I imagine the three sisters floating like delicate ghosts in the dark shadows beneath the water’s surface, mercurial and preserved just like the sideshow mermaid. I think of this photograph every spring, when murmurs begin to circulate through the town of Sparrow about the three sisters who were drowned beyond the maw of the harbor, past Lumiere Island, where I live with my mother. Several men stand in front of the glass tank, staring at her as if she were real.

She is wispy and angelic, with thin lips pinched tightly together, holding her breath against the icy water. I have an old black-and-white photograph taken in the 1920s of a woman at a traveling circus floating in a massive tank filled with water, blond hair billowing around her head, legs hidden by a false mermaid’s fin made of metallic fabric and thread to look like scales. And she will be forced to choose: save Bo, or save herself. And death comes swiftly to those who cannot resist the call of the sisters.īut only Penny sees what others cannot. Penny and Bo suspect each other of hiding secrets. The townspeople turn against one another.

Mistrust and lies spread quickly through the salty, rain-soaked streets. But this year, on the eve of the sisters’ return, a boy named Bo Carter arrives unaware of the danger he has just stumbled into. Like many locals, seventeen-year-old Penny Talbot has accepted the fate of the town. Now, for a brief time each summer, the sisters return, stealing the bodies of three weak-hearted girls so that they may seek their revenge, luring boys into the harbor and pulling them under. Stones were tied to their ankles and they were drowned in the deep waters surrounding the town. Where, two centuries ago, three sisters were sentenced to death for witchery.

Hocus Pocus and Practical Magic meets the Salem Witch trials in this haunting story about three sisters on a quest for revenge-and how love may be the only thing powerful enough to stop them.

The wicked deep shea ernshaw