“I’m sure it is.”
Behind Scuba Joe, Hanry surreptitiously reaches into another aquarium and fishes Bulan out again. Damn it, Bulan! Must all bodies of water be a siren song to you, but with no siren required?
Whatever. I’m just going to have to cut to the chase.
“My grandmother mentionedseven tides passingin her will,” I tell Joe, then recite the words back to him. “I’m wondering what it meant, and if it might have something to do with your shop. Any ideas?”
“Seven tides meant something to you, evidently,” Bulan tells Scuba Joe, dripping onto Hanry’s shirt and arm. I take back all the sympathetic feelings I had for Bulan’s bodilessness and pass them to my freshly waterlogged Hanry.
“Seven Tides Lane was the address of my old shop in Seaport,” says Joe. “In Boston.”
“It was?” I ask weakly. “That’s where the name came from?”
“Correct! I doubt it meant anything to your grandmother. But seven seas—if she had written about sevenseas, that would be noteworthy! There’s seven oceans across the globe. The Atlantic, Pacific, Mediterranean, Indian… Maybe Rosamund wanted you to visit all seven seas and feel the tides on each of those foreign beaches, twice over?”
This lead has turned out to be a bucket of slop. How could I globe-trot while being trapped in Salem? Grandma was zany, but she wasn’t completely impractical.
“Wrong,” I say.
“Probably,” Hanry agrees.
“Sorry,” apologizes Joe. “The only solution I have for you is to wait around until whatever she meant becomes clear. The tides bring up all sorts of interesting things in their time. Oh, on that note! A note. Would you like to see this message in a bottle I found yesterday? It’s mysterious. Remarkable!”
We lean in, mildly interested, as Joe uncaps a plastic bottle of 7 Up.
“I think that’s a receipt from Whole Foods,” says Bulan, then shakes himself all over us like a musty, wet sea dog.
Over the next week, I wait for the gnomes to pop in and inform me they’ve rounded up my saboteur, all while doing my best to ignore my despair-inducing failures at interpreting Grandma Rose’s will—and of course, my failure at escaping its clutches. Every morning, I wake up, slog to the train tracks, and test the limits of magical physics at Salem Station. It only reconfirms what I know: that I’m the captain of a personal, paranormalTitanicweaving through a malignant iceberg armada, waiting for my hull to get ripped open and for a wailing love song to bear witness to my life of tragedy.
In other words, both Grandma’s spirit and I are firmly stuck in Salem.
But most days, I’m able to push the disaster from my mind. I have a lot to do between getting back to wedding vendors and attempting to study for my CPA exam. And of course, hanging out with Hanry. We’ve kind of become unofficially-officially a thing.
Leading up to Sidney’s wedding, Hanry and I are together almost constantly. He brings me coffee in the mornings—black, so Mandy won’t steal it when I’m distracted—and he takes me on dates after finishing up at his craft fairs and farmers’ markets. Salem has a surprisingly romantic infrastructure, once you get past the witchery. We visit a pizza shop that claims to fill their orders in hell, steal the largest pumpkin from the courthouse, walk the rocky beaches of Fort Pickering, and talk.
A lot.
Right now, we’re in his apartment while I wait for the electricity to come back on at Grandma’s place. Turns out she stopped paying her utilities about a year ago, and now that she’s gone—and no other elderly people live in her home—the state of Massachusetts has permitted the local utility to stop providing service. Salem’s such a small town, soquaint, that the electricity won’t be turned back on until morning. On the upside: that means tonight, Bulan’s nesting in a tree with his questionable crow friends, and I get to stay at Hanry’s.
And Hanry doesn’t have a spare bedroom. Or a spare mattress.
Or, for that matter, spare floor space.
The old lady who rents her garden apartment to Hanry is half-senile,and that’s a good thing, with how he’s modified the place. In addition to installing rosebushes at the entryway, he’s affixed wooden wind chimes along the staircase downstairs. He hung one of his dried seed, red berry, and pine-cone wreaths on his door. And presently, at least twenty more half-constructed pine-cone wreaths are strewn across his living room floor like circular land mines. This would be bearable, except that while I sit with him on the couch, I occasionally feel the brush of a passing bushy-tailed red squirrel.
“Remind me why you have a squirrel again?” I ask, drawing up my feet with a shudder.
“Oh. He was caught in the rain two nights ago, so I rescued him,” says Hanry.
“But why did you keep him instead of forfeiting him to animal control? Are you offering wreaths and rodents as a package deal?” I ask. “Buy one wreath, get one bubonic plague free? Or do you have to pay extra for the rabies?”
Hanry laughs. “Want some tea?” he says, clearly to distract me from the squirrel. “I’m about to make a new pot.”
Usually I’d say no, but Hanry has regaled me with foraging tales for weeks now. I guess now’s as good a time as any to indulge my curiosity and see what the big deal is.
We scuttle through the autumnal scene of war into his kitchen. Hanry is the kind of person who has a tea cabinet. It’s filled with rolled-up paper bags so fragrant I can smell them from across the room. I watch from a stool as he goes through the motions of brewing tea, which is oddly sexy. Dressed in loose pajama bottoms and a T-shirt, Hanry’s arms are fully exposed for once, tensing flatteringly when he reaches for an artisanal ceramic mug. He’s so… good-looking. And as the red squirrel dashes away to hide behind Hanry’s sofa, it strikes me Hanry is also justgood. He could hands-down win this year’s title as Newest Disney Princess.
All right. That’s it. It’s decided. Tonight’s the night when we don’t just Netflix, but escalate to the “chill” part of the equation. With nervous excitement fluttering in my stomach, I take the mug from him and carry it with me to the sofa.
