Murder Under the Mistletoe

by K. J. Emrick

  That wasn’t the only question rattling around her brain, however. She also had to wonder about the way Maxwell kept talking about what a great man Orson Bylow had been. If a man was truly great, then nobody had to point it out for them. Nobody had to point out that Ghandi was a good guy, for instance. People just knew it was true. Whenever someone took the trouble to tell you someone was a great man, it almost always meant they were trying to convince someone…maybe even themselves.

  Which made her wonder if Maxwell knew more about Orson than he was letting on.

  He’d kept talking while Darcy was considering all of that. Right now, he was in the middle of describing how the stone for the foundation had been imported from a place called Potsdam in New York, where they had a special kind of sandstone that turned a deep red color after it was cut and exposed to the air. Apparently most of what Darcy mistook for brick on the front of the building was actually that special sandstone. As interesting as that was, Darcy didn’t want an architecture lesson.

  “Hey, Maxwell? Can I ask you…”

  “Sure can,” he told her with a bright smile. “Go ahead. Shoot.”

  “Uh. Okay. A house this old, even if it’s an Inn now it must have a lot of family stories. You said one of Orson’s sons died young. Orson’s wife died here, too. Did anyone else die here?”

  When the words were out, Maxwell actually stumbled. He had to catch himself on the edge of the desk to keep from sprawling headfirst into the floor. He tried to cover it by making it seem like he was just leaning there on purpose, but Darcy knew better. So did Jon. Something about Darcy’s question had deeply unsettled him.

  “Uh, well, here’s the thing ‘bout that,” he told them, sucking on the inside of his cheek. “Sure, there was some deaths here. The story about my great, great, great grandma Jennifer Bylow dying is sort of a local legend. She fell out of the window on the third floor, poor thing. Horrible way to go, I’d imagine. As for any other deaths…well, yes. There was a few. A handyman died here maybe a month after Jennifer fell out of that window. He was found dead at the bottom of the stairs. Poor guy fell and broke his neck. Swanson was his name. Easy to remember a name that unusual. Uh, several of the workers in the fields Orson maintained for crops died over the years, of course, but that was life in the 1800s, right? People lived, people died. Just the way it was.”

  He chuckled as he said it, trying to minimize the idea of people dying here. He said Jennifer Bylow’s death was an accident. That was what the police had determined, after all. Her son dying early could have been just another example of ‘life in the 1800’s’ too, like Maxwell said. Could the clumsy ghost that she saw in the hallway be the handyman, Swanson? If he was that clumsy in life, then she could picture him tripping downstairs. Accidents happened. They happened all the time.

  But that many accidents in one home? That was suspicious in Darcy’s book.

  Plus, what about the old woman in the library? Where did that ghost come from?

  “Did anyone else die here?” she asked him directly.

  His eyes stared back at her, big and blank, and his mouth opened and closed, opened and closed, and opened…

  “Let’s go on to the next room,” he said suddenly, his voice pinched and squeaky and adding an extra twang to his southern drawl. “You’ll like this one. Good stories. Yes sir, this house is so chock full of good stories that you’ll just forget about the bad ones. All that bad stuff won’t mean a thing after you hear all the good.”

  From behind Maxwell, Jon gave her a quick thumbs-up. He liked the way she was getting the story out of Maxwell, a little bit at a time. Darcy knew they were on to something here. Her sixth sense told her so, but so did common sense. All of these deaths hadn’t been accidents, or part of life, no matter what their host wanted them to believe.

  Questions, questions, and more questions. Why was Maxwell being so cagey? The deaths that caused these ghosts to be here all happened in the early 1800s. They certainly weren’t his fault. If any of the deaths were suspicious, the facts would have been lost to history. If there was a guilty party, there wouldn’t be any reason to protect them because they, too, would be long gone. There weren’t even any witnesses to ask what happened…

  Oh. But she did!

  Someone with her talents could have a sit-down conversation with the clumsy ghost in the hallway. Or the stairway climbing ghost of Jennifer Bylow. Or the little boy’s ghost in the bathroom mirror—the ghost she honestly hoped Colby wasn’t up in their room talking to after she specifically said not to. Darcy could call up any of them with a spirit communication, or just wander around until one of them appeared for her.

  She thought about that as they followed Maxwell back into the hallway and then down to the next room. He was babbling on about something to do with how many feet of copper piping had been installed when the house first got indoor plumbing. Darcy was only half listening to him, her mind still working out how to get information directly from the ghosts. Any of them, even the old woman in the library…

  Darcy came to an abrupt stop as they entered the next room, and she saw that same old woman, larger than life, staring down at her.

  The painting on the wall was very lifelike, showing a face that Darcy recognized. An elderly woman, in a flowing black dress, with her gray hair piled up into a bun on her head. A face full of wrinkles from a long life, a lean look in her eyes and a disapproving scowl. The color scheme was bleak, all deep reds and blacks and grays, lending the woman an eerie sort of intensity.

  This was the ghost from the library. Her painting was here, in one of the two rooms that the Hideaway Inn had kept intentionally the same as they had been since the house was first built. That told Darcy that she must be someone important to the history of this place.

  “Now this room here,” Maxwell was saying, “used to be the mansion’s laundry room. Those shelves over there would hold the dry soap and the folded, clean linens. You’ll notice there’s no windows here. In those days, it was thought servants ought to be kept hidden away from the regular folk. Everyone had their stations, it was just some stations was better than others. They did the work, but they wasn’t considered part of the family—”

  “Who is that?” Darcy interrupted, pointing up at the painting.

  “Hmm? Oh! Yes. That painting used to hang in the main hall of the mansion, but when the place was renovated into an Inn it got moved here. Truth be told the family decided it was way too spooky for the guests to be looking at all the time. So, we hang it here now.” He chuckled, as if the intimidating painting was the punchline of a funny joke. “That, my friends, is Jennifer Bylow’s mother. Orson’s mother-in-law. I suppose that makes her my great, great, great, great grandmother. From everything I heard, she was a very willful woman. More ornery than a junkyard dog, as my father used to say. Thankfully I didn’t inherit any of that mean streak!”

  He laughed again. Darcy and Jon did not.

  “Did she die here?” Jon asked. He might not have seen the ghost in the library like Darcy had, but her husband had caught on to her interest, and no doubt the reason behind it.

  Maxwell stumbled again.

  This time he reached out for a chair. A plain chair, with a simple wood frame. This was the servant’s area, after all, not the plush rooms where Orson Bylow had made his life. After taking a breath, Maxwell slowly turned to look up at the painting, and gave them a nod.

  “Her name was Millicent Cussington. She came to live here shortly before Jennifer and Orson’s son died. She was here for only a few weeks, though, before she was found dead in the library. She was seventy-two, see, and that was very old in those days. She lived long enough to see her daughter die, and her grandson, too. Probably wasn’t no good for her heart. Know what I mean?”

  Darcy was stunned. First Orson’s wife dies, and his son too, and then his mother-in-law not long after? That was either the worst string of tragedy in the history of the world, or it was too much coincidence for one family—or rather, too much
for one man. If she had been trying to give Orson Bylow the benefit of the doubt before, she couldn’t now. In her mind, he was starting to look like a murder suspect.

  What else happened here in this place?

  “What about the handyman?” she asked Maxwell. “You mentioned a handyman who died. What happened to him?”

  “Uh, well,” Maxwell hedged. “I thought we could maybe just talk about the history of the house for a bit.”

  “This is the history of the house, right? The handyman…Swanson, you said? He died here, too. How did it happen?”

  “He…well he fell down the stairs and broke his neck, just like I said.”

  “Just like that?”

  “Well, sure. Just an accident. You know. Accidents all around, pretty much.”

  Another suspicious death. Another fall. It was just too much to accept it all as coincidence, no matter what Maxwell wanted them to believe. There must be more to it. If Maxwell wasn’t going to admit it…yeah. Darcy was definitely thinking about talking to the ghosts now. One, or maybe all of them, although that would be exhausting, even with her years of experience with ghosts. If only one of them would tell her straight out that they needed her, then she wouldn’t have to keep wondering if she was putting her nose in where it…wasn’t wanted…

  Under the painting of Millicent Cussington, a figure appeared. It materialized out of thin air, blurring into focus until Darcy recognized the ghost of Swanson the handyman. Tall and skinny in his brown trousers, he blinked around the room as if he’d just woken up from a long sleep. When he saw Darcy, he gave her one of his deep bows like he had earlier, up in the hallway…

  And stumbled and fell backward, through the wall of empty shelves.

  Darcy had to stifle a laugh, and when she did Maxwell gave her a big smile, thinking maybe she was laughing at his attempts at humor. He really was a good host, and he was very knowledgeable about the history of the Hideaway Inn, even if he was acting very strange. The way he was dodging their questions and changing his accents…seriously, what was up with that?

  She was about to ask him another question about the ghosts, when Swanson came back through the wall.

  As she stared at him, he stared back, with blank and ghostly eyes, and intentionally took a step backward.

  He disappeared through the wall again.

  Then he popped out into the room and waved at her.

  And then back through the wall.

  Darcy scrunched her brows down together. That wasn’t the ghost being clumsy. That was the ghost being…clever? Was he trying to give her some kind of message? Was he trying to communicate by walking through walls? Upstairs in the hallway he acted like a door had stopped him cold. Obviously if he was going through the wall now, he was doing it on purpose. So the question was, why?

  She was waiting for him to appear again when Maxwell suddenly slapped his hands together. “All right, then. Let’s get to the rest, shall we?”

  His accent was Australian now, and he was in a powerful hurry to get moving for some reason. All of Darcy’s questions must have really struck a chord to rattle him that much.

  Her curiosity was just about as worked up as it had ever been. What exactly happened here, all those years ago?

  One thing was for sure. Their normal vacation had just become anything but.

  So cold.

  It was so cold and dark, but she had to keep moving.

  Something was wrong, and she needed to let Darcy Sweet know.

  Darcy Sweet could help.

  She might be the only one who could.

  Chapter 4

  The thing about travelling with two children, one a boy and one a girl, was you had to plan ahead for the sleeping arrangements. Any hotel room—including rooms at an Inn like this—only had two beds. Darcy and Jon slept in one, of course, but that meant Colby and Zane had to take turns using the other bed. Whoever wasn’t in the bed had to use the portable air mattress they always brought with them. When they were younger, they didn’t mind sharing a bed together, but Colby had long since reached the age when sleeping with her little brother was taboo.

  And that wasn’t a word that Darcy threw around lightly.

  Tonight, Colby had offered to take the air mattress. Zane didn’t argue. He was all tuckered out from the fun today. By the time they had finished a dinner of takeout fried chicken from a restaurant in town, he was already nodding and yawning. He was asleep almost as soon as his head touched the pillow.

  It was after midnight now, and Colby was breathing deeply and slowly over in the corner of the room where they had the portable mattress squeezed in between a table and the wall. Their daughter had been ready for bed, too, and partway through a chapter in the novel she was reading, she told her parents goodnight. Darcy had picked the book up—Ash, by Malinda Lo—when it slid from Colby’s grip to the floor.

  Darcy was tired too, but the mystery of the Hideaway Inn ghosts had her full attention.

  “The thing is, there might be more of them here.”

  “I know,” Jon said. “At least, I understand what you’re saying. You and Colby are the ones who see the ghosts. I’m just here to support you no matter what you choose to do. So. What are you going to do?”

  He snaked his arm around her, adjusting the sheet so he could move in closer. They were both in their pj’s, and Darcy even had her socks on. They always dressed to go to bed when they were on vacation because you never knew when the fire alarm was going to go off in the middle of the night and force you to rush outside to save yourself. It was a good policy to be fully clothed whenever there was a chance you might find yourself surrounded by firemen.

  “Well,” she told Jon, after considering his question. “I don’t think all of these deaths were accidental. Or from natural causes, or whatever nonsense Maxwell Bylow wants us to believe. I don’t believe Jennifer just fell out of that window. I doubt seriously that her mother just up and died of natural causes in the library. Their handyman, their one son…it’s too much to think that all of that happened by coincidence.”

  “Hmm. Yeah, there’s a definite pattern there.” He stroked a finger down her cheek in the dark. “The problem is we’re talking about things that happened two hundred years ago. It’s going to be impossible to prove anything, one way or the other. There’s no video surveillance to look at, no witnesses to interview, no autopsy reports. Nothing that us police officers would use to build a case.”

  “Well…that’s true…”

  “Not to mention there’s no real reason to dig into it, right? None of these ghosts, if they were victims of foul play, have come asking you for your help. Maybe they’re just hanging around to see what happens in the world, the way your Great Aunt Millie stayed around to watch over you and the kids.”

  Darcy gave him a look even though he couldn’t see it with the lights off. “What could she possibly be watching for two hundred years?”

  “Families keep going,” was his answer. “Children grow up and have children of their own. Then they have children too. Families continue. That’s one of the great things about life. It just never stops. You and I will pass on someday, when we’re old and our time comes, but life will go on. Colby and Zane will be our legacy, and their kids will be our legacy, too. Jon Tinker and Darcy Sweet will go on, even when we’re not here anymore.”

  “You guys…” Colby’s sleepy voice whispered from across the room. “Maybe I don’t wanna have kids.”

  “Shh,” Darcy whispered back. “You’re supposed to be sleeping.”

  “Can’t sleep when you’re planning my whole future, Mom.”

  Darcy smiled, knowing how scary the future could seem at her daughter’s age, and also knowing how quick that could change for a woman. “We’ll have to see how you feel about it, after you meet the right guy.”

  “Mmph hmmm,” was the mumbled response. In just a few seconds, she was back asleep, lightly snoring.

  “We’ll have to whisper,” Jon said in Darcy’s ear, barely audib
le.

  She laughed quietly and cuddled closer to him.

  Jon was right about how families continued down through the generations. That was the whole reason why Millie had been with them for so long, even after her own pre-death issues had been resolved. She stayed around now as much to see how Colby and Zane turned out as she did to watch over Darcy. Maybe she’d be around long enough to see Colby have children of her own. Zane, too.

  But two hundred years? It seemed a little far-fetched to think this many ghosts might have stuck around just to see how the family had turned out, even if the Hideaway Inn had been in the Bylow family’s hands the whole time. It was dangerous for ghosts to stay with the living for too long. The last ghost Darcy had known who was that old had been a very violent, unstable spirit. In fact, that ghost had actually tried to possess Colby. The longer ghosts were kept from crossing over, the more unraveled they seemed to become.

  What did that mean for the ghosts in the Hideaway Inn, who had been here for two centuries and counting?

  They had spent a few hours before bed scouring the internet for any information on the family of Orson Bylow, or the multiple deaths here at the Inn. They had even expanded their search to look for anything that might have happened in the town of Pittsfield. They had only found a few stories, and nothing that seemed out of the ordinary. Deaths from car wrecks, a couple of drownings in the lake four miles away, things like that. Things you would find in any town anywhere in the world. The oldest story they found was from twenty years ago.

  As far as information on the mystery that they had stumbled into here, the internet didn’t seem to have any information. If anyone knew anything about these deaths, they hadn’t given it to Google yet.

  Well, there was something else they could try. More specifically, something she could do. The ghosts hadn’t asked her for help, but she could do something to help them just the same.