K.J. Emrick - Darcy Sweet 13 - Ghost Story (4 page)

***

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 checkout 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.”

“Oh yeah?  Who?”

“The town historian.”

They had taken over an hour at the bookstore looking through those books.  It was getting close to nine o’clock, well past sunset, and the stars overhead cast faint silvery light down on the Earth.  It shimmered on ethereal tendrils of mist that clung possessively to the edges of buildings and to the trunks of trees planted along the sidewalks. 

“Is this the place?” Jon asked her.  The house was a gray three story place with tall windows that were probably the originals from when the place was first built.  An apple tree spread its branches in the front yard, the leaves turning shades of reds and yellows for autumn.  Jon parked in the driveway and craned his neck to look up at the house through the windshield.  Whistling, he said, “Wow.  I’d hate to have to be the one to paint this place.”

“Benson LaCroix is in his eighties, Jon.  I doubt he paints his own house anymore.”

“Still.  Houses this big are a lot of work.  Maybe he should have sold it to that cellphone company that wanted to put up a tower here.  Might have been easier for him.”

Darcy sort of agreed with him, but still.  “It’s his home.  His family grew up here, if I remember correctly, just like my house belonged to Aunt Millie before me, and to her mother before that.  Some people get attached to places like that.”

“Yeah, I can understand how that could happen.  Still.  A lot of work.”

She leaned over and kissed his cheek.  “Tell you what.  I promise that when you’re in your eighties I’ll hire someone to take care of our house.  Okay?”

He squeezed her hand, then kissed the knuckles of her fingers.  “Deal.  Come on.  Let’s go see what the town historian can tell us.”

Their footsteps echoed on the long porch.  The air was chilly, and Darcy tucked her arms around herself as Jon knocked on the heavy wooden door.  She really wished that she had something more than her light jacket with her.  Note to self, she thought.  The next time she went investigating a mystery, she was going to dress in layers.

There were still lights on inside Benson’s home.  Darcy had been worried he would be in bed already.  She shouldn’t have worried, because after a few seconds she heard him inside.  “Hold on, now, hold on,” he called to them.  “Just let me get my slippers.”

Jon’s cell phone rang at the same time that Benson opened the door.  Excusing himself, he stepped back off the porch and over to the car.  Darcy knew from the way he answered that it was the police department, and she wondered if they had maybe identified the woman who had been lying dead on Helen’s lawn.  Benson was standing in front of her, however, and she didn’t have time to ask about the call.

“Well, hey there Darcy Sweet,” Benson said to her.  He folded his purple bathrobe tighter over his pajamas and gave her a bright smile.  His eyes were magnified behind the lenses of his glasses.  “What brings you over to my home so late at night?”

Benson was a nice old man who was still as sharp as a tack.  Even if his dark ebony skin had faded a little with age and his curly hair had turned white, he would never be considered feeble.  He’d been here in Misty Hollow longer than Darcy could remember and it seemed fitting that he was in charge of the museum and the historical documents for the town.

“I’m sorry to bother you so late, Benson,” Darcy said by way of greeting.  “I was wondering if you might have some time for me to pick your brain?”

“Might not be much there to pick,” he joked, with a little laugh, “but anything I can do to help you, I’m always here.  You know that.  Come on in.”

She followed him in, glancing over her shoulder at Jon.  He was intent on the phone call and didn’t notice her.

Inside, Benson brought them to the living room and motioned for her to sit on a plush gray couch.  He sat opposite her in a recliner that looked just as comfortable, his checkered pajama bottoms hanging loosely as he crossed his legs.  Darcy had been in his home before and she liked how cozy it seemed, with deep brown carpeting and walls painted a warm forest green.  She also appreciated how nearly every room had a bookshelf or two, full of everything from fiction novels to technical manuals.  More than a few of those had been purchased from her own shop.

“Now then,” Benson said to her, settling his glasses on his nose and then steepling his fingers at his chest.  “What can I do for the famous Darcy Sweet?”

“Famous?” she repeated, a bemused expression on her face.  “What makes you say that?”

“Don’t be so modest!  That whole affair last month with the car accident on Main Street?  That got picked up by the national news, you know.  You’re all but a household name nowadays.”

Darcy shifted uncomfortably on the couch.  She knew that the accident and the investigation surrounding it had made headlines.  There had even been a few phone calls to her home asking for an interview.  She was used to people in Misty Hollow jokingly asking for her autograph, but national news?  She didn’t know how she felt about that.

“Um.  Well, something else has happened and I need your help.  No one knows the history of Misty Hollow better than you.”

He nodded, pride shining in his eyes.  “That’s true.  Don’t no one know half the things I do.  Did you know there used to be a group of Shakers settled here?  That was quite the scandal back then, let me tell you.”

“That’s interesting,” Darcy said, not meaning to cut him off but wanting to keep the conversation on topic.  Jon would come back any minute, probably with the name of their victim, and they couldn’t afford to get caught up in long historical anecdotes.  “Benson, if I asked you about a man named Nathaniel Williams who used to live here in Misty Hollow, would you be able to tell me anything about him?”

Benson froze where he sat, his smile rigid, his hands perfectly still.  Darcy wasn’t even really sure he was breathing until he blinked and licked his lips.  “Nathaniel Williams.  Now, why would you want to go and ask about him?”

“Well,” Darcy said, thinking quickly, “his name came up in connection with the Town Hall today and I can’t seem to find anything about him anywhere so I was hoping that you knew something.”

He stared at her, and Darcy could feel his reluctance to talk.  He swallowed, and nodded his head, and got up from his chair.  He looked different as he did.  Older, Darcy thought.  His arms shook as he pushed himself up and his feet shuffled on the carpet.  “On second thought it is kind of late, Darcy.  Tell you what.  Why don’t we save this question for some other time.  Tomorrow, maybe?  Yes.  Tomorrow.  That’d be good.”

Darcy didn’t understand.  “Benson, I kind of need to know about this now.  The longer I wait, the worse things are going to be…”

She realized she’d said too much, more than she had intended to, and she tried to stop herself but it was too late.  She could see that Benson had already figured out this was much more than just a casual question on her part.

“Something bad done happened, didn’t it?” he asked her.

She could have lied.  She didn’t, even though it would have made things easier.  “Yes, Benson.  Something bad happened.  A woman has been murdered.  You know what I can do.  What my abilities allow me to do.  I’ve talked to you about it before.  I think the ghost of Nathaniel Williams is involved in the killing, and I think there’s going to be more of it, if I don’t figure this out.”

Not to mention that the ghost had apparently used one of them to kill that woman.  That part was probably best left unsaid, Darcy thought.  At least for now.

“Yes,” the older man mumbled.  “Sooner.  Sooner rather than later.”

“I’m sorry, what?” Darcy asked.

He brought his eyes back up to focus on her and smiled almost apologetically.  “Darcy Sweet, you just have this magnetism about you, now don’t you?  You attract trouble like honey attracts flies.”

Darcy figured that she’d been compared to worse things than honey.  He was right, though.  Trouble seemed to find her here in this quiet little community. 

He took in a deep breath and then sighed it out heavily.  “Well, come on then.  Let’s go on down to my study.”

Benson’s house might be three stories high but it wasn’t very big in terms of floor space.  The living room fed right into the kitchen and dining room, and then off that was a smaller room that was built floor to ceiling with shelves stuffed with books.  A small desk of dark wood sat in the very center of the room.  Papers and more books filled up the desktop.  Benson walked around to the chair behind the desk and sat down.

“Uh, I had another chair in here,” he said, looking around at everything.  “Oh, there it is.  Over there in the corner under the collected works of Shakespeare.  Just put them books down on the floor and scoot that chair on over here, will you?”

Two thick tomes, both with soft brown covers featuring a picture of the Bard holding a rolled piece of parchment, were on the seat of a folding metal chair.  Darcy moved them carefully to the floor like he had asked her to, then carried the flimsy chair over.  Benson had already taken a book off one of the shelves behind him and opened it up on top of everything else on the desk.

“Misty Hollow’s got a long and sordid past,” he started.  “Most folks don’t know that.  Way back when, this whole area wasn’t nothing but trees and rocks and a few wooden shacks.  Group of ten people came here to scratch out a living.  Wasn’t no religious community like the Quakers or the Adventists.  Just a group of friends who wanted to make money off owning the land and selling it to newcomers.  Kind of a get rich quick scheme.  That’s where Misty Hollow came from.  Wasn’t even called that back then.  Had a different name.”

The chair was just as uncomfortable as it had looked as Darcy sat down in it.  She listened to Benson talk, picturing the events of the town’s creation as Benson told them.  It was the same story she’d read earlier, but he was filling in the bare facts with real description and making it possible for Darcy to imagine being there.  “What did the town used to be called?”

“Had high hopes for the place, those original settlers.  Called it New Heaven.”  He paused, tapping a finger against the page in front of him.  “Turned out to be more like New Hell.  See, these folks who bought the land here called themselves friends but there was always bad blood between them.  Two in particular.  Those two were the leaders of that little group, but they sure weren’t friends.  Roderick Chauncy was one of them.  Other was Nathaniel Williams.”

Darcy startled as something sleek and heavy jumped up from the floor, landing softly in her lap.  Benson’s pretty gray cat with the white tipped ears looked up at Darcy with a little mewl, then settled into a curled up ball and let Darcy rub her fur.  “For Pete’s sake, Twistypaws,” Darcy greeted the feline.  She waited for her heart to settle back down from where it had leapt into her throat.  “How about next time you wait for the ghost story to be over before you pounce on me like that, okay?”

Chuckling, Benson continued his tale.  “Now.  This feud of theirs continued for a few years.  Lots happened in them early years, but nothing that will interest you right now.  The wilderness started becoming a town.  More people came in.  Fast forward to the year 1795, and you’ll see an all-out war between Williams and Chauncy over who actually owns the land.  Turned into a mini civil war, from everything I can piece together.  They tried to kill each other.  Both them had their supporters, with everything from muskets to pitchforks to bare hands and teeth.  Ended up with a handful of people dead before Nathaniel Williams and his people finally got arrested by Misty Hollow’s first ever lawman.”

He looked at her with a raised eyebrow, obviously waiting for her to ask something.

“Wait.  You don’t mean…?”  Darcy knew her family had come from some of the first settlers in the area.  One of her cousins had traced their roots back to England, proudly displaying her lineage map at a family get together.  From overseas, the family had migrated here, to this very spot.  But could it be?  “Who was the lawman?”

“Fellow by the name of Whitmarsh Grace.  He got himself elected by the group living here to put an end to the feud.  That’s exactly what he did.  Seems to me your mother named your sister after that part of the family.”

Actually, that wasn’t the reason at all.  Darcy’s mom had been so happy at the birth of her first baby that she had declared it a miracle, and so her older sister had been given the name Grace.  Now that Benson mentioned it, though, maybe there had been more to it.  Maybe the old family name had influenced her mom more than she had realized.

So her great, great, great, great, and so on ancestor had been responsible for arresting Nathaniel Williams.  “What did he do?” she asked.  “I mean, to arrest those people?”

Benson turned a page.  There was a full color reprint of a painting, an artist’s rendering of a man hanging from thick rafters inside a building somewhere while people looked on with grim faces.  His dark fingers slid across the picture like he was reading the scene by touch alone.  “Didn’t exactly arrest them.  More like beat them all to within an inch of their lives.  He got him a few deputies who liked to do their talking with their fists and rounded everyone up.  There was six of them in Williams’ group.  Every single one of them faced hanging for the murders they’d done.  Five of them repented and placed the blame at Williams’ feet.  Said it was all his idea.  Those five got sent to the stocks for a week, starving out in the weather, locked in place, while people spit at them and threw garbage in their faces.”

Without looking, his finger settled over Nathaniel Williams.  Right where his heart would be in the painting.