Murder Under the Mistletoe

by K. J. Emrick

  Almost there.

  Darcy’s heart caught in her throat. Her breath was loud in the stillness.

  There.

  The beam of her flashlight app wavered in her hand.

  There!

  Darcy yelped as a figure jumped out of the dark at her, landing on the floor, staring up at her with a furry face and a tail that flicked from side to side.

  “Meow.”

  Chapter 8

  Oh, how she dearly wished that humans would learn to speak feline.

  Life would be so much easier that way.

  Meow? Did she just hear…meow?

  Blinking furiously, Darcy centered the light from her cellphone on her little visitor. This wasn’t a ghost. It wasn’t even a person. It took her a moment to put it all together and realize who she was looking at. When it finally hit her, Darcy couldn’t believe her eyes.

  “Tiptoe? What are you…?” Darcy knelt down in front of her wet, shivering gray cat. “How are you here? We left you back in Misty Hollow with Izzy. You’re supposed to be safe and warm back home.”

  The cat looked up at her and blinked, as if that was a perfectly acceptable explanation.

  She began to lick her paws, like everything was fine, but she wasn’t fooling Darcy. She could see the way she was shaking.

  “Poor thing, you’re freezing.” She knelt down now and scooped Tiptoe up, holding her in her arms and close to her chest so her little friend could soak up her body heat. She wasn’t just cold, she was wet too, like she’d been running through the snow to get here. Her little body snuggled in closer in Darcy’s arms, her tail wrapping around her nose. She heaved a huge sigh. Gradually, her shivering subsided.

  Darcy chuckled, shaking her head at the impossibility of it all. Tiptoe came all this way, on her own, just to get back to her family. It seemed so unlikely and yet here was the proof all curled up in her arms. Animals were capable of amazing acts of loyalty. Sometimes more so than people. She’d always known that Tiptoe was special, but this right here? This was incredible.

  “Wait until I tell Jon about this,” she said, rocking Tiptoe gently. “He’s not going to believe it.”

  Tiptoe was purring, and the question of how she’d gotten here, and how she got into this secret passageway, became somehow not that important anymore. Just a few short minutes ago she’d only been concerned with getting out of here. Now, she just wanted to stand here and snuggle with her cat.

  A man’s face inched in close over her shoulder. A ghastly pale man, with a five o’clock shadow.

  Darcy jumped, and Tiptoe clawed into her shirt to keep from being spilled out of her arms. With a frantic dance, Darcy managed to keep her feet and pivot around, glaring at Swanson the handyman…

  Just in time to see him spook, too, and cartwheel his hands in wild circles in a losing battle to keep his balance. He toppled over and dropped hard to the floor. Actually, through the floor, as the bottom two inches of his legs passed right below the level of the sandstone.

  Tiptoe showed her displeasure at being disturbed in this manner with a little growl, before curling herself back into a ball with her nose between her paws. She kept her eyes on Swanson, though, daring him to do something like that again.

  “Yeah,” Darcy told her, “you’re a tough cat. Big, tough kitty just like your dad. Not scared of the ghosts at all, are you?”

  Tiptoe flicked her ear. Darcy figured that translated, roughly, to ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about I wasn’t scared for a second.’

  Swanson was still on the floor, staring at his hands as if he didn’t understand how they had failed to stop him from falling—again. It would be so easy to believe that this guy died by tripping over his own shoelaces, if Darcy didn’t know everything else she did. The clues had piled up until she thought she was pretty sure she knew the real story of the Hideaway Inn.

  What she didn’t know, was why she was holding a cat in her arms who should be back in Misty Hollow, two hours away from here by car.

  “Tiptoe, why did you come here? Are you here just to find us? Did you miss me that much?”

  The cat twisted her head up to look into Darcy’s eyes, with a look that said cats don’t ever miss people. Cats were independent. Cats were masters of their own destiny.

  Darcy wasn’t fooled for a second.

  She was trying to give Tiptoe a big, affectionate hug when her fur baby squirmed out of her arms and jumped down to the floor. “Hey, where are you going? What, are you trying to tell me why you’re here? Tiptoe?”

  In typical feline style she ignored Darcy’s questions. She flipped her tail through the air and walked away, around the corner in the hallway, back toward the bookcase.

  “Well. Good talk,” Darcy grumped. She wasn’t worried. Obviously, the cat didn’t come all this way just to be held in Darcy’s arms for a few minutes. She had a reason for being here, and she would reveal what that was in her own time. Which was also typical feline style.

  Swanson floated back up to his feet, drifting over to stand next to Darcy. She turned to look at him, crossing her arms defiantly. He looked at her, and then down the hallway, and then back at her. Hand sweeping across his middle, he bowed.

  “Don’t give me that,” she warned him. “Now you come out of hiding? What, you couldn’t come out earlier and help me?”

  He stared at her for a moment. Then he shrugged.

  “Yeah. Real helpful.”

  In the next moment Tiptoe came back around the corner, padding her way with a proud purpose, tail in the air, ears pricked forward, a little smile on her kitty-cat lips. There was something in her mouth, held gently between her teeth.

  “What have you got there?” Darcy asked her. “What did you find?”

  Tiptoe didn’t answer, of course. Instead she came right over to Darcy’s feet, and dropped the thing in her mouth on the floor.

  Darcy shone her cellphone’s beam down on it.

  In the light, she saw one of the sprigs of mistletoe that had been hung on the stone wall, down near the bookcase opening.

  Swanson saw it, too. He sprung back from it and stumbled, and fell through one of the walls.

  And came back through the opposite wall, still falling.

  Then through the ceiling, and down through the floor.

  Darcy watched him bobbing back and forth like that, wondering what in the world could have gotten into him.

  “Meow.”

  Tiptoe called her attention back to her and put a paw on the mistletoe.

  Darcy looked at the little piece of plant, and at Tiptoe, and then back at Swanson as he floated halfway out of the wall on her left, and just hung there. His face was a mask of anguish, eyes open wide, mouth set in a squiggly sort of frown. Something was wrong, obviously.

  But what?

  She looked back at Tiptoe. The cat blinked at her and pawed her foot at the floor again.

  The Mistletoe…

  Oh, for Pete’s sake, why didn’t she see this before?

  She bent down and swiped it up from the floor by its stem. The clean smell of fresh, living things filled her nose, momentarily covering up the stuffy smell of old dust. This was the smell of outdoors. Of plants and living things.

  It was a little-known fact that mistletoe wasn’t just a holiday plant for lovers to kiss under. Darcy had learned something else about the plant a long time ago, from one of Great Aunt Millie’s journals. It wasn’t something she thought about very often. She was certainly thinking about it now.

  Turning quickly, she thrust the mistletoe out toward Swanson’s ghost.

  He completely freaked out, literally flying backward and disappearing through the wall again. In the air Darcy was sure she heard the echo of a painful scream.

  “Swanson! Hey, Swanson? I’m sorry. I’m sorry.” She stuffed the mistletoe into her pocket so that it wasn’t out where it could be seen. Or smelled. “It’s okay. I won’t do that again, I promise! You can come back. I just needed to be sure.”

  Slow
ly, tentatively, Swanson’s gaunt face appeared through the stones. He blinked up at her, looking intentionally at each hand to make sure she wasn’t tricking him. When he was sure that the plant was gone, he came the rest of the way through and stood there with his hands stuffed in the pockets of his pants.

  Darcy didn’t blame him for the way he had acted. Not now that she remembered the other thing about mistletoe. It was more than just a plant. Across Europe, it was currently being used to treat cancer. In many cultures it was considered to have properties that could ward off infections, even if it was poisonous if eaten.

  And starting in medieval times, mistletoe had been hung over door lintels and around the home to ward off witches…and ghosts.

  Now Darcy understood why the ghosts in the Hideaway Inn had all but disappeared on her. Maxwell Bylow had been putting up more and more Christmas decorations, which included numerous sprigs of mistletoe. The man must have bought them in bulk because he seemed to have an endless supply of it. Darcy hadn’t thought anything of it, because at first all that mistletoe seemed to be just part of the holiday display. Now she knew better.

  Maxwell must have known the ghosts were here, and that they were restless. Now that someone was here who could see them and talk to them, they were more active than ever. Maxwell might not know what Darcy could do, but he had to suspect something was up. He was putting all of that mistletoe around to push the ghosts away, at least for the time being. He wanted the secrets of this house to stay that way. He even put a few in here, back at the start of the secret passageway, to keep the ghosts away from the room with Millicent Cussington’s painting.

  That’s why none of them had been around when Darcy went looking for them.

  Even so, Darcy was only a few clues away from knowing the truth. The ghosts, the murders, even the mystery of Maxwell Bylow himself. She no longer cared if the answers wouldn’t matter. After two centuries, there was no one left to take responsibility for what had been done to Jennifer, Rupert, Swanson, and Millicent Cussington. In a way, the fact that no one would be arrested for the crimes no longer mattered. The answers were still important. The truth always mattered. The ghosts here deserved their rest.

  Maxwell did, too.

  It all made sense, and it gave Darcy an idea.

  “Tiptoe, do you think you can go back and collect all the rest of the mistletoe in here and…I don’t know. Get rid of it?” She wasn’t worried about whether Tiptoe could understand her. She might not be able to have a full conversation with animals the way Zane could, but that didn’t matter. Darcy knew Tiptoe could understand her just fine. “I know. Can you take the mistletoe out the way you came in? I mean, you got in here somehow, right? Can you get out again the same way?”

  The cat gave an annoyed flick of her tail. Like Darcy even had to ask.

  She rose up to her paws smoothly, all lithe grace, and Darcy couldn’t help but see a lot of Tiptoe’s daddy in her. It was unbelievable to think Tiptoe had come all this way on her own. Not only that, but she came here knowing there was something wrong and that Darcy would need her help.

  That was absolutely amazing.

  Every bit Smudge’s daughter, Darcy said to herself. Oh, he’d be so proud if he could see his daughter now. Smudge had always been there when Darcy needed him, oftentimes doing things that had seemed impossible for a cat. That had never stopped him. In fact, he was constantly getting in and out of their basement back home through stone walls that didn’t seem to have even a single crack anywhere. Now here was Tiptoe, somehow coming through the stone walls of this secret passage.

  Obviously, she took after her dear old dad.

  Maybe when she got out of here, Zane could talk to Tiptoe and ask her how she got here. Cat’s intuition, maybe? Animals often seemed to know things that humans didn’t. They could see ghosts, for instance, when most people couldn’t. They knew when their human friends were sad or in pain. It couldn’t all be explained away by superior senses of smell and hearing. There was something almost supernatural about animals. Cats maybe most of all.

  Swanson waved his hand in front of her eyes to get her attention as she continued to stand there, thinking. It was weird to see a ghost pass through your field of vision. Something that was there, but not there, blocking your line of sight but not completely. It was even stranger here in this dark, close-set hallway where she couldn’t see everything anyway. Ghosts had a sort of light all their own, a luminous energy that people like Darcy could see. At the same time, her flashlight passed right through him…frankly the whole effect was starting to give her a headache.

  “Just hold still a minute, will you?” She mimicked him waving his arms all around, trying to show him how distracting it was. When she did, he backed away, out of her personal space. “There. That’s better. Now. If you really want to help me, why don’t you show me how to get out of here?”

  He blinked at her, rubbing a hand over his unshaven chin. Then he snapped his fingers—without making a sound—and floated past her toward the wall at the dead end. He went right through without stopping, leaving Darcy behind.

  She threw her head back with a loud groan. “Come on, Swanson! I can’t walk through walls. I need a way out that a living person can get through. Got it? A living person—erp!”

  That last was a squeak that choked its way out of her when Swanson popped through the wall again without warning. This time he wasn’t alone.

  “Swanson! Will you please stop doing that! Oh…uh, hi,” Darcy said, noticing his companion. “I wasn’t expecting you…uh, how are you?”

  It was the lady of the house herself. Jennifer Bylow stood tall and regal, hands folded over themselves at the front of her black dress. She really was a beautiful woman, Darcy thought to herself. Or rather, she would have been, if her face wasn’t a complete blank and her eyes didn’t have a look of craziness in them. Swanson put his arm around Jennifer’s shoulders, and leaned up to whisper something in her ear, before kissing her gently on the cheek.

  So that was one question answered for certain. These two really had been lovers.

  “Is this why you were killed?” Darcy directed the question to both of them, not really expecting an answer, because ghosts in general weren’t the talkative sorts, and the ghosts in this house had proven to be even less so.

  She wasn’t expecting one, and so she wasn’t expecting what came next.

  Jennifer’s spirit launched itself at Darcy, hands reaching with her fingers curled in claws, mouth open in a scream that echoed in silence. She swept through the short distance between them so fast that Darcy had no time to do anything except back away, falling until the wall was there to catch her and then the light on her cellphone went out and there was a ghost trying to get at her in the dark…

  Until Swanson caught hold of Jennifer’s shoulders, and firmly pulled her away and held her, and whispered things in her ears that Darcy could only barely hear. He soothed the raging ghost of Orson Bylow’s wife and embraced her in a way that could only be described as intimate. These two had loved each other in life, and they had continued to love each other in death through all these decades. Now Darcy understood why the ghosts in this house had lasted here for so long without turning crazy, evil, and insane. They had been keeping each other together, so to speak.

  Love was eternal. Love transcended the separation between life and death.

  These two were in love. Now, and forever.

  Not that Jennifer seemed all that stable…then again, how unstable would she have been without Swanson by her side? That was the real question.

  She watched as Jennifer’s ghost collected herself again, luminescent in the dark. She nodded to something Swanson said, and then turned away, and dissipated into the shadows. Just like that, she was gone.

  Darcy’s hands were shaking as she felt around for her cellphone on the floor. She activated the flashlight app again, and it lit the stones up around her. Swanson stood there, waiting to see what Darcy would do next.

  T
hat was the whole question right there. What was she going to do next?

  “Well, I’m not going to be able to do anything until I get out of here.”

  She forced her hands to be still, and the light to be steady. Jennifer’s mood swings had really frightened her, but she had to keep it together. She was so close now. She just needed a few more clues. Starting with where this passageway went.

  Swanson held his hands up, fingers spread, suddenly excited. He patted the air, looking over his shoulder, then back at her, before rushing over to the wall at the dead end.

  He only tripped once, but when he did it took his feet right out from under him and he spun around in the air. If he’d been alive, it would have been a feat of acrobatics impressive enough to make any Olympic gymnast jealous.

  When he came down, he was on his knees, pointing at one of the flat stones in the floor.

  Darcy stared at him blankly. He wasn’t moving. He was just kneeling there, pointing at that one stone. It was smaller than most of the others, maybe a foot across, nearly a perfect square. That was pretty impressive, considering it would have been cut out of the quarry by hand in the 1800s. Other than that, it just looked like a stone.

  Swanson looked back over his shoulder at her, and all Darcy could do was shake her head. He tapped the stone again. Darcy shook her head.

  He tapped the stone again…

  And that was when Darcy got it.

  She felt so stupid. When she came to this end of the passageway and saw a stone wall, she’d thought she was trapped. She’d checked the walls all around for some kind of a concealed release to open a door. She hadn’t found one but when she asked Swanson to show her the way out, he still passed right through that dead end like that was the way.

  Which it was.

  Not only that, but the way to open the door had been here the whole time as well. She was just looking in the wrong place.