Have Yourself a Merry Little Murder

by K. J. Emrick

  “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. That 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.

  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 c
loser 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 fairly 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.

&
nbsp; 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?”