by K. J. Emrick
“You know that’s not it.”
She could tell he was irritated with her for being that blunt. She didn’t care. She wasn’t about to let him tell her she couldn’t handle being a mother and doing everything she had always done. Her extra senses were a part of her. She couldn’t stop seeing ghosts any more than she could stop breathing.
Or any more than he could stop being who he was.
“Darcy,” he tried again, “I just meant—”
“And what about you?” she demanded, propping herself up on her elbows. “You’re a police officer. For Pete’s sake, Jon, you’re the chief of the whole police force! How many times has your job put you in danger? I’ve lost track of how many times you’ve been in the hospital and that last time… I don’t even like to think about it.”
The time he died, she meant to say. Seeing her husband’s ghost as he hovered on the brink between life and death was something Darcy would never be able to get over. She was convinced of that.
“It is not fair for you to accuse me of shortchanging my family just because I feel the need to use my gifts to help people, when you’re doing the same thing. The same exact thing, Jon.”
He sat on the edge of the bed next to her, and let her run out of words. “Are you done?”
It was infuriating how cute he could be when she was angry at him. She folded her arms across her chest and stared up at the ceiling. “You tell me. You’re the one who doesn’t think I know what I’m doing.”
His hand found hers again. This time, she didn’t pull away. “That’s not what I said, Snowflake.”
Jon had taken to calling her by this nickname and hearing him use it would usually make her melt. She loved the snow. She loved winter. She usually loved it when he got cute with her, too, but not this time. She wasn’t going to let him distract her from how angry she was, even if her heart skipped a beat to have him this near and even if her fingers had started caressing his and even if she loved the smell of that cologne he was wearing.
So, yeah. He would just have to live with her being mad.
“Let’s start over,” he suggested. “Two things, okay? One, I know you’re going to look into this thing with Anthony’s sister. That was just a given from the first moment you saw her ghost. I know the woman I married.”
Now she let herself look at him, and allowed herself to be okay with how amazing it felt to have his hand around hers. “So you’ll help me with it?”
“As much as I can. I mean, let’s face it, Rose Lake is covered by the state police. If they don’t even know she’s dead, there’s not a lot I’m going to be able to do from here in Misty Hollow.”
“Don’t be so sure,” she told him, adjusting the pillow behind her so she could sit up a little more. “It turns out that she and Anthony lived in Rose Lake, but Marcia had a boyfriend when she went missing who just so happens to live right here in town. There’s some other stuff that Anthony said, too, that I can check out from here at the house. I can do a web search for articles on her disappearance, and creep around Facebook a little, and then Anthony told me where Marcia was working… what?”
He’d started to look at her very intently, and she knew it was because when she said she could investigate from home, he assumed she meant by use of a spirit communication to reach Marcia Faber’s ghost. She’d done things like that for years, each time with a slightly different result. Usually it was no problem, and she would just have a nice chat with the dearly departed.
Other times… well. Real ghosts could make those paranormal haunting shows look like Saturday morning cartoons.
Then again, she never said she wouldn’t do a spirit communication, either.
After a moment, he cleared his throat. “Please understand me, Darcy. I’ll always be here for you. If you think this is important enough to look into, then I believe you. Of course I’m going to help.”
“You just think I need to be careful,” she said drily, summing up his argument.
“Well. You are in a cast.”
“Hey!” she laughed, reaching back to pick up his pillow and smack him in the shoulder with it. “I fell off that ladder because of water damage and wood rot, thank you very much. I didn’t fall off the ladder because of a ghost!”
“Shh,” he admonished her playfully, trying unsuccessfully to get his pillow out of her hands. “The kids will hear you. We have to be very…”
He leaned down closer.
“…very…”
His face was right next to hers.
“…quiet.”
And then his lips were brushing over her lips in a way that made her forget anything they had been arguing about. Jon was going to help her, and he said he always supported her in doing what she did best. Of course he wanted her to be careful. He wasn’t wrong, either. Now that they were parents twice over, they both needed to be more careful with themselves. If something happened to either of them, it would affect their whole family, not just the two of them.
His kiss was a slow and lingering embrace. Her fingers were clutching his tightly when he finally leaned back, breathing in the air that escaped her parted lips.
It was several heartbeats later when the world stopped spinning.
“Um, Jon?” she asked, pulling his hand up to her cheek to feel his touch. “You said you had two things to say. I like the part about you helping me with Marcia Faber’s ghost. What’s the other thing?”
In the low light from their bedside lamp she could see the change in his expression. Whatever it was, he was reluctant to talk about it. No, no, she thought to herself. He wasn’t going to back out of his promise to help her now!
Somehow, she knew that wasn’t it. Something else was bothering him. Now she felt stupid for starting an argument with him about how independent she was when he had obviously been trying to tell her something. Not that he didn’t need to be reminded sometimes that she was her own woman, but whatever he was waiting to tell her looked pretty serious.
“Well,” he started to say, “the thing is… wait, do you hear that?”
She did, now that he said it. From down the hall they heard Zane, awake and babbling in the language of one-year-olds, a language adults had long since lost the ability to understand.
Then his voice rose, and he sounded upset.
“I’ll check on him,” Jon said, bouncing off the bed in a rush and zipping right out the bedroom door.
Darcy was only a few seconds behind him. Not that she thought Jon couldn’t handle it on his own, but she had just been arguing about how she could take care of herself and her family all at the same time, cast or no cast. No way was she going to kick back and relax and let Jon do everything for her now.
Besides, she’d never heard Zane sound like this before. Something was going on.
Just as she got both feet on the floor again and had the crutch braced under her arm, Jon called to her.
“Darcy, come here!”
She was frantic when she heard that, scared that something was wrong and all she could do was hobble down the hallway to Zane’s bedroom. Great Aunt Millie’s house had always been big enough to grow a family in, but why did everything have to be so far away from everything else!
When she got to the bedroom door, Jon was just standing there, watching their son in his crib.
His room was a little smaller than Colby’s, with the slanting roof cutting the height sharply down to the windows. The carpet was new. The wallpaper had been a lot of fun to hang together with Jon, especially that border strip of bears playing baseball that wouldn’t stay up until they glued it in place three times. Zane’s crib was up against the corner, where one side faced the windows.
It was the perfect space for a little boy… but what was going on?
Zane had pulled himself up by the wooden slats at the side of his crib to stand on wobbly legs and look outside. The nightlight on his dresser cast a halo of brightness against the window glass. On the other side, a bird was perched on the sill.
It tappe
d against the window.
Zane burbled a bunch of syllables in response. Not exactly words, but somehow they almost made sense to Darcy.
The bird chirped.
Zane spit around his tongue, and bounced on his legs, and laughed.
Jon put his arm around Darcy’s shoulder and let her lean into his side to take the weight off her leg. “I think,” he said, “that he likes the bird.”
Darcy let herself relax. Nothing was wrong. It was just a bird. Zane got woken up by the bird tapping at the window and he thought it was funny.
Everything was okay.
“I thought…” Darcy didn’t even want to finish the thought. There was nothing wrong. No reason to make her fears real by putting a voice to them.
“You know what?” Jon said as he kissed the top of her head. “Our kid stands up like a pro. Before too much longer he’s going to be running marathons.”
Then Zane let go with both hands to clap, and plopped down hard on his diapered butt, and laughed again.
“Bir!” he called out with pride. “Bir, Mama, bir!”
Darcy laughed with him. Baby steps, as they say. And when had he learned to say ‘bird’?
She felt one of the cats winding through her legs and looked down to see Smudge walking into the room. His black and white patchwork fur was getting a little scraggly, and maybe his steps were a lot slower than they used to be once upon a time, and maybe his whiskers drooped more now than they ever had before, but he was still the greatest cat ever.
He went right over to the crib, and turned around in a circle, lowering himself down carefully to curl up on his side in the empty space underneath. He exchanged a long look with Darcy before laying his head down and wrapping his tail up around his nose.
Darcy and Smudge had always had a connection. They might not speak the same language, but they certainly understood each other.
I’ll watch over him, he was saying. If anything else happens, I’ll come get you. Go get some sleep.
“Thanks Smudge,” she whispered to him. “I don’t know what I’d do without you.”
Chapter 3
“Bye, Mom!”
Colby had given up calling her Mommy years ago now, and truthfully Darcy missed it. Sure, ‘Mom’ sounded more grown up, but Colby was already growing up so fast. Sometimes she felt like the best years of her daughter’s life had gone by already, but then she would remind herself that there was lots of milestones ahead. High school. College. A career. A wedding. Grandkids.
Whoa. Slow down there, she told herself.
For now, being able to see Colby off to school would be enough.
As the bus pulled away, Darcy made sure to lock both the front and the back doors. She didn’t want anyone walking in on her unexpectedly. What she had planned for this morning was going to require a little privacy.
She’d brought down her carved wooden box earlier, before Jon had even left for work, and stashed it away inside of the cabinet next to the refrigerator. No chance of anyone looking in there among the baking sheets and Bundt cake pans and all those things that they hardly ever used. That was going to change soon with Thanksgiving coming up. She sighed, reminded once again that she had to start preparing to host a dinner where she could just imagine her and Grace and their mother sitting around the table not talking at all while the men discussed football.
Yippee. Thanksgiving.
That was way down low on her priority list right now. What she had planned for the morning couldn’t wait.
Taking the box out of the cabinet now, she made her way into the living room through the open baby gate and laid the crutch down across the couch cushions. She sat down next to it and put the box on the coffee table.
Darcy studied the beautifully carved designs on the sides of the box, and along the top, remembering back to when Jon had given it to her. A spirit communication kit. This one had been a birthday gift two years ago. It was the size of a hatbox and she could only imagine what it had cost. Not just for the wood but for the beautiful craftsmanship as well. She had a smaller, portable kit that she took with her in the car whenever she was going on a trip. That one had been a gift from Jon as well, but it was nowhere near as fancy as this one.
When you wanted to talk to a ghost, it paid to be prepared.
Which was why she had one more thing with her. The handset to the house phone. She had a cellphone, but it wasn’t much use to her in this situation as she couldn’t make a call with it.
Darcy couldn’t actually use regular cellphones. In fact, for years she hadn’t even owned one. Somehow, in a way that she never really understood, ghosts were able to contact her through her cell. They were constantly phoning her, wailing and screaming and moaning in her ear, until she would change her number or get a new phone. Then the ghosts would find that number, somehow, and the cycle would start all over again.
Finally, she’d just given up. People had lived without cell phones for centuries. It wasn’t going to kill her.
Then Jon got the brilliant idea of getting her a cellphone that wasn’t part of a service plan. She could use the apps, and she could check the time, and in a pinch, she could call 911. The camera had come in handy once or twice too but that was all. Nothing else. No chance of ghosts ringing her up. Jon had taken the phone into a cellular wireless store and had them make sure it couldn’t receive incoming calls, and then paid extra for a lavender case to make it special.
Jon really did love her, and he really did respect what she could do. He might not completely understand it, and he might even be a little weirded out by it, but he would never ask her to be anyone else but herself.
Then again, remembering their conversation last night, maybe that had changed for him. Well. It hadn’t for her, so he was just going to have to deal with that.
Carefully she began taking things out of the box, one at a time, placing them in order on the coffee table.
Five short candles, cranberry scented. Matches. Candle holders. There were incense sticks in here as well, but she didn’t need them today. A plastic Ziploc baggie of salt, too, along with a few other spices. A shard from a pink crystal that a friend in Australia had given her. Spooky stuff, she kidded herself with a wry smile. These things only looked mysterious to people who didn’t know any better.
She also kept a medallion from one of her high school track meets where she’d placed third. It was a good memory of a good time. Whenever she went into the spirit communication state, reaching out to the other side, she needed to have something she could use as an anchor here. Something that would help her find her way back if she needed it. Most times, that would be an object that was important to the person she was trying to reach. Sometimes, it was Smudge who performed that task for her.
But when she didn’t have any of that, she would have this medallion.
She was ready to begin. Now came the tricky part.
When she had two functional legs and could squat or kneel, placing five candles in their holders into a rough circle on the carpet was ridiculously simple. When she had to sort of hold her wounded leg out to the side and balance herself to place each candle down one at a time, it took a bit longer. She felt beads of perspiration on the back of her neck when she was done.
Then she had to do the whole process over again to get them lit.
The cranberry scent of the candles didn’t affect the spirit communication one way or the other and in fact, last month she’d used blueberry scent on a whim. The smell made no difference. What mattered was the symbolism of the circle, and the lights, representing a never-ending wheel of life and death, lit by the energy that humans created by interacting with the world around them. At least, that was what her Great Aunt Millie had written in her journals. Darcy had read them all several times now, listening to Millie’s voice as she read the words of wisdom and instruction in the mystical arts. Millie had taught her so much before she passed away, and then she’d continued to help and guide her ever since.
Now, it was up to D
arcy to continue the family’s tradition of using their gifts to help those in need.
With the circle set, Darcy realized her next hurdle was going to be getting herself down into some kind of sitting position on the floor. Usually she would sit cross-legged in the middle of the circle, which gave her space to center herself and to reach out to the other side. That wasn’t going to happen in a cast.
She sighed heavily, and decided the best way to tackle the problem was to use her crutch as a staff and lower herself down to the floor a little at a time. It sort of worked, although she ended up landing herself on her backside pretty hard, with her cast stuck straight out and her other foot tucked up underneath her. She very nearly kicked one of the candles over before she had herself settled again.
“Well. This is going to be different.”
The sound of her own voice was too loud in the silence. Jon had put Zane into his playpen down here in the living room before leaving for work, and in twenty minutes he’d been asleep again. She guessed that was what happened when you were a one year old and you stayed up late talking to birds.
As she was about to start, she realized she’d left the medallion back in the box.
“You have got to be kidding me.” She looked across the room to where the coffee table sat. It might as well be an entire continent away. There was absolutely no way that she was going to get up from this spot again until she had to. Doing a spirit communication was strenuous on both body and mind, and getting yourself worn out by getting up and down from the floor before you began was not a good way to start.
A cat climbed up on her hip, meowing softly to get her attention. Smudge must have heard her, and seen the problem. He wasn’t going to let her do this on her own.
“Oh, wow Smudge,” she said, resettling him on her lap. “Your paws are always so cold these days. Okay, old man. You ready to help me take another trip?”