by K. J. Emrick
“Tell me about it, sis,” Grace said. She was sitting up, on the floor as well, and Darcy could see her through the legs of the table holding Addison, who had somehow managed to fall back asleep, curled up into her mother like nothing had happened at all. “What just happened?”
“I’m not sure,” Darcy answered truthfully. Had she really been listening to baby Addison’s thoughts before? Was that even possible? She rubbed her temples and decided that she should only tackle one impossible thing at a time. “Jon, where’s Helen?”
“I’m right here,” Helen said, sitting up in her place at the head of the table, her chair turned upright again. Her hands trembled as she held them in front of her, several of the nails broken ragged and bleeding. Blood had smeared down her arms. Andrew was kneeling next to her, holding a small wastebasket lined with a plastic bag. From the smell, Darcy figured Helen had used it a couple of times already. “I mean, I’m here now. Darcy,” she whispered, “what was that?”
“It was a ghost,” Darcy said. “That much I’m sure of.”
“How?” Helen looked like she was about to be violently sick again and Andrew moved the bucket closer. “Oh, Dear God, what’s going on?”
Darcy had seen possessions before. They weren’t always pleasant for the person being possessed but she didn’t remember ever seeing an event this powerful. The ghost had forced its presence on all of them, like a velvet glove reaching in to squeeze their brains. Darcy’s head felt like it had been wrung through a juicer.
“Does your head hurt like this?” she asked Jon.
“Yes,” he said in a quiet voice that didn’t carry past her ears. “That was completely freaky, Darcy. Can you answer Helen’s question? Do you know what just happened?”
She felt like reminding him that he was the detective, but they both knew this was her area of expertise. “I’ll need to check on a few things. That ghost…I’ve felt that presence before. That spirit. In the Town Hall. It’s the one I’ve been telling you about from the Town Hall.”
“The Pilgrim’s Ghost? The one that’s been making you avoid the place like the plague?”
She opened her mouth to argue with him that she hadn’t been doing that but really, he was right. She could have investigated that haunting long before now. All of her excuses about not having time really only meant one thing. She was afraid. Afraid like she’d never been before in her life.
“I know this much,” she said, “that ghost really, really needed to talk to us if it was able to hijack Helen’s body to do it. That kind of means a very strong entity.”
He eyed her, and she realized why. She’d called this spirit an entity. Not a ghost, not a soul, not the dearly departed. Entity. It had a very negative and menacing connotation to it. Darcy hadn’t used that word on purpose, but it fit perfectly with what she had just felt.
“Oh, come on, Darcy,” Andrew said angrily. “You would skip right to possession. Don’t you think that just maybe my Helen is stressed or tired or something?”
Darcy didn’t try to argue with him. Very few of the people in town believed her when she talked about these things. It didn’t matter if the evidence was right in front of them. It didn’t matter what Andrew had just seen or experienced. He wanted an easy, understandable answer.
“Andrew, hush,” Helen said gently. She let him lean her head against his shoulder. Her color looked better, to Darcy’s eyes, but she was obviously drained by what the possession had done to her.
Jon didn’t try to argue with Andrew, either. “What concerns me is what you said at the end there. Helen, could you hear yourself?”
She shook her head no, curling her hand into the front of Andrew’s shirt for comfort. “I could see everything, but it was all blurry, and there was just this violent ringing noise in my ears.”
“You said…um.” It was Andrew who started to answer. He faltered and then drew a shaky breath and tried again. “You said that one of us will be condemned to kill.”
She looked up into his eyes, then over at Darcy. “What does that mean?”
“Helen, I wish I knew. I just don’t. Let me look into some things. There might be a way for me to contact this spirit without him, you know, using you to threaten your friends.”
Helen sat up straighter, trying in the midst of an impossibly uncertain situation to look certain. She nodded her head curtly. “Thank you. That would be very helpful.”
Getting back to her feet with Jon’s help, Darcy looked around the room at each of them. “For now, I don’t think we should tell anyone about this. All of you know a little bit of the things I can do. My gifts. You know that I use them to help people.”
Grace’s face was sour. Aaron’s was blank, and Darcy imagined he was remembering the awful few days when he had been kidnapped and Darcy had used her gifts to help find him. Andrew averted his eyes. Helen’s lip quivered.
When she looked at Jon, there was quiet encouragement in his eyes. He took her hand in his and held it tightly and it gave her the courage to go on. Knowing that he was with her no matter what they came up against made her feel stronger.
“Anyway,” she continued after a deep breath, “I will figure this out. You just need to give me some time. And trust me, don’t tell anyone, because they either won’t believe us or they’ll think we’re crazy.”
“I can see why,” Andrew muttered.
Darcy ignored him. That was the typical reaction from “normal” people dealing with ghosts and the afterlife. Denial.
It didn’t matter. Whatever Andrew wanted to believe or didn’t want to believe didn’t change the facts. They were dealing with a hostile entity—yes, entity—and if Darcy didn’t figure out what to do about him there would be worse trouble than what they had just seen.
Trouble.
She remembered a vision her Great Aunt had sent her just a few weeks ago in a dream. Aunt Millie had warned Darcy that trouble was coming, and she’d been worried that Darcy might not be ready for it. In fact, Darcy had been scared to death by the look on her aunt’s face.
If this was the trouble that Millie was warning her about, they were all in serious danger.
“Come on,” Jon said to her. “We should get home. I imagine there’s some book reading you’ll want to do.”
“Definitely.” Darcy leaned on him for support. “Helen, I’m sorry this happened to you. I’ll do everything I can to find out what’s going on. Okay? I need to look into my aunt’s books. Maybe she knew something that could help us.”
She needed to look through the history books, too. Maybe rereading that story about the Pilgrim Ghost would help. There might have been some detail she missed. There had to be something else about Nathaniel Williams written down somewhere, didn’t there? He thought Misty Hollow was his town. His name must be mentioned somewhere.
Grace and Aaron said their goodbyes as well, promising to keep in touch to make sure Helen was all right. Darcy took a moment to stroke baby Addison’s cheek. Had she heard Addison’s voice? Really? She didn’t know, but she did know that Addison had been affected by the ghostly visitation just like the rest of them had. On such a young mind, that sort of thing could leave a lasting impression.
“What time is it?” Aaron asked, looking up at the clock in the entryway hall. “That can’t be right. Can it?”
Darcy looked at the clock. It read several hours after what she thought it should have. Six o’clock. Some five hours later than what it had been just before Andrew had brought out those desserts. Where had that time gone?
“Did we all pass out?” Darcy asked. “All of us?”
“I know I did,” Aaron said, checking his watch against the clock on the wall over and over. Grace and Jon and even Helen nodded that they had passed out, too.
So…all of them had passed out and lost five hours or more of their day. Darcy had never heard of anything like that, either in her aunt’s journals or from any other source. How could that happen?
“I guess,” Jon said, grumbling as he opene
d the front door to Helen’s house, “that we’re all lucky we’re not…dead…”
Darcy saw it as soon as she stepped out onto the porch next to Jon. On the front lawn, surrounded by pretty flowers, with the bird bath bubbling away cheerfully, a body lay in the manicured grass. A woman, on her back, her hands crossed over her chest and her lifeless eyes staring at the clear sky above. Blood stained her white blouse across her stomach where multiple stab wounds had torn the fabric. Her hands and arms were stained red. Dark hair lay bunched beneath her head like a pillow. A blue skirt settled perfectly over her legs even though the left one had been broken below the knee, the foot twisted at an awkward angle and the femur bone sticking out through the flesh.
“Oh my God,” Grace said, slowly. Aaron put his hands on her shoulders, his face pale.
“I’ll call it in,” Jon said, already digging into his jeans for his cell phone. “Aaron, go back inside with Helen and Andrew. Tell them to stay inside. Grace, go with them, okay?”
Darcy stared at the body. There was no sense in checking for a pulse or trying CPR. Death’s pallor had already claimed whoever this was. A dead body. Here on the lawn. Dumped outside of the house while all of them had been passed out inside.
Or had they?
One of you will be condemned to kill, the ghost of Nathaniel Williams had warned them. Now here was death at their doorstep.
One of them was the murderer.
But…who?
She felt cold all over, and numb, and scared. What had happened here?
A shiver of movement caught Darcy’s attention. Looking past the dead woman, over to the hedge rows with their colorful flowers, she saw tendrils of ground fog snaking their way out of the shadows. Mists, gathering and thickening as evening drew closer.
Trouble wasn’t just coming to Misty Hollow. It had already found them.
Chapter Three
The six of them agreed to a simple story before anyone else showed up. They had been inside at a lunch party and didn’t hear anything. They didn’t discover the poor dead woman until they came outside to leave. Not all of them were happy with the idea of lying. Grace argued against it but Jon and Aaron were able to point out the problems with truthfully reporting that they had been attacked by a ghost who had possessed one or more of their group and then made one of them commit murder.
All of them were suspects now. They had to stick together until they could figure out what had really happened. It helped that there were exactly two other houses on this street, and no one had been home at either one. So. No witnesses.
Which was good and bad. On the one hand, it helped make their story sound more plausible since no one could contradict it. Then again, it would have been nice to talk to someone who had actually seen something. At least then Darcy would know where to start looking for clues.
Jon didn’t like the idea of going back home and pretending their lives were normal but they really didn’t have any other choice. Detective Wilson Barton had asked his questions and the uniformed officers had taken crime scene photos and collected their evidence and the woman’s body had been taken away to the hospital over in Meadowood where an autopsy would tell them more. There was nothing left for the six of them to do.
Nothing, except figure out which one of them was a killer. That part would be up to Darcy.
She stifled a yawn behind the back of her hand and closed the book she had been reading. It went onto the stack to her right. The next one came off the stack on her left, and she started looking through this one page by page just like she had the four others before it.
Lying on her stomach on the living room floor of her own house, Darcy tapped her pencil against the yellow writing pad where she was taking careful notes. Not that there was much to take notes on so far. As soon as they’d gotten home she’d started pulling books from their shelves and from her closet and then she’d set herself up here, her feet kicked up in the air, ready to dive into this mystery.
So far, she hadn’t found much of anything that was helpful.
Misty Hollow had been incorporated as a town back in 1846. Before that, the area had been named something else. Nothing she had here at the house told her much about the town before that. It had been settled, people came to live here, and then the name had been changed and the town had begun to grow up into what they knew Misty Hollow to be today.
And that was as far as she had gotten.
Twisting a strand of her hair she read through a couple of paragraphs on the page in front of her, then flipped to another section. Then another. Then she sighed and slammed the book shut. “This is useless.”
“You can’t find anything at all?” Jon asked from where he was sacked out on the couch. He’d flipped through the television channels for a few minutes after unsuccessfully trying to get her to eat something. He’d shut it off again after finding nothing that could hold his attention, but he’d stayed here in the living room with her just to keep her company.
“I can find bits and pieces of fun facts,” she grumbled. “In ancient Jewish tradition, wandering spirits called Dybbuks could possess people. There was a whole exorcism ritual performed by the Baal Shem to cleanse the spirits out of people. Catholics have been performing exorcisms of demons since the 1500s and I’ve even got a few examples as recent as the 1970s.”
“I didn’t think Jews believed in the Devil and demons,” Jon pointed out.
“They don’t. It’s the Catholics and other religions that believe possessions always involve demons.”
“So…we’re thinking this was a demon?”
She looked at him slantways with her eyebrows lowered and her lips pressed together.
“No. Of course not.” He sat up straighter and spread his hands out helplessly. “Because that would be just plain crazy.”
“I could do without the sarcasm, thank you.” Darcy sighed, realizing she didn’t have any reason to be mad at Jon. “Sorry. I’m just a little tense, I guess. I can’t figure this out. Possessing spirits aren’t always evil, no, but in this case I think there’s a strong argument to say Nathaniel Williams isn’t a friendly ghost.”
“Definitely not getting that Casper vibe.”
“No. Definitely not. Helen’s in danger and we’re all suspects in a murder even if no one but us knows it. I’m supposed to be the expert on all things ghosts and I can’t figure this out!”
She slammed her fists into the carpeted floor and immediately wished she hadn’t. The floor underneath was hard. The sides of her hands tingled painfully.
Jon softened his tone. “Okay. I’m sorry, too. We’re all stressed. Well, what about that thing you do to find out if people are guilty? Where you hold their hands and look for signs of blood on their hands?”
She thought it was cute how he tried to understand the things she could do. The technique he was talking about allowed her to see if people were feeling guilty about something they had done. She would be able to “see” spiritual, figurative blood on the hands of the guilty. It was a technique her Great Aunt Millie had laid out in a book she’d written on the subject of the paranormal. It had come in handy more than once, but it wouldn’t help them here.
“That only works if the person actually feels guilty about something,” she explained. She’d told him this same thing before, but she couldn’t blame him for not understanding the finer points of her gift. She didn’t even understand everything she could do yet. “If a person doesn’t feel bad about killing someone, then there’s no blood on their hands. In our case we were all passed out. If we don’t even know what we did, or if we did anything at all, then there’s no way for us to feel guilty about it.”
He pursed his lips in thought. “I see what you mean. Do we really know if everyone was passed out? I mean, one of us had to still be awake, right? If one of us went off and killed someone then they had to be awake for it.”
“If we were possessed, then whoever did it might not have been consciously aware of what they were doing, awake or not.” Sh
e shrugged and rolled over onto her back. “Just like how Helen couldn’t remember what she said to us because it was the ghost speaking through her. No memory of committing a sin, no guilt. I can try, I guess, but I don’t know what good it would do.”
An idea was nagging at her, but she couldn’t quite think it through. Something either she or Jon had just said. She was getting an idea. Half an idea, anyway.
“None of us had real blood on our hands either,” Jon pointed out, interrupting her thoughts. “Not the spiritual kind. The real stuff. There were a lot of cuts in that woman’s abdomen. It was like a scene out of the Orient Express.”
Murder on the Orient Express, Agatha Christie’s novel about her super detective Hercule Poirot. Darcy so wished she had some of that mystery solving prowess to help her now. “I know. This one is different than our usual mysteries. Ghosts don’t leave physical evidence behind.”
“Actually…” Jon rubbed his fingers along his chin. “Come to think of it Helen did have blood on her hands, didn’t she? Her arms, too. Remember?”
“Sure, but that was because she tore her fingernails on the table when she was in that trance.” That was all it was. Darcy was sure of it.
“So we’re back to the same question. Are we really sure we were all passed out? I mean, I know I was. I trust you when you say you were. Same with Grace and Aaron, but what about Helen and Andrew?”
Darcy admitted she had to at least consider the question. “I’m sure, if Helen says she was passed out, then she was. Andrew…I trust Andrew. I’ve known him for a while now and I’ve never known him to be dishonest. If he says he was passed out, then he was.”
“Wait,” Jon said. He held up his hand, looking down at the floor. She could see his eyes moving back and forth and she knew he was trying to remember something. She’d seen him use this technique any number of times when he was working on a case. “Did he say…I mean, did Andrew actually say he had passed out? I don’t remember him actually saying that. Do you?”