Death Takes a Letter

by K. J. Emrick

  Without training, the gift would wither and shrivel up within Addison. Darcy suspected that was what Grace actually wanted for her daughter. Not everyone viewed the gift as, well, a gift. Grace considered it a curse.

  So, Darcy steered away from that topic of conversation during their get together tonight. She found other things to talk about. The conversation had covered a variety of topics by the time dinner was served. Everything from work to world politics to the big case at the office that Jon and Grace were working on. As the lead detective at the Misty Hollow Police Department it was only natural that Grace would be working on a case that involved a missing teen.

  Darcy told herself it did not make her jealous that her sister got to know about the case when Jon wouldn’t tell Darcy much about it at all. No, it was not jealousy. Just pregnancy hormones. Sure. That’s what it was.

  “Come on, Sis,” Grace said, bringing Darcy’s attention back to the moment. “Let me help you serve. You know Mom would insist on doing it if she was here.”

  Darcy put aside her other thoughts. “Well, Mom will be here next week for the sonogram appointment. She doesn’t want to miss finding out the sex of her new grandchild.”

  “You must be getting excited about it yourself.”

  Darcy gave her sister a quick sideways hug. “Family is everything.”

  The two of them were as alike and as different as two sisters could be. Darcy still liked to wear her dark hair long, whereas Grace wore hers in a short pixie cut thanks to a bad experience on the job when a man she was arresting yanked her down by her hair. There was enough of their mother in both of their faces that no one would ever deny they were sisters, even if their personalities were almost polar opposites. Grace was a woman working in a man’s world, and it had made her both stubborn and hard to get close to. Darcy was the more feminine sister. Even after everything her childhood had dealt her, or maybe because of it, she had always been more easygoing than her big sister.

  Handing one of the serving bowls to Grace, she gladly accepted her help. Jon took the other bowl from her and then held out her chair at the table for her. “You’ve done all the hard work for the dinner already. Let us help with the rest.”

  “I’m pregnant guys, I’m not an invalid,” she reminded them. At the same time she didn’t argue very hard about being able to sit down. “Although I did take the day off from the bookstore today.”

  “I remember taking a few days off when I was about to give birth to Addison,” Grace said, dishing food onto plates.

  “Oh really?” Aaron asked. He scratched into the brown hair at his temple. He was starting to go bald on top, and the heavy sideburns were his attempt to compensate. “Because I seem to remember you working right up until your due date, despite the objections of your loving husband.”

  “You shush,” Grace said, smiling at him, “or no dessert for you!”

  Aaron laughed at that, but Darcy figured her sister meant what she said. “So, Darcy,” he said by way of changing the subject. “If you played hooky from the store, what did you do all day?”

  Jon put down the plastic serving bowl of peas on the table and called for the girls to come and get dinner for themselves. “Darcy’s managed to find herself another mystery to solve.”

  “Really?” Aaron asked, his tone thick with curiosity. “Shouldn’t you take a break from all that. At least for now?”

  “She’s fine,” Jon said, just before Darcy could say the same thing herself. “Besides, this one is different.”

  “Oh?” Grace helped Addison and Colby put together plates of food and then sent them back into the living room. “How so?”

  “This one,” Jon said, pausing for effect, “is a murder mystery from four decades ago.”

  That brought silence to the room, until Grace and Aaron both peppered Darcy with a dozen questions all at once.

  “Hold on, hold on,” she laughed. “We really don’t know much. We’ve got these letters from the 1970s and a woman who may or may not have died of natural causes.”

  “You mean,” Grace translated, “she might have been murdered.”

  “That’s what Linda Becht asked Darcy to find out,” Jon said, a faint note of pride in his voice. “All these years I’ve been in town and there’s still people in town who would rather go to Darcy for help than me.”

  “I remember when you first came to town,” Grace pointed out with a wink for her sister. “You walked around like you had a stick rammed up your, uh, spine. Besides. My sister’s cuter.”

  Darcy smiled back. “Yes, I am.” She reached over and took Jon’s hand, holding it to the side of her face for a moment just to feel his touch. “I’d even look good in lavender lipstick, from what I understand.”

  “Darcy…” Jon started to complain.

  From the other room Colby called out to them, “I want lavender lipstick too!”

  “Ew,” they heard Addison say. “Not for me, thanks. I’m never going to kiss a boy! Ew!”

  Grace loudly applauded her daughter’s decision. “You just keep thinking that way, my little darling. At least until you’re twenty, okay?”

  “Sure thing, Mom! Boys are gross.”

  Here in the kitchen, Darcy kissed Jon’s knuckles. “Oh, I don’t know. I can think of a few things boys are good for.”

  Aaron took a sip from his wine glass. “You said Linda Becht brought you the letter? So this is her mother, Erika Becht, that we think may have been murdered?”

  “Er, yes,” Darcy said. “Did you know her? Wait, no, you couldn’t have. She died in 1977. You were born in—”

  “1978,” Aaron nodded. “Sure, but my mother used to mention Erika Becht often when she would reminisce about her school days. Erika was several years ahead of her but from what I can remember her saying, I think everyone liked her.”

  Darcy thought about that. Of course Erika would have gone to school over in Meadowood, once upon a time, just like every kid in Misty Hollow ever had. That would mean a lot of the older folks in town would have been classmates with her at one point or another or at least would have known her from their school days as Aaron’s mother had. If Darcy wanted information about Erika’s life she should just ask Linda, but in Darcy’s experience there were always things that a daughter didn’t know about their own mother.

  On the other hand, kids in school knew everything about each other.

  “You know who you should talk to?” Jon asked her.

  “Yes.” Darcy did. A group of people who had been in Misty Hollow so long that they’d forgotten more about the town than most people would ever know. “I’ll talk to them tomorrow morning. I’m sure they wouldn’t mind coming to the bookstore if they knew there were going to be coffee and donuts.”

  “And a good book to read,” Grace added. “Maybe 50 Shades of Grey?”

  The four of them chuckled at that suggestion. “Not quite their style,” Darcy admitted.

  “Mommy?” Colby asked, suddenly standing at Darcy’s elbow. “What’s shades of grey?”

  The grownups laughed harder and Colby looked from one of them to the other, wondering what she had said that was so funny.

  Darcy picked her up, scootching her chair back and balancing her not-so-little girl on her knee. “It’s a book, honey. One you’ll get to read when you’re forty.”

  That brought more laughter from everyone, and a toast with glasses raised for the day when Colby turned forty. Colby pretended to raise her own glass and made a tiny clinking sound with her tongue against her teeth.

  Then she leaned up to whisper in Darcy’s ear. “Sometimes old people get to see more than young people do. Sometimes they don’t. Sometimes it’s the old people who know stuff.”

  She slid off Darcy’s knee, down to the floor, and skipped her way back into the living room to join Addison again.

  Everyone went back to dinner after that, talking about this and that through dessert. The chocolate spice cake that Grace and Aaron had brought was from Clara Barstow’s La Di D
a Deli, the only place in town to get things like this now that the bakery had burned down. It was really good. Even Grace said she wanted to get the recipe for it. That was high praise from a woman with simple tastes like Grace had.

  The dinner party went on from there until the dishes were cleared away, and Darcy brought out two decks of cards for them to play a few hands with. It was close to ten o’clock when Grace and Aaron collected Addison from Colby’s room upstairs so they could leave. It was a school night and the girls really should have been in bed an hour ago, but these family dinners were starting to happen with less and less frequency. It was nobody’s fault, Darcy reflected as she put more dishes into the soapy hot water in the sink. Life just had a way of moving on when no one is looking.

  That happened to be the favorite saying of a friend she knew in Australia. Darcy hadn’t spoken to Dell Powers in a long while. She hoped everything was all right Down Under, as they say.

  Turning sideways to move her baby belly out of her way and reach the dish brush, Darcy promised herself she would call Dell soon. They had a lot to catch up on.

  Jon came up behind her and wrapped his arms around her waist… and settled more dishes into the water for her. “Gee,” Darcy told him. “Thanks for that.”

  “Your man is here to help,” he told her. Arms still around her, he kissed the back of her hair. It felt nice.

  “Is Colby in bed?” Darcy asked him.

  “Yup. She conned me into reading her a story out of The Basketball Tree again, but she’s asleep now.”

  “Oh? Which one?”

  “The one with the pigeon on the pogo stick.”

  Ah. Darcy remembered that one. “You’re such a good father.”

  “I’m a pushover, is what I am.” He kissed the slope of her neck now, sending a shiver down her spine. “Anyway. I’m going to call in to the department and see what’s going on with our missing person case.”

  “You know you don’t have to work all the time, right?” Darcy rolled her head back to look at him while she gave a plate a good scrubbing at the same time.

  “Uh-huh.” He found his cell phone on the counter and sat down with it at the kitchen table. “And what is it you plan on doing after you finish the dishes?”

  Well, he had her there. “I’m going to call the members of the book club and see if they’ll come to the store for a special meeting in the morning.” Darcy had started the Sweet Read Book Club many years ago when she’d inherited the book store. The book club had seen members come and go but there were a few that had been members for the entire time. They were the people she needed to talk to. She sighed. “Fine. I guess I don’t know when to quit, either. How about this weekend coming up we go away somewhere and forget that you’re a police officer and I’m—”

  “The town’s go-to girl whenever anything goes wrong?” he asked.

  “I was going to say, forget I’m pregnant,” she said archly, “but yours works, too. Actually, can you finish up the dishes after your phone call? Some of the book club members go to bed pretty early and I want to catch them before they do.”

  “Sure thing. Hold on.” He lifted a pointer finger as his call connected. “Hi, Sean. It’s me. Yes, I’m calling about that.”

  That would be Sean Fitzwallis, Darcy knew. The desk sergeant for the police department. It seemed like he was always working, no matter what time of day or night it was. Now there was a man she should talk to about Erika Becht, she told herself. Sean had a… special knowledge of the town, due to the fact that he’d been here almost literally forever. Nobody could remember a time when he wasn’t working for the police force.

  So. She was going to talk to the members of the Sweet Read Book Club, and with Sean Fitzwallis. Two good sources of information. It all might lead exactly nowhere, she had to admit. Linda’s mother might simply have died in bed, peaceful and undisturbed, like the doctors said. And even if she had been murdered it wasn’t like Darcy would be able to find many clues to the crime now. Not forty years later. Unless she did that spirit communication she’d been thinking about earlier.

  She still wasn’t sure about that. So, she put that under Plan B.

  As the call continued Jon began rubbing at the faded scar on his forehead. The one that usually bothered him whenever a storm was coming.

  “All right, thanks” Jon said. He’d finished his phone call while Darcy’s thoughts wandered. Tossing his cell aside he stood up and stretched, and then rolled up his sleeves before coming over to take the dish brush from Darcy. “My turn. You go make your phone calls. You might want to check in on Colby, too. She was asking for you.”

  “Isn’t she getting a little too old for a kiss from her mother?”

  “Trust me on this one, Sweet Baby.” Jon called her by her nickname as he swept strands of hair behind her ear with one hand, and then kissed her tenderly on the lips. “Little girls never get too old for attention from their mothers. Husbands never get tired of it, either.”

  Darcy hummed happily at that thought. “You know, that would have been almost romantic if you didn’t have dish soap bubbles on your hand when you did it.”

  He laughed. “I know, right? How about after you check on our girl and I’m done with the dishes, I rub your feet?”

  “Mmm. I would so let you do that.”

  “It’s a date, then.”

  Wiping away the wet spot he’d left on her cheek Darcy went into the living room, where the landline phone waited for her on a little table next to the couch. She didn’t own a cell phone of her own. No matter how many times she changed her number the ghosts kept finding her again, and calling at all hours of the day and night. Dealing with them face to face—so to speak—was bad enough. Having to explain to everybody around you why you aren’t answering your phone calls just makes people think you’re avoiding bill collectors.

  She kept a little black book full of numbers next to the phone. It didn’t take her long to call the seven members of the book club. Carson Fillmore was too young to have ever known Erika Becht but he was a member of the group and Darcy didn’t want to explain why she was excluding anyone. It might make the list of questions she was creating in her mind a little less suspicious, too, if they were just a group of friends getting together over coffee and a good book.

  Everyone said they would be there, and a couple of them even promised to bring the donuts so that was one less thing Darcy had to worry about. The bookstore always had coffee going so that wouldn’t be a worry either. The only thing left was for her to pick a book to introduce at the meeting, and she had an entire shop of books to choose from.

  Standing up and stretching, she realized how tired she was. That promise of a foot rub from Jon might just have to wait until tomorrow because she wasn’t entirely sure that she would be able to stay awake for it.

  Upstairs, Darcy went down the hall to the bedrooms. Colby’s was almost directly across from hers and Jon’s. The debate over where they would put their next child had been settled by converting a room on the other end of the hallway. Currently it was storage. Soon, it would be a nursery. Hopefully. Jon was way behind on that. They had a few more months, and they were both busy… but they couldn’t put it off forever. Not unless they wanted the new baby sleeping with them in their bed. Which she didn’t. At least, not forever.

  Speaking of sleeping children, Colby was already out when Darcy carefully opened the door. Her Beauty and the Beast nightlight was bright enough to see her daughter buried under a striped purple blanket that rose and fell with each breath. For a moment she was caught there, in the doorway, watching the little miracle that she had helped bring into the world.

  Her daughter was a mix of her father and her mother and her own vibrant personality. She had Darcy’s gift, the one that always passed down through the female side of the family. Darcy’s Great Aunt had it. Darcy had it. Now, she’d come to find out, her mother and even her sister Grace had a very tiny spark of it.

  For the longest time Darcy had assumed the g
ift jumped around. Went to this woman, but not her daughter. Went to this sister, but not the other. Now she knew different. Every female member of her bloodline had the gift.

  She put a hand over her tummy and settled it there. If the new baby was a girl, she would have the gift as well.

  The baby moved inside of her, and then settled again.

  Inside the room, a cat’s head popped up the rumpled heap of the blankets covering the bed. Tiptoe narrowed her eyes at Darcy, then curled back up again. Colby’s dreams were going to be well taken care of tonight.

  Darcy went over to the edge of the bed and knelt on the floor, leaning over to stroke Colby’s hair. Such a beautiful girl. Darcy wondered how she had gotten so lucky in her life. She couldn’t ask for more than what she had. Except maybe some more rest. Some sleep would be nice. More time to sleep. Yes. That was something she definitely needed. Her eyes drooped closed and she laid her head down on the blanket. Just for a moment.

  “Mom?”

  Colby’s voice woke Darcy from a sound sleep. She sat up, leaning on her elbow on the mattress, and rubbed at her eyes with the heel of a hand. “Oh, sorry honey. Guess your mother was a little more tired than she thought. I didn’t mean to drift off like that.”

  “You’re sleeping when you should be awake,” Colby told her.

  “Well,” Darcy agreed, “that’s what beds are good for. So. Would you like breakfast before school?”

  “It’s not morning yet, Mom.”

  That confused Darcy. Was it still night? She looked out the window of her daughter’s room and saw… nothing. A fuzzy, blurry sort of haze. Just that. Nothing more.

  Darcy gasped. The mists. She was seeing the misty clouds of fog that used to descend on the town whenever bad things were coming. Now, it wasn’t just a blanket. It was a thick wall that surrounded them, and swallowed them up.

  Her first instinct was to shield Colby from that menacing white turmoil pressing against the glass from outside. She put her arm across the girl’s body, never taking her eyes off the window. “Honey, let’s go downstairs. Let’s find your father, okay?”