by K. J. Emrick
COPYRIGHT
First published in Australia by South Coast Publishing, December 2014.
Copyright K.J. Emrick (2014)
This is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents and locations portrayed in this book and the names herein are fictitious. Any similarity to or identification with the locations, names, characters or history of any person, product or entity is entirely coincidental and unintentional.
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Chapter One
The snow outside created a soft blanket of white across the ground. Moonlight shone silver across the unbroken surface. Trees stood tall and frail, their branches bare, their leaves long shed. It was a peaceful picture that Darcy Sweet looked out across, frozen in time.
Inside of her bedroom, it was nice and warm, with the furnace turned up and her fuzzy blue sweater to keep away the chills, but the forecast had been for a seasonal cold and last night's snowstorm certainly hadn't disappointed. Frost crawled in icy, criss-crossing lines over the window, and Darcy's breath fogged the glass as she leaned in to get a better view of the winter wonderland that had come to Misty Hollow.
Christmas was always one of her favorite times of the year. The crisp cold air, the bright decorations, the presents and the company of family and friends. It was a time to remember the good things she had been blessed with and to maybe forget the bad for a while. Christmas had always brought a sense of joy for her—even last year when a haunted Santa suit had led to murder and mystery—and Darcy was looking forward to this Christmas more so than most.
She was hosting dinner this year at her house. It had been a long time since the holiday dinner had been held here, but it only made sense. Her sister's apartment was pretty cramped. Now that Grace's first born was with them, she and Aaron didn't have the space or the time to organize a holiday gathering. Grace was back at work at the police station, too, leaving a hardworking Aaron to take care of things pretty much by himself. Not that he complained about it. Little baby Addison Darcy Wentworth was the apple of her father's eye.
There would be a lot of people at the table this year, too. Their mother was coming back into town after an extended honeymoon with her new husband. At the age of thirty Darcy was still a little unsure how she felt about having a new step-father. James was good to her mom. That was what mattered. Plus, their relationship had gone a long way toward fixing the rifts in Darcy's own relationship with her mother. Hard not to like the man for that.
So, add in Izzy and her daughter Lilly from next door, and the only place they really could have their dinner was right here. Unless they rented out Helen's café or Clara Barstow's deli and Darcy really didn't want to spend that kind of money if she didn't have to. Mixing her and Jon's finances when they moved in together had helped them both immensely, but there were still bills to pay. Both here at home and at her bookstore.
The reflection of her heart-shaped face stared back at her with soft green eyes. Puffing warm breath on the window again she fogged up a good sized area, then drew two parallel lines down, and two parallel lines across, making a tic-tac-toe board. Into the top right corner, she put an X.
Reaching past her, Jon drew an O in the center.
"You never take the middle square," he said. "Why is that?"
Putting another X below his O, she shrugged, her oversized sweater sliding down her arm and laying her shoulder bare. "Everyone goes for the center. People expect it. The only way to win a game like this is to do the unexpected."
They were in their bedroom, at the end of what had turned into a lazy Friday afternoon, and now Jon sat down next to her on the little padded bench Darcy had bought just last week. He was taller than her, even sitting down like this, and a very good looking man. Dark hair. Expressive blue eyes. Strong and smart and tender, and all of him belonged to her. He was in his pajama bottoms and an old blue t-shirt that read "POLICE" in faded letters across the chest. They had the whole weekend in front of them and nothing at all to spend their time on but each other.
Blocking her next move, he found himself caught when she was able to make a row in two directions at once. "See?" she said. "The unexpected wins the day."
He leaned down to kiss the top of her head, running his hands through her long dark hair and making her swoon pleasantly. This was the man she was going to marry in a few short months. She couldn't be happier to have him in her life.
"So, I may have to go into work tomorrow," he said, trying to sound casual.
"For Pete's sake, Jon," she growled dramatically. "We're having a moment here. Don't ruin it."
"Sorry, Sweet Baby. That phonecall I got before dinner? That was Chief Daleson asking me to come in to help with an investigation."
Darcy perked up, sitting up straighter, searching his eyes for any clue to what kind of investigation he might be getting called in for.
Shaking his head, he walked over to sit on the edge of the bed, facing her. "Now, don't get your hopes up. This one sounded pretty simple to me. It's a missing person case."
"But, Jon…"
"Darcy, I know things have been quiet in town recently…"
"Try boring," she corrected, folding her arms and pouting.
"Well, yes. I know. Isn't that a good thing?"
She blew a strand of hair away from her face. She knew she should be happy that there hadn't been a murder or a kidnapping or a psychotic ghost troubling Misty Hollow for nearly two months now. Not since the Town Hall had burned to the ground and Darcy had managed to exorcise a ghost that had inhabited the town for decades, festering and spreading its evil intent into people's minds.
Getting rid of the Pilgrim Ghost had given the town a moral cleansing, of sorts. Without that evil force twisting the good people in Misty Hollow life here had become downright idyllic.
Darcy didn't know what to do with her time anymore.
Bor-ing.
A blur of black and white fur flew across the bedroom floor and jumped up into her lap. Smudge, her big black and white tomcat, looked up at her with sympathy and put a paw up on her arm.
"See?" she said to Jon. "Even Smudge knows I'm going stir crazy."
"Or he just wants something to eat," Jon muttered.
Smudge looked at Jon with narrowed eyes and then shook his head vigorously, a cat's equivalent of "are you serious?" They could understand each other pretty well, her and Smu
dge, even if Jon hadn't learned how to speak the language yet.
Darcy laughed and scratched between Smudge's ears. "Fine. You can have your missing person investigation and I'll stay home with my favorite cat here. Maybe he'll let me read more Evanovich to him."
"Which one are you on now?" Jon asked her.
"Number Eleven. I don't know how I missed reading this series before now."
"You were always into the classics like Agatha Christie before, that's why. The newer detective series have never been your thing."
"Hm. You know me so well."
"Don't I?" he said with a smirk. "You still manage to surprise me every now and then."
"Only every now and then?"
He knew when to take a hint. "Okay, more like all the time. Seriously, though, if this case the Chief has for me is anything you can help me with, you'll be the first to know."
That was probably the best offer she was going to get. "I'm going to hold you to that. Why is he calling you in on your day off? I thought that was the whole point in promoting Wilson to be a third detective for the Department?"
"Sure, but his relationship with Lindsay is really getting serious. He's starting a week's vacation tomorrow and they are going to see his parents, if you can believe that."
Darcy bit her tongue. Jon's relationship with his own family was strained at best. Arresting his sister and sending her back to prison hadn't helped things with the rest of the Tinker clan. She didn't blame Jon in the least for what he had done. In fact, she kind of admired him for it. Making sure a murderer faced justice wasn't always an easy thing to do. Even less so, when that murderer was your own sister.
The thing was, she had been trying to find some way to talk about inviting his mom to Christmas dinner for a while now. So far it had seemed like a mountain neither of them could cross. Every time she even came close to bringing up the idea, Jon would change the subject, like he knew what she was going to ask and wanted no part of it.
They couldn't invite his dad. He was still in prison, and would be for another few years. His mom was the only immediate family who still had the liberty to answer an invite to dinner. Not that she was his real mom, of course. Jon's real mother had died when he was about three years old. It was one of the first things she had found out about him, back when they had only just met, and she had proven to him that she actually did have certain paranormal talents that could help him solve a case.
For the longest time, Jon had kept his family a secret from her. It wasn't until that fateful moment when his sister Aimee had shown up in Misty Hollow standing over a dead body that he had been forced to tell her everything.
How his dad had remarried, and how that woman had become so close to Jon that he had just eventually started calling her "mom." How his dad had then gone to prison and his sister had ran away, and how everything piling up had started to break their family apart.
That was when he’d started spending a lot of time with his grandmother; slowly drifting away from the woman he’d considered his mother. His grandmother been the only constant in his mixed up life back then, teaching him how to cook and look after himself.
There was a lot wrong in Jon's family, and having to open that old wound had caused problems in the relationship between him and Darcy, but eventually it had made them stronger. They'd worked through all of that, and more, and Darcy thought it was time to take another step forward by bringing Jon's step-mother into their lives.
This might be the best chance she would get to ask him.
"Uh, Jon…"
"Are we buying a real tree this year or can I finally convince you to use an artificial one?" he asked, once again blocking her before she could even get the words out of her mouth. "I know you like the real thing, but the artificial ones they have nowadays are just as pretty and they last for years. Instead of paying forty dollars every year for a tree we could spend a hundred now and not have to worry about it ever again."
Darcy smiled a crooked smile. She would find her opening to ask him about this. If not now, then soon. "Well, we can at least look at the fake trees, if you want."
"Really? Well all right then. How about tomorrow? Once I get done at the station, that is. It really shouldn't take all that long. I'll just look over the case notes in the file and see if there's any leads that the uniformed guys have missed. Then I'll come right back here."
Smudge pushed his head against her hand. She got the feeling he understood Jon's reluctance to talk about his family, too. "That sounds good to me," she told him, letting the matter drop.
"Then it's a date." He clapped his hands together like they had just made the most important decision in the world. Standing up from the bed, he held his hand out to Darcy. "Now, then. I believe I promised you popcorn and a movie tonight. Did you decide what you want to watch yet?"
Scooping Smudge up into her left arm, Darcy let Jon help her up. "Something with romance, and humor, and a serious but lighthearted look at the way we view the hereafter."
He pulled a face. "So, Meet Joe Black again?"
She managed, barely, to keep from laughing at him on their way out of the bedroom. "I was thinking more along the lines of What Dreams May Come. You know. With Robin Williams? But if you're going to insist on Meet Joe Black then I won't argue with you."
"How many times have you seen this movie?"
"No more than twenty. Maybe thirty."
They headed downstairs. Their bedroom was on the second floor of the big house that had once belonged to her Great Aunt Millie. Darcy had put as many of her own touches into the place as she could but sometimes it still felt like she was that little girl again, sleeping over at her aunt's house. Like she was an invited guest who could use the place for as long as she wanted to, so long as she understood that it really belonged to someone else.
Someone else who was still around, for that matter.
Millie had been keeping mostly to the bookstore for the last month or more, and even her appearances there were few and far between. For a spirit who wasn't afraid to remind people she was still around, her silence was uncharacteristic. Darcy hadn't thought of it that way before, but now she knew she would have to corner Millie's ghost and ask her about it. So to speak.
After all, that was kind of her thing.
The stairs led directly into the living room, with its matching white couch and love seats, its low wooden coffee table, the bookshelves with paperback thrillers standing beside books on paranormal conjuring techniques, and framed photographs on the wall of her and Jon and Smudge. The photographs were a recent addition to the décor. Now that she and Jon were in a loving and committed relationship—again—showing that off to the world seemed like the right thing to do.
Jon walked over with her and plopped down in one of the two armchairs. "We watching it from video or from the DVR?"
"Ooh, video. Has to be video," she insisted, sitting down on the couch with her legs tucked up under her and Smudge the cat comfortably arranged on her lap. "That way we can look through all of the deleted scenes, too."
"You know those are scenes that aren't supposed to be in the movie, right?"
"They could have been in the movie," she protested. "Sometimes they only get cut so the movie can stay under a certain length of time."
"And sometimes they get cut out because the director decides to go in a whole new direction. Ever watch the deleted scenes from Constantine?" He scratched at his chest for a moment. "Can you imagine if they let authors do that with books? Extra scenes at the end of the novel that didn't make it into the final edit?"
Darcy laughed at the idea. That would be crazy and awesome all at the same time. Alternate endings to books like the Hobbit, or extended scenes for Beautiful Creatures. Hm. Maybe this was an idea that the publishing companies should look into, she thought.
Jon bounced back up from his chair and went over to the bookshelf next to the stairs where their limited DVD collection was stacked on the bottom-most shelf. Neither of them had much time f
or watching movies, but they both had their favorites. She was more of a romantic story girl while Jon liked his action flicks. All in all there was probably eleven or twelve movies over there, only four of which the two of them could watch together.
Smudge purred in her lap, stretching himself out luxuriously. He'd been enjoying how much time Darcy got to spend with him now that things in town had calmed down. Darcy stroked his fur and rubbed his ears while Jon took the movie out of its case and slid it into the DVD player.
Their television set was a small flat screen sitting on top of a little cabinet next to the fireplace. They hadn't had the time to start a fire today, with both of them at work, but Darcy was looking forward to getting it going this weekend, and wrapping herself up in a blanket, and spending way too much time on the couch with Jon. They could talk about their upcoming Christmas dinner plans, and their upcoming wedding plans, and the weather, and how much they had enjoyed their trip back up to the cabin in Bear Ridge over Thanksgiving, and anything else in the world besides ghosts and murder.
Maybe Jon was right. Maybe boring wasn't all that bad after all. She hadn't really ever had the chance to have a normal life, not with her abilities to see and speak with ghosts. Ever since puberty, ever since she had come here to this house to live with her Great Aunt Millie as a teenager when it became obvious that her own mother wasn't going to accept her for who she was, Darcy's life had been anything but normal. As her abilities had developed and she had learned to use them instead of hide from them, she had been able to be around people again and have friends and even find love and get married. Jeff, her ex-and-now-deceased husband, had been a great disappointment in her life, but at least she'd taken her shot at love.
Now she was doing the same thing with Jon. Taking a chance. If it wasn't for what her Great Aunt Millie had done for her, it wouldn't have been possible. Now that Millie was deceased, her spirit still hung around town, helping Darcy and guiding her whenever she needed it. Darcy scrunched her eyebrows down, remembering all of the spirits she had helped pass over to the other side. Not Millie, though. Millie didn't seem to want to go anywhere. Didn't she owe it to her aunt more than anyone else, Darcy argued with herself, to make sure she went on to her final rest?