by K. J. Emrick
“It will be okay,” Jon told her, as if he could read her mind.
She smiled at him behind his back as they went up the stairs. “You always know the right thing to say.”
“Yeah, I’m a real Romeo like that.”
Up on the second floor they went to the linen closet first, getting out the extra blankets. Jon balanced a couple of them in his arms while the flashlight’s beam bounced in front of him. Darcy had the other three. This should be enough to keep everyone warm through the rest of the night.
The floor creaked softly under them as they went. Those were normal sounds in the winter months for an old house like this. She’d been listening to her home carefully for the past few days, worried about the weight of all that snow on the roof. Maybe she was just being paranoid…
Above them, a new kind of creaking sent a shiver running up her spine. She hadn’t realized she’d said anything about it until Jon answered her.
“It’s a good house. It’s got good bones. They built things to last when they built this place. We might get a few leaks, but that’s all. I’m more worried about water getting into the basement to tell you the truth. Those stones down there are loose in spots. Maybe we should go check on that next.”
“Don’t you need to coordinate with the department?” Darcy asked him. “If the power is out all over town then your guys are going to be even busier than before.”
“Yeah, but Wilson’s still there. Sean Fitzwallis, too. They can handle it for a little bit while I make sure my family’s taken care of, too.”
She loved him for that. A whole town to take care of, and his family still came first. The snow could wait. The roof could wait. The cellar could wait. His family was more important. It was kind of like what Casey Levison had been saying. Three brothers, three separate families, but still so close to each other that they got together for Christmas. She remembered the things he said in Jon’s office, about all of them being together just before the snowstorm started. The same day Brian and Joel Harris had been murdered.
A memory snagged at her. She stopped in the hallway, thinking about it.
Oh, for Pete’s sake. Suddenly she knew exactly who the killer was. It had been right there in front of her, and she would have realized it before now if she’d only listened. The murderer was someone who knew the Levison brothers, who knew this town, but who was actually from somewhere else. It all came together, and she was sure this was the answer.
She just had to prove it.
But how?
The roof creaked above her again, and she heard the wind blowing hard against the window in the bathroom. In spite of Jon’s assurances, she was having serious concerns about their grand old house. It had kept them safe for years, given them a place to raise their family, but this storm was stressing everything to the limit, people and buildings alike. Every snowflake that fell might be the one that broke the snowman’s back.
Well, it wasn’t like she could do anything about the weather. She needed to set that aside, check on the kids, and then…
“Jon, we need to get to the church.”
His free hand was on Colby’s doorknob, and as he turned to look at her he nearly dropped the blankets. He fumbled with them, grabbed them up to his chest. “The church? Why?”
“We need to get Izzy up,” she said, not actually answering him. She was thinking ahead and had only half heard his question. “She can watch the house and the kids. I hope she doesn’t mind. I don’t know how long we’ll be out but I’m grateful she’s here to help, you know?’
“Yes, I know, but why are we waking her up?”
A door opened down the hall and Izzy leaned out, wearing an oversized sweater and a pair of fuzzy pajama bottoms she’d brought over from her house, hiding a huge yawn behind her hand. “I’m already up, thank you very much. You guys are about as stealthy as a herd of elephants walking on thumbtacks.”
“Sorry,” Jon apologized. “We were only coming up to check on the kids, but apparently Darcy’s had other ideas.”
“Yeah, she has a lot of ideas, doesn’t she?” Izzy yawned again. “What happened to the lights?”
“Power’s out. We’re bringing everyone extra blankets.”
“Mmm. Gimme,” she said sleepily, wiggling her fingers at him. “Is it the whole town? Is the whole town dark?”
“We don’t know. I’ve got to find out yet, but I want to get an extra blanket to Colby and Zane first. Then, apparently, I need to go to church.”
“How come?”
Jon looked at Darcy, and she brought her racing thoughts back to the present moment. “Because,” she told them, “that’s where we’re going to find the killer.”
“There it is,” Izzy chuckled softly. “Darcy Sweet is on the case.”
If anything, it was snowing harder now.
Darcy was chilled to the bone by the time she and Jon set their skis up against the outer wall of the church. There were floodlights out here, throwing light against the mass of falling snow, but that didn’t mean there was power on this end of town. Darcy could tell by looking at them that they were emergency backup lights, working off stored solar power from earlier when the sun had tried its best to peek down through the clouds. So far, she and Jon hadn’t passed a single house or business with lights on, except for a place just off Main Street where they heard a generator running. The rest of the town was completely dark.
“The police station has a backup generator, too,” Jon reminded her. “We’ll be okay for a while, but I don’t know what everyone here in Phin’s shelter is going to do.”
“Maybe we can have someone donate a generator to the church?” Darcy suggested, stamping her feet on the church’s welcome mat to warm them.
But Jon shook his head. “We’d basically be asking someone to take power away from their own home to do that. Plus you have to hook those things up and that’s not as easy as plugging one in to a wall socket. Not to mention the trouble we’d have getting it here in the first place. You saw how high these snowbanks are.”
Darcy looked back along the path they had just skied. He was right. It was odd to be standing on snow that was five feet deep and more in places, up above the tops of cars parked on the street. Higher than mailboxes. They’d sunk in more than once on the way here, and that was just from their own body weight. What would it take to move a generator from one place to another in all of this?
This storm was truly scary. The perfect backdrop for a terrible murder.
Jon held the door open for her, against the wind and the driving snow. “I tell you, Darcy, if this keeps up, we might have to look at evacuating the whole town.”
For a moment she wasn’t sure if she’d heard him right. Evacuate the town? That was something she’d never heard of. Ever. How would that even work? Where would they go? How would they go? The thought of abandoning Misty Hollow to the weather actually scared her more than the storm itself did.
“Jon…”
The door closed with an audible snap. In the dark of the foyer, Jon found her gloved hands and pulled them close to his chest. “It’s okay, Darcy. We’ve got time before we have to worry about that. Let’s find our killer and take care of this, and then after that I’ll worry about what we need to do to keep Misty Hollow going.”
“I always thought this town could withstand anything,” she said, a tremble in her voice that she couldn’t stop.
She felt his lips on hers. “You know what?” he said to her softly. “I’m pretty sure this town will go on forever, long after you and I have gone to join Great Aunt Millie in her tea party in the sky.”
That made her laugh, and his touch made her feel better. After all, this was a church they were standing in. If she was going to find hope anywhere, why wouldn’t it be here?
Although, there was a killer in this building as well. Death and hope, all in one place.
“Come on,” Jon said to her. He unzipped his coat, and took out his cellphone, and shook it twice to turn on the flashlight ap
p so they could see. “Let’s go find the guy we’re looking for.”
They heard footsteps coming up the stairs from around the corner. In the dark, the wavering beam of a flashlight painted the cheap paneling with white light and moved along the floor. Jon tensed and stood in front of Darcy, directing his own light in that direction. They waited as the footsteps came closer, and closer.
And closer.
Then the man holding the flashlight came into view. He stopped when he saw them, and he smiled.
“Well, hi guys,” Akers Pennington said to them. His dark face looked ghostly in Jon’s weak light. “You guys here to see Pastor Phin?”
“Actually,” Jon told him, “we’re here to talk to you.”
Chapter 12
“You want to talk to me? How come?”
“Is everyone else downstairs?” Jon asked him. “We’d like to talk to you in private.”
“Me?” Akers said again, as if he couldn’t understand why the chief of police would be here, looking for him.
Darcy knew. “You told us you know just about everyone in this shelter, right? That’s what you said?”
Akers looked confused. “Uh, well, sure. I like to get to know them. Learn about their troubles, learn about their families and such. Makes them feel better about being stuck here.”
“Sure, makes sense,” Jon said. He folded his arms, keeping the light from his phone pointed out, his mind already twenty questions ahead as usual. Darcy had seen him like this lots of times before, whenever he was interrogating a suspect.
With the weather the way it was, there was no chance of bringing the killer down to the station to interview them there. It was going to have to be done right here.
“Akers,” she said, moving closer to him. “Do you know Casey Levison? His brothers, his family?”
Akers nodded. With his own flashlight pointed at the floor, his wide face was crisscrossed with shadows. “Sure I do. Not very well, because they’re hardly ever in town, but sure. I know most everybody in town, same as you guys.” His heavy eyebrows bushed together over his unseen eyes. “What’s this all about, Jon? This still about the murder in town? Seems like I knew that woman you took out of here, too. She was kind of familiar. You know, except for the screaming.”
Darcy and Jon exchanged a look. That was exactly what they were hoping Akers would say.
“Well, since you know everybody here,” Jon said to him, “let me ask you this… do you know anybody from Vermont?”
“Uh, well sure,” Akers said with a shrug. “Casey and his family come from Vermont originally. Good people, even if they weren’t born here.”
Jon stepped closer still, and then he lowered his voice to ask, “Any of the people in the shelter from Vermont?”
Akers nodded. “Yeah, actually there is.”
“Any of them fix roofs for a living?”
Akers hesitated only a moment before nodding again. “Yes, there is.”
“Tell me. Is that man here now?”
Akers bobbed his head up and down again, and then pointed back down the hallway, to the stairs that would lead down to the basement shelter.
Darcy smiled. There it was. This was why Jon and Darcy had come to the shelter, and why they needed to talk to Akers first. He knew the people here, and rather than go through the process of getting identification from everyone, spending an hour or more asking everyone the same questions until the killer got spooked and tried to run, they could just have Akers point the man out to them. With any luck, he was downstairs right now, sleeping.
Lana Harris was not the killer. Once Darcy had followed her instincts, and once she had stopped to listen, the answer to the mystery became obvious.
The killer had to be someone who had met Lana and Brian Harris’s car out there on Main Street as it was coming in. That meant it was someone who knew they were coming to town. Someone who knew them personally.
Casey Levison had actually given them most of the clues, although Darcy had missed them at first. She’d tried to listen, to be open and silent so she could hear what was important, but there had just been too much weighing on her mind. Her mother, and why no one had heard from her. The kids, and how she wasn’t able to spend as much time with them as she wanted to. Her fight with Izzy and how she had wrongfully accused Mark Franks. The house, and how it would stand up to the weather. With so much noise going on in her brain, her ears had missed what Casey Levison had told them.
First, the affair that Lana had been having with some guy from Vermont. Casey hadn’t known who the guy was, but as it turned out the affair was the motive for the murder… it just wasn’t Lana’s motive. It was the motive for her lover to kill both Lana’s husband, and her son.
Next was what Casey had said about a lot of people he knew living in this area but working up in Vermont, and vice versa. People he knew. People he worked with.
That was the real clue. This tight circle of people who all knew each other. Didn’t it stand to reason that the person Lana was having the affair with was someone from that group? If not Casey or either of his brothers, then someone they knew. Someone who was also in Misty Hollow just before the snow started to fall. Someone who knew Lana and Brian were coming to town because they were at Casey’s house and overheard him talking about it. Someone who tried to leave town just before the snow fell.
This someone had intentionally met the Harris family in their car on Main Street. Maybe he confronted them, maybe it was all accidental, but however things unraveled this man had killed Brian Harris and his young son Joel. Then he tried to leave town only to find the snowstorm had closed the roads and there was no way of getting out. In just an hour’s time, the roads had become impassable. The killer was stuck. Where would a killer go, if they needed to lay low until they could escape?
Right here in Pastor Phin’s church. Right here, in this shelter. That’s where.
Casey Levison had given them the final clue without even realizing it. He’d told her and Jon exactly who the killer was. Someone from Vermont, who was here just before the storm, and left just as it started…
Anyway, like I said, I had my roof fixed up just in the nick of time. With family coming over I wanted to get that leak fixed but the guy no sooner hammered in the last nail and the snows started to set in, and we couldn’t go nowhere, and we just figured Brian and his family weren’t able to get in like we planned, either.
That man was the real killer. It had been right there in front of Darcy, and she would have seen it, if she could have kept her thoughts quiet, and listened.
“Can you point him out to us?” Jon asked Akers. “Just show us which one he is. I’ll take him into custody, and get him to the station, no muss and no fuss.”
“Good plan,” Darcy told him.
“Thank you,” Jon said.
“I approve of that plan.”
“It is a good plan.”
“Sure. But when do our plans ever go the way we expect them to?”
“Hardly ever,” he admitted. “Doesn’t mean we can’t try.”
“Well, trying does make perfect, I suppose.”
“Actually, that’s practice. Practice makes perfect.”
Darcy shrugged. “Then how come we keep getting into so much trouble?”
“Maybe we’re practicing the wrong thing.” He turned back to Akers and motioned with his hand for him to lead the way. “Just show us which one he is. We’ll take care of the rest.”
Akers hesitated. “You sure? I don’t want to start any trouble. It’s dark. Those people down there, they’re depending on us to keep them safe from the storm and… other stuff.” He swallowed and held his flashlight closer. “I don’t much like the dark.”
Jon clapped him on the shoulder. “Neither do I. Let’s go down together, and you can just point out which one we’re looking for, okay?”
“Okay. You got it, Chief.”
The three of them went down the stairs. It was quiet down there. It was that time of night when she supp
osed most everyone would be sleeping. It was too late to be early, and too early to be late. The people here in the shelter were probably worn out with worry and catching whatever sleep they could. Good. This should go quick and easy, then.
Down in the basement they ran into Pastor Phin. He was headed for the stairs, on his way up with a worn teakettle in one hand and a box of tea in the other. He didn’t look like he’d slept at all since they’d been here a couple of days ago. Darcy had no doubt that Phin had a system in place to take care of this many people, but it wasn’t allowing him much time to rest. Darcy saw boxes of dry, boxed food stacked neatly off to one side, and cases of bottled water right next to them. On the countertops and on the tables were candles, dozens of them, tall ones and fat ones and skinny ones, some in glass jars and some free-standing on plates to catch the hot wax. Some of them were scented, and the overlapping aromas of pine and pumpkin and cranberry created a potpourri of Christmas smells.
Even with all of them burning, a lot of the room was full of flickering, dark shadows.
“Hi Jon, Darcy.” Phin was whispering, making sure not to disturb the people sleeping on the cots. “Crazy, huh? This blackout, this weather… it’s like the end times, but with snow.”
“They’re here to arrest someone,” Akers told him bluntly.
The pastor gave them an odd look and then set the kettle and the box of teabags down on one of the carpeted steps. “You know, the last time you came here to do that it didn’t end so well. Who are you here for this time?”
Darcy suddenly felt very funny. Almost like someone was watching her…
Akers cleared his throat, keeping his voice low like Phin. “They think the person who killed Brian Harris and his son is in here. I know the guy they’re looking for. Leastwise, I know him by sight. I just need to find him. Gotta be on one of the cots, sleeping.”
“Okay.” Phin didn’t look happy about this. “Well, if you’re sure Jon, then we’ll give you whatever help you need.”
Darcy stood up straighter, her eyes straining through the candlelight. There was something coming. No, not something… someone.