Til Death Do Us Part (A Darcy Sweet Cozy Mystery Book 16) (7 page)

Darcy promised herself again that she would have a good long talk with Sergeant Fitzwallis sometime soon.  There was a lot more to the man than met the eye.

She walked into the officer’s work area, the squad room with the desks set up for the detectives and the two or three shared by the rest of the officers.  Her sister Grace was at her desk, looking sharp in her white blouse and dark slacks.  Her short dark hair used to be much longer, but the grasping hands of her little baby girl had convinced her to keep it in something like a pageboy cut.  Darcy thought it suited her.  They had pretty similar facial features, her and her sister, but she knew she would always keep her long hair.  No short styles for her.

Hmm.  How should she wear her hair for the wedding?  Just one more thing to worry about getting done so she could walk down the aisle with the man she loved.

Not that it was going to be an aisle.  There would be a pink roll of fabric laid out on the grass of the town center and flower arches for the bride and groom to walk through.

She couldn’t wait.

“You’re thinking about your wedding again, aren’t you?”  Grace was leaning back in her chair, arms folded, a smug look on her face.

Darcy came back to herself and realized her sister was right.  She’d been lost in daydreams about her wedding again.  It was becoming her favorite pastime.

She sat down in the chair across from Grace at her desk.  “I’m here to see Jon, but I’ve got a little time for my Matron of Honor.”

“You’d better.  I’m not just a pretty face, you know.”

“Aaron thinks you are.”

“Yeah, but he’s my husband.  He’s biased.”

“Doesn’t make it any less true, sis,” Darcy added with a wink.

They shared a laugh, talking about the wedding details for a few more minutes, about flower arrangements and whether they should let the guests have rice to throw or maybe get little bubble blowers.

“It’s too bad mom can’t come sooner,” Grace said after a while.

“I’m just glad she’s coming.  I don’t know.  It wouldn’t have been the same without her, I don’t think.”

“I bet you never thought you’d say that.”

Repairing the relationship between them and their mom had taken a long time.  Eileen Sweet was remarried now herself and in Darcy’s opinion, as odd as it sounded, that was one of the things that had brought them closer together.  Just one of many.

“Sounds like you’re all set for the wedding, sis.”  Grace started shuffling the papers on her desk and Darcy knew she probably had a lot of work to do, with the bodies stolen from the cemetery and whatever other small town goings on the police were handling.  “I’m happy for you.  After you and Jeff divorced I figured you’d never take the plunge again.”

“I just had to find the right man, I suppose.”

Grace looked at her with a knowing smile.  “You and Jon are good together.  I’m guessing you’re good in every way?”

A blush heated Darcy’s face.  She could feel it happening.  She and Jon certainly hadn’t waited for their wedding night to find out if they were, ahem, compatible, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t looking forward to the honeymoon.

“Oh, that reminds me,” she said, getting up from Grace’s desk, “did I tell you?  We’ve decided to go to Australia for our honeymoon.”

“Really?  The land of koala bears and men who talk like Crocodile Dundee?”  She leaned back and twisted her lip up and did her best Australian accent.  “G’day, mate, welcome to the outback!”

“That was a horrible accent.  You know that, right?”

Grace stuck her tongue out at Darcy.  “Don’t they have some kind of giant killer snake there?” 

“That’s Florida.  I think.  I mean, they have snakes—”

“Giant firebreathing lizard?”

“You mean Godzilla?”

“I just don’t want you getting killed by some weird animal, sis.  Like the platypus.”

“I’m pretty sure the platypus is a vegetarian,” Darcy said, unable to keep herself from laughing.  Her sister acted serious all the time, but then suddenly she would slip and remember she actually had a sense of humor.  “I have to go see Jon.  Don’t worry.  I promise not to be eaten by any wild animals when we go to Australia.”

“I mean, seriously.”  Grace opened a file and took out a pen to make some notes.  “Why does anyone go to Australia?”

“Oh, the Sydney opera house, the Great Barrier Reef, the Blue Mountains, driving along the Great Ocean Road…”

“Okay, okay, I get the point.  You two are going to see a lot of things and have a lot of fun and be all lovey-dovey.  Got it.”  She waved with the pen.  “Go talk to your man.  He was looking for you earlier anyway.”

On the way to Jon’s office, Darcy noticed how there weren’t many officers in the building.  Not even Wilson Barton, junior detective of the Misty Hollow police force.  Darcy figured he’d be stuck with most of the grunt work on this case, like collecting statements or talking to the victims’ next of kin.

Jon’s door was open, and he was sitting behind his desk, staring at his computer screen, scrolling through an e-mail or a report of some kind.  She stood in the doorway for a moment, just watching him work.  She loved to watch him. 

When she cleared her throat he looked up.  Blinking in surprise, he stood and came around the desk to wrap his arms around her and draw her inside the room.  “Hey.  I’m glad you’re here.  I didn’t figure I’d see you until lunchtime.”

“I needed to get away from the store for a bit.  I have something I think you should check on.  Plus, there’s way too much excitement in this town right now over people being dead.”

“Well,” he said, “to be fair, the people were already dead.  Somebody just dug them up out of the ground.  With a crowbar or something to pry the caskets open.”

“How do you know that?”

“State Police just sent their report over.  After a lot of arm twisting.  Seems they don’t like to share with us local hicks.”

They sat down.  Jon had two chairs set up for visitors on one side of his desk, and he sat there with her, holding her hand the whole time.  She could see how this case was weighing on him.  His first big investigation since becoming chief of police was going to be a real test for him.  She squeezed his hands and smiled at him, letting him see how much confidence she had in him.

“I love you too, Sweet Baby,” Jon told her, hearing everything she hadn’t said.  “It’s just that this one is really bizarre.  And, the State Police still think this is their case even though all of the bodies were stolen from our town cemetery, and they were people who grew up in our town to begin with.  Helen was here to see me this morning, in her capacity as mayor, asking me what I was going to do about all of this.  How am I supposed to answer that?”

“Do you have any suspects yet?” Darcy asked him, wanting to be helpful even though she was pretty sure she already knew the answer.

“Nope.  There’s no security cameras out at the cemetery or anywhere nearby and even if there was, all of the victims were people who had been buried for years. There’s really no way to know when they were dug up.  I’m assuming it was last summer only because I’d like to believe that wherever the bodies were dumped, somebody would have found them before now if they had been out of the graves for any longer than that.”

That made sense.  Hard to miss a pile of bones.  “How did Maven find them, do you think?”

“I think she stumbled on them and took it on herself to sort them out.  She was the county coroner, after all.  She had that kind of obsessive-compulsive nature, if her home was any indication.  So, she sorts them, one bone at a time, puts them into boxes, identifies each body through dental records or DNA sampling or maybe just sheer luck, and puts the names of each victim on the boxes.  Then she dies before she can do anything with them.  After she dies Baxter Sams finds the first box, we find the others, and here we are.”

It made sense.  Maven must have been getting ready to do something with the boxes of bones, but like Jon said no one had expected her to die.  Probably not even Maven.

“But if that’s true,” she said, “doesn’t that mean the bones were all dug up at once?  Or close to all at once?  If Maven had been finding these bones for years wouldn’t she have said something?  Done something?”

Jon nodded.  “I thought of that.  I mean, obviously Maven had some serious mental problems, what with saving all of her toenail clippings and used toothbrushes, but she wouldn’t keep dead bodies a secret forever.  She had the names of the victims.  She could have taken the next step and found out where they came from just like we did.”

“Unless she died first.”

“Right.  So, most likely the bodies were dug up last summer.”

“I agree.  Learn anything else from all that paperwork on your desk there, Chief?”

He smiled at her little tease, and dragged another folder closer.  “I’ve learned lots of stuff, actually.  Not all of it relates to the case.  Look here.”

He pointed to a very short paragraph in the middle of a page.  Darcy leaned over the desk to read it with him.  “Our first two victims,” he said.  “Oscar and Florence Salvatore.  This is what I learned about them.  They got married young, and stayed married for fifty-three years.”

Darcy’s eyes got a little bit wider.  To be married for that long, to the same person, must be some kind of minor miracle.  Sharing your life with the same person for decades.  Knowing that every day you woke up, the same person was going to be there with you.

Now that was love.

Jon wasn’t finished.  “Then, the report skips forward to their death.  Nothing suspicious.  Both of them died of natural causes at a very advanced age.  On the same day.”

“We saw that on their gravestones at the cemetery.”  Darcy was picturing it in her mind.  The Salvatore’s had literally shared their whole life together.

“Yes.  He died early that day.  Florence held on a few more hours, then she passed away, too.”

Darcy felt herself choking up.  They had been together forever, and then Florence couldn’t go on without her other half.  That was so beautiful.  It was the love that every woman dreamed of. 

It was exactly what she wanted for her and Jon.  To be together forever, to live their lives until there was no more life to live, and exit the stage side by side.

“Are you okay?” Jon asked her, reaching up to brush a tear away from her cheek.  “I didn’t mean to make you sad.  I thought…”

“No,” she interrupted him.  “It’s not that.”

“Then what?”

With a simple look, she told him everything she was feeling.

“Ah,” he said.  “I see.  Yeah, I felt the same way when I read it.  And yes, you and I will be together at least that long.”

“And die the same day?”

His smile touched his eyes in just the right way.  “I wouldn’t have it any other way.”

Her heart was about to burst.  She had to change the subject before she teared up again.  “Um, where are all of your officers?” she asked him.  “I figured you’d have every one of them in here working on this.”

Jon nodded with his head back toward the squad room.  “I called in three extra guys, actually.  They’re all out tracking down the families of the deceased.  Taking statements, letting them know the basic information of what’s going on with their dead relatives.  Wilson Barton went over to the cemetery to see if he could find any trace evidence the State Police boys didn’t find.”

“You think their CSU guys missed something?”

He shrugged.  “I won’t know until Will comes back.  Not that I don’t think the State Police know what they’re doing.  They do.  But they don’t know this town like we do.  If there’s something out of place, he’ll find it.”

She still had to ask about Phoebe Stewart, but she wanted to hear everything Jon had found out first.  “Did you learn anything new at all?  About the case, I mean?”

He clapped his hands together.  “Yes.  Well, sort of.  It turns out your hunch about the victims being buried with valuables was dead on.  Forgive the pun.”

He went back around to the other side of the desk, settling into his chair and turning the computer screen so she could see it.  “These are scanned copies of the records from Grace Community Church.  They’re pretty thorough, and they go back to the early 1800s, before the town was even incorporated.”

He scrolled up a number of pages, then pointed out a few lines.  “When someone is buried, the church has always made a note of who they were.  When they were born.  When they died.  That sort of thing.  What they did for a living.  Who their surviving family members are.  And, what they were buried with.”

“Watches, rings, necklaces,” she read.  “Wow.  This guy was even buried with five hundred dollars in gold.”

“That would be Cadman DeBoers.  He’s one of the bodies that was dug up.  Guess what isn’t in the grave anymore?”

“A whole bunch of gold coins,” Darcy muttered absently as she looked through the list for…  “Florence Salvatore.  Died, July nineteenth, 1947.  Buried three days later in a white dress with her glasses and engagement ring!”

Darcy knew the dream had been more than just a creation of her tired mind.  It had been a glimpse at the real event, when Florence had been married to Oscar, and they had danced and been in love.  When Florence had admired her engagement ring and promised herself she would take it to her grave.