Witch Doctors Inc: SEASON TWO (Ongoing)

Part 2.9

"Not just friends. Best friends."

I'm drowning in stars.

My father knows Big Boss.

My father is friends with Big Boss.

"They met at business school," Hilda continues, oblivious to my shock. "Those two were very close until they had their falling out."

I find my voice again. "They fell out? Over what?"

Hilda shrugs. "Oh, I don't know. There was an argument not long after your mother passed. Your father took offense to something Adriel said. Things weren't the same after that."

"Neither of them said anything to me."

I don't speak to my father much, but it's odd he didn't say anything when I got accepted into Witch Doctors Inc. Maybe he didn't know who the Big Boss was?

But Big Boss. He'd seen my last name. Lily Hartfeld - it was on my application. I mentioned that I'd grown up in Merrivale. Surely he'd figured out I was Robert Hartfeld's daughter?

"Oh, it was a long time ago." Hilda shrugs it off again. "They went their separate ways when you were still small. Though he did attend your mother's memorial this year. I was surprised to see him there. I don't believe he's ever attended before."

A star sticks in my throat. "He was at my mother's memorial?"

"Yes, he was. He even spoke to your father, but the conversation was short. He looked like he wanted to make amends."

Amends. I rake a hand through my hair. Amends for what?

"Did Big Boss - Adriel - meet me when I was a child?"

"Oh yes. You loved it when 'Uncle Adriel' came to visit." Hilda chuckles. "He would bring you business-related toys. Cauldron plushies and plastic potion bottles filled with fruit juice. He saw your connection to magic when your own father couldn't."

I don't remember any of it. When I came to Witch Doctors Inc, he acted like he'd never seen me before. Uncle Adriel indeed.

I don't know what he and my father fought about, or why he's pretending not to know me, but I'm suddenly sure of one thing: that man is not who he says he is.

*

My father, Robert Hartfeld, is not one for punctuality. He has many shining qualities, I'm sure, but being punctual is not one of them.

He sweeps into his study forty-five minutes after he agreed to meet me, red-faced and clutching a briefcase sandwiched with paperwork.

"Lily, hello. I've had an extremely bothersome morning. What can I do for you?"

I resist the eye-roll building up behind my temples. It's not like I want to spend my morning with a balding businessman and his overflowing briefcase.

"I'm investigating the fires," I tell him. "Emmeline insisted."

He rubs at his temples and sighs. "You shouldn't have taken this case, Lily. You're too close to it."

"Adriel," I say, "made me come."

He looks at me sharply. "He made you come, even though it upset you?"

"It's just a job. I'm here to do what I was hired for. There are no personal feelings involved."

My father sits back in his chair and watches me, saying nothing. He looks oddly out of place in his own study. This is a place of towering bookshelves and monstrous tomes. With his short build, he looks like a dwarf sitting at a giant's desk.

"I didn't know you two were such good friends."

"That was a long time ago, Lily."

"What did you two fight over?"

My father chuckles nervously. "Are you investigating me or the fires?" He picks up an envelope on the desk, reads the return address, then places it in a drawer. "It was all silliness. Adriel said something, and I overreacted."

"What did he say?" I prod.

My father's gaze turns stern. "That isn't your concern, Lily. What did you want to ask me about the fires?"

Typical. Always business, my father. No fluff.

"What's directly below the kitchen?" I ask him. "Is it still the basement?"

"Yes," he replies, gaze burrowed in a pile of letters. He dips into his ink pot, scribbles a signature, then relegates more paper to a drawer. "That area is still a basement. Why?"

Because that's where your fires are heading, I don't say. That's where the coldness comes from.

"What's the basement used for these days?"

"Storage. Every knick-knack that I no longer need, but don't wish to throw away, resides there."

"Like what?"

"Your mother's favourite armchair, the one your cat tore up. That's in there. Then there's the cauldron your mother liked to use. Your mother's wedding dress..." His hand pauses over the latest letter. He sighs. "A lot of your mother's things, I suppose. I couldn't bear to throw them away."

Nervousness nibbles at the pit of my stomach. Memories of my mother, buried beneath the light of day. Sheathed in a coldness that won't rest.

My father must notice the expression on my face, because his own changes. "I might not be good at reading people," he says, "but I know that look. Lily...you mustn't take the concoctions of Seraphine's imagination seriously. It isn't a logical explanation."

I know he's right. My mother's death was an accident. There is no such thing as ghosts.

Still, terror grows within me, soft and steady. Terror that I'm wrong, that the world is wrong. That ghosts do exist.

From Jasmine's account, the fires in the kitchen always headed downwards. The other fires behaved the same way. The one in the lounge that scared Emmeline surged downwards and to the right - towards the basement.

That's where I have to go. I have to brave the cold, and meet what's waiting for me in the basement. The answer to this mystery lies there, among all my father's unwanted things.

*