A Murder of Crows

by K. J. Emrick

  Jon paused in what he was saying as the door shut. Darcy saw the pinched look on his face even though he tried to quickly smooth it away. He understood things like mysteriously closing doors better, now that he was with her. “Okay,” he said, not taking his eyes off her. “The police are looking for that man with the blonde streak in his hair that you saw at the bar. The assumption is that Marla got friendly with him, they left the bar together, and he killed her for some reason. Maybe she wouldn’t go home with him or maybe she said something that he didn’t like. Who knows. But they’re pretty sure that he’s a strong suspect.”

  The smoke detector in the room beeped twice and went still again.

  “Will you tell him to stop that?” Jon said.

  He meant Jeff, obviously. “It’s not like I can control him,” Darcy argued. Still, she wished Jeff wouldn’t do that. It was weird enough having his ghost suddenly hanging around. Having him try to talk to them was stranger still.

  “So they’re going to identify that guy and interview him. If they do it while we’re still here they asked if I could help do the interview, seeing as how Marla was from Misty Hollow.”

  “They don’t have any other suspects?” Darcy asked.

  “No. And to tell you the truth, I think their theory makes sense. Think about it. Marla lets herself get picked up by the wrong guy, and then he kills her. That story’s been written any number of times.”

  Darcy twisted the ring on her finger. She had to admit that it did make sense. “I guess you’re right,” she said.

  The smoke detector beeped twice again, louder this time.

  “Jeff, knock it off,” Jon said out loud, then blinked at himself, his eyes wide. He cleared his throat. “I’m going to use the bathroom. You want to go out tonight? Get our minds off this?”

  What she really wanted to do was read her aunt’s book, but she supposed that could wait until they got back. She wanted to show it to Jon, too, but she wanted to look through it first. “Sure, we can go for a walk or something,” she told him.

  He got up, kissing her cheek as he did. When he got to the bathroom door his hand hesitated over the doorknob, maybe remembering how a ghost’s hand had just closed it shut. Then he shook his head and went inside, closing the door again behind him.

  Darcy stood up, looking around the room. “Okay, Jeff,” she whispered. “This has got to stop. I don’t know what you’re doing here, after you’ve been dead for so long, but this needs to stop. Jon’s here now. He can take care of me.”

  The smoke detector beeped loudly, over and over, then burbled and went silent. The little red light that had been steadily lit to show it was working winked out and went dark.

  Jeff apparently had his own opinion of whether she was safe or not.

  Jon came stumbling out of the bathroom now, holding his unzipped pants up with one hand. “What is it?” he demanded. “Is there really a fire?”

  She smiled at him. Her brave protector.

  ***

  Later that night, Darcy cozied up to Jon in the motel bed. Even if they hadn’t been living together for so long she would have still climbed in with him. She couldn’t bring herself to look at the other bed, the one that would have been Marla’s.

  Jon hadn’t been very talkative after Jeff’s prank with the smoke detector. They’d gone for a walk around a few blocks, just wandering around and noticing how the bustling city of Ryansburg changed at night. Streetlights and neon signs lit the world in eerie colors. There were still a lot of people out, just walking around like her and Jon, not in a hurry at all. Back home nearly everyone would be at home at this hour. Maybe even in bed asleep. Life here was very different than what she was used to in Misty Hollow.

  After a while they had made it back to the hotel. Jon had brought pajama bottoms and a single change of clothes in his bag but it was warm enough that he had stripped down to his boxer shorts. He was behind her in bed, spooning with his warm, bare chest against her back. His arm was a comforting weight around her. His body heat felt good through her t-shirt. It didn’t take long for her to drift off into a comfortable sleep.

  She wasn’t sure later if the dream came right away or if it waited for her to be deep in slumber. It felt real, at first. She was walking next to Jeff again. Only this time she knew him immediately. She could feel his presence, smell the scent of that overbearing aftershave he used to wear. It was as real to her as if he were still alive.

  “What do you want from me, Jeff?” she asked. They were walking down a path in the woods somewhere. Sunlight slanted through the branches above and unseen birds sang. Ahead of them the forest went on forever. She couldn’t see an end to the path.

  “I don’t want anything from you,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

  They kept walking. In her dream, Darcy knew she wanted to stop walking but she couldn’t. She needed to find a way out of the woods. “You’ve said that before, that you were sorry. What do you mean?”

  “I have a lot to be sorry for. Otherwise our marriage wouldn’t have ended.”

  “You didn’t have to leave, Jeff. You made that decision on your own.”

  “I made all the wrong decisions. I did things you don’t know about.”

  That surprised her. Jeff had done and said a lot of things that had ultimately led up to him leaving, and then to her divorcing him. She knew the whole story though, step by step. Every word and everything both of them had done.

  Or so she thought.

  “What things?” she asked. The trail through the woods turned, but still kept going with no end in sight. “What did you do?”

  “Bad things. Marla knew.”

  Now Darcy really did stop. She forced herself to stay in that one spot and face him. The trees still stood tall around her, but up ahead there appeared to be fewer of them, and she thought she could see a clearing. She might have found her way through. “What do you mean, Marla knew? Marla knew what?”

  “Why she died. Marla knew.”

  No. No, Darcy wanted to hear about the bad things Jeff had done. Marla knew about them, Jeff had said. Now he was changing the subject. Pressing a ghost for a direct answer was pointless, though. She knew that. You had to go with the things they wanted to tell you. “Okay, so tell me. Tell me why Marla was killed.”

  “Because I did bad things.”

  Circles. He was talking in circles. The woods around them started spinning, slowly, slowly spinning until she lost all sense of which way was out. The sunlight blurred in her eyes and she blinked into it, trying to find Jeff and the path and…and…

  It was then that she realized she was awake, laying in the hotel bed, facing the wall and the window where dawn’s first light had come shining through into her eyes.

  Darcy blinked again and again, rubbing her eyes. She sat up in shock as her vision cleared. She couldn’t be seeing this. The dream was over. She was awake.

  Yet there was Jeff, squatting next to the bed.

  “I’m sorry,” he said to her again, making the hair stand up at the back of her neck.

  Chapter Six

  Jon paced the floor of the hotel room from the door to the beds and back again. “So he’s here. Now.”

  Darcy rolled her eyes and raked her fingers into her hair. She sat on the bed they had slept in, still in her pajamas. “Yes. Jeff’s ghost is here.”

  “Well, get rid of him.”

  She stared at Jon. She knew that he was frustrated, and so was she, but she did not appreciate the tone in his voice. “It’s not like he’s a dog. I can’t just tell him to heel or something. Spirits need to know that any left over business they had is done. Their worry and their anxiety about things that happened during life is what holds them here. Jeff won’t be going anywhere until we figure out what’s bothering him.”

  Jon stopped his pacing and grabbed up his t-shirt and pulled it on. He sighed heavily as he did. “Great. So we have to be his therapist. Can’t you just ask him what’s wrong?”

  From the corner of her eye s
he saw Jeff standing in exactly the same spot he had been standing in twenty minutes ago when she’d woken Jon up and told him what was going on. It had sparked an argument between Jon and her that was still going on.

  “It doesn’t work that way,” she explained for the third time. “Spirits, well, they don’t speak the same language anymore. Sort of. If you ask a ghost a direct question, you’ll get an answer that might seem totally unrelated. The answer will be cryptic and hard to understand. That’s because the ghost is answering the meaning behind the question, not the question itself.”

  He crossed his arms and leaned back against the wall. “I don’t get it.”

  Darcy blew out a breath. It had taken years for her Aunt Millie to explain all this to her, even though Darcy had been using her gift from a young age. How could she condense it into five minutes for Jon?

  “Okay, look at it this way.” She tucked her feet under her on the bed and used her hands to emphasize what she was saying. “If you ask me if it’s raining outside right now, my answer would be no, because it’s a bright and sunny day.”

  Jon looked out the window at the cloudless sky, then turned back to her with a nod. “Okay, I get that.”

  “Good. Now. Ask that same question to a spirit of someone who has died. They might give you an answer like, their mother’s favorite color was red.”

  The frown returned to Jon’s face. “And you’ve lost me again.”

  “That’s because you don’t understand the ways that ghosts use to communicate. To the spirit, that might be the right answer because their mother walked them to school every day when it rained wearing red rain boots and carrying a red umbrella.”

  She saw a little bit of understanding in his eyes. “So, the spirit in your example was talking about their mother when you asked about rain because that’s what rain reminded them of.”

  She clapped her hands for him. “Yes. Exactly.”

  “So, when Jeff was telling you to beware of the crow earlier, it might have nothing to do with a bird.”

  “It might not, and then again it might. Now you understand a little bit more.”

  “Not really,” he grumped.

  Standing beside her suddenly, Jeff snickered. “Not very bright, is he?”

  “Shut up,” she said to him.

  “What?” Jon asked. “I was just saying—”

  “No, not you,” Darcy said, angry at herself for getting stuck as the go-between for her boyfriend and her ex-husband. “Listen, I told you what Jeff said last night in my dream. Marla knew why she was killed. And it sounded like Jeff might have had something to do with it.”

  The lights in the room dimmed, then brightened again.

  “I’ll take that as a yes,” Jon said as he went back to pacing. He hadn’t gone five steps before he stopped again and turned to her. “You know, a group of crows is called a murder. A murder of crows. Maybe Jeff was trying to warn you that Marla was going to be murdered?”

  Darcy thought about it. Not a lot of people knew the proper name for a group of crows. “No, I don’t think Jeff would have been smart enough to know that.”

  Jeff scowled at her and his lips moved angrily like he was trying to shout at her, but this time no sound came out. The lights dimmed and flickered in time to every silent word.

  “Well, it’s true,” Darcy said to Jeff. She was reminded, again, why she had divorced him. This was what it had been like between them, in the end. Him snapping and going off over every little thing she said, and her always on the defensive. Marriage had been a lot harder than either of them had realized it was going to be.

  She caught herself on that thought and tried not to look Jon in the eyes. Sure, marriage was hard. That did not mean she wouldn’t marry Jon. When the time was right.

  “Okay,” Jon said, calming his voice. He moved over to her, putting his hands gently on her shoulders. He didn’t realize how close he was to Jeff’s specter. “Okay. Look, I’m sorry. I don’t like the idea of Jeff’s spirit being with us in the room but I understand it isn’t your fault. Let’s just figure out if there really is any connection between Jeff and Marla. Then we can decide if that’s why Jeff is trying to reach you, or however you say that.”

  Great idea, Darcy thought to herself, but how would she manage that? She had barely known Marla, and as far as she knew Jeff hadn’t known her any better. But then, what had he meant when he’d said Marla had died because he’d done bad things?

  “Was there anything they did together in town?” Jon asked. “Belong to the same community groups or attend the same church, maybe?”

  She snorted. “Jeff wasn’t one for church.”

  The lights dimmed, but then slowly came back up. He knew she was right.

  She racked her brain and thought back but all she could remember was seeing Jeff talk to Marla at a couple of parties back in Misty Hollow, long before his death. He’d called Marla mysterious, or something.

  Of course, there was the way Marla had called Darcy a bookworm, echoing the same hurtful insults Jeff had used against Darcy. She’d thought it was odd at the time but now she had to wonder if there wasn’t something more to it.

  Could Jeff and Marla have known each other? Could there be a connection there?

  There was one way to find out.

  “Darcy?” Jon was saying to her. “What is it?”

  “Jon, we’re going to need some candles.”

  ***

  From a nearby convenience store Jon bought six tall, thin purple candles. They weren’t the special thick candles made of beeswax that she liked to use for her communications, but it wasn’t like she could be choosy. She didn’t exactly have a travel kit for this kind of thing. It also didn’t really matter what shape or size or even what color the candles were. They were just markers for the energies she had to call on.

  If she wanted to reach Marla’s spirit, then she was going to have to focus.

  They had decided to try this in the bathroom, because the floor in there was covered in linoleum. The rest of the hotel room had carpeting. Candle wax was murder to get out of carpets and Darcy didn’t want to be stuck paying for damaging her room. She cringed at her unintentional use of the word “murder,” even if it was just in her own head.

  She arranged the candles in a circle with Jon’s help and then sat down in the center of that circle, the toilet at her back and the shower beside her. This could possibly qualify as the strangest place she’d ever done this. She definitely hadn’t planned on this.

  Usually she liked to have Smudge help her out. Her cat liked to keep her company by curling into her lap while she called forth to the other side. But of course Smudge wasn’t here, so she’d have to make do.

  In her hand she grasped the little item she had found in Marla’s bag. A coin or medallion about the size of her palm, made from copper, and embossed with a four-leaf clover on the one side. Obviously it was some kind of good luck charm, and judging by the wear against the pattern Marla had held it a lot. It obviously had sentimental value to her. That was important when doing what she was about to try.

  Jon was in the bathroom with her but he stood in the corner by the door, keeping quiet, there only for moral support. He knew from experience she needed him to be quiet for this.

  Jeff was here, too, standing inside the shower like that was something normal ghosts did.

  Darcy did her best to ignore them both, and shut her eyes as she drew in slow, calming breaths. In her mind she imagined rolling fog, a mist that covered the blank landscape of her thoughts, churning and coiling. Into that mist she sent some of her own life energy, calling out to the spirit of Marla Benson.

  From inside the trance there was never any way to know how much time had passed. In the past, she had broken out of some after only a few minutes, and then there had been ones where she’d sat cross legged like this for hours on end. Everything seemed to happen all at once in this self-induced state.

  Marla’s ghost was reluctant to come forth. If she knew why sh
e had died, she apparently wasn’t eager to share that information. Calling out to Marla for the third time, Darcy saw the mists collect and shape themselves into the form of a woman with shoulder-length red hair and a pretty face with freckles. Marla, wearing the same black dress Darcy had seen her in the night she was killed.

  “You’re nothing but a bookworm,” Marla said to her, a sneer on her face.

  A sneer that reminded her of how Jeff used to look at her when their marriage was falling apart.

  She had meant to contact Marla to ask a long list of questions. Questions about who killed her, how she was killed, all of that. Instead, something else pushed itself to the front of the list.

  “Marla…did you and Jeff know each other?”

  The woman’s ghost smiled at her again in that same way. “Stick in the mud.”

  The mists shifted again, and Darcy was looking at a scene in a dark room, a bedroom, where two people were making passionate love under the sheets. Even knowing this must be a vision of something from Marla’s past, that it had already happened, Darcy felt embarrassed.

  She had been an unseen visitor in dozens of moments just like this, thanks to her gift. Spirits revealed information in ways other than direct communication, just like she’d explained to Jon. Showing memories from their lives was one of the more common ways.

  The two people on the bed turned so she could see them better in a shaft of slanting moonlight. Marla was the woman, her eyes open and seeming to stare directly at Darcy in a challenge.

  Darcy bit her lip and waited to see where the vision would take her. Hopefully, Marla had some reason for showing her this other than trying to embarrass her.

  In the vision, Marla sat up, kissing the chest of the man with her. He held his hands in her hair, encouraging her, pulling her into him, and then turned his face toward Darcy.

  She gasped. It was Jeff.

  She pulled back from the vision just as fast as she could, barely keeping her connection to Marla but refusing to see anything more of that…that…horrible image. As the last of it broke apart, she recognized the room. It made her sick. Her bedroom. Her own bedroom.