“Fear is incomplete knowledge.”
–Agatha Christie
Frances waved at me when I got outside, but I didn’t have time to say hello, because nothing was going to stop me from talking to Bob. He was already a couple of blocks ahead of me, and I broke into a jog to catch up to him.
A seagull was in flight above me, and it screeched a couple times. “Don’t you dare!” I called to it. It descended until it was flying just above my head. “Don’t you dare!” I yelled, swatting at it as I kept running to catch up to Bob.
The seagull dodged and weaved, expertly avoiding my hand. Battling the seagull slowed my pace, and Bob was getting away from me. The seagull screeched, again.
“I will beat your ass!” I threatened. It didn’t seem to care. It continued to fly above me, as if it was taunting me. I squinted at it. “Is that my hair?” I asked, horrified. Clutched in its talons were a few strands of my long, wavy black hair.
The bird eyed me, like he was out for revenge. I wouldn’t have minded some revenge, too.
“I will beat your ass!” I yelled, again, but my threat seemed to egg it on instead of scare him. It squawked again, and it dove at my head.
I was a goner. Nothing was going to save me. The seagull was going to attack me, and this time, my hair was never going to grow back. It would probably get my nose, too. And no matter what John said about it, I knew I wouldn’t be attractive without a nose.
I stopped in my tracks and cowered, raising my arms up to deflect the seagull, as it got set to attack. But it was too fast and strong for my weak attempts at self-preservation. There was no saving me.
“Go away, bird,” I heard. The voice was deep and gravelly and coming from right next to me. I heard the seagull flap its wings, and I looked up. The seagull was keeping its position over my head, but it wasn’t attacking me. Instead, it was in a standoff with an older man wearing a Vietnam-era military jacket.
“Save yourself,” I told the man, standing next to me. “He’s vicious. I think he’s their leader.”
“He’s got lifeless eyes, black eyes. Like a doll’s eyes,” the man growled. “Be gone with ‘ya, you mangy bucket of feathers.”
The seagull squawked, and just when I thought it was going to attack the man, it flew off, screeching as it flew away.
“How did you do that?” I asked.
“Quint’s the name,” he said, his voice sounding like he had razor blades lodged in his throat. “Y’all got a bad bird, here. I’ll catch that bird for you, but it ain’t going to be easy.” He bowed slightly to me and left in the opposite direction.
“Huh?” I asked, but he was already gone.
I watched him walk away for a minute in wonder and confusion before I remembered that I was chasing Bob. I broke into a run in my sandals. I could barely make out Bob as he continued walking blocks away from me up Sea Breeze Avenue. I ran full out, trying to catch up to him. I managed to make up quite a bit of distance when I saw Bob do something that shocked me to my toes. Something I never expected.
I stopped running and watched Bob make a quick left.
Up the cobblestone road to my house.
Nobody went up the cobblestone road unless they wanted to see the Bright family, and most of them changed their minds the moment their foot touched the enchanted property line.
But Bob disappeared up the road.
What was going on?
I walked the rest of the way home, quickly. But when I got to our road, there was no sign of Bob. I jogged up the road, and when I put my foot on the first step leading to the porch, the front door flew open, and Auntie Ida stormed out, wielding a broom in her hand. She flipped her welder’s mask up.
“What’s happening? Who’s there?” she asked in a panic.
“It’s me,” I said.
“No, not you. There’s someone else. Someone uninvited.”
Auntie Tilly ran out of the house, too. She was wearing her nightgown, and her hair was messed, as if she had just been woken up.
“What’s going on?” she demanded. “Are we in trouble? Are they coming for us?”
We stood in place, scanned the area, and listened. There wasn’t a sound. Even the wind stopped.
“Come inside,” Auntie Ida urged in a whisper after a minute. She put her finger up to her mouth, shushing us.
When we were in the house, Auntie Tilly locked the door, and we walked quietly to the kitchen. When we sat at the kitchen table, my aunts urged me to tell them what was going on. I told them about Bob Hayashi, the second-best taco eater.
“Second-best taco eater, my Aunt Fanny,” Auntie Tilly sneered.
Auntie Ida nodded, sadly “Tilly’s right. Bob Hayashi is a bad omen.”
“You know what this means, Ida,” Tilly said.
“Time to batten down the hatches. Secure the decks. Lower the sails,” Auntie Ida said.
“Are we sailing somewhere?” I asked. My aunts exchanged a look that made my skin tingle in a bad way. They were up to something, but I had no idea what it could be. “What? What are you hiding from me?”
“We may be in a little trouble,” Auntie Ida said.
Auntie Tilly nodded. “Yes, like the Titanic was in a little bit of trouble.”
“We don’t know how much trouble we’re actually in,” Auntie Ida said.
“More than the Unabomber, but slightly less than Eichmann, is my guess,” Auntie Tilly said.
“It might be a good idea to keep the door locked,” Auntie Ida said.
“And set up a watchtower with a machine gun and Klieg lights,” Auntie Tilly said.
“I’m getting dizzy,” I said. “This is like watching a tennis match. What’s going on? Did something happen that I don’t know about?”
“Oh, you know,” Auntie Tilly said. Auntie Ida nodded in agreement.
I knew? Knew what? What on earth did I know?
In a terrible moment, I realized what they were talking about. It turned out that yes, I did know. “John?” I breathed.
Auntie Ida leaned forward and looked me right in the eyes. “And Remington,” she whispered.
“Have we been found out?” I asked. “Is the town onto us? Are we going to have to move? Where will we move? I hear New Zealand is nice.”
“It’s not the townspeople we have to worry about,” Auntie Tilly said, staring at me directly in the eyes, just like Auntie Ida.
“The FBI? The CIA? Facebook?” I asked. “What’re we talking about here? Can you just spit it out? It’s not like you guys to speak in riddles. You’re more like the tell-it-as-it-is kind of women.”
Auntie Ida stood and paced the kitchen, wringing her hands. Auntie Tilly focused on her lap. Nobody was talking. After a minute, Auntie Ida stopped pacing and took out the ingredients to bake something.
“Make pancakes, Ida,” Auntie Tilly said. “If I eat one more scone, I’ll speak with an English accent.”
“Okey-dokey,” Auntie Ida said and poured flour into a bowl.
Auntie Tilly put her hand on mine, patting it gently. “We may be in trouble with the family.” When she said the family, she used air quotes.
“Whose family?” I asked.
“Technically, our family,” Auntie Tilly said.
“We have family?” I asked.
“We don’t actually use the word family. There’s another word for it,” Auntie Ida said, pouring milk into the bowl.
“Coven,” Auntie Tilly whispered to me, like the word was frightening and had a terrible power.
“Coven? Isn’t that a little bit on the nose? Are we really still playing that game? We’ve been on the West Coast for a very long time,” I said.
“It’s like a club you’re not allowed to quit,” Auntie Ida said. “Like one of those subscriptions that has an auto-renewal.”
“Or like Jim Jones,” Auntie Tilly added.
“How worried should I be?” I asked. “Is Bob in our coven? How could he? Bob’s a man.”
“That doesn’t matter. Modern times. Gender fluidity and all that,” Auntie Tilly said.
“We don’t know yet if he’s in the you-know-what,” Auntie Ida said. “We’ve just been getting whiffs of disapproval about John and Remington. We sort of played around with a person’s life, you know.”
“That’s a no-no. It could bring too much attention to us,” Auntie Tilly said.
Tell me something I didn’t know. We had been working nonstop, trying to fix the John/Remington situation and we’re getting nowhere fast.
“Maybe it’s good that they know,” I suggested. “Maybe they can help us fix it.”
Auntie Tilly barked laughter. “If only it worked like that.”
Auntie Ida stirred the pancake batter like she had a vendetta out against it. “Don’t worry about it, Agatha. We will handle it. Just you go about your own business, playing with killers and making soup. Don’t you mind a thing. This isn’t a big deal.”
I ate pancakes with my aunts and walked back to the soup shop. I wasn’t very worried about our so-called coven. In my entire life, we had never heard from anybody else from back East. Everyone had kept pretty quiet since Salem. I didn’t think they would risk some kind of war with us over the John / Remington situation. As for Bob, if he was an angry man with supernatural powers, he didn’t seem to be in a hurry to use them.
As I approached the soup shop, I saw Augustus sneaking out of the dispensary. He was wearing a hoodie and dark sunglasses, but I would’ve recognized him anywhere. He snuck around the line of customers and jogged away in the other direction. I wondered what he was hiding from, and I thought back to the locals’ suspicions about the dispensary. Something was definitely not on the up and up over there. Augustus was into more than just getting folks high and fixing their glaucoma.
When I opened the door to the soup shop, I was surprised to see that it was still filled with people. They had moved the tables and were sitting in a large circle. In the center was Quint, the man who had helped me with the seagull. He was addressing them all with his gravelly, authoritative voice.
“Y’all know me. Know how I earn a living. These snakes will swallow you whole. I’ll find them for three thousand, but I’ll catch them all, and kill them, for ten.”
There was a general murmuring about the ten thousand dollars.
“How about a fifty dollar gift card to the doughnut shop?” one of the locals asked Quint.
Quint pointed at him. “Deal,” he said. “I’ll get right on it.”
He stood up and walked slowly out the door. Everyone in the shop watched him go, like he was a mythical creature.
“Something about that man is very familiar to me,” Bud said, coming up next to me. “Like I’ve seen him somewhere before. Like he’s talked to me before. But I can’t place him. Wow, I’m glad I got off that weed. Those discount gummies really did a number on me. I’d tell you what I saw in my room the other night after I ate three of them, but you would send me off to the loony bin.”
“I’m glad that you’re done with the discount gummies.”
Bud looked around like he didn’t want anyone to overhear and leaned in close to me. “I hear there’s been trouble with that particular weed they sell next door. People are losing their hair. People are having weird hallucinations like I did. I’d call the cops on them, if it weren’t for the you-know-what problem I have.”
He walked back to the kitchen without telling me what the you-know-what kind of problem he had. I sort of didn’t want to know. With all the troubles I was having, I didn’t want to deal with one more. Bud had turned out to be a welcome help in the shop, and I didn’t want him carted off to the slammer.
The door opened, and the two men in pinstriped suits and fedora hats who I’d seen speaking to Frances before walked in. The locals returned the tables to their normal places, and they cleared out of the shop. The two men in the suits sat at a corner table. One of them gestured to me.
“Today’s soups are sweet & sour cabbage, miso, French onion, and beef & bacon,” I told them.
One of the men took off his hat. “I don’t want soup,” he grumbled.
“Neither do I,” the other man said.
Their voices sounded exactly the same, and I realized that they were identical twins. It gave me a creepy kind of feeling to see identical twins in their fifties still dressing the same.
“This is a soup shop. We do have bread and baked goods. And coffee,” I told them.
“How can a man survive on soup?” the man still wearing the hat asked me.
“The beef & bacon is very hearty,” I explained. “And the cornbread that goes with it will stick to your ribs for hours. I promise.”
The twins exchanged a look and nodded. “All right. We’ll take the beef & bacon, but if it ain’t good, we’re not paying,” the man with no hat warned me.
“That’s fine.”
I had more important things to do than argue with them, so I didn’t. My aunts and I weren’t in the business for money, so I frankly didn’t care if anyone paid or not. When a person lives for hundreds of years and doesn’t shop retail, she accumulates a lot of cash.
“We’re looking for a man,” the man with the hat added.
I froze in place. Of course, they were looking for someone. It made a lot of sense. And it made my pulse race and my skin tingle, like a mystery was about to be solved.
“An Asian man?” I asked, thinking of Bob. Could these men also be in the coven? Did East Coast covens wear pinstripe suits? I had no idea. I had worked in a lighthouse for over a hundred years. What did I know?
He shook his head. “No, he’s a white guy. Middle-aged. Brown hair, with an attitude that makes you want to kick him in the teeth.”
I tried to mask my surprise. I knew a man just like that. I had just seen him skulking away from the dispensary. Augustus Flannery III, the shady owner of the marijuana dispensary. He had been hiding, and now I knew who he was hiding from. I was looking right at them.
But no matter how much I didn’t like Augustus or the dispensary, I didn’t want to be responsible for a man’s death. And these two looked like they could be happily responsible for a man’s death.
So, I shook my head. “Nope, I don’t know anyone like that. This is a pretty friendly town. We don’t have anyone here who you would want to kick in their teeth,” I lied. “I’ll get you that beef & bacon.”
I served them, and then business was slow until closing. The two men ate their soup and paid, so I figured the soup must’ve hit the spot. A little later, they left, and then the shop was empty except for Bud, Mouse, and me.
At four o’clock, I closed up the shop and locked the door.
“How come we don’t clean up? Not that I’m complaining,” Bud said.
“Agatha has a cleaning crew that comes in,” Mouse explained. “Although I’ve never seen them.” Her cellphone rang. After she answered it, she handed it to me. “It’s for you,” she said.
“Can you come over to the police station?” I heard John ask me through the phone.
“What’s wrong? Is it about Chris?”
“Yes, I think we’ve run into a good clue.”
I handed the phone back to Mouse, and I practically ran to the police station.
When I walked inside, John met me right at the door. “I don’t think it’s a stalker,” John told me urgently in a whisper.
“No? What’s happening?”
“Remember when his manager said he refused the superhero movie? Did you know that superhero movies make these stars a lot of money?”
I shook my head. I didn’t know a thing about superhero movies.
“Well, they do,” John continued. “A lot of money. Much more than the president makes. Anyway, he refused the movie, and it seems to have produced a lot of bad blood just about everywhere. Chris was supposed to make the movie, and people lost money because of it.”
“I’m confused. Chris lost money. Who else? And who would want him dead because of it?”
The door to the police station burst open, and all of the lifeguards stormed in, mad as hell and looking for someone to take it out on. John pushed me behind him to protect me.
“What’s this about?” he roared.
“You owe us money,” Captain Steve barked, pointing at John. “We need that money for a lifeguard tower. We’ve got seagulls and snakes after us. We need shelter.”
“We deserve shelter. We’re superheroes,” Ace said.
“We’re lifeguards!” all of the lifeguards yelled.
John spun around and clutched my arms. “I want you to get out, now,” he told me. I knew that tone. That was the tone that John used when he would not be disobeyed. It gave me goosebumps, and I almost giggled. “Head out through the back door. Go down the hallway, and make a left. There’s a door there. Take it and get out. I don’t want you hurt. Agatha, are you listening to me?”
I nodded, but I couldn’t say anything because he was being a manly man, and it was making me very excited.
Without looking back, I walked quickly down the hallway and found the door. I pushed it open and found myself in an alley behind the building. I took a deep breath and tried to gather my thoughts, but all I could think about was Remington’s face and John’s words. I was a sex-crazed fish, and I didn’t care if we were in trouble with the coven. I was having a lot of fun, and I shamelessly wanted it to last longer.
I walked slowly down the alley, practically shuffling my feet. I tried to clear away my dirty thoughts about John and gather my thoughts around all of the clues about Danny’s murder and Chris’s attempted murder. What could a superhero movie have to do with it? I didn’t have enough information. I didn’t…
I stopped walking and froze in place. The hair on the back of my neck stood up, and my arms sprouted goosebumps. As sure as I knew that the sun came up in the morning and set in the evening, I knew that I was being followed.
Watched.
I spun around, trying to see who was following me, but the alley was filled with dumpsters and cars and many places where an attacker could hide.
“Who’s there?” I called. “Who’s there? What do you want? Bob? Is that you?”
Nobody answered. Nobody, and that’s what made me scared.
I turned back around and walked slowly but deliberately, trying to get out of the alley to where there would be people, and it would be harder for me to be attacked. I could see the end of the alley. I could hear the people in the park. I walked a few more steps, and this time, I could hear the footfalls behind me. I turned my head as I continued to walk, but again, I saw no one.
I was sure that I needed to get away fast.
My life depended on it.