The Stolen Valentine (9 page)

Grace yawned after her, loudly.  With a little smile Darcy and Jon both looked back at her.

“What?” Grace said, good naturedly.  “I’m pregnant with Aaron’s baby.  What’s your excuse?”

Darcy stole a glance at Jon.  They hadn’t really had a discussion about whether or not he wanted children.  This horrible ordeal with Aaron and Grace had taken up their every waking moment over the past few days.  She wondered, when they ever got down to talking about it, what his answer would be.

Right now she turned her attention back to Grace.  Reaching back, she held her sister’s hand briefly.  “We will find him, Grace.  We will.”

“We don’t even know for sure this is the guy who did the robbery,” Grace pointed out.

Darcy couldn’t argue.  All they had was an answer for the smell Ray had mentioned and a known criminal with a glass eye.  That didn’t mean he was the same one at the bank where Aaron had been taken.  But Darcy knew.  The way her skin crawled whenever she looked at the building on the corner.  She knew.

“When we go in,” Jon said to Grace, “I want you to stay here.  We’ll get Manning, we’ll make him talk.  But you stay here, okay?  You’re too close to this.”

Grace nodded.  Darcy was surprised.  It was a mark of how worried her sister was that she didn’t even try to argue.

“We’re go, Detective,” the voice came back over the radio to Jon.

He handed the small radio with its stubby antenna to Darcy.  “I’ll radio you when we know more,” he said, and kissed her lightly on her cheek.  Then he turned to Grace and squeezed her arm.  There was nothing he could say, though, so he silently left the car and raced to join the dozen or more uniformed police officers swarming up to the chocolate shop with its upper floors of apartments.

Darcy still had hold of Grace’s hand.  Together, the two sisters watched as the officers quickly and quietly cleared everyone out of the chocolate shop.  Of course, people being people, most of them just went half a block, turned around, and watched the scene unfolding.  Darcy had communicated with any number of ghosts whose only crime in life had been curiosity.  It didn’t just kill cats.

“I hate this,” Grace said after a few minutes had passed with no word.  “I should be in there.”

“Jon is right,” Darcy said to her.  “You’re too close to this one.  You wouldn’t be any good to Aaron if you got yourself hurt now.  We’ll know more any minute.”

Tense moments passed as they waited.  Darcy held onto Grace, and Grace kept mumbling under her breath, “Come on, come on, please…”  Darcy felt so helpless.  All of their work had brought them to this moment.  If Manning turned out not to be the guy they were looking for, she didn’t know what they would do then.

On the second floor, a window suddenly broke and a man tried to climb out onto a fire escape only to be grabbed from behind and roughly pulled back out. 

“Well,” Grace said.  “I guess he was the right guy after all.”

Darcy had to fight the urge to run from the car and race up the apartment steps and demand to know what was happening.  She could only imagine how hard this was for Grace as they waited for someone to tell them something.

When Jon’s voice finally came over the radio in her hand Darcy jumped.  “We got him!  We got him!”  He was excited, Darcy could hear it in his voice.

“Give me that,” Grace said to Darcy.  She took the radio and pressed the talk button with a thumb.  “Jon, is it him?  You’ve got Manning?”

“What?” he said back to them.  “Oh.  Yes, we’ve got Manning.  That’s not who I mean, though.”

Darcy knew what he was about to say, and tears of joy filled her eyes.

“We found Aaron,” Jon said to them.  “He’s fine.”

Chapter Seventeen

‘Fine’ might have been a bit of an overstatement, but no one was complaining.

At the hospital in Meadowood again, in a room just two doors down from where Grace had spent the previous night, Aaron lay in a bed.  His right arm was in a cast and there was a yellowish bruise on the left side of his face.  He couldn’t keep the big grin off his face though, and Grace would not let go of his left hand.  She wouldn’t move from his bedside, either.  They had found him, and he was alive, and that was enough to make all of them smile.

“Other than the broken arm and some bruising, you’re in pretty good shape, Mister Wentworth.”  It was a different doctor than last night.  This man was short and had a young face.  “You’re going to need to stay overnight for observation, but other than that you should be able to go home tomorrow.”

“Just in time for Valentine’s Day,” Aaron said, turning to Grace.  “Thanks, Doctor.”

“Don’t thank me, I just work here.”  The man seemed to think that was the funniest thing ever, and left the room laughing after shaking hands with Jon and Darcy.

“I had all these plans,” Aaron started to say.  They could tell he was still weak from his ordeal, from being held by three men in a small apartment for days on end.  “I’m so sorry, Grace.”

“Shh,” she said to him.  “Stop it.  You just rest.  I’m staying here with you tonight and Darcy can come back in the morning and pick us up and then we can go home.  Trust me, being with you is going to be the best Valentine’s Day gift ever.”

“Sounds good to me,” Aaron agreed.

They leaned into each other, gently kissing and touching.  Without taking her eyes off her husband Grace said, “Don’t you think you two should leave?  You’ve been here too long now anyway.”

Jon and Darcy looked at each other.  “Okay, sis.  We can take a hint,” said Darcy.

“We were leaving anyway,” Jon said.  “I have to go back to the Meadowood station and help question Howard Manning.  They caught the other two men also, Grace.  Just so you know.”

“Good,” she said.  “I hope they rot in jail.  Now, seriously.  Get out.”

Jon chuckled as he led Darcy out of the room and to the hospital exit.  “Good to know he’s okay, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” Darcy agreed.  “Now let’s go nail these guys.”

***

At the Meadowood police station Darcy watched from behind one-way glass as Jon and a Meadowood detective sat down across from Howard Manning.  They had let her stay as a courtesy, at Jon’s request.  The voices from the room came through the speaker on the wall.  She wasn’t the only one watching.  This had turned into one of the biggest cases that Meadowood had seen in a long time.

“You’ve been advised of your rights,” Jon reminded Manning.  “You’ve waived your right to an attorney.  I have a few questions.”

Howard Manning looked bigger in real life than Darcy had imagined him.  His skin was blotchy and pale, and his mousy brown hair was chopped short.  He fiddled with the edge of the table nervously as he nodded.

“You’re sure you don’t want an attorney?” the detective from Meadowood asked.

“Yeah I’m sure.”  Manning’s voice was gruff and pinched.  “You guys are gonna give the deal to the first guy what
talks, and that’s gonna be me.  I know how this works.  I’ve been through it before.”

“More than once,” Jon said.  “We’ve seen your record.  All right.  You tell us what happened, you sign off on it, and agree to testify against your partners.  That’s the deal.”

“And I get what?” Manning asked gruffly.

Darcy saw Jon’s fist clench and then relax.  Anyone else probably would have missed it.  Jon was holding back a lot of anger right now.  “What you get, Mister Manning,” he said, “is us talking to the District Attorney on your behalf.  Don’t forget that we found a man bound and gagged in your apartment.  Don’t forget you tried to run from us when we executed our arrest warrant.  Don’t forget that you’ve been seen spending money from the bank heist.  It’s not like you’re going to skate on this.”

“All right, all right,” Manning said, obviously understanding how bad his position was.  “What d’you want to know?”

“These other men,” the Meadowood detective said, referring to his notes, “Harry Floson and Douglas Merceaux.  They were your accomplices?”

“Yeah, yeah.  You know that already.  We went into that bank, held the teller at gun point and made him give us the money.  He wasn’t gonna do it at first.  Can you believe that?  I remember a time when bank tellers was eager to give up the cash so they wouldn’t get hurt.”

Darcy shook her head.  She understood the dead a lot better than she would ever understand some of the living.

“So why take the two men?” Jon asked.  “You had the money.  What good were they to you?”

Manning sat back and folded his arms.  “Simple.  That teller man was trying to run.  Couldn’t have that.  We needed to get away first.  So we took both of them.  Hadn’t planned on hostages, but we figured we needed to keep them quiet until we got away.”

Jon waited for the other detective to get all that down before he continued his questions.  “But then you let Ray Stephenson go.”

“That a question?” Manning asked.

Jon’s hand clenched again.  “The question is this.  You let one guy go, you held the other man.  Why?”

Manning shrugged.  “Two hostages was too much trouble.  We’d already gotten away by then.  Or so we thought,” he grumbled.  “Anyway.  We could only keep one of them, so we tossed the little redheaded teller out of the car and left him.  The other guy turned out to be some kind of accountant or something.  Thought maybe we could get a ransom for him.  Never got around to that, though, before you guys found us.  How’d you do that, anyway?”

Jon pointed to his own eye, then to Manning’s.  “You should maybe get an eye that matches your color, if you want to keep committing crimes.”

Manning grimaced.  “Knew it.  Had to get it cheap, though, ‘cause I didn’t have money.  Was going to order me a real nice one with the take from the bank.”

Darcy blinked away tears as she listened to the man prattle on about what he would have done with all that money.  Dumb luck.  It had just been dumb luck that the robbers kept Aaron and not Ray.  If they’d tossed Aaron out first, then it would have been Ray they would have kept in Manning’s apartment.  Darcy and Grace and Jon never would have gotten involved.  Manning might never have gotten caught.  Things would have turned out very differently.

Not that she would ever want Aaron to go through what he had, but she was happy with the results.  Ray Stephenson was safe and sound.  Aaron, too.  Manning and his buddies were going to prison.  It made her smile to think about.

Her life always took her in strange directions, but she’d learned to accept that she often ended up where she needed to be, whether she wanted to be there or not.

“You know,” Manning was saying, “that guy was getting way annoying.  Wouldn’t stop going on about how he had to get home to his wife.  She was having a baby, he said.  She needed him, he said.  Gah.  Good thing I kept that gag on him.  I couldn’t stand it.”

Jon stood up, and for just a moment Darcy was sure he was going to punch Manning in the face.  She leaned forward, willing him to do it.  Instead, he just turned to the Meadowood detective.  “You can take it from here?”

When the other officer nodded to him, Jon quietly left the room.

***

Jon and Darcy slept through the rest of the day after they got home.  Going straight up to their bed, They managed to kick off shoes and socks and coats and then fell down on top of the covers in each other’s arms.  They didn’t wake up until noon the next day, both of them starving.  They fixed huge sandwiches and hot bowls of soup and ate in silence.  They were sitting next to each other at the table, and somehow her hand touched his.  Then his fingers caught hers, and then his bare foot rubbed over hers, and the next thing they knew they were headed back up to bed, most of their meal forgotten.

Darcy didn’t remember falling asleep again.  She just knew it was dark when they woke up.  They didn’t wake up again until the next morning.  Valentine’s Day, Darcy realized.  And close to time for the dance.

“Happy Valentine’s Day,” she said to Jon, curling into him tightly, kissing his lips.  “I love you.”

“I love you too, Darcy Sweet.  Happy Valentine’s Day.”

Smudge pounced on both of them and meowed loudly.  Laughing, Darcy reached over and scratched his neck vigorously.  “Happy Valentine’s Day to you too, Smudge.” 

“We should get changed for the dance, don’t you think?” Jon asked her.

Showering and dressing, they talked to each other about Grace and Aaron and what might happen to the three thugs who had caused so much grief to so many people.  Darcy was feeling better than she had in a long time, and she smiled and hummed happily on their drive back into town.

The mists had receded, as they always did after a crisis passed by  Misty Hollow.  Most of the snow had managed to melt as well, and the decorated square was alive with lights and music.  Stars shined brightly in a clear sky.  “Look!” Darcy said.  “There’s my cousin’s band.  Oh, don’t they sound wonderful?”

“I agree.  Care to dance?”

Darcy was mildly surprised.  “Dancing in public? Well, I never thought I’d hear those words coming from Jon Tinker’s mouth.  Yes, I’d love to!”

Darcy was very relaxed as she swayed to the music.  Her head was resting on Jon’s chest as they danced a slow dance around the makeshift dance area in the town square.  Several other couples were doing the same thing.

“I’m so happy that everything worked out,” Jon said to her.  “You know in all of this craziness I didn’t have time to wrap your gift.”  He stopped dancing and pulled a book out of his coat pocket.

“You know, I felt that there,” she said to him coyly.

He laughed with her and handed her the book.  Her eyes got a little wider.  It was a rare edition of the Canterbury Tales, one of Darcy’s favorite reads.

“Oh, Jon.  This is wonderful.  Thank you, I love it.”  She wrapped her arms around him and leaned up to give him a quick kiss.  “I have something for you, too.  It took me forever to figure out what to get you I hope you like it.”  She pulled a card from her own coat pocket and handed it to him.

He looked at her with a smile in his eyes and then quickly ripped the envelope open to pull out the card.  Opening it up he read the words inside.  She was worried until the smile touched his lips as well.  “Darcy.  Perfect.  Just what we needed.  A long weekend away together at our favorite cabin.”