A Darcy Sweet Mystery Box Set Seven

by K. J. Emrick

  Darcy saw them. All the time.

  For one to seek her out here, in her own home, usually meant the ghost was very troubled about something. Troubled, and in need of real help. The special kind of help that Darcy could give them.

  To her, death wasn’t something sad. It was just the next step in the process of what people called life. Everyone had their time here on Earth, to live and to love and to hopefully find some happiness, and then they died. But that wasn’t the end. Their spirit continued on to the next plane of existence. Sometimes death was wrong, certainly, like when someone was murdered before it was their time to go. Sometimes death was mysterious, and even a little scary, maybe. She understood why people cried at funerals, because they missed the people who were gone so much, and that was normal. But death itself? For Darcy Sweet, the end of a life wasn’t something to be sad about.

  Except when the ghost in her basement was a child. A child’s death was always sad.

  “Hello,” she said to the boy, in the tone of voice grown-ups always used with children they met for the first time. “My name is Darcy. What’s yours?”

  The boy held out his shadowy hand again and looked down at the ball in her hand.

  “You want this back?” she asked him.

  He nodded his head. Wiggled his fingers.

  “Okay. Well, here’s the thing. You’re in my house. My basement, to be exact. You must be here for a reason, right? Can we talk about that?”

  Looking around like he was only just realizing where he was, the boy curled his arm into his chest, and took a step back, already beginning to fade into the wall again.

  “No, no,” Darcy said to him quickly. “It’s okay. You don’t have to go. Tell me why you’re here, honey.”

  The boy looked down at the red ball again. Already his appearance was starting to fade.

  Darcy stood up, and took a few steps toward him, holding her hand out. “Here, you can have it back. Just, stay for a minute, okay? Can you at least tell me your name?”

  When she offered him the ball he stopped, and his image grew stronger again, and both of his hands reached forward to wrap themselves around Darcy’s. The sensation of it was cold, and somehow damp, and reminded her of snow melting inside of a glove on a harsh winter day.

  The boy looked up, his eyes flashing green against the dark haze of his ghostly self. Darcy let go of the ball, and he held it tight.

  “Joel,” he said, his voice nothing but a whisper. “My name is Joel Harris.”

  Then he disappeared, turning sideways and dissolving away like shadows do when they try to come into the light.

  The ball dropped from the empty air, smacking into the floor again, and again, until it finally came to rest against the toe of Darcy’s sock.

  Thump…thump…thump…thump.

  Chapter 2

  “Snow day, snow day!”

  Darcy heard her daughter shouting those words with great joy down the hall, and she knew without a doubt that any chance she’d had of sleeping in was completely, irrevocably gone.

  She closed her eyes harder anyway and tried to will herself back to the blissful state of unconsciousness that she’d been in just a moment ago.

  “Snows day!” Zane began yelling, imitating his sister, getting the phrase just a little wrong. “Snows day! Snows day!”

  Then they were saying it together, like a song they had just made up.

  “Well,” Darcy sighed into her pillow. “I guess that’s better than waking up to an alarm, anyway, right Jon?”

  She pushed herself up on one elbow, and pulled her hair out of her face, and smiled over at her husband.

  Only, he wasn’t there. She blinked in surprise to find his side of the bed empty.

  “Jon?” she called out, looking around for him in the room.

  Sunlight was slanting in through the windows. Just after eight, she thought, and the clock on the nightstand confirmed it. The light was muted and gray, filtered through the thick clouds and the snow that she could still hear falling against the glass panes. Jon wasn’t in the bedroom.

  She was hoping to talk to him this morning about the little boy’s ghost that she’d seen last night. Jon knew all about her gift, and her many interactions with ghosts. He was one of the very few people in her life who did know all about it. They had no secrets from each other. They told each other everything, and she preferred it that way.

  She and Jon were good for each other. Marrying him had turned out to be the best decision she ever made.

  Well, her story could wait until later. The boy hadn’t come back, and hadn’t told her anything about himself, really. Just his name. If he needed help, she imagined that she’d be seeing him again.

  She sighed and rolled over again. Well. Better get up herself. Maybe Jon was downstairs making everyone breakfast, but if he wasn’t then she would need to put something together for the kids. Pancakes, maybe. Something nice and warm to put in their bellies on a cold day.

  In spite of her decision to get up, her eyes started to drift closed again… just as the bedroom door crept open and two little people came sneaking in to jump up on the bed and bounce on their hands and knees. Darcy kept her eyes closed and began snoring as loudly as she could until both Colby and Zane were telling her to wake up, wake up, wake up!

  Then she jumped up suddenly, twisting her face into horrible shapes, holding her hands up like claws and roaring like some monster just woken up for a thousand-year nap. Her children went into fits of giggling at her antics. She grabbed them both up in her arms and began tickling them, and they laughed even harder. Soon they were all out of breath, giggling and laying there, while Darcy made a few half-hearted “rawr, rawr” sounds pawing her hand at the air. The tickle monster had been defeated… for now.

  Zane was pressed up against her side. Colby burrowed herself under the blankets and grabbed hold of Jon’s pillow like a teddy bear. She was definitely her daddy’s girl, taking after him in her mannerisms as well as the shape of her face. Her hair might be a mix of both her parents’ colors, with hidden auburn highlights under the dark brown, and she had definitely inherited the family gift from her mother’s side of the family, but when Darcy looked at her, she saw so much of Jon. She was the best little girl in the world, in Darcy’s opinion. In her Diamond Princess pajamas, the very mature twelve-year-old tugged playfully on her mother’s arm.

  “Come on, Mom. It’s a snow day. We need to go do stuff!”

  “Hmm,” Darcy frowned at her. “You and I have a very different definitions of what a snow day is for.”

  “Snows day!” Zane cheered, lifting one hand in the air and pumping it in a fist like he’d seen his big sister do countless times before. “Snows day!”

  Colby clucked her tongue at him. “Like you’d know anything about it. You aren’t even in school, Zane. Every day is a snow day for you.”

  “Is not,” her little brother protested. “Doesn’t snow every day. So there.”

  Darcy smiled at their antics. Colby might roll her eyes at her brother sometimes, but those two were just as close as close could be. Zane was only four years old now, and it was next year that he’d start school. Until then he wouldn’t be able to really appreciate what it meant to play hooky from all the big kid responsibilities that his sister had. As their mother, she could see it from both sides, and she knew that she was going to have to enjoy all these little moments before they were gone for good. Someday, these two would be her age and all they would want to do in the mornings was sleep in.

  What fun would that be?

  “Okay, tell you what,” she said to both of them. “How about we go downstairs and find your father, and then we can all have some breakfast. After that, we’ll have some playtime in the snow once I figure out how bad the storm is, and if there’s any sense in opening the bookstore today. Probably not. Well. Let’s go find your dad.”

  Since the Sweet Read Bookstore mostly did business with tourists, it counted on the people coming into town who came
to visit and do a little shopping. If there weren’t going to be any tourists today because the roads were still impossible to get through, then she might as well keep the place closed for another day. Although the book club members might try to come in for some coffee and to have a place to visit… Well. They could wait another day to gossip about the snowstorm of the century. She ran a bookstore, not a coffee shop. She had no doubt that Clara Barstow wasn’t going to open her deli today, and Chef Marios Pizza wasn’t going to be open either, not unless the delivery guy had a dogsled…

  “But Mom,” Colby said to her. “Dad’s not here.”

  “Not here? That doesn’t make any sense.” Darcy craned her neck up to look out the window as she stroked Zane’s curly blonde hair. “For Pete’s sake, where could he go in all of this snow? There’s nothing out there but endless white and silence all around.”

  “There’s more wisdom in silence than in a thousand words.”

  Colby’s eyes got really wide when she heard herself say that, and she swallowed, and then her gaze drifted up to her mother’s again. Darcy smiled to let her know it was all right, and then gave her a nod of understanding. This wasn’t the first time Colby had uttered something she didn’t mean to say, and didn’t understand, and it wouldn’t be the last time either.

  The family gift had manifested itself more strongly in Colby than it ever had in Darcy at the same age. They never knew when she was might suddenly come out with something cryptic like that. At first glance what she had just said made no sense but they both knew that sometime soon, when they least expected it, those words would become more important than they could ever guess.

  So Darcy took these moments seriously, and made sure to let Colby know it. She would never, ever make her daughter feel like a freak for just being who she was. Not like her own mother had done to her.

  Which reminded her, she needed to text her mother this morning and see what the weather was doing to her travel plans. Later. Right now she was spending time with her children.

  “Well,” she told Colby, “I guess I’ll have to remember that. Wisdom in silence. I guess, like listening, right?”

  Colby nodded, her eyes still a little too big.

  “Feel okay?”

  “’Kay,” Colby answered with a cockeyed grin. It was one of her favorite little things to say, and Darcy could tell when she said it that she really was all right. Her daughter had been through a lot this year. Darcy’s life had always been full, to say the least, and now she was afraid that the scary things that kept finding her would also end up being a part of her daughter’s life. She would help Colby learn to manage her gift, but that was the way it worked for the women in her family.

  Of course, it turned out that Zane had a special talent of his own. That had been very unexpected. To her knowledge, the family gift had never passed down to a male child. Not ever, and especially not ever like it had manifested in her little boy. That made Zane Tinker pretty special. Just like his sister, Colby Sweet.

  Tinker-Sweet. That was their family name. When Darcy had married Jon she kept her own name, because he understood how much it meant to her. When they started talking about having children, Jon had promised that all the girl children could keep her last name, but in return he wanted all the boy children to have his.

  It was a modern sort of family, and it worked for them.

  Kissing Zane on the top of his head, she gave Colby a wink. “Let’s go call that father of yours. I want to see how he managed to get out of the house in this weather. Maybe he dug a tunnel. Or maybe,” she added brightly, “Santa Claus came and offered him a ride.”

  Zane clapped his hands and sat up, bouncing on the bed again. “Santa! Santa! Santa’s gonna come on Christmas and that’s when we get our presents. I been good, right? I been good?”

  “I have been good,” Darcy corrected him.

  He looked at her funny. “Of course you been good, Mommy. You’re Mommy. You’re always good.”

  Swinging her feet over the edge of the mattress, Darcy threw her arms around her son and squeezed him tight. “Now that is the nicest thing anyone’s said to me all day long. Know what? Santa always brings two presents for kids who say nice things about their mothers.”

  Zane’s mouth opened into a wide O. “Really?” he breathed.

  “Uh-huh,” Darcy promised. “Santa’s definitely going to be coming here on Christmas.”

  “Even with all this snows?”

  “Sure. He lives in the North Pole. He’s used to snow. As long as there’s good little boys in the house, Santa always comes.”

  After hearing that, he was too excited to stay up on the bed. He slid down to the floor and started doing a dance that was mostly running in place and waving his arms up and down. He looked adorable. Darcy wished she had her cellphone up here to record it.

  “Santa Claus is comin’ to town,” Zane sang, badly. “Santa Claus is comin’ toooo town!”

  Colby slid off the other side of the bed, straightening out her pajamas as she rolled her eyes at her brother. “You are such a little boy.”

  Zane stopped his dancing and looked across the bed at her. “How come?”

  Clearing her throat, Darcy gave her daughter a warning glance. The secret of how Santa Claus really worked was not something she was allowed to tell her brother for several more years, and Colby knew it. She might be too mature for jolly old elves with rosy cheeks and jiggling bellies, but Zane was not. He still believed in the magic of it all, and his sister would get put on the naughty list for the rest of her life if she ruined it for him.

  With a flip of her hand through her long hair, Colby skipped over to the bedroom door. “No reason, Zane. You’re just always going to be younger than me.”

  “Well… duh,” Zane said when his sister was gone.

  “That’s telling her,” Darcy agreed. “Ready for breakfast?”

  “Uh-huh. Cha Cha already went downstairs. He said he was too hungry to wait for us peoples.” He pulled a face, wrinkling up his nose like he’d smelled something bad. “I don’t like his food. It’s kinda gross.”

  Darcy looked at him sternly, trying to hide her sudden concern. “Zane? You haven’t been eating the dog food in Cha Cha’s bowl, have you?”

  “Well, sure,” he said, “but just once. Cha Cha told me it was good and said try it, try it, so I did. Blech. Won’t try it again. Nope.”

  He obviously had no idea why his mother would be worried about him eating food meant for a dog, from a bowl full of slobber and half eaten pieces and God alone knew what else. That was all well and good for dogs—and cats, for that matter—but she definitely did not want her son making a habit of eating after the four-legged members of the family. She didn’t care if Cha Cha told him to do it or not.

  That was her son’s gift. He could talk to animals just like she could talk to ghosts. The difference was that his gift dealt with living creatures. For him, it was just natural to hear an animal talk and know what they were saying. He found it strange that no one else understood what Cha Cha was barking about. Why a bird was twittering at six in the morning. Why Tiptoe stared up at the corner of the ceiling with her kitty-cat whiskers twitching.

  It might not be odd for him, but it was going to be plenty odd for everyone else he ran into. When he went off to school Darcy and Jon were going to have to remind him daily not to let the other kids know what he could do, for his own protection. Same as they had with Colby.

  Darcy remembered her own experiences in school with her abilities, and how her friends thought she was weird whenever she told them a teacher was going to be absent before the substitute walked in the room. Or that it was Jackie Fenwold stealing the lunch money even though no one, including Darcy, had seen him doing it. Or to stay away from Mister Egars the biology teacher.

  Or, that she really was talking to people they couldn’t see, or at least their ghosts…

  But that was then, and this was now. She would prepare her children for the world as best she cou
ld. Kneeling down to be at eye-level with her son, she said, “Let’s not eat out of Cha Cha’s bowl again, okay? Tiptoe’s either. Can you be a big boy and promise me that?”

  He nodded, very proud of himself for being a big boy. “Uh-huh. No more. Wasn’t no good anyway. It was yucky.”

  “Wasn’t any good,” she corrected him.

  “Any good,” he repeated. “Okay, Mommy. Can we get breakfast now?”

  “Yes, we can. No dog food, though, right?”

  He laughed and tried to roll his eyes like his sister. He didn’t quite have it. He looked more cute than sarcastic. “Dog food’s for dogs, people food’s for people. Promise.”

  “Good. Now, you go on downstairs while I put on some pants. Go on, you.”

  She shooed him with her hands, and he spread his arms out wide like an airplane, making noises for the engines as he sailed his way out of her bedroom and then down the stairs. Darcy cringed until she could tell by the sound of his laughter that he was safely at the bottom. A mother never really got over worrying for her children, is what she’d found out. Every day when Colby went to school, Darcy worried until the bus brought her back. So maybe when Zane was a teenager, she’d stop worrying about him making it down those stairs without tumbling and breaking a bone. Maybe, but she doubted it.

  Where was Jon, she wondered? While she picked out a pair of jeans and a sweater to keep warm, she chewed on her bottom lip. She worried about her husband just like she worried about her children. It wasn’t like him to leave and not tell her. He always left a note or left her a text, or… oh. Maybe he had. Her phone was downstairs still. Probably there was a text waiting for her.

  Well. Time to get down there and make breakfast. She was going to need to check the weather report, too. School had already been cancelled for today, but she needed to see about tomorrow. Then it would be the weekend, and it wouldn’t matter anyway. Next week was the Christmas vacation. The kids were getting an extended break.