K.J. Emrick - Darcy Sweet 13 - Ghost Story

by K. J. Emrick

  Caught off guard by that question, Darcy sat up, holding Jon’s gaze as she thought back on the events in Helen’s house. She tried to remember exactly what everyone had said. She had still been a little groggy, still dizzy and trying to get her bearings, but she remembered asking if everyone had passed out. She remembered what Jon had said, and Grace, and Aaron, and she remembered Helen nodding her head with that look of terror on her face…

  But she didn’t remember Andrew answering the question, one way or the other.

  Plus, he had been almost confrontational with her about the whole possession thing. She had thought it was just because that was how some people reacted whenever she brought up the subject of ghosts, but could there have been a different reason?

  A cold dread settled into the pit of her stomach. Maybe Andrew had stayed awake while all the rest of them had been rendered unconscious. Was it possible that he knew exactly what had happened, and who the murderer was?

  Could he be the killer?

  “Okay,” she said, not liking where this was going. “I’ll go back there tonight and ask both Helen and Andrew to sit for me to perform the ritual. If nothing else it should clear them both of having intentionally committing the murder.”

  “But not if they were possessed when they did it.”

  “Right. My aunt’s technique only goes so far.”

  Her aunt’s technique.

  From her book.

  That was what she had been trying to think of before. Her aunt’s book was back at her store, along with her journal and a couple more books on the history of Misty Hollow. Those were the books she really needed.

  “Jon, I need to go into town.” She was already up and kissing him on the cheek. “I just remembered something at the bookstore that might help.”

  He caught her hand and pulled her back, kissing her lips firmly. “That’s better. You want me to drive you in?”

  “It’s not that far, silly. I can walk.”

  She thought that would be the end of it, but he kept hold of her hand. His eyes were troubled.

  “Jon,” she said, “I’ll be all right.”

  “I know. I know, it’s just…what Helen said today. Well, what the ghost said through her, I guess. Any of us could be next. We’re all in trouble. You most of all. I don’t want to let you out of my sight.”

  She rolled her eyes, but really his concern made her warm inside. Besides, as much as it would kill her to say so, he was right. With her abilities so tuned to the other side, to the world of ghosts and things that went bump in the night, she would be more susceptible to any attacks that came from the spirit of Mister Nathaniel Williams.

  “Okay,” she told him. “You can come with me. It will be nice to have some company. Maybe we can talk more about choosing a date for our wedding.”

  “How about Halloween?” he joked with her as they went to the kitchen to get their jackets and the car keys. “That’s just a few days away.”

  “Jon. I am not getting married on Halloween.”

  “Why not? Everyone loves Halloween. Instead of rice our guests can throw candy corn.”

  “I hate candy corn.” Darcy was smiling in spite of herself, and she was grateful that he could bring humor into even a crazy situation like this. “You and I will find the perfect date for our wedding and it will not, I repeat, not be Halloween.”

  The town usually did their Halloween celebration on the weekend before the thirty-first when the holiday fell during the week. That would have put it tonight, but the town council had decided to try trick or treating on the actual night this year to see how it went. All the kids in town would be going door to door in just a few days to get their free candy sugar rush, and she and Jon would not, under any circumstances, be getting married then.

  Smudge came up to her at the door, rubbing between her legs. Her big black and white tomcat purred loudly, then looked up at her and meowed.

  “I know, Smudge,” she said, bending down to scratch between his ears. “We’ve been gone all day and now we’re going out again. We won’t be long. Just hold the fort for us here and let me know if any ghosts come knocking at the door.”

  When she said it, Smudge sneezed as if to say, “You’re kidding, right?” Then he promptly dashed across the kitchen floor and into the living room.

  “Some guard cat,” Jon muttered. “Come on. Let’s go. I’m freaked out by this one, I don’t mind telling you. I want to find out what’s going on, and fast, before someone else gets hurt.”

  Darcy nodded, agreeing with him completely. “Has anyone identified the victim yet? Wilson was working on that, wasn’t he?”

  “Back at the station, yes. That’s what he gets for being the junior detective at the department.” Jon held the door open for her and then locked it behind them again. “He hasn’t called yet. I told him to let me know the minute they had anything.”

  “I thought I knew everyone in Misty Hollow. At least by sight.”

  “She didn’t look familiar to any of us, Darcy. I don’t know what that means.”

  Darcy didn’t either.

  ***

  The front window of the Sweet Read Bookstore had been replaced after debris from a terrible car accident had crashed through it. It had taken a week for the local hardware store to get the glass in and then another three days for them to install it. Darcy had used the opportunity to have the name of the store printed onto the window in gold, scripted letters. Below the name in a smaller size was Darcy’s new slogan.

  “The Mysterious is All Around Us.”

  She’d heard the phrase “isn’t it mysterious?” so much in her life that she’d decided to adopt it as her unofficial motto. It had caught on, to an extent, and she’d had t-shirts and coffee mugs printed to sell in the shop in a wide range of colors. The mysterious is all around us.

  Wasn’t that the truth.

  Several of the people in town had already complimented her on it. Apparently there were a lot of people other than herself who felt the strangeness in Misty Hollow, the odd sense that the paranormal was here and watching, waiting for an opening to slip into their lives.

  Darcy glanced at her slogan now as Jon pulled up to the curb in front of the bookstore and really, really wished that there was just a bit less mystery in her life. Nancy Drew might have enjoyed getting caught up in enough mysteries to make a television series but Darcy wasn’t a fictional heroine in some novel. The mysteries she got caught up in were real, and real people were getting hurt.

  They got out of the car together and she took the key ring from her pocket to unlock the door. The store was never open on Sundays, but it was after seven o’clock now and normal business hours would have been over regardless. Flicking the lights on, she and Jon headed for the back office.

  Paper pumpkins hung from the ceiling beside goofy cutouts of ghosts that looked more like kids wearing bed sheets than the real thing. Darcy didn’t mind, though. It was decoration for Halloween. It wasn’t meant to look real. It was meant to be something fun for the kids who came into the store.

  She couldn’t help but notice that several of the cutout ghosts had been turned upside down on their strings. Great Aunt Millie apparently wasn’t as okay with the goofy looking ghosts as Darcy was.

  “Looks like I have some redecorating to do tomorrow,” Darcy grumped, knowing her aunt would hear her.

  “Looks like,” Jon agreed. “You really should fix that gouge in the floor, too.”

  “I know. It’s on my list of things to do. Right after picking a date for our wedding.”

  He rolled his eyes at her and smiled.

  The gouge was from the same piece of accident debris that had shattered her window. She’d meant to have the floorboards replaced by now, but it wasn’t a priority. Besides, it gave her place character and was something for her customers to talk about.

  Back past the rack of printed t-shirts and hooded sweatshirts, past the display of electronic readers, the door to the office stood open behind the checko
ut counter. A separate switch inside the door turned on the lights here, revealing a small rectangular space. Darcy’s desk was crammed against the wall and two filing cabinets stood mostly unused and a shelf above the desk was filled with books that would never be for sale, ever.

  Darcy reached up on her tiptoes to take down three books in particular. One was her aunt’s journal, a small book with a black leather cover. Millie had spent a lot of time filling its pages with her personal observations of Misty Hollow. Darcy had been able to find help in her aunt’s words time and time again and she was hoping there would be something in here to help her now.

  The other two books were older volumes with pages that were starting to yellow and covers that were starting to fade. She and Jon had picked them up in a rare bookstore. They were books on the history of the area and the different towns and the people who had lived there. Misty Hollow was mentioned in there a few times. If they went back far enough, historically, then they might shed some light on who Nathaniel Williams was.

  “I can’t believe you haven’t read through these already,” Jon said to her. “Considering how much of a bibliophile you are.”

  “That’s a pretty big word there, Mister Detective.”

  “Well, my girlfriend runs a bookstore. I’ve picked up a few things.”

  She smiled at him before sitting down to turn her attention to the books. The history books seemed the best way to start. Opening the first of the two in the set she hooked strands of her hair behind her ear and turned to the table of contents. Each chapter was labeled with the name of a story. Some of them she remembered, some she knew she hadn’t read yet, and others she wasn’t sure about.

  The one near the end definitely had to do with Misty Hollow. She remembered that one. Turning to it, she skimmed through the narrative, knowing already it wouldn’t be any help to her. It was about a railroad that had come through here at one point, only to be abandoned twenty years later in favor of the growing popularity of vehicle transport. Darcy knew where the tracks had been. Even today the ground was all gravel with the occasional rotting railroad tie sticking up out of the dirt. Interesting, but not useful.

  Another short paragraph mentioned a fire that had destroyed the Town Hall on Main Street back in 1796. The building at the time, a wooden construction with timber beams and flooring, had burned to the ground and had to be reconstructed. It wouldn’t be completely refinished until the turn of the century. Thereafter, several renovation projects had changed the look of the place again and again.

  A few other stories turned out to be tales from Meadowood, or Parkerton, or Edwardsville, or some other nearby town. She found another one about Misty Hollow’s original families, Helen’s included, and she recognized the name of one of her ancestors as well in there, but there was no Williams family in the list.

  Frustrated, she turned back to the table of contents.

  “Jon, this is going to take a while. I’ll need to read through the book my aunt published on paranormal techniques, too. Are you sure you want to stay with me?” She found one other story from Misty Hollow and turned to that page. “I promise I can take care of myself.”

  He stood behind her and kissed the top of her head. “I know you’re a big girl, Darcy. But I care about you. You’re going to have to accept me being protective sometimes.”

  “Like when psychotic ghosts kill people and leave them on the front lawn at our friends’ houses?”

  “Exactly.”

  There was a long pause as they both remembered what they had seen today. A dead woman, murdered by someone’s hand. Worse was knowing that the hand involved belonged to one of them. Was it her? Darcy had wondered that more than once this afternoon. Jon was probably wondering if it was him, too. She didn’t think she had done something that awful, but she had been blacked out and at the mercy of a crazed specter…

  Darcy began to read the words on the pages in front of her. As she read, Jon kneaded the muscles along her shoulders and upper back with his fingers. It was too bad they weren’t back at home doing this where she could really enjoy it…

  The narrative she was reading caught her full attention. It was set in the late 1700s, a few decades before the area became Misty Hollow. Apparently, some sort of holiday had been declared in celebration of five straight years of bountiful harvest and prosperity. It kind of sounded like Thanksgiving, actually. The writer of the book had a very dry, textbook-like style that made what could have been an interesting story seem boring and dull, but Darcy trudged through the rest of it.

  The celebration had been cut short when a riot broke out. A group of men armed with guns and knives and pitchforks had tried to seize the land by force, right there in broad daylight apparently. The leader of the group claimed that his family held the original title for the town and that the property had been stolen from him by the governor of the area, one Roderick Chauncy. People were killed during the chaos before it was finally stopped. A lot of people.

  Five of the men responsible for the riot did penance for their deeds and were held in the stocks for a week. The leader of the group had a different fate. He was defiant to the end, and got himself hanged for his crimes. On the night before All Hallow’s Evening.

  The night before Halloween.

  In the Town Hall.

  “I think I’ve found something,” Darcy said, after she’d read the last paragraph two more times. “Look at this.”

  He read through the two pages of historical drama and then reached past her to tap his finger against the book. “This sounds like what our ghost was ranting about. How Misty Hollow was stolen from him. It doesn’t name the guy who caused the riots, though.”

  “I noticed that, too. History has a way of forgetting certain things. This is a pretty obscure fact about the area history. We’re lucky anything got recorded about it at all. I can’t believe they hung people right in the Town Hall!”

  “Hanging was a favorite form of capital punishment back in the day,” Jon said. “Less bloody than beheadings, cheaper than a firing squad. The Town Hall would have served as the courtroom and the public meeting place as well. Kind of makes sense that if they were going to hang people then they would do it in the Town Hall.”

  “I suppose. It still seems a little gruesome.”

  “Yes, it does. So. How do we find out if Nathaniel Williams was the one who got hanged? Or if he’s anyone for that matter. Do you think the ghost could have lied to us about who he is?”

  Darcy shook her head. “Ghosts don’t usually lie about who they are. Their identity is very important to them. That’s not to say they might not have their own agenda. They just don’t have all the reasons to lie that living people do. For the most part, it’s impossible to get a ghost to give you a straight answer, let alone a lie.”

  “Well the dearly departed Nathaniel Williams certainly had a lot to say.”

  That was true, Darcy had to admit. “I think that’s because he was possessing Helen. That was allowing him to speak through her. It’s easier for a ghost to communicate when they have a host body. You know, a real mouth to talk with. That’s what my Aunt Millie wrote out in her journal, anyway.”

  “Heh,” Jon chuckled. “Dearly departed. Guess I can’t call him that. Not sure it applies. Still, I understand what you’re saying. So this is really the ghost of Nathaniel Williams, angry rampaging spirit. Now we just need to know what his problem is and we can…uh, what? Exorcise him? Open the door for him?”

  “You know, I love how you try to understand what I do.” She stroked his cheek and wished there was time for them, like there had been this morning. “Yes. Something like that. I’ve helped spirits cross over before. I’ve never performed an exorcism and I really didn’t want to start now.”

  “What’s the difference? Isn’t that the same thing whether you call it crossing over or exorcism?”

  “No, see, when I help spirits cross over, it’s because they want to go. An exorcism involves forcing a dead person to leave the realm of the
living. Emphasis on the force part. It’s very serious stuff.” Darcy had helped people in town “get rid” of ghosts from their houses before. Usually there was no ghost, but having Darcy say a few words in Latin and burn a few white candles made them feel better. “What we need to do is find out the ghost’s backstory if we’re going to be able to help him. Or help ourselves. I have the feeling we don’t have much time to do it, either. Halloween is right around the corner.”

  “So?”

  “So, if this person here is Nathaniel Williams, and he was hung on the night before Halloween, then that will be when he has the strongest connection to the world of the living. He felt pretty strong enough to me today. I don’t want to see him when he gets stronger.”

  “I can’t believe this,” he said, his voice stressed. “I mean, I know ghosts are real, Darcy. I’ve seen you interact with them enough to know a fact when it hits me in the face. But this… This is something different. This is a ghost actually committing murder. I don’t know if I’m ready for this.”

  “The ghost didn’t commit murder,” she corrected him. “Even the strongest of spirits can only move objects around a little. They couldn’t stab a knife into someone over and over. That took a human’s hand.”

  “A human possessed by a ghost. And didn’t we just say how very strong this ghost was?”

  “Psychic force. You were feeling it in your mind. We all were. That wasn’t physical. Nathaniel Williams would have to be a ghost unlike anything I’ve ever seen to have done this himself.”

  “So we’re back to one of us being the murderer.”

  Darcy didn’t like it, but there it was. “Yup.”

  “One of us did it while we were possessed.”

  “Yup,” she said again, shivering at the very thought.

  Jon put his arms around her to lend her his warmth. “So where do we go now?” he asked. “Over to Helen’s?”

  “That’s going to have to wait. I know someone who might be able to help us.”