Page 27 of Never Been Witched (Starfall Point #3)

Alice

Sitting in the Starfall Point Historical Society’s reading room, Alice yawned over a book of birth records. It had been a rough day already and it wasn’t even noon.

It was Sunday and technically her day off.

Usually, she would spend the day puttering around the shop, organizing, but since she’d spent the last few weeks establishing new expectations with her grandparents, she needed somewhere to go.

The Proctors had put on a big show of demanding an apology, even though she knew—thanks to Arthur—that they were secretly panicked over her departure.

And Alice decided to use that to her advantage. Ruthlessly.

Oh, she’d put on a show of a sincere, heartfelt mea culpa for her behavior, complete with a perfectly nice Lewis Foreman Day mantel clock Collin insisted she take from his house.

He told her to claim it was the thing she’d supposedly smuggled out of the shop, which was plausible, given that her grandparents didn’t fully understand the shop’s computerized inventory system.

He just gave her a three-hundred-dollar clock like it was couch change.

She didn’t care what Riley said. Rich people were different.

Alice told her grandparents that she’d found the clock in the cabinet and taken it to Barber’s Watch Repair Shop on the mainland.

She’d claimed she’d been reluctant to tell them because they’d previously vowed never to speak to Mr. Barber.

They swore he charged them more than other customers, and Alice couldn’t find a way to tell them that their tabs included “pain in the ass” surcharge without a resulting explosion.

After putting up a token protest, the Proctors graciously “allowed” Alice to return to work.

She did not put in her usual effort to sell or even clean.

She stuck to her purpose—checking in on Arthur and searching for Victoria’s lost ring.

Unfortunately, Arthur hadn’t spotted the ring in his meanderings about the shop, which would have solved a lot of problems.

Manipulating her grandparents was possibly the most Proctor-ish thing she’d ever done, and the similarities made her uncomfortable.

But subterfuge was allowing her to find better work-life balance.

She was leaving precisely at closing time every day.

And she’d drawn the line when they none too gently suggested that she might come to Proctor House to “help” them straighten it up, since it hadn’t been prepared for their arrival.

Spending time in her childhood home always put Alice in a touchy mood—which was ironic because the house was filled with furniture labeled with “don’t touch” signs, plus taxidermized animals and porcelain plates with creepily ornate moth-themed patterns.

Her grandparents were still unhappy that she’d moved out of her apartment, and even less so that she refused to tell them where she was staying.

They grumbled about “putting on airs” and getting ideas from spending too much time at Shaddow House.

But they were also so desperate to eventually access the house’s famed collection of antiques through her relationship with Riley that, for once, they held their tongues.

Alice knew it wasn’t a good idea to put herself back under her grandparents’ authority, even under false pretenses, but she needed to find Victoria’s ring.

The little sapphire had been stuck in Alice’s mind since the minute she’d found it.

She wasn’t accustomed to losing valuable antiques, so it was a bit of a blow to her professional pride.

At the same time, she’d never had such circular thought patterns relating to one item like she had with this ring.

If her mind wasn’t actively engaged in something else, it felt like it was constantly wandering back to the ring—how it had felt on her hand, the promise of it, even though it wasn’t the most elaborate or expensive of settings.

There was an uncomfortable Gollum feeling to it, but Alice refused to give that too much thought.

It was natural, she supposed, considering that Victoria might be a member of her family.

She still didn’t know how to process that one.

And honestly, Victoria had been no help.

Despite her initial interest, the very vocal ghost had not made another appearance during Alice’s subsequent visits to Shaddow House.

But honestly, Alice was used to this sort of mercurial communication style from family members, so it didn’t throw her off.

Edison hadn’t been able to find any information about a Victoria Proctor in the public library or in the Shaddow House collection.

So Alice was here at the Society, housed in Beach Glass Cottage, sitting at an uncomfortable donated desk, poring over the names and birthdates for every citizen born on the island.

The white clapboard two-story house just off Main Square was unremarkable aside from blue-and-green windows made entirely from bottle glass supposedly salvaged from beaches along Lake Huron.

Donated to the town in the 1970s, it was a sort of genealogical archive and museum—and it was normally closed on Sundays.

But Alice happened to know that volunteers spent Sunday afternoons re-shelving and updating the materials, so she managed to sneak in under the good graces of Norma Oviette, a museum volunteer and founding member of the Nana Grapevine.

The problem was that, like Edison, Alice couldn’t find a single mention of a Victoria Proctor in the birth records from the period about twenty years before Alice guessed she might have been born, based on her dress.

She’d found plenty of Proctors, far more than she’d expected given the current size of their family, but no Victoria.

Maybe she hadn’t been born on the island? Alice wasn’t about to call her grandparents and ask them about it.

“You’re wearing an awfully big frown for someone who’s supposed to be doing genealogical research for fun,” a husky voice said from the foyer.

Norma was an absolutely lovely older lady who landed on the wiser side as opposed to displaying the judgmental tendencies Alice had experienced with the other Grapevine members.

But Norma had also worked as Clark’s legal secretary for years, and Alice didn’t know where her loyalties lay.

Would Norma mention to Clark that she’d seen Alice here?

Was that a bad thing? It felt like giving Clark any information about her habits was a bad thing.

But honestly, what was Clark going to do with demographic details about one of Alice’s dead relatives? He wouldn’t even know what to do with it. And she wasn’t even sure there was anything he could do with it.

“I’m just having a little trouble tracking down the person I was looking into,” Alice said.

“And that would be?” Norma asked.

“Victoria Proctor?” Alice said, still unsure she was doing the right thing.

Norma frowned at that, her rich sepia-brown skin crinkling into unfamiliar lines. “Not a name I’ve heard before. Any idea of birth date and death date?”

“Late 1800s?”

Norma chuckled. “So, it’s one of those vague and unhelpful searches with no parameters, hmm?”

“I really thought my grandparents would have kept more of a record,” Alice replied, careful not to let her annoyance show. For all their posturing about preserving history through antiquities, they didn’t have a journal or even a family Bible around the house to track their family’s story.

“Can you tell me anything else?” Norma asked.

“She liked to wear a ruby brooch that looked like a flaming sun?” Alice said, shrugging. “I figure it had to be important, or at least genuine, because it didn’t go with her outfit at all. I would only do that with an important piece of jewelry.”

“You’ve seen a picture of her?” Norma asked.

“Mm-hm.” She nodded. “Er, my grandparents wouldn’t let me take it out of the house.”

Norma bit her lip, mulling it over. “Are you sure it was a Proctor ancestor?”

Alice blinked at her. She wasn’t sure she was related to Victoria. She’d just assumed, based on Victoria’s response and the ring having been found in one of her family member’s dressers. “Now that you mention it…no.”

Norma grin became downright brilliant. “Then there’s a collection of letters I think you’ll find very helpful.”

Norma clipped across the wooden floors in her sensible heels, took a leather-bound book from one of the shelves, and returned. “A few years back, that nutty Bancroft woman with the blond helmet hair donated this to the Society with a bunch of other documents.”

Norma sat next to Alice and opened the book to reveal stationery protected behind peeling acetate covers.

The ink was so old, it was bleeding purple onto the ancient pages.

“She took entire boxes from the attic at Forsythia Manor. Told us they were ‘just taking up space,’ and left it out on our front porch. In the rain .”

Alice’s mouth dropped open. “She did what?”

“Yes, I know,” Norma said, shaking her head.

As she moved, Alice noticed a bronze lapel pin near the collar of Norma’s coral tweed jacket.

It was a small shield with a capital “J” etched inside.

Alice had never seen anything like it. “It was bad enough that we couldn’t keep that awful Aura creature from doing the inside of the hotel in orange and chrome, but this was actual abuse of historical materials. ”

“I am genuinely horrified,” Alice whispered.

Journals and letters had always been an invaluable resource for their coven.

From the diaries left behind by previous Stewards of Shaddow House to the retellings of Caroline’s deadly ancestor and her reign of social terrorism on the island, firsthand accounts were always more informative than other, more “official” sources.

So Cynthia Bancroft had donated Collin’s family history to the Society? Did Collin know?