Read Online 4 The Ghost of Christmas by K.J. Emrick - Free Book Online Page B

memory.
    She saw him, Roger, in the Santa suit waiting behind a stage and she realized that this must be that long ago pageant. The one twenty years ago just before he died. The image faded in and out between scenes of him talking to kids and then walking off stage when the pageant was done and then suddenly Darcy heard a grunt of pain. She saw Roger limping away from the stage. He was injured, somehow, but still alive. The viewpoint shifted and she saw one last thing before the images vanished. A man, standing in shadows behind Roger. There was no way to see his face. Yet, somehow he looked familiar.
    Darcy tried to push harder, to see more, but she felt the force against her multiplying. She was snapped forcefully back to reality, Jon holding her arms as her head lolled to the side.
    “Darcy, are you okay?” Jon asked. His voice was tight with worry.
    “Yes, I think so,” she said. The night was dark around them. The candles were knocked over, their wicks trailing wisps of smoke. The Santa suit was on the ground a good distance from them in a heap as though it had been thrown aside.
    Jon pulled her into him and hugged her tight. “I couldn’t wake you,” he said as he pulled back to look at her. “The wind was so strong.” He hugged her to him once again.
    “Wind?” She remembered something then, something of a cold arctic blast that pushed her around while she was trying to hold onto the connection of the communication. Roger August. Or was it something else?
    Darcy’s mind was still on the image that she had seen. And then it came to her. She realized who the man was. She pulled back out of Jon’s arms a little so she could see him. “I think that Mister Baskin killed Roger.”
     

Chapter Nine
     
    “When you weren’t responding to me, back there in the town square, there was an icy wind blasting around us.” Jon’s eyebrows were drawn down in a frown of worry. They were sitting in Darcy’s kitchen, huddled around cups of hot chocolate. Darcy just couldn’t seem to get warm. “Why was this one so violent?”
    “One of the entities involved in this is trying to keep me from seeing into things. They’re exerting a force working against me.”
    “One of the entities?” he asked, his eyebrows shooting up.
    “Right. At first, I thought it was Roger himself. Now, we have to consider the possibility that the suit really is haunted in some way by something. So that’s why I say, one of the entities.”
    “Could it be something else entirely?” Jon asked her.
    Darcy appreciated the way he was making an effort to understand this part of her. With a smile she couldn’t quite supress she leaned across the table to kiss his cheek. “I’ll know more when we talk to Roland Baskin.”
    “You’re sure it was him you saw in the vision?”
    “Very sure.” Darcy shuddered as she remembered. “I saw a younger version of Mister Baskin in the background, standing behind Roger August just as Roger got hurt somehow. It must have been him.”
    Jon nodded. “We should go and talk to him in the morning. Right now I think we both need sleep.”
    “I wish that you could take my visions as evidence and arrest him or at least bring him in for questioning,” Darcy said, putting a hand over a yawn she hadn’t felt coming until he mentioned sleep.
    “You’ve done your part,” Jon said to her. “Now it’s time for old fashioned police work to do the rest.”
    ***
    “Police station first,” Jon told her. “I’m all for confronting Baskin, but I want to look up a few things first.”
    As they drove into town the next morning, Darcy noticed the fog being burned away by the bright winter sun. Most of the snow still clung to the ground, and the mists were quickly receding back into the white ground cover. She didn’t think Jon had seen them.
    He let her out in front of the bakery and then told her he’d meet her over at the station. “Make mine black,” he told her, holding her hand briefly before letting