Chapter 16 Werewolves Can Be Classy, Too
HANRY, BULAN, AND I BEHOLD the front of Da Seven Tides Scuba Shop with differing degrees of wonder.
“I feel like it’s had a rebranding,” I say finally.
“That’s one way to put it,” says Hanry.
In the window, the painted driftwood sign revealing the shop’s name is lost beneath a burden of barnacles.
And by “barnacles” I mean witch junk: crystals backdropped by tie-dye sarongs.
Odd statues with vaguely spiritual vibes.
Lava lamps. A sincerely painted canvas of a werewolf riding a surfboard.
“Joe’s had something of an identity crisis since discovering he was one-eighth mermaid,” says Bulan. “Best not to mention his snorkel.”
“You’re talking about Scuba Joe?” I say, stunned. “Our mermaid-client liaison! This is his place?”
“Well, yes. Weren’t you planning to pretend that you were coming here with questions about the mermaid wedding?” Bulan blinks at me questioningly.
“No. I was planning to be honest.”
“That doesn’t sound like you!”
It’s not, but sometimes, one must compromise their values. I don’t want to hear any rambling that isn’t Grandma-related.
“I’m trying the door,” says Hanry, ever helpful. Grateful as I am for his diversion, unfortunately, the door doesn’t budge—and if Hanry’s heft can’t do the trick, what can? And I may be new to entrepreneurship, but I can’t imagine closing my shop in the middle of the afternoon during peak season.
“Bulan, can you get in through the pet door?” I ask. “See if anyone’s inside?”
“Much obliged to try!” Bulan pops out of my arms.
A passing tourist points as my pet head vanishes behind the plastic flap. “Cute cat,” she says.
“Thanks,” answers Hanry. “I trained him to be off leash.”
I roll my eyes, evenly irritated at both conversing parties.
Hanry has a habit of rolling with the oddities of Salem, rather than finding them grating.
My current theory is that New Hampshire isn’t too far from Stephen King’s Maine, so he must’ve witnessed some paranormal horrors in his time, beyond what even Salem can cough up.
I have a whole zombie-hunting logger fantasy that Hanry has neither confirmed nor denied.
The door swings open, revealing a familiar whiff of chlorine and a scuba-clad owner. Sure enough, it’s Scuba Joe.
“Hello, Sabby,” he says after removing his mouth from his snorkel.
It looks slightly algaeic: both the snorkel and his mouth.
“What a nice surprise, seeing you with your coworker! And your noble companion! As I told Bulan here, I’m in the middle of feeding, so my attention might be divided. But come on in!”
“Watch your step!” says Bulan, not quite fast enough to escape the edge of Scuba Joe’s flipper. Poor head.
Predictably, Hanry holds the door for me. I can’t help mouthing “my noble companion” at him. It triggers an adorable blush.
Scuba Joe floppily leads us past the crystals and two walls of diving equipment, backlit by a few empty aquariums, colored LED lighting, and a hint of tropical wallpaper.
Through the back door into his office, we find…
much weirder aquariums. These are inhabited, but I don’t know by what.
Is that a starfish? It has far-too-prominent lips.
And that is definitely some kind of a bear with fins, but it’s the size of a gummy bear. It growls menacingly when we make eye contact and flings itself at the aquarium wall.
“I’m getting some weird Ursula energy in here,” I whisper to Hanry. He shrugs.
“I hear you. I associate glowing lights with evil,” he admits. “At least most of the lights seem electric-powered.”
“So, how can I help you three?” asks Joe, lifting his mask onto the top of his head.
Looking into his dark eyes, unmediated by a reflective layer of plastic for the first time, I gather that he came by his shop’s Caribbean theme honestly.
The Jamaican flag pinned to the wall is also a decent indicator.
“I’m curious what you know of my Grandma Rose. Did your shop mean anything to her?”
He thinks. “She helped me source my kelpie kelp,” he says, gesturing to a slime-filled bucket with a concerning stench. “It was a great tragedy she passed. My new supplier overcharges. She wants nail clippings along with my payment.”
“Unacceptable!” cries Bulan, followed by a splash.
This is because he has leapt into the sea bear’s aquarium.
“Whoops, sorry!” says Hanry. He fishes out Bulan, who seemed happy to bob around as the tiny bear-monster beat its claw-fins against his ears.
“How’d Bulan get in there?” asks Joe, concerned. “That shelf is five feet up.”
We are not going to talk about the physical impossibility that is my pet head. “Please, never mind that.”
Joe allows his attention to be drawn back to me.
“Did Grandma come visit here often?” I ask. “Did she rent out this building before you, maybe?”
“No and no. Are you trying to learn more about her life? I’ve gotten skilled at compiling genealogies, should you be interested.
I’ve got friends at the Maritime Museum.
Salem was once renowned as a maritime town, you know, and my great-great-grandfather—a whaler, in fact—had the strangest experience in the Bermuda Triangle. It’s quite the tale.”
“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 mentioned seven tides passing in 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 seven seas, 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, paranormal Titanic weaving 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, so quaint, 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.