A Murder of Crows

by K. J. Emrick

  Marla seemed to realize what she had said and snapped her head up with an apologetic look. “Oh, sorry. Right. Sure. You know I didn’t mean anything by that… right?”

  As Marla went back to unpacking clothes from her bag Darcy went into the bathroom and shut the door. Marla’s words had stung more than a little. She knew better than to think the people in Misty Hollow thought of her as a bookworm. She had many friends in that town. No one called her that.

  Except…

  She put her things down on the sinktop and then stood there, staring at nothing, remembering. Jeff used to call her that. At the end of their relationship, when arguing had become the normal means of communication, he had said it to her several times. It had been his favorite insult. It was odd, now, to hear echoes of those heated conversations in Marla’s offhand comment.

  Come to think of it, he used to tell her she was being a wet blanket, too. Just like Marla had done when she’d first picked Darcy up this morning.

  Shrugging, she decided things like that were best forgotten. She was probably just overthinking things because she thought she had seen Jeff’s spirit. He had been dead for a while now, and hadn’t ever appeared to her. She was just being silly. She ran some water to rinse her hands and then checked her face and hair in the mirror.

  Darcy gasped. In the reflection a man in dark clothing stood behind her shoulder, between herself and the bathtub. She was so completely freaked out that it took her a moment longer to realize who it was.

  It was Jeff.

  She spun quickly, realizing even as she did it that he wouldn’t be standing there. He couldn’t be. He was dead. This was his spirit come back to speak to her. Her special ability meant things like this happened at odd times. Usually at moments that were completely inconvenient. Like when she was in a hotel room with someone who didn’t know anything about her ability.

  In the empty bathroom, Darcy turned back to the mirror. Jeff’s eyes looked at her from shadows that had nothing to do with the small recessed light in the ceiling. He raised a hand that would have settled on her shoulder if he had been corporeal, urgently reaching out for her, like he needed to tell her something.

  Then just like that, he was gone.

  Darcy was shaken by her vision. The only spirits who could appear to her without the assistance of her communication techniques were ones that were truly troubled, truly upset. Or sometimes spirits who felt so strongly about getting a message through to the living that their urgency transcended the veil between the living and the dead.

  “Oh, Jeff,” Darcy whispered. “What’s wrong? Why are you appearing to me now?”

  There was no answer, of course. At least not a spoken one. The temperature in the bathroom dropped several degrees until Darcy could see her breath. The mirror fogged up and little lines of frost traced their way up the metal shower head and the sink faucet. Shivering in spite of herself, Darcy watched as words were drawn with squeaky hesitation in the condensation on the mirror.

  Beware. The. Crow.

  Water droplets ran from some of the letters, leaving irregular lines through the message. Darcy read it twice more to make sure she had it right.

  Beware the crow? What was that supposed to mean?

  ***

  Marla sat at the bar next to Darcy, in a short black dress that she obviously hadn’t brought along for the conference. They had the rest of the night to just relax and have fun, Marla argued. The seminar didn’t start until tomorrow, she said. Tonight was for going out and letting their hair down. At least, that was how Marla saw it.

  After wiping away Jeff’s message in the mirror Darcy had flushed the toilet to cover her reasons for being in the bathroom for so long, and then acted like nothing had happened. Very few people knew anything about her abilities. Most people who knew her thought she was a little odd sometimes, but Darcy kept the fact that she could see and talk to people who were dead to herself. Not everyone took it well. Even her wonderful and amazing boyfriend Jon had taken some convincing before he believed that what she could do was real.

  Marla had put on dark lipstick and blue eyeshadow and high heeled shoes. She was dressed to kill. Sitting with her, still in her blue jeans and t-shirt, Darcy felt very underdressed. She hadn’t really wanted to come out to a bar, but she figured that since Marla had stopped at that bookstore with her, she could try sitting here for a while.

  Now that she’d tried it she couldn’t wait to leave. She had only sipped at her cosmopolitan, and she was already wondering if she should just go back to the hotel and call it a night. Marla, on the other hand, was on her third drink and already eyeing a couple of men at the other end of the bar.

  “I think I’ll ask that one to dance,” she told Darcy, meaning the one on the left with the glossy brown hair and pressed silk shirt. His hair had a streak of blonde feathered into the side. “He’s cute. It sure would help if someone asked his friend to dance, too.”

  She looked at Darcy out of the corner of her eye, her meaning obvious. Darcy shook her head and took out a five dollar bill from her front pocket to drop on the top of the bar. “I don’t really feel like dancing, Marla. Thanks anyway. I think I’ll just head back to the hotel. See you there later?”

  Marla caught hold of Darcy’s wrist as she was standing up. “Come on, Darcy. Don’t be that way. Be a friend. It’s just dancing, that’s all it is.”

  “No, actually it’s more than that. You don’t have someone back at home. I do. I can’t do that to Jon.”

  “Come on, Darcy, don’t be such a stick in the mud.”

  Darcy frowned. There it was again, echoes of things Jeff had said to her in the last few months of their marriage. Could it be that his spirit was influencing Marla to make her say these things? She knew possession wasn’t impossible for spirits, even though Darcy had never run into it herself. That didn’t seem like what was happening here, though. It was probably just coincidence.

  She took her hand back and tried to smile politely. “I’m going to head back to the hotel. You’ve got your room key, right?”

  Marla had already turned away again. She waved a hand and raised her glass to her lips. “Yeah, yeah. I’ve got it. Don’t wait up.”

  Darcy felt like she had been dismissed. Sighing through her nose she took one last look at Marla, then one last look at the two men down at the bar, the one with his too-shiny brown hair and the other youngish looking man with a port wine birthmark on his left cheek. Then she turned in a huff and made her way through the crowd of people to the exit door.

  She reminded herself that she didn’t know Marla very well. They had met several times, of course. Hard to run a bookstore in a small town and not know the head librarian. Their interactions had always been formal, though, and Marla’s private life had never been Darcy’s concern. Jeff had said something like that about her once, too. How she was mysterious. Or something.

  There it was again. Thoughts of Jeff were filling her mind. She hugged her arms around herself even though the evening air was warm and mild. People passed by her on the sidewalk without noticing her as thoughts churned through her mind. Beware the crow, Jeff had said. For Pete’s sake, what was that about? Was he trying to warn her? He couldn’t possibly have come back to tell her to stay away from birds. Spirits didn’t reach out to people to make sure pigeons didn’t poop on their heads.

  On her way back to the hotel she passed by a bookstore she had seen earlier. After what had happened in Cementville, Marla had wanted nothing to do with it when Darcy suggested checking out this one. She only wanted to go to a nightclub or a bar or something. Not exactly Darcy’s idea of a good time, even when she was with Jon.

  She frowned at her reflection in the bookstore mirror. Was she a bookworm? No. No, she knew better than that. She had things she liked to do for fun, like camping and hiking. If Marla’s idea of fun was different, that was fine. It didn’t change who Darcy was.

  Darcy stuck her tongue out at her reflection, being goofy. Take that, reflection. She
laughed at herself, feeling a little better.

  In the display behind the window, she saw an array of books. She recognized a few from the current best seller lists. Behind those were a few older volumes, heavier than their newer companions, thick covers embossed with gold lettering. “Spirit Tales,” one title read. Darcy looked closer at it. Stories of local spirits that haunted areas around this state and the neighboring ones. Hmm.

  It was after seven o’clock now, and the sign in the store window declared store hours were only until 6:30 P.M. Disappointed, Darcy went to walk away. A knock on the door’s window pane from inside brought her attention back.

  An old man, short and thin with frizzy gray hair ringing the lower part of his head, smiled up at her from a wrinkled face. He opened the door and stepped back for her. “Come on in, dear. I saw you looking at my window display and anyone with that much interest must be a book lover. I’m always open for people like that.”

  Darcy smiled. She liked this man instantly. “Thank you. I was noticing the book on spirits in your window display.”

  The man nodded. “Oh, yes. Quite popular a few years back that one was. Not so much anymore but I still keep a few copies on hand. Always good for a sale or two every month. My name is Goddard Hershing. Pleased to meet you.”

  “Good to meet you, too, Goddard. My name is Darcy Sweet.” She shook his outstretched hand. “I actually run a bookstore a few hours away from here, in Misty Hollow.”

  He pursed his lips. “I don’t believe I’ve heard of…oh, wait a sec, yes I have. There was a tale from that same book, actually. Hold on now.”

  Goddard went and plucked the Spirit Tales book from the window display. Leafing through the pages, holding the tome out to help focus his old eyes, he came to a spot somewhere near the middle of it. “Ah yes. Here. Take a look.”

  Darcy took it from him, balancing the heavy book across her left forearm as she read. Her eyes widened. The book told about the spirit of a pilgrim settler who haunted the town hall of Misty Hollow. He’d been hung there for witchcraft, a charge not uncommon in those days and in that area. Now, it was said, he came back every night before Halloween, the very night he’d been hanged, to wail and scream and throw objects around the upper chamber of the two story building.

  The story came with a picture of the town hall as well. Darcy recognized it easily, but she’d never heard anything about this. A haunting in Misty Hollow? There were more than a few, actually, but all of them were benign spirits who wouldn’t ever hurt anyone. Like the ghost of her Great Aunt Millie, still lingering around her bookstore.

  This was something else. Darcy promised herself to look into it as soon as she got back to Misty Hollow.

  She smiled again at Goddard. “I’m glad you stayed open for me. I definitely want to buy this book.”

  Chapter Three

  Back in the hotel room Darcy read through the book well into the night. It wasn’t until she was yawning nonstop that she realized it was after one o’clock in the morning. Already snuggled down into the sheets of her bed, in her pink pajamas, Darcy set the book on the nightstand and fluffed her pillows under her.

  Most of the stories in the book were interesting reads. Ghost stories to scare people. Some of them had even raised goosebumps on her arms, and she had lived through enough ghost stories to write her own book.

  The story of the pilgrim’s ghost had been a very short one. Two pages. Apparently the author didn’t know a lot about him other than his name, Nathaniel Williams, and the fact that he had been accused of witchcraft in the late 1700s. He’d been found guilty after a short hearing and hanged from the rafters of the town hall in full view of everyone. The town hadn’t been called Misty Hollow back then. That name had been crafted when the town was incorporated in 1846, and the previous name was lost to antiquity.

  The rest of the story had been completely anecdotal evidence of people saying they had heard strange noises or had things fall to the floor when no one else was around, and always on October thirtieth, the day before Halloween. It explained why Darcy had never heard anything about it before. It was just an interesting folk tale with no real proof. There might not even be a ghost there at all.

  Great Aunt Millie’s ghost was far more interesting. Maybe she should write a book about her someday, Darcy mused with a faint smile, just as sleep overtook her.

  Dreams came and went, all of them whimsical and barely formed, none of them memorable. In all of them, a dark man walked beside her. He didn’t say anything, but she found his presence comforting. She knew in her heart that it was Jon, her strong and caring boyfriend come to protect her.

  When at last she looked up at him, in the middle of a dream where her cat Smudge had invited her to a tea party, it wasn’t Jon.

  It was Jeff.

  “I told you so,” Smudge said to her, sipping from his cup of tea, sitting cross legged and very human-like. “I always knew.”

  “Darcy,” Jeff said to her. “I’m sorry.”

  “Sorry?” she heard herself ask. “Sorry for what?”

  “Beware the crow.”

  It was very loud and very clear in her dream, even though his lips never moved. She studied his face. It was so much like how she remembered him from life. Handsome, sort of, with a rugged face and a pronounced brow. His hair was just a bit lighter than her own with natural highlights in it. She had been so in love with him, once upon a time. Funny how love can be twisted until it breaks away completely.

  That thought settled into her mind as Jeff continued to stare at her. Well, not the love she had with Jon, she thought hastily. Their love wasn’t in any danger of that. She repeated it to herself again, almost as if she needed to convince Jeff of how strong her love for Jon really was. He smiled knowingly, and she thought a little smugly as well.

  From his side of the table, Smudge slammed his teacup down on the table several times in a row. Bang bang bang.

  She looked over at him, wondering why he was being so rude. The whole table was shaking.

  “You need to get the door,” he told her, blinking his big cat eyes.

  Bang bang bang.

  The images of the tea party and Smudge and Jeff all disappeared, slowly fading away to a hazy gray light. Only the banging continued. It was at her door, she realized, and whoever was there knocked again.

  Bang bang bang.

  Darcy tried to focus her thoughts clearly enough to remember how to get out of the bed. Sleep was still thick like a blanket around her. She scrunched up her brow, trying to remember every detail of the dream she’d just had. Jeff was trying to tell her something, but what?

  The next thing she knew, the door to the motel room was opening. She yelped and lifted the sheets up to her chin, now very much awake. “Who’s there?” she demanded, feeling foolish and scared both at the same time.

  Two men stood there, staring at her. One was dressed in the maroon shirt and gray vest that the hotel used for its dress code. The other was in a dark blue policeman’s uniform.

  “Oh. I’m sorry,” the officer said to her. Even so, he kept coming into the room. “We thought no one was in here.”

  “Um. I’m here.” Darcy said, a little stupidly. She relaxed a little seeing the officer’s uniform with its gold badge and flag sewn on the shoulder. Still, this wasn’t how she had expected to be woken up this morning. She was obviously missing something. “Do you mind telling me what’s going on?”

  The officer took out a little spiral notebook from his uniform pocket. “You’re Darcy Sweet, right? Here from Misty Hollow?” He looked up at her and must have seen the surprise on her face. “Don’t worry. I got that information from the desk. You’re not in any trouble.”

  A cold chill filtered up her spine, and Darcy knew there was something bad going on. “If I’m not in any trouble then why are you here in my hotel room?”

  He looked very uncomfortable, and exchanged a look with the hotel employee before saying anything else. “Miss Sweet, can you put some clothes on?
I need to talk to you. I’ll be right outside. Come get me when you’re ready, okay?”

  She was actually wearing fuzzy pajamas. The hotel employee’s eyes were becoming a little too friendly, though. She nodded, and the officer nodded back and made sure the door was closed tightly behind them.

  After they had left Darcy jumped out of bed and quickly went to the drawer where she had put away her clothes. What was happening? A police officer at her door at…she checked the clock on the stand between the beds. At quarter to six in the morning. The seminar was supposed to start today at nine A.M., so she hoped whatever this was about wasn’t too serious and wouldn’t take too long.

  The cold chill went up her back again, like ice water being poured over her skin. She turned with one leg in her jeans to look at the room’s second bed. It was still neatly made. Marla’s bags were still next to the bed on the floor, her clothes spilled out over the sides from when she had gotten dressed to go out.

  She’d never come back to the hotel.

  ***

  Darcy knew she had cried at some point, but now the tears were all done.

  She hadn’t known Marla that well, sure, but she was a neighbor. Someone from the same town. Not only that. Darcy had just talked to her last night. She couldn’t believe Marla was now dead.

  “I was in the bar with her last night,” she said. She sat at the desk in the motel room, twisting the ring on her finger to give her hands something to do. “Did I tell you that already?”

  “You did, yes,” the officer said. “Don’t worry. Just tell me what happened at the bar.”

  She nodded. “Um. She had a few drinks. Then she talked about asking a guy at the bar to dance. I didn’t want to stay. I didn’t want to go drinking in the first place but Marla did so I went and then I left.” Darcy took a deep breath.

  “So you were drinking too?” he asked her.

  “Yes. I was. I didn’t even finish my first drink.”

  “That’s fine, Miss Sweet. I was just trying to get a sense of what happened.” He scratched some notes in his pad. Darcy studied his face. For someone so young, there were deeply etched lines around his eyes. His blonde hair had quite a bit of white in it, too, she realized now. His uniform was clean and pressed and his leather equipment sat just so on his belt. She could tell he took pride in doing what he did.