by K. J. Emrick
And from each of the two doorways leading away from this main room, sprigs of mistletoe were hung, tied up with red ribbons. Darcy thought it was a nice touch for the season.
“Where is everybody?” Jon asked, holding a big suitcase in either hand, looking around at the empty room. Classical music played quietly in the background over a speaker system that Darcy couldn’t see, but otherwise the place was quiet.
Colby set down the suitcase she was carrying. There were two more in the trunk still, but those were going to go up to the room later, when the children weren’t looking. They had the Christmas presents in them, and there was no peeking before Santa came. The idea to sneak them in later was more for Zane’s benefit than Colby’s, but it would be fun to surprise their daughter, too. What was Christmas, without a little surprise?
But for the moment, they needed to grab the attention of whatever staff was around.
“Hey, Zane?” Darcy said to her son, “can you go over to the counter and ring the bell for us?”
“Yup.” He knew what that little bell with the plunger on top was for. Darcy had a similar one in her bookstore and he and Colby had practically grown up there. He went right over and lifted his hand up as high as he could over this one.
Darcy was just about to tell him he didn’t need to whack it as hard as he could, when a figure jumped up from behind the counter.
The man was in a three-piece suit with sloping shoulders and a sagging, red bowtie. He leaned his elbows on the marble top and smiled down at Zane with crooked teeth. “Hey there, sport. What’s new?”
Zane had to crane his neck to look up at the man. He was so tall that Darcy had to wonder how he could have possibly been hiding back there, but nevertheless he was there now. She stepped across the woven rug in the middle of the floor in three quick steps, and took Zane’s hand in hers, worried that he might be frightened by this stranger.
“Hi, Mister,” was what Zane said to him. “You have funny hair.”
Darcy shushed him, but he wasn’t wrong. The man in the bowtie had frizzy red hair that stuck out in several directions at once. With his pale blue eyes and slightly large nose, he had kind of a clownish appearance.
“That’s okay, really,” the man said with a chuckle. “No worries about the what the lad said. He’s aces. I’ve tried to do something with my hair but it’s quite unruly. Runs in my family, and not a thing I can do for it.”
He laughed, full of good humor, and Darcy relaxed. Jon had been right. They were all so used to running into some sort of trouble wherever they went that she was seeing boogie men where there weren’t any.
“I’m sorry,” Darcy told the man. “I didn’t mean to overreact but you startled me. I’m Darcy Sweet, and this is my husband Jon Tinker. These are our children. We have a reservation.”
“Ah, yes. Certainly.” He swung the sign-in book open to a page marked with a red cloth strip. “I’ve got you all set up in the finest room. If you’ll just sign in, please, and then there’s the small matter of a credit card. So unpleasant, asking for payment up front, but as Shakespeare said, if money go before, all ways do lie open. I’m Maxwell Bylow, by the way. I own this establishment. Welcome to the Hideaway Inn.”
He had a subtle British accent, more pronounced on his vowels, and now Darcy could see that he was just being friendly, not intentionally spooky.
She gave him their credit card and let Colby sign the register. Maxwell raised an eyebrow over the different last names they used, and Darcy gave him the short version of how she and Jon had agreed that the men of the family would have his name, and the girls would have hers. It worked for them, and that was all that mattered.
“I’m a little surprised,” she added, “that we’re the only ones here. The town we passed on the way here is lovely. Pittsfield, was it? I thought you’d be swarming with tourists coming to visit, even this late in the year.”
“Hmm, yes,” Maxwell murmured. “Usually we are, but it always thins out over Christmas. Some years we have a handful, some years less. At the moment, I am the only one here to attend to the Inn. This is a family run affair, but as I’m the last of the family I depend on paid help, and without more guests it doesn’t pay to have their help.” He chuckled at his joke, but then shrugged. “Truth be told, I’d’ve closed for the season already, if not for your last-minute reservation.”
“Well, we’re glad to be here,” she told him. “This place looks amazing.”
“And there’s small golf at the fun place!” Zane exclaimed.
“Mini golf,” his sister corrected him, with another sigh.
Darcy favored them both with a smile, and then looked around the spacious main room, at the hallways leading off to the wings on both sides, and the stairways leading guests up to the second floor. She wondered how anyone got to that third-floor section she had seen from outside and if maybe Maxwell would be willing to give them all a tour of the building, and explain some of its history…
A shadow formed on the stairs over on her right, past the doorway to the East wing. It detached itself from the lamplight, and shimmered darkly, until it became the outline of a woman in a dark dress, with long hair knotted into a braid. She began floating up the stairs, and then she hesitated, as if she could sense Darcy’s gaze on her. Hand on the railing, she turned a blank face with empty eyes her way.
And then the ghost smiled at her.
As Darcy continued to watch she moved onward again, floating up the curving staircase, disappearing as the stairs rose above the level of the ceiling.
“Mom?” Colby said in a quiet voice. She was looking over at the stairs as well. She’d seen it, too.
“Yes, honey. I know.”
No matter how much she wanted it to be otherwise, she knew what they had just seen was real. There were ghosts in the Hideaway Inn.
Which meant she brought them to a haunted house after all.
Chapter 2
“So, there is a ghost.”
By Darcy’s count that was Jon’s fourth time saying those exact same words. Darcy had a feeling that wasn’t the last time she was going to hear them today, either. She’d promised him this would be just a normal sort of vacation for them and now, not five minutes in, that promise had gone out the window.
“There’s nothing I can do about it,” she told him. “Unless, of course, you want to tell the kids we’re going back home and ruin their fun.”
She waved a hand in the direction of the 3D laser tag room here in the ‘Little Bit of Everything’ fun center—“Where the Fun is Always On!”—daring him to say they could leave now. Colby and Zane were racing through a glow-in-the-dark maze in there with other kids, all of them shooting at each other with toy guns that used beams of light to strike sensors on their gaming vests. She and Jon were sitting at one of several little tables in the main area of the place, where parents waited for their kids. The four of them had already played two rounds of mini golf together, and now the adults were sitting, and talking, while the kids wore themselves out having even more fun.
It gave them the chance to talk about what Darcy had seen. A single ghost, that had come and gone. Darcy was trying to explain that there were ghosts in lots of places. Just because she’d seen one didn’t mean she would get involved with a new mystery.
Probably.
“Okay, look,” Jon said after a long moment of silence. He set his Styrofoam coffee cup aside to reach across the table and take her hand. “I know that this is going to be a thing no matter where we go. I know my beautiful wife has this amazing talent to see…you know. I wouldn’t have it any other way. And, I mean, there’s…you know…everywhere in the world, right? Anywhere someone has died, there’s a chance of there being a…you know. Right?”
Darcy gave him a knowing smile. He was intentionally avoiding the word ‘ghost’ because there were still parents and kids walking everywhere. No need to get anyone upset and thinking they were some kind of nuts. Her husband was a smart man, who loved her just the way she
was. He didn’t care what other people thought of her, but he wasn’t going to make a scene, either. She was definitely fine with that.
“It’s sort of like that, Jon. Yes, there are…you know…everywhere in the world, but they aren’t like, everywhere. Usually, they only haunt a place when they have some unfinished business to deal with. Something serious. So, I’d be willing to bet this woman I saw on the stairs is there because something went wrong in her life. Something big. She has something left to do.”
He squeezed her hand, and his blue eyes held hers. “So…I guess we’re going to have to solve a mystery while we’re here?”
Darcy shook her head. “I was just thinking about that, and no. This trip, no mystery solving. No spirit communications. The…you know…is there, and I admit that I’m curious about her, but she didn’t ask for my help. She didn’t reach out to me when she realized that I could see her. All she did was smile and move on. If she needed help, I’m sure she would have asked.”
“So, you’re just going to let it be? Wow. That’s very unlike you.”
“I know, right?” she smiled at him, and with her free hand picked up her soda for a sip through the straw. “Usually I’m the first one diving into a mystery. Not this time, though. This time, Darcy Sweet is officially on vacation.”
“Unless the woman you saw comes asking for help.”
“Well, if that happens I’ll worry about it.”
He played with her fingers for a moment before asking, “Were there any signs the place would be haunted?”
“Signs?” She wasn’t sure what he meant. “Like what? It’s not like ghosts hang out banners announcing their presence. It doesn’t work that way.”
“No. I know that. I just meant…did you see any articles online about murders at the Hideaway Inn when you were booking our vacation? Unexplained deaths, anything like that?”
“For Pete’s sake, Jon, I wasn’t looking for that stuff. I was just looking for a fun place to spend a few days. I never gave a thought to looking into the history of every Inn I found on Expedia.”
“Hmm,” he murmured. “Well, let’s fix that now.”
Letting go of her hand, he reached into his pocket for his cellphone.
“Jon, what are you doing?”
“I’m going to look up the history of the Hideaway Inn. If there were any kind of mysterious deaths there I’ll bet it will be all over the internet.” He tapped at the screen on his smartphone and swiped down a list of results when it came up, humming the whole time. “You know, they never do this in horror movies. I feel like if they took a few minutes to do a Google search before the action started, they’d save themselves a lot of trouble. Cabin in the Woods, Psycho, Don’t Blink, all those movies. I mean, check the Yelp reviews, for crying out loud.”
“Well, to be fair, most of those movies were made before cellphones existed. They didn’t have the great Google machine.”
“True, but we do now.”
Darcy watched him doing his research, loving the sight of her husband doing what he was good at. The caring police officer, digging until he found the truth about whatever was bothering him. Jon was a good man, and he chose to be a police officer to help people. Sometimes she imagined him in shining armor, riding a white horse, coming to the rescue of those in need.
Sometimes, he was the guy sitting across from her, searching through online articles to help his wife…
“Huh.”
Jon’s single word of surprise broke her out of her thoughts. His finger was hovering in midair over his screen. “What is it?” She asked him. “What did you find?”
“Uh, well. I found an article from the 1990s that says before it was an Inn, the Hideaway was a manor estate for some guy named Orson Bylow.”
“Okay. Their website did say the place used to be a mansion. I knew that part. That’s the whole point to them keeping some of the rooms like they used to be. It lets guests see the grandeur of a bygone age, or whatever. I don’t think it said who used to live here, though.”
“Well, I’m betting there’s a reason they left that off the website.” He set the phone on the table and turned it around for her to see the page he’d found.
Darcy looked at the information on the page, scrolling down to read more, her frown deepening with each new detail.
It was a magazine article about unsolved mysteries in New England. Ghost stories, basically, meant to entertain the reader. Each one was given only a paragraph or two, just enough time to give the basic details. Darcy had even heard of a few of them. In fact, there was one here about the Pilgrim Ghost of Misty Hollow, her own hometown.
Halfway through, she found the part about the Hideaway Inn.
In the early 1800s, a man named Orson Bylow had lived there with his wife. They owned most of the land around as part of their estate. One winter’s night in December, just before Christmas, a neighbor passing by on his way to town heard screaming from the estate. When he rushed up the driveway to find out what was going on, he witnessed Mrs. Jennifer Bylow jumping out of the third-floor window to her death.
Although, as the article explained, there was speculation that she didn’t jump. Some people thought she was thrown from that window. Rumors flew, fueled by a history of domestic violence between Jennifer and Orson Bylow. The police responded to investigate and when they arrived, they found the third story room locked from the inside, and with the security chain still in place. The room only had the one entrance—not counting the window. There couldn’t have been anyone else in the room with her when she died.
That certainly seemed to make it a suicide. But people who were going to commit suicide didn’t usually scream about it. They were calm and resigned to the fate they had chosen for themselves. So why did her neighbor hear her scream?
For that matter…why did she jump in the first place?
“Since then,” Darcy read, “there have been several reported sightings of a woman in black walking the staircases up to the third floor, possibly on her way to jump to her death again and again, over and over.”
She felt a tingle run up her spine. She might have spent her life around ghosts, and stories just like this one, but that didn’t make them any less chilling.
“So you agree,” Jon said when she passed him back his phone. “This sounds like a real mystery to me.”
Darcy did agree. A locked room, and a suspicious death, and people who thought they’d seen a ghost. She reached across the little table and swiped Jon’s coffee, wanting something to warm her up and chase away the sudden chill she felt. She told herself it was just the cold outside, but she knew better. Her gift lent her a sort of sixth sense. A knowledge about things she shouldn’t know.
The goosebumps crawling up her arms were telling her there was something wrong in the Hideaway Inn.
Even so, it wasn’t her problem. The ghost of Jennifer Bylow had been in that place all this time. Nearly two hundred years now, and except for a few appearances on that staircase for unsuspecting guests, she hadn’t ever reached out to anyone for help. Including Darcy, she should add, who could see her clear as anyone. If the ghost wanted help for whatever her issues were, she could speak up. Until then, Darcy Sweet was on vacation.
“You’re sure?” Jon asked her. “I know you, my beautiful wife, and I know that you don’t take these things lightly. You’re always there when someone needs help, whether they’re alive or dead.”
She gave him back his coffee and smiled at the love she could hear in his compliment. It meant a lot to her that he understood her so well. “I am sure. For this week, my family comes first. No mysteries. No…you know whats. Nothing but a good time with you and the kids and the snow and the quiet—”
A loud buzzer chimed from the laser tag room, cutting her off, and the doors opened and a knot of kids came pouring out, screaming and laughing and cheering their victories. Their two were right at the front, flushed faces and wide eyes telling Darcy that they were ready to do it all over again.
; So much for ‘quiet’ and ‘kids’ going together in the same sentence, she thought to herself. Those two were having so much fun. This was a really good idea, and she was glad that Jon had agreed to this trip.
An unexpected yawn overtook her, and she had to cover her gaping mouth with her hand.
Jon laughed, and Darcy found herself laughing with him even though her cheeks flushed hot with embarrassment. “Stop it!” she told him. “I don’t know where that came from. I just couldn’t stop it.”
“I know. You’ve had a long day.” Jon gave her a wink as Colby and Zane came racing up to the table, begging to go again, and to do the trampoline room next—a whole section of the fun zone that had trampoline pads lining the walls and the floor with ramps and slopes and hurdles to jump over.
“Well,” Jon said, making his face appear dramatically sad. “I thought maybe we should go back to the Inn and make sure we didn’t use up all the fun at once…”
“But Dad!” Zane said immediately, “I still have lots of space left for fun. Really. I promise I do!”
“Yeah, Dad,” Colby was quick to add. “Plus you have to come in with us to do laser tag. You are absolutely going to love it. Bet I can score on you a dozen…no, wait…two dozen times!”
“Well…” Jon tapped a finger against his lips, pretending to think about it.
“Please!” both kids begged in chorus.
Darcy used her cellphone to take a picture of the two of them practically hanging off Jon, pleading that this wouldn’t be the end of the amazing day they were having. That was going to be a keeper, along with the one of Zane laying down on the eighth hole of mini golf to use his golf club like a pool cue to knock his ball in the hole.
Another yawn hit her, one big enough to bring tears to her eyes.
