A Darcy Sweet Mystery Box Set Six

by K. J. Emrick

  Swirling.

  Falling.

  Feathers.

  Colby had told her to watch out for the feathers.

  “If he didn’t get it from her then where did he…?” she started to ask, but then she looked over at Anthony again, and something made her stop talking. She needed to just listen now. Listen, and think.

  Jon was talking to someone on his end of the phone call, and then he was back. “Right. This was why I wanted to call. Before you talk to Anthony again you need to know that Matt’s saying he got that necklace from Anthony. After Marcia went missing.”

  Darcy could feel her eyes go wide.

  Anthony…

  She remembered when he first came to her house, half a week ago now, and she’d asked him about his sister. He said that Marcia had disappeared. He told Darcy that he missed her. That he was still full of guilt because he was alive, and she was gone.

  She had this freckle on her left cheek.

  Oh, no.

  Marcia was her name.

  Past tense.

  It wasn’t like her to do something like this.

  Everything he said about his sister had been said in the past tense.

  Like he already knew she was dead.

  “Darcy?” Jon asked her. “Did you hear me? It might not mean anything but you saw the necklace on the ghost and doesn’t that mean it was with her when she died?”

  “Jon… I have to go,” she told him. She saw it now. She understood why Marcia came to haunt her brother every year, and why she was so angry with him…

  Anthony was the killer.

  He always talked about his sister in the past tense, because he knew she was dead, and Darcy had missed it. Now she was sitting alone in her kitchen with a killer.

  She could hear the tension in Jon’s voice. “Darcy? Are you all right?”

  “No,” she told him, putting a smile on her face for Anthony. “There’s no reason for you to come over, Jon. Everything’s fine here. I’ll let Anthony know that you haven’t found anything out yet.”

  He was deadly silent for the space of a heartbeat. Then she could hear him getting up from his desk in a rush. “Stay there, Darcy. We’ll be right over.”

  “Love you, too,” she said, hoping that she was being convincing enough. “Bye.”

  Jon had caught on to what she was doing. By telling him not to come over, when he hadn’t even asked to, she was telling him to get over here right now.

  She hung up the phone and put it down on the table. Picking up her crutch from where it was leaning on the wall she pushed her chair back and started to stand up. “Can I get you anything else, Anthony? It looks like we might be here a while. Jon hasn’t found anything out yet.”

  His eyes followed her every move. “You haven’t signed the paper yet.”

  “Oh? Well look at that. How silly of me.” She was standing now. If she could just get some distance between her and him, she was going to feel a lot better. “I’m going to see if I have any butter cookies. I’ll be right back.”

  She wasn’t two steps away from the table before he caught ahold of her arm, grasping it in a tight, hard grip. She met the heat of his stare and tried not to lose her nerve.

  “You know,” he said.

  “Hmm?” she asked. “What do I know?”

  His grip tightened, hurting her wrist. “You know how my sister died. You know that I… that I killed her.”

  Darcy took a deep breath, and fought the desire to let it out again with a loud scream for help. Izzy might hear her next door. Then again, she might not. There was a lot of ground between the two houses.

  She needed to get away.

  Right.

  Now.

  Taking a firm hold on the crossbar of the crutch, she slammed it forward into Anthony’s throat. The top part was padded, to be comfortable when it was braced under an armpit, but even that must’ve hurt.

  Anthony released her and she nearly fell until she got her crutch around to brace herself. He threw his hands up to his throat, gagging and hacking like he couldn’t catch his breath. Darcy didn’t wait to see if he would recover. She teetered sideways, using the countertops and the walls to prop herself up as she hopped and strided her way from the kitchen to the living room, heading for the stairs just as fast as she could.

  She didn’t want to go up. She wanted to go somewhere she knew she could hold Anthony off, for as long as it took for Jon and the cavalry to get here.

  So instead of going up, she was going to go down. Into the cellar.

  The door to those stairs was right under the ones leading up to the second story. They weren’t used very often, because there was nothing down there but storage, and cobwebs, and loose stones in the walls that had been built by hand decades ago. Smudge and Tiptoe had their secret entrance and exit down there somewhere.

  Too bad she was a grown woman. If she’d been a cat, they could have shown her how to get out the same way.

  She was through the door before Anthony got up from the table, launching himself after her. He was going to catch her. She knew it in her heart that she was not fast enough on this crutch to get away from him.

  A gray ball of fur streaked out of nowhere, right in Anthony’s path. Tiptoe yowled like a banshee as she raced back and forth in front of him and he tripped over his own feet trying to keep from stepping on her. He fell against the couch and as he did, a thin black and white cat that was all claws and teeth jumped up and swiped at his face. Smudge was slower than he used to be, but he was still a terror when he was defending the people he loved.

  Darcy whispered her thanks to both of them, Smudge and Tiptoe, and then closed the door.

  There was no lock. They never thought they would need a lock on the cellar door. She turned the light switch on, and bare LED bulbs came on in a string along the ceiling. It was musty and dank smelling down here, and the pile of boxes they had stored in the corner had gotten bigger and bigger until it was a hulking mass just waiting to tip over. Jon had added more shelves, and the place had almost become organized.

  Now she would have lots of places to play a deadly game of hide and seek.

  It wasn’t easy to get down these stairs. They were narrow and uneven. Not exactly designed for a woman with a crutch.

  She was at the bottom now, sweating and breathing hard, looking around for a good hiding spot. The thing of it was that no matter where she went it would only be a matter of time before Anthony found her.

  No escape.

  As she got around the first row of shelves, she heard the door at the top of the stairs open on creaky hinges. She stopped. She listened.

  There was only silence.

  Her leg began to tremble in its cast. She needed to sit down. She needed to rest her leg before it gave out on her and she fell flat on her face.

  Most of all, she needed to live.

  “You don’t understand,” Anthony said suddenly, and he had somehow managed to get closer, partway down the stairs. “You don’t know what happened. Marcia was ruining her life. She was going to give up everything she could have been and go live with that boyfriend. That Matt Courson guy. A worthless man with no future. He works at a hardware store. No money. No prospects. He got my sister pregnant and she was going to throw away everything for him.”

  He stopped when he was at the bottom of the steps, and Darcy moved further back behind the shelves. Her cats had done their best to delay him but Anthony was here now. She hoped Smudge and Tiptoe were okay. If they weren’t, if something had happened to either of them, Anthony was going to answer for it.

  She would never know, unless she stayed hidden until Jon could get here.

  One more step back into the shadows.

  Her elbow caught a paint can, knocking it off the shelf with a clatter as it hit the floor.

  Clenching her jaw hard, she directed silent thoughts of loathing at the universe for its warped sense of humor.

  “I took care of her child,” Anthony said. “I took Marcia to a c
linic. She didn’t want to at first but I convinced her that it would be for the best. I told her she had no way of taking care of a baby. No money, no future. No hope, really. Not with Matt Courson, she didn’t. It took a bit of convincing but finally she gave in. She always trusted me. I was her big brother. I took her to the clinic, and they took care of the baby.”

  Darcy put a hand up over her mouth. Waves of hot bile roiled in her stomach. This man… this horrible man had convinced his sister to have an abortion against her will.

  What kind of monster…

  Beside her, Marcia’s ghost appeared. She wasn’t screaming this time. She was quiet, and eerily calm as she lifted up the bottom of her shirt and showed Darcy the wound on her belly again.

  The abortion. Marcia hadn’t wanted it and the act of killing her child had left a scar on her soul.

  Darcy’s guess had been right, not that she took any pleasure in it.

  “After, she was mad at me.” Anthony was so close now, still going through his story as if it would make a difference, somehow. Like it could change the past. “She got so angry with me. I couldn’t understand why she was so mad! Do you know she tried to tell me that I had tricked her into doing it? I was just looking out for her. I knew what was best for her. I always did. But, when I tried to tell her that, she yelled and screamed at me. I’ve never seen her like that.”

  Darcy had. That’s how Marcia saw herself now, how she always looked whenever Darcy saw her. Angry, and screaming. When she’d been in Colby’s room it had been the same.

  Oh. Of course. She hadn’t been in Colby’s room to hurt anyone. She was trying to tell Darcy the reason why she was angry. Her baby had been taken from her. Colby was Darcy’s child but Marcia would never be able to have a child or know what it was like to be a mother. She’d had that taken away from her by the man who killed her.

  Her own brother.

  “She yelled,” Anthony said, right on the other side of these shelves now. “She screamed and she swore at me and she said she never wanted to see me again. I couldn’t lose my sister. I couldn’t let her run away from me. So I grabbed hold of her, and I tried to make her understand, but she stopped breathing and I didn’t know what to do. I held onto her so tightly, but she just slipped away from me. She died right there in my arms.”

  Darcy could see him walking now. Just past all of the items and junk and stuff piled on the shelves, she could just make out his form.

  “I loved my sister, Darcy, and she turned on me. She was ungrateful for everything I had done for her. You should count yourself lucky that you’ve never been in that situation. Just… count your blessings.”

  Marcia held her hands up to her neck, the bruises from the moment of her death appearing in dark blotches all around her throat. Darcy could imagine Anthony’s hands there, holding onto her tightly, choking the life out of her…

  “I want you to understand, Darcy. I need you to understand.”

  He was coming for her.

  “I’ll make you understand. Just like I did with Marcia. I’ll make you understand.”

  He was right there behind the shelves. A few more steps, and he’d be able to get to her.

  Marcia’s ghost screamed.

  Darcy felt it even if she couldn’t hear the sound of it. The ghost grew dark, lit with a black light and hazy with wisps of smoky tendrils. She threw herself at the shelves, the energy of her spirit crashing into them.

  The metal supports squealed. Boxes and things that had been left here and forgotten for years fell off the other side as the whole long shelf leaned and tipped and began to fall.

  Then it crashed down on top of Anthony with the sound of an avalanche.

  When it was over, everything was quiet.

  The metal frame of the shelves was twisted and bent. Broken bits of unrecognizable items spread across the floor. Cardboard boxes had burst open to add their contents to the disorder. Anthony was buried under it all, one arm hanging at the wrong angle. His eyes were closed. For a moment Darcy thought maybe he was dead. That maybe, just maybe, his sister had killed him in her vengeance.

  But then she saw his chest rise with a slow and painful breath. He was still alive.

  Marcia stood in the middle of the chaos, transparent again and sort of glowing, like her spirit was finally at peace. A serene expression spread slowly across her face. She looked absolutely beautiful.

  Her voice, just this once, was eerily clear when she spoke.

  “…I needed him to see what he did to me…”

  “We’ll make sure that he never forgets,” Darcy promised her. “He won’t get away with what he did to you.”

  Marcia smiled.

  And then she disappeared.

  Darcy felt Marcia’s energy leave the room as she crossed over from the world of the living for the last time. Her soul was finally at peace.

  In the next instant the sound of several voices came rushing through the cellar door and footsteps pounded down the stairs. Then Jon was there, and Grace, and Wilson, all with their guns drawn, all of them expecting trouble.

  None of them had expected to find Darcy Sweet, leaning on her crutch, standing over the bad guy.

  “Are you okay?” Jon asked her.

  She smiled at him. “To tell you the truth… I’m a little tired.”

  “I don’t understand how you could ever think I did this?”

  Matt Courson had been released from custody almost as soon as everyone got back to the police station. He was sitting in Jon’s office now, like he had been for the better part of an hour, listening to Jon and Darcy explain what had happened. The mystery was solved.

  Not that they could tell him the real ending. Even Grace and Wilson didn’t know that. As far as they were concerned, Darcy had pushed that shelving unit over on top of Anthony, saving herself and knocking the man out until help could arrive.

  It was an easier explanation than ghosts.

  Jon had insisted that Darcy come back to the station with him after the medical personnel brought Anthony Faber up their cellar stairs on a stretcher to load him onto an ambulance. He had a broken arm. Broken ribs. A concussion. He still hadn’t regained consciousness and one of the EMTs had quietly told Jon that there was no way of telling how long it would be before he did. In some ways, Darcy had thought to herself, it might be the best justice in the world if he was trapped in a coma for the rest of his natural life.

  Anthony had killed his sister because he was afraid of losing the only part of his family he had left. Marcia’s death had sprung from a warped sense of possession. Anthony wanted to keep his sister with him, forever.

  In the process, he’d lost her.

  Darcy had no doubts in her mind that if Anthony had gotten to her down in that cellar he would have killed her, too. Some part of his mind had broken when he killed Marcia. Life and death had very little meaning to people like that. He had lived and worked in Rose Lake and Misty Hollow and all the places in between for three years now, telling everyone the sad story of how his sister was gone. Missing.

  All the while, it had been him who put her in the grave.

  Wilson had ridden in the ambulance with Anthony to the hospital. He would be kept under guard until they knew for sure what was medically wrong with him, just in case he did wake up again. In the meantime he would be watched over by doctors while he lay comatose, trapped in his own body.

  If he did wake up, then he would be going to a prison of a very different kind.

  Now they sat in Jon’s office, giving Matt all the details that they could. No doubt all of this would be in the newspapers and online tomorrow. A new reporter had started writing the stories of Misty Hollow and she was very good at her job. Ciera Bodewell was just as passionate about getting to the heart of the story as Brianna Watson had ever been. No doubt she’d go places one day, too, just like Brianna had.

  Especially if Misty Hollow kept coming up with stories like this one.

  Darcy was glad that Jon had insisted on bringing her
here before they went to collect their kids from Grace and Aaron’s apartment. She knew Colby and Zane were safe there, and for now there were no ghosts demanding her help in forceful and scary ways, so they could give their attention to Matt Courson. He was grieving all over again for a woman who had been taken from him three years ago, and for the unborn child he never even knew about.

  “I would have been a good father,” he said, slumping in his chair. Jon had rearranged the office furniture so that they were all sitting on the same side of the desk, the three of them facing each other while awful truths were revealed. “Why didn’t she tell me about being pregnant?”

  “Near as we can figure,” Jon told him, “she was keeping it a surprise. Then her brother got involved and convinced her to have an abortion she didn’t want. It wasn’t long after that when he killed her, and buried her out in those woods.”

  His face fell even further. “All this time. I kept going out to that spot because it was special to us and all this time, she was right there under my feet.” He shook his head sadly, and Jon and Darcy let him wander through his own thoughts for a moment until he finally looked up at them. “You know, when he came to me and gave me Marcia’s necklace I thought it was so nice of him. I figured he was trying to build a friendship with me since we were both missing her so much and we didn’t… at least, I didn’t know… where she’d gone. Do you think… oh, man, do you think he gave me the necklace in case she was ever found? To make me look guilty?”

  Darcy had thought of that, too. “Yes, Matt, I do. He probably took it at first to have something to remember her by but after a while he realized having that necklace was as good as an admission of guilt. So he gave it to you.”

  Matt nodded, unable to even work up enough emotion to be angry about that. “I’d like to go home now,” he said to Jon. “If that’s all right? I want to arrange a funeral service for Marcia. I have a lot to do.”

  “Sure,” Jon told him. “Sergeant Fitzwallis is waiting for you out there. He’ll take you home, Matt. Oh, and I have a feeling that if you contact the owner of the Lockbox Firm over in Rose Lake that they’d be happy to help pay for the service.”