14 Christmas Spirit Read Free Page A

sleep," Jon said in a whisper.
    "There's a lot of truth in this movie."
    "Says the girl with more knowledge of death and the afterlife than anyone else I know," he teased.
    "And don't you forget it.  Now, shush.  I'm watching a movie."
    His fingertips stroked her cheek, and she felt her heart skip a beat.  The movie might be talking about what love was, but she was living it.
    The scene they were watching took place inside the lavishly appointed office of Anthony Hopkins' main character, Bill Parrish.  It was just Hopkins and Pitt and a whole lot of discussion, and it was amazing how much emotion those two actors could squeeze out of a few lines of dialogue when no one else was there…
    Except that blonde woman standing over by the lamp in the back of the shot.
    Darcy sat up straighter, gently extricating herself from Jon's arms.  Smudge woke up with a mrowl of displeasure but managed to hold onto his spot on her lap.  Darcy stared, the interaction between Hopkins and Pitt forgotten, trying to place the woman she was seeing.
    "Darcy?" Jon was saying.  "What is it?"
    "This isn't right," was all she could say.  "That's…not right."
    "What?"  He turned his attention to where she was looking, at the movie playing out on the television screen.  The shot had panned away from the desk and the lamp for the moment, away from the woman Darcy had seen.
    "There's someone in there who shouldn't be."  Darcy realized exactly how crazy that sounded, but that was the truth of it.  She'd seen this movie too many times to have forgotten something like that.  There was someone in this scene who shouldn't be there.
    The camera came back around as Brad Pitt started to walk out of the room.  There.  Behind the desk, standing close enough to Anthony Hopkins to reach out and touch him, looking not at the actors on the set but directly at the camera with eyes cloaked in shadow, was the blonde woman again.
    "See?" Darcy asked.  "Right there.  You see her, right there?"
    "Sure.  Blonde, thin build?  Kind of a triangular face and pouty lips?  She's not exactly dressed for this scene.  I always thought this was more of a black tie and evening gown sort of film.  That sweatshirt and those jeans don't exactly fit in."
    "No, they don't," Darcy agreed.  "Jon, you've seen this movie with me before.  Think.  That person has never been in this movie.  Never."
    The woman nodded her head, like she understood what Darcy had just said.  She took her hands out of the front pockets of that gray sweatshirt, and pulled on the drawstrings to the hoodie.  "Saxton University" was written across the front of it.  What in the world was going on, Darcy wondered.
    Then the woman looked directly at Darcy.  Directly at her.  She mouthed something that Darcy couldn't make out at first.  When the movie trespasser saw Darcy shake her head in confusion—yes, saw Darcy shake her head—she tugged on the strings of her hoodie again and mouthed the same thing, slower.
    Find me.
    Then the scene changed to the grand party that staged the final resolution of the movie.  The blonde woman was nowhere to be found. 
    That had been a ghost.  Darcy had no doubt about that at all.
    If a ghost had inserted herself into Darcy's favorite movie just to ask for her help, it wasn't time to ask Jon to pass the popcorn and wait for the end credits.  It was time to get off the couch and do something.
    The question was…do what?
    "Well, Smudge," she said, stroking his fur one last time.  "Looks like our lazy weekend plans just got changed."
    He mewled and rolled over onto his back, paws up in the air. 
    Darcy knew how he felt.

Chapter Two
     
    "Maybe it's a mistake?" Jon said.  "You know, like that ghost boy standing in the curtains of Three Men and a Baby ?"
    He had rewound the movie and played it through that same scene again twice.  The figure both of them had seen standing in the background was gone now.  Like she had never been there in the first