The vision vanished, and Joy blinked, trying to let her eyes adjust to the darkness again.
Grace placed a soft hand on Joy’s arm. “What did you see?”
Joy turned to her, completely disoriented. The vision had been different than the other two she’d experienced. Those had run in her mind sort of like a movie. In this one, she felt like she’d been transported to the white Victorian, only to be immediately relocated back to Premonition Pointe. “Huh?”
“Did you see where Harlow is?” Grace tried again.
“Yes. I think I did,” Joy said, finally getting her bearings. “Only, I still have no idea where that is!” The frustration was palpable as she came to understand that the spell had worked. It just hadn’t been specific enough. She peered at Grace. “We need to do it again.”
Grace shook her head and bit her bottom lip. “I don’t think we can.”
“Why not?” Joy glanced at Hope and Gigi and noticed both of them were lying on the blanket. Hope had her arm draped over her eyes while Gigi was staring at the sky, taking deep breaths.
“That was a long time to hold the magic,” Grace said as she sank to the blanket. “We’re all exhausted.”
Confusion made Joy do a double take. What did she mean by that had been a long time to hold their magic? To her if felt as if the entire thing had taken just a few minutes. She studied her coven mates and noted that all three of them had tired eyes and lacked the vibrant energy they’d had before the spell. “How long was I gone?”
Grace pulled her phone out of her pocket and glanced at the time. “Forty minutes.”
“Forty minutes! You’re kidding me, right?” How was that even possible? “What was I doing that whole time?”
“At first you were just levitating, your eyes wide, but unseeing. I figured you were in another plane, maybe in a vision. But then, finally, you were alert and obviously studying something. It didn’t take long before you started mumbling about cherry trees and no address.”
“Oh, wow. I had no idea. It felt very quick to me. I don’t remember the time when I was unresponsive. Sorry. You three worked hard for the information I did get,” Joy said. “I just wish it was more helpful.”
Grace gave her a tired smile. “It’s all right. Just tell us what you saw, and we’ll go from there.”
Joy nodded and went through the details of the white Victorian, the cherry trees, the manicured lawn and flowers, the forest, and the fact that the house was set back from the road without a street sign. “That’s why I wanted to try again. We need to ask to see the street so we can find that house. It could be anywhere.”
“Not just anywhere,” Gigi said thoughtfully. “Some of the details will narrow it down, right? Like the forest. We know she’s not being held in a city. Then there’s the cherry trees. Those don’t grow just anywhere.”
“Right,” Grace added. “And the Victorian. If it’s an older turn-of-the-century home and not one built recently in the same style, that helps, too. If you could sketch it out, I could maybe try searching real estate transactions to see if anything comes up.”
Joy gave her a look that said she thought her friend had lost her mind. “That seems like a longshot at best.”
Grace shrugged. “Maybe, but it’s worth a try.”
“I agree it’s a longshot,” Hope said. “I mean what are the chances that house has been on the market recently? But it’s something to try when we have very little else to go on.”
“All right.” Joy rummaged in her handbag and pulled out a small notebook she’d started keeping with her when she became vice president of the Arts Market Co-op. Too many times she’d been caught off guard by running into artists who had something they needed for her to fix. She’d given up on remembering and finally went with the small diary for all their grievances. And there were a lot. In some ways, Joy was glad to have taken a leave of absence from the board. Everyone always wanted something from her. But in other ways, she very much missed the art. It was what had gotten her involved in the first place.
Joy had always been fairly decent at drawing. Especially architecture. It had been a favorite elective of hers when she’d been getting her theater arts degree in college. But when she’d gotten married and had kids, there just wasn’t enough time or energy to devote to either her acting or her love of sketching. Even when she’d gotten involved in the Arts Market, she hadn’t put any priority on trying to sell her own drawings. Instead, she’d focused on trying to help other artists market their work. It was satisfying helping people succeed.
She was a little rusty, but it didn’t take long to get the house and the grounds down in her sketch book. Joy passed it to Grace. Hope and Gigi immediately moved to studying the drawing over her shoulder. “If I had my colored pencils, I could really make this come to life.”
“Damn, Joy,” Gigi said, her eyes wide. “You’re good.”
“Isn’t she though?” Hope said with a sigh. “I’ve been trying to get her to devote time to her drawings for years, but so far she just keeps blowing me off.”
“I’ve been a little busy,” Joy said with a shrug, but she couldn’t help the smile that claimed her lips at the praise.
“Can you do me a favor?” Grace asked Joy as she eyed the drawing.
“Of course,” Joy said automatically. “Anything.”
“Color this in and then send me a picture of it.” She finally took her eyes off the drawing. “That will help when I try to find recent real estate transactions. I might be able to load it into Google and do a reverse image search.”
Joy’s skepticism for the plan started to fade. If there was a way the computer could help with the match, it just might work. But then she frowned. “Like we were talking about earlier, this sounds like a longshot at best. Do you have any reason to believe this property would come up in the records?”
“No. Not really,” Grace said, pursing her lips. “But it’s something. And if we do get a hit, that’s worth all the effort. If we don’t? All we’ve wasted is some time.”
“It’s a decent idea,” Gigi said.
“I’m all for it then.” Joy smiled at them, feeling a little better that they at least had some sort of plan going forward.
Hope nodded her agreement. “And while Grace is working on that, I’m going to ask Angela to keep a mental ear out just in case Harlow’s abductor is hanging around town.”
“You really don’t need to do that,” Joy said automatically and then wanted to kick herself. Why was she discouraging help they obviously needed? “I just mean that I know how much of a toll it takes on her, and I don’t want her to have to go through all of that.”
“We’ll leave it up to her,” Hope said firmly. “But I’m willing to bet we won’t be able to keep her away from the Bird’s Eye Bakery. I know her. She’ll want to do anything she can to help. She might not like spending a lot of time with people, but she has a kind heart. It would really bother her to not do everything she could to find Harlow.”
“Okay,” Joy said, unable to work up the energy to argue further. Then she smiled. “Thank you.”