by K. J. Emrick
Jon let that comment hang in the air, giving Mason time to squirm. Darcy had serious doubts about whether her friend Helen had ever allowed him to do this back when she was in charge. Helen had been a very decent person, but she was certainly no pushover. Mason might have been skimming money from Misty Hollow for a decade, or longer! How much money did that add up to, she wondered? That was stealing. It was a crime he’d just confessed to, plain and simple.
They had him over a barrel, and he knew it.
Mason blew out a heavy breath. It was like all of the air was deflating out of his lungs. “Fine, Chief. You got me in a bad spot but there’s no need to tell anyone, is there? Money’s been a little tight lately. Well, a lot tight, actually. I got some loans I can’t pay down and you know how it is around tax time. Think maybe you can let this slide?”
Jon crossed his arms and thoughtfully tapped a finger against his elbow. “I don’t know, Mason. This is a pretty serious thing you’ve done. How serious it is I won’t really know until I look back through your time sheets, and that could take some time…I don’t know if I can keep this quiet…”
“Maybe, but come on. I wasn’t hurting nobody. You know they pay crap to guys like me, even with all the hard work I do around here. I clean the Town Hall, and the library, and I do the police station once a week, even. I barely get paid above minimum wage for doing a job nobody else wants to do.”
Darcy tried to feel sorry for him. She knew that financial struggles hit everyone from time to time, good and bad people alike, but that didn’t give anyone permission to steal. How many times had she struggled with the bookstore when sales were down? She’d never once thought about double charging her customers, or maybe stealing their credit card information. She also knew that Jon was a police officer, and it was his job to arrest people who stole, no matter why they were doing it.
They’d come here to look for a stolen trophy, but they’d found another thief in the process.
“Tell you what,” Jon finally said. “You’ve got work to do today, and I don’t want to stand in your way. After all, you’re charging the town for your services and I think they need to get a fair day’s work out of you. How about this. You let me and Darcy shadow you for a little while, say…while you’re doing this hallway right here. That way, I’ll be able to tell everyone that you really are doing the job you’re being paid for.”
Suspicion crept into Mason’s piggish eyes. “This hallway, right here?”
“Sure. You probably have to clean all the rooms down here, right?”
“Well, yeah…”
“Great. As it turns out, I want to get a peek inside those same rooms. This way we both get what we need. I’ll just follow you around to make sure you’re doing your job and not sleeping or goofing off. I am the chief of police, after all, and it is my job to make sure you aren’t stealing more time from the town, right?”
With a heavy nod, Mason started pushing his cart down the hall to the first door. He was grumbling under his breath as he pulled a big ring of keys away from his pudgy waist. It was one of those ones attached by a metal line to a spool clipped to his belt. He grudgingly flipped through each key until he found the one he wanted.
“Jon,” Darcy whispered, keeping them back a step with a hand on Jon’s arm. “You can’t just let him get away with this! His salary comes from our taxes. I mean, I like Mason and all, but he’s been stealing from the town by lying on his timesheets. That’s a crime!”
“I know,” he promised her. “But right now, we need to find that duffle bag. He can get us in and out of every room here without anyone being the wiser. I’ll circle back around to what he’s done later. Maybe work out an agreement for him to pay back whatever money he stole from the town a little at a time. First things first, let’s find the trophy.”
She had to admit he was right, and the idea of letting Mason pay back the money he owed without having to send him to jail really did appeal to her. Her husband was a smart man, in more ways than one.
The first two rooms were conference spaces, although Darcy had the impression neither of them had been used in a while. They watched Mason wipe the dust off the tables and the chairs and the windowsills, check the thermostats, and peek into the empty garbage cans that didn’t even need to be emptied. Jon looked everywhere he could in the meantime, waiting until Mason opened up the cabinets to get a look inside there as well. The bag wasn’t in either room.
“There’s only one other room in this hallway,” Darcy pointed out. “After that we’re going to have to search the community room. That could take an hour or more.”
“Yes, it could,” Jon said with a patience Darcy certainly didn’t feel. “Don’t worry, I’ll take you to an early dinner when we’re done here.”
“You’d better. I’m not talking a salad, either. I want a burger.”
Mason was just putting his key in the lock on the last door. “A hamburger sounds great to me. I don’t usually go out for lunch. I just live over on Sparrow so I usually drive back home for my lunch breaks. Or walk, when the weather’s better. It’s a lot cheaper than buying a lunch every day.”
“That’s true,” Jon agreed. “Have to save money where you can, right?”
“Especially when you find your bank account reaching zero month after month.” Mason shrugged. “Maybe it’s time to find another job somewhere else.”
“Well, finish doing your job today, first,” Jon said. “We can worry about tomorrow when it comes. So what’s this room here?”
“Locker room. Everybody who works here has one of these little lockers to put their stuff in. I’ve got one, myself.”
Inside, Darcy saw ten lockers, stacked two high in rows of five. They were like the small half-lockers she remembered from high school, painted green with handles that allowed the user to put their own padlock on them. Some of them had locks. Some of them didn’t. A wooden bench was bolted to the floor in the middle of the long, narrow room, giving people a chance to sit down while they changed or tied their shoes.
There were bags and hats and things on top of the lockers, in the space between them and the drop ceiling. Darcy stopped looking around the room when she saw what was sitting above locker number eight.
A blue duffle bag, with white nylon straps.
“Eureka,” Jon said, reaching up to pull the bag down. “Looks to me like we just found the elusive wild goose.”
He put the bag on the bench. Darcy could see from the way the sides bulged that it was full of something. She and Mason crowded around as Jon unzipped it. When he pulled the opening wider they could all see…
A pile of clothes.
“Jogging pants. Socks. T-shirt.” Jon listed each item off as he pulled it out and set it aside. “This is just a bunch of workout clothes. There’s a towel here…no, two towels.”
Darcy frowned. She’d been very sure about this idea she had, of Tobias hiding the trophy in his bag. “Not exactly what we were hoping for. Guess our wild goose turned into a dead duck.”
“What were you guys looking to find?” Mason asked them, leaning on the handle of a broom.
“That’s police business,” Jon told him without missing a beat. “If you don’t know already, then I can’t tell you. Hmm. This is interesting.”
Darcy had already turned away but now she came back, sitting on the edge of the bench. “Did you find something?”
“I’m not sure.”
Jon was pushing through the rest of the clothes in the bag, and when he brought his hand out this time, she was expecting to see a baseball cap, or maybe even a jockstrap.
Instead, he was holding a ten-inch plastic pipe with a coined edge, painted to look like gold plating.
“That…” Darcy couldn’t believe it. “That’s a piece of the trophy. It’s one of the posts.”
“There’s more in here, too. There’s some pieces of tinfoil in here, too, but I don’t know if that has anything to do with…oh, hello! Here’s the wooden base. Here’s the middle se
ction and here’s more of these columns. I think…yeah.” He fished around at the end of the bag and came out with a jogging sneaker. When he turned it up and shook it, a winged victory statue fell out into his waiting hand. The wings were swept up, arms outstretched and holding a laurel leaf crown.
Victory’s blank eyes met Darcy’s as if to say, “Here I am!”
She looked at everything Jon had taken out of the bag. That was the SpringFest trophy, disassembled and hidden in Tobias Hart’s duffle bag.
Lying in pieces.
Darcy suddenly remembered what Colby had said this morning at the house. A little bit of premonition brought to her by the family gift, something that neither of them had understood at the time.
We won’t have to pick up the pieces.
No, they certainly didn’t have to pick them up. The thief had taken the trophy apart and then kindly put all the pieces into a convenient carrying bag. No doubt Tobias would have snuck it all out later, easy as you please, without anyone noticing.
Jon dropped everything back into the duffle and stood up. “I’d say we found our thief.”
The door opened at that exact moment. Tobias Hart stopped just a few steps into the room, his expression turning from surprise to confusion, and then to irritation.
“That’s my bag, Chief Tinker,” the man all but growled. “You mind telling me what you were doing inside my bag?”
Jon gave him a cold smile. “Sure. As soon as you tell me why you stole the SpringFest trophy. Tobias Hart, you’re under arrest.”
Chapter 6
Jon sat across the table from Tobias in the interview room, back at the police station. Darcy watched them for about twenty minutes from the hallway, through the one-way glass, but she got bored with that after hearing Tobias say he didn’t know what was going on for the twentieth time. She didn’t feel like sticking around for number twenty-one.
Her sister was at her desk out in the main room, back from her prowler investigation. She was typing on her computer keyboard and grumbling to herself about something. A couple of other officers were over at one of the desks that the uniformed cops all shared. They waved to her as she came out, and she waved back. Darcy knew all of the officers who worked for Jon. Most of them she knew personally, a couple she only knew by name. The one sitting at the communications desk, by the service window, was someone she’d known ever since coming to Misty Hollow as a teenager.
Sergeant Sean Fitzwallis was leaning back in his chair, with his long legs thrust out in front of him and crossed at the ankles, leafing through a police supply magazine. His hair was gray, but his face was oddly smooth, and it would have been impossible for anyone to guess his age. He noticed her from across the room and lifted his eyes to meet hers with a wink. She waved back. Theirs had been a mixed kind of friendship over the years, but she definitely couldn’t imagine Misty Hollow without him.
“Darcy,” Grace called to her. “Come here for a second.”
“What’s up, sis?” Darcy pulled a chair over from another desk to sit with Grace. “I wasn’t going to bother you because you looked busy. I’m just bored watching Jon get nowhere with Tobias Hart.”
“Yeah, well I guess that depends on how you look at it.” Grace rolled her eyes and feathered her fingers back through her hair. She looked frazzled. “We’ve already fielded three calls from the mayor’s office, two from Mayor Andy himself, all about how we violated due process and the right to privacy and God alone knows what else. Never mind that it was the mayor who asked us to look into this in the first place. Never mind that Jon put way more effort into this than anybody would have expected him to.”
“Well, he did kind of search Tobias’s duffle bag without getting a warrant first.”
Grace dropped her pen on her desk. “Not you, too. Come on, sis! Yes, he looked through the bag without asking Tobias first. He had exigent circumstances, though. There was suspicious activity involved, and every chance that the stolen property would disappear if he left the premises to get a warrant first.”
“It’s a new century, sis,” Darcy reminded her. “He could have called for a search warrant from his cellphone without ever leaving the locker room.”
“Dear God, Darcy, who’s side are you on?”
She said it loudly enough that the other officers in the room turned to look their way. Even Sean Fitzwallis folded down the corner of his magazine to glance over the pages at them.
Darcy knew her sister pretty well. They’d been through a lot together over the years and it had brought them close to each other. Each of them could tell when the other was upset about something. This wasn’t the family gift, or sixth sense vibes or anything like that. It was just the way it was between sisters.
She scooted her chair closer, and instead of engaging Grace in an argument, like she knew her sister wanted, she picked up the pen and handed it back to her. “Are you all right? You seem like you’re on edge. You were even confrontational with Jon in his office earlier. I mean, more so than usual for you. What’s up?”
Grace curled her lip, about to argue, but Darcy held her sister’s gaze until she gave up. “It’s nothing,” is what she said, even though they both knew that wasn’t true.
“Is it the case you’re working on?” Darcy pressed. “That prowler complaint you mentioned?”
“What? Oh, no it’s nothing to do with that. The neighbors up on Sparrow Street saw somebody lurking around one of the homes there and they got spooked. We get calls like that all the time when someone gets scared. We just go out and tell them that we’ll watch the area and to call us again if they see anything.”
“But you checked the home, right? The one where they thought they saw a prowler?”
“Of course we did. This isn’t amateur hour, sis. We made sure the doors were locked and the windows were locked and nobody was home. No signs of a break in. I do know how to do my job, and sometimes I even get it done without your help, thank you very much.”
“Grace…you did it again.”
Her sister tossed her pen on her desk this time, and it hit with a little bounce that sent it rolling. It stopped when it hit up against her keyboard. “Fine. You’re right. It’s nothing to do with work.”
“I figured.”
“Of course you did. Listen, it’s just…” She sighed. “This is going to sound so stupid.”
“Since when has that ever stopped you?” Darcy teased.
“Ha, ha. Very funny. It’s just…look. You know Valentine’s Day is at the end of the week, right?”
“Sure. It’s the day before the kids go back to school this year.”
“Yeah, well, it’s also supposed to be this big romantic day between me and my husband and I don’t think he’s got anything planned, and I don’t have anything planned, and I guess it’s just got me upset even though there’s no real reason to be upset after all the years we’ve been married, you know?”
“Sis, take a breath. How long have you been keeping that inside?”
Grace actually managed a quiet laugh. “Honestly? I think it’s been building up ever since last Valentine’s Day when we both went out to McDonald’s and then came home and watched Pretty Little Liars until we both fell asleep on the couch. I’d kind of like this year to be special.”
“Hey, we watched your kids for you that night so you and Aaron could have time to yourselves! You told me you had an amazing night with him.”
“Of course I told you that, Darcy. What else am I going to tell you?” She raised her hands in a shrug. “Not everybody has what you and Jon have. For you guys…romance happens when you look at each other. It happens when you just walk into the same room. I’ve seen it, and it’s kind of disgusting if you want to know the truth. You fall in love with him every time you see him brushing his teeth. He thinks you’re the most beautiful woman in the world when he sees you sick with the flu and barfing your guts out.”
Darcy pulled a face. “Thanks for the visual.”
“Well, it’s true. You guys
are like the perfect couple. Jon walks into a room and your heart flutters. You don’t need Valentine’s Day to feel special because he always makes you feel that way. The rest of us have to work at it and it’s not easy to admit that my husband doesn’t make me feel like I’m a teenager with a crush anymore.” She settled her hands on the edge of her desk and studied the pale blue polish on her nails. “I just want to do something special for him, and I’m hoping he’s going to do something special for me, but every time I bring it up he just kind of deflects it like it’s any other day.”
Now Darcy understood what had her sister so upset. She forgot, sometimes, how lucky she was to be married to a man like Jon Tinker. He took special care, every day, to let her know she was loved. They were still like a couple of teenagers whenever they crawled into bed, even if it was just a marathon cuddling session. Last year for Valentine’s Day they had hosted a kids’ party at their house for Grace’s two children Addison and Emily, and their own two, and a couple of other kids as well for friends who wanted a grown-up date night.
At the end of the evening, after all the kids had been picked up and Colby and Zane were in bed, Jon had kissed her tenderly, and then started dancing with her while he hummed soft music in her ear. It was one of several amazing memories she had of Jon’s love.
“Well, sure,” she said finally, “me and Jon are good together—”
“Good?” Grace said with a laugh. “You’re freaking perfect. Me and Aaron…I know he loves me, and he knows I love him, but sometimes knowing isn’t enough, you know?”
“Well…okay. I’m sorry, sis, I didn’t realize you were so worried about this. How about I have Jon talk to Aaron and see what he has planned? I don’t want to spoil any surprises he might have in store for you, but I can at least let you know if you need to take the reins and plan something yourself. How’s that sound?”