A Darcy Sweet Mystery Box Set Six

by K. J. Emrick

  “That’s not fair,” she argued. “I didn’t cause any of those murders. They would have happened whether I was here or not.”

  He shook his head. “Would they? I’m not so sure. Darcy, you’re dangerous in a different way. You attract danger to you like a magnet pulls at iron filings. And, you love it. I swear that you live for it. Now, I never said anything before because you’re one of my Helen’s best friends, but I swear that you enjoy all of this. The mystery. The intrigue. All of it.”

  “Bruce, I…” she tried again.

  “No, Darcy, this is my wife we’re talking about, not one of your little mysteries! You can’t just let it be, can you? She died in her sleep. She died in our bed. Why can’t you just let it be without trying to turn it into something else entirely?”

  Silence fell between them again and for the longest time all Darcy could do was blink at him. Was that what he really thought of her? What about the rest of the town, she wondered. Did they all think the same?

  For a moment, a sweeping sense of depression washed over her as she imagined people whispering behind her back and pointing at her as she walked down the street. She hadn’t felt that insecure for a long time. Not since she was a young girl just coming here to Misty Hollow to live with her Great Aunt. Things had changed for her since then, but she remembered how that had felt.

  It was a feeling of loneliness, and separation. A feeling of not belonging.

  This was what it felt like to be different from everyone else. When you had all the best intentions in the world and still you were constantly misunderstood.

  A flash of memory brought her back to her childhood, when she would try to act ‘normal’ around everyone. She would hide her special gifts, so no one would call her different, or odd, or weird.

  Or dangerous.

  In her next breath she was able to calm herself down and realize that Bruce was only speaking out of his grief and anger. He didn’t mean it. Or, if he did, he hadn’t mean it to sound as harsh as it did. Grief and anger were the same emotions Darcy had been drowning in for the last few days. It was hard to feel good about what he had said about her, but at the same time it was understandable. She wasn’t going to hold it against him. His wife was gone. She thought coming here would make things better for both of them, but the truth was something he just wasn’t ready to hear.

  The most she could do was be the friend to him that she had always been to Helen.

  “I’m sorry,” she told him, standing up from the chair. “I didn’t come here to upset you, Bruce. That’s the last thing I’d want to do. I can’t change the way you think about me, but please understand I wasn’t here to make things worse. Helen put a great deal of stock in the truth. That’s all I came here for today. I wanted you to know we haven’t given up on Helen. We all still love her, and we’ll get to the bottom of whatever happened.”

  “Even if I want you to leave it alone?” he said, his angry voice now touched with sadness. “Just, leave it alone and let it be? My wife is dead. Finding someone to blame for it isn’t going to change that fact.”

  “No, but it will make things right.”

  He held her gaze for a long moment, his expression unreadable, before slowly shaking his head. A ghost of a smile crossed his lips. “You are something else, Darcy Sweet.”

  She took that as a compliment. “I’m going to leave for now. Again, I’m sorry. Is there anything that I can do for you before I go? Anything at all?”

  “Uh, well,” he hesitated, scratching at the side of his beard. “Actually, if you could take the garbage down to the container outside for me? All that food people keep bringing and I’ve got nowhere to put it. I’ve already tossed out a nasty looking scalloped potato and ham casserole dish from Judith Shapiro, and there were these homemade rolls that were hard as stones, and something that had chunks of pineapple floating in it. I mean, I know Helen used to do all of the cooking for us but how much food do people think I can eat all by myself? Plus, some of these recipes. Terrible.”

  Darcy’s memory jolted at those words. “Oh, that reminds me. Did Helen leave her recipe for blueberry lemon tarts anywhere? I’d love to have that.”

  “You know what, I think she did. I’ll have to find it for you. Then, at least someone in this town would know how to cook decent food.”

  Darcy laughed along with him. He wasn’t throwing her out of his house anymore, and that was something at least. Depending on how the mystery unfolded, she might have better news for him next time. Or, she supposed, he might never let her across his doorstep again. So if he wanted her to take out the trash, that’s what she would do for him.

  He wasn’t lying when he said that he’d dumped out several food dishes. He’d put them in, containers and all. Glass casserole dishes and plastic Tupperware containers and other things that made funny shaped bulges against the plastic garbage bag when Darcy pulled it out. It made for a pretty heavy load. At least it didn’t smell too bad.

  She managed to hold it up over the floor on the way out of the house but when she got outside, she let it drag along the grass. This was definitely not something she had expected to be doing today. When she told Zane that she had an errand to run, this had never crossed her mind. It was the least she could do, though. Actually, she wished she could do more. Sometimes helping a friend meant lending an ear, sometimes it meant helping them through tough financial times, and sometimes it meant taking a leaky bag of garbage out to the curb.

  In Misty Hollow, almost everyone’s trash was picked up by Danny White. He’d been running the business since his father retired twenty years ago. He was a nice guy with a sunny disposition, especially considering he literally dealt with people’s garbage day in and day out. He ran the route twice a week, and the next pick up day was tomorrow. Good thing, too. It didn’t smell yet, but a bag full of food like this was going to start reeking sooner rather than later.

  Setting the bag down, leaning it against the side of the green garbage container at the end of the driveway, Darcy took off the lid. She glared at the collection of bags and loose trash inside. She wasn’t looking forward to lifting the new, heavy bag up and in. She was going to have to change her clothes afterward to get the smell off…

  She stopped where she was. On top of the trash inside the container was a small plastic shopping bag poorly tied around something with an odd shape. An eight-sided object about ten inches high.

  It couldn’t be. Yet, there it was right in front of her.

  She reached for it, feeling like she’d just spiraled into the Twilight Zone.

  Wrinkling her nose at the smell, she snagged it out. Pulling back a corner of the bag, she saw a clear acrylic octagon, with a very familiar inscription written on it.

  “In Honor of Your Years of Service.”

  Darcy was holding Helen’s missing award. The one that should have been in her office up there at the house. The one that disappeared around the same time that Helen was murdered.

  She’d looked everywhere for this.

  Everywhere except here, in Bruce’s trashcan.

  She looked back up the long driveway to the house. How did this get here, from there? Her thoughts were taking her down some very dark pathways. She had been so sure that Carson Everly was the murderer, but her theory of him as the killer didn’t include him throwing away this award. Someone had tossed it out. Right here. In front of Bruce’s house.

  Did that mean Bruce was the killer?

  It couldn’t be true. Bruce Turner was a good man. He loved Helen. He had an alibi…

  Except, his alibi had never been confirmed. He’d said he was out with a friend, and no one had checked him on it because no one would ever think the worst of that man.

  And, he didn’t want Darcy even looking into the possibility that someone had killed his wife. He’d called her dangerous and told her to leave it alone. Was that because he did it?

  No.

  Maybe...

  Now she needed to talk to Helen’s ghost more than ev
er.

  Zane was down for a nap in his room. Cha-Cha was in the kitchen chomping on some kibble that Darcy had bought today when she stopped to get a frisbee like she’d promised Zane. There was still two hours left in the day before Colby would get home from school. That should be plenty of time for her to conduct a communication.

  Hopefully. As long as Helen’s ghost was cooperative.

  She’d already taken everything she would need out of her spirit communication kit. Now the carved wooden box was sitting on the coffee table, which had been moved to the side of the living room to give her more space to work. She had to move some of Zane’s toys aside as well, which reminded her that it was high time to start teaching her son the value of picking up after himself.

  The box had been a gift from Jon, and she loved it dearly. Every few weeks she changed up the stuff that was in it. The tools of the trade changed based on what she needed, and even more so on her mood.

  The candles from the kit were from last Christmas. They were short and squat, made of beeswax, and scented like coconut. Not that coconut had any particularly special power when it came to summoning ghosts. Darcy just liked the aroma. Over the years she’d used scentless candles, and flowery scented candles, and pine scented, and several others. There had also been one in there that smelled like coffee a few years ago. That had been a mistake. The aroma kept distracting her when she tried to make a connection to the other side.

  She took the coconut candles one by one, all five of them, and set them into an imaginary circle on the floor of the living room. The glass coasters underneath each one would keep her rug from being scorched by their heat. They kept the candles from tipping over accidentally, too. The last thing she would ever want was for the house to catch fire while she was in a trance.

  The light from the candles, and the essence of the circle, were both basic elements of the spirit communication. Darcy knew the whole explanation behind both, and she’d tried to explain it to Jon once or twice, but it was a lot more complicated than it sounded. Now he didn’t bother asking her to explain. He just took it on faith.

  Darcy folded herself down cross-legged in the middle of the candle circle, and then placed Helen’s award on the floor in front of her, still in its plastic bag. She hadn’t told Jon about what she had found. Not yet. She needed something important of Helen’s to help forge a link between this plane—the world of the living—and the next place. The award would be perfect. If he took it to run his cop tests on it then she would have to find something else of Helen’s. She didn’t see the point in wasting time finding another object when she already had one in hand.

  Thankfully, she didn’t need to take it out of the grocery bag she had found it in. Yes, it stank like garbage, but if her paranormal gifts failed to get the answers she needed then science might just have to step in. The police could lift fingerprints off the plastic octagon or the wooden base of the award to show who had been holding it. Assuming this really was the murder weapon, she’d rather not add her fingerprints to the killer’s. Leaving it in the bag was for the best.

  In the kitchen, she saw Cha-Cha staring at her through the diamond spaces of the child safety gate. With Zane upstairs for a nap, she usually unhooked the gate between the kitchen and the living room so that she didn’t have to step over it. At least, she used to. Now that there was a dog in the house, she needed to keep that gate closed for her spirit communications.

  “It’s all right, boy,” she told him. “Stay in there for a bit. I’ll be done here shortly. I hope.”

  He sneezed, but then turned around and went back to his bowl of dog food.

  Now what was that supposed to mean? Darcy considered herself fairly fluent in cat. Learning how to talk dog, on the other hand, was going to take some getting used to.

  And speaking of cats…

  Tiptoe had watched her silently from the top of the stairs while she got out her spirit communication kit and then got everything ready. She knew what that meant. For years, her daddy had helped Darcy during her spirit communications. Smudge had been an old hat at this. He’d helped Darcy into and out of dozens of communication states. Maybe hundreds. She’d lost count over the years.

  Now, that job had fallen to Tiptoe. While Darcy was inside the meditative, trance-like state that allowed her to talk to the other side, her feline companion would keep an eye on things going on around her. If someone came knocking at the door, Tiptoe would try to get Darcy’s attention. If Zane woke up and started wandering around, Tiptoe would rouse Darcy awake. If someone broke into the house, or if the house caught fire—not because of the candles, of course—or if she got stuck in the communication for more than an hour or so, Tiptoe would find some way to warn Darcy about the danger she was in.

  Now, Tiptoe climbed nimbly up into Darcy’s lap and curled into a ball with her tail covering her mouth and nose. Her eyes narrowed on the kitchen doorway and that safety gate, almost daring Cha-Cha to try getting in here until they were done.

  One ear flicked. Dogs. Why did it have to be dogs?

  “He won’t bother us,” Darcy told her. “He knows his place is in the kitchen for now.”

  Tiptoe made a noise in her throat. Whatever.

  Darcy chuckled, and stroked the cat’s fur. There was a reason why witches were so often depicted with cats as their familiars. Cats made the best guardians for a spirit communication. They were smart and quick, and they were more than capable of sitting still for long stretches of time, which was more important than it sounded when it came to a spirit communication. If your little animal helper got bored and wandered off while you were in a trance, and no one was there to tell you the house was on fire, then that was bad. A cat would at least hang out until they got hungry.

  There was something about a cat’s essence that bridged the gap between life and death, too. That part was less science and common sense than it was pure magic.

  Not that Darcy was a witch. Far from it. She just understood where the myth came from.

  She had read in Great Aunt Millie’s journals that some people used parrots during a spirit communication, because they could be trained to say certain phrases like “wake up stupid,” or just make a lot of noise. Some people had actually been known to use snakes, which was just weird to Darcy on so many levels. Cats were best, though. That was more than just Darcy’s opinion. It was fact.

  There had never been an entry in Millie’s journals about someone using a dog in a spirit communication. Probably because dogs had that tendency to get distracted at every little dust mote floating in the air. Or their own tail wagging, for that matter.

  “Come on, Darcy. Concentrate.”

  Focusing on the award in its plastic bag, she pushed her thoughts aside, picturing Helen in her mind’s eye and only Helen. Then she started to enter the trance.

  Closing her eyes, Darcy took three slow breaths. One at a time. Breathe in, breathe out.

  Breathe in… breathe out.

  Breathe in…

  …breathe out…

  The slow rhythm cleared her mind. It became a blank space, endlessly filled with nothing in every direction. When she opened her eyes, she found herself standing in the middle of that nothing.

  A momentary sense of vertigo quickly passed over her just like it always did. She imagined clouds of billowing white fog, all around her, filling up the entire empty space she had created. This was the space in between life and death. The bridge between this world, and the next. This was something her gift allowed her to do. She could stand here, in this gap between the living and the dead, here but not really here at all, and call out to the spirits of those who had departed.

  It was kind of neat, even now that she’d seen it so many times before. Hard to believe she had ever been ashamed of what she was. She could do something so amazing. It really was a gift.

  Of course, it wasn’t nearly as easy as it sounded. This was kind of like trying to make an important phone call to someone when you didn’t even know their number.
Sometimes the call to the other side got redirected, like a wrong number. Sometimes the call got hijacked and Darcy would find herself stuck talking to a ghost who had problems she knew nothing about. Other times, no one even answered the call. Sometimes the dead didn’t even know they were dead. It was hard to convince someone they were a ghost in need of your help when they wouldn’t even believe they really were a ghost.

  It was also very tiring to do this. The gift drew on her own physical energies and left her feeling tired and weak.

  She stood there, in the empty endless space, and cast out her voice and her gift, calling for the ghost of her good friend.

  “Helen?” Her voice sounded hollow in this place. Like the fog and the emptiness were swallowing it up and then echoing it back to her from every direction. She spoke Helen’s name again, and it was repeated back to her again, and again.

  She waited, but there was no answer. That wasn’t unusual. The distance between here and there was immeasurable, even in this place she had invented within her mind. What was right next to her could be unreachable. The other side of eternity could be in the palm of her hand.

  So she didn’t get discouraged. She just tried again.

  “Helen Turner! It’s me, Darcy. I need to talk to you.”

  “Need to talk…” her voice echoed, rising in volume and fading away again.

  It was kind of creepy.

  “Darcy…me…you…”

  “Helen…”

  The name rushed at her out of the mists.

  “Helen…”

  Over and over.

  “Helen…”

  “Darcy.”

  That last word didn’t echo. It didn’t sound muffled. It was perfectly clear, and it was spoken in a voice that she easily recognized.

  She couldn’t help the way she smiled when she saw Helen. A shadow became solid within the mists, and when it stepped closer, there she was. Here was her friend, or her essence at least.