by K. J. Emrick
Darcy couldn’t believe it. “Am I okay? Are you seriously asking me that question? Colby, honey, you’re the one in the hospital bed.”
“Sure, but the worst thing that can happen here is having nothing to watch on TV. So tell me, what happened downstairs?”
Even with the family gift’s warning, Colby had only had a vague sense of danger, it seemed. It worked like that sometimes, and though Darcy had learned to live with the uncertainty of it all, she suspected it would be frustrating to Colby for a long time to come. At least until she gained a little more maturity and wisdom. Like Darcy had.
Although her… ahem… forty-plus years of experience hadn’t kept her from being attacked by a man in a janitor’s closet, so maybe maturity wasn’t all it was cracked up to be, either.
So she gave Colby a quick rundown of the events in the closet, leaving out a lot of the little details that she felt were better left to the adults. Colby might be growing up, and she had already seen a lot more than most kids her age were exposed to, but Darcy was still her mother. She was going to protect her from as much of the bad things in the world as she could, and for as long as she could. She told her about the locked room mystery, too, so she could understand why the attack had happened.
Now she understood why Smudge had been afraid for Colby. If the hotel manager who attacked her had found her and Jon up here in their daughter’s hospital room, would he have tried something here? The thought of Colby getting seriously, physically hurt by that man clenched her insides into knots.
For a moment she sat there, halfway through her story, and then she let out a breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding. “There’s more to it, though,” she said, thinking it through out loud to herself just as much as to Colby. “It’s all connected, somehow. I just can’t see it. The murder, and this man attacking me here in the hospital, and your troubles, too. Even the jewelry box of Mom’s with its little secrets.”
“The jewelry box has secrets?” Colby asked her. “Wow, so cool. What secrets?”
Darcy hadn’t had time to tell her daughter about all that, and now didn’t really seem the time, either. “It’s a long story, honey. I’ll tell you later, just suffice it to say that there’s a lot going on, and there’s something that connects all of it. There’s threads that I’ve been pulling but I’ve only found a couple of the ends.”
Colby turned the television off, ending the background drone of a newscaster reading from a script. “What do you mean, it’s all connected?”
“Well, like how you’re here, in room 203, which is the same number of the hotel room where the murder took place. Or… like how the jewelry box showed up just when your headaches started getting worse. I haven’t seen it since I was just a little older than you are, and now that it’s here you end up in the hospital.”
Maybe you should ask the person who owned your jewelry box, was what Smudge had told her. To find out about what was hurting Colby, ask the first owner of the box.
Willamena Duell, dead for nearly two centuries.
A ghost.
With a look that was just as grown up as an eleven-year-old girl could manage, Colby said, “I think you might be stretching things a bit.”
“Oh, do you now?” Darcy smiled carefully back at her. She couldn’t help it. If Colby felt good enough to challenge her mother’s wit and wisdom, then maybe she would soon be back to her normal, wonderful self. She must have been overreacting with all of her worrying about supernatural illnesses. Colby was going to be fine. “Well, you just lay there and rest, okay? Doctor Malik is here and he’s getting the results of the tests they’ve done so far. There’ll be a few more tests this morning, and then you can come home. The rest of it is for me to worry about, okay?”
“’Kay,” she answered, closing her eyes again, already on the way back to sleep. “Know what I do, when I can’t see something? I just close my eyes and imagine the problem from all different angles. That’s what I do. Yup.”
Darcy rolled her eyes, even though Colby couldn’t see her. “And sometimes, you slip into a spirit communication when you know you aren’t supposed to, trying to find answers from ghosts who like to eat little girls on toast for breakfast.”
“They do not,” Colby giggled drowsily.
“No, you’re right. They don’t eat people, but they can still be dangerous. No more spirit communications when I’m not around, all right? Not until you’re much older.”
“For Pete’s sake, Mom,” she said, cracking one eye and using Darcy’s favorite phrase. “It was only one time.”
“One time when you almost didn’t come back to me,” Darcy reminded her. The memory of finding Colby unconscious on the floor of her bedroom in the middle of a botched seance, a candle threatening to set fire to the rug, was just too much even now. “Just go to sleep and promise me you’ll only reach out to the world of the spirits when your mother is there to give you a little guidance.”
“Yes, Mom.”
She was already asleep on her next breath.
Darcy stayed where she was, knowing she should get back to Jon and the wrap up of the murder case, but not wanting to go just yet. She wanted to spend some time with her daughter, even if it was with her asleep. Sleep was good. Sleep meant you would wake up to a new day, and new chances. Sleep was good.
She put her hand on Colby’s forehead, smoothing back her hair.
A blue snap shocked her skin, like a sharp bite, and she drew her hand back again.
There was no mark on her flesh, but she wouldn’t have been surprised to see a red welt there. Or tiny teeth marks. That hurt! That… that wasn’t just static electricity.
That was something else.
She looked down at Colby again, this time not so comforted by her daughter’s sleeping, peaceful face.
A knock on the door turned her around, still cradling her hand to her chest. Doctor Nicholas Malik was standing there. He motioned for her to follow him out into the hallway.
Darcy gave her daughter one more look, wondering.
“I didn’t want to disturb your daughter,” Doctor Malik told her when they were outside of Colby’s room. His eyebrows were drawn down, and his glasses rode high on his wide nose. He looked worried, and Darcy did not like that. “I have news about her tests. Can you follow me down to my office, please?”
Chapter 10
“I heard what happened to you downstairs,” Doctor Malik said as he showed her into his private office at the far end of the second floor. “Are you okay?”
Darcy tried not to sound as embarrassed as she felt. “Oh. You heard about that?”
“My word, yes. The entire hospital heard about it.” He waved his hand for her to take a seat on a small green leather couch, while he sat in the chair behind his desk. “This is supposed to be a place of healing, where people can feel safe. I’m sorry that happened to you. Especially while your daughter is here and under our care.”
“Speaking of that, I have something I need to tell you about Colby. Something happened… but you said you had some news first?”
He leaned back in his chair thoughtfully. It squeaked on its springs when he dropped his elbows on the armrests. The office was much smaller than Darcy had thought it was at first. Between the shelves crammed with books and manuals, and the two five-drawer filing cabinets shoved into the corner, Doctor Malik’s desk was far too large for the remaining space.
“You have to understand,” he finally said, “our tests are only as good as the people who run them. Human error… it’s a more common thing than you may think. Now, your daughter’s attending physician is a very competent man, so I really think the problem was with whoever ran the blood sample in the lab.”
Darcy’s head was beginning to spin again. Just when she thought things were becoming settled, Doctor Malik was talking about some new sort of problem. “What error? What happened?”
He pushed aside a couple of file folders on the pile spread across his desk and took out a green one that had
Colby’s name typed across the corner tab. “They took a blood sample from your daughter, like I told you.” He flipped over the top page and took out the next one. “They sent it to the lab for strictly routine analyses. Blood type, CBC count, virus load, that sort of thing. They were looking for something that might indicate the cause of the headaches. What they found was something very, very unexpected.”
Her fingers found her aunt’s ring and began twisting it with a vengeance. “For Pete’s sake, Doctor, you’re scaring me.”
His eyes went bigger behind his glasses. “Oh, no no. Please don’t misunderstand me. I’m not saying there’s something wrong with Colby. There is something wrong with these lab results, however.”
He handed her the page that he’d turned to, and Darcy found herself looking at a chart with numbers and labels and words that meant absolutely nothing to her. “I don’t know what I’m supposed to be looking at here. Can you put this in plain English for me? What does this say?”
Doctor Malik leaned across the desk, stretching out as far as he could to point at the chart. “You see the two columns? There’s a reason for that. The lab determined that, in Colby’s one blood sample, there were genetic markers from two separate blood types.”
“Two?” She looked at the numbers again, but they still didn’t make any sense to her. “That’s impossible, isn’t it?”
“Exactly my point,” he said, settling himself back in his chair. “It’s basically a worthless sample, and we’ve wasted time that we could have been using to find out what’s going on with Colby. So, we’ll take more blood in a little while, and we’ll come down on whatever lab technician is responsible for contaminating the original sample, and then we’ll move forward with a diagnosis. I’m sorry, I just wanted you to see why we’re going to be delayed in treating Colby.”
Darcy felt herself relax. This was just a mistake. It was a technical glitch. A lab error, like Doctor Malik said. She could breathe easy again, and not worry that everything around her was falling apart…
Only, what was this?
Reading through the tables on the chart again, she saw something that she thought she recognized. She had no medical training, far from it, but in today’s world everyone knew a little bit about a lot of things.
“Um, Doctor?” She turned the paper back around and slid it across the desk to him, pointing to an entry about halfway down the page. “I have a couple of friends who have done those DNA profile kits that they advertise on television. Does this say what I think it says? The two samples that were analyzed by the lab… they have a genetic link? Like they’re from relatives?”
“Hmm?” He adjusted his glasses, looking where she indicated. “Oh. Well, I suppose it looks that way to a lay person such as yourself. But remember, there weren’t two samples. Only Colby’s blood. So the lab was undoubtedly comparing her own blood to her own blood, which of course will give a false-positive match for a genetic relationship. It’s completely a screw up on the part of the people down in the lab. We’ll get it squared away as soon as possible.”
Darcy continued to stare at the page in her hand. “I’m confused… was there a second sample, or was there not?”
He shrugged, taking the paper back from her to put it away in the folder. “I honestly couldn’t tell you. Whatever the problem is, you have my word that it won’t happen again.”
Darcy nodded, no closer to an answer about Colby now than before Doctor Malik had taken her aside. Colby was having headaches, bad ones, and just in general her health seemed to be getting worse and worse. She seemed to be okay now, but would that last? No one seemed to be able to tell her anything, and not only that…
“Oh,” she said, reminding herself what she’d wanted to tell him. “I don’t quite know how to describe this, but twice now I’ve touched Colby and I felt a zap of electricity.”
The look he gave her was completely blank. “You mean, like a static shock?”
“No, more than that. Much more. It actually hurt.” She rubbed her fingers together, remembering the snap. “It felt like something was biting me. Or pinching me, I guess. There’s no mark, but I’m telling you, it hurt.”
He pursed his lips, and rubbed at the back of his neck, and adjusted her glasses, and then finally lifted his hands helplessly. “I can’t think of any medical reason for that to be happening. Truly, I can’t. What I will do, is I’ll have housekeeping or maybe maintenance come in and check the wiring to Colby’s hospital bed. With the new safety requirements for hospital equipment it would be highly unusual for there to be any loose wires or stray voltage, but let’s not take chances.”
“So you don’t think it’s anything to do with her? With Colby?”
“Oh my, no. How could it be? There’s no medical reason for something like that. None at all.”
Darcy looked down at that folder showing the two separate blood types in Colby’s one sample, related to each other through their genetic markers. Of the things happening to her daughter, maybe an electrical discharge wasn’t all that strange in comparison.
Or was the doctor right? Nothing to worry about, just a glitch-error-mistake, and the rest of it would all work itself out. She wanted to believe that. More than anything, she wanted to know that was true. A few minutes ago, she might have been happy to believe that.
But now with what she’d just been shown… she knew what she felt.
He gave her a smile and told her that he would come and find her when he knew more, or else call her immediately if she wasn’t around. Darcy was left feeling like there was a lot more that needed to be said, but not knowing how to put it into words. She’d had her own stints in the hospital before, or bouts with the flu, or days when she stayed home from school with a stomach bug and had Great Aunt Millie take care of her with soup and grilled cheese sandwiches. She knew getting sick was part of being a kid.
This thing that was happening to Colby was not like that. She’d been fooling herself before to think that they’d just go home today and it would all be over. This wasn’t over.
Down the hallway to the stairs, Doctor Malik’s words kept ringing in her ears. No medical reason for what was happening to Colby. None at all.
There were two distinct blood signatures in the sample they took from Colby.
No medical reason.
The snap of energy when she touched Colby that felt like someone biting her.
None at all.
And then what Colby had said when she was falling asleep, about how she always closed her eyes and thought about a puzzle when she couldn’t find the answer. Darcy gently scolding her for when she’d used a spirit communication as a shortcut to do the same thing…
She stopped in her tracks partway down the hall, leaning her shoulder against the wall as her legs turned weak, gripping the patient handrail until her knuckles turned white.
Suddenly she knew exactly what was wrong with her daughter. Lord help her, she knew.
It wasn’t a physical problem. This was one with no medical reason.
She’d seen it before, and then let herself get talked out of it. Why hadn’t she just listened to herself? Why hadn’t she figured this out right from the start! If she had, she wouldn’t have wasted time coming to doctors and the hospital. There was no help for Colby here. The fact of the matter was that no one else could help Colby. Nobody but her mother.
With renewed purpose, she pushed herself forward, and made the entryway to the stairs in five long strides. She needed to tell Jon what she was going to do.
And then she needed to get something from her car.
Her emergency spirit communication kit had seen a lot of use over the years. Although, technically it should be called a séance kit because that was what these spirit communications actually were.
Darcy hated the term ‘séance.’ That word had been so overused in movies and television shows that people automatically associated it with gypsy women sitting at a little round table and peering into a ball of glass in a dimly lit room
. Darcy had no gypsy blood in her—although until this morning she hadn’t known she had French roots, either, but there were definitely no gypsy relatives in her family tree. She changed the term séance to spirit communication a long time ago.
Even so, with the way the term had been corrupted by Hollywood it still applied to what she was about to do. Its literal meaning was “a sitting” or “a calling,” and right now, Darcy was sitting on the floor of Colby’s hospital room, about to call out to the other side.
Colby slept on, oblivious to anything. That was good. It would make things easier.
She had learned a long time ago that if she was going to use her gift away from home, she needed to be prepared. In her life that happened a lot. So that was where her emergency spirit communication kit came in handy. She had started carrying candles and salt and some other supplies in a shoebox, of all things, and then Jon had surprised her with a beautifully carved wooden box to use instead. She’d used it ever since. She swapped the candles out, sometimes, if a vanilla scent caught her fancy or if plain white single-wicks were on sale. Other things changed as she needed them to, but the box was always went with her in the car, was always waiting for her.
Waiting, for moments like this.
Jon was outside in the hall, making sure no one got too curious about why the door was closed, and telling the doctors and nurses that Colby’s mother needed a moment with their daughter alone. Which was true. He just wasn’t telling them the real reason she needed that moment. He was a good husband, and a good father. All this weirdness all around him and he handled it like a pro. And now their son, little Zane, could talk to animals!
She shook her head to clear it. Her thoughts were all in a jumble with everything that was going on. Zane, the locked room mystery, the troubles with Colby, the jewelry box, being attacked earlier… it was just too much. Grace had been right. When it rains, it pours.