Have Yourself a Merry Little Murder

by K. J. Emrick

  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 her 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.

  Darcy saw them. All the time.

  For one to seek her out here, in her own home, usually meant the ghost was very troubled about something. Troubled, and in need of real help. The special kind of help that Darcy could give them.

  To her, death wasn’t something sad. It was just the next step in the process of what people called life. Everyone had their time here on Earth, to live and to love and to hopefully find some happiness, and then they died. But that wasn’t the end. Their spirit continued on to the next plane of existence. Sometimes death was wrong, certainly, like when someone was murdered before it was their time to go. Sometimes death was mysterious, and even a little scary, maybe. She understood why people cried at funerals, because they missed the people who were gone so much, and that was normal. But death itself? For Darcy Sweet, the end of a life wasn’t something to be sad about.

  Except when the ghost in her basement was a child. A child’s death was always sad.

  “Hello,” she said to the boy, in the tone of voice grown-ups always used with children they met for the first time. “My name is Darcy. What’s yours?”

  The boy held out his shadowy hand again and looked down at the ball in her hand.

  “You want this back?” she asked him.

  He
nodded his head. Wiggled his fingers.

  “Okay. Well, here’s the thing. You’re in my house. My basement, to be exact. You must be here for a reason, right? Can we talk about that?”

  Looking around like he was only just realizing where he was, the boy curled his arm into his chest, and took a step back, already beginning to fade into the wall again.

  “No, no,” Darcy said to him quickly. “It’s okay. You don’t have to go. Tell me why you’re here, honey.”

  The boy looked down at the red ball again. Already his appearance was starting to fade.

  Darcy stood up, and took a few steps toward him, holding her hand out. “Here, you can have it back. Just, stay for a minute, okay? Can you at least tell me your name?”

  When she offered him the ball he stopped, and his image grew stronger again, and both of his hands reached forward to wrap themselves around Darcy’s. The sensation of it was cold, and somehow damp, and reminded her of snow melting inside of a glove on a harsh winter day.

  The boy looked up, his eyes flashing green against the dark haze of his ghostly self. Darcy let go of the ball, and he held it tight.

  “Joel,” he said, his voice nothing but a whisper. “My name is Joel Harris.”

  Then he disappeared, turning sideways and dissolving away like shadows do when they try to come into the light.

  The ball dropped from the empty air, smacking into the floor again, and again, until it finally came to rest against the toe of Darcy’s sock.

  Thump…thump…thump…thump.

  Chapter 2

  “Snow day, snow day!”

  Darcy heard her daughter shouting those words with great joy down the hall, and she knew without a doubt that any chance she’d had of sleeping in was completely, irrevocably gone.

  She closed her eyes harder anyway and tried to will herself back to the blissful state of unconsciousness that she’d been in just a moment ago.

  “Snows day!” Zane began yelling, imitating his sister, getting the phrase just a little wrong. “Snows day! Snows day!”

  Then they were saying it together, like a song they had just made up.

  “Well,” Darcy sighed into her pillow. “I guess that’s better than waking up to an alarm, anyway, right Jon?”

  She pushed herself up on one elbow, and pulled her hair out of her face, and smiled over at her husband.

  Only, he wasn’t there. She blinked in surprise to find his side of the bed empty.

  “Jon?” she called out, looking around for him in the room.

  Sunlight was slanting in through the windows. Just after eight, she thought, and the clock on the nightstand confirmed it. The light was muted and gray, filtered through the thick clouds and the snow that she could still hear falling against the glass panes. Jon wasn’t in the bedroom.

  She was hoping to talk to him this morning about the little boy’s ghost that she’d seen last night. Jon knew all about her gift, and her many interactions with ghosts. He was one of the very few people in her life who did know all about it. They had no secrets from each other. They told each other everything, and she preferred it that way.

  She and Jon were good for each other. Marrying him had turned out to be the best decision she ever made.

  Well, her story could wait until later. The boy hadn’t come back, and hadn’t told her anything about himself, really. Just his name. If he needed help, she imagined that she’d be seeing him again.

  She sighed and rolled over again. Well. Better get up herself. Maybe Jon was downstairs making everyone breakfast, but if he wasn’t then she would need to put something together for the kids. Pancakes, maybe. Something nice and warm to put in their bellies on a cold day.

  In spite of her decision to get up, her eyes started to drift closed again… just as the bedroom door crept open and two little people came sneaking in to jump up on the bed and bounce on their hands and knees. Darcy kept her eyes closed and began snoring as loudly as she could until both Colby and Zane were telling her to wake up, wake up, wake up!

  Then she jumped up suddenly, twisting her face into horrible shapes, holding her hands up like claws and roaring like some monster just woken up for a thousand-year nap. Her children went into fits of giggling at her antics. She grabbed them both up in her arms and began tickling them, and they laughed even harder. Soon they were all out of breath, giggling and laying there, while Darcy made a few half-hearted “rawr, rawr” sounds pawing her hand at the air. The tickle monster had been defeated… for now.

  Zane was pressed up against her side. Colby burrowed herself under the blankets and grabbed hold of Jon’s pillow like a teddy bear. She was definitely her daddy’s girl, taking after him in her mannerisms as well as the shape of her face. Her hair might be a mix of both her parents’ colors, with hidden auburn highlights under the dark brown, and she had definitely inherited the family gift from her mother’s side of the family, but when Darcy looked at her, she saw so much of Jon. She was the best little girl in the world, in Darcy’s opinion. In her Diamond Princess pajamas, the very mature twelve-year-old tugged playfully on her mother’s arm.

  “Come on, Mom. It’s a snow day. We need to go do stuff!”

  “Hmm,” Darcy frowned at her. “You and I have a very different definitions of what a snow day is for.”

  “Snows day!” Zane cheered, lifting one hand in the air and pumping it in a fist like he’d seen his big sister do countless times before. “Snows day!”

  Colby clucked her tongue at him. “Like you’d know anything about it. You aren’t even in school, Zane. Every day is a snow day for you.”

  “Is not,” her little brother protested. “Doesn’t snow every day. So there.”

  Darcy smiled at their antics. Colby might roll her eyes at her brother sometimes, but those two were just as close as close could be. Zane was only four years old now, and it was next year that he’d start school. Until then he wouldn’t be able to really appreciate what it meant to play hooky from all the big kid responsibilities that his sister had. As their mother, she could see it from both sides, and she knew that she was going to have to enjoy all these little moments before they were gone for good. Someday, these two would be her age and all they would want to do in the mornings was sleep in.

  What fun would that be?

  “Okay, tell you what,” she said to both of them. “How about we go downstairs and find your father, and then we can all have some breakfast. After that, we’ll have some playtime in the snow once I figure out how bad the storm is, and if there’s any sense in opening the bookstore today. Probably not. Well. Let’s go find your dad.”

  Since the Sweet Read Bookstore mostly did business with tourists, it counted on the people coming into town who came to visit and do a little shopping. If there weren’t going to be any tourists today because the roads were still impossible to get through, then she might as well keep the place closed for another day. Although the book club members might try to come in for some coffee and to have a place to visit… Well. They could wait another day to gossip about the snowstorm of the century. She ran a bookstore, not a coffee shop. She had no doubt that Clara Barstow wasn’t going to open her deli today, and Chef Marios Pizza wasn’t going to be open either, not unless the delivery guy had a dogsled…

  “But Mom,” Colby said to her. “Dad’s not here.”

  “Not here? That doesn’t make any sense.” Darcy craned her neck up to look out the window as she stroked Zane’s curly blonde hair. “For Pete’s sake, where could he go in all of this snow? There’s nothing out there but endless white and silence all around.”

  “There’s more wisdom in silence than in a thousand words.”

  Colby’s eyes got really wide when she heard herself say that, and she swallowed, and then her gaze drifted up to her mother’s again. Darcy smiled to let her know it was all right, and then gave her a nod of understanding. This wasn’t the first time Colby had uttered something she didn’t mean to say, and didn’t understand, and it wouldn’t be the
last time either.

  The family gift had manifested itself more strongly in Colby than it ever had in Darcy at the same age. They never knew when she was might suddenly come out with something cryptic like that. At first glance what she had just said made no sense but they both knew that sometime soon, when they least expected it, those words would become more important than they could ever guess.

  So Darcy took these moments seriously, and made sure to let Colby know it. She would never, ever make her daughter feel like a freak for just being who she was. Not like her own mother had done to her.

  Which reminded her, she needed to text her mother this morning and see what the weather was doing to her travel plans. Later. Right now she was spending time with her children.

  “Well,” she told Colby, “I guess I’ll have to remember that. Wisdom in silence. I guess, like listening, right?”

  Colby nodded, her eyes still a little too big.

  “Feel okay?”

  “’Kay,” Colby answered with a cockeyed grin. It was one of her favorite little things to say, and Darcy could tell when she said it that she really was all right. Her daughter had been through a lot this year. Darcy’s life had always been full, to say the least, and now she was afraid that the scary things that kept finding her would also end up being a part of her daughter’s life. She would help Colby learn to manage her gift, but that was the way it worked for the women in her family.

  Of course, it turned out that Zane had a special talent of his own. That had been very unexpected. To her knowledge, the family gift had never passed down to a male child. Not ever, and especially not ever like it had manifested in her little boy. That made Zane Tinker pretty special. Just like his sister, Colby Sweet.

  Tinker-Sweet. That was their family name. When Darcy had married Jon she kept her own name, because he understood how much it meant to her. When they started talking about having children, Jon had promised that all the girl children could keep her last name, but in return he wanted all the boy children to have his.