefer black, no milk, no sugar,” he said, sipping his.
I dropped in two cubes, stirred it and then took a sip. Oh . . . that was good. The tea burst inside me in a wave of warmth and I relaxed.
“Do you want to start again?” he asked, raising an eyebrow.
He still had his crazy dyed hair and punk outfit, but without his contacts he’d changed. Zero Bend was gone. Hamish Reynard was sitting in front of me. The tea calmed my shock and I rallied.
“So . . . you’re British?”
Well done, Harlow.
“It’s all an act, a game, a . . . fantasy. No one cares about Hamish Reynard, quiet sculptor. No one buys his work or experiences it. No one installs it in the lobbies of their buildings.”
“So you invented Zero Bend.”
Hamish smiled and sipped his tea.
“In a way. He’s a mixture of two people I knew at university. Remember, a good artist copies, but a great artist steals. I stole bits of their personalities, whipped them up together, and went out into the carving circuit under my dangerous pseudonym. Voilà—suddenly I’m in demand, my work is being shown and I’m constantly working.”
“All of it is an act? The fights, the breakups, the girl you apparently threw out a window?”
At this question, Hamish looked down into his drink and gave a slight frown before sighing.
“It’s not all an act. Somewhere along the line, the drugs, drinking, sex and rock ‘n’ roll stopped being an act and became the way I was living. A few of the fights were staged, like the one with Holt in Tokyo. Other ones . . . it’s really hard to stay calm with people sticking cameras in your face all the time. I threw Issa out the window because I was convinced she was keeping me drugged. Total insane paranoia at the time, but once she was gone and I sobered up a bit, it turned out not to be far from the truth. I certainly didn’t kill Holt—we were actually friends.”
All the stories I’d read online were conflicting with the quiet man in front of me. He seemed so . . . gentle. Impossible that he’d murdered anyone. I wondered if he knew his agent was possibly buying drugs. Did he know some model had been in his house recently? I didn’t want to sound like I’d been spying on him.
“I can see you’re struggling with it. Don’t worry, I sometimes do too. You pretend to be someone else for long enough and then one day you become your mask. You know what I mean?”
I nodded and sipped my tea so I didn’t have to say anything. Of course I knew what he meant. I’d done exactly the same thing when I’d left Harlot Bay and gone out into the world. I was no longer Harlow Torrent, Slip witch with a magical, indestructible talking cat. I was Harlow, sorta writer, college student, then dedicated employee, easygoing girlfriend. I’d played that role well, right up to the point where the magic hiding inside me had lashed out and burned an entire apartment complex down.
“It’s a bit like professional wrestling. It’s real wrestling, they’re pushing and jumping and fighting, but it’s all choreographed for entertainment. Holt and Zero were going to do a joint sculpture. A sort of bury-the-hatchet type deal. We’d make up, best of friends, and then a few months down the line we’d start feuding again. Some of the other sculptors are in on it too.”
“So the competitions are all rigged?”
“No, they’re real. We all want that money and prestige. But a lot of that other stuff is all for show. Including most of the fights we had.”
He looked down at his cup and a tear streaked down the side of his nose.
Hmm . . . most of the fights. I could see that he was hiding something.
Well, hiding something more than secretly being an entirely different person.
“Do you know who might have killed Holt?”
“His real name was Andrew,” Hamish whispered, staring at his drink.
“I found footprints in the warehouse. Were you there?”
Hamish nodded and then took a deep breath, wiping away the forming tears.
“I went down to check the butter the night before—you know, make sure the sizes, temperatures were all good. I didn’t know Andrew would be there. The place was empty, which was weird, and then I heard this chanting.”
Chanting? This didn’t sound good.
“Did you see who it was?”
“I called out, because that’s what Zero Bend would do, and they stopped. I couldn’t understand what they were chanting, either. It was all echoey, didn’t sound like any language I’ve ever heard before. I looked around and that’s when I found Andrew. He was dead already. I stepped in the blood, saw the ice hammer, freaked out completely. I knew I couldn’t call the police because they’d never believe it wasn’t me. I bolted out of there and came back here. I was going to make an anonymous call, but . . . I don’t know, I couldn’t. I got drunk instead and by the time I sobered up, you’d found him.”
I nearly added and was immediately suspected of murdering him but managed to hold back. He should have called the police. The killer might have still been in the area, but I could understand why he didn’t. My first impulse had been to run, too.
I filed chanting away—I didn’t really want to deal with what that might mean right then—and circled back around to whatever Hamish was concealing. I couldn’t think of a better way to put it, so I just blurted it out.
“You said most of your fights were fake. You had real ones?”
“I had a girlfriend . . . it didn’t last. A while later she became his girlfriend. We were out drinking one night and suddenly we’re punching each other. Stupid.”
There was no good way to change the topic to the model I’d seen earlier, so I just went for it.
“When I was waiting for you, I saw a girl come in here. She looked like a model. Tall, blonde.”
“Kachina, my girlfriend. Probably picking up something. She’s staying at a hotel in town.”
“Do you think it’s possible someone is still drugging you? I saw Fusion Swan buying drugs.”
“Sorry, what?”
I put my down my cup and stood. As I did, a rush of warmth swooshed up my legs and into my head. It felt so comfortable and good. I needed to talk to the family, find out what this chanting might mean. I knew it was important, but I was starting to not care in a big way.
“I’m gonna find out who did this and you’ll be okay. You need to tell the police, though,” I said.
Well, that’s what I think I said. My mouth was feeling all funny. Hamish looked at me, frowning.
“Are you okay?”
His face stretched out, his mouth opening up bigger and bigger, and before I knew it I was swimming toward the door. I burst out into the sunlight. It was singing at me.
Was I drugged?
I didn’t get to answer myself. The ground turned soft like marshmallow, and everything went all melty.