by K. J. Emrick
“Oh, the argument was about you,” Darcy insisted. “We know that for a fact. Leighton himself confirmed it.”
Rosie’s face went very pale.
“As for you and Leighton dating…” Darcy shrugged. “Of course that’s impossible. It’s a lie.”
“What?” Rosie exclaimed, relief evident in her voice. “But that’s what I was telling you!”
Darcy and Izzy exchanged a look. This was the heart of the mystery, right here. “What we’re saying,” Darcy explained, “is that we’ve all been fed lies about this case. It made it very hard to figure out what really happened. But that was what the real killer wanted. All of this misinformation about Leighton and Erika came from one person. That person was jealous of what those two had together. Erika and Leighton were deeply in love. In fact, this person wanted that love for themselves. She thought if they broke Erika and Leighton up, she could have Leighton all to herself. So she spread lies about Leighton playing around with other girls to make Erika upset. It worked. They argued, and she broke up with him.”
“This same person,” Izzy added, “spread lies about Leighton and Erika being already engaged, to keep any other women who might be interested in Leighton away. All those lies did what lies usually do. Eventually, if you tell enough lies, they start to get all tangled up.”
The book club members were looking at each other with deep suspicion now. They now knew the suspect was a woman, interested in taking Leighton for herself. They knew it wasn’t Rosie, because she’d been the victim of the lies all those years ago.
That left three women at the table. Three possible suspects.
Could Darcy get the real killer to confess?
She stood up, mindful of her baby bump as always, and started walking around the table. “This person succeeded in breaking Leighton and Erika up, but it backfired on her. Leighton left town anyway. He was gone.”
She stopped behind Damita’s chair, and then moved on.
“She would never have him now. So she went to Erika’s house, and killed her.” She stopped behind Evelyn’s chair, and then moved on.
“There wasn’t any marks on the body so I’m assuming she was smothered with a pillow. Back in 1977 they wouldn’t know to look for signs of broken blood vessels in the eyes or other signs of suffocation.”
She stopped behind Cora’s chair, and then moved on.
“Our killer dressed Erika up in her nightgown, and put her in bed, and left. It was a crime of passion, and it was supposed to be perfect.”
She stopped back at her own chair, and then leaned in to stare at the killer.
“Isn’t that right, Damita?”
The little smirk that had been frozen in place on Damita’s face slipped away. Her hands fidgeted with the broach pinned to her shirt, and with her sleeves, and with the edge of the table. Darcy knew the sudden tears in her eyes were because she had been caught. Not because she was sorry.
“Damita, it was you,” Darcy pointed out, “who told everyone in town about Leighton dating other women. It was a lie. It was you who told everyone about them being engaged. That was a lie, too, and every single person here said they never heard about the supposed engagement directly from Erika. They all heard it from each other, or from you. Only you claimed to hear it from Erika.”
When Damita had nothing to say, Izzy took up the explanation. “You were the only member of this book club who didn’t come to the cemetery for Roland’s burial. You didn’t come, because you knew Leighton might show up and figure out what you’d done.”
“Exactly,” Darcy said. “And there’s one more thing. Damita, you told us that you knew Leighton and Erika were arguing about Rosie here. Leighton confirmed that part of your story at the police station just a couple of hours ago. Only three people could have known what that argument was about. Leighton, Erika… and Erika’s killer. She died right after she had lunch with Leighton. She didn’t have the chance to tell anyone what happened. Telling us that piece of gossip, trying to cast suspicion off of you and onto Rosie, was probably the biggest mistake you made.”
Darcy had known who the killer was just as soon as she saw the name Leighton had written for Jon on that pad of paper. Not Rosie.
Damita.
For a moment, no one broke the silence. No one breathed. Then Evelyn cleared her throat and reached over to hold Cora’s hand, like she needed someone’s help to find her voice.
“Damita?” Evelyn asked hesitantly.
Cora’s eyes were wide. “What did you do, Damita?”
On her side of the table, Damita closed her eyes, and seemed to deflate in her chair until she looked impossibly old. “I only wanted him to love me,” she whispered. “He loved Erika, but he could have loved me. I was just trying to break them up. I told Erika that Leighton was fooling around with you, Rosie. That day I followed her to that lunch, and I watched her and Leighton argue. I heard him say he was leaving the state. All of my planning was for nothing. Everything I had done was for nothing. So when Erika left him there, I followed her home.”
Her gaze was lost in the past as she made this confession that was so long overdue. “I just wanted to know they were broken up for good. I had more lies prepared to tell Erika. I would have said anything to get Leighton to be mine. Anything! No matter what I said to her, no matter what I tried to make her believe, Erika was still in love with Leighton. She was going to run back to him, and tell him she was sorry, and… and… I couldn’t let her do that! I tried to get her to be quiet and listen to me and the pillow was right there—”
She held her hands up like she was gripping the pillow in them now.
“—and I put it over her face and she fell—”
Her hands dropped to the table, smothering her victim all over again.
“—and when I was done she wasn’t breathing and all I wanted was to make it so it never happened. So, I put her in her pajamas, and I put her in bed. No one knew about their secret rendezvous. No one but me, and Leighton, and he was gone. He was supposed to stay gone forever. Now he’s back, and you all know the truth…”
That word caught in her throat. She choked on it, and the only sound she could make after that was her quiet sobbing.
From the corner of her eye, Darcy saw Linda step out of the back office where she’d been hiding and listening. She’d heard it all. Her mother’s killer had been found out and now she knew the truth.
Now they all did.
Linda started to say something, but she just couldn’t bring the words out of her throat. This was not what she had been expecting when she started this with Darcy. Damita was a friend. She was someone they had all shared coffee with, or spoken to on the street. How many book club meetings had they sat through together, discussing what they liked about a book or what they thought could have been better. They had lived together in the same town for years and now all of that was tainted by the knowledge that she had killed Linda’s mother all those years ago.
Unable to meet Linda’s gaze, Damita lowered her eyes to the table. Her hands went to her broach again, nervously fiddling with the little piece of red jewelry. Darcy had looked at that broach for years. Damita never took it off. She wore it with everything. A red circle with black dots and three bent, stubby red lines on either side. A ladybug. It was supposed to be a symbol of good luck. It hadn’t done her—or Linda for that matter—any good.
That same broach, all this time… and still Darcy hadn’t recognized it when the same design had shown up on her kitchen floor, created out of spilled tomato soup.
That had been Erika’s ghost, of course, pointing her in the direction of the answer she needed. It was a clue to who the killer was and Darcy had missed it. Ghosts. They couldn’t just give a straight answer. Spelling Damita’s name out with the soup would have been too much trouble, apparently. Either way, now they knew who the killer was.
Aunt Millie had been right about that. Darcy didn’t like these answers. The book club members were all looking at her strangely now, li
ke dredging all of this up had been her fault. Damita had tried to frame Rosie, and she’d almost gotten away with it. If anything, Darcy would expect them to be grateful to her for finding the real killer. Yes, Damita was their friend, but Erika had been their friend too. Sometimes real answers were hard to take.
That didn’t mean they weren’t worth finding.
After another moment, Evelyn laid a hand on Darcy’s arm. “I’d like to go with Damita to the police station, if that’s all right.”
“So would I,” Cora said.
One by one, they all said the same thing. Even Rosie.
No one liked this answer, but they weren’t going to stop being who they were. They were all friends. They would see this through, together.
“So it was just that easy?” Darcy asked Jon.
In bed next to her, Jon stretched, pushing his body up against hers and getting their feet tangled together. “Easy? It’s never that easy, but yeah. That’s the gist of it.”
They’d finally made it home again just after eleven o’clock. The police station had been a very busy place tonight. In one holding cell sat a very old and very miserable Damita Marino. She didn’t say much, which wasn’t like her at all. She just sat there while Jon explained to her what was going to happen to her now. She would be processed, and arraigned in front of a judge, and a lawyer would get assigned to her.
There was no statute of limitations on murder. Even a murder from forty years ago.
Leighton had given a final statement and left Misty Hollow, headed back to the airport that would in turn take him all the way back to Arizona. He said he couldn’t stay here in this town. Not now that he knew the truth about what had happened to Erika all those years ago. Before he left he shook Jon’s hand. Darcy could tell how much it hurt him to say thank-you, but he said it anyway, to Jon and to Darcy too.
Then, in the middle of all that excitement, Grace and Wilson had walked into the station with Jon’s niece, and one other surprise.
Darcy’s idea to find Allison Tinker’s secret online profile had worked. It led them right to the boy she had been staying with three towns away. As it turned out, the boy who had bought Allison her bus ticket wasn’t really her boyfriend. Not as far as Allison was concerned. She’d just been using him to get what she wanted, promising to love him forever in return for that ticket. In Allison’s mind, forever only lasted as long as it took to get what she wanted.
Jon had explained that part with a kind of patient understanding. “Look at the family she came from,” he said. “Is it any wonder all she knows how to do is use people? Maybe if she had the right person to help teach her better, this won’t happen again.”
Allison’s new boyfriend had been about to leave with her for good when Wilson and Grace and Jon caught them. They’d been en route to the Canadian border. That’s why Grace had been in such a hurry about the whole thing. Once across the border, it would have been practically impossible to get them back to America. If Darcy and Jon hadn’t figured out how to find her, the story would have had a very different ending.
The new boyfriend was cooling his heels in the jail cell next to Damita. The State Police would pick him up later tonight or tomorrow morning.
“Wow,” Darcy said with a long yawn. She was in bed now, she had her husband next to her, and she was exhausted. Sleep couldn’t be far away. “So we’ve got a woman who committed murder trying to get a boyfriend, and a teenage girl who lied and cheated to sneak away with a boyfriend she hardly knew. Are all girls this much trouble?”
He rolled closer to her and put a kiss on her cheek. “Not the ones who are really worth it.”
“Charmer. I’m serious, Jon. What if we have another girl and she pulls the same stunt that Allison did? How are we going to handle that?”
“Or how about this. What if we have a daughter and she has your gift? Colby’s been a handful.” He stroked her chin when he saw her frown. “In a good way. I mean that. Our little Starshine has really been the light of our life. I’m just saying we can play what-if all night long and all we’ll get for our troubles is bags under our eyes. If we have another daughter with the gift, we’ll make it work. You know why?”
“Why?” she asked, laying her head down against his shoulder.
“Because, this is us. We’re great together, and we’re great parents. That’s why I’m not worried about having another daughter. That’s why I know any daughter of ours would never feel the need to lie and cheat and run away to Canada. We’ll give our baby all the love in the world. All the love that my sister wasn’t able to give Allison because she was a selfish, stupid woman who couldn’t see how being a parent was more important than anything else she would ever do.”
“What’s going to happen to Allison?”
“I’m going to check in on her from time to time,” he said. “She’s going to a juvenile facility for now, and after that she’ll go back to my aunt, probably. I’m going to make sure I stick around in her life to give her a stable figure. She’ll probably hate me for keeping her from going to Canada with this boy, and then there’s the whole thing about me putting her mother in jail but you know what? I don’t care. Allison needs a positive role model. Someone to look up to. Maybe someone to give her some good advice in her life.”
Darcy kissed his lips. “Is that how you see being a parent?”
He returned her kiss. “I’ve done some things I’m very proud of in my life. Being a father to your children tops that list.”
She lost her breath to the kiss they shared at the end of those words.
Later, as they were falling asleep, he whispered in her ear, “I can’t wait to meet our new baby. Girl, or boy.”
Chapter 9
There were certain pains that a person just never forgot. Childbirth was just such an experience.
Even though Darcy could remember every excruciating moment of giving birth to Colby, it had seemed like a lifetime ago. Until now.
It was four months after the incident with Linda’s letters. Four months after putting Damita Marino in prison for a decades old murder. She was at full term—plus eleven days—and now the baby was coming. In the hospital in Meadowood, in the delivery room, she was experiencing that pain again. For her, it was both agonizing and sweet. It meant she was having a baby.
They knew the sex by now, of course. The ultrasound four months ago had clearly shown the gender. For her and Jon, it was a surprise. Then she realized that Colby had known all along. Colby’s gift had let her know the gender long before medical science could see it. Darcy’s little girl had always referred to the new baby as ‘he.’ Darcy had heard Colby say it over and over, and never once gave it a second thought.
Darcy was having a boy.
Now, with a last physical exertion, and a shout that welled up from her toes and seemed to last forever, Zane Tinker came into the world.
He was beautiful. Resting swaddled in her arms as she lay there in the hospital bed all sweaty and exhausted, he cooed and whined, his eyes tightly closed against the bright new world he had been thrust into. Darcy could already see how strongly he was going to resemble his father.
Jon had stayed with her through the whole four hours of labor. He was there with her now, holding her hand, pushing back the sweaty strands of her hair from her forehead, and making her feel loved. He was amazing. Pulling him down close so she could kiss his beautiful face, she told him what was in her heart. “I love you, Jon. I always will.”
“You are amazing,” he said. Then he reached out to touch his baby son’s face. “This is amazing. I’m so glad I found you, Darcy Sweet.”
Zane started to cry. He was hungry, and before Darcy could get any sleep she would have to make sure his needs were taken care of.
After all, that was what a mother did for her children.
In the corner of the hospital room, a shimmer in the air caught Darcy’s attention. While Zane fed, and while Jon sent text message after text message from his phone, Great Aunt Millie’s spirit s
lipped quietly out of the shadows and up to the side of Darcy’s bed.
The nurses didn’t see her. Her face wrinkled in a smile as she looked down at Darcy holding the newest addition to their family. Darcy’s mother, and Grace and Aaron, and Colby too, were all waiting for them to come out of the delivery room. They would get to meet Zane in a little bit. For now, they would have this moment together.
“Thank you, Millie. I wouldn’t be the woman I am today if you hadn’t taken me in.”
A ghostly hand cupped the back of Zane’s head. Millie’s gaze locked with Darcy’s for a moment, sending her love from beyond the grave.
Then she disappeared, leaving Darcy alone with her new baby, and her husband, and whatever future was in store for them.
She couldn’t wait to see what stories they would make together.
Coming home was such a relief.
Not that the hospital hadn’t been great to them. All the nurses and doctors, and the rest of the staff, had been wonderful. The food left a bit to be desired but Darcy had been too tired to care. Zane certainly didn’t mind. He was getting his food from a different source.
Darcy was sore from how hungry the kid was. Bottle feeding was a definite possibility.
In the driveway, Darcy got out with Jon’s help. She was still a little sore but that was normal the doctors told her. After all, she wasn’t Wonder Woman.
Colby chattered nonstop to her brother, showing him everything in the house, telling him all about how they did things here, how much fun they were going to have together, and everything else she could think of. Zane was never going to be bored with his sister around, that was for sure.
