Laid to Rest (A Darcy Sweet Cozy Mystery Book 18) (8 page)

Darcy could only stare.  She’d just assumed Millie had always intended the house and shop to come to her.  In the future.  Many years from now, after Millie had lived to be about a hundred and fifteen.  Now all the pieces seemed to point to Millie’s death being something more than the peaceful tragedy she had been told it was.

Thinking about it that way, hearing that Millie seemed to know her death was coming…it was just creepy.

In the back of the bookstore, several books fell off their shelf to the floor.  Thud.  Thud.  Thud. 
Thud.

Helen jumped.  Darcy knew what it was.  Or rather, who it was.  Millie had finally decided to show up, and she wasn’t happy that this secret had come to light.  Darcy was two steps away from screaming at her aunt’s spirit that this was something she needed to know.  No more secrets!

“Well, I should go…” Helen said, clasping her hands together to keep them from shaking.  Some people weren’t as comfortable around ghosts as Darcy and Jon were.

“Was there anything else?” Jon asked before Helen could bolt out the door.  “Anything else from that time that struck you as odd?”

“Why?” Helen wanted to know.  “What’s all this got to do with Millie?”

“That’s what we’re trying to figure out,” he answered, evasively.  “Was there anything you can remember?”

Helen went through her memories while her eyes kept darting to the back of the store.  “Um.  Well.  There was one time that she saw a man in my deli.  She asked me if I knew who it was but when I looked, there was no one there.  I just assumed it was one of her, um, visions.  I guess that’s what you call it.  But she insisted there was someone following her.  I asked her if she wanted me to call Joe Daleson, but she told me no.  She said she knew who it was and she could take care of it.”

Now Darcy did turn around to glare at the back of the store.  “Handle it, Aunt Millie?  Really?”

Another book fell, but that was the only answer.

“Darcy, um, I’m going to go home.”  Helen’s voice was less than steady.  It was easy to tell she had no interest in being here if her dead friend was about to make an appearance.  “Please, call me if there’s anything I can do.”

With an uncertain glance at the back corner of the store, Helen backed her way out of the door and went walking quickly down the street.

“I swear to you, Jon,” Darcy snapped, throwing her hands in the air, the beehive journal still tight in her grip.  “My aunt must have been the most stubborn, bull-headed woman I’ve ever known!”

“Runs in the family,” Jon muttered, watching her.

“You are not funny,” she told him, punctuating her words with a finger against his chest.  “None of this had to happen.  Millie could have come to me.  She could have gone to the police.  But, no!  She had to ‘handle it’ by herself!”

“Maybe she couldn’t go to the police,” Jon offered.  “Besides, Darcy, we don’t know what happened, or if anything at all happened.  Remember?  As far as we know Millie’s death was just that.  An old woman passing away in her sleep.”

“Sure,” she griped.  “I don’t know.  I don’t know what to believe anymore.”

“Then let’s go talk to Sean.”  He took her hands, and held them tightly, even though she tried to stay mad at him.  “We need answers.  We won’t find them here listening to books falling off shelves.”

The next book falling to the floor was so loud that Darcy had no doubt it had been thrown with all the force her aunt’s ghost could gather.

Photocopying the journal took nearly twenty full minutes.  Some of the pages got torn in the process but other than that it survived.  Then they were at the police station, up the street, in five minutes more.

Darcy kept track of each second that passed them by.

Time was slipping away from her.  No matter how she tried to rush, it kept working against her.  What she really wanted to do was run from house to house through town, calling Smudge’s name, even though she knew how stupid that sounded.  The best they could do was follow the trail where it led them.

Right now, it had led them to Sean Fitzwallis.

The police station was an oasis of light in the middle of the deepening night.  A one story building that had always seemed so big to Darcy when she first moved here.  It was such a sleepy little town, why would they ever need a police force with this many officers?

Now the department had outgrown this building and was looking at moving to a new location or expanding the existing structure somehow.

Through the tall glass doors at the front she and Jon entered the lobby, where a sliding Plexiglas window allowed visitors to speak to an officer before ever being granted access to the areas in back where the real police work was done.  A door to the right of the service window could only be opened from inside by the press of a button.  Darcy and Jon could have used his key to get right in through the locked back door, but they wanted to come in through the front.

The front desk was where Sergeant Fitzwallis would be working.

He was sitting there now as they came in, feet kicked up on the desk in front of the radio console and the phones, reading the sports section of the newspaper.  He folded the page down when they came in, looking at them over the top of it.

Smiling, he set the paper down and sat up in his chair, taking his feet quickly off the counter.  “Hi, Chief.  Sorry about that, just kicking my feet up for a minute, I was.”

“Don’t worry about it, Sean.”  Jon pushed the sliding service window open all the way, and leaned his elbows on the ledge.  “I know how long the night shift can be.  Come on out here for a minute, will you?  I want to talk to you.”

The sergeant watched Jon with his pale blue eyes, searching for some indication of what his chief might want.  He was a very old man.  Darcy knew that, but he was still a very capable police officer.  Maybe not for patrol work, or walking a beat, but he was a smart man and really kept the whole department running.  He’d been a police officer here in town for as long she could remember, and for as long as she could remember, he’d been old.

She had no idea what age he really was.  He still had a thick head of white hair, even if it was starting to recede a little up front, but his body had become thinner with time, his uniform hanging from his shoulders, his duty belt hanging low from a thin midsection.  His exact age might be a mystery but one thing was for certain.  He was old enough that he would have known Aunt Millie probably since she was a young girl.

So it wasn’t his age that concerned Darcy.  It was what he might know.

“Uh, sure thing, Chief.  Be right out.”  Sean closed the service window and locked it, coming around to the locked door into the lobby.  “What do you need?”

Then Darcy stepped out to stand next to Jon, and she saw Sean’s eyes widen.  He’d seen the beehive journal in her hand.  There was no mistaking his reaction.

“Oh,” he said, shifting his feet.  “You found that, did you?”

Darcy held the journal up.  “Yes, I did.  Did everyone know about this thing but me?”

“No, nothing like that,” Sean assured her.  “I knew about it, sure.  Your aunt told me about it.”

When, Darcy wanted to ask.

Jon spoke first.  “So you didn’t know Darcy had it?”

Sean arched a gray eyebrow and spread his hands.  “How could I?  Near as I knew, your aunt had hidden it away.  That’s what she told me, anyway.”

When?  Darcy stared at Sean Fitzwallis, the question burning inside of her.

“Sean, listen.”  Jon looked around the small lobby with its waiting chairs and Stay Safe posters.  They were still alone, just the three of them.  “This is important.  The reason Darcy’s cat got kidnapped has something to do with this journal.  I need you to tell us what you know about it.”

“How did you know to come ask me?” Sean wanted to know.

“Not really the point right now, is it?” Jon said, his voice tight.  “Let’s just say that Millie left us enough clues to figure it out.”

“Yup,” Sean nodded.  “That’s how she was.  Same with the journal.”

“When?” Darcy finally shouted.  “When exactly did she tell you about this?  Huh, Sean?  When?”

He looked at her for a long moment, as if making a decision, and then answered.

“It was when she died, Darcy.”

The words crashed into her like waves.  Everything she had thought was solidly set in stone was being washed away.

She didn’t remember sitting down.  She was just suddenly in one of the chairs against the wall, looking up at Jon and Fitzwallis.  Her hands were clenched around the journal.  This damned book.  This one stupid little book.  Maybe it would have been better if it had stayed buried in that wall.

“Sean,” she said, making herself put the journal down on her lap, “please, tell us what you know about this.  Why is it so important?  Why did my aunt hide it?”

“She said it was the most important thing she’d ever written,” Sean said, as if that explained anything.

It didn’t.

“A lot of what she wrote is ruined now,” Darcy pointed out, “because she stuffed it into some hidden nook in our basement.  Why would she do that, Sean?  Why would she hide it away if it was so important?  And when, exactly, did she have time to tell you about it after the fact?”

He sat down next to her, his eyes on the journal.  “She hid it because she didn’t want the wrong people to find it.”

“Like me?”  The question tasted bitter on her tongue.

“Oh, no.  She wanted you to find it.  Just not until you were ready.  I guess now was the time.”

Darcy looked at him sharply.  Did he know about Millie?  He couldn’t know her spirit was still around, still here for Darcy to talk to.  He couldn’t know that her aunt had, in fact, decided to give the journal to Darcy now.

He couldn’t…but it sure sounded like he did.

Jon cleared his throat, drawing their attention back to him.  “It seems like you knew a lot about what Millie did and didn’t do.”

It was a simple statement with a lot of implication hidden behind it.  Sean didn’t quite smile, but his face softened with whatever memories he was thinking about.  “Millie was a special woman, Chief.  There were a lot of men who wanted to be her one and only, back when we were all young.  I was one of them, but she made it clear she wasn’t interested.  She surely did.  Her one true love was the man she eventually married.  That was your Uncle Phillip, Darcy.  I understood how things like that go, and she and I stayed friends.  Even after Phillip passed on.”

He drew a deep breath, the memories turning bitter.  “So I knew she was keeping the journal.  I knew she hid it, too, because she knew she was going to die soon.”

“Why didn’t you say something?” Darcy demanded.

“It was her wish that I keep it to myself.  It was her decision.  I just respected it.”

“When,” Darcy asked again, locking her gaze with his.  “Tell me when all this happened.”

He didn’t hesitate.  “It was the day she died.”

Jon swore.

Darcy drew in a sharp breath.  “You were there,” she guessed.  “When she died, you were there!”

“Well.  Not when she died, no.”  Sean leaned back in his chair, staring up at the ceiling, looking backward through the years.  “I was the responding officer, though.  Of course, that was before your time, Chief.  Darcy had taken up with that Jeff fellow back then.”

“Thanks for reminding me,” Jon mumbled sarcastically.  “So what happened when Millie died?  We get a call here at the office or something?”

“You could say that.”

“I think I did say that.”  Jon crossed his arms, his stance suddenly confrontational.  “I have the feeling you’ve got a point to get to but you’re taking a long time to get there, Sergeant.  You responded to the call.  You found Millie in the house.  From what Darcy told me, the cause of death was natural causes?”

Sean’s eyes slipped toward Darcy, then back to the ceiling.  “That was just what she wanted me to say.”

“What are you saying, Sergeant?”

“I’m saying,” Sean answered, “that I wrote the report up as death by natural causes.  Died peacefully in her sleep, in bed.”

Darcy felt the tears start and she tried to hold them back but she couldn’t, because she knew what was coming next.

“The truth is,” he continued, “she was smothered in bed.  Sorry, Darcy, but it’s time that you knew.  Someone held her down, put something like a pillow or a plastic sheet down over her face, and smothered her.”

Time slipped for Darcy.  She might have screamed.  She knew she cried.  The beehive journal went sailing across the lobby to land like a wounded bird against the floor, pages folded over on themselves and mushed up together.  If she didn’t know it might be the key to getting Smudge back then she would have been very happy to leave it right where it was.

“How could you do that?” she finally shouted, coming back to herself with Jon holding onto her shoulders, her hands fisted tightly, and the strongest urge to throttle someone.  Anyone.

Sean Fitzwallis would be a good start.

“Darcy, it was Millie’s request.  I know it was wrong, and believe me I thought it through every which way I could, but it was the right thing to do.”

“How?  For the love of God, Sean, you explain to me how covering up my aunt’s murder was the right thing to do!”

Still sitting in that chair, Sean Fitzwallis turned to look at her at last.  “It was to protect you, Darcy.  She asked me to do it to protect you, and I agreed to help her do that.”

“Protect me from what?  The truth?”

“In a way, I guess.”  He shrugged, and tried to find the words to explain it better.  “If you had known the truth, your life would have been in danger, too.  The only way Millie could protect you was by keeping you in the dark all these years.  Until now.”

He stood up, long and agile for a man his age, and reached out with a hand that Darcy swatted away.  “I know you’re angry, Darcy.  You’ve got a right to be, and that’s a fact.  Please try to understand that Millie did this because she loved you.  She asked me to watch over you after she was gone.  And I have.  I’ve watched over you like a friend should.  I’ve seen you grow up and get yourself in and out of all sorts of trouble.  You’ve become a smart, amazing young woman.  I know your aunt is so proud of you.”

Jon exchanged a look with Darcy.

“You know, Sean, this all raises a big question,” Jon said to the sergeant.  Darcy stepped away from him with a hand in the air to show him that she was fine.  Or, as close to fine as she was going to be for the moment.  “You keep saying that Millie asked you to do all this.  That she told you about the journal and asked you to keep it a secret.  That she told you Darcy’s life was in danger and then asked you to watch over her when she was gone.  Darcy’s asked you several times when Millie did all of that, and now I’m asking you.  When, Sean?”

Shifting his feet, Sean spread his hands apart.  “I can’t tell you that part, Chief.”

“Excuse me?  I’m in charge of this department.  In case you missed it that means I’m your boss.  Even if I wasn’t, I’m Darcy’s husband and I’m telling you, right now, to tell us everything you know about this!”

“I’m telling you everything I can, Chief.  Millie knew she was in danger.  She told me so.  She told me that Darcy would find that journal when the time was right and that until then it would stay hidden.  There was someone after her, and she was afraid for her life, and for Darcy’s.”

“Who, Sergeant?  Tell us who was after her.”

“That part she never told me.  She said it was in the journal.”

“I’ve read that journal!” Darcy exploded.  “At least, every part of it that can still be read, thanks to my aunt’s wonderful plan of burying it in our basement.  There’s nothing in there about who was trying to hurt her.  Not.  One.  Thing.”

Sean looked at her with a gentle kind of criticism.  “When have you ever known Millie to tell you anything straight out?  Isn’t she always leaving clues and expecting you to figure things out on your own?”

Darcy had to admit that was exactly how Millie had always been.  Even back when she’d still been alive, she’d expected Darcy to figure things out on her own.  It sharpens the mind, she said on more than one occasion.  Can’t tell you everything or you’ll never learn to think for yourself.

Too bad her aunt couldn’t make an exception.  Just this once.

No.  That wasn’t how Millie did things.  Or Darcy either, for that matter, and in that moment of realization Darcy came very close to understanding everything her aunt had done.  The lies, the secrets, all of it.

Not that she was ready to forgive her.  That would be a long time coming.