4 The Ghost of Christmas (2 page)

She stopped. He seemed so distant. The good feeling she had gotten back about their relationship started to slip away again. She spun the antique silver ring on her right hand ring finger. It was a nervous habit she had whenever she was stressed or anxious. The ring had belonged to her great-aunt Millie when she had been alive, along with the house that Darcy lived in and the bookstore. Darcy had inherited all three. The ring meant a lot to her. In times of stress she sought its comfort.

Jon finally smiled and she thought maybe she had only imagined the way he had looked at her. She stepped closer to his desk, and as she did he stood up. “I have to go and help out the guys in Meadowood tonight. Um. Raincheck on dinner?”

Darcy felt her mood deflate again. These ups and downs were getting exhausting. “Oh, okay. Is everything alright?”

Meadowood was the next town over from Misty Hollow and was quite a bit bigger. The crime rate had increased over there in the last few weeks as Christmas got closer. It wasn’t unusual for that township to ask for help from the surrounding departments, including Misty Hollow, but still Darcy couldn’t help but feel like Jon was making up excuses.

Rifling through the papers on his desk he said, “No, baby. Everything’s fine. They had a tip that a larger burglary is going to take place tonight. They’re asking for help. That’s all.”

Darcy hoped that he wasn’t using that as an excuse to avoid her. Even as the thought flashed through her mind she felt foolish for it. “No I understand. Just be safe. Okay?”

“Of course.  Thanks for being understanding.” He leaned into hug her, holding her tightly. She reached up for a kiss but he was already walking past her for the door.

“I’ll see you later, all right Darcy?”

The door closed behind him with a very final-sounding click. Sometimes she wished that her abilities extended to sensing what living people were feeling and thinking. Sometimes it was so much easier to communicate with ghosts than it was with real people.

Realizing she was starting to draw the stares of the other officers in the room she quietly slipped out the door and headed home.

***

Darcy stood back with hands on hips to admire the Christmas tree she was decorating in the living room of her home. She looked it up and down and this way and that. It looked pretty good but it needed something else. She riffled through her decoration box looking for the perfect ornament when her hand landed on a delicate silver angel. She hung the ornament on one of the top branches and stepped back again to admire her handiwork. Perfect.

Darcy laughed when Smudge jumped up and swiped some of the candy canes lower down on the tree. He had been trying to knock them all off as soon as she put them on. It had become a sort of a game. “Stop it Smudge. I have it looking perfect. Don’t ruin it.”

He gave her a glare with his wide green kitty cat eyes and then skulked away. They had worked out a language between them over the years. She didn’t know if he actually understood what she said or what she meant, but either way, Smudge had been her closest friend for a long time.

As Darcy straightened the tree once again she shivered with a sudden flash of cold. Rubbing her hands up and down the goose bumps on her arms she looked all around for the source of the cold. A draft, maybe? Had she left a window open?

Darcy went around the room, and then the rest of the downstairs checking the windows one by one but they were all shut and locked.  It wasn’t that.

She breathed out. Her breath plumed.

Still shivering she wandered back to the living room and stood with hands on her hips. Listening carefully, she heard noise where there was just silence a moment ago. Outside something whirled and paced, like a gale force wind. Her front door started banging with the force of it and she jumped.

It almost sounded as if someone was knocking. Strange.

She went to the front door. It thumped rhythmically against its thick wooden frame, thump, thump, thump. Curious, she reached out to open it, startled when it blew inwards with force enough to knock her off her feet before she’d even touched the handle. Stunned, her vision sparking with stars, she looked up into the face of the night.

The ghost of an older man stood there. Graying dark hair, wide face, clothes that were wrinkled and unkempt.  He reached his arms toward her and she felt the waves of frigid cold coming off from him.

“Who are you?” Darcy asked as she pushed herself to her feet again. Ghosts in her life were nothing new. She had spoken to any number of them. Usually, however, they didn’t make house calls.

The ghost raised his arms up above his head and as he did so Darcy was pushed back by a harsh gust of wind. She felt fear ripple in her belly. She had never met a ghost where this happened before.

“My name is Roger,”
she heard the spirit speak, a watery voice that touched the furthest corners of her mind.
“Many years ago on Christmas Eve I was murdered.”

Ghosts were rarely this direct. The ones who were able to speak to the living usually had to do so in riddles or snatches of remembered conversations. Roger here seemed to have no trouble communicating. Darcy centered herself and prepared to do what her gift allowed her to do.

Communicate with the dead.

“Why are you here?” Darcy asked. She shivered again. “And why did you bring all this cold?”

“I am too angry to rest!”
The ghost shimmered with his rage.
“I need peace!”

“Roger,” Darcy said as she searched for some way to calm the spirit down, “you have the option to leave. Go on to the next place.”

“No!”
he shouted, his face distorting before snapping back to the visage of what he must have looked like in life.
“I was murdered! I want justice!”

Before Darcy’s eyes, he seemed to shrink down, become smaller even as his voice became quieter.
“I can’t rest until I know who killed me.”

There it was. This was what most restless spirits wanted. Darcy sighed. Here we go again. “If you want,” she offered, “I can help you with that.”

Roger smiled at her. The wind died down, the cold receded, and then the ghost simply faded away.

Smudge wound his way around her ankles. “Big help you were,” she muttered. “You could have at least hissed at him or something.”

The tom cat meowed loudly. Darcy laughed and picked him up, scratching his ears until he purred.

Well, she thought to herself. What do I do now?

Chapter Two

Darcy straightened the last piece of tinsel on the Christmas tree that had been mussed by the ghost’s cold breeze. She had to smile as Smudge crawled under the couch for a moment only to re-emerge with an ornament in his mouth. He trotted over to her and dropped it at her feet.

“Good boy. Are there anymore lying around anywhere? Our friend Roger certainly made a mess didn’t he? Who do you suppose he was?”

Darcy carefully picked up the last pieces of the broken colored ball ornaments that were lying on the floor and threw them into the trash. The ghost had really done a number on her Christmas tree. Several of her favorite decorations hadn’t survived the violent wind that had accompanied him.

She picked up some magazines from the floor and straightened them into a neat pile before dropping them down onto the coffee table. Smudge waddled over to her and dropped another ornament at her feet once again. She bent to pick it up and placed it back on the tree.

Darcy propped her hands to her hips and did a slow rotation around the room. It looked like everything was back in order. While she had been tidying up she had been going over the mystery of Roger’s visit in her mind. She couldn’t shake the feeling that he was familiar to her. Somehow, she thought that she may have seen a picture of him at one time.

If he came knocking on the door, she reasoned, maybe he had been a friend of her Aunt Millie. Maybe the picture was in her great-aunt’s journal.

A cold gust ruffled her hair.

The journal was at the bookstore. She grabbed her coat and shrugged into it, looking around the empty house as she did. She wished Jon were here. Just to have someone to talk to. Of course, he was already freaked out by her abilities and Roger the ghost hadn’t exactly been gentle about his request for help. Maybe it was better that Jon wasn’t here.

Darcy stopped suddenly, one arm in and one arm out of her coat. She hadn’t meant that to sound the way it did. She couldn’t take the thought back, though. It was there now.

She shoved her feet into her boots and headed out of the house.

***

The town center looked practically deserted when Darcy cycled into it. Her bicycle was newly fitted with all terrain tires and thankfully the snow was only a dusting. She didn’t know what she would do once it got deeper.

Outside the bookstore she leaned the bike up against the wall and quickly unlocked the door to rush inside. Twinkling white Christmas lights lit the corners of the room and the stacks of books, strung around the bare ceiling beams and pull away hooks on the walls. The tinsel taped to the end of each row of books glittered in the muted light and the cut out paper snowflakes swayed softly on their strings in the gentle breeze coming through the open door.

She closed the door softly and went into her small office near the back of the store. There, on a shelf above her desk, she slid the journal out from between a copy of Pride and Prejudice and a first edition of Palmer’s Journal, then she sat down to read through the leather bound book her aunt had kept such careful notes in.

In the light of her desk lamp she slowly flipped her way through the book, carefully studying the photos that were pasted into several of the pages. She had read through her aunt’s journal any number of times, and knew entire passages by heart. Was there a photo in here that could help her?

A dozen or more pages in, Darcy saw it. A picture with a bunch of people, all of them labelled, looking like a committee for one of Misty Hollow’s many festivals. She traced her finger over the man who had visited her, standing near the back of the group in the faded photograph. His name was scrawled under the picture. Roger August. He looked exactly the same, wide face etched with fine lines around his eyes, thick dark hair turning gray. A scowl set into his mouth. There was no other information on the page to give her any idea who he was or how her great-aunt knew him.

She had the next step, though. Now that Darcy had Roger’s full name she would go and ask Jon for help in looking him up. She decided to do that tomorrow. Jon was gone for the evening, after all, and he had said he wouldn’t be coming over.

She tried not to let that thought bother her. They weren’t spending every night together. One night didn’t matter, in the bigger picture.

The picture in front of her hadn’t been much help. There was a lot more about the story to learn. She slid the journal back onto the shelf and stood up to leave. She was almost to the front door when she heard the journal fall to the floor back in the office.

“Oh for Pete’s sake,” she said as she went back to pick it up. “Millie. Stop it. I have to get home. I’ll be back tomorrow, I promise.”

Her aunt still haunted the bookstore. For some spirits, like Roger, hanging around the mortal coil was a sign that something was unresolved from their lives. For Millie, it just meant she was somewhere she loved to be. This bookstore had been her life, so to speak, and the memories that Darcy had of being here with her would always be some of her most cherished. Millie loved to play little pranks now by throwing books or knocking things over in the store. Darcy just didn’t have time for it tonight.

The journal had fallen back open to Roger’s photo. Darcy looked at it again, deciding she hadn’t missed anything, and putting it back on the shelf once more.

As she turned to walk away, the book fell again.  She growled between her teeth. Turning back, she saw the book was on a different page this time. A page showing a picture of one of Misty Hollow’s many previous Christmas celebrations. A group of children were on stage, singing carols. One girl stood in front of the rest of the group, doing a solo by the looks of it. The photo was dated, thirty five years ago.

Was Millie trying to tell her something?

***

The next morning Darcy cycled into town early to see Jon before he went to work. She had on her heavy winter coat. Last night’s encounter with Roger made everything seem colder somehow.

There weren’t many people out and about this early in the day. Darcy had gotten up before dawn and headed out before seven. Jon’s shift would start in an hour or so, depending on how late he had been out last night in Meadowood. Maybe he’d decide to stay home.

She went to the Bean There Bakery and Café to get some breakfast for the two of them first. She was delighted to see that Helen was working behind the counter again.

There weren’t many people in the café this early in the day. Leo Hanway, who always came into the café for breakfast every day, was sitting in his usual place and was reading his morning paper. “Hello Mister Hanway, how are you?” Darcy said with a smile as she walked past him towards the counter.

He nodded hello to her but didn’t speak as he turned a page of his paper and shook it out, holding it up in front of his face rather rudely. Darcy had always thought he was a bit of a strange man and not very likeable. He kept mostly to himself and could be a bit curt at times. He was just one of the dozens of unusual characters who lived in Misty Hollow. The place seemed to have more than its fair share.

Darcy sighed as she turned towards the counter. “Hi Helen,” she said. Helen had come up to the counter when she was talking to Leo.

“Hi Darcy what can I get for you?” Darcy ordered two coffees and two muffins. “Thanks,” she said as Helen set the order down in front of her.

“Going to Jon’s for breakfast?” Helen asked with a smirk. Darcy just grinned as she left the shop without answering.

At Jon's front door Darcy knocked a couple of times before he opened it yawning loudly. “Hey you,” he said, sleepily looking at her with his eyelids low. He was still in his pajama bottoms and an old t-shirt.