Page 22 of Hexes and Hiccups
Daisy reached for her friend, tucking one arm beneath her head to hold her close. Tessa let out a heavy sigh of relief, her eyes already falling shut.
“I haven’t told anyone that,” Tessa whispered. “All this time, I thought the Council must have known. They must have been able to tell.”
“If we all got in trouble for thinking about cheating on a test, no one would be around anymore.” Daisy felt herself smile sadly. “Everyone considers it, Tess. You’re only human, after all. Thinking about it doesn’t make you a cheater, it doesn’t make you a villain or unsaveable. It makes you…well,you. And there’s nothing wrong with that.”
Tessa’s shoulders trembled as she quietly cried, her face buried in Daisy’s neck. They held each other silently, as if the other might fall without it. Daisy remembered how she had been looking towards the other side of the bed, imagining another sleeping person there beside her, and grew grateful that Hecate managed to answer her wishes. Now, she had Tessa beside her, and in the end, that was all she needed.
“You’re not a bad person,” Daisy whispered into Tessa’s hair. The empath’s chest rose and fell as she easily sunk into a comfortable sleep. Daisy repeated the words a few times, hoping they clung to Tessa’s mind as she dreamt.
While Tessa soundly slept, Daisy stared up at the ceiling fan. It swirled and swirled, resembling the unrest happening within her own mind. Though she craved some sort of relief from the exhaustion she had been feeling Daisy could not fall into a deep sleep. She could only stare, her mind wandering about everything that had happened so far. There were no answers to her questions, no easy way forward. The rumors still lingered around Willowbrook. The culprit had brought so much negativity and darkness to people that were only full of light and goodwill. There were now two townspeople rendered into statues, their fates unknown for the time being.
Everything remained a mystery, and Daisy needed to figure it out before the Council decided that Tessa would be the culprit they were searching for. The questions lingered over her head as that eerie feeling returned to her, the idea of someone watching her from within her own home too great for her to ignore.
10
Daisy
Despite the world feeling as though it had been turned on its head, life continued on in Willowbrook. Daisy and Tessa opened the shop at its regular time, their hangovers easily subdued by a few tonics and remedies they had lying around Fields’ Herbals.Tessa moaned and groaned while setting up for a busy day, not really remembering the conversation they’d had in Daisy’s bedroom the night before. Daisy, who ended up not getting much sleep, kept the memories at the forefront of her mind, determined to use them as fuel for the investigation. They would work at the shop till Anne could arrive and take over. Afterwards, Daisy had already set up a meeting with Malric. Though it was obvious that the Council did not entirely approve of them handling him, they approved of the meeting, much to Daisy’s dismay.
As the morning carried on, a great rush swept through Willowbrook. Tourist season flourished that year, and crowds upon crowds lingered on main street, slipping into the shop and loitering around the aisles. Daisy quickly realized how little patience she had for people by the time the fourth group entered the shop, and she took to restocking the shelves to avoid havingto talk too much. Tessa had her beautiful customer service smile on, her natural empath abilities radiating off her in waves. While they would normally soothe Daisy’s impatience, she wanted to hold onto it on that day. She was more than determined to figure the case out, even if it meant being a bit of a grouch for the morning.
The tray Daisy held of glass vials labeled by their properties wobbled as she rested it against her hip, using her other hand to stock the rotating shelves beside the front counter. Most of the patrons were within the aisles, a few over by Tessa on the opposite side of the shop, listening to her list out the products they were looking for. Daisy was just beginning to simmer down, her anger and impatience almost out the window, when a few sharp voices reached her from where they were within the closest aisle.
“I didn’t think it was true at all,” one woman said. “But Lorelai saw it when she was taking Jackson to school. Can you believe it?”
“Hardly!” the other woman laughed. “Rebecca Mitchell indebt? I won’t believe it till I see it!”
“Well, just the other day, Rebecca was spotted at the laundromat on the edge of town.”
“No!”
“You heard me right: thelaundromat!” The woman sighed. “And, June, believe me when I say that she wasnotthere to wash her Prada or Chanel.”
June, the other woman, giggled and snorted. “Boy, how I wish I could’ve seen that. Listen, Helen, what could she possibly even be in debt for? The Mitchell’s are swimming in money!”
“Well,” Helen replied, “that’s what everyone always thought. Apparently, something’s going on with the family business, but spoiled Rebecca can’tpossiblylive without all of her expensive things! Needless to say, she’s maxed out all her credit cards!”
The pair of women erupted into giddy laughter from within the aisle. Daisy gripped onto her tray as tightly as possible, trying to remember what she was doing in the first place, but far too distracted by her irritation. Not that Daisy was ever a friend of Rebecca Mitchell’s or even a sympathizer, but she was beginning to view gossiping in a different light. Immediately, she was brought back to Tessa’s quiet cries in the middle of the night, her face tear-stricken and afraid as she recounted how she thought about cheating on her test in the past. A mere rumor, something whispered without a care for anyone else, had managed to put them all in that mess.
All of it, no matter what the subject ended up being, was cruel and unkind. Daisy could hardly stand by and listen to the gossip any longer, not when it was the people she loved being directly affected by it. She began to cross the storefront, taking her bottles to another shelf on the opposite side. Tessa’s voice still rang through the store, bringing a wave of ease over her. Daisy breathed in deeply as she went back to stocking, feeling the irritation begin to drift away when a few more voices caught her attention.
A pair of older women, both with wispy grey hairs, stood in front of the tonics with a few bottles already in their hands. Perhaps they had been whispering to each other at one point, but their voices raised steadily, as if their hearing aids had stopped working in the middle of their conversation.
Daisy focused on the bottles in her hand as much as she could.
“You know what,” one of them crowed, “I ammorethan happy to hear those things about Anne. You think you know a person till -blam!The truth comes out years later.” She shook her head and made a ‘tsk’ sound with her teeth. “At least we know it now.”
“To think I’ve adopted all my cats through her.” The other woman raised a hand to her lips, her face flushed. “I ought to give the shelter a call about their belovedvolunteer.”
Daisy gripped onto the tray, beginning to fume.
“A friendly face can be as conniving as an evil one,” the first woman exclaimed. “We’ll do well to remember that now. That Anne just isn’t as sweet as the entire town makes her out to be.”
“At least we know the truth!”
“And to think that an animal abuser has been living down the street from us foryears!”
The second woman let out a heavy sigh. “I tell you, we should be paying the shelter a visit to complain! I’d hate to think she hurts them poor strays.”
