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Authors: K.J. Emrick

3 From the Ashes (6 page)

BOOK: 3 From the Ashes
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The rapid change of subject threw Darcy for a moment. She shrugged. “Actually, I was supposed to invite him to lunch with us but I haven’t had the chance to call him.” It was a little lie, but it was easier than saying she’d just forgotten.

“Oh really Darcy dear, that’s not an answer. I think you should have us all over to your house to dinner tomorrow night so that I can get to know this new man in your life. Let’s hope he’s an improvement on Jeff.”

Darcy didn’t know how to respond to that. Her ex-husband, Jeff, had been murdered a few months ago. Was Jon an improvement over Jeff? Without a doubt. But Jeff and she had started to reconnect just before his death and she had been incredibly sad that he had been killed.

“Mom, how about we just go for lunch today? I’ll call Jon and maybe he can meet us.”

Eileen gave her another sharp look. “Nonsense. I didn’t come all this way out here to the backside of the civilized world to not meet him. I’ll see you at your place for dinner tomorrow night. I’ll make sure Grace and Aaron are there on time. The Lord knows that was never your sister’s strong suit.”

She made her way to the door. Turning before she left, she gave Darcy another long look, and then she was gone.

“Wow,” Sue said from the other side of a book stack where she’d apparently been hiding for a while now. “I’ve heard you talk about your mom. Your stories didn’t do her justice.”

Darcy sagged against the counter feeling thoroughly frazzled. She wasn’t sure how she was going to get through an entire dinner with her mother. The one bright spot was that at least Jon would be there with her.

 

Chapter Nine

 

Later that day when lunch time rolled around Darcy found that she wasn't very hungry. So she decided to skip lunch and take a walk out to the cemetery on Applegate Road.

In general, she tried to avoid the cemetery. Ghosts and spirits anchored themselves to the living world at whatever place they felt most tied to. That’s why houses became haunted by those who used to live there, and why those same ghosts never moved on to haunt deluxe apartments in Beverly Hills. They liked the familiarity of what they knew.

Sometimes, the deceased ended up tied to their gravesite. It was a lonely existence for them, as far as Darcy had been able to determine, and it made many of them irrationally angry. That was a lot of emotion in one place for someone as sensitive to the other world as Darcy was.

It took her nearly a half an hour to walk out past the school and the town hall to lonely stretch of road where the town’s cemetery was. It had stood in this same place for more than a century, predating the incorporation of the town, even. There was one corner of the place that had headstones from the early 1800s and another where there was only flat stones on the ground with names on them that might have been even older.

Darcy was very glad she was coming here in the daytime.

The rusted wrought iron fence around the three acre plot of ground had an archway that faced the street with Misty Hollow Cemetery written in metal letters across the top.  Leaves skittered across the ground in a sudden wind. The grass was kept mowed and the trees inside the cemetery were ringed with red mulch. It was a nice, peaceful place.

The headstones on this end were newer, some with dates that were only a year or two old.  Aunt Millie’s grave was in here, too, next to her husband Frank’s. Darcy decided to visit it later. Right now she had to search for Angelica’s.

Up and down two rows Darcy searched, her eyes darting everywhere, catching fleeting movements of gray figures that she knew were the spirits that resided here. They kept their distance today, and she was grateful for it.

In the third row back from the front, Darcy found a short, squat black stone with the Fender’s names. Angelica on the left, with her date of birth and death, and Louis on the right with just his date of birth and a blank for when he passed on, too. Darcy liked these kind of stones. They spoke of the dedication people had to each other in life.

Kneeling down at the site, she felt her hand along Angelica’s name.  She closed her eyes and reached out with her sixth sense and tried to feel anything of the woman who was supposed to be buried here.  Again, there was only that dark emptiness. Nothing. Not only was Angelica’s body not here, her spirit wasn’t, either.

More proof that she might be alive.

Darcy opened her eyes to find several faces staring back at her.

She jumped back with a little squeak and nearly tripped over another gravestone before she got ahold of herself.  The misty, blurred figures of two men and a woman stood there, faces indistinct, clothing matching eras of a different time, shifting in and out of focus. They drifted closer to her again and she held up a hand as if to push them back.

“I don’t have time for you today,” she whispered. “I can maybe come back some other time, all right? We’ll talk then?”

They stared at her silently. She felt stupid, trying to order them around. They weren’t even really here, in the strictest sense. Anyone else looking where Darcy was wouldn’t have seen anything. Finally, one at a time, they started to fade away until only the woman was left. She was a young, young girl, maybe all of twelve in real life, with wide eyes and a cute face.

As the girl started to drift apart and disappear as well, Darcy suddenly had a thought. “Wait. Do you…do you know an Angelica Fender?”

The girl seemed to laugh at her, then shook her head, and with that she melted away.

Darcy sighed out a deep breath. Well, it had been worth a shot.

A hand settled on her elbow and made her jump again. Turning, she saw Sarah standing there, an embarrassed look on her face. “I’m sorry,” she said to Darcy, “I didn’t mean to startle you.”

“No, no you didn’t. I mean, you did, but it wasn’t…” She inhaled deeply and tried to settle herself. “It’s fine. I just wasn’t expecting to see you. You know, here.”

“I come here every few days to visit with my mother.” Sarah looked down at the gravesite. “Seems kind of foolish now, if she isn’t even dead.”

“I don’t know that for sure,” Darcy said quickly.

“But you’re pretty confident, right?”

Darcy twisted the antique silver ring on her finger. She couldn’t lie to Sarah. “Yes. I’m pretty confident.”

Sarah nodded, her blue eyes sad. “I don’t know what to feel about that. If mom’s alive, why did she leave me? If she really died in that fire, then why do I feel that there’s so much more to what happened?”

“I don’t have answers for you, Sarah. I’ll keep looking until I find some though. I can promise you that much.” She felt a little better when the girl worked up a smile. “Hey, I tell you what. My Aunt Millie’s gravestone is in this same cemetery. Want to come with me while I pay my respects?”

Together, the two women walked down and over a couple of rows to where Aunt Millie’s white marble stone stood. Next to it was Uncle Frank’s, a man that Darcy had hardly known as a little girl before he passed away. On both of the stones, at the top, Millie had paid to have pictures of her and her husband colored into the glaze on the stone. They had been transferred over to the stone from real photos of them both, and they looked remarkably life-like. Millie’s gray hair was done up in a bun, her eyes sparkled, and she was smiling.

Darcy knelt and said a little prayer, something she did infrequently but with conviction each time she did. When she stood up again Sarah was staring at Millie’s headstone.

“Is that your aunt?” she asked Darcy. There was a strange look on her face.

“Yes, that’s Millie. She was my great aunt, actually, but that’s such a mouthful… What is it?”

Sarah was still staring at the gravestone. Without answering, she reached into the back pocket of her jeans and took out a slim woman’s wallet. Zipping it open she removed a photo and handed it to Darcy.

“That’s a picture of my mother,” she explained. “I keep this with me to remember her by. Look at the woman in the photo with her.”

Angelica had been a young woman in the photo. Long blonde hair swept over one shoulder, and she was smiling at the camera. Standing next to her was a much older woman, her brown hair already mostly gray. Darcy was shocked to see the face of her great aunt Millie staring back at her.

“Why do you think your aunt would be in a photo with my mom?” Sarah asked. “Were they related? Are you and I related?”

Darcy shook her head. “I don’t think so. I knew my mom’s family pretty well.” Still, there was something familiar about Sarah’s mother. Something about the eyes, she thought. “Maybe Millie and Angelica were friends?”

Sarah took the photo back and carefully put it away. “Maybe. I mean they both lived here in town. It is a big coincidence though, don’t you think?”

“Yes,” Darcy said quietly. “Quite the coincidence, isn’t it?”

In the back of her mind, though, she had to wonder. Had this mystery just gotten more mysterious?

In the corners of the graveyard, fog started to lift from the ground.

 

Chapter Ten

 

Later that night Darcy went over to Jon’s. The mists that had given the town its name began to crowd in along her feet. They always came in when something was wrong, Darcy had found. She was shaken by what Sarah had shown her in the cemetery. She needed to talk to someone about it.

When Jon opened the door to let her into his apartment she didn’t say anything, she just slipped into his arms and hugged him tight, pressing her face into his chest. She breathed him in and it calmed her. He let her stand there like that for several moments before he broke the silence.

“What’s wrong?” Jon said as he ran a soothing hand over her hair.

She sighed that the moment of peaceful comfort was over, and gently pushed past him to let the door close. “Can we sit down? I need to talk to you about this thing with Sarah and her mom. And I really need a drink. Do you have any of that wine left?”

Jon raised an eyebrow at that but went to the cabinet to take out the bottle of dry red wine they had started a few days ago. Two glasses in his one hand, bottle in the other, he met her at his couch in the living room.

“Thanks,” she said as he poured her some in the long-stemmed glass. He took a sip of his drink and then leaned back next to her, loosening the top two buttons of the dress shirt he still had on from work.

He was patient with her, letting her sip and ruminate and take her time before she brought up what was bothering her. “I went to the graveyard today. To look at Angelica’s grave.”

“That sounds…well actually that sounds dreary.” He picked her feet up off the floor and put them across his lap. Putting his drink down on the coffee table, he took her shoes off one at a time.

When he started rubbing the soles of her feet she thought she might swoon.

“Oh, yes, that feels good.” She sipped her wine and let the warmth and pressure he was applying relax her body.

“So what happened? Did you see Angelica’s ghost?”

She looked at him, wondering how he possibly put up with her and all her eccentricities. He was wonderful, she decided. That must be the answer. “No, I didn’t see her ghost.” She left out the part about seeing three others. Jon was wonderful, no doubt, but she didn’t want to push her luck. “What I did see was a picture of Angelica.”

“Oh? How did you see that?”

Darcy went on to explain to him about Sarah arriving at the cemetery, about seeing Millie’s grave and about the photo Sarah showed her.

“I told her it was just a coincidence, but now I don’t know. Why would Millie be in the photo with Angelica? What was the connection there? Is it possible that Sarah and I are related?”

“I don’t know,” Jon answered with a shrug and a very pleasant motion of his thumbs under her right big toe. “I guess you could ask your mom. I mean, she’s in town.”

“Yeah. That reminds me.” She gave him her other foot to do the same heavenly things to as she dropped her news. “We have a date to have dinner with my family tomorrow night.”

Jon’s eyebrows rose. “In the middle of all this? Are you sure now is a good time?”

“No. With my mother, I’m never sure. How about you? Aren’t you still busy with that case?”

He shook his head and ran his finger up her foot, making her twitch and giggle. “Grace and I finished it today. Bernard Munson was stealing scrap from around town for resale. So my night is free. I meant the stuff with Sarah and her mom.”

“I know what you meant,” she said, sinking lower on the couch to brush her foot around his chest. “I figure I can spare a few hours for my family. How about you?”

He smiled at her. Then he caught her foot and brought it up to kiss her toes. “I would do anything for you.”

Yup. He was wonderful.

***

Darcy went to work from Jon’s apartment the next morning, leaving him snoring in bed as she snuck out before seven o’clock. She wanted to get to the bookstore early so that she could talk to Millie uninterrupted. It had occurred to her last night that she could just go to the source with her questions. She might not be able to find Angelica to ask, but she had Millie.

She locked the door behind her and then stood in the middle of the store. “Millie?” she called out. It took only a few seconds for the vague shape of her great aunt to materialize, sitting in one of the reading chairs. She smiled at Darcy as if she was encouraging her favorite niece.

“Hi Millie. Can you help me with something?”

Her aunt nodded, moving her hands in a rhythmic motion that looked like she was knitting. Darcy remembered how she used to talk with her great aunt for hours at a time about everything under the sun while the woman would sit and work her knitting needles. The memory made her smile.

“You know Sarah? The woman I’ve been trying to help? Are we related to her at all?”

Millie shook her head no. She tapped a finger to her nose, and Darcy got the feeling that there was more to tell. Talking with spirits was beyond frustrating sometimes. Some wouldn’t stop talking. Some never spoke at all. Millie was the second kind.

“Do you know anything about Angelica being alive?” Darcy tried. Millie shook her head again, her face shifting from surprise to sadness and a host of emotions inbetween.

BOOK: 3 From the Ashes
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