by K. J. Emrick
There was no answer.
Tiptoe padded across the living room, around the couch, and then halfway up the stairs on the other side. When she got to the middle step she stood there and looked back to Darcy with another little mewl.
Now that was odd.
“Jon?” Darcy said, keeping her eyes on Tiptoe’s pearl green eyes. “I’m going to go get Colby and bring her down.”
“Okay,” he said distractedly, checking his cellphone after a series of buzzes signaled a text message coming in.
Darcy had always had a very special relationship with her cat Smudge. The two of them practically had their own language and when he tried to tell her something, she listened. Tiptoe was still sort of new to the family, and they didn’t have the history that she and Smudge had, but she was learning that Tiptoe was very much like her father. When she needed the people in her life to know something, she found a way to tell them.
The fact that Tiptoe wanted her to come upstairs meant, to Darcy, that she should go find out exactly why Colby was being so quiet. Now.
Tiptoe was true to her name as they rounded the top of the stairs to head down the hallway to the bedrooms. She moved silently on little cat paws, without a sound. Darcy did her best to imitate her because she knew something was up. She didn’t know what, but Tiptoe wouldn’t have come to get her if Colby was only taking a nap. Still, it was hard to imagine her little seven-year-old daughter getting into any kind of real trouble. Especially in the… what? Ten minutes that she’d been up here without parental supervision?
Colby’s bedroom was nearly right across from Darcy’s. It had been a convenient place for the nursery, but now it was causing a few issues for Jon and her when they were alone at night in bed and wanted to, um, not sleep. They were learning what it really meant to be parents. It wasn’t just love and attention your kid might need. Sometimes, it was a little discretion on the part of mom and dad.
The door to her daughter’s room was open just a crack and Darcy stood outside it for a moment, listening. It was very still in there, but she thought maybe she could hear breathing. Slow and steady. Was Colby asleep? It hadn’t been a long day, but growing girls did need sleep and on a lazy Sunday afternoon with snow falling against the windows it was the perfect time—
Darcy opened the door and stopped. Her heart leapt up into her throat. Her hand reached over to the other, feeling along the etched edge of the antique ring she wore there. It was her talisman, always there for her when she felt worried or upset.
Or terrified, like she was now.
Colby wasn’t asleep. She was sitting cross-legged in the middle of the floor, her hands resting upside down on her knees, her eyes closed. Smudge lay curled up in her lap, his front paws tucked under his body, his head up and his eyes closed.
He was watching over Colby, the same way he would watch over Darcy whenever she did a spirit communication.
Around Colby there were five birthday candles burning. The green ones from the leftmost kitchen cabinet drawer. They were stuck into upturned caps from those little plastic milk containers Colby liked to drink. At least, four of them were. The fifth one had tipped over and its little flame had already scorched a black mark on the polished floor boards.
Darcy’s mind went into overdrive and she almost did a baseball slide as she dove to grab the candle up. The wax was hot, and she blew the flame out quickly so she could drop it before it burned her skin.
She reached out to shake her daughter awake, but her hand hesitated over Colby’s shoulder. Being brought out of a spirit communication too suddenly could have devastating results. Even as an adult, Darcy had woken up suddenly from deep trances unable to breathe, with her heart racing. Once, she’d been unable to see for about five minutes.
The thought of what it might do to Colby…
How did this happen? Darcy tried to move past that question but she couldn’t. There shouldn’t be any way that Colby could be doing this. Not at her age. Not without training! It had taken Darcy months to learn how to do this with Aunt Millie teaching her every step of the way. Her daughter had done this all on her own.
Colby was deep in the trance. She was trying to reach through to the other side, or maybe she already had. Darcy recognized the signs of it. The candles. The cat. Her breathing. The way she didn’t respond to her mother’s voice. Darcy needed to do something.
How did this happen?
Smudge opened one eye, and purred.
The candles weren’t necessary for the communication. They just helped focus the practitioner’s mind in this world while their spirit stepped into the next. So, did the presence of something comforting, like a cat. Oh, right. Darcy suddenly knew how to get Colby back from wherever she had gone. Remove one of the things that was anchoring the person to both sides, and they would start to float back into consciousness.
So she reached in and gently picked up Smudge. He felt so frail and thin in her arms. So old. His black and white fur trembled as he stretched, and yawned, and flicked his paw against her arm. When he looked up at her, she could see the excuse in his eyes.
“Oh. You were just watching over her, is that it?”
He blinked. Yes. That was his answer.
Tiptoe came over to them, where Darcy knelt just outside the imaginary line of the candle circle, and put her paw up on Darcy’s leg. When Darcy settled Smudge down next to her, the two of them sniffed each other’s faces, talking to each other on their own level. Darcy had the sneaking suspicion that the two of them had worked together to bring her up here. They must have known that Colby was in over her head.
“Mom?”
Colby’s voice was weak, and sleepy, like she’d been dozing heavily for hours instead of just a few minutes. Darcy smiled as she snuffed out the other candles one by one. The communication was over. Folding her daughter’s listless body into her lap, she stroked Colby’s hair, and rocked her back and forth. “You’re okay now, honey. You’re okay.”
“Feel funny,” Colby lisped.
“You’re going to for a little bit. We’ll go downstairs and eat in a minute or two, okay? That will make you feel better. Honey, that was a very dangerous thing you were trying to do. What were you thinking? You almost set your room on fire!”
“Needed to talk to her.” Colby rubbed at her eyes, and yawned. “I just did what you do, Mommy. Sorry ‘bout the candle.”
“I know.” Darcy took a moment to remember Colby had given up calling her “Mommy” after she graduated from kindergarten. If she’d gone back to it now she must really be rattled. “I know you’ve seen me do this before, but you’re not ready for this. It’s really, really hard.”
“Kinda hurts,” the girl admitted grumpily. “I didn’t know that part.”
“Mmm-hmm. It does. It’s like… you’ve been running way too long,” Darcy said, reaching for an analogy that Colby might understand. “When you’re still little, you can only run so fast. When you grow up and get stronger, then you can try out for the Olympics, but only when you’re ready.”
“What’s a ‘lympics?”
Darcy chuckled and gave her daughter a squeeze. “The Olympics are a big competition where the best people in the world win trophies for being the best runners or swimmers or, um, ping pong players.”
Colby pushed back in her mother’s arms just far enough to look up into Darcy’s eyes. “So you’re like a ‘lympic runner, and I’m not?”
“Not yet,” Darcy said. “You will be, one day, but for right now I don’t want you trying this again. I’ll start showing you the technique, if you want, and we can practice until I think you’re ready to try it for real, okay?”
Her daughter nodded, and rubbed her eyes again, and then got up to her feet. Brushing her dress flat of wrinkles, she shrugged. “I just wanted to talk to her. Smudge came in and kept me company. Um. I’m real sorry about the candle falling over. I thought I had them all set good.”
“Don’t worry about it…” Only, Darcy was worrying about it. Tha
t scorch mark on the floor could have been the start of a fire that destroyed a house that had been in Darcy’s family for three generations now. “Honey? That’s the second time you’ve said you were trying to talk to someone. Who was it? Who did you do the spirit communication to talk to?”
Colby looked at her as if it should have been obvious. “The girl from church.”
Of course. “The ghost we saw today? The girl with the burns?”
“Uh-huh.” The color was returning to Colby’s cheeks. She already looked much better than when Darcy had first walked in on her a few minutes ago. “She needed to talk to me.”
“What do you mean? How could you know that?
“Because,” Colby said with another stretch, “she told me.”
Darcy felt uneasy at that. She remembered the ghost reaching out for Colby, remembered her mouth moving as she tried to say something. Darcy hadn’t heard anything, which wasn’t unusual when dealing with ghosts. It took an incredible amount of energy to get any verbal communication from the other side. Only…
Colby was saying she did hear the girl. From across the unfathomable distance between life and death, Colby had heard the ghost speak.
She shivered, because it shouldn’t have been possible. Not at Colby’s age. Not at anyone’s age. “Honey—”
“Darcy?” Jon was calling to her from downstairs. “Darcy, can you come down here?”
Colby was already out the door and skipping down the hallway. Smudge sauntered out of the room slowly. Tiptoe followed along with him, jumping around her father, trying to get him to play with her or at least move faster. Smudge wasn’t having any of it. He was too mature for little kitten games.
Darcy took one more look at the burn mark on the floor before getting up, and leaving the room to follow after them.
Downstairs, Jon was waiting for her in the living room. “Where’s Colby?” she asked him.
“I set her down at the table to eat.” He was pulling on his coat, and it was only then that Darcy noticed he had his boots back on. “Yes, you guessed it. I have to go. Wilson Barton just called and they’ve got a fire downtown. A bad one. The fire department is there and my guys, but… Darcy. It’s bad. It’s really, really bad.”
“Jon, you’re scaring me.” She realized she had to tell him about what had just happened up in their daughter’s room, but that would have to wait. The look on Jon’s face, the way he was rushing to get ready to go… “What is it? What’s wrong?”
“The fire’s in the bakery, Darcy. Helen’s bakery is on fire.”
The only upside, as far as Darcy could see, was that the bakery wasn’t actually Helen’s anymore.
Tragedy seemed to find Helen just like a driving rain always found the tiniest holes in what was supposed to be a solid roof. Her first husband was in prison, still, after breaking Helen’s heart and murdering two people. The next man she had fallen helplessly in love with had been one of the worst men that Darcy had ever encountered. That wasn’t a title Darcy gave out lightly.
Now that she was happily married and retired from the bakery business, Darcy hoped that her good friend would be able to distance herself from the tragedy of the bakery burning down, a business that she had built up with her own two hands.
A small crowd stood on the sidewalk on Main Street the next morning across from the remains of the bakery, staring at the end of an era outlined in yellow police tape and white snow. The mix of precipitation that had started coming down on the town yesterday had turned to heavy wet flakes overnight but Darcy wasn’t sure if that had helped the firefighters in their efforts or hindered them. Either way it was done now. Neighbors and friends stood talking quietly to each other about what a tragedy this was. She recognized more than a few of them. Even grumpy old man Roland Baskin and Pastor Phin, and of course Elizabeth Archer who had worked in the bakery for years.
Until now.
The two-story red brick building still stood in its place, but black scorch marks flared around all of the windows on the second floor where they had been broken out by flames merrily gutting the place. That was the bakery’s storage area, Darcy knew, stacked with fifty pound sacks of flour and boxes of cooking spray and other highly flammable tools of a baker’s trade. There had also been a little cot and a television set up there for times when Helen would spend entire nights here getting baked goods ready for a school function or someone’s wedding. Thank God there hadn’t been anyone here last night.
One of the big windows at the front, on the first floor next to the door, had shattered. The bakery’s name had been spelled out there but now only a few of the letters survived. “Bea r k and é.” The Bean There Bakery and Café had been reduced to bear kandé, and Darcy didn’t find anything funny about it.
The rest of the glass was jagged splinters under piles of snow. The front door was gone off its hinges and Darcy could imagine the firefighters breaking through to get at the flames before they spread to the businesses next door. Through the charred openings Darcy could see upturned tables and water dripping from the ceiling and the black and gray of burnt walls. The display cases were melted through. Once upon a time, the bakery had been a centerpiece of life in Misty Hollow. Looking over what remained, Darcy grimaced. There was no saving it. The Bean There Bakery and Café was no more.
Jon had gotten the call about the fire around six or so which meant it must have started right after everything on Main Street had closed on a lazy Sunday afternoon. The fire department had done an amazing job of containing the blaze to just the bakery. The new hair salon to the right and the small liquor store to the left had come through the night with nothing more than black streaks to mark where the flames had tried to jump across the alleyways, and failed.
It was Monday, which meant Colby had gone off to school for the day. Second grade already. She looked forward to being picked up by the big yellow bus each day with Lilly from next door. Darcy usually liked getting her ready and dressed and packed up to go but this morning she had felt like everything was happening too quickly. She still needed to have a real talk with Colby about her attempting a spirit communication, and about what—if anything—the ghost from Pastor Phin’s church had said. She needed to tell Jon about it, too. The call about the fire had sidetracked all of that. When he’d come home so late, and dropped off to sleep as soon as his head hit the pillow, there hadn’t been time for anything but a goodnight kiss.
Speaking of Pastor Phin and his church, she needed to find time to sit down and think about what she’d seen when she shook his hand, too. A house in flames, burning fiercely. It could be nothing, or it could be something very important. Was that something from Phin’s past? Did it have anything to do with the ghost girl with the burns on her face?
For that matter, standing here in the light of a new day and staring at the burned-out wreck of the bakery, she had to wonder if maybe the vision of fire, and this very real one, were maybe connected as well. There was too much to do, and almost no time to get it all done.
Well. At least it wasn’t snowing. She should be glad for small favors.
Beside her in the crowd, a man cleared his throat. Several other people were snapping pictures with their cell phones. After all, this was history in the making. A part of Misty Hollow’s community gone for good. But Wilson Barton wasn’t interested in taking pictures. He’d already been here last night and seen the fire firsthand. It wasn’t the first fire he’d seen in his career, either. Looking up the street, Darcy could just see a bit of the new Town Hall where it had been rebuilt when a fire destroyed the old one. Spinning her aunt’s antique ring on her finger, Darcy grimaced at the memory. She supposed it could be worse.
At least a ghost hadn’t caused this fire. At least, not that she knew of.
Wilson cleared his throat again.
“Oh, sorry,” Darcy said to him. “I was kind of lost in my thoughts.”
“Lots of people like that today,” he said with a nod. “I know I was kind of melancholy myself seeing this
place burn.”
She looked over at him, not quite able to keep the surprise from her face. “Melancholy?” Wilson was usually so reserved. The goatee he had taken to wearing softened the severity of his intense brown eyes and his buzzcut blonde hair, but she’d still never known him to use big words like that to describe his feelings. “That’s not a word you manly men use very often.”
“Yeah, well, don’t tell Kara. She still thinks I’m a stud.”
Ah. Kara Larrabee was one of the officers at the Misty Hollow Police Department. She’d started only a few years back, but it hadn’t taken very long for her and Wilson to realize there was chemistry between them. They’d gone public with their relationship about half a year ago. Good for them. Darcy always thought they were good for each other. Lots of loving relationships started right here in this sleepy little town. Like Lilly and Connor. Like her and Jon. Now, add Kara and Wilson to that list.
“So what happened here?” Darcy asked Wilson as the crowd continued to stare at the looming husk of the bakery. “Jon was too tired when he came back to even talk. You’re looking pretty exhausted yourself.”
She caught him in the middle of stifling a yawn. Trying to laugh it off, he yawned again. “Yeah, well, sometimes being a police officer means you don’t get any sleep.”
“This I know,” she agreed. Jon had missed sleep any number of nights. He’d slept through lots of lunches they were supposed to have together, too, after being up all night to catch the bad guy or help his officers solve a case. “As busy as it is here it’s hard to believe we live in small town America.”
“We get reminded often enough,” he agreed, pointing across the street. “Stuff like this keeps us on our toes.”
“Yes, it does.” Darcy scrunched up her face as his words pricked a memory. “Someone was telling me that just yesterday. About how so much happens right here in Misty Hollow.”
“Oh really? Who was that?”
“Tobias Ford, that’s who. Where is he by the way? I thought he would be here since it was his shop that burned down.”
