Darcy Sweet Mystery Box 1 Read online

  The warmth inside the café was definitely welcome. Darcy unzipped her coat as she went up to stand next to Grace. “Hi Grace. Good morning, Helen.”

  “What’s good about it?” Grace snapped at her. There was a scowl on her face. “We’ve got stolen cars and all sorts of crime taking place in this town and the best I can do is get coffee and muffins!”

  Darcy was surprised at her sister’s tone but Helen just smiled at Darcy and winked. “Your sister is feeling out of sorts this morning, Darcy. Not uncommon, I think, in women with her, um, condition.”

  Grace put a hand to her belly and sighed, rolling her eyes. “I’m sorry, Darcy. I’ve been irritable all morning. I’m not even sure why. Poor Aaron probably thinks I hate him.”

  From behind the counter Helen produced a folded paper bag and a styrofoam cup with steam coming out the little hole in its plastic lid. “I’m sure Aaron understands, Grace. Men have tolerated their wives during pregnancy since the beginning of time, because they know you’re giving them the greatest gift. Don’t worry about him. Kiss him when you go home tonight, tell him you love him, and you’ll see.”

  Darcy saw the way Helen smiled as she wiped her hands on her white apron and turned to look back over her shoulder at the double swinging doors that led to the kitchen area. Darcy smiled, too. There was a new man in Helen’s life, a man she had hired to work here as a cook. It was obvious there was a lot more to it than that, and Darcy was happy for Helen that she had found love again.

  Helen saw Darcy looking at her and her cheeks colored just a little. “Well. What can I get you today, Darcy?”

  “Just a coffee and a blueberry muffin, please. Grace, do you have time to sit down and have breakfast with me here?”

  Grace shrugged. “Why not? It’s not like I have anything to do back at the office except shuffle papers.”

  The way she said it made Darcy laugh, and then Grace was laughing with her, telling her to stop it this was serious, but laughing still. They sat with their muffins and talked for a while, and it felt good to have that time together.

  Just before they got up to leave the conversation turned to Laura Lannis and the murder in Cider Hill. “Jon told me what he found out,” Grace said. “You know, I remember that place now. That fair always seemed so big to me when I was a little girl. It was always so much fun. Hard to believe something like this murder happened there. Are you thinking Laura is this Izzy woman?”

  Darcy didn’t want to believe it. She didn’t know what Laura was running from, but she didn’t think it was murder. There was something else going on, and whatever it was had terrified Laura in her vision. “I’m not sure.”

  “Just promise me you won’t go running off and getting into trouble, okay sis?”

  “Would I do a thing like that?” Darcy asked with false seriousness.

  Her sister laughed again. “Fine. Just be careful.”

  The bookstore seemed empty without Sue around. She wasn’t gone, not yet anyway, but she was out again this morning on their big project. It was really hitting Darcy that she would be alone in the store by herself all day once Sue went back to college.

  Across the bookstore from where Darcy sat at one of the reading tables, the door to the office closed. She smiled. Well, she wouldn’t be completely alone. Great Aunt Millie would always be around. “Why are you still here?” Darcy wondered out loud, not really expecting an answer. “I’ve helped dozens of spirits move on from this realm, Millie, and in my opinion if anyone deserves a peaceful afterlife it’s you.”

  Just like she’d expected, the only answer she got was silence. Maybe Millie would get around to answering that question for her one of these days.

  The jingling noise the bell over the front door made was so unexpected Darcy actually jumped up from her chair. Jon came in, a paper bag in one hand and a smile on his face. “Hi, sweet baby,” he said to her. “I thought I’d bring us lunch.”

  She laughed and sat back down again. “It’s a little early for lunch, isn’t it?”

  Jon frowned and checked his watch. “Nearly eleven o’clock now. That’s close enough. Besides. I brought you a gift.”

  “Oh, really? What is it?”

  He put the sack from Helen’s deli down on the table next to her, the smell of freshly baked sandwiches and coffee smelling so good, and slipped out of his coat. His blue tie had managed to get tangled around a shoulder of his dress shirt and he took a moment to smooth it out before pulling out a folded piece of paper from his back pocket.

  Darcy raised an eyebrow at him as she took the paper. “I prefer flowers, for future reference.”

  Leaning down, he kissed the top of her head, then opened the bag to take out the carefully stacked coffee cups and two foil-wrapped sandwiches. “There’s going to be lots of flowers in your future, I promise. In the meantime, I thought you might like this better.”

  Darcy opened the folds of the page to find a police bulletin, the word “WANTED” written in big black letters at the top. There was a picture of a woman in the middle of the page, a close-up taken from some photograph where the woman was smiling and laughing.

  Darcy gasped. The page was a faxed copy, and the quality wasn’t the greatest, but there was no mistaking it. This was the same woman she’d seen in her vision. Laura Lannis, only with blonde hair and a smile instead of that scowl she always seemed to have on her face now.

  “Jon, that’s her,” Darcy said. “That’s Laura Lannis!”

  Jon finished unwrapping his ham and cheese melt and then reached over to tap the bulletin. “This,” he said, “is Izzy McIntosh. Wanted for murder.”

  Darcy unwrapped her own sandwich, a turkey and swiss, toasted and steaming. She took a bite of it and chewed as she thought. “Mmm,” she said. “Honey mustard. You always know.”

  “Yeah, I’m a great boyfriend.” His smile slipped as he chewed. “But, I’m also a police officer. If the woman living next door to us in Anna’s old house really is Izzy McIntosh, I have to tell the State Police. The sergeant I spoke to was very interested in knowing if I had found her.”

  Darcy’s heart skipped a beat. “What did you tell him?”

  “I told him the truth. We didn’t have anyone in town named McIntosh, but if I found her, I’d let him know first.”

  Darcy could breathe again. She hugged him quickly as he held his sandwich out of the way. “You really are the best boyfriend ever.”

  “I’ll take that. Darcy, you have to understand, I can stall this, but I can’t stop it. I know you’re worried about her, and you think she’s in danger, and you want to help her. If Laura really is Izzy—”

  “I know she is, Jon,” Darcy said firmly. “I know she’s hiding from something, too.”

  “You know because of a face in a vision. That’s not anything I can take to court.” He brushed his hands together to clean off some crumbs from his fingers and then sat back. “Now, if I go to Laura’s house with this photo and find out for myself that it’s her, I won’t have a choice but to arrest her. So, it’s a good thing that I haven’t had the time to go check on this yet, don’t you think?”

  Darcy nodded, knowing what Jon was saying. He was putting himself in a tricky spot and he was doing it for her. She had never loved him more than she did in that moment.

  “Plus, there’s the whole question about Izzy’s daughter. Laura has a son, right? Alex?”

  Darcy had a few thoughts on that, but she nodded her head. What else could she say?

  “So there you go. Reasonable doubt. At least for me. There’s obviously a lot more to find out before we do anything. You should eat your sandwich,” he said to her. “Then maybe you have some errands to do? Like just outside of town?”

  Darcy pushed the sandwich aside and got up from her chair. Sitting down on Jon’s lap, wrapping her arms around his shoulders, she flipped her hair back over a shoulder and locked her eyes on his. “I do have several errands to run. Starting with kissing you.”

  “Well,” he said with a ha
ppy grin. “You’d better get started, then.”

  Darcy hoped no one came to the bookstore while she was gone. She really would have to hire someone when Sue left. She couldn’t keep putting up the be-right-back sign and then leaving, even for something this important.

  Rushing down the path that led to her house and the one Laura had moved into, Darcy made quick time. She rushed up the steps of the porch and knocked on the door before she could lose her nerve. There was no answer. She knocked again with the same result.

  Finding a window on the front that didn’t have the curtain pulled completely closed, Darcy peeked inside. She couldn’t see anyone. Her heart beat loudly in her ears. Should she try going in? Logic told her no. It was dangerous. It was illegal. It was wrong.

  And she was going to do it anyway.

  After Anna’s death, Darcy had found the house key that Anna had given her. As neighbors, they had checked on each other’s houses any number of times. Darcy had put the key on her ring and kept it there, partly for the sake of having something of Anna’s to hang onto, partly because she had thought it might come in handy someday. It looked like today was that day.

  She fit the key to the front door lock, hoping Laura or the realtor for the house hadn’t ever changed the locks. It fit, and the handle turned quietly, and the door swung open without any alarm. Darcy breathed a sigh of relief.

  She stepped inside quickly and then shut the door behind her. Around her, the house was silent and still. She remembered the whole layout, downstairs and upstairs, every room, every door. The furniture, even, was still Anna’s. She took a moment to remember her dear friend, then got started on what she was here for. There was no way of knowing where Laura was or when she’d be back.

  Darcy didn’t know what she was even looking for. She just started looking. Papers on the kitchen table were all about the sale of the house, and all of it was in the name of Laura Lannis. There was nothing in any of the kitchen drawers but some silverware. There weren’t any photos or pictures stuck to the refrigerator. All in all, there was hardly anything in the house at all to show people lived here.

  Laura, or rather Izzy, was travelling light.

  The living room was the same, without even a photograph on the wall. The downstairs bathroom had two toothbrushes and a tube of paste and handsoap and other things, but no personal items. In the garbage, she found a discarded box of hair dye, dark black like Laura’s was now.

  Frowning, feeling like a thief, Darcy went upstairs to the bedrooms.

  The first one she went into looked like it was being used by both Laura and her son. A second bed had been set up, crammed in where there really wasn’t space for it. That was odd, she thought. It was like Laura didn’t want to let Alex out of her sight even when he was sleeping.

  There weren’t many clothes hanging in Laura’s closet. A few jeans, some shirts, and that was it. Darcy bit her lip, embarrassed, but went through the dresser drawers anyway, telling herself she was trying to help Laura and she needed to be sure. In the top drawer there was an opened pack of underwear, some socks, and a couple of bras. Nothing else. The other drawers were empty.

  As she was about to shut the dresser up again she stopped. The open pack of underwear was a plastic set of six like you might find from a department store. There were two or three pair taken out, but the others were still there. They caught her eye. They were covered in cartoon fish.

  Not really something a grown woman would wear, Darcy thought to herself. She picked the package up to look closer at it. They were cotton panties and the picture on the front showed a smiling little girl. They were sized for a child.

  Alex. Laura’s little boy was really Izzy’s little girl. What had Jon said her name was? Lilly. Lilly McIntosh.

  Darcy put the panties back. There was no doubt in her mind anymore but she couldn’t very well bring a pack of opened underwear to Jon and call it proof. Especially since she wasn’t supposed to be in their house in the first place.

  Even more so because she wasn’t trying to get Laura arrested. She was trying to find something that would let her help.

  Putting everything back where she’d found it, Darcy tried to decide what she should do next. It was obvious that Laura hadn’t left a note lying around that said, “My name is Izzy McIntosh and I need help.” There had to be some other way to find out what was really going on with her. Izzy McIntosh was supposed to have killed her husband. Darcy didn’t believe it. It didn’t fit what she had seen in her vision. Not to her mind, anyway, but Jon was right. She needed some way to prove it.

  “Oh,” she said, as a thought suddenly occurred to her. If Izzy’s husband was dead, Darcy could probably reach out to him on the other side and ask him how he died. All she would need was something personal of his to guide her through the murky pathways of the afterlife.

  Maybe there would be something downstairs, something she missed. Izzy must have kept some personal items from her past. Even someone on the run must have something that reminded them of who they used to be.

  She started back down the hallway to the stairs. That’s when she heard a woman scream.

  It was followed by the sound of the front door swinging wide and slamming into the wall, and the muffled voice of a man swearing. “Stop it, you’re hurting me!” she heard Laura yelling. Alex—Lilly—was screaming, too. “Don’t hurt my mommy! Don’t hurt my mommy!”

  Darcy didn’t think. She ran down the stairs as quietly as she could and then snuck along the wall until she could see into the kitchen where Izzy had been thrown to the floor. Two plastic bags of groceries had spilled around her, oranges and boxes of kids’ cereal and a broken jar of spaghetti sauce. A man stood over her, tall and dark, wearing a long dark coat and a baseball cap pulled low over his eyes.

  Darcy knew him. The man from her vision. She was sure of it.

  Lilly threw her eight year old body over her mother, crying hysterically and still pleading for the man not to hurt her mommy.

  The man raised a gun.

  “Everyone, he’s in here!” Darcy shouted as loud as she could, making sure to bang into the wall and push an end table over and make as much racket as possible. “Call the police!”

  It was probably one of the stupidest things she had ever done in her life, she thought to herself. Even so, it worked. The man’s head jerked up at the commotion and then he spun around and raced out the front door. He was gone.

  Darcy rushed into the kitchen. “Izzy, are you all right?” she asked.

  Izzy’s eyes grew wider. “What did you call me?”

  “It’s all right,” Darcy said to her. “Yes, I know who you are. I’m not going to tell anyone. Um. Well. Other than my boyfriend. He knows.” She turned to the little girl disguised as a boy, still hugging tightly to her mother. “Hello, Lilly.”

  Lilly didn’t smile, but she sniffed her tears away a little and whispered, “H-hello.”

  Izzy stood up, picking Lilly up with her. “I can’t believe this. Oh, I can’t believe this. First he finds me, then you! We’re not safe here. We’re not safe anywhere!”

  Darcy went to the phone hanging on the wall. When she picked it up and started dialing, Izzy rounded on her. “What do you think you’re doing?”

  “We need to call the police. That guy might not be fooled by my trick for very long.”

  “Trick? What trick? Where are the other people you were talking to?”

  Darcy listened to the phone ring on the other end. “That was the trick. There’s nobody here but me.”

  “You can’t call the police!” Izzy insisted. “I can’t let them know who I am!”

  “Don’t worry,” Darcy said. “This one already does. He’s my boyfriend.”

  Chapter 6

  Darcy and Izzy and Lilly sat at the kitchen table, drinking tea that Izzy had freshly brewed. Darcy had helped them clean up the ruined groceries, after making sure the doors were all securely locked, and in the mess of things Izzy had bought was a box of green tea bags. When D
arcy had said she’d love a cup of tea, Izzy had looked almost grateful to have something to do that would keep her mind off, well, everything else.

  Now, they sat and waited for Jon. He had been out on another stolen car case. This time, the car had been stolen from someone living in Misty Hollow. He promised to be there as soon as he could. “You know what this means, right Darcy?” he had asked.

  She did. There was a very good chance that Jon would have to arrest Izzy. Unless he had a very good reason not to.

  “I’m still not sure I should talk to you,” Izzy said to her, turning her tea cup around and around. The ceramic mug was actually meant for coffee, but they were the only cups she had in the house.

  Darcy tried to look Izzy in the eye but the other woman kept looking away. “It’s all right,” Darcy said. “I promise, I’m here to help you. I know I may not look like much, but I actually help people all the time. I have this gift that allows me to see things that other people can’t. That’s what happened to me yesterday on your porch. I had a vision. A vision of you running away from a man.”

  Darcy went on to describe the whole scene perfectly to Izzy. Her mouth fell open when Darcy was done. “How can you know that?”

  “I told you,” Darcy insisted. “I had a vision.”

  Ordinarily, Darcy would never tell anyone about her gift. People either thought she was crazy or they laughed at her or they tried to get Darcy to contact long dead relatives who hadn’t wanted anything to do with the people when they’d been alive, much less now when they were dead. She had to convince Izzy that she could help, though, and the truth seemed to be the only way to do it.

  “Mommy?” Lilly said slowly. She sat in a chair pulled right up next to her mother and did her best to attach herself to Izzy’s side. Lilly stretched up to whisper in Izzy’s ear, “I think we can trust her.”