Fabulous Witch (Torrent Witches Cozy Mysteries Book 4) Read online

  Contents

  Copyright

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  More titles

  Fabulous Witch Copyright 2016 Tess Lake. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. This book contains material protected under International and Federal Copyright Laws and Treaties. Any unauthorized reprint or use of this material is prohibited. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without express written permission from the author.

  Tess Lake

  Tesslake.com

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  This is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents and dialogs in this book are of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is completely coincidental.

  Chapter 1

  Mattias Matterhorn, legendary film actor, renowned drunk and on his eighth marriage (the current Mrs. Matterhorn was a twenty-year-old blonde former stripper named Liberty) was refusing to come out of his trailer until the light green dinner plates were replaced with brown ones.

  “Day one on set and Mattias Matterhorn is already displaying why he was voted ‘most difficult film star’ by insisting that green plates are cheap looking,” I murmured into the brand-new handheld recorder supplied by the producers.

  The director, Cyro Nash, had appeared on set for all of five seconds before shouting at a bunch of people and then disappearing again. Cyro’s shouting was akin to whacking an ant nest with a shovel – it produced a lot of nervous scurrying but not much in the way of results.

  “As far as I can tell, the set designers are searching for brown plates for the heart attack scene,” I recorded.

  My official job title was “scribe” and I wasn’t entirely sure who my actual boss was. I’d interviewed with a marketing person (who’d called me out of the blue after reading my pretty much now dead online newspaper, the Harlot Bay Reader) and been passed on to a low-level producer when I got the job, and now I was on set with conflicting instructions to “observe, record and report” and “weave a tale of the story being told.” The movie title was a secret, so thus far I was working on Untitled Witch Movie. Exciting, huh?

  The set designer, a harried woman named, funnily enough, Harriet, rushed to the set with her arms full of brown plates, closely followed by her assistants. They switched out the green plates sitting on the table and in the drying rack. Once that was done, one of Cyro’s assistants (there were a few – I think this one was named Hiro) went off to find Cyro, another went off to talk Mattias down, and soon the legendary star who’d won practically every award under the sun was stalking the set, scowling at it.

  He was in his early sixties, carrying a bit of weight, but he still had the piercing eyes and gravitas that made him famous. For this film, he was whiskery, playing the kindly elder who reveals to the main character, Ivy Spark (played by Bella Bing – real name Susan Smith, but more on that later), that she’s actually a witch before he dies of a heart attack.

  He was in this and one other scene where he came back as a ghost, and for that he was collecting two million bucks.

  Life, as most people know, is not fair.

  Everyone waited, making themselves look busy (Mattias hated people staring at him) until he finally sat down at the table.

  “Let’s get going,” he called out to no one in particular.

  Another flurry of activity as people checked light levels and the camera people did their thing. One of the makeup artists, a thin man named Wilbur, gave Mattias a quick touch-up. Soon all the commotion subsided and we waited just long enough for Mattias to start tapping his foot in frustration. Then Cyro appeared, a long streak of a man with wild black hair, and waved his people in.

  I’d looked at the list of names the producers had given me, but I still didn’t have a good grasp on who was who. There seemed to be at least fifty people on set and most of them appeared to be mostly watching.

  I’d arrived on set at seven in the morning, bright and fresh, and now it was nearly lunch and I was quickly learning that movie sets could even make a snail frustrated with how slow they were.

  I glanced around set, slowly feeling my butt go numb. I was being paid a cool two hundred dollars a day for the next three weeks at least, and for that kind of money, I’d put up with boredom.

  We were filming inside a warehouse where they’d built a kitchen for the big heart attack scene, and over at the back of the set, one of the big producers, Tobin Hemming, was gliding around like a shark. I hadn’t spoken with him at all, and both times I’d seen him, he’d seemed to walk with sinuous ease, constantly moving, the expressions on his face comically exaggerated. Right now he was stepping from foot to foot as some low-level assistant with a clipboard and a stopwatch around her neck tried to explain something. She was obviously terrified of him, and his face kept going up and down. First he smiled, looking happier than anyone who’d ever lived. Then he frowned, a grim judgment that quickly flickered away as he moved to puzzled, back to happy, around to angry, and then he was waving the assistant away, having used up the thirty seconds he had to talk.

  He glided off and vanished from sight.

  Back in the kitchen, it looked like something might be about to happen, but then one of the light guys yelled out, and off went people scurrying again.

  Might I add in this long delay: the kitchen was built (partially) by my boyfriend, Jack Bishop?

  Yes, that’s right, folks… I have a boyfriend!

  Okay, we haven’t officially called each other that yet, but what are we, sixteen years old? We’ve seen each other virtually every second day since Hendrick Gresso tried to burn a mansion down with me and two teenage witches in it. I don’t need to officially call him that to know he’s mine.

  Although the entire town knows that Hendrick set the fire that burned out the place Jack was renovating (and destroyed a beautiful library), his very new renovation and restoration business took a hit anyway. He was working with his brother Jonas, restoring some run-down homes, until the movie people came calling to hire anyone who could swing a hammer. Since then, Jack has been building sets, including this delightful kitchen that looked very cozy.

  “Bella Bing on set,” someone called out.

  Another flurry of activity as the star of the film, Bella Bing, aka Susan Smith, walked onto the set. I’d only worked one day so far, but I was fairly sure the actors, directors and producers were all playing the “make them wait” game to show some sort of power over everyone else. To wait for others meant you had no power; to make them wait for you meant you had all the power.

  Bella had been playing this game most of the morning.

  In this scene she was brunette, the cute girl next door with big blue eyes. Her witch powers were about to hit, and then a silver streak would appear through her hair. I hadn’t read the books they were basing the film on, but
my vague understanding was that Mattias was the kindly elder who revealed the truth and promptly dropped dead. I think in the books it didn’t happen quite this way, but this was film and they always messed with stuff like that.

  Bella smiled at the various people on set and flashed those eyes at everyone. In her current costume, she looked the way I remembered her – Susan Smith, former resident of Harlot Bay who used to be in my class at school. Before the end of high school, she’d left Harlot Bay for Hollywood, making her way up through bit parts and some memorable minor roles.

  I hadn’t spoken to her yet either, but from what I gathered online and from the general feel on set, this movie was possibly her so-called “big break.” The book series had ten titles in it so far and was beloved by millions of fans. If this movie was successful, Bella was signed up for many more sequels.

  With Bella on set, the director finally got things moving. Bella sat down near Mattias and everyone on set stopped moving. Cyro walked over to talk to them for a moment before a girl with a clapboard snapped it and yelled out, “Ivy Spark, scene seven, take one.”

  Another lesson from the film set: scenes aren’t filmed in chronological order.

  “Why didn’t you eat the cupcakes I brought you?” Bella said.

  Mattias patted his stomach. “I’ll never win that swimsuit competition if I keep eating those,” he chuckled.

  I’ve been to plays, but this was nothing like that. Grumpy Mattias was gone, replaced by Kindly Old Man (I couldn’t remember the character’s name). Bella was the warm, happy small-town girl about to learn a big secret.

  “Now, Ivy, I need to tell you something,” Mattias said. He pulled out an old bound diary from his pocket and slipped it across the table. Bella touched it and then jumped as though it had shocked her.

  “Be careful, there’s magic in those pages,” Mattias warned with a smile.

  “Magic?”

  “Of course. You’re a witch, didn’t you know that?”

  “A witch?”

  Based on all my memories of Susan from school, she was incredibly annoying, but while I’d only seen one or two things she’d been in, even I was big enough to admit she was a good actor. Her big blue eyes practically glowed as she looked at Mattias, a puzzled expression on her face.

  “A witch, my dear! And what’s more—”

  Mattias suddenly jolted and grabbed his arm. His face turned beet red in an instant.

  “Henry! Henry, what’s happening!” Bella cried out.

  Henry, that was his character’s name.

  Mattias staggered to his feet and then fell against the table, knocking a brown plate to the floor, where it shattered into a hundred pieces. He then toppled over, crashing against the cupboard and finally collapsing on the ground.

  Bella fell to her knees beside him, grabbing at his clothes and wailing his name, but he didn’t move. After a moment of sobbing, she stood up and grabbed the book sitting on the table. The camera moved in closer, zooming in on her face.

  “I’ll never forget you, Henry,” Bella whispered, and then Cyro called out, “CUT!”

  I don’t know if this was standard on a film set for the first scene, but everyone clapped and cheered. They were cut short a moment later when Cyro waved his hand to stop them and called out for the actors to go again.

  It was around this time that someone noticed Mattias wasn’t getting up.

  Bella turned to look down at him, that million-dollar puzzled expression on her face. One of the nameless assistants rushed in and knelt beside Mattias, calling his name.

  The set suddenly went quiet as everyone realized something was very wrong. A woman I’d never seen before rushed out of nowhere and took charge. She pressed a stethoscope to Mattias’s chest, tried to find a pulse, started CPR.

  “Medical! Now!” she screamed out, trying desperately to restart Mattias’s heart.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a portly figure moving behind the shocked crowd.

  The ghost of Mattias Matterhorn.

  He was definitely dead.

  Chapter 2

  The tourist sipped from his Traveler-branded takeout coffee cup, frowned and then sighed in disappointment before throwing the whole thing in the nearest trash can. As I passed him on the way to Traveler, he murmured, “Don’t bother, it’s not as good as they say.”

  I walked into Traveler, the bell over the door jingling, but Molly didn’t bother looking up from her list of suspects in the case of “who stole our coffee machine?”

  Luce was wiping down its replacement, a generic commercial coffeemaker that unfortunately produced generic coffee.

  “Hey, family,” I said and walked up to the counter.

  “Hey,” Molly said.

  She pulled a map of Harlot Bay out from under the counter. On it were marked at least thirty separate locations. They were the addresses of all the carpenters and workers who had been on the Traveler transformation job. They were the prime suspects in the theft of the Fuoco Oscura, or Stefano, as Luce called him.

  “I think she’s lying about the eye of newt. There is no way that’s a real potion ingredient,” Luce said.

  The revamped Traveler coffee shop had operated for around one week before someone had come in the middle of the night and stolen the coffee machine. Molly and Luce had immediately suspected the couple who had wanted to buy Stefano and had previously offered thirty thousand dollars for him, but so far they’d been unable to locate them via magical or any other means. They’d also been unable to locate the coffee machine using magic and had even enlisted Aunt Cass to help them, but she hadn’t been able to find it either. Aunt Cass had helped them by giving them what she said was the very last of her money so they could buy their standard commercial coffeemaker, but while they now had a small amount of business coming in, it was nowhere near the heady days of double-decker busloads of tourists forming a line that reached to the street.

  They were desperate to get Stefano back, and it seemed they had devised a new plan that somehow involved eye of newt.

  Molly looked up at me.

  “Do you know if a truth serum requires eye of newt? Have you ever heard of anything like that?”

  “Are truth serums even a real thing? It seems like if they were, our mothers would have used them on us many times in the past,” I said.

  “Oh, they’re definitely real. We’re going to make one and then we’re going to track down every single person who worked on the renovation. One of them must be the thief, or must have tipped off the thief.”

  Luce finished wiping down the coffee machine and turned around to look at the map.

  “That’s a lot of people to dose,” she commented. Then she looked at me and frowned. “Aren’t you supposed to be on the movie set today?” she asked.

  “Filming has been shut down for the day. Mattias Matterhorn had a heart attack and died.”

  “Matterhorn died? Oh my goddess, that’s so sad. I loved him so much in Blake Buckley,” Luce said, covering her face with her hands in shock.

  “Did you see it?” Molly asked.

  “We all saw it. The entire thing was caught on film. Then I saw his ghost walking around the set. It vanished into his trailer, and when I went to have a look, it wasn’t there.”

  “Does this mean Bella’s movie is going to be shut down?” Molly asked carefully.

  Molly had a particular grudge against Bella, aka Susan Smith, over some certain stolen boyfriend issues from high school. She wasn’t taking any joy in the fact that Mattias Matterhorn had died of a heart attack, but she wasn’t entirely unhappy with the idea that the entire movie production might be shut down.

  “One of the assistants said they’ll find someone to replace him. It’s probably going to take a day or two. In the meantime, they’ll film other scenes.”

  “I’m sure Bella is going to use this to her advantage anyway. She’ll be on television doing an interview, sobbing about her lost costar who was like a father to her. Goddess, she annoys me,
” Molly said.

  “You seem calm for someone who just watched someone die,” Luce said.

  “Yeah, I guess I am. A standard death of natural causes is a nice change,” I said.

  “Unless he was murdered,” Molly said, writing a note on her map.

  “Probably some rival who wanted him dead. Maybe whoever they’re going to hire to replace him did it,” Luce added, diving readily into the deep end.

  I put my hands up in front of me. “Whoa. Sometimes people die. It’s not always something sinister,” I said.

  “Good luck with that. This entire town is cursed. Even a flat tire here is sure to have some bad person or magical entity behind it. That’s why the coffee machine was stolen,” Molly said in a dark tone.

  Luce raised her eyebrows at me in silent communication. Molly was going slightly crazy trying to discover who had stolen their coffee machine. Unfortunately, her efforts had also pulled her in quite a morbid direction.

  “So… eye of newt?” I said.

  “Aunt Cass claims it’s a vital truth serum ingredient. I think she’s saying it to be annoying,” Luce said.

  “What is a newt, anyway? She’s definitely not being helpful,” Molly said.

  “Isn’t it sort of like a frog crossed with a lizard? Like a salamander, but they live in the water,” I said.

  “I don’t care what they are, I’m not pulling the eyes out of a cute little aquatic salamander no matter what,” Luce said.

  “Let’s move this to the booth,” Molly said.

  As part of Traveler’s renovations, multiple comfy booths had been installed, along with tables and chairs. The entire counter area had been moved back to provide more space. This had used up every cent that Molly and Luce had, and now they owned a beautiful coffee shop that was empty ninety-five percent of the time. Apparently the word they were now serving ordinary coffee had spread amongst the tourist buses quite quickly.

  We moved across to one of the booths and sat down. Molly unfolded the map on the table and put down her list of names.

  “So your plan is to brew a truth serum and then go to each of these locations and somehow get the carpenter or builder or painter or whoever to ingest it and then ask them questions?” I asked.