14 Christmas Spirit

by K. J. Emrick

  There was something haunting this spirit.

  Darcy waited to see if the woman wanted to say anything first, but the specter just stood there silent as, well, death. After a moment Darcy figured she would have to do most of the talking.

  "Hello," she said, adding a smile. She didn't get up, didn't make any move at all that could possibly spook…uh, frighten the ghost away. "My name is Darcy Sweet. You reached out to me tonight. Um, in my movie, actually. Do you need help?"

  The woman nodded, and that was all.

  "Okay. Well. Let's start with your name. What's your name?"

  The ghost didn't answer her. As Darcy watched, the clothes the woman was wearing changed. They shifted like smoke around her body, colors morphing, length and cut and style changing, until where sweatshirt and faded jeans had been a pair of black slacks and a blousy maroon top appeared. Pinned to the shirt was a gold nametag with a hotel emblem on it, and a name.

  Megan Bortchowski.

  "That will work," Darcy whispered, committing the name to memory. "All right, Megan. Let's figure out what I can do to help—"

  FIND ME.

  The words weren't so much spoken as hurled at Darcy. She felt the force of them and, real or not, her upper body was pushed back in a blast of hot air that blew her hair back over her shoulders and made her close her eyes.

  When she opened them again, Megan was standing closer.

  Her lips had never moved. They didn't move now.

  DARCY FIND ME PLEASE HELP ME HELP ME HELP ME!

  This time Darcy had to grit her teeth and lean into the psychic force of Megan's plea. Find her, the ghost had practically demanded.

  All well and good. Except, why did a ghost need to be found? How could a ghost be lost, for Pete's sake?

  She fought down the urge to point at Megan and blurt out "found you!" Obviously there was more to it than that. The ghost didn't need to be found, so that meant…

  Oh.

  Darcy understood now. Of course. Something like that certainly would be disturbing enough to keep a person's spirit caught between worlds, unable to move on to their final rest. Jon would need to know about this.

  "All right, Megan," Darcy said, catching her breath now that the ghost had fallen silent. "I understand. I can help you, if you let me."

  Megan nodded. Find me.

  She said it quietly enough this time that the words were just a gentle caress against Darcy's ears. It was still eerie to hear Megan talk without physically moving her lips, but that was ghosts for you. "Good. Now let's get a little more information, all right?"

  Help me.

  "I understand. I will, I promise. Just let me ask—"

  Find me.

  Talking with ghosts wasn't like having a conversation with a living person. Ask a living person a question, they generally tried to answer you. A ghost almost always told you only what they thought was important, whether it answered the question at hand or not. Megan wanted desperately to be found. That's what she kept saying. That was what was important to her, and she was apparently stuck on that like an MP3 player set on repeat.

  "Megan, listen to me," Darcy tried.

  Help me. Louder, more insistent.

  "Megan—"

  Help me.

  "—I need to know—"

  Help me!

  "—just—"

  Help me!

  "—a little bit more. Please."

  FIND ME!

  The force behind those two words ripped into Darcy with the weight of a tidal wave, heavy and impossible to turn aside. It knocked her back, flat against the imagined surface of this inbetween place, holding her down with the fury of the Megan's continued shout. She floated closer and closer, as Darcy struggled and fought to regain her control. Struggled, and failed.

  Megan floated over her, screaming her plea loudly from behind closed lips, her presence pressing down on Darcy, holding her fast.

  When she got close enough, Darcy looked up into the shadows that obscured Megan's eyes.

  Eyes that simply weren't there.

  Darcy screamed and fought as hard as she could to get up, to get away, to pull herself out of the trance. She tensed every muscle of her body, straining with all her might.

  In her hands, the DVD broke in two, snapping the link she had created between herself and Megan.

  She opened her eyes in a panic, gasping for air, pinwheeling her arms, not sure where she was or what was happening.

  "Darcy!" Jon's voice. He was there immediately, holding her, grasping her arms and pulling her into him where he knelt next to her. "Darcy, be careful. You'll knock the candles over."

  The candles. Their living room. The communication. She was in her living room still, right where she had been. She was out of the trance. Jon was holding her, and everything was all right.

  In her hands she held the DVD of Meet Joe Black, broken into two pieces.

  A furry weight bumped against her left knee. Smudge had come to comfort her as well. The two most important guys in her life. What would she do without them?

  "I'm okay, Jon," she told him, hugging him with her one arm, dropping the pieces of her favorite movie. For Smudge, she scratched around his neck and under his chin, listening to him purr. "I'm okay. That was just pretty intense."

  "More than usual, you mean?" Jon asked her.

  "More than some, yes." She shivered in his arms, then gently pushed him and Smudge back so she could get up. Jon had to help her get her balance until the circulation returned to her legs. "I know why our ghost was upset enough to jump into our movie. Her body hasn't been found. She's dead somewhere and no one knows where. For a ghost, that fact can be pretty traumatic."

  Jon managed to look skeptical and squeamish at the same time. "What?" he asked her when she smiled a familiar smile. "You know it still weirds me out when you talk about ghosts having feelings. So she's what, a victim? Murdered, do you think?"

  Darcy had wondered that same thing. "I think so. She's very upset. And there's something…terrifying about her. Like, she's terrified, I mean. Yes. I think someone killed her."

  FIND ME! Darcy heard those words again in her mind, screamed across the distance between death and life, and another shiver ran up her spine.

  "Well," Jon said, rubbing his chin, "we haven't had a murder in Misty Hollow in a few months now. I guess we were overdue."

  "Very funny," she told him drily. "I didn't get a whole lot from her. She wasn't the talkative type, I guess you might say. She let me know why she needed help, and she let me know her name. Then she scared me to death and screamed a lot."

  "All right, let's start with that, then." He led them both over to the couch and sat down next to Darcy. "What was her name?"

  She pulled her sweater down further over her legs, over her knees. She was colder than she realized. Smudge jumped up into her lap and purred and nestled down into a big round ball, lending his warmth to her. "Thanks, Smudge. Okay. Well, she didn't actually tell me her name. It was on a tag she was wearing in my vision. Megan Bortchowski. That's all I got from her."

  Jon's eyes widened and she could have sworn his face paled by degrees.

  "Jon? What is it?"

  "You're sure about the name? Megan Bortchowski?"

  "Yes, I'm sure." She searched his eyes, wondering what had him so uneasy. "Why?"

  He nodded, like he should have expected this. "That's the name of the missing person the Chief asked me to look into. It's the same girl."

  Chapter Three

  The Misty Hollow Police Department was a one story building near the center of town, not far from the park and the shops and the Town Hall that was still under reconstruction two months after it had burned to the ground. Again.

  Darcy still felt bad about that, but it wasn't like she had intentionally set the Hall on fire.

  The front entry doors to the police station were tall panes of glass framed by metal. They were only locked at night, when anyone needing police assistance would have to call 911 or push
the button on the call box next to the doors and hope someone was in the station and not out on a call. They definitely weren't very secure, being made of glass, but they only allowed a person to get to the front lobby, where another door kept anyone from getting inside.

  This early in the morning the doors were already open. Seven-thirty seemed a lot earlier to Darcy than it used to when she was a high school student sneaking out of her Aunt Millie's house to go hang out with friends.

  She smiled at the memory. Millie had always pretended not to know, but Darcy had come to realize later in life that her aunt knew exactly what she was doing and who she was doing it with. Millie had kept tabs on her niece without smothering her. Darcy was grateful, looking back, for the opportunities to make her own mistakes.

  Now, she and Jon stepped through the tall glass doors to the department lobby. The freshly mopped white tile floor made her sneakers squeak. At the front desk, behind the courtesy window, Sergeant Sean Fitzwallis sat reading the morning newspaper. A cup of coffee steamed on the desk next to his elbow. Sean had been an officer here in town for as long as Darcy could remember. His gray hair was still thick and wavy, even though his body had begun to look thinner with age. He was long past the point of being able to retire, but now that his wife was deceased and his kids had all moved away, he seemed to spend a lot of time here at the station.

  His pale blue eyes looked up from the paper. When he saw it was them, he smiled and waved. "Morning, you two. You know it's the weekend, right?"

  "Crime doesn't punch a clock," Jon said, returning Sean's smile. Darcy had heard him use that phrase any number of times before.

  "Yup," Fitzwallis agreed. "I've heard the same thing, too. Don't work too hard, Jon."

  He buzzed them through into the back area of the department where the officers had their desks. Past that, down another short hallway, the interview rooms and holding cells stood empty and waiting for the next big case.

  The officer's room was an open area with individual desks for the detectives to work at and then shared desks for the uniformed officers to use when they were on duty. There were two officers here now, just getting ready for their shifts at a desk at the far side of the room, huddled over a computer screen to read a report. Their dark uniforms had the Misty Hollow town emblem on the left shoulder patch, and the American flag on the right. Darcy knew them, sort of. They were younger officers fresh faced and quite new to the department. Blake and Shane, she remembered, although their last names escaped her. They both nodded a quick greeting then went back to the incident report.

  Jon went right to his desk and sat down. Darcy checked her little gold wristwatch with the painted hearts at the twelve and the six. "When was Joe supposed to meet you?" Chief Joe Daleson was an early riser, but it was the weekend, after all.

  "He said to be here at eight," Jon said. "Another twenty minutes or so. Gives us plenty of time to look through the case file which should be…here."

  He found the manila folder at the corner of his desk on top of a short stack of others that all looked exactly the same, with names and case numbers written or typed in the tab. Darcy sat down on the opposite side of the desk, and together they started looking into the disappearance of Megan Bortchowski.

  Megan's girlfriend was the one who had reported her missing. Blair Clinton. She called the Misty Hollow Police Department yesterday, when she hadn't heard from Megan in a week. They lived at an address on Lavine Street. That was one of the nicer residential areas in town.

  "Do you know either of them?" Darcy asked.

  "No." Jon was turning another page. "I don't recognize either name.

  "I wonder if Grace knows them?"

  "Worth asking," Jon muttered, still reading. Darcy knew that his trained police eye would pick out more details than she could ever hope to. "Hm. Megan isn't from Misty Hollow. She's originally from Cider Hill."

  "Izzy's home town? Well. What are the chances of that, do you suppose?"

  Jon shrugged. Their next door neighbor Izzy and the missing girl, both from the same town. Coincidences did happen, his shrug said. "Everyone has to be from somewhere. It might be worth talking to Izzy, too. Maybe she knows the family or might know something about Megan, even."

  "You mean other than how her ghost likes to hop into movies." Darcy's attempt at sarcasm fell flat. Her good friend Isabelle McIntosh—Izzy—worked at her bookstore with her. She had escaped an abusive relationship and left Cider Hill to go into hiding here in Misty Hollow. She was finally fitting into town, with her daughter Lilly, and the thought of reminding them about their former life didn't make Darcy very happy. Jon was right, though. They would have to follow up every lead they could. Izzy would understand, and hopefully be eager to help.

  "So why did Blair wait a week before she reported Megan missing?" Darcy asked.

  Jon flipped a page in the report. "Good question."

  "I pick up a few things by living with a police detective."

  "Is that so?" Jon asked her, the corner of his mouth turning up in a smile. "Like what?"

  "Like how to kiss the right way. Turns out police detectives are really good kissers."

  He sat up a little straighter and now his smile touched his eyes. Darcy had meant what she said. Jon was the best by far out of any man she had ever kissed. It made her feel good to know she could still boost his ego in little ways like that.

  "It says here," Jon told her, "that Megan was gone for a few days. Blair expected her to come back by Thursday at the latest, and when she didn't, she called us. That's not unreasonable, I guess."

  "As long as you're willing to accept that her girlfriend wasn't worried about not hearing from her in all that time."

  "Which I'm not ready to accept."

  "Me either," Darcy agreed. "That's suspicious in my book."

  "Ah, the team of Darcy Sweet and Detective Jon Tinker," they heard Chief Daleson say. "Nice to see you two hard at it already."

  The Chief was just coming in through the door from the lobby, wearing black slacks and a crisp white dress shirt over his burly physique, the sleeves rolled up to his elbows. That was as close to weekend casual as Joe got. His balding head had recently been shaved tight to his scalp, and in a way he reminded Darcy a lot of a squat Jason Statham.

  "Hi, Joe," Darcy greeted him. "We only just got here ourselves. Has anyone interviewed the girlfriend yet?"

  He smiled at her in a fatherly way as he took a chair from another part of the room and joined them at Jon's desk. "No, not yet. We only got this call in yesterday, and I wanted the first person who spoke to her to be the detective on the case. You know, Miss Sweet, I really should put you on the payroll here. You think just like a cop sometimes."

  "No, she doesn't Chief," Jon argued. "She outthinks me, most times."

  Joe chuckled and Darcy rolled her eyes at Jon. "Well," she said, "when you run the place then you can hire me. How's that sound?"

  "You've got a deal," Jon told her without hesitation.

  Joe was oddly silent for a moment, then he reached over to point at the open folder in front of Jon. "We get requests to check on people's welfare all the time. We get lover's quarrels, too, where the boyfriend, or I guess girlfriend in this case, disappears. Usually it's nothing more than someone who wants to break up and isn't brave enough to do it in person. They cut off all contact with the other person and hope they get the message."

  "Do you think that's what we have here?" Jon asked.

  "I did at first." Joe sat back and shrugged his shoulders. "Don't anymore. You see what I saw yet?"

  Jon flipped through the pages for a few seconds, but Darcy could see that he already knew what the Chief was talking about.

  Tapping a finger against the incident report page, Jon read aloud. "Ex-boyfriend. Neilson Daye. Blair gave us his name because she thought Megan might be there. Address and phone number are here, too, over on Birch Lane. Low income housing apartments. History of domestic incidents between him and Megan. Did someone talk to Mister
Daye yet?"

  "Yup," Joe said. "I did. Not because I think it's strange for a girl to have a boyfriend one week and a girlfriend the next, either. I'm not like that. I just figured I should at least give him a call and find out if he'd heard from Megan."

  "I never would have thought any different, Chief," Jon promised. "How long did Neilson and Megan date?"

  "About eight months, according to Neilson. Then she broke it off and immediately took up with Blair." He shrugged again. "Kids."

  Darcy knew anyone younger than Joe qualified as a kid, in his eyes. Including her and Jon. She caught Jon's smirk and knew he was thinking the same thing, too.

  "So," Jon said, "you asked Nielson if he had seen Megan now on the off chance she was leaving Blair to go back to him. Makes sense. What did he have to say about it?"

  "He said no. Just what I expected him to say. Then, when I asked if a uniform officer could come over and do a follow up with him, he hung up on me."

  Darcy's eyebrow rose. "Not exactly civic minded of him."

  "Just what I thought," Joe agreed. "People have all sorts of things they want to hide from the police. But when the Chief of Police himself calls you up and asks about your missing ex-girlfriend, seems to me you do everything you can to prove you're not involved."

  "Unless you are," Jon finished the thought for him. "So how did we get this information about the ex-boyfriend?"

  "Sergeant Fitzwallis took it down from the original call. In fact, just about all of the information in there was stuff he either got directly from the girlfriend, Blair, or stuff that he dug up before he passed the complaint on to me. He's always been good at what he does."

  Jon shook his head in agreement. "He does keep this place running. Does he even take his days off anymore?"

  The Chief scratched the back of his scalp. "Tell you the truth I don't even remember when his days off are supposed to be. Sean just comes in to work and takes his tour at the desk. I feel bad for the guy. Guess I'd spend way too much time at work, too, if I lost my wife."