by K. J. Emrick
“That’s just what me and Izzy were doing earlier,” Darcy told him.
“Oh, good, then you’ve seen her? I stopped at her house before yours, but the lights were out and no one answered.”
“Yeah, she came over here when she lost power. She’s good. We went into town like I said, only we used skis instead of snowshoes. If our local pastor isn’t saintly enough to do it without help, then what chance did two girls like us have?”
They laughed at her joke just as Izzy poked her head into the kitchen. “Hey, what’s going on out here? I thought I heard my name… oh, hi Pastor Phin! I was wondering who was at the door.”
“Just me,” he said with a wave. “I was going around town to see if anyone needed help, but Darcy tells me you’ve already done that. God blesses those who care for their neighbors, I can tell you that.”
Izzy pursed her lips with a frown. “Well, God actually took the power away from my house today, so I’m not feeling overly blessed. Except for good neighbors like Darcy, of course. I’m blessed to have her as a friend. She’s letting me stay here until the power comes back on.”
“That’s what she said, and it’s good to hear. Neighbors relying on neighbors. That’s what it’s all about.” He tapped his chin as the kettle began to whistle. “Might have to do a sermon on that after we get everybody dug out from all this glorious white stuff. Oh, that’s the other thing. I’m gathering volunteers for snow shovel detail after the storm passes. Did you see some of these drifts? There’re some folks can’t even use their front door. Adrian Fowler over on Maple Street was climbing in and out of his second-story window when I saw him. He had a sheet of plywood rigged up from the roof to the snowbank like a slide.”
He laughed at the memory of it. Darcy knew Adrian Fowler. He never came into the bookstore, but he was always at the Town Hall meetings to complain about whatever had gotten under his skin on that particular day. He was never happy. At the next meeting he would no doubt complain about how unprepared Misty Hollow had been for this winter onslaught.
Hmm.
“Did you see anyone else out and about?” Darcy asked him as a sudden thought occurred to her.
“Anyone else? Oh, a few people. Victor Gladstone was trying to walk his dog, quite unsuccessfully, I might add. Wendy Parsons was rowing a canoe around her yard in the snow, if you can believe that. Quite a sight to see, that was! Actually, I’ve spoken with half the town by now. Yours was one of the last streets I was going to check on, what with just the two of you down here. It will be dark soon, and I need to go back and check on things at the church.”
Darcy stirred the cocoa, and then put some milk into it to cool it down a little before handing it to Pastor Phin. “Well, we appreciate you coming to look in on us. Do you need any help down at the church? Like I said, Izzy and I found a way to get around.”
“Oh, that would be just fine, just fine indeed.” He swirled the drink in his cup, inhaling the aroma, and then took a long drink. “This is really good. Maybe I’m just cold but it is really, really good. Thank you, Darcy.”
They talked about this and that for a few minutes. Darcy offered to let him stay with them for a while and get warm but once the hot chocolate was gone, he insisted he had to get moving. There were still a few people to check on, and a couple of the older residents did need a few things, like drinking water and bread, simple things that they just couldn’t go out to get for themselves. Phin had made arrangements with Clara Barstow to donate some of her supplies from the La Di Da deli and sandwich shop. It was going to be a lot of work to collect it and give it out, but Phin had never blinked at helping out whenever anyone needed him.
He was a true friend. Darcy thought the town was lucky to have him here.
After he bundled himself back up tight, he thanked Darcy once more and went back out into the weather, his snowshoes strapped to his feet again. She watched him through the window for maybe half a minute before the swirling flakes swallowed him up from view. She hoped he was right about the eye of this storm coming soon. They could all use a break from the snow.
“Why,” Izzy said, “did you ask Phin who else he saw out and about?”
Darcy was a little embarrassed to admit it, but it was because her mind had already been working on the mystery of the dead father and son. Jon hadn’t been sure if both of them had been murdered or just the little boy, but Darcy had to believe both had met with foul play. With the snowstorm raging like it had been last night… well, that almost certainly meant someone already here, in town, had killed them.
In her experience, there were always plenty of bad people living just down the street. Literally.
“I just wanted to know who might have been out in the storm,” she said. “You know. Um. Like us.”
Izzy crossed her arms, and stuck out her hip, giving Darcy a level look. “You mean, like someone who might have been out in the snow killing two people in a car.”
“Well, yeah, actually. I don’t want to think we have killers among us but it wouldn’t be the first time.”
With a heavy sigh, Izzy uncrossed her arms with a shrug. “You’re right about that. Like with poor Helen.”
A tight feeling clenched the center of Darcy’s chest. Helen Turner had been one of Darcy’s very best friends and now everywhere she turned, there was something to remind her that she was gone. Helen had been a magnet for bad things, from the arrest of her first husband, to the deceit of the next man she fell in love with, and then her own murder not all that long ago. Even for all that, Helen had always found the good in life, and had helped Darcy to do the same. She was certainly a reminder of how bad things happen to good people. Often, when they least expect it.
She put that aside, knowing she would never truly forget Helen, any more than she would ever stop missing Smudge. “Come on. Let’s go back to the couch. The furnace is having a hard time keeping up with the cold and I want to get back under that blanket.”
“Me too,” Izzy agreed. “You’ll never hear me saying I prefer the cold again!”
They were still laughing when they heard the crash from the basement.
From the living room, they heard Colby’s hesitant voice. “Mom?”
“Stay there with your brother,” Darcy told her, trying to keep a sudden sense of dread out of her voice. “It’s probably nothing. You know. Just boxes falling off the shelf or something.”
She saw the look on Izzy’s face. What she said hadn’t fooled her friend at all. She doubted it had fooled her children, either. The boxes down there did fall sometimes, but in the Tinker-Sweet household, nothing was ever that simple.
“Can you stay with the kids?” she whispered to Izzy. “I’m just going to go down and take a quick look.”
Izzy nodded to her, wide-eyed. She might not know everything about Darcy’s secret gift, but she knew things were puzzling in Darcy’s life, to say the least. She’d already seen a dead man today and she wasn’t ready for any more oddness.
Darcy opened the basement door. It was dark down there. They didn’t keep the lights on when they weren’t down here. There was no reason to burn the electricity for a space that was supposed to be empty.
She turned the lights on now. She did not want to be here in the dark. Not if things were falling off shelves, and definitely not if the noise had been caused by anything else. The fluorescent lights blinked on down below as she made her way carefully down. She crouched under the lip of the ceiling, looking left and looking right. She could hear the furnace churning away as it poured heat into the house. From here, everything looked all right.
Two steps from the bottom, she stopped. She heard a noise behind her.
Thump. Thump. Thump.
Slowly, she turned to look over her shoulder.
One stair at a time, slowly but surely, the red rubber ball was rolling down to her.
Thump, down one stair.
Thump, the next.
Thump.
Against the rules of gravity and friction and co
mmon sense, the ball stopped next to her left foot, rolling sideways until it was resting up against her sock.
“Joel?” she called out tentatively. There was no answer.
Before she bent to pick the ball up, she ran her fingertips over her antique ring.
She squeezed the ball, inspecting it closely. It was definitely the same one. She’d left it upstairs on the shelf in the kitchen. There was no way it could have jumped down from there, bounced its way past Izzy and her kids, and then literally taken a ninety-degree turn to find its way down to her.
Impossible… and yet here it was.
“Meow.”
Darcy jumped and nearly went tumbling down the stairs when she heard the muffled sound of Tiptoe’s greeting. Oh, for Pete’s sake! She hadn’t seen the cat slink around the corner of the shelves and pad her way over. Hadn’t seen her stop and look up at Darcy with unblinking eyes.
Her heart was beating a mile a minute. Her breath was caught in her throat. Calm down, she told herself. It’s just your cat. Ghosts of young boys don’t say ‘meow’ when they sneak up on you.
“Tiptoe, you scared me half to death.” She held a hand to her chest, breathing in and out slowly several times until she relaxed. “Was that you making all that noise down here? You could at least give us some warning, don’t you think?”
“Darcy?”
She didn’t jump this time when she heard her name being called down to her… at least, not really. That was Izzy, up in the living room. No doubt she wanted to make sure everything was all right. It had been a minute or two already.
“It’s okay,” she called back up. The stairs weren’t very long, but they weren’t short, either. The basement was ten feet high easy, and then add the height of the beams supporting the entire first floor of the house, and she had to raise her voice to be heard. “It was just Tiptoe. I guess I found where she’s been all this time.”
She wasn’t angry with her cat. More like, she was embarrassed at herself. For a woman who spent her life around ghosts, she had a tendency to get scared way too easy.
Then again, maybe some things were just always going to be scary.
Tiptoe continued to stare up at her, and now that Darcy had calmed down, she saw that there was something in the cat’s mouth. Not a mouse, although Tiptoe had proven to be a very capable mouser, to the point where they hadn’t had one in the house for over a year now. No, this was something else.
The cat’s fur was wet, especially her paws, like she’d been out in the storm.
When Tiptoe saw her noticing the object, she dropped it on the bottom stair. Then she sat back on her haunches and wrapped her tail around her feet. She flicked her left ear, silently waiting for Darcy to tell her she was a good cat.
“Fine, you’re a beautiful cat and we’re lucky to have you. Okay? Now what did you bring us?”
She lowered herself down, sitting on a higher stair as she reached to pick up the thing Tiptoe had dropped. It was small and thick and square, folded and blue. It was wet when Darcy picked it up, too. Tiptoe must’ve brought it in from outside.
A wallet, she realized suddenly. It was a woman’s wallet. Not hers. Not Izzy’s either, and not anything they would have had stored down here in the basement. That was odd. Whose wallet was this, and how did it get here?
She opened it up, and on the inside left flap was a slot with a plastic window for a driver’s license. Darcy gasped when she saw the name next to the picture. Lana Harris.
Harris. Just like the name of the father and son, dead in that car on the far end of Main Street. Just like the name of the young ghost boy who came looking for her help. There were a few Harris’s in town but no Lana. No Joel. Darcy didn’t recognize the woman in the license, either.
On the opposite side of the wallet fold, behind another plastic window, there was a photograph of a woman kneeling on a summertime lawn, hugging a laughing child in her arms. A boy, holding onto a red rubber ball.
The same one that Darcy held in her other hand.
“Darcy! I’m home!”
That was Jon this time. His voice carried through the house, down to her, and he sounded excited. Whatever he’d found out about the latest mystery in Misty Hollow, it must be really interesting. That was his I’ve-got-something-to-tell-you voice.
Darcy looked at the wallet in her one hand, and the ball in the other. Well, she had a lot to talk to him about, too.
Tiptoe blinked at her, and then began to purr. She knew she did good.
Chapter 5
They waited for dinner to get into specifics. Jon was very interested in the wallet Tiptoe had found. Darcy was very interested to hear about the car and its deceased passengers. They both wanted to know how the woman in the wallet tied into everything else.
But when Jon waved a finger, and held it up to his lips, she understood that he wanted her to wait to ask him anything until the kids were out of earshot. And that could only mean bad things.
They didn’t have any hotdog buns so Darcy fried them up and cut a couple into pieces instead, mixing them into bowls of mac and cheese for Colby and Zane. She and Izzy and Jon ate theirs like adults, wrapped in slices of white bread. While they sat out at the kitchen table, Colby and Zane were allowed to eat in the living room with some more television. The old Christmas cartoon about the mouse who fixes the town clock to chime for Santa was on. It was one of Darcy’s all-time favorites, and now the kids loved it, too.
They usually weren’t allowed to watch this much TV in one day. This snowstorm was turning into a real treat for them.
Jon took a drink from his milk before leaning over to make sure the kids were occupied. It had taken him half an hour to warm up from being outside when he got home. His cheeks were still a little rosy, and he snuffled like he might be catching cold.
“So Tiptoe just dropped this at your feet?” he asked Darcy, picking up the wallet from the middle of the table. “Any idea where she got it from?”
“Outside, is my guess.” Darcy remembered how both the cat and the wallet had been wet. “Most likely it was in the snow somewhere and she brought it back to us.”
“Why? I mean, pets will sometimes bring dead animals to their owners, but wallets?”
“Tiptoe’s a very smart cat, just like Smudge was smart. You know that. Remember all the help Smudge used to find for us?”
“Yeah, actually I do. I kind of miss that guy.”
Darcy smiled fondly at him. His relationship with Smudge had always been a little stressed, a little standoffish maybe, but she knew they secretly liked each other. It made her feel good to hear him say he missed Smudge.
“But why,” Jon asked, ‘did Tiptoe bring the wallet here? How could she know…? You know what? Never mind. I’ll never understand cats. Especially ours.”
“I’ll second that,” Izzy said around a mouthful of her dinner.
Darcy exchanged a look with Izzy. She shrugged, but added a grin.
Jon winked at Izzy to say he understood right where she was coming from. “Anyway, I’ll just say I was the one who found this out in the snow. That will look a lot better on my reports than saying the cat dragged it in.”
“I don’t think Tiptoe will mind,” Darcy said. “So, this Lana Harris is related to the two people who died in the car?”
“Yeah. Her name is on some of the paperwork in the glovebox. The address on her driver’s license matches the registration address for the car.” He took a bite of his hotdog and wiped away mustard from the corner of his mouth while he chewed. “I figure she’s the mother of the little boy. I don’t know for sure but that would fit. A family taking a trip for Christmas. They come to town, and… something happens. My department is still trying to contact the authorities in Vermont where they lived. I was hoping we’d find the mother back there, safe and sound, but now that we have this,” he pointed to the wallet, “I might have a missing person on my hands, too.”
Darcy followed his line of reasoning to its logical conclusion. “And cons
idering what happened to her husband, and her son…”
“Right. I can’t hold out a lot of hope for Lana Harris to still be alive.”
He shook his head sadly. That meant another victim for him to worry about. For all they knew she might have dropped into the snow somewhere, buried under endless sheets of white, lost until the weather warmed up and things started to melt. If that was the case, then she could have been just a few feet away from the car and they wouldn’t have even known it.
The thought of it terrified Darcy. When her time finally came, she was hoping to die peacefully in her bed, surrounded by the warmth and comfort of her friends and family, not alone and cold where no one could find her.
If only Tiptoe could bring them to where she found that wallet. Then they might know more, like where Lana Harris might be, if she was even still alive, or…
Oh!
“Hey, Jon,” she said to him, “we forgot to tell you that Pastor Phin stopped by earlier.”
He looked at her for a long time, and then swallowed the food in his mouth. “Um. Okay. I’m not sure what that has to do with the rest of this…?”
Izzy leaned forward, realizing where Darcy was going with this. “Well, it turns out that Pastor Phin has started a shelter at the church. He says there’s some people there from out of town. Tourists, he said.”
Jon’s eyes got a little wider as he caught on. “I see. So, it’s possible that if a woman was in town, stranded, and say her family had just been murdered and she had nowhere to go because of Snowmageddon, then she might go to the church where there was a shelter. If she’s still alive. Nice. I can get someone down there to check. Nice.”
Darcy put her fork aside, stuck now on one single word in what Jon had just said. “Murdered? You mean both of them? So now you know that Joel and his father were murdered? It definitely wasn’t an accident?”