Chapter 3 Late-Night Decisions are Always Regrettable
PER THE PARCHMENT SIGN GRANDMA affixed to the door with egg yolk and horse hair, the Spük Apothecary of downtown Salem opens at noon.
Per a new sheet of cheap printer paper I’ve affixed with Scotch tape—a significantly less noxious adhesive than Grandma’s favorite multipurpose potion—Spük Apothecary now opens never.
I try not to be impressed by his slick black Tesla or his punctuality.
It’s early October, and a Saturday, so the holiday traffic is already threatening to stack vertically.
Car exhaust battles the scents of spilled pumpkin spice lattes and moldering leaves crunched into Salem’s bloodred brick sidewalks.
It isn’t easy to navigate this witchy town, is what I’m getting at.
But I refuse to acknowledge that Grandma’s lawyer does it well, because even the impressive things about him are off-putting and lumpy.
Case in point? He double-parks.
And now, as I let him in, Baldy awkwardly clears his throat. His checkered bow tie stifles the noise from reaching its true potential.
“Do you need some water?” I ask. Unlike Baldy, I was brought up with social graces. If I had a car, I would have at least attempted to introduce it to a curb.
“Unnecessary,” he says. “You and I have bigger priorities to address.”
Oh, goody. “As long as I don’t have to lick any envelopes.”
“No envelopes are involved.”
Baldy surveys the shelves of Grandma’s occult-leaning pharmaceuticals, probably to avoid sighing over me again.
He and I have known each other for a week, and he couldn’t make it clearer that I grate at the scratchy wool fibers of his being.
I suspect he has an eldest daughter he’s projecting onto me.
At least this would explain why he’s so invested in micromanaging my handling of Grandma Rose’s last will and testament.
“So,” I say, hoping to keep his visit short, “funeral’s done. Peachy. Now that that’s over, the probate should all just be downhill from here, right?”
Baldy rubs his unpleasantly wet-looking, stumpy nose. “Not quite.”
Rather than simply explaining like a normal person, Baldy drags himself theatrically into the center of the room.
He settles for standing directly beneath the giant, dusty, and low-hanging chandelier.
A blinding sheen bounces off his head. I consider grabbing sunglasses.
Or SPF 50+ sunscreen. But I don’t, because that would be rude, and I’d prefer to stay in Baldy’s good graces.
He holds my future in his pale, sweaty hands.
“There is a… hiccup,” he says at last.
Oh, crap. I can see from Baldy’s face that he’s about to do it again. He’s going to cruelly code-switch out of English into the foreign languages of Business and Law.
“It has,” he begins ominously, “come to my attention that your grandmother confirmed receipt of a creditor’s validation notice.
A collections agency has petitioned the Massachusetts probate courts for possession of a portion of Rosamund’s estate, requiring us to follow the judge’s order to set up a payment plan to resolve the debt.
Being that this is the case, I will need to intervene with a legal motion of… ”
“Uh-huh,” I say. “Yep. Uh-huh.”
These are lying noises.
Because as might be expected of a twenty-two-year-old girl fresh out of college, I am lost. Completely in over my head.
I have no idea how to read wills or contracts or IKEA instruction manuals, and not for lack of trying.
The fact that I have been hired to perform audits at a professional level remains deeply mysterious to me.
Also, I suspect Baldy rambles like this to pad his legal fees.
“… and of course, that stipulation is magically binding.”
I blink. “Sorry, what?”
“This requirement of Rosamund’s will and testament is magically binding,” Baldy repeats, sniffing emphatically. I’m tempted to offer him a Kleenex and pretend I didn’t hear him mention magic, but with yesterday’s head discovery, I can’t let this go.
“Explain,” I demand. “But simply.”
“Until the will releases you, you will have to remain physically, corporeally in Salem.”
I take a moment to process this.
“No. I can’t do that,” I say once my blood remembers how to carry oxygen through my body. “I’m not staying.”
“You said you would uphold the requirements of this role, Samantha, when I called you to inform you of Rosamund’s most sorrowful passing—”
I interrupt. “My mom informed me of Grandma’s death. And if I said yes to staying here, I meant for a few days, a week at most. It’s been a week. You told me I would be named executrix within the week, and guess what, I was! What more could she want?”
“Part of the instructions for the executor include guarding Rosamund’s spirit until it ascends.”
“You can’t be serious. That sounds like a quote from a nineties goth rock ballad!” Baldy shakes his too-shiny head at me. “Why hasn’t she ascended yet?”
“Per the wording of her will, ‘Once I am returned to the earth, my appointed must guard my spirit until the passing of seven tides, low and high, twice over.’ ”
“I don’t remember you reading that part to me in your office a few days ago. Why would you leave that out?”
Baldy leaves my question unanswered as he rambles on mercilessly. “As I mentioned, the matter of the debt is indubitably keeping your grandmother’s spirit here. I suspect that she will need to remain until that piece is resolved. And of course, she must be waiting for the passing of the—”
“—seven high tides,” I finish with a groan. Then I groan again, louder, when it doesn’t improve my mood. So I turn my back to the lawyer, take up a broom, and start sweeping.
Grandma Rose, why would you do this? Who puts a magical stipulation on a will!? Or who claims to do so, I should say? Because I know you weren’t magical, Grandma.
To be fair, this is all par for the course. My grandmother’s loony lunacy looned deep.
Pretty much every summer of my childhood, Mom spent a couple months test-driving a new boyfriend in Canada or wherever.
She would drop me off in Salem with Grandma.
Taking advantage of the situation, Grandma leaned hard into the kindly matriarch schtick: she fed me a diet of home-cooked food and gingerbread cookies laced with medicinal, possibly illegal herbs; she took me shopping, outfitting me in a black and purple Gothic wardrobe; she regaled me with legends of our eccentric and paranormally inclined clan.
When I was little, I ran with it. Sure, kids at the playground stared at us in our Addams Family cosplay, and the librarian banned us after Grandma kept sneaking in stray, flea-trafficking cats.
But Grandma Rose encouraged me to ignore them all.
After all, weren’t the little families she invited to her house cute and fun and accepting?
Even if they were unusually hairy or had pets with tentacles, not arms?
I can’t believe I trusted Grandma when she said that was normal for homeschoolers.
Everything changed the last time I stayed with Grandma.
Mom was excited about her most recent boyfriend, so she extended her vacation time with him into September.
This meant Grandma had to enroll me in one of Salem’s public middle schools for the fall.
I must’ve been handling the transition too well, because Grandma’s friends persuaded her that this meant it was time to introduce me, an innocent and unsuspecting twelve-year-old, to their favorite local community event.
On Halloween night, Grandma brought me to a “very special” party in the Salem Woods.
There, her best friend, Matilda, unsheathed a dagger and held it against my heart, her silvery eyes boring holes into mine.
This is it, I thought. I’ve been Hansel-and-Greteled.
Fattened up and dressed up and now I’m going to be dinner. I was sure I was going to die.
Of course, I didn’t.
No one ever planned to sacrifice me. It was all a joke they were playing while Grandma picked up pizza.
When she returned, Grandma didn’t notice my shaking, my terror.
The fact that I’d peed myself. She just cackled around the fire with her wannabe-witch coven while I stress-vomited into a barrel of bobbing apples.
I still wake up sweating from nightmares about it, sometimes.
The dagger part, sure—but the pants-peeing part especially, because on my way home from the forest, I bumped into a popular kid who witnessed my wet-jeans waddle of shame.
His discovery ushered in new and horrible humiliations.
Between every class period, I was afflicted by water bottles “accidentally” squeezed in the direction of my pants.
In math, the substitute let us play hangman, and the answer was “Only gross girls pee their pants.” Thanks to social media, even the kids who’d skipped school nursing candy hangovers knew what happened and joined in the mockery.
Overnight, I’d become something worse than “the new girl” or “another strange Spük.”
I’d become an actual pariah. A pee-riah.
After that, I decided to stay as far from Grandma—more specifically, from the unstable people orbiting her—as I possibly could.
I called Mom, pleading with her to come pick me up.
She sacrificed the nascent bud of whatever was happening with her then-boyfriend to rescue me and move us all the way to the West Coast. To the far-flung city of Portland, Oregon.