by K. J. Emrick
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 supposed 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.
And they were close.
She spun around. There was no one there.
Just paranoia, she thought to herself. For Pete’s sake, calm down.
But then… no. She felt something. She sensed it.
Akers was turning in a slow circle, looking at the people all lying down on their cots. It was hard to see faces in the gloom, but he must be able to recognize them by the shapes under the blankets, or where they were in the room…
Someone is coming.
Darcy turned around again, to the other side of the room. The shadows there jumped about with the movement of the candlelight, but they were just shadows. There was no one here but the four of them, and the people asleep on the cots.
She reached across herself to touch the antique silver ring on her finger. She turned it around, and around, wondering why she felt like danger was right on her heels.
Akers spoke suddenly, making Darcy jump. “I don’t know what to tell you, guys. I don’t see him here now. He was here. I know he was.”
Darcy’s skin was beginning to crawl. There was definitely someone coming. They were close, and they were definitely not friendly.
But where…?
“Sorry, Jon,” Phin said. “Who were you looking for, exactly?”
Darcy rubbed her hands over the gooseflesh on her arms.
“I’m not sure of the name,” Jon admitted with a sigh. “Like I was telling Akers, we’re looking for someone from Vermont who works construction. They got caught here in town when the storm came down. If they aren’t here, maybe they left during the
break in the weather yesterday.”
“I tried to leave,” someone said from behind them, from up on the stairs.
Darcy threw up her hands defensively as they all turned to face the man. He’d come down behind them, in the dark when they weren’t paying attention, and his footsteps had been muffled by the carpeting. She hadn’t thought to watch for someone coming from upstairs. She’d been paying attention to the room and the people down here.
The killer had snuck up on them.
It was odd, she thought to herself, but he didn’t look… scary. He was just average height. Not tall, not short, not big or small. His face was plain. His hair was light brown and receding in front. His jacket was gray. His pants were brown workman’s pants. There was absolutely nothing descriptive about him. Darcy would have walked right by him on the street if she’d seen him, and not given him another thought. In fact, she probably had. She’d most likely seen him right here when they’d arrested Lana but had overlooked him because he was so… well… average.
“I tried to leave,” the guy said again. “I was up to my knees in snow, trying to walk out of here. Can’t drive out, can’t walk out, just had to wait it out, you know? But now you guys brought your skis again and I’m thinking, hey, I can just ski out of here. How exactly did you figure out it was me?”
Darcy was about to say something mildly sarcastic when the guy lifted his hand to tell her not to bother.
“Never mind. Doesn’t matter. I was upstairs in the bathroom when you came in and I heard what you said so I know I’ve overstayed my welcome. So. You guys are gonna let me get my stuff, and then I’m leaving on your skis. Got it?”
He jabbed his hand in the air to emphasize his point. In his fist was a long, thin object that caught the candlelight and flashed with deadly intent. A knife, slender and shiny, no doubt taken from the kitchen area right here in the church.
“Let me go,” the man said, “or I’ll kill you too, and everyone in this room. I mean it.”
Akers backed away. Phin lifted his hands to show he wasn’t going to interfere.
Jon didn’t move. Neither did Darcy.
“Look,” Jon said, “Mister…?”
The man sneered down at them, keeping the knife pointed. “I’m not giving you my name. I’m going to get out of here, and then I’m going to disappear. You’ll never see me again, if you let me leave now. Got it?”
Phin moved another step sideways. “We don’t want any trouble. These people are all innocent. I don’t want to see them hurt.”
“Then let me go, preacher.”
“Brian Harris found out about the affair, didn’t he?” Jon said. If he was going to get answers, it was going to have to be now. He still kept his voice down, not wanting to wake anyone else up and put them in danger, too. “Is that why you killed him?”
The man laughed at that. “Brian Harris was a clueless moron. That’s why Lana ended up coming to me for what he couldn’t give her. Love. Understanding. Sex. I was the total package her husband never could be. I gave her everything. Even that son of hers.”
Darcy blinked. Joel was the son of Lana’s affair? That’s how long her infidelity had been going on? “But… he was your son, and you killed him. You killed your own son.”
This time the knife wavered, just a little. “It wasn’t my fault. I only wanted to talk to Brian, get this out in the open, make him see he should leave and let Lana be with me. I heard Casey and his brothers talking when I finished up their roof. Heard them say Lana and Brian were coming into town. So when I left Casey’s I waited out there on Main Street and then pulled my car in front of them when they got here. I waited too long, though. The storm had started by then.”
He took a breath before going on with a story that had obviously been weighing on him. “I tried to reason with Brian. Lana told me not to say anything, but I had to because I loved Lana and I wanted her to be with me. Just me. We started arguing, and then Brian tried to get out of his car and I told him to stay there, just stay there. I had a pipe in my hand from my truck. I didn’t want to hurt him, just scare him, maybe. You know? That was all. I didn’t want to hurt him, but he struggled with me and I put the pipe up across his throat to shut him up and then I heard his neck snap… it was too late. He was dead.”
“Dude,” Akers said. “That’s cold.”
“I’m not a bad person. It was… it was just an accident.”
Not an accident, Joel had said, and now Darcy understood what he’d meant all too well.
“You killed Joel,” she pointed out to him. “You killed a little kid. Your own child.”
The man shook his head. “I didn’t mean to. I’m not a bad person, it’s just… He started screaming, and I needed him to stop. That was all. I just wanted him to stop. He screamed, and Lana was screaming, and I swung the bar to shut the kid up and it hit his head. I didn’t realize… I didn’t mean… that was an accident. That’s all. It shouldn’t have happened.”
“No,” Darcy agreed. “It definitely should not have happened. You had no right.”
With the candles reflecting harshly in his eyes, he turned the knife toward her, and shifted in her direction from the bottom step. “I just wanted Lana to be with me. When it was over, I told her we should leave. I told her we should just go and be by ourselves somewhere. I picked up her purse and dropped the pipe in it so no one would find it, and I was pulling her out of the car but she just went crazy. She started hitting me, she started yelling, she grabbed her purse back and then she was just running down the road, in the snow. She wouldn’t come back. I knew I was in trouble. Nobody would ever believe it wasn’t my fault so I got in my truck, and I drove. I drove out of this blasted town just as fast as I could.”
“But the storm got you,” Jon guessed.
“It came down so fast!” he said. “I was driving and I couldn’t see and then the truck slid off the road into this heavy drift and… and… well, for all I know it’s still out there. I had to come back into town. I had to find some place to stay but I couldn’t go back to Casey’s. Not after what I did.”
“You mean,” Darcy said pointedly, “how you killed a man and a little boy.”
“Yeah. That.” The confession didn’t even faze him. “So, I was walking down the street here, freezing my toes off, half blind with the snow, and I saw the lights of the church. Here was this shelter, like some sign from God. I came in and I thought, hey, I’ll just wait it out and no one will be the wiser but then I saw Lana and I figured this was my chance to explain myself, but you guys showed up and took her away. I’ve been trying to leave ever since. I tried to get out during the break in the weather, but I barely got the truck unburied when it started snowing hard again, harder than before, and there I was, stuck again. So, I came right back here. I figured no one would know, but you did.”
“We’re smart that way,” Darcy told him.
“Whatever. I don’t care because now, you’re going to let me go. I’m going to get my things, and take your skis, and you’ll never see me again.”
Jon crossed his arms. “And if we don’t?”
The man’s face darkened as he stepped into the light from the nearest candle, and the knife came up again. “I’ll kill you. I’ll kill any of you who stand in my way. That’s the deal. Got me? I’ll kill you…!”
In one swift movement, now that the man’s attention was on Jon and Darcy, Pastor Phin reached down and grabbed his tea kettle, swinging it in an upward arc, smashing it into the side of the man’s head. The metal caved in with a hollow clang. The knife dropped to the floor. The man’s eyes fluttered and closed. He dropped to his knees, and then down on one hip, and then fell all the way over onto the floor.
All of them stood there for a long moment, surprised by what had just happened.
“Well then,” Phin said finally. “I can’t say I’ve ever done that before.”
“Don’t worry,” Darcy told him with a tired smile. “You get used to it. Trust me.”
Chapter 13
“Tony Alouette. That’s the guy’s name.”
Darcy had been wondering, but now that Jon had told her that piece of the puzzle, she found that it wasn’t all that important after all.
Christmas day had dawned early, with a clear blue sky. The clouds were gone. The snow had stopped the day before. The power had been restored a few hours after the harrowing events in Phin’s church. In fact, the last two days had been almost… peaceful.
Now the living room was littered with torn wrapping paper and open boxes, books that Colby had started to read and put aside, and new clothes that weren’t greeted with nearly as much enthusiasm as the other gifts. That was fine. Darcy knew the clothes would actually get used more than the toys, which would no doubt end up in the corner of their rooms or forgotten on a shelf in a few months.
Colby had been noticeably disappointed that there wasn’t a cellphone among her presents. Darcy called her over, and hugged her, and let her know that she and Jon had talked about her getting a phone and yes, she could have one. She was just going to have to wait until the roads cleared out for them to go to the store.
The hug she got in return was the biggest one she’d ever gotten from her daughter.
From his perch in front of the fireplace, the animatronic Santa danced as he watched the scene with merry glass eyes. His hips swung back and forth as his hands pumped the air. His fake beard wiggled as his mouth moved silently. Darcy had turned off his music and his cheerful Ho Ho Ho again. She much preferred him this way.
She snuggled up to Jon on the couch, soaking in the heat from the furnace. It was getting close to dinnertime, but there really wasn’t anything left to do. The power being out had done in almost everything in the fridge and their meal was going to be nothing fancy. In an interesting twist, the turkey had nearly thawed out completely in the blackout and so Darcy had just kept it refrigerated until this morning, when she popped it in the oven. There were instant potatoes in the cupboard, and cans of corn and cranberry sauce. Darcy had found a box of stuffing, too, and all of that could be ready to eat in just a few minutes. It wasn’t the meal she had been planning all this time but it would do for them, and Grace and Aaron and their kids.