A Darcy Sweet Mystery Box Set Six
Page 33
He stamped his foot and puffed out his lip. “Pancakes, Momma. Lotsa pancakes!”
Of course he knew that word perfectly.
Jon gave her a kiss on her way out of the bedroom and squeezed her hand. “I love you, Darcy Sweet.”
She might be in her flannel pajamas, but she could feel his body standing this close to her, in ways that went beyond the physical touch of his hand. This kind of love was something a girl didn’t find every day. She’d lucked out with Jon Tinker.
In the bathroom, she set the spray in the shower and while it warmed up, she undressed. Wiping the steam away from the mirror with her hand revealed her face, so familiar to her even with the changes life had brought.
Once, not that long ago, she could have overlooked the wrinkles creeping in around her eyes, but there was no denying that she wasn’t exactly young anymore. Young at heart, yes. Too young to act old, sure. Young enough to pull off the tank tops and tight jeans she used to wear… not so much. Maybe the chunky belts. Oh, and the sandals. She could definitely still rock the sandals. Just not today. It might not be snowing yet but it definitely wasn’t sandal weather.
Her soft green eyes were still the same. Age hadn’t faded them one bit.
She ran a hand through her hair and blew herself a kiss. She shifted her gaze down in the mirror’s reflection.
Nope. She wasn’t old yet.
A glint on her right hand in the mirror was her Great Aunt Millie’s ring. Etched in intricate designs all the way around, it had become a talisman of sorts for Darcy. Whenever she felt sad or worried, it was always there to remind her that she wasn’t alone. Not really.
On her other wrist, the charms on her mother’s bracelet jangled, reminding her to take it off before getting in the shower. This had been a gift from Colby and Jon a few years ago and she tried to remember to wear it as often as she could. It was a fun piece, it just wasn’t always practical. The little gold bangles included a cat, and a heart, and a pair of dice, and an elephant, among others. With all those things swinging around, it could be noisy at all the wrong times. It would be fine for mini golf, just not for stuff like a church service, or whatever.
The sleek gray cat jumping up onto the sink startled her. “How did you get in here little cat?” Darcy looked toward the closed bathroom door and then back at the cat. She figured the little cat must have followed her in and she hadn’t noticed.
Tiptoe curled her tail around her feet and stared at Darcy with those pearlescent green eyes. Those eyes came from her mother. The black tip of one ear came from her father, Smudge. So had the three white paws she’d been born with. She’d grown out of those, the white slowly giving way to a gray the same color as the rest of her, but the black on her ear was still there if you looked hard enough.
There was a curious sort of intelligence in Tiptoe’s eyes. There was more than a little aloof indifference, too. Even for a cat, Tiptoe felt she was superior to people. She had never outgrown the defiance she’d picked up in her teenage years. Strictly speaking, she was well past that now—in cat years—but she seemed determined to hold onto that attitude. She wasn’t that way with Colby. If anything, she was Colby’s cat, not Darcy’s.
Part of it was the fact that she was still grieving the loss of her father. Smudge had been important to both of them, but Darcy could at least see him sometimes in her dreams. She didn’t know if Tiptoe was ever that lucky. Those two had been so close. Not having him around was still an adjustment. For all of them.
Darcy ran her hand down the cat’s back, over and over, as the shower continued to steam up the room. Tiptoe arched into the motion and purred softly. Darcy was about to make a comment about how nice this was when Tiptoe decided she didn’t want to be touched anymore. She jumped down from the sink to curl up on the fuzzy rug in front of the door. One eye stayed open, looking up at Darcy.
“Fine. You stay there. I have to get ready to go out with the family, anyway. You know. Shower, brush my teeth, that sort of thing.”
Tiptoe opened her other eye, and lazily brought one front paw around to start licking at her toes.
“Oh, sure,” Darcy laughed, “you can clean yourself. If I tried that, people would just call me weird.”
Rubbing her damp paw over her face, Tiptoe kept on with her bath while Darcy stepped into the nice, hot shower.
After she had toweled dry, and gotten dressed, she got out the toothpaste and her toothbrush. Her hair would need to be combed before it dried into a tangled mess, but that could wait until—
The knock on the door was a soft rapping, but it still startled Darcy. It spooked Tiptoe as well. She jumped up to her feet, glaring at the door as if there might be a monster on the other side. Or a dog. Tiptoe didn’t like dogs very much.
Then she flicked her tail, and sat back on her hind paws, focusing her gaze on an unseen spot on the wall. She hadn’t been the least bit scared, she was trying to say. It had been her choice to wake up out of that nap. That’s all.
Darcy tried not to laugh at her. It was just the family looking to get in. Jon or Colby, most likely, because Zane hadn’t learned the fine art of knocking softly yet. Nothing to be spooked about. She’d heard of plenty of ghosts who knocked on walls to get the attention of the living, but they usually didn’t knock on doors. Usually, they just came right through. Normally it was just the living types who knocked on doors.
“Just a minute, please. I haven’t been in here that long, have I? I’ve got to brush my teeth yet. I guess I could skip it. I mean, we’re going for pancakes, right?”
“Darcy?” she heard Jon’s voice. He sounded… odd. “It’s me. Can you unlock the door so I can come in?”
“Well, sure. I’m dressed and everything.” Why was he being so quiet? She unlocked the door and opened it for him. Tiptoe zipped out as soon as she did, before Jon closed it again behind him. “Hey. You need your cologne or something? We’re just going out with the kids. No need to doll yourself up just for us.”
She said it with a smile. He didn’t smile back. “Actually,” he said, “I need to go into work. Mini golf’s going to have to wait.”
“What? Jon, the kids have been looking forward to this for a week now.”
“I know, Darcy. I feel really terrible about it. I’m hoping we can do it tonight instead.” He paused, like he wanted to say something and couldn’t find the words. “That is, if either of us feels like going out tonight.”
“Jon, I don’t know what you’re talking about, but whatever they called you in for on a Sunday had better be seriously important.”
She knew that it would be. He wasn’t the type of man to just bail on his family for no good reason. He’d worked himself into a position as police chief, and now he got to schedule his own hours when it came to his free time. She just couldn’t imagine what could be going on that couldn’t be handled by someone else. It had to be something serious, didn’t it, for them to call him—?
“Someone was found dead, Darcy.”
Well. That certainly counted as serious.
This was Misty Hollow, and it wasn’t the first time someone had turned up dead. Something told her there was more to it than that. Maybe it was her gift, telling her a hidden truth. Or maybe it was just the fact that she knew Jon so well. Either way, she could look into his eyes now, and see there was something else going on.
“Jon? What is it?”
He didn’t answer her. Instead, he took her hands and moved her over to the bathtub, sitting her down on the edge, crouching down in front of her. “Darcy…”
Now she really was worried. “Jon, what is it? What happened?”
“It’s Helen Turner.”
Darcy’s eyebrows bunched together. Helen? She was the mayor of Misty Hollow, and Darcy’s good friend. The mayor’s race had been heating up in town and Darcy had been doing everything she could to help Helen win. There was even a “Turn the Tide, Vote for Turner” sign in her front yard, with Helen’s friendly face smiling at anyone who drove down
their short stretch of road.
They’d just spent some time together yesterday, in fact. Darcy had met Helen for lunch and they’d talked for an hour or more about all the things going on in their life.
Now Jon was sitting her down, and telling her something about Helen…
Oh, no.
“Jon, you don’t mean…?”
He nodded, not needing her to say it out loud. “Her husband found her this morning, apparently. She was in her bed and he called an ambulance for her but it was too late.”
Darcy slumped against his chest, her face buried against his shirt. The tears started almost immediately.
“I’m sorry,” Jon told her, sliding his hand in comforting circles around her back. “I’m sorry, Darcy. Helen passed away sometime overnight. She’s dead.”
Chapter 2
Did they suspect foul play?
That had been her first question. She wanted to know if it was murder.
No, he assured her, it was definitely not murder. As far as everyone knew, Helen Turner had passed away peacefully in her sleep from natural causes. There would be the usual tests done by the County coroner, but in all respects, this just looked like the sad passing of a friend. After all, Helen was well into her seventies at this point, and probably should have been taking a break from her life in politics instead of running again for mayor. She just loved Misty Hollow so much. She wanted to be the mayor to help people, and to help the town, and to make things better for everyone just like she had for years.
That was just who Helen was.
Or rather, who she had been. Now she was gone, and Darcy was going to miss her.
She was sitting on her bed again. In fact, she’d been sitting here since Jon left, staring at her socks. Her thoughts were all over the place with no way to focus them. She wanted to be over there with Jon, at Helen’s house, sitting at her side until they came to take her away. Even though there was nothing she could possibly do, that was where she wanted to be. With a sigh, she told herself it was all right. There would be calling hours, and what would undoubtedly be a lovely service with the whole town in attendance. There was no doubt Helen would be remembered well by everyone.
At several points she found herself thinking about the mayor’s election. This was going to make the whole thing pointless. There was only one other candidate, and that would be Carson Everly, and even if everyone voted for Helen in a symbolic gesture Carson would still win by default.
Darcy wasn’t really thinking about the election, though. She was thinking about all of the things she and Helen had done together. Some good, some bad, some that no one would believe even if they were written down in a book and sold through Amazon.
A lot of memories. There were a lot of reasons to remember Helen Turner.
“Mom?”
Darcy looked up to find Colby standing in the doorway, watching her. She had no idea how long her daughter had been there. For that matter, it suddenly struck her that she had no idea what time it was.
“Hey, baby girl,” she said while wiping at the unshed tears in her eyes. Even though Colby hadn’t been a baby for years, Darcy would always think of her that way. “I’m sorry about mini golf. We’ll go later, okay?”
Colby shrugged. “It’s okay. Plans change, and you have to be grown up enough to roll with it. Otherwise, you’re just being juvenile.” She came over to the bed and hopped up to sit next to her mother. “If you’re too sad to play golf, we don’t have to go.”
Darcy couldn’t help but smile. Her daughter really was wise beyond her years. She could always make Darcy feel better. “It’s fine,” she said, giving Colby a sideways hug. “We’ll go as soon as your dad gets back. I think Zane will be upset if he doesn’t get to go after we promised him. Where is Zane, by the way?”
She’d left Colby in charge of her younger brother, explaining that she needed to be alone for ‘just a few minutes.’ That had probably been over an hour ago now, and even though the baby monitor up on the dresser was on, connected to the one in Zane’s room, she knew better than to leave a three year old unsupervised for any length of time.
“He’s fine,” Colby promised. “He was up on his bed pretending to read The Laughing Dragon when I left him. If he gets down, we’ll hear him.”
That was true. For such a little boy, he managed to sound just like an elephant whenever he dropped to the floor. Darcy wouldn’t be a bit surprised to go into his room one day and find a depression worn into the spot right in front of his bed. She gave Colby another squeeze, feeling better for it.
“Mom,” her daughter asked after a moment, “why are you sad?”
Darcy thought about how best to answer that question. What information she should give, and what information she should hold back. She never liked to lie to her children. At the same time, there were things that an eleven-year-old—even one as mature as Colby—just wasn’t ready to hear.
Colby had tried to perform her own spirit communication a while ago, Darcy reminded herself. She had been seeing ghosts for years. She knew more about life and death than most people who claimed to be experts on the subject. Her gifts made her more than prepared for an honest talk on the subject.
So with a slow breath, Darcy opted for the truth.
“One of my best friends died last night. You remember Helen Turner, our town mayor, right?”
Colby nodded, and Darcy thought her eyes got a little bit bigger. “She died? Last night while we was sleeping?”
“Yes. Or this morning, maybe. I don’t have a lot of those details yet. Your dad is there now. I’m sure he’ll be able to tell us more when he gets back.”
“Um.” The little girl fidgeted, stuffing her hands under her legs. “I sort of remember Helen. She was nice. Why would anybody want to hurt her?”
“Oh, no honey. It wasn’t like that.” Darcy pushed the hair back behind Colby’s ear on her right side. “No one hurt Helen. She just passed away. Remember, we’ve talked about how that happens for everyone, eventually. It’s a natural part of life, and it’s nothing to be afraid of.”
Colby nodded. She and Darcy had sat down together several times and talked about what ghosts were, and how people only lived for so long, and all of that. Darcy had added more and more to the conversation each time. There were still things for Colby to learn, but they could wait. Her daughter deserved to be a child for as long as she could, even if she wanted to be all grown up right this instant.
She watched as the little girl chewed on her lip, thinking through what she had just heard. “But, if everyone is going to die, why are you sad?”
“Well, I suppose that’s because people always miss friends when they’re gone. We still miss Smudge, don’t we?”
“Sure we do,” Colby agreed quickly, some of the gloom that had started to collect around her eyes fading away. “We loved him a lot. Tiptoe misses him, too, I think. Don’t tell her I said that. She likes to pretend nothing bothers her. It’s a cat thing.”
Darcy actually laughed. A real, out loud sort of laugh. Suddenly, she wasn’t all that sad anymore. “There’s lots of things cats do that are just like people. You and Tiptoe have been getting along really good, haven’t you? I think she’s more your cat than anyone else’s.”
“We’re good friends,” was the answer, as if it was important to make the distinction between having a pet and having a friend. “So, why did Dad have to go?”
The change in the conversation caught Darcy off guard. “Why? Because he’s the police chief. Sometimes it means he has to go to work even when he’d rather be here with us.”
“No, I mean, why’d he have to go into work if Helen just died from natural clauses like everybody does—”
“Natural causes,” Darcy explained. “We call that natural causes.”
“Right. If she died of natural causes, why did Dad have to go? He’s a police officer and they investigate when someone does something bad. Nothing bad happened to Helen. Death isn’t bad, it’s just… death.”
“Oh. Does that mean it’s more important when some people die than when other people die?”
“No, not at all. It’s just that Helen did something important for the town so they called the police chief in to make sure nothing is wrong.”
Colby nodded. “I get it. You mean like they’ll do when you die in a hundred years from now?”
Darcy appreciated the thought, but she knew it wouldn’t be quite that long. “I don’t think they’ll do that for me when I die, honey.”
“Huh? Why not? You said they have the police investigate whenever someone important dies. Nobody’s more important than you.”
Again, the sentiment in those words made Darcy swell with pride, knowing that her daughter thought so highly of her, but the reality of it was that Darcy was just a local business owner. She liked to help people whenever she could, and she liked to think that she was going to leave the world a better place than she found it, even if it was only in small ways. That didn’t make her important to the town, though. Not in the way that a mayor or a police chief was.
“I’m just me, baby girl. Just plain, ordinary me. When I pass away I hope my children will remember me, and that’s all I can really hope for.”
Colby looked shocked for a moment. “But you’ll come and visit me when you die, right? Me and Zane? You’ll come and visit me the way Aunt Millie still comes to visit us?”
There was a note of panic in that question. When you were little, death was just an abstract idea. People lived, and they died, but it didn’t really mean anything because everyone you loved was going to live forever. When you were just starting your life, every day was the start of an eternity. Colby, grown up eleven-year-old that she was, knew better. Even the people you loved had to die. Sometimes, they died before you were ready.