A Darcy Sweet Mystery Box Set Six

by K. J. Emrick

  Addison was kicking off her sneakers and running past the grownups to go and find Colby just as soon as she was through the door. She might be a couple of years older than her cousin, with the weight of pre-teen girl issues already starting to crowd her life, but those two were definitely the best of friends. Darcy could hear them in the living room, excitedly jabbering to each other about everything and nothing.

  Aaron was carrying Zane in his arms, with the little boy’s head down against his shoulder, tickling his scalp with the neatly trimmed brown hairs of his beard. With a wide yawn, his little fingers reached up to push Aaron’s cheek away. He must have played hard today, Darcy thought to herself.

  But as soon as he saw Darcy he perked right out of his sleepy state and reached for her with eager arms. She was sitting at the table again and Aaron had to bend down quick to deliver him, or else Zane was going to squiggle his way free in his rush to get to his mother. She perched him sitting on her good leg and then listened to him babble about everything he’d done that day, making sure to put in several comments like, “Really?” and “Wow. You did all that?”

  The grownups laughed at the exchange between them. His vocabulary was building by leaps and bounds even if some of it was still gibberish. She did wish she could understand more of what he was saying. She caught Mama and she caught bird and she caught badu—his word for his sippy cup—and somewhere near the end, she was sure she heard Aaron’s name spoken clear as a bell.

  She could tell that Aaron heard it, too, from the very pleased look on his face. Her sister Grace had just finished placing Zane’s car seat and go bag inside the door, and now she stepped up close to her husband, wrapping her arms around Aaron’s waist and leaning her head on his shoulder. “My guy did good as a babysitter, didn’t he?”

  “He’s a good father,” Jon said as he checked on the rolls, “that’s why. The women of the Sweet family always pick the best husbands.”

  Grace didn’t argue, but she did roll her eyes. Darcy caught herself before she did the same exact thing. There was no doubt the two of them were sisters, from the similar facial features right down to the little gestures they had learned from their mother in younger years. Their dark hair was nearly the same length and style now, even. There were differences, of course. Darcy liked to think she was much more relaxed than Grace, and better able to adapt to changing situations as well, like when your husband was obviously thinking about having a second child.

  Darcy looked up at Aaron with a mischievous little smile. “You know, there’s still plenty of time for you and Grace to try for another one of your own. Might get a boy this time. It’s pretty much a fifty-fifty chance.”

  His expression changed subtly, and Grace’s cheeks turned pink, and without them saying anything at all Darcy knew that they had already started trying. “Oh, wow! Hey, that’s fantastic Grace. I think that’s wonderful.”

  Jon turned around from the stove, oven mitts on both hands to hold the baking sheet loaded with fresh rolls. “What? What’d I miss?”

  “Shh, nothing,” Darcy told him. “I’ll explain later. For right now let’s get all this food organized and start dinner. I’m starving.”

  Over supper, the conversation naturally turned to the mystery of Marcia Faber’s murder. Even Aaron knew about Darcy’s gift, and that she could see and talk to ghosts, so it was no surprise to anyone at the table when Darcy had more information to give them. Besides Matt all but declaring he’d buried Marcia’s body at that place near Rose Lake, she knew exactly what the place looked like. If she saw it she would recognize it for sure.

  She still wasn’t clear how much Grace had told Aaron about her own gift. It was a small spark, just like the one that existed within their mother, and like Aunt Millie had said that made it hardly worth mentioning. Grace may or may not have told her husband about that, or about how the gift had been passed on to Addison as well, in a small amount. Either way she’d decided to leave that be their business.

  “What about this guy from the Lockbox Firm?” Jon asked. “I don’t like the idea of you meeting with those people at all, but I certainly don’t like you meeting them alone.”

  Darcy pushed around the broccoli on her plate with a fork. Zane watched her from his high chair, and then began pushing his own steamed and mushy “little trees” around his tray with his fingers. She smiled at him as she answered Jon. “I won’t meet him here. I wouldn’t be here alone with anyone I didn’t trust. I’ve been through that too many times before, thank you.”

  “So, what then?” Aaron asked. “You’ll meet them somewhere else in town?”

  “Yes. Clara Barstow’s Deli or maybe the pizza parlor. Someplace with lots of people and no chance of anything going on except talk.” Darcy chewed on a forkful of vegetable thoughtfully. “I mean, what’s the worst that could happen? We know that Matt must be involved, and if we get some piece of information from this Oscar Bismuth that puts the nail in Matt’s coffin then that’s a good thing, isn’t it?”

  “Unless,” Jon said, “we’re wrong about all of this and it’s Oscar Bismuth who’s involved. I still don’t like him coming here.”

  “I’ll be fine,” Darcy promised him.

  “Still don’t like it,” he muttered. “We haven’t even proven this was foul play, you know.”

  “Find her body, and we will,” Darcy countered. “I still think at this point that all the evidence is pointing at Matt. Especially since he had Marcia’s necklace.”

  Grace speared a piece of pork chop with her fork a lot harder than she needed to. “I wish we could just go arrest the creep right now. I don’t have a whole lot of love for men who kill young women.”

  Aaron reached across and took his wife’s hand. Grace was a tough-as-nails police officer, tougher than most of her male coworkers, but she still needed the love of her husband to keep her strong. Darcy was the same way about Jon.

  “We can’t just arrest him yet,” Jon said. “We need the evidence.”

  “So let’s go get it,” Grace insisted. “We’re sure where Marcia is buried, right?”

  “I’m pretty sure.” Darcy shrugged, glad that their daughters were in the next room, and that Zane wasn’t old enough to understand what was being said. Hopefully. “I mean, we won’t know for certain until we dig up that spot in the woods, right?”

  “Have to find the spot first,” Jon pointed out. “If you were up for a walk through the woods then this would be pretty easy, wouldn’t it? You could just walk around until you find the right trees. Easy.”

  Darcy patted the side of her cast. “Well, I’m not ready for that, and I probably won’t be for a while yet.”

  “Are you going to have that thing off before Thanksgiving?” Grace asked. “Or are we going to have to wait on you hand and foot?”

  Aaron jumped on the change in conversation. “Oh, that sounds like a lot of fun. We’ll bring you one of those little bells with the handle so you can call for us whenever you need something.” He scratched the top of his head, where his brown hair had become very thin. It had all migrated down to that beard he’d decided to grow. “I think I have one of those bells at the apartment. If not, I suppose we could always get you a megaphone…”

  “Hey,” Darcy said testily. “I made this meal. Well. Most of it. All right, I started it and Jon finished it, but still. I’ve been managing on my own just fine, thank you.”

  Jon quirked an eyebrow, but he didn’t say anything.

  “I haven’t fallen since yesterday,” she told him, “and you know that’s true.”

  He nodded. “Oh, I know. Believe me, I’ve been keeping track of how many times you’ve fallen or dropped something, Miss Independent. I know you think you can do it all, and I also know we’re going to have Thanksgiving here even if I have to push you around the house in a wheelchair.”

  Darcy stuck her tongue out at him while the others laughed. Even Zane joined in with them, clapping his hands together in glee over a joke he couldn’t understand.
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br />   “Fine,” Darcy told them. “Yes, I will start planning the Thanksgiving feast.”

  A round of cheers went up around the table, echoed by the two little girls out in the living room.

  “But,” Darcy continued when everyone settled down, “you guys will have to take care of walking through the trees yourselves. No way can I manage that.”

  “So what’s the plan, then?” Grace asked, ever the pragmatist. “Are we supposed to just tromp around the woods outside of Rose Lake and poke the ground with sticks until we find a grave that was dug three years ago?”

  Aaron had a piece of pork halfway to his mouth. After Grace asked that question he stared at the food, and dropped it back to the plate, and pushed the whole thing away.

  Grace frowned. “Sorry, honey. I didn’t mean that to sound as morbid as it did.”

  “No, no. It’s fine. You’d think I’d be used to it by now, living with the great Grace Wentworth.”

  “Yeah, well, flattery will get you everywhere.” Her cheeks colored again. Darcy smiled to see it. “I’ll tell you something else I know, too. That area isn’t our jurisdiction. It’s not even close to our jurisdiction. We’ve got no legal authority to go investigating so much as a parking ticket up there. So how are we supposed to go stumbling around out there looking for something without any idea of where to find it, and without being able to tell anyone what we’re doing?”

  Jon tapped his knife against the edge of his plate while he put his thoughts together. “I think I have an idea about how to get all of that done, actually.”

  Darcy shared a secret smile with him. She might not know what he had up his sleeve, but she knew that whatever it was, it would be a lot of fun.

  She really loved having this man in her life.

  “I guess that just leaves one little detail,” Grace said. “Who’s going to tell Anthony that his sister is dead?”

  There was silence around the table. Even the girls in the next room stopped talking. Darcy wondered if maybe they were listening a little closer than she had thought.

  “I’ll do it,” she told everyone at last. “He thinks of me as a friend. But let’s wait until we actually have something to tell him, okay?”

  “Good idea,” Jon agreed. “Tomorrow, me and Grace will go out to Rose Lake and look around. We can bring Wilson with us, too. He likes the woods.”

  “It’s a plan, then,” Grace declared, raising her glass of milk. “A toast. To great plans among friends that never, ever go the way we expect them to.”

  “I’ll drink to that,” Aaron said, raising his glass as well. Jon did the same.

  Zane lifted his sippy cup, imitating the grown ups with a comically serious look on his face.

  Darcy raised her glass, toasting to whatever tomorrow might bring.

  Chapter 6

  “So what are we thinking?” Jon asked Darcy. “Matt loved this girl so much that he killed her and buried her so no one else could have her, and before he threw down the final shovelful of dirt he took her necklace as a keepsake?”

  “Is that so farfetched?” Darcy sipped at a glass of lemonade while Zane sat in his highchair with his badu, drinking milk with a dramatic “Ah” after each gulp. She was playing hooky from work again so that she could stay home with Zane, and help look for the location of Marcia Faber’s grave.

  All from the comfort of her own home.

  She heard Jon swat at an insect, and the image on her laptop jerked and shook as he looked down at yet another bug bite on his arm.

  “Should have worn long sleeves,” Darcy told him with a little smile, drinking from her lemonade again.

  Zane sucked on his badu. “Ahhh.”

  From behind Jon, out of the camera shot, she heard Wilson laughing. “That’s what we told him, Darcy. You don’t go hiking in the woods in a t-shirt. At least, not without some kind of bug spray that’s ninety-five percent DEET.”

  Darcy laughed softly behind her hand so the microphone wouldn’t pick up the sound of it. The computer was displaying everything Jon’s wireless sports camera recorded. Jon and Wilson and Grace could only hear Darcy, but the audio went both ways and she could both hear and see them. She had to admire Jon’s ingenuity. She couldn’t join them, so he’d found a way for her to help solve the mystery while sitting right here at their dining table.

  This had to be the most bizarre thing she’d ever done, and that was saying quite a bit.

  So far it had been a half hour of the three of them tramping around Rose Lake to find the pylon on the north shore. Now they were moving in ever-widening circles, trying to find the spot that Matt Courson had mentioned.

  Jon swore it was a grid search. Grace had muttered something about them wandering aimlessly hoping to trip over something.

  Darcy was inclined to agree with her sister. She just didn’t want to let Jon hear her say it. He was the one out there doing the hard work. All Darcy had to do was keep her eyes open for a ring of trees that looked like the ones in her vision. The trees where Matt said he and Marcia had their special spot. Where he felt close to her after she died…

  Like those trees, right there.

  Jon’s camera showed them coming into a small clearing, where pine trees stood side by side with white birch. They formed a circle so tightly spaced that they blocked out the rest of the world. The sun slanted down and lent the space an almost magical quality. The soil was dark and rich, but there was nothing growing there. Not even grass or moss. It was like nothing wanted to come close to that circle of ground.

  “Darcy?” Jon asked, slowly panning the camera around.

  “Yes,” she said in answer to his unspoken question. “I think that’s it.”

  She thought back to the image from the spirit communication, pictured each individual tree that Marcia had shown her, and matched them up to the ones on the computer screen. Jon turned another full circle to show her everything.

  “Sis?” Grace was asking her. “Are you sure?”

  “That’s it,” Darcy said. “I’m sure of it. You guys found it.”

  “Great,” she heard Wilson saying off camera. “Now we get to dig.”

  Zane started to fuss and squirm in his chair, and Darcy knew what that meant. Time for a diaper change.

  “Hey, Jon? Zane needs me. You guys do your digging and I’ll check back in with you in a little while.”

  The image jogged and shook as Jon took the camera off the headband where he had it clipped and then turned it around so Darcy could see him. “Okay, Snowflake. Keep the link active and the computer plugged in. If anything happens I’ll let you know.”

  “Okay.”

  “Hey.” He kissed his fingertips, then held them to the lens. “Wish you were here.”

  “Uh-huh. You just want me there so you don’t have to do all the digging.”

  Grace’s face popped into the screen, pushing in front of Jon’s. “He won’t be doing it all.” She lifted up her folding Army Surplus shovel for Darcy to see. “Next time, Sis, I get to be the one to break her leg.”

  “That’s a deal.”

  With the push of a button, she shut off the audio, leaving just the visual stream live.

  “Ready Zane?” she asked him. Walking around behind his high chair, she pushed the foot levers that unlocked the back wheels. These things had come a long way since she’d been a baby. Big and bulky and plastic, on wheels for easy movement, Zane’s high chair served as a pretty decent walker for the mother with a broken leg trying to take care of her child.

  “Here we go!”

  She made revving engine noises as she pushed him around in a zig zaggy line, right through the living room, and then around the couch, like a racecar at the Indianapolis 500. “And coming down the stretch, it’s Zane Tinker ahead by a nose, now he’s ahead by an ear, now he’s ahead by a belly button!”

  “Voo voo, Mama!” he squealed, urging her to go faster. “Voo voo!”

  Her leg was cramping by the time she came back around to the couch, but it was s
o worth it to hear Zane’s delightful laugh. She slid the tray on his chair forward, and then undid the buckles that kept him in place, lifting him carefully up and out and then laying him down on the couch. This was their makeshift changing table during the day. It worked pretty well.

  Stinky boy giggled and babbled to her as she wiped his bum clean and put him in a fresh diaper from the stack on the floor beside the couch. They were getting a little low down here. She’d have to remind Jon to put some more out for her.

  While he was being changed, Tiptoe jumped up on the back of the couch, and sat there looking down at Zane with her tail swishing back and forth.

  One of her ears flicked.

  Zane gurgled a laugh and then babbled something unintelligible.

  Tiptoe answered back. Mrow-rowl.

  Darcy stopped, and watched.

  Zane chattered away.

  Tiptoe meowed, and purred, and meowed some more.

  It was like the other night, when she and Jon had gone into Zane’s room and found him pretending to talk to the bird. He was doing the same thing now. It was almost like they were having a real conversation.

  “Hey, Zane?” she said quietly. “Hey. What’re you up to, little boy?”

  His head turned so he could look at her, and his smile lit up his big blue eyes. “Teetoo,” he said, almost nearly getting Tiptoe’s name right. Or maybe, Darcy thought, she was just imagining it was so. Every mother wanted their child to be the genius who picked up English by age two, and then French by three, and maybe Russian by age ten. Thinking that Zane was going to be that kid, a master of several different languages, was just a mother’s wishful fantasy.

  Or, hey. Maybe he really was just that smart.

  He held his arms out for her now, waiting to be picked up now that he was clean and dry and dressed again.

  Tiptoe sniffed, and closed her eyes as she looked away. Darcy reached out to stroke the gray cat’s ears. She allowed it, but just for a moment, before she jumped off the back of the couch and wandered upstairs without looking back.