Laid to Rest (A Darcy Sweet Cozy Mystery Book 18) (3 page)

“Well, I guess we’d both better get home,” was all she could think to say, with a little laugh at her own expense.  “Is Lilly still here?”

“She’s out in the shop waiting for me.  She’s anxious to get home and enjoy the rest of her weekend.  After tonight she’ll have to get back to school.”

“That’s right, I forgot.”  Darcy closed her aunt’s journal and stood up.  “I’m still on Australian time, I guess.  It’s Spring down there, you know.  Not Fall like it is here.”

“Heh.  I hope some dashing Prince Charming marries me someday and whisks me off to Australia for a honeymoon.”

“Well, I don’t know if Jon Tinker would ever make it as Prince Charming, but he sure comes close.”

The two of them giggled together at that.  Darcy almost felt guilty.  She had her man, a wonderful man who treated her like a princess, to hold her at night and kiss her during the day and be there for her whenever she needed him.  Izzy’s husband had faked his own death and tried to blame her for it.

Someday, she hoped her friend would find love, too.  Real love.  Like she and Jon had.

On her way out of the office, Darcy tapped the open book of history on the desk.  “Thanks, Millie,” she whispered.  “I’ll figure this out tomorrow.”

She tucked the journal into the empty paper sack her pretzel bun had been in and headed out after Izzy, ready to tackle more of the journal in the comfort of her own house.

Izzy gave her a ride home.  Their houses were close to each other and it only made sense.  Most days Darcy would have enjoyed walking the short distance from the center of town out to her home.  It gave her time to think and reflect and unwind from the day.  Still, a ride from a friend was always appreciated.  Plus she was in a hurry to get back to reading through the journal.

Darcy walked from Izzy’s house after saying goodbye to her and Lilly. It was a short distance.  A few minutes at most.  She hummed to herself on the way, hoping that Jon had already made something for dinner.  She could see his car parked up next to the house already.  Figured.  The one day that he got home on time was the one day she was late.

Every light in the house was on.  Strange, she thought.  Even down in the cellar, lights shone through the little rectangular windows.  They never turned on every light.  There were always rooms that they weren’t using, where the lights should be off…

What was going on?

She picked up her pace, stepping quicker, hoping nothing was wrong.

For a moment the night of Aunt Millie’s death flashed back to her, the night she had come home to find the police waiting and her whole world changed forever.

That was silly.  Just bad memories, resurfacing.  That’s all it was.  Nothing was wrong.

Only bad memories.

She quickly entered through the front door and made her way into their kitchen.  She’d expected to find Jon at the table, or Ellen even, but the room was empty.  Her big goofball of a cat wasn’t even around.

“Hello?” she called out, kicking her sneakers off.  Where was everyone?  She set her aunt’s journal down on the table, calling out to the house again.  Just as she was taking her denim jacket off Ellen came running in from the living room.

“Darcy, oh Darcy I’m so sorry.  I just went out for a walk.  I went for a walk with Connor and I was gone for maybe fifteen minutes, Darcy, I swear to you.  I came right back.”

Her friend’s short, dark auburn hair flew around her face as she shook her head wildly, apologizing again and again.  Darcy’s heart began to feel like a heavy rock in her chest.  “Ellen,” she asked, “what is it?  What’s wrong?”

Jon appeared in the doorway behind Ellen, and the look on his face told her bad things were happening.  He gently took hold of Ellen and sat her down in a chair at the table.  She let him do it, and that proved something was wrong. 

In his hand Jon had a yellow piece of paper inside a plastic bag.  A Ziploc freezer bag, one of the big ones.  “Darcy,” he said, “I don’t know how to say this.  There’s…been a kidnapping.”

Her head was spinning now.  “A kidnapping?  Who…Ellen where’s Connor?”

Ellen looked up at Darcy, shaking her head again, tears in her eyes.  “No, Darcy.  It’s not Connor.  He’s fine.  I sent him upstairs while me and Jon tried to figure this out.  We would’ve called you sooner but you never carry a cell phone.”

“I can’t carry a cellphone,” she started to argue, then realized this wasn’t the time to bring up how ghosts kept getting her cell number and calling her at all hours of the day.  “Never mind that.  Who’s been kidnapped?”

Jon pulled her into him, hugging her and holding onto her tightly.

“For Pete’s sake, Jon,” she said to him, starting to get really worried.  “Just tell me.  Who was kidnapped?”

She saw it in his eyes.

She looked up into his face, and she knew.  She knew before he even handed her the note and said, “Kidnapping might not be the right word.”

With trembling hands, Darcy took the note.  Fingerprints, she realized.  Jon was protecting the note so they could fingerprint it later.

If you want your cat back alive you will leave the beehive journal in the library.  Put it in the historical research section next to the book on the State of Deseret.  You have until midnight.

Darcy slumped down into a chair.  The room spun around her and the words stared back at her from the piece of paper in its protective plastic sleeve.  She couldn’t understand what she was reading.  She couldn’t breathe.  For a moment, she was certain that even her heart had stopped beating.

“Darcy?” Jon said to her.

She looked up and saw him kneeling beside her.  When had that happened?  The note was still in her hand, just a plain sheet of yellow paper with those few typed words on it.  Someone wanted her aunt’s journal.  This one.  The one right here on the table.  The one she had only just found.  If they didn’t get it, then she would…never see…

“They have Smudge,” she said, weakly, passing the note back to Jon.  “Someone took my cat.”

“I think so,” was his answer.  His hands were a gentle comfort on her shoulders.  “We’ll find him, Darcy.  We already looked all through the house.  Upstairs, downstairs in the cellar, everywhere.  He’s not here.  I think…yeah.  I think someone has him.”

“Well that doesn’t mean anything,” Darcy decided, standing up, wiping away moist tears from the corners of her eyes.  “He always goes out when he wants to, Jon.  He’s always slipping out of this house and then slipping back in again.  He’s probably just out in the town somewhere.  Just out there, doing his own thing, until he’s ready to come home.”

He didn’t say anything to that.  He just stood up with her, silently waiting for her to finish.

“You know I’m right, Jon.  He’s always getting out.  That note doesn’t mean anything!”

She wanted it to be true.  She hoped it was true.  She prayed with all her might that the ransom note with its demands and its threats was a lie.

But she knew it wasn’t, and when Jon finally shook his head in answer to her pleading, she crumpled inside. 

“We’ll find him,” he promised.  “We’ll get him back.”

Darcy fell into his arms, angry and scared and sad all at the same time.

Someone had taken Smudge, and midnight was the deadline to get him back.

***

“Thanks, Grace.  I’ll meet you guys here.”

Jon hung up the house phone on the wall and came back to sit with Darcy and Ellen at the kitchen table.  “Your sister will be here soon with a couple of our officers.  We’ll go over the house, look for evidence, fingerprints and whatever else we can find.”

“Do you think you’ll find anything?” Ellen asked when Darcy stayed silent.

“Honestly?”  Jon hesitated.  Darcy felt his eyes on her.  “No, I don’t.  We can always hope whoever did this got sloppy, but I doubt we’ll find anything here.”

“Why not?”

Darcy wanted to hear him say it, too, even though she already knew the answer.

“Because,” Jon said, “you told me the door was locked when you went for your walk, right?”

“Of course,” Ellen told him, her tone sharp.  “I never leave it unlocked.  Not even for that short amount of time.  I’m not stupid.”

“That’s one thing I’ve never accused you of being.  So, you have the door locked and you’re sure that Smudge was inside when you left.”

“Right.  Asleep on the couch.”

“So, unless he got up and ran out of the house just as soon as you left, he was still in here.  So the kidnapper got in and took him while you were on your walk, and then left this note, but there wasn’t any sign of forced entry.  No broken glass, no signs that the locks were picked and really no time to pick them anyway.  So.  The kidnapper came in the house.  How did he get in?”

“We have a key outside in the knothole of that one tree remember,” Darcy said, knowing where Jon was going with this.  “We keep it there for emergencies.”

“Right.  Now.  How many people know we do that?”

She threw her arms up in the air.  “Everyone in town, practically.  We’ve never had to keep our doors locked from our friends.”

Jon waited.

Darcy blew out a breath and slumped in her chair.  “Which means whoever did this knew us.  They knew where the spare key was.  And even if they were dumb enough to leave fingerprints, it will be fingerprints of someone we know and who has probably been in our house before.”

Ellen closed her eyes tightly shut.  “Guess we start locking our doors on our friends now, don’t we?”

“And change the locks,” Darcy added.  She wanted to be out in town, looking for Smudge, but Jon had pointed out how useless that would be.  They didn’t have the first clue where to look and they only had until midnight to find him.  They couldn’t just run around aimlessly.  She just felt so frustrated!  “Someone we know did this to us.”

“Right.”  Jon drummed his fingers on the table.  “So they used the key.  Probably waited for you to leave, Ellen, or just lucked out that you weren’t home when they got here.  They came inside, looked around quickly for the journal, and when they couldn’t find it they went to plan B.”

“Kidnap Smudge,” Darcy growled.

“Darcy,” Ellen said, again, “I’m so sorry…”

“Just shut up, Ellen.  I don’t blame you, I really don’t, but I keep wanting to shout at you because you were supposed to be here and you weren’t and if you keep telling me how sorry you are then so help me, I’m going to claw your eyes out!”

No one was more surprised by her outburst than Darcy was herself.  She never lashed out like that.  Ever.  Especially not at a friend.  It really wasn’t Ellen’s fault.  It wasn’t anyone’s fault.  That’s what made it so hard.  Every mystery she had ever solved, every request for help by a ghostly presence reaching out from beyond the grave, in every one of those there had been someone to blame.  Someone she could point a finger at and say, it’s your fault!

There wasn’t anyone to do that to here except Ellen.  She should have been here.

She should have been here!

Ellen set her lips in a firm line, and slowly got up from the table.

“Ellen,” Jon said to her, with a helpless expression.

“No, Jon.”  Ellen swallowed, and nodded her head, once.  “I understand.  I’d want to yell at someone, too.  Even if it was a good friend of mine.”

Then she stalked out of the kitchen.  A moment later they heard her stomping up the stairs to her room.

Jon reached out for Darcy’s hand.  “Hey.  Talk to me.”

She yanked her hand back.  “Don’t, Jon.  Just don’t.  I’ll apologize to her later.  For right now let’s just figure this out.  How do you know they went through the house looking for the journal?”

He hesitated like he wanted to say more, but instead he hooked a thumb towards the living room.  “Go take a look at your bookshelf.”

Darcy did, feeling like each of her steps was weighted down with cement.  She tried to remember all the stages of grief.  She felt like she was experiencing all of them at once.

In the living room she looked at the bookshelf, then looked at it harder.  She had several paperback books lined up here, her personal reading collection, along with a few reference books and how-to manuals on the paranormal arts.  She always kept them lined up in a specific way so she could find them when she wanted them.

None of them were where they were supposed to be.

She swallowed back a lump in her throat and looked all around the living room, feeling little prickly crawlers walking up and down her arms.  Other things were out of place, too.  It creeped her out to see.  She knew there was no one in the house now except for them.  Just her and Jon and Ellen and Connor.  No one else.

Still, she couldn’t shake the feeling of being violated.  Someone had come in here, in her house, and gone through her personal things, and then left with one of her best friends.  Smudge was a cat, sure, but he was family.

She folded her arms over herself, physically holding herself together.  She was shaking.  It wasn’t cold.  It was all just…wrong.

Jon wrapped his arms around her from behind and Darcy let herself ease into his comfort.  “Where’s Smudge, Jon?” she asked softly.

“I don’t know,” he answered, honestly.  “We’ll find him.  I think our suspect walked here, because I think Ellen would have noticed a car on this road.  So if we’re really lucky we’ll find a shoeprint outside.  Other than that, we’ve only got that note to go on, and your aunt’s journal.  We can’t even do a handwriting analysis because the note was typed.”

“There’s something different about this journal,” she confided.  “Millie almost sounds…scared.  Like she knew someone was trying to hurt her.”

“Does she say who?”

“No.  At least, not that I’ve found out yet.  I didn’t start reading it until today, what with us just getting back from our honeymoon and everything else I just didn’t have the time and now…now…”

It hit her, all of a sudden, that if she’d come home early like she’d planned she might have been here when this guy came to the house.  She might have been able to keep Smudge from being taken.  If she’d only been here, right here where she was supposed to be.

She shivered, and her angry shout came out like a strangled squeak.

“Shh, I understand.  Hey, there was no way you could have known how important that journal was.  It’s strange though, don’t you think?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean,” he said, turning her around in his arms to face her, “you’ve had that journal since before we went to Australia, right?  Yet, this guy, or this woman, or whoever it was, didn’t demand you turn it over to him until the day you started reading it.”