by K. J. Emrick
He closed his eyes, and butted the top of his head up against her hand. That was a yes.
“How many of these have we done, Smudge? Do you remember? Somewhere along the line I lost track.”
With his eyes still closed, he flicked an ear.
“You too, huh?” She settled herself as best she could, and let him rest his chin and his front paws on her leg. “I’m glad you’re my cat, Smudge. I wouldn’t really be Darcy Sweet without you.”
He purred under her hand, as if to agree with her.
“Um, Smudge? One more thing. Watch Zane, okay? If he wakes up, you let me know.”
“Mrrow.”
“Thanks.”
All the same, she had already set the alarm on her digital watch for forty-five minutes. She would not risk being deep in the spirit communication for longer than that. Her children had to come first. Whether she made contact with a ghost or not, and whether or not she got any information if she did, she was not going to leave her little boy unattended.
She had done a spirit communication with Zane in the room twice. She knew his sleep patterns well enough to know he was probably going to be asleep for the next two hours so she wasn’t too worried about it. Smudge would let her know if he woke up sooner. Besides, the last time she’d done this, he had woken up, and not even the dead could sleep through that kid when he wanted to cry.
Darcy took three slow breaths, in and then out, and began.
In her mind she pictured an endless blank space. Nothing at all, in every direction. Peaceful, and quiet.
For now.
She imagined clouds of billowing white fog, rolling in from nowhere to fill the entire infinite space. A three dimensional blank canvas. She was setting the stage, creating a bridge between this world and the next where she would be able to call upon the spirit of Marcia Faber and hopefully make contact.
Sometimes the call to the other side got redirected or usurped by the wrong ghost and in those cases she might have to spend a very long time trying to get things back on track. Sometimes, she might get no answer at all, from anyone.
Usually, having something of importance that belonged to the person she wanted to contact would make the connection easy. Today, she was searching blind. What she was hoping was that a presence as strong as the one she had felt in her kitchen watching over Anthony’s shoulder would be easy to find.
Not that things were ever easy when she expected them to be.
Deep breath in, deep breath out. Again. And, again.
When she opened her eyes again she was standing there, in the empty space with the misty fog. The in-between space.
She looked all around her. She was alone.
“Hello?” she called out. Her voice was swallowed up into the vast, endless nothingness all around her. The edges of the mist quivered and folded in on themselves, creating half-formed images and shapes that slid away whenever her eyes tried to focus on them. There were things out there, waiting for her to make contact. Spirits of the dead, floating through eternity.
She just needed to find the right soul to talk to.
“Marcia…” Darcy let that name drift out through the ether until it faded away completely into the mists around her. “Marcia Faber. I need to talk to you.”
Sometimes spirits would respond to their name, just for the asking. Not this time, apparently. This time she would have to work for it.
Darcy pulled up some of her own inner spirit, and pushed that life energy into the void, calling for Marcia.
When she did the sound of voices rose up all around her. The noise of it built slowly, filling the space with echoes, until they became louder and louder and more insistent. It was just a few at first, and then more, and then more, filling up her ears until she couldn’t hear her own thoughts, and then some of the voices were shouting to be heard over the others and Darcy had to put her hands over her ears because it was beginning to be too much and then…
Silence fell.
And one voice spoke.
It was a young woman’s voice, full of life and energy and hope… and anger.
“…not supposed to be here…!” she screamed at Darcy, the sound of it a whispery reverberation that disturbed the mists around them. The gray fog parted, and out stepped the spirit that had been in her kitchen yesterday.
She stood there, in her tank top and jeans, with the necklace flaring in the gloom, a bright blue triangle against the pale skin of her chest. Anthony had been right about his sister. She was a beauty, with that freckle on her cheek and that haughty little twist to the corner of her lips. Darcy had no doubt that any number of boys had carried torches for this girl.
“Marcia,” she said gently. “I know you’re not supposed to be here. You aren’t supposed to be dead. Not even Anthony knows you’re dead.”
The girl’s voice faded in.
“…Anthony!…”
And then faded out again.
It set Darcy’s teeth on edge.
“Yes. Your brother’s worried about you. I guess a lot of people are. You’re dead, Marcia. I hope you can understand me. This isn’t your life. This is supposed to be your death and if you want me to help you cross over to the other side I can—”
“…Anthony!...needs to see…me…what he…needs to see…”
She balled both of her hands into tight fists and pounded them against her hips, just like she’d done in the kitchen yesterday. Her red curls flew wildly about her face in a wind that wasn’t there. Her face reddened in frustration. Anger radiated out from her in waves.
Darcy knew that even for the strongest of spirits, it was hard to communicate back to the world of the living. Sometimes they could carry on snippets of a conversation. Sometimes they prattled on to themselves without ever realizing anyone could hear them. Usually, whatever they wanted to say was tangled up in their emotions and only bits of it ever got through.
She could understand Marcia’s frustration. There was something she wanted to say, obviously, and she just couldn’t make anyone understand.
“Marcia, I can help you. I think. I mean, I don’t know that much about you. Can you tell me anything? Anthony needs to know what happened to you. What happened to you, Marcia?”
Now Marcia’s wispy, semi-solid hands reached down to lift the bottom of the tank top, exposing her belly and that stabbing wound that Darcy had seen before. It was ugly and puckered and it seemed to be driven in deep.
Ghosts didn’t have physical bodies. They didn’t get hurt. They certainly didn’t carry wounds with them into the afterlife. The image of a ghost was all just a manifestation of how the person remembered themselves from life. A drowning victim’s ghost might start gagging up water whenever they thought of their death. A convicted murderer put to death through lethal injection might have huge gaping injection holes in their arms… or they might see themselves dressed in shining clothes with radiant skin, like a hero, if they thought they died for the right cause. It was tricky thing to understand another person’s self-image, and sometimes even Darcy got fooled.
That wound in her belly might be symbolic of something that happened to her when she was killed, too, or it might be a childhood injury that held some importance that only Marcia understood. Then again, it could be completely symbolic, which meant Darcy would have to play a very long game of charades to figure out why Marcia was showing it to her.
She’d done that before. It was exhausting playing charades with a ghost.
“I don’t understand,” she said. “Can you explain it to me?”
The ghost glared in response, her transparent face eerily insistent. The moment stretched for an eternity even though time had no meaning here in the in between space. For ghosts, time no longer existed.
As for Darcy, she could feel the minutes slipping away back in her living room.
Just as she was about to try another question, Marcia raised her hands, and uncurled her fists so she could brush her long fingers across her neck. They traced a line along her ghostly
flesh, and wherever they touched, purplish-yellow marks appeared. Bruises.
Marcia was showing a clue to how she had died.
“You were strangled?” Darcy asked. “Is that it? Someone strangled you to death?”
Marcia nodded. She made her hands into fists again. “…Anthony needs to see…”
Darcy thought she was beginning to understand. “You need Anthony to see what’s happened to you. I promise you he will. We just need to figure this out. We need to know where you are, Marcia. Can you tell me that? If you can tell me where your body is then I can help you. I can bring your brother to see you then, okay? Just tell me where you are.”
The mists swirled, and Marcia threw her head back, and screamed silently into the void around them.
“Marcia? Marcia, I can’t hear you.”
Throwing her arms wide, the ghost began to spin around in a circle, lifting up into the roiling haze.
“I can’t hear you,” Darcy said again. “Marcia, where are you? Where can we find you?”
Marcia spun around, slowly, slowly, until she was facing Darcy.
“…Rose Lake…” the spirit said. “…Anthony needs to see…”
Then she rushed toward Darcy in the space between heartbeats, her eyes wide, her mouth screaming, her necklace flaring with the intensity of the sun.
In that flash of light Darcy had the briefest glimpse of a lakeshore and a collection of trees standing in a nearly perfect circle, and a patch of ground where nothing would grow.
Then the mists rolled in.
A buzzing sound pulled her out of the spirit communication and sent her crashing back into her body with the sensation of a roller coaster coming off the rails. The alarm on her watch was going off.
Forty-five minutes. She had been in the space between life and death for all that time and she’d learned so very little.
Marcia had been strangled to death, and that spot near the lake…was that where she was buried?
Darcy looked around, craning her neck to look over at Zane’s playpen. He was still there, still sleeping away his mid-morning nap. She smiled at her son. He was such a beautiful boy. How would he react, when he was old enough to understand, and he found out that his mommy could talk to ghosts?
Smudge stretched himself up and put a paw against her chest, and she picked him up to cradle him in her arms. “Thank you, Smudge. You’re always there when I need you.”
He meowed softly, and purred happily as he snuggled into the warmth of her body. In another moment he fell asleep, twitching in his dreams, leaving Darcy to puzzle over the mystery of Marcia Faber’s death.
Not that she had to puzzle about it for very long.
Around lunchtime, while she was feeding Zane in the kitchen, the phone rang.
Before her accident and the wonderfully restrictive leg cast, rushing from anywhere in the house to the landline phone in the living room had been enough of a chore all on its own. She'd replaced the phone handset back into the charging base after the spirit communication so answering the phone was completely out of the question right now. With the cast on and a hungry little boy to feed, Darcy was just going let it ring. “It’s okay,” she told Zane, sitting in his highchair. He was happily devouring a banana, making a mess out of most of it and scooping up the mush off the tray with his fingers. “If it’s important they’ll leave a message.”
The machine beeped.
“Hi Darcy, it’s Jon. I’m guessing you’re upstairs or something. Listen, I called over to Rose Lake and found the accounting office where Marcia was working. Wasn’t hard to find. There’s not a lot of those places around and especially not in a little dot on the map like Rose Lake.”
“What? Wait!” Darcy blurted out, as if Jon could somehow hear her through the answering machine. She tried to get out of the chair where she was sitting at the table, but her cast got tangled up under another chair, and then she was falling. She desperately grabbed at the table to save herself, but her fingers slipped and the best she could do was drop herself down to the floor on her backside.
Her plate of half-eaten turkey sandwich and chips flipped over and scattered all around her.
Zane laughed hysterically and reached over the edge of his tray to drop a handful of banana onto the floor with his mother’s lunch. He wanted to play this game, too.
Both Smudge and Tiptoe came racing to the kitchen entryway when they heard the commotion. When they saw her they stopped, and sat there, regarding her with the sort of aloof curiosity that only cats can manage.
“So yeah,” Jon’s voice continued on the machine. “I’ve got some information you’re going to want to hear. Give me a call when you can get to the phone.”
“Oh, ha ha,” she said to him, and to the universe in general. “Very funny.”
“Love you guys. Say hi to Zane for me.”
From his highchair Zane squealed. “Da da buh buh!”
The phone clicked off, and the message was over.
Darcy ran a hand back through her hair, blowing away a few errant strands of it from her eyes. Her bum hurt from the fall, and her leg was still tangled in the chair, and this was just a great situation she found herself in.
Maybe she needed some help taking care of things around the house, after all.
She leaned back on her elbows, rolling her head around until she could meet Smudge’s and Tiptoe’s stares with one of her own. “What are you guys looking at?”
Tiptoe looked up at her father. He was still taller than her even though he’d become so frail in his elder years. She had her tail curled around her gray paws in the exact way that Smudge had his white-tipped tail curled around his mismatched monochrome feet. Tiptoe had always wanted to be just like him. Darcy had to wonder who would miss Smudge more when the day came for him to pass on. Her, or that beautiful gray kitten over there.
It took her all of five minutes to untangle her leg and lever herself back up into the chair. Then when she realized her crutch had slid to the floor in all the commotion it was another two minutes for her to reach down and grab it without spilling herself onto her backside again.
Finally, she managed to hobble into the living room, with Zane babbling behind her, talking away to Smudge and Tiptoe like he was revealing the secrets of the universe to them.
Tiptoe meowed, once, like she was asking a question.
“Ad-da-da-da,” she heard Zane saying.
Smudge’s mrowl was a low sound of agreement.
Someday, when she had time, she was going to use that lavender cellphone of hers and record Zane doing these things. It was so cute.
Darcy got herself onto the couch and looked back at this little section of her family. Her two cats, and her son. Zane’s highchair was placed where she could see it from in here, a little trick she’d learned back when Colby was that age, so she wouldn’t have to get off the couch to check on him. He happily picked up the sloppy remains of his banana, content to just sit there and eat the sweet treat. For now, he was dependent on his mother to lift him out of that chair if he wanted to go anywhere.
She couldn’t wait for the chaos that would begin once he learned to sit up at the table, and run around, and tie his own shoes, and go to school.
Okay. Maybe she was getting a little ahead of herself, but she just loved being a mother.
Giving herself a moment to rest on the couch and catch her breath, Darcy reached for the phone on the end table, cursing the luck that had broken her leg. How many times had she and Izzy climbed up that ladder in her bookstore to get at the tops of the wall shelves where the extra book copies were stored? Hundreds of times. More, even. If it was going to give out, why couldn’t it have broken away when she was somewhere on the bottom four or five rungs? Oh, no, it couldn’t do that for her. Nope. It had to wait until she was right there at the top, so that she came crashing down to break both her tibia and her fibia.
Well. At least the whole thing had brought this mystery to her doorstep. If she hadn’t broken her leg at work
, then Anthony never would have had a reason to come around, and she never would have seen his sister’s ghost.
A flash of that location Marcia had shown her, in the trees by the water, came to her again. She wished that she knew what that meant.
The phone was ringing in her ear after she dialed the private number to Jon’s office. She wasn’t going to wait for him to get home to hear what he’d found out. On the other hand, she would probably wait until he was home to tell him about the spirit communication she’d performed with a broken leg. Yes. That was definitely a conversation that would go better face to face…
“Misty Hollow Police Department, how can I help you?”
Darcy was so surprised that she didn’t say anything right away. She’d been expecting Jon’s smooth and masculine voice.
Instead, this was her sister.
“Grace? Is that you? Why are you answering the phone in Jon’s office?”
“Good to hear from you too, sis,” Grace joked. “Did you want something or should I just hang up and let you call back for our voicemail?”
“No, Grace, sorry.” Darcy rolled her eyes but couldn’t help laughing at the same time. She and her sister had been through a lot, especially in the last ten years or so when family secrets started bubbling to the surface. “I just meant I called Jon. I didn’t expect you to be in his office.”
“I’m not. He had to step out for a minute and when he’s not in there the phone rings through to the detectives. Which is me, at the moment. Hey, you ready for Thanksgiving?”
The question was completely off base from what she’d been thinking about. It was like her sister had spontaneously started speaking in Greek. “Excuse me?”
“Thanksgiving, Sis. You know, that holiday that’s coming up near the end of the month? What is it now, ten days away, something like that?”
Darcy slapped her hand to her forehead. There was just no way to escape this, was there? She’d agreed to host the dinner here and she was just going to have to bite the bullet and make it happen for everyone. That meant her family, and Grace with her husband and their daughter Addison, and her mother and stepfather. She hadn’t seen James Bollinger in a very long time. She liked him well enough, but their family had never done well with big family dinners.