Have Yourself a Merry Little Murder Read online

  Have Yourself a Merry Little Murder

  A Darcy Sweet Cozy Mystery Book 27

  K. J. Emrick

  First published in Australia by South Coast Publishing, December 2019.

  Copyright K.J. Emrick (2012-19)

  * * *

  This is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents and locations portrayed in this book and the names herein are fictitious. Any similarity to or identification with the locations, names, characters or history of any person, product or entity is entirely coincidental and unintentional.

  - From a Declaration of Principles jointly adopted by a Committee of the American Bar Association and a Committee of Publishers and Associations.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  No responsibility or liability is assumed by the Publisher for any injury, damage or financial loss sustained to persons or property from the use of this information, personal or otherwise, either directly or indirectly. While every effort has been made to ensure reliability and accuracy of the information within, all liability, negligence or otherwise, from any use, misuse or abuse of the operation of any methods, strategies, instructions or ideas contained in the material herein, is the sole responsibility of the reader. Any copyrights not held by publisher are owned by their respective authors.

  All information is generalized, presented for informational purposes only and presented "as is" without warranty or guarantee of any kind.

  All trademarks and brands referred to in this book are for illustrative purposes only, are the property of their respective owners and not affiliated with this publication in any way. Any trademarks are being used without permission, and the publication of the trademark is not authorized by, associated with or sponsored by the trademark owner.

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  Contents

  Free Book!!

  Have Yourself a Merry Little Murder

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Connor and Lilly Special Bonus - Mystery Takes a Leap

  Message from K.J. Emrick

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Acknowledgments

  More Info

  About the Author

  Free Book!!

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  Have Yourself a Merry Little Murder

  Chapter 1

  The entire town was shut down because of the layers of snow that blanketed everything. Snow had fallen for days, and continued to fall, without any sign of stopping. No one had ever seen the like of it. Not in recent memory, anyway. The roads were closed. The stores were closed, because the roads were closed. The school over in Meadowood was closed, because the roads were closed.

  This was a monster snowstorm. It had come down through Canada last week and settled right over their heads. Snow off and on for days, frigid temperatures and the whole works, and then last night the heavens had opened up and Jack Frost had started dumping on everyone in earnest. Two feet of fresh snow in the last three hours. Christmas was just six days away—well, five, now that it was after midnight—and no one could get anywhere.

  Darcy Sweet loved snow, but even for her this was too much.

  “The radio says that the plows have been taken off the roads,” Jon said, climbing back into bed. “If this keeps up, the snowbanks are going to be up to the roof by morning. The airports are closed everywhere in New England. Have you heard…?”

  He waited for Darcy to say something. Her mother was supposed to be flying in for Christmas but if no planes were flying, well, then that just wasn’t going to happen.

  “She sent me a text,” she said behind a yawn. “From the airport in her state. That was like, two hours ago? Mmm. I think. Something like that. She hasn’t said anything about being stuck but if I don’t hear from her by tomorrow morning I’ll message her again. Mom’s gonna be here. Just—” Yawn. “Just you wait and see.

  Sleepy and tired after a long day of playing with her two wonderful kids out in the winter wonderland of snow and ice, she closed her eyes, and rolled over, and wrapped her arm around Jon’s bare chest. He was in his flannel pajama bottoms, and she was in a pair of his sweats rolled down at her waist and an old purple tank top. The one with the hole at the side. They should have been asleep two hours ago, but Jon had stayed awake to monitor the situation in town. Whatever else got closed up or shut down the police department had to stay open, and Jon was still the police chief in Misty Hollow.

  Of course, at this point his whole department was on foot patrol. Snowshoes worked better than studded tires when the drifts were stacked up higher than the windshields of the patrol cars.

  “I remember storms like this when I was a little girl,” Darcy muttered. “It was the best thing ever. Curl up under a blanket. Read a book. Eat chicken soup…”

  “Maybe your mom,” Jon said behind a yawn of his own, “can fix you some soup when she comes for Christmas.”

  “Hmph,” Darcy muttered. “Not if the airports stay closed.”

  “Hmph,” he muttered back. “I’ll send a sled team for her.” Yawn. “Like in that cartoon you like so much with the dog and the… other dog.”

  “Balto,” she reminded him. It really was one of her favorites. Just listening to Kevin Bacon voice the title character made it… worth… watching…

  Her mind was wandering. She yawned, and thoughts of cartoon dogs and snowbound airports and upcoming Christmas dinners with the family all disappeared into a hazy fog. She was too sleepy to think. Too sleepy for anything except sleep.

  Jon snuggled closer to her. The furnace was on in the cellar but the cold world outside was still trying to reach in to them from the other side of their bedroom windows. Under the blanket, her husband’s body heat felt so very, very good to Darcy. If she wasn’t so bone-tired she might have let her hands wander a little lower, and maybe kissed the side of his neck like she knew he liked, and let the night take them wherever it wanted.

  They had been married for years and years now, raising a twelve-year-old girl and a four-year-old boy along the way, but still she couldn’t keep her hands off Jon Tinker’s strong body. Maybe there was more gray in his hair now than there used to be, and maybe there was some pudginess around his midsection, but that didn’t matter to her. Besides. There were streaks of gray in her own dark hair now, and just a few wrinkles at the corners of her eyes.

  Jon didn’t care about that. Neither did she. They loved each other like they were still young and wild and carefree.

  “We should get some sleep while we can,” Jon told her. He stretched, but Darcy could tell he was just as tired as she was. “School’s already cancelled for tomorrow. You know our kids don’t understand the meaning of ‘sleep in.’ They’ll be up bright and early wanting to go outside.”

  “Mmm,” she murmured, resting her head on his shoulder. “Before sunrise, they’re your kids.”

  His voice trailed off as he drifted to sleep. “After sunrise… they’re yours.”

  She smiled and listened to his breathing
slowly even out.

  Darcy drifted away, her thoughts mingling into a landscape of dreams. Images danced with emotions and played games of hide and seek with reality. It was nice. She felt so, so relaxed.

  Until something woke her up again.

  Blinking, she opened her eyes and looked at the shapes and shadows in the room around her. Nothing. There was nothing here. Just part of the dream, she told herself. Nothing to worry about. Go back to sleep.

  She closed her eyes tighter and rolled over onto her other side. Jon followed her, spooning up against her back and folding his legs into hers. Nice. That felt nice…

  Thump.

  “Mmph,” Jon mumbled sleepily. “Heard something.”

  Darcy groaned. If Jon was hearing it too, then it wasn’t a dream. She had vivid dreams all the time, so real she could touch and taste and smell them, but she had never shared a dream with Jon. He was hearing the noise, so the noise was real.

  But where was it coming from?

  She pushed herself up, untangling her limbs from Jon’s, listening in the dark to the house around her. She could hear the snow tapping against the window screens as it continued to fall outside. She rubbed her eyes. Next to her, Jon was already starting to snore softly as sleep overtook him again. After a moment, when she didn’t hear anything else, she decided it didn’t matter. With that logic that every brain uses in the deep, early morning hours, she told herself it could wait until the morning. Whatever it was could wait.

  She put her head back down on her pillow and rolled her body up against Jon’s…

  Thump.

  This time Jon shot straight up, startling her, dragging the blankets with him and swinging one leg over the edge of the mattress. “Wuzzit?” he snorted. Then he stopped, and he turned back to Darcy, still only half awake. “What…?”

  The poor guy had gotten hardly any sleep at all, Darcy thought to herself, and he was probably going to be up early and at it again. On the other hand, she was the owner of Misty Hollow’s only bookstore. The most she would have to do tomorrow would be to shovel the sidewalk in front of her business. That’s if she didn’t decide to just lock the doors and hang the sign that said “CLOSED, The End.” Jon had to oversee the safety of the entire town and everyone who lived here. Not to mention being a father to their two wonderful children. That was a full-time job in itself. In a good way, but still.

  Sitting up next to him, Darcy kissed Jon’s shoulder and pushed her fingers through his short, bed-mussed hair. “Go back to sleep, babe. I’ll go check on whatever it is. It’s probably just Cha Cha batting around one of the ornaments from the Christmas tree again.”

  “Mmph-hmph.”

  Whatever that was supposed to mean.

  He was asleep almost as soon as his head hit the pillow. Darcy’s thick, fuzzy socks padded along the floor as she found her way across the room and out into the hallway. Jon was going to owe her a backrub for doing this and letting him sleep instead.

  Thump.

  Oh, for Pete’s sake. What was that?

  There were very few things that were scarier than a sound you couldn’t identify in the middle of the night. There was something ominous about the unknown, in the dark… in your own house. Darcy lived in a world of ghosts and specters. She could see the dead, and they could see her. She knew the true meaning of scary. In her life she’d been scared half to death more times than she could count.

  She wasn’t terrified of this sound—at least, not yet—but she was worried.

  It didn’t sound like any of the normal house noises she was used to. Her Great Aunt Millie had owned this house for years before Darcy came to live with her as a teenager. Since then, she’d come to know all the sounds the house made in winter, spring, summer and fall. This sound wasn’t any of them. There better not be anything wrong with the furnace. Not when it was already four below.

  What worried her more, was the thought that it might be something in one of the kids’ rooms.

  Down the hall, she stopped into Colby’s room first. The butterfly nightlight on the far wall fell on the silhouette of her daughter, tucked under her comforter, snoring softly into her pillow. Darcy waited, but she didn’t hear anything but Colby’s breathing. Whatever the noise was, it didn’t seem to be coming from in here.

  Not that long ago her daughter had been deathly sick with an ailment that was beyond the ability of medical science to cure. She was better now. Back to her old self. Darcy couldn’t be more relieved, but she had been carefully watching Colby ever since. Like a mother hen. Like she wasn’t fully convinced that the danger was past.

  She wasn’t the only one, either.

  From the end of the bed, a furry little head lifted up. A gray cat with a single black-tipped ear looked back at Darcy with eyes that were luminescent in the dark room. Tiptoe was sleeping with Colby, just like she usually did. Those two had formed a fast friendship, hardly ever apart from each other. It was nice to see. Darcy and Tiptoe’s daddy, Smudge, had been best friends for years. She still had a little empty space in her heart, left from him being gone.

  Tiptoe blinked at her, and then stretched out against Colby’s feet. She was happy right where she was. If there had been anything wrong in here, Tiptoe would have known about it, and she would have warned Darcy.

  “Thanks, little girl,” she whispered to the cat. Tiptoe flicked her ear and wrapped her tail around her paws and went back to sleep.

  Darcy closed the door most of the way, but left it open a little just in case Tiptoe needed to come and find her after all. That was her worry surfacing again. A mother’s prerogative.

  Out in the hallway Darcy shivered. It was so cold! When she was in bed with Jon’s arms wrapped around her, she had all the warmth she needed. Out here… not so much. She should have put her robe on before coming out here to search for this mysterious noise. And a flashlight, too! Seriously. What had she been thinking? Not that she’d be wandering through the house looking for an errant noise, that’s for sure.

  Thump.

  Right. That noise, right there. Where was it coming from?

  She reached over and touched the antique silver ring on her right hand. It had been her aunt’s, and she kept it as a favorite keepsake. It made her feel safe and comforted her when things got crazy or weird. It was like having a piece of Aunt Millie close at hand. Literally. The etchings along the side of the ring played under her fingertips as she spun it around, thinking to herself and wondering what she would find when she finally tracked down the source of this sound.

  Next, she peeked into Zane’s room. A soccer ball lamp shone a warm, pale light across the mess of toys and discarded clothes. Her son was fast asleep under his Avengers blanket with one arm folded behind his back and his mouth hanging wide open. He looked oddly comfortable like that. Up near his face, sharing the pillow, Cha Cha twitched in his sleep. The Bassador hound was never going to be a very big dog—maybe twice Tiptoe’s size—but he had a boundless energy. Even in his dreams. One floppy ear covered his eyes, and his stubby tail thwapped at the bed as he chased squirrels or ran after the birds or whatever it was he did in his sleep.

  She listened to the sound of the tail going thwack, thwack, thwack. No. That wasn’t the sound she and Jon had heard. That was definitely different. Everything was fine here, just like it had been in Colby’s room.

  Darcy backed away quietly into the hallway again. She knew that if she accidentally woke up Cha Cha there would be no more sleep for anyone tonight, whether or not she figured out what this noise—

  Thump.

  What it was.

  She heard it more clearly now. Downstairs. That had definitely come from downstairs. So… that’s where she was going next.

  Not that long ago there had been safety gates at the top and bottom of the stairs. Zane had been too young to wander around unrestricted. Now he was a big boy but if Darcy had her way, the whole place would be locked down and wrapped in foam rubber until both of her children were out of college. Longer, mayb
e. After all, she was hoping for grandchildren someday.

  There was nothing amiss in the living room. The Christmas tree was standing in the corner, right where it had been since the day after Thanksgiving. They put it up as a family, with Jon assembling the artificial limbs and the kids helping Darcy put on the tinsel and the ornaments and the lights. It had been Zane’s year to select the tree topper and he’d picked a small Santa hat that Darcy had saved from an old teddy bear of Colby’s. It perched at an angle on the tip of the top branch. The end result was a haphazard hodgepodge of too many ornaments around the bottom and bunches of lights that blinked green and red and blue whenever they turned them on.

  They weren’t on now. The room was dark, and empty. She could barely make out the sparkle of tinsel strung along the walls. There were paper snowflakes taped to strings hanging from the ceiling, but she couldn’t see them, either. There was also—

  “Ho, ho, ho, Merry Christmas!”

  Darcy jumped and inhaled a sharp breath as the animatronic Santa Claus in front of the fireplace reacted to her movement and started playing Jingle Bells, while wishing her a happy holiday in a voice loud enough to wake the whole household.

  Swallowing her heart back down into her chest, she glared at the bearded four-foot-tall elf, and then stalked over to flip his off switch. The last thing she needed when she was trying to find an odd noise was more noise.

  “Shut up, Santa.”

  Thump.

  She tried to pinpoint where the sound was coming from. All she knew for sure was that it didn’t come from in here.