by K. J. Emrick
“Well, everyone’s going to have a different opinion, right? That’s what makes a book worth reading.”
“Hmm. I never thought of it that way. You’re certainly going to have different opinions with this one. Good choice.”
After saying goodbye, Darcy hung up on the call and gave the phone back to Jon. “I guess that’s everything I can do here. I’ll see you back at home tonight? We can catch each other up on anything else we’ve learned.”
“Sounds good to me. Just promise me you won’t accuse Wilson of anything, or Alan Harlow either for that matter. Not without proof.”
“I promise,” she said with a smile as she crossed a finger over her heart. Their eyes locked and Darcy was drawn into him again, her lips brushing against his in a kiss—
Jon’s cell phone rang.
He heaved a sigh but answered the phone anyway. She didn’t blame him. There was too much going on right now for him to ignore the call, even in the middle of their public display of affection.
“Detective Tinker,” he said, giving Darcy an apologetic look. “Yes. Yes, thank you. Go ahead with that.” There was a pause, then Jon’s expression fell. “Are you sure? Okay. Not what I was expecting to hear.”
Darcy put her hand lightly on his arm. “What? What is it?”
He held up a finger, asking her to wait. “Thanks for your help out there. Can you fax me a copy of your report? Good. You have the fax number for my office, I think. Right. That’s the one. Thank you again.”
When he ended the call, he closed his eyes for a moment, shaking his head. Then he looked at Darcy. “That was the police agency I had talked to about getting the information from the rental car company. It turns out the company has a main headquarters in their state. That’s why the car had an out of state registration. But, it has business almost everywhere. Their cars get rented and then driven to any of their several locations, and left for the next person to rent.”
“That makes sense,” Darcy said to him, “but did they get the name of the driver for you?”
“No. They couldn’t, because the car wasn’t rented there. It was rented from one of their other places, which happens to be just two hours away from us. So, what we have to do is get the rental agreement from the place where the car was actually rented.”
“Two hours away from right here,” Darcy said, catching on to what he was saying. That was very close. Close enough that anyone from Misty Hollow could have rented that car.
Anyone, including Wilson Barton.
Just as she was about to say exactly that, Jon’s phone rang again. He grumbled to himself as he connected to the call.
“Hello?” There was a pause, then with a shrug he handed the phone to Darcy. “It’s for you.”
Darcy flipped the hair back from one ear so she could bring the phone up. What could Izzy have forgotten to ask, that she had to call back so soon? “Hi. What’s up?”
There was static on the line, hissing and popping noises that almost sounded like words, bits and pieces of things Darcy couldn’t make out. “Hello? Izzy?”
A voice laughed. A man’s voice, pushing up from the whispered secrets in the white noise of the static.
Not Izzy. That was not Izzy’s voice.
“Who is this?” Darcy asked, a cold feeling seeping into her chest. There was a reason she didn’t own a cell phone.
This was that reason.
“You should leave,” the man told her. There was an odd dialect to the distorted, crackling voice. An accent that she couldn’t quite place. “Are you listening?” he hissed at her, angry and demanding.
A few years ago, when one ghost after another after another had called her personal cell phone to beg for her help, to plead with her, to threaten her life if she didn’t do what they asked, Darcy had thrown her phone into the trash and never gotten another one. She still didn’t understand how ghosts could get ahold of her personal cell phone number. Or in this case, Jon’s.
“I hear you,” she answered the voice in the static. “I’m just not listening. If you really need my help come and see me.”
There was that laughter again, turning her blood to ice and freezing her in place so that she couldn’t move to take the phone away or end the call or anything. At the same time, sweat slid down the curve of her spine.
“You aren’t safe here,” the ghost told her with a calm certainty. “Bad things are coming. Bad things that you cannot stop.”
Darcy couldn’t help herself. She had to know. “What things? Who are you?”
A final burst of static collapsed around the answer. “You will see.”
Darcy listened to the silence of the ended call, knowing the ghost had given her at least a partial answer.
She just didn’t know which of her questions it was an answer to.
***
It took her a while to convince Jon that she was all right. The fact that her face had gone pale and her hands were shaking probably didn’t help. Most ghosts didn’t have the power to speak directly to the living. Cell phones seemed to help, assisting them somehow to break through the barriers that kept the world of the dead from the world of the living. Stronger spirits could make themselves heard whenever they wanted to, cell phone or not.
When this ghost had spoken to her, Darcy had sensed power so strong it made her sweat.
What had he been trying to warn her about? What bad things were coming? Why did it want her to run away? These were the questions she asked herself over and over again as she drove back from Misty Hollow to the hospital in Meadowood. Was the spirit’s warning somehow tied to the mystery of the accident in town?
No. Somehow, she didn’t think so. It felt like something else. Something deeper, and somehow darker.
A tiny corner of her mind trembled with a thought that had been coiling there like a slithering snake. She recognized the voice that had spoken to her through Jon’s phone. Not by how it sounded, but by how it made her feel. Menaced. Targeted.
Just like the ghost in the Town Hall earlier today.
Darcy swallowed. She had to set that aside for right now. No matter what the ghost’s purpose in contacting her had been, she had other things to deal with.
Like catching whoever had killed Jarred Perrigon and put Lindsay Weaver in the hospital.
Any ghosts and their problems would have to wait.
Chapter Seven
In the hospital parking lot Darcy found Jon’s unmarked car and parked next to it. Wilson Barton was still here. Good. She wanted to ask him a few questions. Jon didn’t want her to accuse the man of anything without proof? Fine. She’d get proof.
The ICU nurse recognized Darcy from before, but frowned and motioned her over to her work desk. From behind the shiny counter top with its neatly ordered binders and folders and papers, the nurse smiled in a way that didn’t touch her round, brown eyes. She motioned at the computer monitors as Darcy got closer. “You can’t go down, honey. You’re not family.”
Darcy frowned, but she knew she should have thought of that. “Can you call down for my friend, then? Rosie is expecting me. I’m supposed to pick her up.”
“Hey, Darcy,” she heard Wilson Barton calling to her from down the hallway. “What are you doing here?”
Darcy made sure to keep her expression friendly as she returned his greeting. “Hi Will. I came to pick up Rosie for our book club meeting. Is she down there with Lindsay?”
At the mention of Lindsay’s name, Wilson’s face twitched. It was there and gone again and if Darcy hadn’t been looking she would have missed it. “I’m not sure,” he said. “I was talking to Lindsay’s new husband, Alan, in the nursing supervisor’s office. Taking his statement. He’s an…interesting man.”
Darcy tapped her fingers on the raised counter surface of the ICU desk. “Rosie said pretty much the same thing. Did you go in to see Lindsay? It must be hard,” she ventured, “to see her like that. I mean, since you two used to date each other.”
He stared at her for the longest
moment. Then his eyes turned to steel. “I never would have wanted to see her like that. Ever. She meant the world to me, back then. I never…”
He swallowed, and his expression slipped, like he realized that he’d said too much. “Anyway. I know Rosie went to find a doctor to talk to but Lindsay’s asleep again. They gave her something to help put her out. It was Alan’s suggestion, I guess, but anything that helps ease her pain is a good idea in my book. I’ll just have to come back later to get her statement.”
Darcy’s mind was chewing over everything he said. Seeing Lindsay like this had obviously upset him. The question was whether he was upset because someone he cared about was hurt, or because he was the one who hurt her. Wilson was still the prime suspect in her opinion, and her mind played out a scene where he had been stalking the woman he loved, the woman who had married secretly and who was now coming back to the town where she and Wilson had fallen in love.
Had he been following them too closely in that red car with its out of state rental tags? Had it truly been an accident? Or, the more suspicious side of her asked, had he intentionally run into Lindsay’s car in a fit of rage?
The same kind of rage she had just seen flicker across his face before he could hide it from her.
“So I guess you’re going to head back to Misty Hollow now?” she asked as sincerely as she could. “It’s too bad you had to borrow Jon’s car to come all the way out here. Yours must be in the shop or something.”
“I have a loaner right now,” he told her, not really answering what she had said. “It’s not much. Good thing Jon doesn’t mind sharing his car. So. Do you want me to find Rosie and bring her back into town for you? I can get around the hospital a little easier than you can. Since you’re not family, I mean.”
“No,” Darcy said quickly. Then, more slowly, she added, “I mean, I promised to take her back. I’m sure she hasn’t gone far.”
In that moment, she did not want Rosie to be alone with Wilson. There wasn’t a reason for it that she could point to. Her sixth sense wasn’t going off, and as far as gathering proof about him to show to Jon she hadn’t gotten much. He had admitted to using a “loaner” car, which could easily mean a rental car, but that was all. That, and the emotions he obviously still had for Lindsay. It wasn’t enough to create solid proof, though.
“Rosie can come back with me,” she said again for emphasis, adding a smile for effect. “I’m sure she’ll want to spend some time with her new son-in-law but that can wait, don’t you think? Obviously they aren’t going anywhere just yet.”
“Sure, sure,” Wilson said, looking down at his watch. “All three of the victims from the car accident are here so that makes things easy on our end, too.”
“Wait. Three victims?”
He looked at her, his eyebrows raised. “Sure. Lindsay and Alan Harlow are here in the ICU, but they brought the body of the driver here as well. What was his name?” He took out his pocket notebook and began leafing through it.
“Jarred,” Darcy supplied before he could find the right page. “Jarred Perrigon. He’s here?”
“Sure. Down in the morgue. The autopsy is scheduled for tomorrow morning. Kind of a procedural thing at this point, but we do have a missing driver and a death involved, so.”
Yes, Darcy thought to herself, we do. A missing driver, and a dead body.
And Darcy had ways of making dead men talk.
“Uh, Will, I need to find the ladies room,” she said, already backing down the hall. “If you see Rosie can you tell her to meet me down at the front entrance?”
Wilson nodded, watching her, and in his eyes she saw something very calculating. Maybe he was trying to figure out what she was thinking.
He wouldn’t like it if he knew.
***
Darcy did not like leaving Rosie alone in the hospital knowing that Wilson was still there. Hopefully, he would shrug off her odd behavior and just leave to go back to Misty Hollow like he said he was going to. Everyone in town thought she was a little odd anyway. Sometimes, that worked for her.
The hospital’s morgue was down in the basement level, down below even the first floor where the Emergency Department was. Most people would never even know there was a morgue in the hospital. That’s the way St. John Camilus Hospital wanted it. No one wanted patients thinking about death when they came here. This was supposed to be a healthy, healing environment. The idea of sharing the building with dead people stored in metal freezer cabinets would be enough to upset most anyone.
Darcy wasn’t exactly freaked out by dead bodies. She’d certainly seen enough of them, in various stages and poses of death that she was used to it by now. What bothered her was the idea of people’s spirits sometimes being stuck with their bodies after death. Not everyone could let go of this life as easily as they were meant to. Unfinished business, terribly violent deaths, unspoken final words for loved ones, or lots of other things could trap a person’s life essence in the mortal coil when they were supposed to move on to the hereafter.
Waiting in the elevator until she was alone, she quickly pushed the button marked B for basement. Access to that level wasn’t restricted. She’d been down there before, actually, with Jon when they were working together on a different case. There weren’t many people down there. Maintenance workers, sometimes, and one or two employees working in the morgue. Unless an autopsy was in progress, and then there would be doctors and nurses, too.
She had to take the chance. If she could get close enough to Jarred Perrigon’s body, then maybe she could talk to his spirit. She could have done a communication and tried to reach through to his ghost from this side of the barrier, but that took time she might not have. Time, and an item of personal interest of the deceased which she also didn’t have. This might be her only chance to get Jarred’s view of things first hand.
Jon would probably kill her if he knew she was doing this. She’d call him on her cell phone to let him know, but there was that whole thing about her not owning a cell phone. So.
The call she had gotten from that eerie voice in the static came to mind again. If it was connected to the Town Hall, it couldn’t mean anything good.
For now, she flattened herself against the side wall of the elevator as it dinged and opened up onto the basement level. Subtle, she told herself with a frown. Real subtle. No one would ever think it was suspicious for her to be down here if they saw her pressed up against the wall, hiding.
Right.
Clearing her throat she caught the doors with her hand as they started to close and stepped through. The elevator opened up on a T intersection, a hallway leading to her left and right and one leading away straight ahead of her. She knew her way to the morgue. Thankfully, there was no one around.
It was darker down here in the basement level where long fluorescent bulbs hung suspended in their fixtures from a bare concrete ceiling. The walls were poured concrete as well, part of the original foundation. The floors were tiled with grayish-brown squares that were cracked at their corners and scuffed from years of foot traffic and hospital gurneys being run over them. Equipment and boxes full of file folders were stacked up against the walls haphazardly, leaving a narrow space to walk through.
She started down the hall in front of her, hearing voices at the far end.
“Great,” she whispered to herself. She’d been hoping that everyone would be on dinner break or something but now she would have to figure out a way to get past at least two hospital employees, based on the conversation she was listening to. Sports. Two men talking about sports.
At the end of the hall a brighter light shone from inside a room, through one of those industrial grade windows with metal mesh set into the glass. The door next to it was painted a dull green with MORGUE spelled out in black letters. Under that, someone had taped up a hand drawn sign on orange construction paper that read “No admittance to the living dead.”
Darcy smiled at the lame joke and stood back a little to watch through the glass. The d
oor was open a crack, which was why she could hear the two men inside so well. They were both tall and skinny, she saw, wearing blue scrubs and blue gloves and blue hairnets. One wore glasses. The other had a big, bushy brown mustache, big enough to make Yosemite Sam jealous. Those were about the only differences between the two.
“I’m telling you, they really should move the Buffalo Bills to Toronto,” said the one with the mustache. “It would make up for America taking the Expos away from Montreal and then renaming them the Nationals. It’s like America has to make everything in the world theirs or they can’t enjoy it.”
The one in the glasses laughed.
“I mean,” the mustache went on, “Toronto could take the Buffalo Bills and call them the Canadian Mounties or something. You don’t see Canada trying to make up for an inferiority complex, do you?”
The Morgue room was bright with overhead lights that reflected off light green walls and a bright white floor. Against the far wall Darcy could see the nine square metal doors of the cadaver freezers, locked and secured. Three stainless steel examination tables stood in a row across the center of the room. The two Morgue assistants were busy over one of the tables, and at first Darcy thought they were prepping a body for an autopsy. Maybe even Jarred Perrigon’s body. Then she saw the one with the glasses lift up a hand with three cards in them and throw them down on the table. They were playing a game. Poker, most likely.
“Bam,” the guy with glasses almost shouted. “How d’you like them apples?”
Mustache Man groaned and shook his head. “You have the best luck of anyone I’ve ever seen.”
If that was true, Darcy figured she must have the worst luck of anyone in the world. She had tried to stay hidden back in the shadows of a stack of file boxes bursting at their seams, but just at that moment Mustache Man looked up and saw her through the window. He stared, blinking, and then realized she shouldn’t be there.
“Hey,” he said to Darcy, raising his voice unnecessarily. “What are you doing out there?”
The one with the glasses turned to look at her, too, and Darcy knew she had to think of something quickly.