by K. J. Emrick
Millie smiled sweetly. “Ah, but you were.”
For once, the other woman had no witty comeback.
A child? Willamena had a child It must be a sore subject if she wasn’t able to come up with a snarky joke in reply. Darcy was going to have to remember to look into her family tree a little more. She had no love for Willamena, and in fact she was embarrassed to say that this was the first of her relatives to make it across the ocean from Europe to the Americas. Anything she could find out about her would be ammunition she could use to get this particular ghost out of her life for good.
Thump.
The sound of a rubber ball bouncing on the bedroom floor was loud in this dream space. It made Darcy jump, and she accidentally knocked her paperback novel off to the floor.
Thump.
The ball dropped from somewhere out of sight, into the shadows. It bounced off the floor. Into the air.
Putting out her hand, Willamena caught it.
“Why is that here?” Darcy asked. “That’s Joel’s ball. Why is it here?”
Beside the witch woman, another shadow resolved itself into the shape of a person. Or rather, a ghost. A little boy’s ghost. “It’s my ball,” Joel Harris told Darcy. “I always kept it with me. I never went anywhere without my ball.”
Darcy brightened. “Uh, well, hi Joel. It’s good to hear you talk. You were talking with my daughter before. Remember?”
He stepped back, further into the shadows, as if he’d used up all of his nerve just to say those few words and now he was too scared to talk again. He pushed himself closer to Willamena, and the woman wrapped a comforting arm around him.
She beamed at the look on Darcy’s face. “See? I can be both pleasant and nurturing. Perhaps, Sweet Darcy, you have misjudged me.”
“No, I really don’t think I have. Did you bring Joel here? Does he have something to tell me? Something important?”
From the shadows, the boy nodded.
“What is it? Joel, I’ve been waiting for you to come and tell me what happened to you. Can you tell me now?”
He stared at Darcy with wide eyes. He didn’t say anything.
Darcy knew this was a dream, and she knew Joel was only a ghost of his former self at this point, but she could sense his fear clear as day. “Joel, it’s okay. I know all of this is scary, and it’s hard to understand but if you tell me what happened when you were in the car, then I can help you go to a place that isn’t scary. A next place, somewhere far away from here.”
From the corner of her eye, she saw Millie sit forward in her rocking chair, and nod her head approvingly. She knew Darcy was doing her best to reach the boy and ease his troubled soul.
Willamena sneered. Her fingers gripped Joel’s shoulder tighter.
Darcy ignored her. “Joel, something bad happened in the car. Do you remember what happened?”
Very slowly, the boy nodded.
“Good. That’s good.” She shifted around on the bed until she was sitting on her knees. “Now, this is very important. Take your time, and don’t rush, and just tell me what happened.”
It seemed like it took forever before he said, “My mom.”
That wasn’t what Darcy had expected to hear him say. “Your mother? Joel, did your mother have something to do with what happened?”
“She screamed.”
This must be what Joel had told Colby. “She screamed? Your mother screamed? Was she shouting at your dad?”
“Not shouting,” he said. “Screaming.”
“But was she screaming at your dad?”
“Dad was screaming, too.”
That didn’t sound good. That sounded like Lana and Brian were having an argument before the killing began. She was screaming, he was screaming…
“Joel,” she said, “what were they arguing about?”
He looked up at Willamena, like he was asking her if it was okay to tell. Willamena nodded. Joel turned back to Darcy. He closed his eyes, and she could see him readying himself to tell her what horrible things he’d seen when he was still alive.
Then his eyes popped open so wide it startled Darcy.
“Listen,” he said.
She did, expecting to maybe hear the ghostly echo of whatever had transpired in that car, in the snow, on the far end of Main Street.
There was nothing. No sound at all. Her bedroom was completely silent.
“Joel, what are you trying to tell me?”
“Listen,” the boy said again.
And in the back of her mind, Darcy heard Colby again, saying, There’s more wisdom in silence than in a thousand words.
She listened again.
This time, she heard a faint voice, indistinct and distant. A woman’s voice, she thought. A desperate, anxious woman.
As the voice grew stronger, Darcy realized the woman was saying a single word, over and over. A name.
“Joel…”
In the middle of the room a shimmer in the air became a silhouette and then the outline of a woman Darcy recognized. Her face flickered in and out of view again. She was here, but not really.
Lana Harris. She was calling for her son.
Her ghost was reaching out for him.
“Oh no,” Darcy said to herself. “Oh no…”
She knew what this meant.
The image of Lana Harris was crystal clear for just an instant, and then it disappeared, and then faded back in. She was here and gone, here and gone. Lana was dying. She was standing on the thin line between life and death.
“Joel…” she whispered as her ghost became fully visible.
And then she screamed.
“JOEL!”
Her son threw his ghostly hands up over his ears, trying to block out the sound of his mother’s pleas. With a single step back, he disappeared through the shadows, and he was gone.
Lana looked around the room. Her eyes were desperate and when she didn’t see Joel, she faded away again. This time, she didn’t come back.
Back at the police station, in her holding cell, Lana was dying very slowly. Probably not from natural causes, either. Lana was frantic, and she was upset, and even though Darcy didn’t yet know exactly what had happened she knew that Lana had seen her husband and her son get killed.
Now, she was trying to kill herself. Darcy had no doubt about that.
“Dear,” Millie said to her from her rocking chair, “I think you’d better hurry and tell Jon what’s going on, if you want to save that woman’s life.”
“You know,” Willamena mused, “we could just let her die.”
Darcy glared at her.
“What?” The witch woman faded backward, into the same shadows where Joel had disappeared. “It was just a suggestion.”
Darcy leaned forward, finger jabbing in her direction, ready to give her a piece of her mind.
And then she woke up, sitting straight up in bed. The dream shattered around her and she was back in her bedroom for real. She reached out to Jon’s side of the bed, but it was still empty. He must still be at the police department. She had to call him, right now, from the phone downstairs to tell him to get to the holding cells. Get there, before it was too late to save Lana Harris.
She threw off the blankets and swung her feet out onto the floor. Her toes knocked into her paperback novel, lying where she’d accidentally dropped it, sending it sliding under the bed.
Chapter 11
Darcy sat at the kitchen table, watching the sun turn the cloudy sky from the deepest black to a solid gray. The snow was falling in earnest again. Whatever might have been melted off by the temporary reprieve yesterday had already been replaced, and more continued to fall. The weather wasn’t letting up. In fact, it was getting worse. “Storm of the Century,” was how one news website had put it. Her phone was good for more than just sending texts. It was good for connecting to the internet and giving her bad news, too.
Still no word from her mother, so more bad news there. Grace hadn’t heard anything, either. At this point it was f
airly obvious that Eileen was not going to make it for Christmas. Then again, it was going to be hard just to get Grace and Aaron and their two kids here from across town to celebrate. Skis, and snowshoes, and snowmobiles—and magical flying sleighs—were going to be the only mode of transportation for a while. Christmas was not turning out the way any of them expected.
It hadn’t turned out well for Lana and Brian Harris, either, or their son Joel. Their holiday was ruined. Husband and son dead, Lana the most likely suspect… Not exactly the makings of a Hallmark movie.
She looked up at the ceiling, up to where she knew Colby and Zane—and Izzy, too—were still asleep. She was truly blessed with her family and friends. Her life, chaotic as it might be, was something she would never think of trading. Not that they would ever be the subject of a movie of the week either, but being happy didn’t require perfection. Just the right people to share your life with.
Jon had texted about a half an hour ago to tell her he’d be home soon. He knew she’d still be awake, still going crazy over what had happened after she warned him to check on Lana Harris. Had they been in time to save her? She hoped so. The woman’s ghost hadn’t appeared again, and she took that as a good sign. Despite everything, all the evidence and all the clues thus far, she still wasn’t sure that Lana was the killer.
“Maybe,” she said out loud to herself, “you should just stop overthinking things and accept the obvious. Who else could have done this, except Lana?”
Nobody answered her, of course. Just the silence and the snow slapping against the windows.
There might be wisdom in silence, but what she needed was answers.
She was on her second cup of tea when she heard the snowmobile coming up the street. Those things were so incredibly loud. The police must be waking up everyone tucked sound in their beds, disturbing visions of sugarplums and all that. What exactly was a sugarplum, anyway? Was it a fruit or a candy? Ooh, her tired brain giggled, maybe those were the techno-colored bits in fruitcake that no one could ever identify.
The snowmobile’s single headlight made reflective confetti out of the snow as it stopped in front of her house. She could hear muffled voices talking over the put-put-put sound of the idling engine and then the machine turned around and took off down the street again, probably on its way back to the police station. Darcy took another sip of her tea and got up from her chair to meet Jon at the door.
The kitchen lights went out.
She stopped for a minute, tensing in the dark. It was a normal human reaction to be afraid when the light suddenly disappeared for no reason. Human beings feared the dark as much as they craved the light. Having lived her life basically between the worlds of the living and the dead, Darcy didn’t mind it quite so much… but she was still human. She went to the light switch on the wall and flicked it up and down several times. Nothing. The digital clock on the stove was out. The refrigerator had stopped humming.
Power failure, she told herself, and felt her body relax. It was just a power failure.
Did that mean the whole town was out? All this snow weighing down on the powerlines, all the people running their furnaces and their space heaters at full and their Christmas lights nonstop. It must have finally overloaded the power grid.
Under the sink was where they kept the emergency lantern. She took it out now and put it on the countertop. Moving blindly by sense of touch, she found the right drawer and took out their three-cell LED flashlight. She was going to go up and check on the kids in a moment, but she could hear the front door opening, and she wanted to talk to Jon first.
When he came in, he tripped over the doorway, stumbled into the wall, and swore softly. “Darcy? Why is it so dark in here?”
“The power just went out. I’ve got the flashlight.” She turned it on and handed it to him. “I’ll get the lantern lit. Just give me a second.”
Jon held the flashlight for her as she worked a lighter over the wick and then adjusted the trim and settled the glass chimney back in place. Soft, warm light bathed the kitchen, and the harsher white of the flashlight glared wherever Jon pointed it. Now she could see the expression on Jon’s face. He was unhappy about something, and it wasn’t the lights.
“What is it?” she asked him. “Did Lana… did she hurt herself?”
Jon’s expression soured further. “She tried to. If you hadn’t messaged me when you did, we might not have gotten to her in time. That would have been a very black mark on our department, I can tell you that. We’ve never, ever, had an in-house suicide at our department and I certainly didn’t want to be the first chief in our history to let it happen.”
“No one saw her doing anything? There’s cameras in the holding area for just this reason, right?”
“All of us were busy with taking statements. Even then I’m not sure it would have mattered because what she did was tear off pieces of her shirt and swallow them. Basically, she was trying to choke herself to death so she could just lie down and die, and it almost worked.”
“I know. I saw her ghost, remember? She was on the cusp of death when I saw her. One foot in the grave, as they say. A few more seconds and it would have been too late. You saved her life.”
“Actually, I think you saved her life. You and those amazing gifts of yours.” He shook his head, tapping the flashlight against his thigh, making the shadows dance. “You know what this means, right? This is just one more piece of evidence against her. A jury will see this as her trying to kill herself out of remorse for what she did.”
“I don’t think that’s what it was, Jon. I think she was so desperate to see her son again that she was willing to kill herself to make that happen. She just missed her son that much.”
“Maybe so, but I don’t think that makes it look better for her, and I can’t have you go on the witness stand and testify to the emotional state of her almost-dead spirit. No. I’ve got to charge her officially now. There’s just no one else who could have done the crime. She won’t speak up and say there was anyone else there. Nobody else could have known they were coming to town except the Levisons and they all have alibis. The murder weapon in her purse. She has motive because of the affair. That’s it. That’s everything in a nice, neat package wrapped up with a bow. There isn’t a jury in the world that wouldn’t convict her.”
“You don’t sound too happy about it.”
“I’m not,” he admitted. “Something just doesn’t feel right about this whole thing.”
“I agree, but you’re right that there just aren’t any other suspects. You’re sure there was nothing in the statements from Casey and Lloyd and their family?’
“Just alibis. None of them was ever alone. None of them did this.” He stepped closer and hugged her close for a quick moment. “I think we just need to accept the fact that we’ve found the killer. It just happened quicker than it usually does.”
Darcy still wasn’t sure. Both her gift and Jon’s cop instincts told them Lana wasn’t the murderer. What were the chances of them both agreeing that the wrong person was in jail?
“Did she say anything to you?” she asked him, with her head leaning against his shoulder. “Even after she almost choked to death?”
“Well, actually… I guess it’s not that she didn’t say anything. It’s just that what she did say isn’t helpful.”
“I think anything might be helpful at this point.”
He laughed softly into her ear. “Think so? When we got her airway cleared, she said just one word. Listen.”
Darcy stepped back, and looked up at his face, studying it in the light from the lantern. There was that word again. Listen. Well, that’s exactly what she’d been trying to do. She listened to everyone from Mark Franks to Willamena Duell, Casey Levison to Joel Harris. She hadn’t heard anything of use yet.
So what, exactly, was she supposed to be listening for?
“Come on,” Jon said, giving her one more squeeze before letting her go. “Let’s check on the kids. We should get out the extra blan
kets, too. It’s going to get really cold in this house if the power stays off for long. I don’t even have any wood stored up for the fireplace. Is Izzy still with us?”
“Yeah, she is. Her and Mark Franks were texting up a storm before she went to bed. I’m glad she’s been here to watch the kids so we could investigate the mystery.”
“Sure, just so we could end up charging Lana with the killings in the end anyway. Hold on, did you say Izzy… and Mark? When did that start?”
“Recently, I think. I just found out myself. She’s mad at me, by the way, for accusing Mark when I shouldn’t have.”
“Huh. Why didn’t you tell me those two were a thing?”
“Honestly, I kind of forgot about it with everything that’s going on.”
“Understandable. Just like we forgot to talk about Colby getting a cellphone?”
“Yeah. I guess I’m going to have to give in on that one, aren’t I?”
Jon held her hand and started moving them toward the doorway to the living room. “She is growing up, Darcy. She’s still our little girl, but she’s getting there quick. She’s going to need a phone of her own. Just think about the hours she spends on our landline talking to that Audrey friend of hers. If she had a cellphone—”
“We’d never see her again?”
He gave her a look that was hard to read in the shifting shadows. “She’s getting to be that age where she needs that kind of freedom. We can always do what we did for you, get her a phone that only texts and connects to the internet. No phone calls, if you’re worried about ghosts calling her.”
“I am, among other things, but can we talk about it when the lights are on?”
It was kind of eerie walking through the living room with the Christmas tree standing there dark and solemn, and the animatronic Santa standing still and unmoving. It was like Christmas had been frozen in place. Darcy really hoped this didn’t last long. Christmas was only three days off and she didn’t want her kids to have to spend it huddled under blankets eating whatever canned food was left in the cupboards. She was not going to let Zane start eating dog food again no matter how bad the storm got.