by K. J. Emrick
Cameron’s head snapped up, his eyes wide. On the other side of the car, his wife’s jaw dropped. “What are you doing?’
“Don’t worry,” Jon said to her. “You’re next. I’m sure once we get back to the station that the whole story will come out.”
“What story? We didn’t kill anyone. You can’t prove that!”
Darcy looked from Gloria, to Cameron. “You can’t possibly expect us to believe that you broke into the Town Hall but had nothing to do with Steve’s death, can you?”
Gloria blinked at her. “Broke into the Town Hall? Darcy, we didn’t do that. Just like we didn’t kill Steve. I wanted to, sure. I’ve wanted that brother of mine dead since I learned he was a murderer. But I’m no killer.”
Jon had one side of the handcuffs around Cameron’s left wrist. He had stopped in the middle of cuffing the other hand. “Wait. You’re saying you didn’t kill anyone, didn’t break into the Town Hall… then what do you think I’m arresting you for?”
With a look of utter defeat, Cameron shrugged. “We’re transporting a shipment of marijuana from California to Maine.”
“Cameron, shut up!” Gloria screamed at him.
“What does it matter now?” Cameron asked her. “They think we’re murderers. What we’re doing isn’t anything compared to that.”
“You idiot,” his wife growled at him. “You beautiful, wonderful idiot.”
That brought a little smile to Cameron’s face. “Yeah, so. Marijuana. It’s legal in our state now. We grow it in our back yard. It’s still not legal to sell it in Maine but that doesn’t stop people from wanting it. They pay a high dollar price up there for a good California strain. This trip was going to make us rich. We were going to retire after this trip.”
Jon looked at him for a long time, one handcuff on and one handcuff off. Then he snapped the other one in place and looked back at their red car. “Well,” he said. “I guess I’m going to need a warrant now, aren’t I?”
The trunk, Darcy thought to herself. Now she understood why Gloria had put her suitcase in the backseat. The risk of getting caught had been bad enough when they had agreed to come to the house of the town’s police chief for dinner. Opening the trunk to put their suitcases in, when it was stuffed full of marijuana… yeah.
That might have been pressing their luck a little too much.
Darcy couldn’t remember the last time she’d had a day this long. Jon was nice enough to drop her off at the house before he went back to the police station so that at least she could get some sleep. His night wasn’t even close to over yet.
With the help of the State Police and the PD in Oak Hollow, the Misty Hollow Police Department had just made one of the biggest marijuana busts in recent memory. One hundred pounds of packaged product, all right there in the trunk of Gloria and Cameron’s car. He was going to be directing his people with the paperwork until dawn and maybe longer. There was still a question in Darcy’s mind about whether they were responsible for Steve’s death, but for the moment the felony of transporting marijuana was going to be enough to hold them in jail.
Which should give her and Jon a chance to investigate the mystery the right way.
In the meantime, Darcy was having a late supper of cold roast and mashed potatoes. She wanted to just crawl into bed, but her stomach had other ideas. She had offered to let Izzy and Devon stay for a plate, too, but they had just laughed and explained Colby had insisted on helping them make some mac and cheese earlier. The kids were tucked into bed and there hadn’t been a peep out of either of them for over an hour. Izzy wanted to hear all the details of what had happened, but she wanted to get some sleep first.
“I have a feeling,” she said on the way out the door, “that I’ll be in charge of the shop again tomorrow.”
Devon had been right on her heels, his hand in hers, and somehow Darcy just knew that sleep was a distant second on their list of things to do.
Sleep was a good idea. Tomorrow was going to be just as long as today had been and wherever Steve’s ghost was now, the only person who was going to be able to ask him any questions was one Darcy Sweet. Tired, hungry, and confused Darcy Sweet.
Bringing her plate out to the living room, she sat down on the couch and reached over for the TV remote. She never used to watch much television, but since Colby had come along, and then Zane, she’d come to appreciate the escape offered by a good drama or comedy. Nothing compared to what a book could do for you, but it was hard to read anything with a plate of cold food balanced on your lap. Television had its place, she supposed.
Just as she was about to push the on button she felt a weight drop onto the cushion next to her. A streak of gray became a cat sitting close to her, blinking pearlescent green eyes.
“Hey, Tiptoe. Oh, that’s right. I promised we’d have some hang out time tonight, didn’t I?”
She mrowled an answer, and then laid down with her front paws just touching Darcy’s hip. Then she yawned and laid her head down over one arm.
“You want to share my supper?” Darcy asked her. “It’s cold, but it’s meat and potatoes and gravy. You gotta like gravy, right?”
Tiptoe’s whiskers twitched.
“You don’t like gravy? Wow. I thought every cat liked gravy. Your dad loved gravy.”
At the mention of Smudge, Tiptoe’s head came up, and her eyes sparkled with interest.
“You want to hear about your dad, don’t you?”
Little green eyes blinked.
“Yeah. I like hearing about Smudge, too. He was a nut for gravy. There was one Christmas I remember where he actually got up on the table and started licking it up right out of the gravy boat. Oh, I was so mad at him,” she laughed.
A paw pressed harder against Darcy’s leg.
“Why? Because cats don’t eat off the kitchen table. You know that. How long has that been a rule for us?”
Tiptoe came very close to rolling her eyes as she turned her head away.
“I know all the good food is up on the people table but that doesn’t mean you just jump up there and take it. Don’t I always share?” When there wasn’t an answer, Darcy cut a piece of roast off with her fork. “Well. Almost always. Here. Try this.”
She dropped the little bit of meat onto Tiptoe’s paw. The cat’s head twisted around quick, her nose sniffing at the food before her delicate pink tongue came out to lick, lick, lap it up into her mouth. She chewed it wildly, and then sniffed for more.
“Good, right?”
She took off a little bit more and gave that to her, too. “That’s all for now, okay?”
Tiptoe ate the piece greedily and then sniffed the air in the direction of Darcy’s plate, looking for more. “Mewr?”
“I get more, because I have a bigger stomach. I’m like, twenty times taller than you.”
The cat’s eyes were wide and dilated. Her little nose kept moving.
“Oh, okay. Fine. Have another piece, but that’s it. No more.” She set it down on Tiptoe’s other paw and watched as she ate it up just as quickly. “Want to hear more about your daddy?”
Tiptoe was too busy licking gravy off her lips to answer, but she looked up at Darcy and blinked her eyes. Darcy knew what that meant.
She and Smudge had always been able to understand each other. It was like they had their own language. It wasn’t that easy with Tiptoe, at least not yet. She was still sad about losing Smudge, just like Darcy was, and maybe even more so. Darcy might have known Smudge longer, but he had been Tiptoe’s father. Nothing trumped that.
“We’ve got each other, Little Cat. You and I can figure it out, can’t we?”
The gray cat with the one single black ear tip and three white paws looked up at her, and then down at the plate of food, and her whiskers twitched again.
We can figure it out, she was saying, if I can have some more of your food.
“That sounds like a deal to me.” She cut the biggest piece yet and dropped it to the floor. Tiptoe lunged for it, and inhaled it, and
then jumped back up to the couch, sitting up now with a kitty cat smile on her lips.
“And they say the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach,” Darcy muttered around the bite of food she’d taken for herself. “That’s got nothing on a hungry cat, am I right?”
Tiptoe rolled herself over onto her back, four feet in the air, tail flicking playfully. The food that Darcy had shared with her had definitely put her in a better mood. It was nice to have the loving, frisky Tiptoe back, even if it was just for a little bit.
“We’ll find our way without your daddy,” Darcy promised her. “It’s just going to take us some time. That’s all.”
She put her fork aside and reached over to scratch that gray, furry tummy while Tiptoe purred and purred and swished her tail.
The house phone rang.
When it did, it spooked Tiptoe. She twisted herself onto her feet and clawed her way up and over the couch to zip across the room and halfway up the stairs, a gray blur until she stopped and sat there panting, staring accusingly at Darcy.
“Oh, for Pete’s sake. I didn’t do it,” she tried to explain. “Honest. Here, I’ll make it stop.”
The phone was on the little square table next to the couch, a portable handset resting in its base. The red light on the front flashed each time it rang. Darcy picked it up and pushed the button that would answer the call. This was almost an antique in the day of cellphones. Still, for Darcy at least, the landline had its place. Like when she was trying to avoid calls from telemarketers.
Or when Jon was calling. It was his number on the caller ID.
“Hey,” she said, “are you almost on your way home?”
“Hardly,” he said bitterly. “Don’t wait up for me. If I’m lucky I’ll catch a couple of hours right here in my office chair.”
“I’ve sat in that chair before, Jon. It’s not that comfortable.”
“You learn to make do. Listen. That’s not why I’m calling. Do you know a Nash Fullerton? We don’t have any record of him here at the office. Wilson says he thinks the guy sounds familiar, but he can’t place him.”
“Um, yes, we know him. Sort of. He’s the new maintenance man at the Town Hall. Remember, Helen mentioned his name earlier?”
Darcy swore she could hear Jon slapping his palm against his forehead. “Right! I do remember that. Wow, I must be tired. I still can’t quite place him though. Does he live in town?”
“Just for the last six months. He moved here from out of state, I think. Helen was telling me about it a couple of weeks ago. He has references from his last job, no criminal record. They needed someone, and he basically showed up on the front doorstep, so they hired him. Why?”
There was a short pause on the line as Jon covered the receiver to talk to someone on his end, and then he was back. “Okay. You remember that receipt we found in the Town Hall?”
“You mean, the one I found for you guys?”
“Yes, you beautiful and incredibly smart woman, you. The one that you found for us. It was a receipt from Alex’s Shop and Go, dated from two days ago. I called Alex out of bed and had him see if he could match the receipt to a name. Turns out that Nash paid with a check, so all Alex had to do was match the time on the receipt to the purchase.”
Darcy didn’t know what to say about that. “Is Alex supposed to give out that kind of information?”
“Well, no, not technically. Once he knew why I was asking he didn’t have a problem with it. Turns out not everyone demands a warrant when they know there’s a murderer on the loose. So now we have a receipt belonging to the maintenance man, left at the scene of the crime.”
“He could have dropped it there on his rounds, couldn’t he?” Darcy didn’t even really know what Nash did at the Town Hall. Was he supposed to be in the records room?
“Well, that’s possible,” Jon admitted. “He could have been there to clean up, and then dropped a crumpled receipt of paper instead. Somehow, I doubt that. Besides, if we want to believe Gloria and Cameron, they were never in that room and I think that makes Nash the next logical suspect.”
“What about the bootprint?”
“It didn’t match Cameron’s boots. Kind of supports their story that they aren’t killers. Just major drug traffickers. So, if it didn’t match Cameron’s boots, what are the chances it will match Nash’s?”
“I think it’s a pretty safe bet,” Darcy told him, taking another small bite of mashed potatoes. “I still don’t understand why he broke into the public records room and not Helen’s office. The door to the office was fine. He must have keys to the whole place, right?”
“I guess we’ll have to ask him when we find him”
“Yeah. I’m just glad it wasn’t Gloria and Cameron. It’s bad enough that my pen pal of all these years is transporting bundles of drugs from one state to another.”
“It’s just marijuana, but yeah.” Jon seemed torn about that, what with the changing laws about marijuana in the country. “Taking it across state lines like that might just get the DEA involved. We’ve got a call into their field office but for now, those two are guests in our holding cells. Why in the world did they think stopping at a police officer’s house with all of that in their trunk would be a good idea?”
“Well, they probably weren’t expecting to get wrapped up in a murder investigation along the way.”
“Sure. So, if the killing wasn’t them, my money is on Nash Fullerton.”
Darcy took another bite of her roast and chewed thoughtfully. “What about the security cameras, though? We shouldn’t have to do all this guessing. The recording must have shown someone breaking down the door to the public record’s room, right?”
“Funny you should mention that. It turns out the recordings for today were erased, all the way back to midnight. So, there goes Helen’s alibi, and there goes us seeing who broke in this evening. But hey, guess who has access to the cameras?”
“The maintenance man,” Darcy guessed. Nash Fullerton.
“Yup. Exactly. So, he and I will be having a nice conversation as soon as my guys find him.”
Darcy put her plate to the side, carefully setting it down on the cushions. “You’re sending an officer to pick him up now? Tonight?” Wow, he really was going to be there for hours yet.
“That’s the way it goes when you’re the police chief of a sleepy little town.”
She could hear the sarcasm in his voice, and she knew what he meant. Things had never really been “sleepy” here in Misty Hollow. Intriguing, sure. Dangerous, sure. Crazy and fun and exciting, sure. Never sleepy.
“That reminds me,” he said, his voice taking on an odd tone. “I still need to have a serious discussion with you about—”
“The big R?” she said.
“The big what now?”
She smiled, even though she knew he couldn’t see her do it. “That’s what I’ve decided to call it. You want to talk about maybe retiring. The big R.”
“Er, yes. I do. It seems like every time I mention it you have something better to do. I think last time it was a pressing need to clean out the fridge.”
“Well those Tupperware containers weren’t going to clean themselves.”
“Not my point, Darcy, but that right there is exactly what I’m talking about.” She heard him moving his phone from one shoulder to the other. “Tell you what, we’ll find some time to talk about this later when—”
“Now,” Darcy said to him.
“Excuse me?”
“Now,” she said again. “I want to talk about this now. I’m here, Jon, and I’m listening. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you that before. I promise, I want to hear you out. I really do.”
“Darcy…”
“If this is what you want, Jon, then we’ll make it work.”
“Darcy…”
“You’re what’s important to me. It doesn’t matter if you’re a police chief or a pizza chef. As long as we’re together.”
“Darcy. Hey, Darcy? Listen to me.”
“I am, Jon. I promise.”
“No, what I mean,” he said, chuckling into her ear, “is that you need to listen to me. Right now. The judge is on the other line. I have to go. This time, it’s me who doesn’t have time to talk about it!”
They both laughed together. It was an easy and natural expression of their love, bubbling up within Darcy. Even during those rare times when they fought, Darcy had never doubted Jon’s love for her. Hopefully she had never given him a reason to doubt hers, either.
After she hung up the phone, she checked her My Little Pony watch. It was seriously late. She should just finish up her dinner and get into bed.
Before she could even lift her fork, Tiptoe was there beside her again, stealthy as ever, curling up against Darcy’s hip and laying her tail over her nose. With a deep sigh, she went to sleep, dreaming kitty-cat dreams.
Darcy snuggled down into the couch cushions. Looked like she might have to sleep right where we she was, unless she wanted to scare Tiptoe off again.
She gave the cat some gentle rubs between her ears. Then she closed her eyes, laying her head back. The couch would be comfy enough for tonight.
Chapter 5
“Darcy? Hey, Darcy.”
Someone was shaking her awake by her shoulder. Darcy opened her eyes, and then closed them again as bright sunlight stabbed at her.
In the gentle breeze, the hammock swayed under her, trying to lull her back to sleep. She yawned and stretched. As much as she wanted to stay right here all day, comfy and cozy, she knew that she couldn’t. There were things she had to do.
She also knew this was a dream.
This was part of her gift, these life-like dreams. It wasn’t real. It just felt that way. For instance, there was no hammock in her back yard. Also, Tiptoe was not five feet tall, and she wasn’t able to stand on her back legs, and she wasn’t able to talk.
Seriously. Talking cats were just silly.
“Darcy, don’t be like that,” Tiptoe said. “I’m cute, but I’m not silly. And here I thought we were starting to get along so well.”
