by K. J. Emrick
“For Pete’s sake Jon, we knew this was going to happen sooner or later.” She also knew that he would be upset when it did. Their little girl, their sweet and innocent little girl, could see and hear and talk to ghosts. Growing up was going to be different for her than it would be for most girls. Darcy knew all about how that felt. “Thankfully, she has an understanding and loving father who isn’t going to go off the handle when she’s just trying to understand her powers.”
He snorted at that, but he did lay his hands down over hers. “You make it sound like we’re raising Supergirl.”
She’d never thought of it that way before, but… “Well, in a way it’s not that far off. Think of everything Clark Kent’s parents must have gone through with him while he was growing up. Son, don’t cook your microwave meals with your heat vision. Son, don’t fly to school. Son, don’t juggle the cows you know it curdles their milk.”
That earned her a real laugh from Jon, and she could see the lines of worry melting away from his face as he did. “Okay, you’re right, I get it. And I did tell you that I would let you take the lead in all things supernatural involving our daughter. Just remember that when it comes time I’m going to be the one to teach her how to throw a football.”
Careful of the tight space in the office, she slipped down to her knees, between his legs, and held his hands in hers. “You’ll make a great peewee coach someday. Right now, Colby has this amazing gift and she needs to practice with it. I agree she’s too young to try the communication. I told her that myself. I do think I’m going to have to start teaching her the techniques for one though, just in case she decides to try it again without us around. I need her to be prepared in case anything happens.”
Jon’s hands smoothed up her arms, to her shoulders, where he pulled her in close to him until her head was against his chest and she could hear his heart beating. She slid her hands around his waist, and if Heaven had a list of the most comforting and reassuring positions for soulmates, this had to be on the top ten list.
“I understand,” he said to her. “I mean, I don’t understand. Not really. I never will, and I’m man enough to admit it. This is where Colby is going to need her mother. I trust you.”
Her heart was melting. “I love you, Jon.”
“I love you too, Darcy. Besides, the next one’s going to be a boy.”
“Oh, the next one.” She laughed softly against his chest. “Is that right?”
“Yup. It’s on my Christmas list.”
Her heart skipped a beat. “I love you, Jon.”
“I love you too, Babe.”
They stayed that way for… well, she didn’t know how long before he said, “Who was Colby trying to reach in this communication anyway?”
“Well, that’s the other part of it, really.” Pushing up off her knees, sitting back up on the coffee table, feeling his warmth all over her body still, she hooked her hair back behind her ear. “See, we were in church on Sunday and, um, there was this ghost sitting in the pews.”
He looked at her with a blank expression. “A ghost. In the church.”
“Yeah, it surprised me too but there she was, sitting right up next to the Barses.”
“Oh.” He tapped his one foot against the floor, coming to grips with the fact that he’d been in the same room with a ghost and hadn’t even known it. “So, it was someone from their family? The Barse family?”
“No, I don’t think so.” She went on to describe the ghost with the burned face, and how the young phantom had been standing next to Pastor Phin on the way out. “That’s when she spoke to Colby. She tried to reach out and touch her, too, but I pulled Colby away before she could. Sometimes there’s no telling what a ghost wants from a person. Especially someone as young as our daughter.”
“So, you think the ghost is someone associated with Pastor Phin.” He sat up a little straighter, and held her hands a little tighter.
“I do, actually.” Darcy thought back to what she had seen yesterday. “I had a vision when I shook Pastor Phin’s hand. There was a house, a big beautiful two-story place, and it was on fire. It was a terrible sight because I knew the house was going to be completely destroyed by the flames. The girl’s ghost was burned pretty badly, and probably that means she died in that fire. So… yeah. I think she died in that fire I saw when I touched Phin’s hand.”
Jon let go of her hands as he sat back on the sofa. His eyes had lost their focus and she knew that look on his face.
“What are you thinking?” she asked him.
“I’m thinking about what Grace told me not even an hour ago. About your talk with Elizabeth at her apartment.” He looked up at the ceiling, resting his head against the back of the couch. “Elizabeth said that Pastor Phin would give her at least a partial alibi because he was there at the bakery when she closed up, and then he was there on the sidewalk in front of the fire when she showed up later.”
“Right,” Darcy agreed, not quite following along with his line of reasoning. “I remember. So, Elizabeth is off our list of suspects.”
He ran his hands through his hair and heaved a sigh. “Yeah, she is. If her alibi about this gambling problem holds up, she’s not our man. Or, woman I suppose. She’s off the list. But… I think I have to put someone else’s name on it.”
“What? Who?”
“Pastor Phin.”
“Jon! You can’t be serious.” She stood up, nearly knocking the table over when she did. “You can’t be… why? Why him?”
“Darcy, you just told me there’s already one fire in his past. I’ll have to look up the details but if someone died in that fire, someone close to him, then that makes him a pretty good suspect for this one. He was there before it happened, and he was there after it happened, according to Elizabeth, but what about in between?” He sat up again, tapping a finger in the palm of his opposite hand. “What if he wasn’t just there before and after. What if he was there the whole time, and he set the fire? Remember, he was there the next morning, too. He was in the photos that Wilson took.”
“Sure, Jon, I know that. I was there.” Darcy paced in front of her desk, careful not to knock over the stack of paperwork she still hadn’t gotten around to finishing. “He was just there to give, you know, comfort and support to the community… wasn’t he?”
“I don’t know,” Jon told her. “But I’m going to find out. Obviously, I can’t bring your psychic visions to a judge but I’ll look into Phin’s background and see what turns up. He’s only been in town for a few years. I don’t know that much about him. Do you?”
“No,” Darcy admitted. Then she brightened. “But I know who will. Helen hired him. As the mayor she had to give him permission to use the church building and be a pastor here. She must know all about his background.”
Jon slapped his knee and stood up, grabbing up his coat and the half-eaten slice of pizza. “There you go. That’s a great idea. I’ll start with Helen. Oooh.” He stopped, one arm in and one arm out of his jacket. “I was supposed to stop by and talk to Bobbi Jo Cameron at the hair salon. She said she won’t be around later. This was the only time she had to talk to me.”
“I see you’re working your way through our little list,” Darcy said. Her mind was still on Phin, and the vision she’d seen. She hadn’t gotten any sense of evil intent from touching his hand. Certainly nothing that would indicate that Phin was a firebug who liked to see places burn. Then again, who was that ghost, and what did she have to do with Phin?
And what had Colby heard during her communication? That was a question she hadn’t gotten to ask yet. It was going to be the first thing she asked when her daughter got home from school in just… less than an hour.
Jon noticed her looking at the clock. “I know you have to get home for Colby. Do you maybe want to stop at the hair salon with me on the way, and then I can give you a ride home?”
“Are you inviting me along on the interview, Mister Police Chief?”
“You bet,” he said, gripping the pizza
in his teeth and talking around it so he could finish putting the coat on. “I’d be thupid not to have my beth conthultant with me.”
“Your best consultant, am I?” Darcy laughed and picked up her own jacket. “Well. Since you put it that way, how could I refuse?”
Truth be told, she would have went along if Jon had called her a chicken-livered baboon. She wanted to know what Bobbi Jo had to say. If she really meant what she had written in her statement to the police, about wanting to make Tobias regret threatening her, then the whole mystery of who burned the bakery down might just be that easy.
Of course, that would leave them with all the other little mysteries they were digging up. Pastor Phin and his past. Elizabeth and her gambling. Edmund Beres with his arrest warrants and whatever his business was here in Misty Hollow. Colby, and what she might have heard from that ghost.
It was Christmas after all. The season of giving. Her holiday cup was definitely running over.
***
The Misty Twisty Hair Salon had only been in business for about three years. Darcy could still remember when it first opened. It was the year before she’d almost lost Jon to that nasty business at the Brick Road Casino, the same year that Colby had gotten her purple Bittie Bunny as a gift. Even now, at seven years old, she loved that bunny. It mostly stayed on a shelf in her room these days, but it was still one of her favorite things in the world.
The walk over from the bookstore had been chilly, but it was warm inside the salon. Four swivel chairs with heavy padded seats were lined up along one wall in front of mirrors. The hair shop wasn’t very wide but it was deep. Bobbi Jo worked here with three other women from town, giving cuts and dying hair to make people look younger, and even doing professional makeup consultations. Not the sort of thing Darcy had ever wanted to take advantage of but she knew quite a few of her friends who had paid for the service. She had to admit, Bobbi Jo did good work. She was a definite hit with the tourist crowd.
Hard to believe she’d have any reason to threaten another business owner in town, when she was doing so well for herself.
Stamping slush off their boots, Darcy and Jon stood patiently at the front of the store. The distinctive smell filled the air, a mix of styling gel and hairspray and chemicals that Darcy didn’t even know the names of.
It was the middle of the afternoon on a weekday, and there was only the one customer in the shop at the far end. There must not have been many other appointments scheduled for the day either because Bobbi Jo was the only one working. Wearing a heavy green cloth apron over her sharp black blouse and black trousers, she was busy trimming the hair of a middle-aged man who probably could have done it himself at home with an electric shaver for all of the bare scalp he was showing.
Jon cleared his throat very pointedly. When Bobbi Jo looked up and saw them, she pulled a sour face and went back to finishing her customer’s haircut. She was a short woman, slim and elegant in her movements but no taller than five foot even. A colorfully painted wooden stepstool was helping her reach up high enough to cut the man’s hair. She tried to make up for her lack of height by twisting her very, very brown hair into a layered beehive style. Darcy had never really liked Bobbi Jo, or disliked her either, but she did think the woman was incredibly vain.
“There you go Mister Bonn.” She gave the hair at the back of his neck a final snip with her scissors. “All done. See you same time next month?”
The man smiled and made some small talk while Bobbi Jo cast veiled glares in the direction of Jon and Darcy. The hostility coming from her was a tangible, real thing, and Darcy couldn’t understand why. Unless…
Was she the one who set the fire?
When Mister Bonn paid for his cut he passed Bobbi Jo a folded white envelope. Odd way of paying, Darcy thought, but maybe he organized his bills that way. There were still a lot of people who came into her shop and paid for books with cash money. It wasn’t a completely plastic world yet.
He smiled at both of them as he left. A draft of cold air snuck its way in until the door closed again on its pneumatic hinge. Even so, the frost hung in the air as Bobbi Jo took out a small towel from the catch pocket of her apron and slapped away leftover pieces of hair from the chair. Pieces that Darcy couldn’t see, and that she suspected weren’t really there.
“Miss Cameron,” Jon said, after they had stood there for nearly a minute being ignored. “I’d like to ask you some questions.”
“I have nothing more to say to you,” was the curt answer. Walking over to the far corner of the shop Bobbi Jo got a broom and began sweeping the floor. She kept her eyes down, and her hairdo bounced against the hold of whatever industrial strength hairspray she used to keep it looking just so.
Jon was not one to be ignored. “Miss Cameron, you called us, remember? You complained about Tobias Ford to my officers. You said he threatened your business.”
“And then the next day,” Bobbi Jo said with a particularly fierce thrust of her broom, “his bakery burned down. So now you’re here to accuse me of being the one who set the fire. You think I’m stupid, Chief Tinker? You think I could build up all this if I wasn’t smarter than the average woman walking the streets of Misty Hollow?”
She waved an arm around to indicate her shop when she said it. Darcy immediately wanted to give her a piece of her mind, because she’d also built up a business of her own, and so had several other people in this town. People, she might add, who were at least as smart as Bobbi Jo and certainly much less arrogant!
“Nobody said you weren’t smart,” Jon said. He sat up in one of the swivel chairs, letting it spin around until he was facing Bobbi Jo. When it stopped he reached over the side and pulled the lever to make the chair drop lower with a soft hiss of hydraulic pressure. “Hey this is fun. I can see why you like doing this.”
“Stop that,” Bobbi Jo told him, obviously flustered that he’d sat in one of her seats. Darcy knew that was exactly why Jon had done it. “You… you can’t just plop your behind there! Those chairs are for customers.”
Jon appeared to consider that. “Well then. I guess I’ll just have to ask for a trim.” Taking off his jacket he handed it to Darcy, and then pushed against the floor with his foot so the chair spun back around to face the mirror. “Just a little off the sides, if you don’t mind.”
Darcy knew he didn’t need a haircut. He’d gotten his hair trimmed at his regular place just three days ago. She didn’t say anything, though. She just stood back and watched him work. He was a master at putting people at ease and making them feel relaxed when he asked them questions. At the same time, he could also make people feel nervous and off guard when it suited his needs.
Grace had talked about how police officers had to be cruel sometimes to get people to open up. Jon had another way of doing things altogether. He sidled up to them all nice and quiet like, and then he struck.
When Bobbi Jo continued to just stare at him, the broom gripped tight in her hand, Jon pointed up at his neat, perfect hair. “Just a little trim. This is a hair salon, right?”
“Uh, sure it is, but you don’t… I mean… um.” Bobbi Jo clamped her mouth shut to keep from stuttering. She wanted Jon gone, but at the same time she didn’t want to refuse a customer. Especially one like the chief of police in the town where she worked. She brought the broom back to the corner, muttering and shaking her head while she took her time putting it away.
“So while I’ve got you here,” Jon said in a conversational way, “let me ask you something. You told my officer that if Tobias Ford ever threatened your shop again he’d regret it. Do you remember that?”
“Of course I do,” she grumbled. “I didn’t mean I’d burn down his bakery.”
“What did you mean?”
“I was just angry, that’s all.” She snatched a comb out of a glass jar full of a blue sanitizing liquid, and smacked it against the edge of the counter a few times to dry it off.
“Angry people sometimes do bad things,” Jon pointed out. “Hey, do I g
et to wear one of those apron things? You know, to keep the hair off my clothes?”
Bobbi Jo glared at him, then spun on her heel to the back wall where a cubby was full of what Darcy had thought were folded white cloths. She yanked one free and shook it out and sure enough, it was an apron just like Jon had described.
“That’s just what I needed,” he told her. “Thanks. So where were you yesterday after five o’clock?”
“I went home,” she snapped, throwing the apron over his chest, then tying it off behind his neck. “Happy? I closed up shop at four-thirty like always, and I went home. I didn’t have any late afternoon appointments. Not on a Sunday.”
“You’re sure?” Jon asked, fluffing out his apron so it covered his arms and legs down to his knees. “Can anyone verify where you were?”
“Of course I’m sure! I should know where I was last night, don’t you think?” She made a rude noise in the back of her throat, and then dragged her little stool over to position it behind Jon’s chair. The sound of it scraping against the linoleum was like fingernails on a chalkboard. “You cops. You all think you’re so smart, don’t you? Think you know everything.”
“Well, not everything,” Jon said with a smile. “But we do know a lot of things. We see a lot of things, too.”
“I’m sure,” was the sarcastic reply. She took out her scissors from her catch pocket.
“Oh, absolutely.” Jon caught her eyes in the mirror. “Just like I saw you selling drugs to Mister Bonn a few minutes ago.”
The scissors hesitated in the air.
Darcy’s jaw dropped. Drugs? Bobbi Jo Cameron was a drug dealer?
“Didn’t think I saw that, did you?” In the mirror, Jon smiled. “I’m a pretty smart man myself. I’m guessing the baggie you handed Mister Bonn back here was marijuana? A man like him doesn’t need a haircut. He was obviously here for the other part of your business. So. Let me ask you this again. Where were you yesterday after five o’clock?”
In Darcy’s eyes, the diminutive hairdresser seemed to grow even smaller. She was caught. As smart as she thought she was, she’d just been outwitted completely by accident.