Page 10 of Hexes and Hiccups (Mystery In A Bottle #3)

D aisy

The neighborhood Daisy and Tessa lived in was rather close knit in comparison to the one they now found themselves in.

The deeper one went into Willowbrook, the more spaced out the houses became, becoming more and more shrouded by tall trees and bushes.

While Daisy didn’t venture that way too often, she knew the way as they drove to the address Iskra handed to them, after begging them to get to the bottom of it as soon as they could.

Despite Iskra making sure they knew that the Council believed Tessa to have been behind Riven’s statue reality, they didn’t shy away from having her fix their problems.

The more distance they put between themselves and the shop, the easier it became for Daisy’s irritation to settle and simmer down.

Tessa was rather quiet for the entire drive, staring out the window and hiding her expression.

Daisy pulled up in front of a small, quaint house, one that had yellow walls and a wide garden blossoming on every side of it.

There was another car parked in front of them, one that Daisy recognized though she couldn’t quite put her finger on why.

As she turned the car off, Daisy faced Tessa and reached for her hand, giving her a reassuring squeeze.

“You alright?” she asked.

Tessa nodded, although her eyes looked rather faraway. “Do you know Fern Harper?”

Ignoring the fact that Tessa avoided answering her question, Daisy sighed and looked back towards the house.

The mailbox at the edge of the driveway had Harper written on it with very neat handwriting.

There wasn’t much she knew about Fern, other than the fact that she came into Fields’ Herbals every now and then.

“I think she can’t sleep well,” Daisy replied.

“Huh?”

“Fern made special orders for sleep tonics,” she explained. “Ones that were stronger than what we had over the counter. Maybe insomnia. I didn’t speak to her much, though. She came by once and we had the orders mailed to her ever since.”

Tessa held onto her chin thoughtfully. “Something about the name Harper rings a bell, although I can’t quite put my finger on it.”

“Really?” Daisy shrugged. “Might just be from the shop.”

“Could be. But…” Tessa sighed, and grabbed onto the door handle. “It’s probably nothing. Why don’t we start to head in?”

Daisy nodded. “Iskra mentioned there’d be another Elder here.”

The pair climbed out of the car with an uneasy air about them.

Daisy couldn’t shake an uncertain feeling, a feeling that there was something more about this situation, something that she couldn’t quite put her finger on just yet.

It wasn’t Tessa, though she worried about her friend very much.

There was only the worry about what they would find next, about the next statue they’d come across and another rumor to follow.

Daisy grew sick and tired of gossip as the days went by, suddenly unsure of how she had done it all so carelessly beforehand.

How had she gossiped alongside Tessa for so long?

How had she not realized the damage it could do, especially if it happened to be entirely wrong?

Daisy eyed her friend as they neared the front porch to Fern’s house.

With every fiber of her being, she believed that Tessa was innocent, and would never dare try to cheat on her empathy exams. Even if she did in some strange other world, Daisy would never be able to understand why.

Tessa had far too much talent to need to go to such extremes.

She was naturally gifted and would pass with flying colors, something Daisy was very sure of.

At the front steps of the house, Serelith sat with her head in her hands.

There were a few squirrels loitering around her feet, and sparrows were beginning to land on her shoulders.

She seemed to be in the middle of a tense conversation with the animals as they strolled up to her, unsure of how they were meant to politely interject in animal kinship.

As they got closer, the critters began to scurry and fly away, allowing Serelith to raise her head with wide eyes.

“Ladies,” Serelith said as she stood, swiping stray dirt from her pants. “I’d say it’s good to see you, but…well, you know the circumstances.”

“How are you faring, Serelith?” Daisy asked.

The Elder shrugged, but gave her a half smile. “I’m sure Iskra has told you plenty of our worries so far.” She gestured towards the Harper house’s front door. “Shall we?”

Serelith led them through the small house, till they came upon the living room.

There was a long couch on one end, with a small, cheap television on the other.

Rows of framed pictures lined the mantel and the wall, showing bright, smiling faces into the shadowy room.

In the very middle of the room was Fern Harper, petrified into a state of stillness.

Though there was nothing about her that looked like a statue, they knew very well that she wouldn’t be moving, no matter what they did.

Fern, who happened to be around seventy years old, was fairly short and wore a thin black dress that had red roses printed across it.

There was an aghast look on her face, as though she had been trapped in an impenetrable state of shock when petrified.

But the most shocking thing within the room wasn’t Fern herself, but rather the blood-red words written across the wall behind her.

They were bright and obvious, written in a rush.

Daisy’s eyes went wide the longer she stared, the case they found themselves in growing more and more muddled with every new clue they happened to stumble upon.

Daisy mouthed the words as she read them, hoping they would take a different shape, as if she was only seeing things.

Malric Graves is spreading the rumors across Willowbrook.

“T-That can’t be right,” Daisy murmured. “It just can’t be.”

Tessa reached for her hand, giving her a tight squeeze before looking back at Serelith. “Have you spoken to the boy yet?”

Serelith shook her head. “We are waiting for the right time,” she replied. “He’s a…ticking time bomb, to say the least. If he is behind all of this, we –”

“He isn’t.” Daisy faced her, holding her chin up. “We’ve dealt with Malric in the past, and he’s turning over a new leaf. He has turned over a new leaf. This is just another rumor.”

Serelith frowned. “How can we believe that so easily? With everything we know about him already, I believe it’s safe to assume he could be involved.”

Daisy shook her head, already growing riled up.

“You Elders on the Witch Council are far too ready to simply go with whatever is ‘safe.’ Whatever happened to investigating? To seeking the truth out rather than believing a random stroke of gossip?” She shook her head again, her irritation simmering.

“I refuse to pander to the rumors and gossip. Malric is a good kid, and he means the town no harm.”

Serelith pressed her lips together. “What would you like to do then?”

“Let us speak to him.”

“Well, now, I –”

“He knows us,” Daisy blurted. “He knows we’re on his side. He won’t be a problem if you let us handle it.”

Serelth released a heavy sigh as she looked over the room.

Eventually, when she couldn’t stand to just be beneath their stares any longer, Serelith retrieved her phone, and began to head towards the front door.

“I’m sure that’d be fine,” she finally grumbled.

“Let me inform the Witch Council. You two are more than welcome to take a look around the house. I’m sure Fern wouldn’t mind. ”

As the Elder left the house, shutting the door quietly behind her, Daisy and Tessa began to quietly move around the living room.

Daisy was no longer expecting to simply come across the Book of Gossip, and now had her sights set on finding the slip of paper that had been torn from the book itself.

She tried her best to avoid the words written across the wall, finding herself growing more and more annoyed every time she happened to see Malric’s name.

She could only remember seeing him a short time ago, when he was one of the supposed suspects behind cursing the entire town.

Malric proved himself to be nothing more than a simple kid who had done wrong in his past, and now sought to make a new name for himself.

There was only one person who seemed to be at the receiving end of hurtful gossip for a long time, and that was Malric himself.

In the end, he managed to turn it around, though the words still hung over his head.

“I’m not getting anywhere,” Tessa called out.

“Me either.”

With no sign of the paper within the living room, the pair began to make their way through the rest of the house.

Everywhere Daisy turned, there was another framed photograph of a young woman.

Some of the pictures had her even younger, but none of them showed her to be older than twenty, it seemed.

Daisy paused in the hallway, flicking on the light to face another large picture of her.

The girl was very beautiful, with pin straight black hair and a fair complexion.

“Tess,” Daisy called out to her. “Why are we seeing this girl everywhere? Do you have any idea about who she is?”

Tessa curved down the hallway, her brows raised. “I just remembered who she was! Evelyn Harper!”

“Name sounds familiar. Remind me, won’t you?”

“About thirty years ago,” Tessa explained as she leaned against the wall, “Evelyn disappeared from Willowbrook. She was only twenty. Everyone went out looking for her. I think even you and I. We were in a search party that stretched down the valley, remember? With the Sheriff?”

Daisy squinted as the memory came back to her. “That’s right,” she murmured.

Evelyn was only twenty years old when she disappeared.

Daisy could remember the feeling she had when she saw the news story on television.

She was only a few years older at the time, and the case surrounding Evelyn soon became every young woman’s worst nightmare.

While stories like that plagued bigger cities far from Willowbrook, it wasn’t at all the norm within their sleepy town.

What happened to Evelyn felt like an anomaly, a single outlier in a place where crime happened to be a rarity.

In the end, despite the entire town flooding to the streets in search of her, Evelyn Harper never turned up, and her family was left wondering what became of their young daughter.

All of Fern’s house felt like a shrine to her missing daughter. Daisy looked upon it all with a new light, suddenly intrigued as to why that cold case from long ago was connected to the odd one they found themselves within.

“I remember the gossip surrounding her ex-boyfriend,” Daisy finally said. The news had been plagued with pictures of the boy who was around her age as the local police began to seek him out. “He left town shortly after she was reported missing.”

“It was suspicious,” Tessa murmured. “What I remember the most is that creepy old guy.”

Daisy’s eyes narrowed. “Huh?”

“You know,” she explained, “the one who was, like, obsessed with her, despite being almost a decade older?” Tessa shuddered. “The whole thing still puts a chill down my spine.”

“They were both proclaimed innocent, though,” Daisy said.

Tessa shrugged. “But it doesn’t mean they were, does it?”

They continued carrying on through the house, their newfound information lurking suspiciously in the back of Daisy’s mind.

As they kept looking, all she could think about was how terrible it must’ve been for Fern.

Her only daughter was ripped away from her, leaving a mother suddenly childless, and she was forced to continue on living, like nothing had ever happened in the first place.

Daisy couldn’t imagine raising a child only to lose them.

Daisy sighed as they came back to the front door. “None of this makes any sense.”

“There’s no page,” Tessa said.

“Not even a hint of one.”

“What does this mean?”

Daisy shrugged. “This time, it’s different. I’m not sure why, yet, but that much I know for sure.” She breathed in deeply as the uneasy feeling began to take hold of her once more. “Why don’t we get out of here and plan on meeting Malric sometime soon? The sooner we clear his name, the better.”

Tessa nodded. “Sounds like a plan.”

Leaving Fern’s house behind, Daisy and Tessa stepped back out into the afternoon and marched towards her car, noticing that Serelith was nowhere to be seen.

The peculiar feeling quickly came back to Daisy, bringing an eerie chill down her spine once more.

Everything continued to become muddled and incoherent, but it only made her far more determined to see it through – once and for all.