K.J. Emrick - Darcy Sweet 13 - Ghost Story

by K. J. Emrick

  “It doesn’t mean she ever spoke to our victim,” Jon argued. “One of the secretaries could have fielded those calls.”

  “Not likely,” Joe said with a shake of his head. “Not that many of them.”

  “Okay, true, it’s unlikely, but that doesn’t mean it couldn’t have happened that way.”

  Drumming his fingers, Joe nodded. “You’re right, of course. That’s all circumstantial. Nothing that we could convict on. We’ll have to wait for that fingerprint report to come back before we can be sure of a conviction. We do have enough to make an arrest right now, and that’s what I wanted your opinion on, Jon. This is the mayor we’re talking about. The mayor of the entire town of Misty Hollow. No good can come of arresting the mayor, especially after we had to arrest her husband, who was mayor at the time himself. The people of this town have had enough of scandal and murder to last them a lifetime and I don’t want to add more to that. Not without good, solid evidence to back it up.”

  “So,” Jon said, slowly, “you’re asking my opinion?”

  “That’s why I brought you down here.” The Chief spread his hands wide like the point should have been obvious, and then leaned back in his chair.

  Darcy heard the long sigh of breath Jon let escape through his nose. Joe probably missed it, but Darcy knew Jon well enough to sense the waves of relief rolling off him. He and Darcy hadn’t been called down here for one of them to be arrested. Not only that, but Jon had the chance to keep any charges from being brought against Helen.

  At least for now.

  “Chief, I don’t think we have enough yet. We should get the fingerprint evidence, and maybe even bring Helen in for an official written statement.”

  “That might raise a few eyebrows,” Joe said. “I’m trying to avoid that.”

  “All right. Let me do it, then. I can be quiet about it and nobody will have to see her being brought down here to the station.”

  Joe considered the idea, shook his head slightly. After a few moments of silence where he seemed to have an internal argument with himself he turned to Darcy. “I asked you to come down, too, because I know Helen is a good friend of yours. You’ve helped us out more times than I can count, Darcy, and I trust your opinion.” He paused to take a deep breath. “If I went to Helen myself, just to talk, what do you think she’d do?”

  Darcy had to untie the knots in her tongue before she could speak. “You mean, do I think she’ll try to run away? No. Of course not. She’d welcome the chance to speak to you if it means clearing her name.”

  The frown that stole over Joe’s face was telling. “I’m glad to hear that, Darcy, but I really think it’s only a matter of time before I end up arresting her for this. I’m just delaying the inevitable. Lining up all my ducks in a row before I do anything.”

  “I think that’s smart, Chief,” Jon said quickly. “You don’t want to look like you’re going after an innocent woman.”

  Subtle, Darcy thought. Still, it did the trick. Chief Daleson nodded along to the thoughts in his head until he came to his conclusion. “Thanks. Both of you. I’ll try to put a rush on the fingerprinting guys, and in the meantime I’ll call and arrange a meeting with Helen. Either of you know where she is?”

  “I’m not sure,” Darcy lied.

  “All right. I’ll get ahold of her by phone. I don’t suppose I have to tell the two of you not to mention anything about this to Helen, right?”

  “Of course not,” Jon told him. Darcy recognized the lie in his voice. “We’ll keep this to ourselves. Anything else we can do to help?”

  “Actually, there might be,” Joe told him. He collected the photos back into the folder, making all the pages nice and neat and square before closing it up again. “Can I get both of you to stay here for just a bit longer? There’s one other thing I’d like you to see.”

  Darcy tried to check her My Little Pony watch without being obvious about it. The interview rooms didn’t have clocks in them on purpose, but she was very aware of how late it was getting. She needed to get to the Town Hall and perform the ritual. It had already been getting dark when they drove into town, and Jon’s headlights had reflected off wispy tendrils of fog crawling out of the shadows and dark places. The mists, rolling heavy and thick, feeding off the trouble that had come to town.

  The trouble her aunt had warned her about.

  “We had someplace to be, Chief,” Jon said carefully, “and you’ve had us here for over an hour as it is.”

  Joe held up a hand in an apologetic way. “Sorry. I know I’m taking up a lot of your time. I could really use your help, though. This is a big one for our town. One more in a long string of big ones, I suppose. Sort of makes a man think about retirement.”

  He looked at Jon as he said it, and Darcy had the feeling that there was more to his words than just idle conversation.

  “Anyway. Jon, Darcy, I think you’ll be able to help me with this other thing. Give me one more minute?”

  Jon didn’t look at Darcy, but she felt him hesitate, trying to figure some way to get her out of here so she could go and perform the exorcism and put an end to this whole mess. There really wasn’t much they could do without looking suspicious. Asking the Chief to excuse them for a moment while they went and cleansed the Town Hall of a psychopathic ghost probably wouldn’t go over very well.

  So, finally, Jon smiled and eased back into his seat. “Sure thing. You know I’m always here for you and the department.”

  “That’s what I like to hear,” Joe said with a broad smile. He got up from the table, collecting the folder as he did. “Just be a minute.”

  Jon waited for the door to the interview room to close before he turned to Darcy, head very close to hers, and whispered, “We need to warn Helen.”

  “We need to get out of here, Jon,” was her response. “I can’t do anything from in here!”

  “What if I could get you into a private room?” he asked in hushed tones. “If you locked the door and did the ritual here, would it still work?”

  “Maybe. But, I don’t have any of my supplies. Plus, the Pilgrim Ghost isn’t here. He’s somewhere out there in town doing God alone knows what! I need to go to where I’m sure the ghost will be.”

  “What, our house?”

  She shook our head. “No. The Town Hall. That’s where his spirit will be rooted in this world. It’s the surest, safest bet.”

  “Okay. So, we stay here and see what the Chief has for us, then get out of here.” He looked uncomfortable, and his hands held both of hers like he was afraid to let go. “It’s going to be full night by the time we get out of here. I’m not comfortable with you taking this thing on at night.”

  “I don’t know if we have a choice,” she argued. “Halloween is tomorrow. That means tonight is the night that Nathaniel Williams was killed all those years ago. If I don’t stop him now, I don’t know how strong he might get.”

  He blinked at her. “That another law of ghosts?”

  “Yes. It’s just as true as the law of gravity, believe me.”

  “I do, Darcy, I do.” He sat back up, looking up into the corner of the ceiling where an inconspicuous black plastic bubble sat suspended from the tiles. A surveillance camera. “Good. The red light is off. If it were on then it would be recording. Since it’s not…”

  He took out his cell phone and hit the first speed dial. Their house. It didn’t take long for the call to get answered.

  “Helen, it’s Jon. Stay in the house,” Darcy heard him say, still keeping his voice down. “Don’t answer the phone unless it’s my personal cell number.”

  After listening for a few seconds, he shook his head. “No. But the Chief suspects you, and the longer we can keep you away from him the better. It will give us a chance to stop the ghost and maybe prove who the killer is or isn’t on our own. What’s that? No. Don’t worry about what the Chief told us. Helen. Don’t worry. Seriously. It’s nothing. I’ll tell you all about it when we get back. Okay? All right. Stay inside, don�
�t answer the door, and don’t answer your phones. Unless it’s me or Darcy,” he added.

  After a quick goodbye he hung up and put the cell phone back in his pocket. Darcy eyed him levelly until he shrugged. “What?”

  “You lied to Helen just now. The evidence they have against her isn’t nothing. It’s a lot.”

  “I know.”

  “I mean, you did a good job of playing it down to Joe, but you’ve arrested people on less.”

  “I know,” Jon repeated. “Just, give me a moment to be glad it’s not you, okay?”

  Darcy couldn’t quite bring herself to smile. The evidence showed it wasn’t her. That was something to be happy about, but not at the cost of her friend being arrested. Especially for something that wasn’t her fault.

  “I don’t get the phone calls to her office, though,” Jon said, looking around nervously, waiting for the door to open up again at any moment. “Why wouldn’t Helen just tell us that she’d spoken to the victim before?”

  “She probably didn’t know. Remember, people who are possessed don’t always remember what they’ve done. It’s just possible that Bonnie Verhault spoke to the Pilgrim Ghost all those times, thinking it was Helen. Who knows, maybe Helen actually was on the phone some of the times I heard her in her office, just like the phone records show on that list we saw.”

  He took a slow breath. “That evidence is going to bury her.”

  “Looks like.” Darcy hated this. After everything Helen had gone through, she didn’t deserve to have this happen to her.

  That thought had occurred to her before, and she tried to follow it through now. Did the Pilgrim Ghost somehow think Helen did deserve what was happening to her? Was that why he had waited all these years to come out of hiding?

  Was there a connection with Helen, too?

  The photographs that Chief Daleson had shown them came back to her mind. There was a lot of evidence against Helen. No jury in the world would find her innocent with all of that. The knife, especially. A bloody knife with fingerprints on it. Did it get any more damaging than that?

  Not that they had the fingerprint match yet, but it was only a matter of time. Darcy clenched her teeth angrily. If it hadn’t been for that bloody knife, there would be nothing to worry about. There was no real, hard evidence without that. None of them had woken up with blood on them anywhere. No one but Helen. Great, even more evidence to convict her. Yup. A jury would have a field day with all this. A victim stabbed and bloody and lying on Helen’s lawn…

  As something clicked into place in her mind, Darcy sat up straighter, her eyes wide.

  “What is it? Are you all right?” he asked, searching her face. She knew what he was looking for. “Darcy, you aren’t…I mean, he’s not…you aren’t…?”

  “No, I’m not possessed,” she said impatiently. “I just thought of something.”

  “What? Can it help Helen?”

  “Yes.” She looked up into his amazing blue eyes and managed a joyless smile. “I know who the killer is.”

  And that was when the lights went out.

  ***

  “What’s going on?” Darcy heard the note of fear in her voice. She wasn’t a scaredy-cat but there was nothing natural about the lights going out in a police station, all at once, while they were there to investigate a murder committed by a ghost. Nothing at all.

  A little fear was normal. Under the circumstances, she didn’t mind being normal.

  An emergency light, a pale red thing that didn’t help them see so much as it deepened the shadows in the room, winked on over the door. It was better than nothing, Darcy supposed.

  “Stay here,” Jon told her. He knocked his chair over backward as he fumbled his way to his feet. “I’ll be right back.”

  As soon as he opened the door, someone screamed.

  A cold tingling spread over Darcy’s skin, crawling up her spine to a spot just between her shoulder blades, making every muscle in her body tense up. She’d never been a big believer in coincidence. There could be no doubt in her mind what was going on.

  “He’s here,” Jon guessed, echoing her thoughts. “Isn’t he?”

  Darcy swallowed back the lump in her throat and nodded. “We need to go. Now.”

  “He’ll be after you,” Jon guessed. “We can use the back entrance. My car’s right outside.”

  It was a good plan. Darcy liked that plan. Of course, every plan they made usually went wrong somehow. She doubted this time would be any different.

  Out into the hallway, where more red emergency lights cast their ghastly glow, Darcy followed close at Jon’s heels. They kept hold of each other’s hands as they went. She saw Jon reach for the gun he wasn’t wearing out of habit, and she didn’t have the heart to tell him it wouldn’t have done him any good anyway.

  Another scream. A man’s voice, but high pitched and strained. Someone up towards the front of the station had found some reason to cry out in fright.

  Or pain.

  They made it through the hallways, down past the holding cells, to the back of the building. When they were fifty feet away from the exit door they heard the gunshots. Two, in rapid succession, followed by a lot of raised voices and shouting.

  Jon stopped suddenly. “I should go see what’s happening.”

  He turned back, still holding Darcy’s hand. She tugged him closer to her. She had the eerie feeling, almost a premonition, that if she let him go down those darkened hallways that he would never come back.

  Into the faint red light a figure appeared. Darcy’s heart stopped. A darker shape among the shadows, it came stumbling against the walls and then turned toward her and Jon.

  That’s when Darcy saw his face. Chief Daleson was scared. She thought nothing could ever scare this man but his eyes were darting everywhere and his chest heaved in short, quick breaths and his hand held a snub nosed automatic pistol up and ready.

  His eyes locked on Jon, surprised to see him and Darcy still here. “Jon, get her out of here. I’m not sure what’s going on. There’s someone in the station. The lights are all out and I can’t get anyone to answer me. Something’s going on and…just get her out. Get her out!”

  Another scream from up front was cut abruptly short. That seemed to decide things for Jon.

  “Come on,” he said, turning and running for the door as fast as he could.

  Darcy didn’t argue. She could feel the presence coming for her. Feel the dark energy of a malevolent spirit rampaging through the halls of the police station, searching for her, hunting her, tearing through everything to find her.

  Out into the night, everything was dark and still. The air felt fresher than she would have thought possible, and she filled her lungs with it as they ran.

  Turning, she caught a glimpse through the door, just before it closed, of a formless shadow bearing down on Joe Daleson.

  Chapter Nine

  They got into their car and Jon started the engine and was backing away from the police station even before he had his door closed. “I’m going to get you back to the house where I know you’re safe and them I’m coming back here to help.”

  “Jon, no.”

  “Darcy, I have to. I can’t leave my people, my friends, like that!”

  “That’s not what I meant,” she explained gently. “I can’t go home. Not now. I need to get to the Town Hall.”

  He stopped the car in the middle of the street, the tires locking up and screeching against the pavement. “What? You said you don’t have any of your equipment. You said he’d be seriously strong tonight. That’s what you said. What are you going to do, go in there and push the ghost out with your bare hands?”

  “Of course not. Jon, look at the town.”

  He did, and saw what she meant. Everywhere in town was dark. Not just the police station. Every electric light was out. The buildings, the streetlights, the lamp posts in the park. It was a complete blackout.

  Except for the Town Hall.

  Up the street, floodlights on a manic
ured lawn shone up at the brick building with its white columns. More lights on the building lit up the front doors and the windows, and the clock in its front roof that was forever stopped at 11:59.

  Darcy pushed the button on her little watch to light up the dial. It was ten o’clock. Two hours to midnight.

  The streets were empty. That was unusual even for the sleepy little town of Misty Hollow. People should still be out in the park, or walking their dogs, winding the day down before heading home. It was like everyone knew not to be out of their homes tonight, that something wicked was not only coming their way but was already here.

  “We have to do this now,” Darcy said.

  “Yeah,” he agreed. “Yeah, I think you’re right. You need your things first though, right?”

  “Right.”

  “Bookstore?”

  “Bookstore.”

  They were practically in front of the Sweet Read bookstore as it was. Getting there involved Jon pulling the car to the curb and shutting off the engine.

  Then they sat where they were, staring out at the night.

  “Is it safe?” Jon finally asked.

  No, she wanted to say. They had to do this, though. “Won’t know till we try, I guess.”

  After a long count of five seconds, Darcy took a breath, held it, and raced out of the car to the front door of her store. She yanked on the handle, expecting to fly inside with Jon right behind her.

  Only, the door was locked.

  Feeling stupid, feeling the rush of panic coming up inside of her, she turned to Jon with her hand out. “Keys. Quick.”

  Without hesitation he passed her his ring of keys, where the spare key to her store dangled next to his car keys and the key to their house and others. She was really glad she had insisted on him having a copy of his own.

  Two seconds later they were inside and the door was shut and locked again. She turned to Jon, he turned to her, and as their eyes met she couldn’t help but burst out laughing. They fell against each other, holding tightly, laughing, letting the stress of the past two days wash away.