by K. J. Emrick
Darcy was only listening to him with half an ear now. She was thinking about the possibility of this affair and how it affected Jon’s investigation. Bad love, just like she thought. That was a strong motive for murder.
“You know,” Casey said. “I mean, whoever Lana was having her affair with could be someone in our circle, the guys going back and forth to Vermont, but I really wouldn’t know who. I try not to think of her any more than I need to. For all I care you can let her rot back in that cell of yours.”
After another few questions led them around in circles, Jon stood up and offered his hand to Casey. “Well, thanks for coming in. I better let you and your family get home before the snow starts falling again. According to the weatherman that’s going to be any minute now.”
“I appreciate that, Jon. I want to try to salvage what I can of this holiday, maybe even cook our dinner up and spend a meal around the same table. Toast a beer to Brian, and maybe a cream soda to Joel.” He heaved in a deep breath and let it go with a sigh. “Thankfully we stocked up on the food we need before the storm came. Even the turkey. We’re going to bring some of it to Pastor Phin at his church for that shelter he’s got going. Akers Pennington was asking around for donations. You guys know Akers? Good guy. He’s been over there all day helping people who got no place to go. What about you guys? Do you have family in town?”
This time Jon did look up, giving Darcy a quick glance of concern. “We were expecting Darcy’s mother and step-father. We’re still hoping they make it but like you said, with the storm and all.”
“Well, I hope they make it. If you need anything else from me or my family, just give us a call, okay?”
“We will. You’ve been very helpful, Casey. You and the whole family. You want one of my guys to walk you all home?”
“Nah, we can make it. Me and my brothers used to play football. We’d do drills in the snow to increase our leg strength. Kind of takes me back to my college days, tell you the truth.” He sighed again. “Brian would have loved this weather. I mean, really loved it. I hope you catch whoever did this, Jon. And if it’s Lana… don’t just keep her in jail. Drop her in a hole and then drop the jail on top of her after.”
“Are you sure you don’t want to see her?” Darcy asked him. “She hasn’t been very talkative and maybe seeing someone she knows—”
“No. Absolutely not. Jon, I’m sorry, I know I said I’d help you any way I could, but I do not want to see that woman. I just can’t.”
Darcy understood but she also knew that getting Lana to talk at this point might be the only way for them to know for sure what had happened in that car. Seeing Casey, or Lloyd, or someone else from this family she knew so well might be exactly the push she needed to find her voice again. She started to tell Casey exactly that when Jon reached out and took her hand with his.
“It’s okay, Casey” he said. “We’ve got everything we need for now. You just take care of your family. Let us worry about the rest of it.”
“Thanks, Jon.” He pushed himself up from the chair and put his hat back on his head, pulling it down over his ears. “Merry Christmas, I guess.”
“Same to you.”
When he was gone, and the door was shut again, Jon grabbed Darcy by the waist and pulled her down into his lap.
“Jon!” she laughed, “you’re going to break your office chair!”
“This chair? No way. This chair has been in this office for years and it isn’t going to ever fail me. Now come here.”
He kissed her, slow and tenderly, and Darcy felt it all the way to her toes. It warmed her in a way that her winter coat never could. When it was over, she sighed with pure contentment and nestled into his chest. She fisted his shirt into her hand, and imagined them both at home, snuggled up under the blankets of their bed.
“That was nice,” she told him. “We haven’t had much time together in the past couple of days. With the kids, either. First it was the storm, and now this murder.”
“That’s life in Misty Hollow,” he joked.
“Yeah. Murder and mayhem are kind of our thing, aren’t they? At least the snowstorm is new. I can’t remember the last time it snowed this bad all winter, let alone in just a few days.”
“It’s going to get worse before it gets better, I’m afraid. I mean, it was bad enough already to bury a car and trap the Harris family. I wonder if they’d still be alive if their car hadn’t gotten stuck?”
That reminded Darcy of some of the things she wanted to tell him. “Actually, it turns out their car was stopped before the snowstorm got bad. It wasn’t the storm that stopped them there. They could have kept driving. It was something else that stopped them.”
He shifted in the chair, sitting her up on his legs, a quizzical expression on his face. “How do you know… oh, I get it. You were talking to the ghost of the Harris boy again?”
“Uh, well, actually our daughter was talking to him.” She patted her hand on his chest. “Now, don’t give me that look. You know our daughter has the Sweet family gift in spades. If I could give her a normal life I would, but our family doesn’t do normal.”
“Aw, normal is boring.” He hugged her, and then set her up on her feet and stood up with her. “Well, that does fit with what we know so far. There wasn’t anything wrong with the Harris’s car. No damage on it anywhere that we can find and believe me, we shoveled all the way around it. This certainly reads like it just stopped in the middle of the road.”
“Just like Joel Harris’s ghost said. Something, or someone, made Brian Harris stop the car there.”
“Meaning, Lana could have told him to stop the car before she killed him, and Joel too.”
“Yes, I guess so. Joel said there was a lot of shouting going on when it happened. Did you get anything from the Levison’s statements?”
He shook his head. “So far, a whole lot of nothing. They really take family togetherness seriously. Not one of them has been alone for longer than it took to go to the bathroom for the last three days. Two of them were always together, or five, or all of them, or whatever. They basically alibi each other.”
“You’re kidding,” Darcy said flatly.
“Nope. They might as well have been glued at the hip.”
“So not them. Not Mark Franks, either, by the way.” She laid out the explanations Mark had given her, and even told him about the image she had gotten from her flash of the possible future Izzy and Mark might have.
He raised an eyebrow when she got to that part. “Well. Isn’t that interesting.”
“Yes, it is. So not the Levisons. Not Mark Franks. Where does that leave us?”
“With fewer and fewer suspects, that’s where.” Jon looked thoughtful for a moment. “It’s looking more and more like Lana might have done this herself. If nothing else, it seems to me we’re looking for someone who was coming into town just when the snowstorm hit, like Lana did, or we’re looking for someone who was leaving town just as the storm hit, someone who stopped their car right where the snow buried it. That could be anyone. Did our little ghost say anything else to our little Starshine?”
“Actually, yes. He told Colby there was lots and lots of shouting.”
“So you said. Did he mean like an argument? Something between Lana and Brian?”
“That I don’t know. Joel didn’t tell her and when I came in the room to check on her, he spooked and disappeared.”
Jon cocked his head to one side. “You’re telling me that you scared away a ghost?”
“Mm-hmm,” she said with a goofy little smile. She understood the irony.
“You,” Jon said slowly, “scared a ghost.”
“Hey, mister. I can be a very scary girl when I want to be.”
He leaned in and kissed her nose. “Not to me. You are a lot of things to me, Darcy Sweet, but scary isn’t one of them.”
She pressed herself against him again, wrapping her arms around his waist. “Jon, can I tell you something?”
“Anything.”
<
br /> “I’m worried about my mother.”
He held her tight. “From what I’ve seen in the weather report, the storm is pretty much hovering over us. The snow is going to start again soon.”
“Yes, I know. It’s already getting colder again.”
“Right, but that’s just here. The rest of the Eastern seaboard is snowy, but not snowed-in like we are. I’m sure she’s okay.”
“Then why haven’t I heard from her?”
“I don’t know. This is your mother we’re talking about. Eileen doesn’t always think about doing little things like letting other people know what’s up with her life.”
That was true enough. Still, with the number of texts Darcy had sent, her mother should have responded to at least one of them. She should ask Grace again if she’d heard anything. Maybe talk to Great Aunt Millie, too, because a ghost might know something that the living didn’t.
Maybe Millie could help them unravel this mystery as well. Because Darcy had listened to everything Casey Levison had just told her and Jon. She’d listened very closely, in fact, but she hadn’t heard anything that pointed to any other suspects besides Lana. The affair gave Lana a very good motive to kill Brian… but her son? Darcy couldn’t picture that. A mother killing her son because she was running around on her husband? That didn’t make sense. Unless her mind had completely snapped. Considering the state Lana Harris had been in when they found her at Pastor Phin’s church, that was a very strong possibility.
Darcy frowned. Everything she found out, everything she heard, certainly made it look like Lana was the killer.
Or maybe, she thought to herself, she just hadn’t been listening hard enough.
Chapter 10
At the end of the day all Darcy felt was tired.
Izzy and the kids were playing Mouse Trap at the kitchen table when Darcy got back. Cha Cha had been sitting on the floor next to Zane’s chair, looking up at him expectantly like he was waiting for his turn to play. Tiptoe had been on the counter again, looking over with practiced disinterest. She wasn’t fooling anyone. The mice in the game might be plastic and cartoonish, but she was still on her guard.
For the rest of the evening, all she could think about was this mystery, and if Lana really was their only suspect. By the time she was putting the kids to bed it had started snowing again. Just a few flakes meandering their way down from the sky to land on top of the piles already covering the world below. Hardly enough to notice.
They stayed up late, watching Frosty the Snowman and talking and laughing before heading to their rooms. Izzy hardly looked at her. She was friendly and smiling for the kids, but still cold as ice toward Darcy.
With a heavy heart, she waited for Jon up in bed with the pillows propped up behind her and a paperback novel open in her hands. Three more texts to her mother had gotten the same answer as before, which was to say no answer at all. She was worried, and perplexed, and a little drained emotionally from everything that had happened in the past few days. The words on the page began to swim and slip out from under her gaze as her eyelids drooped.
“Perhaps,” she heard someone saying, “you should put the book away before you lose your place.”
She did close the book, and laid it down on her chest, and then smiled over at the ghost of Great Aunt Millie. She was sitting over by the window in a rocking chair that Darcy didn’t really have in her bedroom, dressed in her usual black dress and floppy black hat. The shawl wrapped around her shoulders was a new addition to her outfit, purple with white flowers, fluffy and warm.
“Do ghosts even get cold?” Darcy asked her. “I mean, this is a dream you’re using to talk to me. Can’t you just wish yourself to be warm?”
“Give an old lady her little fancies,” Millie chuckled. “I remember snow. I remember how much fun you and I used to have in the winters. I miss those times something fierce.”
Darcy tucked her knees up to her chin under the sheets and set aside her novel on Jon’s empty side of the bed. “I miss it, too, Millie. You were good to me back then. If you hadn’t taken me in when you did I have no idea what my life would have been like.”
Millie nodded her understanding, rocking back and forth. “Pish posh, my dear. You would have grown into an amazing woman with or without my help.”
“I don’t know about that. I think I’m better for knowing you. This life I have, with Jon and the kids and this town, none of it would have been possible without you. I owe you a lot. I miss you, Millie.”
A smile creased the fine lines across her great aunt’s face. “I miss you, too.”
“And me?” another person in the room asked abruptly. “Doesn’t anyone miss Willamena Duell?”
In the opposite corner of the room, a figure faded out of the shadows. A woman, wearing a long gray dress that was probably considered stylish in her own century. A heavy silver necklace sparkled around her slender neck. Her deep red hair, in its high-bun style, appeared nearly black in the dim light of Darcy’s bedroom. There was a deep smile on her hatchet face. One that did nothing to make her look friendly.
For a while now, these two had shown up together in Darcy’s dreams. Always both of them. She always looked forward to the moments where she could see her great aunt again, talking over problems like this murder, or just reminiscing about the old times. She enjoyed these dreams. Or at least, she used to, before her distant ancestor Willamena Duell became a constant presence. The woman was an honest-to-God witch, and not a nice woman in any regard.
Millie swore there were things Darcy could learn from both of them, but she wasn’t so sure. Willamena had her own agenda.
Whatever it was, Darcy was sure it wasn’t good.
In the silence, Willamena sniffed. “Well. If you don’t want me around, I suppose you don’t want to hear what we have to say about this mystery you’re working on, either.”
Darcy dangled one arm off her knee. “I’m not sure I need to hear anything you have to say, Willa.”
“Don’t trust me, hmm?”
“I’ve never had any reason to before. Maybe,” she said with exaggerated brightness, “it had something to do with you trying to possess my daughter.”
Willamena clucked her tongue as she waved a hand through the air. “That old bit of news? Come now, Sweet Darcy. Every family has its issues. I may have done some… shall we say, questionable things in the past, but I’m here to help you now. Honestly, I thought we’d worked all this out already.”
“You’ve got a long way to go before I come anywhere close to trusting you.” Darcy wished she wasn’t wearing her nightgown and her Grinch socks. It was hard to act tough when you were dressed for beddy-bye. “And my name, by the way, is Darcy Sweet, not ‘Sweet Darcy.’”
“And my name is Willamena, not Willa. You know I don’t like that.”
“Well, I guess I’m just not as ‘sweet’ as you think I am.”
“Oh, now that’s just not true. You are such a sweet little thing,” Willamena hummed. “Sweet and nice. You’re always doing good things for the people around you whether they appreciate it or not.”
“That’s my niece,” Millie said with pride. “She is a credit to her family line. Unlike some I might mention.”
She gave Willamena a meaningful glance and got a shrug in reply. “If you ask me,” she said, “it’s kind of pathetic.”
Darcy ignored that insult. “Well, ladies, if that’s everything, I think I’ll go back to reading my book. Millie, you’re welcome any time. Willa… feel free to find your path to the afterlife. Head to the light, and just keep going.”
“Hmph,” the witch woman snorted. “How rude.”
“Ladies,” Millie interrupted sternly. “Let’s not argue, shall we? We’re all here for the same reason.”
“Are we?” Darcy lifted an eyebrow. “Because I was here to sleep.”
“Were you, dear? Oh, and here I thought you were trying to figure out the mystery of who killed those two people. That man, and that poor young boy. T
hat seemed to be weighing pretty heavily on your mind.”
“Well, sure. I mean, we’re kind of at the end of the investigation, I think. Everything seems to point directly at Lana Harris as the killer.”
“Mm-hmm, yes I suppose it does. But you don’t believe it, do you?”
Darcy felt the smile tug at her lips. “No, I don’t think I do. How’d you know?”
“Because I know you.”
“Yeah, so do I,” Willamena snarked. “Never willing to accept the obvious, our dear Sweet Darcy.”
“Pish posh on you as well,” Millie told her. “The truth is rarely ever obvious.”
“That’s why it’s so much easier to simply—”
“Lie?” Darcy asked her.
The witch woman shrugged one slender shoulder in her dress. “I was going to say just take the easy way out, but whatever works for you, I suppose.”
This was becoming tiresome. “Millie, why is she here?”
Millie adjusted her shawl. “We’ll get to that, dear. For now, you need to understand why you’re here.”
“Because this is my bedroom,” she answered wryly. “That’s why I’m here.”
“Well, yes. That’s true. But you’re also here because you care so much about other people, just as Willamena said.”
Darcy looked over at the woman in her gray dress. Willamena stuck her tongue out at her.
Once again, the memory of the dream with herself, pleading for help, came back to her. Millie and Willamena had been there in that dream, too. They had faded away before the image of herself came to her, and since then they had acted like it never happened, but Darcy knew it had. She remembered it. She wanted an answer to that mystery as well but until it happened again all she could do was wonder. At the moment, there was a more pressing mystery to think about.
“Ugh, fine. I don’t believe Lana killed her family. I just can’t believe that a mother would ever kill her own son. It’s just… it goes against everything I believe as a mother.”
“Me, too,” Millie agreed.
“You were never a mother,” Willamena pointed out, crossing her arms.