Have Yourself a Merry Little Murder Read online

  But what if her instincts had been right all along and Mark was a bad guy after all?

  A killer.

  She bumped the corner of the table with her knee in her rush to get out. It made the laptop bounce. The screen came back to life. She saw the words that Mark had typed onto the page again.

  * * *

  I’d given in to my panic and it was just dumb luck that I’d survived. That any of us had survived.

  What would happen the next time we encountered a Child of the Event?

  * * *

  And just like that, she remembered where she’d seen them before.

  With a quick detour to the side wall and the nearly empty shelves, Darcy grabbed the book with the crack down its spine. She tucked it into the pocket of her coat.

  Then she practically ran outside.

  Chapter 7

  I’d come to accept that part of me as a good thing. As something that could save me whenever I felt threatened. Not this time. This threat had been too much. I’d given in to my panic and it was just dumb luck that I’d survived.

  * * *

  Those were the words Darcy had seen on Mark Frank’s laptop. The unfinished novel he was supposedly working on.

  Only, these words were right here on the open page of a science fiction novel that had already been published to half-decent reviews, from a new author by the name of S.J. Taylor. Colony 41. This was the book from the shelf in Mark’s house. The one she snagged on her way out before snapping on her skis again and getting herself home as fast as she could.

  Mark wasn’t writing a new novel. He was writing this novel. Copying it word for word. He plagiarized this book to make it look like he was writing one of his own.

  It was more proof that he was a liar, and maybe something worse.

  Jon closed the paperback novel and dropped it on the table. “I’ve been meaning to read that one. So, you’re saying that what you read on Mark Frank’s laptop is exactly the same as what’s in this book?”

  Darcy nodded. “Yes. That’s exactly what I’m saying.”

  They were in their kitchen, sitting at the table with Izzy, talking about everything Darcy had just found out. She was lucky she caught Jon when she did. He’d been on his way out when she made it back home. It had taken her a little bit longer to get back because she kept looking over her shoulder to make sure she wasn’t being followed. Whatever Mark’s intentions were, he hadn’t come after her. Even so she hadn’t felt safe until she was back inside her own home.

  Through the whole conversation Izzy hadn’t said much of anything at all. She listened to everything, sitting back in her chair, legs crossed and one foot tapping in the air.

  “He was out there on Main Street, Jon,” Darcy repeated herself. “He was there in the middle of the storm, just like the Harris family was but he says he couldn’t see anything. How can that be possible?”

  “Plus the bruise you saw on his hand,” Jon added.

  “And, his lying about being a writer.”

  “Hmm. Sure adds up to something.”

  “Yeah. That’s what I think, too.”

  Izzy’s foot began tapping harder.

  Reaching across the table, Jon cupped Darcy’s face. “That’s my girl. Always thinking. We’ll add Mark into our list of suspects.”

  “List?” Darcy asked him. “We have a list?”

  “Yeah, unfortunately we do.” He yawned behind his hand. Obviously he hadn’t gotten much sleep and yet here he was, ready to go back into work where he was needed. “A list that keeps growing. We’ve got Lana Harris, the only survivor of whatever happened to her family in that car. Now, we have Mark Franks, who appeared suddenly in our town just a few months ago and who is apparently lying about why he came here, and what he saw or didn’t see on Main Street. Both of them can be placed at the scene of the crime.”

  Izzy shifted in her chair.

  “There’s still the question of motive,” Darcy said.

  Jon nodded. “Yup. One problem at a time, though.”

  Izzy stared down at the table.

  “So,” Darcy said, “are there more names? You did say we had a ‘list,’ right?”

  He held up two fingers. “Those two.” Then he held up all his other fingers. “And an entire family.”

  “A family of suspects? What do you mean?”

  “Turns out,” he said, “that you were right with your other guess, too. The presents in the Harris’s luggage did have names on them. Fred, Sam, and Mary. With names like those it took my guys a few hours to put them to a specific family, but they did it. Grace called me just thirty minutes ago. After she rubbed it in my face that she got to work first, she told me that the presents were for the Levisons over on Fairfield. So. Now we know who Lana and her family were coming to see, and why they were here.”

  “How does that make them suspects?” Darcy asked.

  “You mean,” Izzy asked, her voice laced with sarcasm, “that we aren’t just picking people out of a hat?”

  “No, we’re not,” Jon said. He glanced at Darcy, obviously wondering what was eating Izzy. “The Levisons are suspects for a specific reason. They would be the only ones who knew Lana and Brian were coming to Misty Hollow.”

  “And Joel,” Darcy said. They couldn’t forget that whoever did this, had also killed a young boy…

  At the mention of Joel’s name, the rubber ball rolled off the shelf from above the refrigerator. It bounced hard on the kitchen floor. It was a crazy bounce, sending the ball off at an angle through the entryway to the living room. Logically, that direction shouldn’t have been possible. It should have gone up, and then down, and then up again, like a normal rubber ball. Not sideways.

  But when you were dealing with ghosts, the impossible often became possible.

  Joel Harris was reminding them that he was still here, still hiding himself from the living. The three of them were staring after the ball from the kitchen table, waiting to see if it would come back. Darcy bit her lip. Now that she knew more about what had happened to the boy, maybe it was time to try a spirit communication with Joel Harris after all.

  When the ball didn’t come back, Jon stood up.

  “Well, on that note,” he said. He leaned over and gave Darcy a kiss on the top of her hair. “I’m borrowing your skis to get in to work. Will you guys be okay here until I get back?”

  “Of course,” she assured him. “I’m going to try getting ahold of my mother again, and then we’ll watch the kids play outside or whatever.”

  “Right,” Izzy said with a false smile. “Or, you know. Whatever.”

  Darcy watched her friend closely while Jon got his coat and hat and gloves on. What was going on with Izzy? She’d been standoffish at best this morning, like something was seriously bothering her. Cabin fever, maybe. Or maybe she was still upset about all this talk of murder, and what she’d seen in the Harris’s car.

  When the door closed, and Jon was gone, Izzy snorted. “I can’t believe you did this, Darcy Sweet. You have a lot of nerve, you know that?”

  “Whoa, where did that come from?” Darcy could clearly hear the anger in Izzy’s voice. “What’s wrong with you?”

  “What’s wrong with me? What’s wrong with you, Darcy? I thought we were friends.”

  “Of course we’re friends. Why would you even ask me that?”

  “Because if you were my friend you wouldn’t have gone off half-cocked to interrogate the guy I’m crushing on, that’s why!”

  She kept her voice low, because Colby and Zane were upstairs at the moment but voices tended to carry in this old house. Both of the kids had proven over and over that they could hear everything the grownups didn’t want them to hear, even if they never seemed to hear it when anyone told them to pick up their rooms.

  As weird as it was to be arguing with her best friend, it was weirder still to basically be whisper-shouting at each other. Darcy didn’t know whether to scream or cry or laugh.

  “Izzy, I went to talk to Mark Franks
because it seemed like he might have seen something while he was out last night. Something to do with that accident we saw. That’s all it was.”

  “Oh, no. Don’t you try to play me. I’ve known you too long. We’re supposed to be friends, and partners, and watch out for each other, and you went behind my back and did all this but that’s not even really the point! You’ve never really liked Mark Franks. Not from the moment he came to town.”

  “That’s not true,” Darcy said, trying to defend herself.

  “Yes it is! Yes it is,” Izzy repeated. “You thought he was a killer the first second he dropped into this town. You know you did!”

  “Well, yeah, that’s true, but still… Izzy, look at everything I found out while I was there. He’s not a writer. He’s got part of an already published book on his laptop to make people think he’s working on a novel of his own. He’s a liar. He’s probably lying about not seeing the accident, too. Maybe even about being involved.”

  “Oh, yeah? Did you do one of your special techniques on him to make him reveal himself as a killer? Huh?”

  That remark stung, and Darcy had a hard time hiding it.

  This is why she didn’t share this part of her life with a lot of people. Izzy knew a little bit of what Darcy could do. They were good friends, and Darcy had chosen to open up to her, and now it was being thrown back in her face like an insult. Yes, she knew some techniques that could have let her know things about Mark Franks. She could find out if there was blood on his hands—literally—but she didn’t like to do it without telling the person what she was doing. It was an incredible invasion of someone’s privacy to reach into their soul like that.

  There were other things she could have tried, she supposed. Most of them required her to at least be holding Mark Franks’ hand, and all of them would have required her to stay there in his house after he was getting suspicious of her. Staying there by herself would not have been a wise choice.

  All her life she’d felt like she had to hide who she was from the people who knew her best. With Izzy she’d taken a chance, and opened up a little, and now she wished she’d never said anything at all.

  She looked into Izzy’s eyes, and she saw tears forming there. Darcy wasn’t the only one whose feelings were being hurt here.

  There had been good reason to go confront Mark, and she had good reason to do it by herself too, but that didn’t change the fact that she’d gone behind Izzy’s back to do it. The end might justify the means, but it didn’t justify violating a friend’s trust.

  So she put her own hurt aside, and tried one more time to explain. “Izzy, look, I’m sorry I didn’t tell you first, but we need to focus on the fact that Mark might be involved in this. At the very least, he isn’t what he claims to be.”

  “Since when are you some kind of expert on being a writer?” She snorted. “Besides, you don’t get to call someone a liar without letting them defend themselves first. You had no right to do this to Mark. No right to cut me out, either, but you were afraid I’d defend him against these stupid allegations, right? Yeah. That’s what I thought. Face it, Darcy, you could have trusted me and told me what you were doing but instead you did what you always do. You just went off to solve the whole thing yourself and didn’t even bother thinking about me, or my feelings.”

  She wasn’t trying to keep her voice down anymore. Darcy winced at the intensity of those words. She’d really touched a raw nerve and it seemed like no matter what she said it only made things worse. Had Izzy and Mark gotten that close? This quickly? Darcy had watched Izzy text with Mark for nearly an hour last night, wondering what they could possibly be saying to each other.

  That’s probably when she should have told Izzy she was planning to come see Mark…

  “I had to do this,” she tried to explain again. “You heard what I said. Mark is lying to us. About being a writer, and about what he saw on that street. He was out in the snow on his skis. He had to see the car in the snow. Why would he say he didn’t?”

  Izzy snorted. “We were out in the snow, too, remember?”

  “And we saw the car. We saw it plain as day. So how come Mark says he didn’t?”

  Crossing her arms, Izzy glared at her. “I don’t know. I would have asked him, but you went off and accused him of being involved in a murder without telling me what you were up to. Maybe if you let me talk to him, we would have all the answers to these wonderful questions you keep asking. He talks to me. He likes talking to me. But, oh no! You couldn’t possibly do that. You had to do it your way. You always have to do it your way, don’t you?”

  Darcy searched for the words to make things better with her friend, but she wasn’t sure those words existed. Maybe if she was a writer, then the words would come to her easier. In a novel, the character always knew what to say, and just when to say it. This wasn’t a novel, she reminded herself. This was real life, and in real life people got angry, and feelings got hurt, and there was often no way to fix things.

  “Izzy, let me explain.”

  “Just save it, Darcy. I’m going to call Mark right now and I’m going to let him know what this crazy theory of yours is.”

  She got up from the table and started for the living room. Darcy reached out for her, wanting to keep her here so they could talk this through. She couldn’t alert Mark to this. If she did, it would interfere with the investigation. It might ruin everything. Her feelings for Izzy mixed with her anxious concern to find the murderer and churned all together in her stomach. She reached for Izzy…

  And both of them stopped as they saw Zane standing just inside the entryway from the living room, watching them closely.

  Darcy had figured out very quickly after having children that adults often said things to each other that they would never say in front of children. Especially things they didn’t want to explain later. Arguing with another adult always led to awkward explanations, one way or another. Izzy—as a mother herself—understood that, too.

  Both of them stood there, with Zane staring back, all of them waiting for someone to be the first one to speak.

  Cha Cha came padding up next to Zane, panting happily, his tongue hanging out of his mouth, until he saw the standoff in the kitchen. His mouth closed, and his ears drooped, and he backed up until he was safely behind the legs of his boy.

  “Hey, buddy,” Darcy said, putting a smile on for her son. “What’s up?”

  “How come you’re arguing, Mommy?”

  He was in fuzzy pajamas again today, the Star Wars ones with that stupid round robot, because it was going to be another day to stay inside. The look of intense worry on his face made him look so small and vulnerable. The lights on the Christmas tree blinked behind him, reflecting red and blue off his hair. Christmas was supposed to be a happy time of laughter and singing and being with family. The snowstorm trapping them in their little town was giving them all a bad case of cabin fever. Here she was, fighting with her best friend!

  Darcy wanted to protect him from any kind of trouble in his life, ever, but that just wasn’t the way life worked. White lies had their place, but she had always made it a point to tell her children the truth when they asked her a question.

  So what was she supposed to tell Zane now?

  Izzy was quicker than she was. “Sometimes grownups do stupid things,” she said, looking over at Darcy, “and then other grownups need to tell them it was dumb.”

  The subtle jab in those words would have been hard to miss. Darcy’s smile went crooked. Izzy turned away again.

  Zane wasn’t satisfied with that explanation. “Okay, but how come you were yelling?”

  “Because,” Darcy told him, “sometimes grownups don’t hear very well.”

  Izzy folded her arms again.

  Cha Cha snuffled the air, sniffing out the mood in the room. Then he sneezed.

  After a moment, Zane shrugged. “Okay. I’ll ‘member to talk louder when I has something to say.”

  Darcy hoped that would be the end of it, but Zane
still looked worried. She could see something was wrong. “Zane? What is it?”

  “Um. Colby won’t let me and Cha Cha play with her.”

  Ah, the problems of youth, Darcy said to herself. At least he wasn’t upset about her and Izzy arguing anymore. “Sometimes your sister likes to be by herself, buddy. Us girls are like that sometimes. We like our privacy.”

  “Speak for yourself,” Izzy mumbled.

  Zane pursed his lips, thinking about it, and then he shook his head. “No, ‘cause she’s not alone.”

  Cha Cha huffed. It was a very ominous sound.

  Not alone…? Darcy stood up from her chair. There wasn’t anyone else in the house. What did Zane mean, not alone?

  She was already moving, suddenly worried that Zane had been down here with them for five minutes listening to the two of them not-lie about why they were fighting, while maybe someone was upstairs with Colby. Her friend Audrey, maybe? They both knew she wasn’t supposed to visit without Darcy or Jon knowing about it but kids that age found ways to do things they weren’t supposed to.

  Whatever it was, Darcy felt the sudden need to be upstairs, right now.

  Izzy caught her eye on the way by. She was just as worried as Darcy felt. No matter how mad she was at Darcy, they were still friends. She was still Zane and Colby’s unofficial aunt. If something was wrong upstairs with Colby, then she wasn’t going to just sit here. She was two steps behind Darcy as they ran to the stairs. It meant the world to Darcy.

  At the top of the stairs, down the hall toward her daughter’s room, Darcy could hear voices. One of them was Colby’s.

  The other wasn’t.

  “What’s going on?” Izzy asked her.

  “I don’t know,” was what Darcy said to her, but at the same time she had a suspicion.

  Colby was stronger in the family gift than Darcy was. She could reach out to ghosts, even at her age. She could talk to them, and a ghost wouldn’t need to use the front door to get in.