A Darcy Sweet Mystery Box Set Seven

by K. J. Emrick

  “Hmph,” Darcy muttered. “Not if the airports stay closed.”

  “Hmph,” he muttered back. “I’ll send a sled team for her.” Yawn. “Like in that cartoon you like so much with the dog and the… other dog.”

  “Balto,” she reminded him. It really was one of her favorites. Just listening to Kevin Bacon voice the title character made it… worth… watching…

  Her mind was wandering. She yawned, and thoughts of cartoon dogs and snowbound airports and upcoming Christmas dinners with the family all disappeared into a hazy fog. She was too sleepy to think. Too sleepy for anything except sleep.

  Jon snuggled closer to her. The furnace was on in the cellar but the cold world outside was still trying to reach in to them from the other side of their bedroom windows. Under the blanket, her husband’s body heat felt so very, very good to Darcy. If she wasn’t so bone-tired she might have let her hands wander a little lower, and maybe kissed the side of his neck like she knew he liked, and let the night take them wherever it wanted.

  They had been married for years and years now, raising a twelve-year-old girl and a four-year-old boy along the way, but still she couldn’t keep her hands off Jon Tinker’s strong body. Maybe there was more gray in his hair now than there used to be, and maybe there was some pudginess around his midsection, but that didn’t matter to her. Besides. There were streaks of gray in her own dark hair now, and just a few wrinkles at the corners of her eyes.

  Jon didn’t care about that. Neither did she. They loved each other like they were still young and wild and carefree.

  “We should get some sleep while we can,” Jon told her. He stretched, but Darcy could tell he was just as tired as she was. “School’s already cancelled for tomorrow. You know our kids don’t understand the meaning of ‘sleep in.’ They’ll be up bright and early wanting to go outside.”

  “Mmm,” she murmured, resting her head on his shoulder. “Before sunrise, they’re your kids.”

  His voice trailed off as he drifted to sleep. “After sunrise… they’re yours.”

  She smiled and listened to his breathing slowly even out.

  Darcy drifted away, her thoughts mingling into a landscape of dreams. Images danced with emotions and played games of hide and seek with reality. It was nice. She felt so, so relaxed.

  Until something woke her up again.

  Blinking, she opened her eyes and looked at the shapes and shadows in the room around her. Nothing. There was nothing here. Just part of the dream, she told herself. Nothing to worry about. Go back to sleep.

  She closed her eyes tighter and rolled over onto her other side. Jon followed her, spooning up against her back and folding his legs into hers. Nice. That felt nice…

  Thump.

  “Mmph,” Jon mumbled sleepily. “Heard something.”

  Darcy groaned. If Jon was hearing it too, then it wasn’t a dream. She had vivid dreams all the time, so real she could touch and taste and smell them, but she had never shared a dream with Jon. He was hearing the noise, so the noise was real.

  But where was it coming from?

  She pushed herself up, untangling her limbs from Jon’s, listening in the dark to the house around her. She could hear the snow tapping against the window screens as it continued to fall outside. She rubbed her eyes. Next to her, Jon was already starting to snore softly as sleep overtook him again. After a moment, when she didn’t hear anything else, she decided it didn’t matter. With that logic that every brain uses in the deep, early morning hours, she told herself it could wait until the morning. Whatever it was could wait.

  She put her head back down on her pillow and rolled her body up against Jon’s…

  Thump.

  This time Jon shot straight up, startling her, dragging the blankets with him and swinging one leg over the edge of the mattress. “Wuzzit?” he snorted. Then he stopped, and he turned back to Darcy, still only half awake. “What…?”

  The poor guy had gotten hardly any sleep at all, Darcy thought to herself, and he was probably going to be up early and at it again. On the other hand, she was the owner of Misty Hollow’s only bookstore. The most she would have to do tomorrow would be to shovel the sidewalk in front of her business. That’s if she didn’t decide to just lock the doors and hang the sign that said “CLOSED, The End.” Jon had to oversee the safety of the entire town and everyone who lived here. Not to mention being a father to their two wonderful children. That was a full-time job in itself. In a good way, but still.

  Sitting up next to him, Darcy kissed Jon’s shoulder and pushed her fingers through his short, bed-mussed hair. “Go back to sleep, babe. I’ll go check on whatever it is. It’s probably just Cha Cha batting around one of the ornaments from the Christmas tree again.”

  “Mmph-hmph.”

  Whatever that was supposed to mean.

  He was asleep almost as soon as his head hit the pillow. Darcy’s thick, fuzzy socks padded along the floor as she found her way across the room and out into the hallway. Jon was going to owe her a backrub for doing this and letting him sleep instead.

  Thump.

  Oh, for Pete’s sake. What was that?

  There were very few things that were scarier than a sound you couldn’t identify in the middle of the night. There was something ominous about the unknown, in the dark… in your own house. Darcy lived in a world of ghosts and specters. She could see the dead, and they could see her. She knew the true meaning of scary. In her life she’d been scared half to death more times than she could count.

  She wasn’t terrified of this sound—at least, not yet—but she was worried.

  It didn’t sound like any of the normal house noises she was used to. Her Great Aunt Millie had owned this house for years before Darcy came to live with her as a teenager. Since then, she’d come to know all the sounds the house made in winter, spring, summer and fall. This sound wasn’t any of them. There better not be anything wrong with the furnace. Not when it was already four below.

  What worried her more, was the thought that it might be something in one of the kids’ rooms.

  Down the hall, she stopped into Colby’s room first. The butterfly nightlight on the far wall fell on the silhouette of her daughter, tucked under her comforter, snoring softly into her pillow. Darcy waited, but she didn’t hear anything but Colby’s breathing. Whatever the noise was, it didn’t seem to be coming from in here.

  Not that long ago her daughter had been deathly sick with an ailment that was beyond the ability of medical science to cure. She was better now. Back to her old self. Darcy couldn’t be more relieved, but she had been carefully watching Colby ever since. Like a mother hen. Like she wasn’t fully convinced that the danger was past.

  She wasn’t the only one, either.

  From the end of the bed, a furry little head lifted up. A gray cat with a single black-tipped ear looked back at Darcy with eyes that were luminescent in the dark room. Tiptoe was sleeping with Colby, just like she usually did. Those two had formed a fast friendship, hardly ever apart from each other. It was nice to see. Darcy and Tiptoe’s daddy, Smudge, had been best friends for years. She still had a little empty space in her heart, left from him being gone.

  Tiptoe blinked at her, and then stretched out against Colby’s feet. She was happy right where she was. If there had been anything wrong in here, Tiptoe would have known about it, and she would have warned Darcy.

  “Thanks, little girl,” she whispered to the cat. Tiptoe flicked her ear and wrapped her tail around her paws and went back to sleep.

  Darcy closed the door most of the way, but left it open a little just in case Tiptoe needed to come and find her after all. That was her worry surfacing again. A mother’s prerogative.

  Out in the hallway Darcy shivered. It was so cold! When she was in bed with Jon’s arms wrapped around her, she had all the warmth she needed. Out here… not so much. She should have put her robe on before coming out here to search for this mysterious noise. And a flashlight, too! Seriously. What had she
been thinking? Not that she’d be wandering through the house looking for an errant noise, that’s for sure.

  Thump.

  Right. That noise, right there. Where was it coming from?

  She reached over and touched the antique silver ring on her right hand. It had been her aunt’s, and she kept it as a favorite keepsake. It made her feel safe and comforted her when things got crazy or weird. It was like having a piece of Aunt Millie close at hand. Literally. The etchings along the side of the ring played under her fingertips as she spun it around, thinking to herself and wondering what she would find when she finally tracked down the source of this sound.

  Next, she peeked into Zane’s room. A soccer ball lamp shone a warm, pale light across the mess of toys and discarded clothes. Her son was fast asleep under his Avengers blanket with one arm folded behind his back and his mouth hanging wide open. He looked oddly comfortable like that. Up near his face, sharing the pillow, Cha Cha twitched in his sleep. The Bassador hound was never going to be a very big dog—maybe twice Tiptoe’s size—but he had a boundless energy. Even in his dreams. One floppy ear covered his eyes, and his stubby tail thwapped at the bed as he chased squirrels or ran after the birds or whatever it was he did in his sleep.

  She listened to the sound of the tail going thwack, thwack, thwack. No. That wasn’t the sound she and Jon had heard. That was definitely different. Everything was fine here, just like it had been in Colby’s room.

  Darcy backed away quietly into the hallway again. She knew that if she accidentally woke up Cha Cha there would be no more sleep for anyone tonight, whether or not she figured out what this noise—

  Thump.

  What it was.

  She heard it more clearly now. Downstairs. That had definitely come from downstairs. So… that’s where she was going next.

  Not that long ago there had been safety gates at the top and bottom of the stairs. Zane had been too young to wander around unrestricted. Now he was a big boy but if Darcy had her way, the whole place would be locked down and wrapped in foam rubber until both of her children were out of college. Longer, maybe. After all, she was hoping for grandchildren someday.

  There was nothing amiss in the living room. The Christmas tree was standing in the corner, right where it had been since the day after Thanksgiving. They put it up as a family, with Jon assembling the artificial limbs and the kids helping Darcy put on the tinsel and the ornaments and the lights. It had been Zane’s year to select the tree topper and he’d picked a small Santa hat that Darcy had saved from an old teddy bear of Colby’s. It perched at an angle on the tip of the top branch. The end result was a haphazard hodgepodge of too many ornaments around the bottom and bunches of lights that blinked green and red and blue whenever they turned them on.

  They weren’t on now. The room was dark, and empty. She could barely make out the sparkle of tinsel strung along the walls. There were paper snowflakes taped to strings hanging from the ceiling, but she couldn’t see them, either. There was also—

  “Ho, ho, ho, Merry Christmas!”

  Darcy jumped and inhaled a sharp breath as the animatronic Santa Claus in front of the fireplace reacted to her movement and started playing Jingle Bells, while wishing her a happy holiday in a voice loud enough to wake the whole household.

  Swallowing her heart back down into her chest, she glared at the bearded four-foot-tall elf, and then stalked over to flip his off switch. The last thing she needed when she was trying to find an odd noise was more noise.

  “Shut up, Santa.”

  Thump.

  She tried to pinpoint where the sound was coming from. All she knew for sure was that it didn’t come from in here.

  Nothing in the kitchen, either. Darcy turned on lights as she went, checking everywhere. She even turned on the outside lights and pulled aside the curtains to look out through the windows. Not that she could see much. The snow was falling so fast now that the storm was limiting visibility to mere inches.

  Thump.

  Whirling around, she looked toward the cellar door. Finally, she knew where the muffled sound was coming from. Downstairs. She started worrying all over again that something was wrong with the furnace. Something bad, that would leave them without heat in the middle of the worst snowstorm in recent memory. They did have the fireplace in the living room, but they hadn’t used it in a long time, what with the mess the wood made and the smoke when it backed up. It was just too much trouble when they could just turn up the thermostat. Jon had been joking about them buying a generator… maybe they should have gone through with it instead of laughing it off.

  The wind picked up outside to a howl, throwing clumps of snow against the windows with a pat-pat-pat-patpat-patpatpat staccato that worried Darcy almost as much as the thought of the furnace going out. This house was old, and although it had stood its own in good weather and bad, it wasn’t immune to the occasional leak in the roof or loose bit of siding. Well. She was just going to have to cross her fingers and pray for the best. There was nothing she could do about the weather.

  She could find out what was making that strange noise though, and make sure that everything in the cellar was working the way it should be. That meant going downstairs and finding out what this was all about.

  Of course, if anything really was wrong, they would have to wait until morning to get someone to come and look at it, and even then it might not happen because of the travel ban. If the snowplow drivers had been ordered off the roads for their own safety, then she doubted the furnace repair man was going to be in a hurry to go anywhere.

  Thump.

  There it was again. She had to go down there and check on the noise first, before she started worrying about what troubles tomorrow would bring.

  It was an odd sound, sort of familiar but in a way that she couldn’t put her finger on. It set her mind at ease, though, to think it was something not immediately identifiable but nothing sinister, certainly. Nothing that she should be scared of.

  Standing at the top of the stairs leading down, she hesitated.

  There had been a dream Darcy had not too long ago that had scared her more than she had ever been scared in her life. For her, that was really saying something. In the middle of a dream, she had seen herself, begging for help. It had felt real. It had sounded real. It had terrified her so much, in fact, that she hadn’t slept right for a week.

  Ever since then, when something odd happened in her life, there was a hesitation. What had that dream meant? It hadn’t happened again, so maybe it didn’t mean anything. Maybe.

  Or maybe, the answer was going to pop out at her from around a corner someday when she least expected it…

  There was a light switch just inside the doorway to the cellar and she turned it on now.

  She saw nothing but the stairs, leading down.

  On the sloping ceiling above her, a bare hundred-watt LED bulb came to life, and down below there was a flash as two sets of fluorescent lights flickered to life. It was enough to see where she was going, but it still left a lot of shadows. Besides the furnace and the water tank and the water heater, the cellar was mostly used for storage and no one came down here very often. Tiptoe liked to prowl down here, hunting for any mice who dared to invade her territory, and using a secret gap in the stone walls to sneak out just like her daddy used to do.

  Cha Cha wanted nothing to do with coming down here. If any of them ever tried to call him down he would just sniff at the air from the top of the stairs and then sneeze, before turning and padding away, shaking his head until his overlong ears flapped everywhere.

  Jon had done a number of renovations down here, and so the risers were sturdy two-by-ten boards for the steps, supported from underneath by six-by-six beams. She could jump up and down on these stairs and they would never once utter a protesting creak. Colby herself had tried it when her father was done putting in the final screw. It was bright, and it was safe… and still she felt a shiver run up her spine that had nothing to do with her forgetting h
er robe.

  She started down now, one step at a time, listening all around her. The cellar opened up around her when she got down below the level of the main floor. From here, the furnace was off to her left…

  Thump.

  She turned slowly to her right. That was where the sound had come from. Louder, and more clear now. It wasn’t the furnace, then. The water heater, maybe?

  Darcy looked that way, bending down on the stairs to see under the lip of the ceiling, and around a crammed shelving unit.

  Along the poured cement floor, a red rubber ball came bouncing into view.

  Thump. Thump. Thump…

  Now she realized why the sound had been so familiar.

  She watched it coming, feeling a growing sense of unease at the sight of that simple child’s toy. She was glad the lights pushed away most of the shadows where she stood. Now she really was scared, and with every reason.

  There were no rubber balls down here. She knew everything packed away in all of these boxes, and this shouldn’t be here.

  Thump.

  And besides…who was bouncing it?

  Thump, thump…

  The ball rolled to a stop against the bottom step. Darcy stared at it. She sat down on the second stair up, and she reached for it, picking it up in her fingertips. It was solid, smooth and round, spongy when she squeezed it. Just a child’s toy. Nothing more.

  So how did it get into her cellar?

  In the corner, where there were no shadows, a shadow moved.

  Darcy looked up sharply. The shadow detached itself from the wall and became the shape of a person. A young boy, standing there with a sad expression on his hazy, dark features. She could just make out the barest hint of hazel eyes, blonde hair. He looked to be all of ten years old. Maybe less.

  A ghost.

  The boy stood there, watching her. Then he held out an uncertain hand. He was asking for his ball back.

  Ghosts often came to Darcy, looking for someone who could see them and hear their pleas for help. It was part of her gift that she could communicate with the other side. Something she had been born with. Most people never knew when ghosts walked right beside them. At most, they might feel a strange prickling on their skin, or they might see something in the corner of their eye that they would later decide was just their mind playing tricks on them. Even people who firmly believed ghosts were real rarely ever saw one themselves.