Laid to Rest (A Darcy Sweet Cozy Mystery Book 18) (5 page)

“I don’t know as much about relating to ghosts as you do,” he offered, “but from what you’ve told me spirits don’t hang around unless there’s a reason.  What reason would Millie have to still be here, if there wasn’t something wrong?”

She pushed away from him and stood up, wiping at the moisture in her eyes with the heel of one hand.  “Jon, don’t start.  Just…don’t start, all right?  I am not in the mood to drag up a bunch of old memories and feelings and…ungh!”  She grunted in frustration and turned on him as he stood up behind her.  “I’m not doing this, all right?  All I know is what’s in that book and most of that is gone!  I want Smudge back, and I want this over so can we please, please,
please
just get on with this?”

His face tightened in surprise, and after a moment he nodded.  “Darcy, I’m sorry…”

“Just, please, don’t.”

She couldn’t take it if he started being all understanding with her now.  She was too angry for that.  All she wanted was for him to be the tough, strong cop he had been that first day they’d met.  That’s what she needed right now.  She’d come back around to needing the comfort and gentle reassurance of her husband later.

Right now she just wanted him to be a cop.

“All right,” he said, like he could read her thoughts, “let’s go and talk to Roland Baskin.  Then we need to photocopy this journal.  If Baskin doesn’t pan out then we’ll still need to use it for bait at the library.”

Right.  That’s right.  Tonight, by the deadline at midnight.  In the library, next to the book about Deseret in the reference section.  A very public place.  What good would it do to put the book there?  The man involved in this scheme wouldn’t be able to get the journal without being seen.

Well, that was a worry for later.  They had plenty of other worries right now.

Like finding Roland Baskin.

***

Not that it was that hard.  Baskin hardly ever went out of his house.  He’d become the old hermit in town, always mad at everyone and everything and complaining how noisy the sleepy little town was.

“You ever wonder why he turned out this way?” Jon asked on the drive over.

“No,” was Darcy’s curt reply, “and I don’t care.”

“I mean his daughter’s a police officer in my department now and she’s not like him.  She might be a little more serious about things than most people, but she’s certainly not a…a…”

“Sour old man who wouldn’t think twice about hurting people to get what he wants?”

Jon looked at her from the corner of his eye as he took the last turn onto Baskin’s street.  “Darcy, we’ll find Smudge.  We will.  Baskin may or may not be our man.  Right now he makes a great suspect but if you don’t think you can be objective in this interview then I’ll understand.  You can stay in the car until I’m done.”

She shook her head, turning the ring on her finger over and over.  “I want to hear what he has to say.”

They drove silently up the short, quiet street in the northernmost tip of Misty Hollow.  There were just the two houses here, Roland Baskin’s and another that had been empty for years.  The trees were gnarled and untrimmed and the grass hadn’t been mown in a while.  Baskin didn’t even come outside to work in his yard much anymore.

She could tell Jon had more to say but he held his tongue until he parked out in front of Mister Baskin’s house.  A little white square of a house with old, brown roofing tiles and painted trim to match.  Nothing special.  Darcy would have liked it better if it resembled Dracula’s castle or even that motel from Psycho.  Then it would be easy to tell if the man inside was as evil as she suspected he was.

Bad guys were never considerate like that.

Turning the engine off, Jon turned to her, hooking an elbow over the top of the steering wheel.  “Do you think you could do that thing where you hold someone’s hands and see if they’re telling the truth?  Would that work with Baskin?”

“Jon, I’m not a fortune teller.  I can’t tell if someone’s lying or not.  Besides that technique only tells me if someone has guilt on their hands.  We’ve learned that people carry lots of guilt around with them.  For lots of different reasons.  A guy like Baskin…you don’t think he’ll have a ton of things he feels guilty about?”

Jon snorted.  “I’m not sure that Roland Baskin knows the meaning of the word guilt.”

“Well, yeah, you could look at it that way, too.  No guilty conscience would mean nothing for me to see.  Either way, I have to hold someone’s hands and sit with them while I concentrate in order to make that work.  You think Mister Baskin’s going to let me hold hands with him for that long?”

“No, I don’t.  It might be nice, though.”

“What?” she asked.

“If you could tell when someone was lying.”  He shrugged.  “Sure would make my job easier.”

“Come on, Jon, be serious.  I might be able to touch Baskin’s hand and get a flash of a vision, maybe, but even that’s a long shot.  It works sometimes, and not others.  I can’t control that part of my ability.  I might get a great insight into where Smudge is, or I might get every detail of what he had for breakfast.  Or I might get nothing at all.  I’ll try, but we might just have to go on what he says.”

“Then let’s go see what our old friend Roland has to say for himself.”

He got out of the car and she followed him.  It was after seven o’clock now and the sun was already going down below the tops of the trees.  True sunset probably wouldn’t happen for another half hour but darkness was already coming.  Darcy tried not to find too much literal meaning in that simple event.

It was Jon who knocked on the door.  Darcy waited for the sound of the doorknob turning and the hinges squeaking as the door opened, and then she rushed in past a surprised Roland Baskin and Jon, who was muttering something about Darcy and her impulsive nature.

“Smudge!” she called out as she went from room to room.  “Smudge!”

“Hey, what are you—”

Jon cut off Mister Baskin’s objections with a rapid fire string of questions that he stuttered to answer.  Darcy opened doors and closed them again and each time she did her heart sank a little more.  There wasn’t much to see.  The place was neat and orderly, with everything in its place.  Furniture just so.  Knick knacks on shelves.  Magazines piled into a square stack on a coffee table.  Even the kitchen was clean and organized.

“Smudge?” she tried, one last time.  There was no answer.

Except for the panting of a little scruffy dog who came running out of the bedroom when she opened the door, a long red leash trailing behind him as he trotted over to Roland Baskin and then pranced at the old man’s feet to be picked up.

He bent with some difficulty to cradle the white-haired ankle biter in his arms.  Then he stood again, petting the dog between his two alert little ears.  A Yorkie, Darcy thought, or maybe a terrier.  It was obvious that the dog loved his master, and that his master loved the dog just as much.

“Now, see here, both of you,” Mister Baskin grumbled at Jon and Darcy.  “What’s this all about?”

Jon looked at Darcy with an unspoken question.  She shook her head.  Smudge wasn’t here.

“Mister Baskin,” Jon said to him.  “We’re sorry to disturb you like this.”

“Barge in on me, you mean.”

“We’re sorry for that, too.  I’m investigating a break-in at my house today.  Your name came up in the course of that investigation.”

“Hmph,” was the response to that.  “Not the first time you accused me of something I didn’t do.  Remember the whole deal at the Christmas pageant?  What’s the matter?  You run out of real criminals to harass?  Seems to me the last big case I heard our dedicated police force handled was a bunch of kids stealing from people’s garbage cans.”

“All the same,” Jon continued in that same calm, reasonable tone, “I’d like you to tell me where you were today.”

“And I’d like to be left alone.  You think either one of us is going to get what we want?”  But then he sighed, and answered the question anyway.  “The café.  You saw me there Darcy, you know you did.  Then I went for a walk around the park with Phineas here.  Since then I’ve been home.  You want to take my dog in for questioning, Chief?”

Darcy reached out and put her hand on Mister Baskin’s arm.  Through the material of his sweater she could feel how frail the man had become.  He used to be a real terror around town, yelling at all the local kids to behave and be quiet and go home.  Now he was just a grumpy old man with nothing left in his life but a little mutt that was barely an armful for him.

“Roland,” she said, holding his arm, trying to reach out with her abilities to feel anything at all from him.

She felt absolutely nothing.  There was no vision, no sense of right or wrong or neutral indifference.  Just an angry old man in a knitted sweater and baggy slacks.

It wasn’t him.

A dead end.  Smudge was depending on her, and she had guessed wrong. 

Turning away from Mister Baskin’s glare, she went to walk out of the front door, but a thought occurred to her.  “Roland, you knew my great aunt, didn’t you?”

“Everyone knew Millie,” he answered.  “She was one of the few people in this town that I actually liked.  That’s saying something for me.”

That was definitely true.  “Do you know,” she asked, “if there was anyone who held a grudge against my aunt?  Maybe somebody who wanted to hurt her?”

“Your aunt?  Millie?”  Mister Baskin actually laughed, which was something Darcy was sure she’d never seen him do.  Ever.  “There wasn’t nobody didn’t like her, Darcy.  Oh, I remember she had her trouble with people same as you do, but that was because she didn’t back down.  If somebody needed to be taken down a few pegs or such, she was there to do it.  Always respected that about her.  Say.”  He screwed his face up now and peered closer at the both of them.  “What’s this really about?”

“We can’t say a whole lot,” Jon told him.  “What isn’t confidential is private.  But I can tell you that someone is after something that belonged to Millie years ago.”

The old man’s eyes got a little wider.  “Can’t anyone let the good ones rest in peace?”

Darcy smiled in spite of herself.  If he only knew how restless Millie really was.  Still, they weren’t going to learn anything here.  It certainly looked like Roland Baskin wasn’t the one who had taken Smudge.  Darcy doubted that he had the strength to kidnap a goldfish, let alone a strong and smart cat like Smudge.  Defeated, angry all over again, and suddenly very tired, she turned once more to leave.

“Wait.”

This time Roland Baskin caught her by her wrist, his rough skin like old leather.

And in her mind, a vision sprouted.

Her Great Aunt Millie, sitting at a bench in the park, alive and well, and so much younger than Darcy had ever seen her in real life.  A man, sitting next to her, with eyes the color of robin’s eggs and a smile that rarely ever came out.  He was much younger back then, too.  He was older than Millie by a handful of years but still young and handsome and…happy.  It was a strange look for him but there was no mistaking Roland Baskin.  The two of them talked for hours, almost every Tuesday, and Millie would often invite Roland and his wife over for dinner.

That was before his wife died.  Before all the joy disappeared from his life.

Oh.

Darcy moved just enough to break the contact with the old man Mister Baskin had become.  It hurt too much, seeing her aunt in such a happy time.  She only had her aunt in spirit now.  As grateful as she was to have even that, she missed Millie so much.

Withdrawing his hand from her, resting it on Phineas the pooch again, Mister Baskin almost smiled.  His gray eyes softened, faded now and dull.  “She used to say I had eyes as blue as a robin’s eggs,” he said to Darcy, as if he knew what she had just seen.  “And she was always kind to me.  She never had a complaint, or a harsh word, except once…”

His voice trailed off, and she could tell that he was remembering something that he hadn’t thought of in a long time.  “Once I heard her say she was worried something might happen…to you.  That someone was…I don’t remember.  I’m sorry, Darcy.  I’m an old man now.  And back then I had lost my wife and I didn’t have time for my friends anymore.  It was Christmas, you know, when I lost my Ruby.  I didn’t have time for anyone, after that.  I’m afraid I didn’t pay much attention to what Millie was saying.”

Darcy met his stare, and it was him who backed away first.  Maybe he was thinking that if he’d only listened to what Millie had tried to tell him back then, he could have helped.

Exactly what Darcy was thinking.

“We have to go,” she said abruptly.  She didn’t know what had happened in her aunt’s life back then, but it was looking more and more like it had been serious, and more than that…

She’d kept it a secret from Darcy.

Why would she do that?  How could she?

Back in the car, Darcy broke down.  Completely, utterly, broke down.  Tears came out in racking sobs and she slammed her fists against the dashboard until Jon came in through the driver’s side and pulled her to him and held her.  That was the only thing that stopped her shaking and her uncontrollable ranting.

Roland Baskin had probably been waiting for Darcy to tell him that it was okay, that the past was the past and there was nothing they could do to change it now, and whatever had happened to her aunt wasn’t his fault.