2 Mists of the Past (8 page)

“Guys I’d like you to meet Darcy,” Jon said to them. They both greeted her warmly. Jon turned to her and said, “This is Dale and Cindy. We’ve been friends forever but they just got married recently. It took Dale years to coax her into it.”

The other two laughed and Dale slapped Jon on the back. “Yeah, and you were supposed to be my best man, if you remember. How the hell have you been Jonno?”

They all headed inside Jon’s apartment. Darcy listened as they talked about how they had all gone to college in Jon’s home town of Pequot Lakes and how Dale had an aunt that lived in Misty Hollow. Darcy thought she knew everyone’s family here in Misty Hollow. She still thought it was a strange coincidence that Jon’s best friends from college not only had a connection to this place but were showing up now. But she reminded herself she wasn’t going to let it disturb Jon’s obvious happiness at seeing them. For the moment, she could set aside the buzzing in her sixth sense.

That didn’t mean she wasn’t going to be extra careful around them.

She pushed the thought out of her mind, reminding herself that not everything was murder cases and mysteries. She decided to let Jon and his friends catch up alone and told them she would see them later. She headed out the door and decided it was a good day to go to work after all.

***

She checked in with Sue by pay phone, one of the few left in town that was located just outside of Jon’s apartment complex. Sue assured her that, once again, she had everything under control and the new display of horror novels was coming along nicely. So before she went to work, Darcy paid a visit to her sister. Grace hadn’t fully recovered from her hit on the head and was confined to bed rest. Darcy had rung her after the doctor had visited to find out how she was. It was a concussion, nothing worse, but Darcy still felt horrible that it had happened to her.

Darcy had phoned ahead, after talking to Sue, and been told by Grace to just come in. She used her spare key, and found her way down to the bedroom to sit in the chair by the bed again. “You look like you got run over by a chicken truck.” Darcy joked with her sister.

Grace laughed, appreciating the levity instead of the grave concern everyone else had shown her. “I feel like I got beat up in a prize fight, is what I feel like.”

Darcy hesitated. “I don’t want to bother you with this if you’re not feeling up to it, Grace.”

“Oh, please. I’m so bored! Aaron won’t let me do anything. He’s been smothering me.” She screwed up her face in disgust.

“He’s just worried about you, sis. So am I.”

“I’m fine. It’s a bump on my head. You and Jon act like I can’t take care of myself. Aaron, too. Just tell me what it was that you came here for.”

“Okay,” Darcy said, giving in to her. “I don’t know where to go with any of this. Jon doesn’t seem like he’s interested in diving any deeper into it. I don’t know if he’s upset about getting you hurt or if he doesn’t want to bring up bad memories or what. But I need to find out what’s going on. Are you sure that you can’t remember anything at all from the attack?”

Grace shook her head. “I’ve been trying to remember but I can’t think of anything. Whoever it was that hit me did it just as I came in the door. I didn’t have a chance to see or hear anything.” She gave Darcy an encouraging look. “You’ll think of something, you always do.”

Darcy smiled back at her sister. “I hope you’re right.”

***

Darcy stopped by the Bean There Bakery and Café on her way to work. She was glad to see Lily behind the counter serving a customer. Darcy just hoped she wouldn’t be too mad at her over Jon bringing her in to be questioned. She made her way slowly to the counter, not sure what sort of reception she was going to get. Lily finished serving the customer ahead of her and turned frosty eyes towards Darcy.

“What can I get you?” Lily asked, managing to make it sound like an invitation to leave.

Darcy chose her words carefully. “I just wanted to apologize to you for everything that happened. We were wrong. I was way out of line, and I’m sorry.”

Lily’s eyes narrowed and turned even colder, if that was possible. “Well that’s just too little too late, isn’t it? I’m not going to accept your apology. What happened to me was unforgivable. Thanks to you I’ve become the hot topic of gossip around town. Everywhere I go I have people hassling me about what happened. It’s not pleasant. I’m a laughing stock.” Tears moistened her eyes and she tilted her head to the side. “So if you don’t need anything I am super busy and need to get on with my day. No? Good.”

Lily walked away without giving Darcy time to say anything more. She sighed. Well, so much for that. Just as she turned to leave an angry Lily came rushing back and hissed, “I thought you were my friend Darcy. Robbie is furious with both you and Jon, too. I don’t know if I can ever forgive either or you for what you did to me.”

“I’m so, so sorry Lily. I don’t know what else I can say or do.” Feeling awful Darcy turned and left the shop. She was mad at herself for doubting Lily and ruining a friendship. It was in the name of solving a mystery, of finding whoever was threatening Jon. Not to mention the person who had hurt her sister. That might make it right, but it didn’t make her feel any better.

***

The rest of the day went by in a blur. Sue didn’t say much, picking up on her dark thoughts. A few customers came and went, and she barely noticed what books they bought. That night when Darcy hopped into bed she couldn’t help but think back to the night before with Jon. It had been a wonderfully romantic evening and she loved him more for the whole experience. Smudge jumped up onto the bed and curled up next to her. She wriggled around for a few moments, until she was comfortable.

Darcy soon drifted off to sleep and quickly found herself inside a dream.

She was sitting on the front porch with her great aunt Millie. Usually when Darcy saw Millie as a ghost her figure was vague and hardly defined. But in the dream Millie was just like Darcy remembered her when she had been alive. She was a young woman in the dream, the sun was shining brightly as she and Millie sat in rocking chairs drinking homemade lemonade.

The rocking of the chair should have been soothing for her but it wasn’t. It was the rhythm of a beating heart, a tempo of something marching closer and closer. “I miss you so much Millie,” Darcy said.

“I miss you too sweetheart.” Millie smiled at her. Her cheeks were creased with laughlines. She looked happy. This was how Darcy remembered her from when she was just a young girl. It was how Darcy liked to remember her now.

“Millie,” Darcy said to her, “can you help me with this mystery?”

In her dream, her aunt smiled at her and pulled out more pea pods from a bowl that suddenly appeared in her lap. She started shelling them without looking. “No child, I can’t help you. I’m sorry. But you have more tricks up your sleeve than you think. You need to go back and to talk to Grace again. Grace is the key.”

“What do you mean, Grace is the key? I don’t understand.” Darcy was confused. She saw herself take a pea pod that Millie handed to her. She ate it. It was sweet. She could feel the snap of it between her teeth.

Darcy sat bolt upright in bed gasping for air. She was disorientated. It was the middle of the night and dark in the room, where just a moment before she had been sitting in the bright sunlight with her aunt. She could still taste the sweet crunch of the pea pod in her mouth. She fumbled for the light switch and turned the light on. She squinted against the sudden harsh light as it filled the room.

Smudge meowed at her and she bent down to stroke her hand over his fur. “I’m fine, Smudge. I just had a strange dream. That’s all.”

Of course, she knew that wasn’t true. She knew her special dreams from her normal ones. This had not been a normal dream.

She decided to go and see Grace in the morning.

Chapter Twelve

“I knew it was you,” Aaron said with a broad smile on his face as he opened the door to Darcy the next morning. “You’re making a habit of banging on our door at an early hour.”

“I’m sorry, Aaron. How is she?”

He didn’t need to ask who she meant. “Grace just got up. You know the way down to the bedroom, right?”

“I do. Thanks.” She gave him a quick hug. She had always liked Aaron, even when she’d accused him of having something to do with Anna’s murder last month. He stood back to let her in and she went straight into Grace’s room.

Grace was just sitting up as Darcy entered the room. Rubbing at her eyes and yawning she said, “What’s wrong now, Darcy?”

Darcy went right to the same chair she’d used to visit with Grace yesterday. Sitting down she said, “I had a dream.”

Grace rolled her eyes. “So what does that mean for me?”

“I, um, need to try something.”

Grace was used to Darcy’s strange habits. She might not understand them, or even want to, but she knew they always worked. “Sure, sis. I’ll help any way I can.”

“That’s good, because I’m not really sure where to begin,” Darcy said as she took Grace’s hands between both of hers. “I’m going to try to figure out more about the night that you were attacked. Will you talk me through your night up to the last point you remember?”

“Darcy, we’ve done this already.”

“I know,” Darcy said with a patient smile. “Indulge me.”

“Okay. Well. Let me see. I had gone grocery shopping and then I walked home.” Darcy tried to visualize that. The images came to her slowly, her hands warm where she held Grace’s. Grace continued, “I was reaching for my keys when I felt a sudden sharp pain and then the next thing I remember was waking up and Aaron was carrying me to the bedroom.”

“Try to really picture those final moments,” Darcy said. She closed her eyes. As Grace did as she asked, a clear image came to Darcy’s mind. She no longer heard Grace’s voice. She saw everything as it transpired in her sister’s mind.

Grace walked up to her apartment door. She balanced a bag of groceries in one hand, and dug into her pants pocket for her keys with the other. Something hit her on the head and everything went black. No. Play that back. She was reaching for her keys and a thick, round piece of wood, like a cane, hit her at the base of her skull. Grace fell to the ground. She looked up at the attacker but his face was covered in shadow. His body was a blurred smudge in the memory. Blurry and undefined.

But there was something. A smell. A unique scent. It was almost like an herb. Rosemary, maybe?

Darcy snapped awake from her trance with a fantastic feeling inside. “I think that I was able to see a few things about what happened to you that you didn’t remember,” Darcy said to Grace. She explained how the attacker was definitely a man, and about the herb like scent.

“I’m glad to help,” said Grace a little skeptically as she squeezed Darcy’s hands.

“I’ll keep you updated.” Darcy rose and stretched. “I need to go and tell all of this to Jon.”

***

Darcy stopped by Jon’s apartment hoping maybe to catch him home if he had taken some more time off to visit with his old friends. He wasn’t there, as it turned out, but Dale and Cindy were. They welcomed her in.

“Hi,” she said to them. “Um. I thought maybe Jon would be here.”

“We came over to have breakfast with him,” Dale told her. “But he had to get to work. He told us we could hang out here for the day.”

Darcy made small talk with them for a while. She was getting a strange vibe from Dale. She might have been tempted to chalk it up to a little latent jealousy on her part as they had known Jon so much longer than she had, only she knew to trust her feelings. Even when they turned out to be wrong. As soon as it was polite to leave she said goodbye and headed over to the police station. Darcy found Jon busy at work behind his computer.

“Oh hi, Darcy. You’re out and about early today.” Jon got up to kiss her. She leaned into him, encouraging his affection.

He sat back down in his chair and she took the one in front of his desk. “Yeah. I needed to see Grace. I, uh, swung by your apartment to see you. Dale and Cindy told me you were here.”

“Oh yeah? You three have a nice visit?”

It seemed important to him that she did, so she told him yes, keeping her feelings about Dale to herself for now.

“I hated to leave them there at my apartment,” Jon went on, “but I got a call this morning from the Lieutenant at my old police department. He’s sending over the files from the first murder case by special courier. They should arrive any second.”

“That’s great. Speaking of that, I learned something important about the man who attacked Grace. I was able to read Grace’s memories this morning.”

“You…did what now?”

She laughed at the expression on his face. “Just listen.” She told him how she had walked through the event with Grace, experienced it with her, and had seen a man and how that man had a specific scent like the herb Rosemary.

Jon looked a little dumbfounded. “I don’t understand how you’re able to do this.”

Darcy shook her head. “If I ever figure it out, I’ll let you know.”

“Okay, so let’s say what you saw is correct.” He waited for her to nod his head, then continued. “Do you have any ideas about who it could be?”

“Just one. But you won’t like it.” Jon raised his eyebrows. No stopping now. She took a deep breath and then just blurted it out. “Dale gives me a weird feeling.”

Jon shook his head vigorously. “Come on, Darcy. You’re wrong. Dale’s a nice guy. I’ve known him and Cindy since college. I would have picked up on something like that.”

“Look, I don’t know them like you do. I know that. And I don’t mean to upset you, Jon, really. But don’t you think it’s strange that he has family here in Misty Hollow? Strange that right at the time you start getting hand delivered letters from a psychopath, Dale and Cindy show up?”

“No, I don’t. They’re friends, Darcy. And Dale grew up here. There’s nothing strange about it.” Jon stiffened his back and Darcy knew that she wouldn’t change his mind. “I need to stay here and wait for those files to arrive. Why don’t I see you later?”

Darcy knew when she was being dismissed. She didn’t want to push him further. She said goodbye, and he said goodbye, and she left knowing that she would have to take things into her own hands.