4 The Ghost of Christmas

by K. J. Emrick

  His understanding made Darcy feel all warm and happy. She smiled at him and said, “Remember how I told you before about how Millie wrote about her abilities, that they were the same as mine?” He nodded. “Well, I remember reading in the journal something about a way to meditate before a communication to enhance the connection. I’m going to go and get the journal, it’s back at the bookstore. The Santa suit, too.”

  His face twisted when she said it. “Do we have to?”

  “I know you don’t want to be anywhere near it. Neither do I, but I think we’ll need it.”

  “Fine. But I’m going with you,” Jon said. “It will be quicker if I drive and I don’t really want you wandering around on your own this late at night with that crazy violent ghost out there somewhere.”

  Darcy felt a warm feeling spread through her at his concern. It was nice to know his love was there for her.

  ***

  As soon as they arrived at the bookstore Darcy went to get the journal. As she reached for it the book flew across the room at Jon. With lightning fast reflexes he reached up and caught it before it could smack the side of his head.

  “Millie!” Darcy yelled at her aunt. She wasn’t sure if Millie was just making trouble, playing pranks like she always did, or if she was trying to tell them something. “Are you trying to warn me about something, Millie?”

  The book wrenched out of Jon’s hands and flew back across the room towards her, falling softly into her hands. “Thanks. That was very informative.” She rolled her eyes and opened the journal to the page she needed. Refreshing her memory, she nodded firmly. “Yes. This, and the suit. You want to grab that?”

  “No. I will, because I love you, but I don’t want to.”

  She smiled at him. “Just be sure to break the circle with your toe first.”

  He eyed her skeptically, but she watched him as he did exactly as she had instructed. In the meantime, she got the candles out that she kept in the shop. Never know where you might need to use them, she always figured.

  With the journal firmly in her hands and Jon carrying the paper sack with the suit in it, they left the bookstore and went back to the pageant stage. Darcy wasn’t too keen on being around here this late at night, especially after what had happened earlier.

  “Why here?” Jon asked her. He checked his watch, finding out exactly what Darcy had already known. It was after midnight. Everyone had gone home. Everyone, that was, except for them.

  “This is where the event happened. If there is any connection between our world and a ghost living in this Santa suit, it will be strongest here.”

  “Do you ever keep track of the number of times during the day you say things like that with a straight face?”

  She shrugged, taking the package with the suit from him. “It’s who I am. I’ve gotten used to it.”

  He watched her silently. She desperately wanted to ask him what was going through his mind, but this wasn’t the time or place.

  The area was completely deserted as Darcy had known it would be. Yellow barrier tape surrounded the stage until the town’s work crew could come out tomorrow and remove the broken staging. By mutual consent, they set up right in front of the stage.

  Darcy set the candles, lit them, and set the Santa suit on the ground in front of her. She realized that she was very tense and tried to relax and breathe deeply. If she was honest with herself she could admit that she was a little apprehensive about doing this particular communication. Roger had scared her during the couple of times she had communicated with him previously.

  This time, when she sat cross-legged, it was to study her aunt’s journal for a minute or so until she was sure she had the basics of the technique down.

  “Thank you, Millie,” she whispered. She looked at Jon and said, “I need total silence to do this, okay?” He nodded but didn’t speak. She could see he was tense and she guessed he was worried about her doing this. She wouldn’t be doing it if it wasn’t very necessary. Then she began.

  The flames from the candles spread a soft, flickering light where there was only darkness otherwise. In her mind, she recited the words from her aunt’s journal.

  “To be better protected from, and better connected to, the other side, you must have a very firm grip on your own life. You must be certain your life is in order, before you can attempt to order around the stronger spirits that you may encounter.”

  Which made sense. She thought about her life now. She and Jon had been fighting, and headed down a road to breaking up. They were back together now, stronger in many ways than they had been. He was accepting of her. She had that in her life, and she could build on that foundation to become stronger.

  She was stronger.

  She took hold of the Santa suit and called out for Roger August. For a few moments nothing happened, just like before. Something was blocking her. It was Roger himself, she realized. His spirit was trying to keep her from seeing what she needed to see. With a force of will, she pushed that barrier aside, and made the connection. She was inside Roger’s memory.

  She saw him, Roger, in the Santa suit waiting behind a stage and she realized that this must be that long ago pageant. The one twenty years ago just before he died. The image faded in and out between scenes of him talking to kids and then walking off stage when the pageant was done and then suddenly Darcy heard a grunt of pain. She saw Roger limping away from the stage. He was injured, somehow, but still alive. The viewpoint shifted and she saw one last thing before the images vanished. A man, standing in shadows behind Roger. There was no way to see his face. Yet, somehow he looked familiar.

  Darcy tried to push harder, to see more, but she felt the force against her multiplying. She was snapped forcefully back to reality, Jon holding her arms as her head lolled to the side.

  “Darcy, are you okay?” Jon asked. His voice was tight with worry.

  “Yes, I think so,” she said. The night was dark around them. The candles were knocked over, their wicks trailing wisps of smoke. The Santa suit was on the ground a good distance from them in a heap as though it had been thrown aside.

  Jon pulled her into him and hugged her tight. “I couldn’t wake you,” he said as he pulled back to look at her. “The wind was so strong.” He hugged her to him once again.

  “Wind?” She remembered something then, something of a cold arctic blast that pushed her around while she was trying to hold onto the connection of the communication. Roger August. Or was it something else?

  Darcy’s mind was still on the image that she had seen. And then it came to her. She realized who the man was. She pulled back out of Jon’s arms a little so she could see him. “I think that Mister Baskin killed Roger.”

  Chapter Nine

  “When you weren’t responding to me, back there in the town square, there was an icy wind blasting around us.” Jon’s eyebrows were drawn down in a frown of worry. They were sitting in Darcy’s kitchen, huddled around cups of hot chocolate. Darcy just couldn’t seem to get warm. “Why was this one so violent?”

  “One of the entities involved in this is trying to keep me from seeing into things. They’re exerting a force working against me.”

  “One of the entities?” he asked, his eyebrows shooting up.

  “Right. At first, I thought it was Roger himself. Now, we have to consider the possibility that the suit really is haunted in some way by something. So that’s why I say, one of the entities.”

  “Could it be something else entirely?” Jon asked her.

  Darcy appreciated the way he was making an effort to understand this part of her. With a smile she couldn’t quite supress she leaned across the table to kiss his cheek. “I’ll know more when we talk to Roland Baskin.”

  “You’re sure it was him you saw in the vision?”

  “Very sure.” Darcy shuddered as she remembered. “I saw a younger version of Mister Baskin in the background, standing behind Roger August just as Roger got hurt somehow. It must have been him.”

  Jon nodded.
“We should go and talk to him in the morning. Right now I think we both need sleep.”

  “I wish that you could take my visions as evidence and arrest him or at least bring him in for questioning,” Darcy said, putting a hand over a yawn she hadn’t felt coming until he mentioned sleep.

  “You’ve done your part,” Jon said to her. “Now it’s time for old fashioned police work to do the rest.”

  ***

  “Police station first,” Jon told her. “I’m all for confronting Baskin, but I want to look up a few things first.”

  As they drove into town the next morning, Darcy noticed the fog being burned away by the bright winter sun. Most of the snow still clung to the ground, and the mists were quickly receding back into the white ground cover. She didn’t think Jon had seen them.

  He let her out in front of the bakery and then told her he’d meet her over at the station. “Make mine black,” he told her, holding her hand briefly before letting her go. She knew he’d never admit it, but he was still shook up over last night.

  When Darcy entered the café she could see that Elizabeth Archer, Helen’s assistant, was working behind the counter. Helen was nowhere to be seen. “Helen not working today?” Darcy asked Elizabeth.

  “No. What can I get you?” Darcy had always found the middle aged woman to be rather abrupt. With those scars on her face that she kept hidden behind her long auburn hair, Darcy didn’t doubt that she’d had a rough life. Even after Elizabeth had been in town now for several months, Darcy knew little about her.

  With the coffees in hand Darcy made her way back to the police station. She’d remembered to bring one for the desk sergeant and he smiled at her in appreciation as he waved her through to the offices where Jon worked. Sergeant Fitzwallis was an older man that Darcy had gotten to know pretty well after so many trips here to visit with Jon and Grace. “Come back when you can bring me a sandwich, too, you hear?”

  Darcy laughed and promised she’d bring him some of Jon’s apple pie next time she came through. He acted surprised that Jon would be able to cook anything past boiling water.

  That was Jon, she thought. In his own way he had as many layers to his life as she did to her own.

  As she came through the door she could see Jon tapping away at his computer, looking thoughtfully at whatever he was reading. He looked up and smiled at her when she set his coffee down in front of him.

  “Have you found anything yet?” Darcy asked him.

  “Noise complaints. Baskin has literally filed hundreds of noise complaints. All around Christmas, most of them related to the pageant.” He shrugged. “Other than that, there’s nothing on him. Either in our database or anywhere online that I can think to look.”

  Darcy thought about that. “Well maybe he just wasn’t caught for anything before.”

  Jon made a noncommittal face, then took a big slurp of his coffee. “Won’t know until we ask, I guess. Ready to go and have a chat with him?”

  ***

  Jon knocked on the front door of the small, well-kept cottage. It had been a short walk to Baskin’s house, here on a quiet street just off the main town center.

  Baskin answered with a grumpy expression, shoulders hunched, eyes narrowed. “What do the two of you want?”

  Jon kept his voice calm and even managed a smile. “We would like to speak to you about the Christmas pageant.”

  He looked from Jon to Darcy and back to Jon again. He made no attempt to invite them in. “What do you want to know?”

  “Why don’t you like the Christmas pageant, Mister Baskin?” Darcy asked him. If he wasn’t going to let them in, they needed to get to the heart of their questions quickly.

  Baskin scowled at her. “It’s too noisy, that’s why. I’m old and I just want a peaceful life but every time there is something to celebrate Misty Hollow makes the biggest racket. And that stupid Christmas pageant is the worst.” He waved his hands animatedly, his voice growing angry. “I thought I could get enough signatures to stop the damned thing, but I should have known better. This town never listens to reason. I’ve been trying to stop that stupid pageant for years but it never works. You should know,” he said to Jon, “you nearly died in it yesterday, didn’t ya?”

  “Now how did you know that, Mister Baskin?” Jon asked him with deceptive politeness. “I figured a man like you who was so dead set against the pageant wouldn’t have been there at all.”

  Baskin scratched at his balding head. “I wasn’t there. I was out of town, just like every year. Can’t stand to be here. It’s just all around town this morning, is all.”

  “Oh? And where exactly were you when you were out of town?”

  Baskin sighed loudly. “I was in Meadowood with my daughter, if you need to know. What’s this all about?”

  “Do you have any proof of that?” Jon pressed.

  Baskin glared at Jon. “What is this, an interrogation?” Baskin snapped. “I do have proof actually.” He pulled his wallet out of the back pocket of his trousers and showed them a receipt from a dinner with his daughter. “There. If you need to know so badly, there it is. I always pay.”

  Jon and Darcy looked at the receipt carefully. It was time stamped for a half hour after the pageant began. Assuming the credit card number on the receipt matched Baskin’s then this gave him an alibi. They thanked him for his time and left him grumbling in his doorway.

  In the car on the way back into town Jon said, “So much for that. Wouldn’t we have seen him around the stage, anyway? Someone would have. You can’t cause that kind of trouble without someone seeing it.”

  “You’re probably right,” Darcy agreed. “Now what?”

  “We need to talk to everyone else who was behind the stage last night to see if they know anything or saw anyone acting suspiciously. I will get a couple of officers to do that. Right now I am going back to the station and do some more digging into Rose Abbington. The female police officer in that photograph. I was working on that angle when this thing with the suit and the pageant came up.”

  He pulled into the parking lot in front of the police station and shut the engine off. “I don’t know, Darcy. Maybe this Roger guy, er, ghost is barking up the wrong tree. Maybe there’s a simple explanation and his spirit is just refusing to believe it?”

  How did she explain this to him, she wondered. “It doesn’t actually work that way,” she said at last. “The spirits of the dead are aware of certain information that they can’t necessarily pass on to us. If Roger says he needs me to find out who murdered him, you can bet that it wasn’t an accident or a simple mugging or something like that.”

  He looked at her skeptically, but didn’t say anything. Instead he leaned across and kissed her. It was the best answer she could have hoped for.

  “Okay. I have a couple of things to do so I’ll see you later?” she said. He nodded and she jumped out of the car to head over to the bookstore. She knew what she needed to do now. Although it was dangerous she didn’t feel like she had another option. She needed to try and communicate with Roger again. Otherwise they were at a dead end.

  But before she could go home and do that she had a special book club Christmas meeting to attend to. Life went on even if the dead needed her attention. The mystery of the Santa suit would have to wait for a couple of hours.

  ***

  The book club group were in high spirits as they took turns reading passages from Charles Dickens’ ‘A Christmas Carol.’ Darcy thought that the book was fitting with what she had been going through with her own Christmas ghost, plus it suited everyone’s holiday mood so well. She could just imagine Roland Baskin as Scrooge, humbugging his way through life. What had happened in his life, she wondered, to make him hate Christmas so much.

  She was anxious to get home and begin her preparations to summon Roger August’s ghost again. All through the book meeting she fidgeted and tried to apply herself to the reading of the book. Afterward, everyone stayed to try some of the delectable treats that Cora Morton and Evelyn
Casey had brought in.

  Preston Morgan had brought in a huge batch of his special recipe eggnog and Darcy was sure that the group would be tipsy before they started filing out. Maybe she should just have one of the group lock up for her, when they left. She wished that Sue had been able to attend this meeting but she’d had a family gathering to get to so it was left to Darcy to handle it alone today. Which was fair enough, as Sue had worked most of the day covering for Darcy while she had been out with Jon investigating the mystery.

  She stayed longer than she wanted to, checking her watch when no one was looking. She had to admit everything was tasty, though. Maybe just one more fruitcake cookie.

  She was about to make her escape when she realized that the group before her presented an opportunity she shouldn’t pass up. At least half of the book club members had lived in Misty Hollow for more than twenty years so she figured that any of them could have known Roger. Maybe they would have information about his murder. She just needed to find the perfect opening in the conversation to bring it up casually.

  In the end it was easier to do than she had thought it would be. Tommie Sullivan, who was on about his fifth glass of spiked eggnog by then, started to reminisce about Christmases past. Something in The Christmas Carol story had set him off and he started rambling about lost friends. Darcy was surprised to hear him say Roger’s name.

  “You knew Roger August?” she asked Tommie.

  He looked at her with slightly unfocussed eyes and hiccupped behind the sleeve of his blue knitted sweater. “He was my best friend at school and the friendship lasted after we finished school. It wasn’t right how he was cut down like that. And they never did find the culprit who did it.”

  Several of the group were listening now, and Tommie began eating up the attention. “He was shot in the back in his own home on Christmas Eve. Twenty years back now. A Christmas never goes past without me thinking about him. It was such a waste. He was such a good person at heart. Grump of a man toward the end of his life, though. Give old Scrooge a run for his money.”