Laid to Rest (A Darcy Sweet Cozy Mystery Book 18) (2 page)

It was funny, in a way.  Darcy had been sure she knew everything about her Great Aunt Millie by now.  After hitting puberty and seeing her natural abilities blossom she’d come to live with the one person who could understand her and help her develop her talents.  Her mother’s aunt, Millie.

Her mother couldn’t handle what her little girl was going through, and Darcy couldn’t take feeling like a stranger in her own home, so Millie had taken her in.  Since then she’d lived and laughed and cried along with her great aunt.  They’d shared every secret imaginable.

Or so she’d thought.

The day Millie had died had been the worst day of Darcy’s life.  She remembered coming home from being out with her friends to see the squad cars parked in front of the house she shared with Millie.  She remembered running, right up the steps and into the arms of a young Joe Daleson, just a sergeant with the police force at the time.  He stopped her from going inside.  Stopped her from seeing her aunt, dead in her bed, passed on unexpectedly from natural causes.  There were other officers there, too.  Some of them she remembered, and some she didn’t.  A lot about that day was a blur.  Mostly she remembered her emotions.  The sadness.  The grief.  The anger at being left so suddenly alone.

That was ten years ago now, or near enough.  She still carried those emotions with her.

Millie had left her the house and all of its contents in her will.  She’d left the bookstore to Darcy, too, which she had renamed the Sweet Read Bookstore.  The decision to stay had been a tough one to make.  She almost didn’t do it.  She had almost shut the store down and sold the old house and moved far, far away with her grief.

She was glad she stayed.  There was no place she’d rather be than right here in Misty Hollow. 

Pushing the door open to her bookstore now, coffee in one hand and paper bag in the other, Darcy suppressed a choking sigh.  Even now, she sometimes felt the pain that she had back then, when Joe Daleson had held her and let her cry on his shoulder.

“Darcy?”  Izzy McIntosh asked from behind the sales counter.  “Are you okay?  You don’t look so good.”

“Thanks,” Darcy said with a wry smile.  “No, I’m fine.  Just remembering something from a long time ago.”

Izzy didn’t press.  She wouldn’t, of course.  That wasn’t her way.  Instead she nodded, and went back to what she’d been doing.  Strands of her long blonde hair fell loosely across her cheeks as she bent over the cash register to ring up a sale for one of the handful of customers in the shop.  The man looked like one of the tourists who had swept through Misty Hollow in the last few months.  Khaki shorts and a baseball cap weren’t exactly something you saw local residents wearing.

Darcy knew she had lucked out to find Izzy when she had.  She’d pretty much taken over the day-to-day operation of the Sweet Read Bookstore after Darcy’s previous employee, Sue Fisher, had gone off to start a life somewhere more exciting than here.

On the other hand, Izzy had been running from the kind of excitement that had almost gotten her killed.  Izzy knew what it was like to have a past full of painful memories.  Darcy wasn’t surprised when she didn’t pry into Darcy’s memories.

There were three or four other people in the store too, looking through the stacks of books and browsing through the catalog of e-books they offered for sale.  She saw a couple of them were looking through the t-shirts from the clothing section, the ones printed with the store’s logo.

The Mysterious Is All Around Us.

Truer words had never been spoken.  Although here in Misty Hollow, the mysterious seemed to have nearly dried up.  Exorcising the Pilgrim Ghost from the town had settled things down considerably.

“I’m going to be in the back doing paperwork,” Darcy said to Izzy.  “When did you want to take your lunch break?”

“Oh, I’m not that hungry yet,” Izzy answered.  “I’ll let you know in an hour or so.  That all right?”

“Fine with me.  Just remember I’m leaving early today.”

“No problem.  I’ve got Lilly to keep me company.”

Izzy’s daughter poked her head out from around one of the far stacks, where the young adult paperbacks were displayed.  The nine year old girl was very into young romance novels now, and Darcy had the feeling it had something to do with a certain young boy who lived next door to her.  Darcy and Izzy were neighbors, and Darcy’s good friend Ellen Gless and her son Connor lived with Darcy.  Connor was just a bit older than Lilly, and the way those two spent every spare minute with each other…well, when the dating years hit them Darcy bet their romance would be better than any in those books.

Sunday meant Lilly didn’t have school.  It meant she got to spend time here at the bookstore with her mother instead.  Darcy watched her go back to searching through the titles on the shelves before stepping into her office, shutting the door behind her.  Papers in neat piles were waiting for her on the desk right where she’d left them.  With a sigh, she sat down and started in on the first stack.  The room was small, but cozy, with its filing cabinets and its shelf over the desk stuffed with books and the poster of the kitten dangling from a branch by its front paws.  “Hang In There,” the poster read.  Darcy thought it was more cute than it was inspirational.

Not as cute as Smudge, of course.  That reminded her.  She should pick up some more food for the big tomcat on the way home.  He’d gone through the last can of his wet food just yesterday.

After finishing the forms to renew the lease on the building, and then correcting a few items on next month’s inventory shipment, Darcy sighed and dropped her pen on the only corner of the desk not covered by papers.

Maybe she could leave some of this for tomorrow.

Or all of it.  Yes.  That sounded good.

The little purple journal book was waiting patiently for her on the corner of her desk, calling to her for attention.  She couldn’t focus on anything else.

Pulling it over, Darcy opened up the cover.

It had probably been a beautiful book to look at, once upon a time.  The leather cover was dark now with age and exposure to cold and damp, and the embossed impression of the beehive was almost impossible to make out.  She’d missed it entirely the first few times she’d looked at this book.  There were a few hints of color remaining on the cover, too, when you knew to look for them.  Flecks of gold, in the layers of the hive and in the three bees buzzing around the image.  In fact you could barely see the bees at all any more. Darcy smiled, because she could picture Aunt Millie picking something like this to use as a special journal.

That was what she’d decided the book must be.  A few quick glimpses inside had shown her aunt’s strong handwriting, letters all at an even slant, the cursive loops flying around the words like an art form.  Which was what cursive script was meant to be, even if it was a dying art in an age of computers and text messages.

The pages inside were a heavy paper and that was probably what had allowed them to survive whatever cubby hole or secret space the book had been stuffed into down in the cellar all these years.  Darcy had been twenty-one when Millie died.  That was nine years ago.  Quickly coming up on ten, for that matter.  The book had been down there at least that long, maybe longer, before Smudge had brought it to her attention.

Even so, the pages were a mess.  Some of the writing was so obscured it was lost forever.  In other places, Darcy could puzzle out what her aunt was saying if she filled in enough blanks.

Then there were whole passages where her aunt’s thoughts and feelings came shining through.

Opening up to the first page, Darcy read aloud to herself.

“This is my journal.  Quite possibly, this will be the last thing I ever write.  I know how that sounds, but it’s a big book, and I’m an old woman, and time has its way of catching up on all of us.”

Darcy didn’t know whether to smile, or cry.  She’d read other journals that Millie had written,  as well as how-to books for people like herself—and Darcy—who had a gift for feeling and interacting with the ghosts of the departed.  Her aunt had such a flair for writing.  It was too bad Darcy hadn’t known about that.  She had only just learned about this side of Millicent Carlisle, and she couldn’t help but feel cheated.  It was like she’d missed out on something special they could have shared.

Anyway.  Back to the journal.

“I can’t shake the feeling,” Darcy read on the next line, “that when this journal is completed, my time will be at an end.  I’ll finally join the spirits in the next stage of life, one step closer to God’s door, and one step further away from the people I love.  If you ever read this, Darcy, you should know you were always tops on that list for me.”

Now Darcy did feel tears starting.  This was a message, written to her, from across time.

It was almost too much for her to take in.

What other secrets did this journal hold?

Turning the page, she found herself suddenly swept into stories of her aunt’s everyday life.  Things that happened in Misty Hollow.  Her aunt’s impressions of the people who lived here.  Her speculations on what might lay ahead for the town of Misty Hollow.  Some of them were amazingly accurate, from what Darcy could tell.

At the bottom of each page, along the lower edge, her aunt had added a flowing border of squiggly lines.  Some of it looked like letters, in English and Hebrew and a couple other languages besides, and some of it was just nonsense.  Well.  It made the pages pretty, she supposed.  Like an illuminated manuscript.  Seemed like a lot of work to print that across each page by hand, but obviously her aunt considered this book to be important.  After all, Darcy had never seen her aunt do that for any of her other journals.

The next few parts she came to were obscured by black smudges and something that had stuck two of the pages together.  After carefully prying them apart Darcy found that nothing in that section could be saved.  Whatever her aunt had found important enough to write down there was gone.  Forever.

The next legible part was a reminiscence about a walk Millie had taken one Thursday afternoon along the river on Applegate Road, down by the cemetery.  The beauty of the area was chronicled in sharp detail.  The trees, the flowers, the wildlife.  It was all captured there in Millie’s own words.  Darcy walked along with her aunt, enjoying a sunny day and a breeze, watching birds fly overhead.

With a new paragraph, the story changed.  Millie’s walk wound up at the cemetery.  There, among the gravestones, she encountered one of several ghosts who haunted that patch of ground. 

A child’s ghost. 

Darcy had seen the ghosts out there at the cemetery herself.  Including the little kids.  Nothing in life was sadder to her than the death of a child.  There were a handful of kids buried in the cemetery just outside of Misty Hollow.  Confused and alone, a few of their spirits still walked on this side of the mortal plane.  It was one of these ghosts Millie spoke to, here in the pages of the journal.

The writing began to deteriorate again, until entire sentences were obscured.  Darcy could only make out parts of it.  Something about a warning, a premonition or something like that. 
“…the poor little girl said she knew…a thing so terrible for a little mind…”

Darcy tried to make out more of the words, tried to trace the lines the pencil had made on the paper so many years ago, but it was no good.  Water marks and something darker had interrupted the story.  The next thing she could read chilled her blood.

“…the little dear told me to watch out for him.  I was in danger, she insisted, and…anything it took…protect myself.”

Now what was that about?  Everyone loved her Aunt Millie.  This entry wasn’t dated, but it must have been from after Darcy came to Misty Hollow, based on other things she’d read so far.  Millie had never said anything to her about having to protect herself from anyone.  Was this what she was supposed to see in the journal?

Who was this person the ghost had warned Millie about?

A little noise drew her attention up just in time to see one book inching its way out from between the others up there on the shelf.  It slid out on its own to tumble through the air and bounce on the desktop next to her.

The book, a large tome with a brown leather cover, bounced on its spine and opened to a page near the front.  It was one of Darcy’s books on the history of Misty Hollow and the surrounding towns, with pictures of what the area used to look like and interesting facts about the growth of the town.  This page listed the family names recorded in the census back in 1913.  Darcy read through them, seeing names she recognized, and a few that had disappeared into history.

Millie had dropped the book in front of her, obviously.  Her aunt’s ghost had a way of showing her things that only made sense in a certain context.  If you knew what she was trying to say, then it was easy to understand.  If you didn’t, well, ghosts were tricky that way…

The door to the office opened up and Darcy jumped in the chair, until she realized it was just Izzy coming in to check on her.  “Oh, hi Izzy.  Sorry, I got distracted.  I’ll be leaving in a few minutes.  You’re okay to stay and lock up for me, right?”

Izzy looked at her with a bemused smile.  “But Darcy, it’s already past closing time.  I just came in to ask if you want anything.”

That couldn’t be right.  Darcy checked her watch, and then checked it against the little clock up on the filing cabinets.  Sure enough, it was already half past five o’clock.  Oh, for Pete’s sake.  Where had the time gone?  She’d been reading through this journal all this time, trying to puzzle out the pieces of the past, and she’d gotten through so little of it!