by K. J. Emrick
Then he really was asleep.
Darcy stared at him in disbelief, remembering the words he had spoken to her in the communication, there in the in between space.
He’d promised to be back before she knew it, and now… here he was. Even after nearly dying, he’d kept his promise.
Chapter Nine
Darcy knew her thoughts were written all over her face when she came back out to sit with Ellen. The way she slumped into the plastic seat, with her head back, and her eyes closed, said it all.
Ellen regarded her for a few seconds, listening to her cell phone up to her ear. “I’ll call you back,” she said to the person on the other end of the line.
Then she disconnected the call with a swipe of her finger and shoved the phone down into her pocket. “So tell me,” she said. “How is he?”
“He woke up,” Darcy answered, starting with the good news.
“Serious? Wow. Mister Police Man is tougher than he looks.”
Nodding her agreement, Darcy pulled herself forward to rest her elbows on her knees. Now the bad news. “He doesn’t remember anything. I mean, he remembers going to the conference. I think he might even remember leaving to come home. After that… it’s all a blank.”
Ellen whistled. “That’s rough. Kind of takes away any chance that he’s gonna tell us who did this to him.”
“Exactly. We’re back at square one. I thought… when I believed Jon was dead, I figured he might give us some hints about who his attackers were. You know… when I spoke to him.”
There was no reason for Ellen to ask what she meant. “Right. Darcy Sweet and her mystical, magical gifts.”
“Right. That was the best I could hope for. Then he came back to me, and I thought everything was going to be fine. I figured he’d help me figure everything out. When he’s with me, I’m stronger. When he’s with me, I feel like I can do anything. Now he’s in there, on that hospital bed, barely able to open his eyes for more than five minutes and I can’t… I don’t… Ellen, I don’t know what I’m going to do.”
“Really?” Ellen raised an eyebrow.
“What do you mean? Ellen, I’m telling you, Jon doesn’t remember anything. He can’t help us.”
“Well, then it’s a good thing we have other leads to follow.” She took her phone out again, and flipped through to the pictures in her camera app in an exaggerated way. “Don’t ya think?”
Darcy finally smiled. Jon was still recovering from what had been done to him, and she still wished that he could be right here by her side instead of lying in a hospital bed, but Ellen was right. Darcy knew she was a strong woman. She always had been, even without Jon. Solving mysteries was what she did. With Jon, she was stronger, but even without him there was no reason why she couldn’t take on this mystery, and solve it herself.
With Ellen’s help, of course.
Feeling a little better, Darcy took the cell phone out of Ellen’s hand and began skimming through the images. “Right. So let’s get this back to Misty Hollow and see if Ferguson can identify any of the workers from the casino.”
“You want to wait here for Jon to feel better?” Ellen asked, sounding like she already knew what Darcy’s answer would be.
In fact, Darcy wasn’t sure which she wanted to do. On the one hand, she didn’t want to leave Jon’s side. On the other, sitting here and waiting for him to regain his strength wasn’t going to do anybody any good. Someone had to follow the clues. Grace was in the hospital. Now Jon was in the hospital, too. Ellen was right. It was up to them…
Her finger paused over the string of pictures. She’d been there when Ellen had taken most of the shots with her phone’s camera, but they had wandered off separately a few times to see what they could see. That’s when Ellen must have taken this picture.
From the screen, a man with piercing gray eyes stared back at her.
Ellen reached across to tilt the phone so she could see it, too. “What is it? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
“I wish I had,” Darcy told her. She used her two fingers to enlarge the photo and center it on the face of the man with thinning black hair and the muscle tone of a bull. The crescent scar under his left eye was exactly as Darcy remembered it, too.
A ghost? Yes. She wished she’d seen a ghost.
Ghosts she could handle.
***
The casino was just as blazingly bright at sunrise as it had been in the middle of the night.
Darcy and Ellen had come back to the room they had rented at the Brick Road and gotten a few hours of sleep. The decision had been made to stay rather than go back to Misty Hollow, but for completely different reasons than before. Now they had a suspect to find. They had no doubt that the person they were looking for would still be here when they woke up in the morning, and both of them were tired, and the room was still rented to Ellen. It only made sense to catch what sleep they could.
Even so, Darcy didn’t sleep well.
She’d stepped in to see Jon one more time before leaving the hospital. He never woke up, and she left him with a quick kiss and a handwritten note.
Be back tomorrow. Something we need to check on. Be well.
Sweet Baby.
She giggled like a little girl when she signed her nickname to the note.
Still, she felt a little guilty leaving him there, just like she’d left Grace in the hospital in Meadowood. Even if it was for the right reasons she felt like she should be with her family. Not to mention little Colby waking up at Izzy’s house without her mommy around.
Those thoughts hounded her as she slipped into a broken dream.
“You can’t be with them all the time, you know.”
Aunt Millie sat with Darcy on the couch in her living room. Fitting, considering that this used to be Millie’s house. She was in her long black dress again, and it suddenly occurred to Darcy that her aunt never wore anything else. It was such a dreary color. Maybe she meant it that way, to remind Darcy that there would always be dark times to come.
Then again, maybe Darcy was reading too much into it.
“Darcy, dear,” Millie said to her, laying a hand over her knee. “Do pay attention, won’t you?”
“I heard you,” Darcy promised. “I’ve just got a lot of things on my mind.”
Millie nodded. “No doubt. Still, pay attention.”
“To what, Millie?”
The older woman smiled at her niece. “Why, the important things, dear.”
Smudge purred from the chair nearby, licking his paw to wash his white and black face. “She’s already seen what she needs to,” he insisted. “She usually does. My Darcy doesn’t miss much.”
“Your Darcy?” Millie chuckled. “She was my Darcy long before she was yours, Mister Smudge.”
The cat purred again and twitched his tail, and didn’t argue that point. Beside him on the chair, little Tiptoe looked up at her father, imitating his every move. Every motion of his paw. Every swish of his tail. Darcy could see how much she wanted to be just like Smudge.
“Hopefully,” Smudge said, “she’ll be better than I was.”
“Nuh-uh,” the little cat meowed. “Nobody’s better than my daddy.”
Darcy smiled. Such a cute voice. This was the first time that Tiptoe had ever appeared in one of her dreams. Well. If she really was just like her daddy Smudge, then Darcy had better get used to seeing Tiptoe here a lot more.
“Pay attention, dear. We don’t have a lot of time tonight,” Millie repeated. “I’m sorry about Jon.”
Darcy got up from the couch so quickly that she scared Tiptoe. The kitten mrowled and bolted off up the stairs. Smudge shook his head with a little sigh and a twitch of his whiskers, then trotted after her. Darcy noticed that he was acting his age now, walking slowly, taking the stairs one step at a time instead of bounding up them like he used to do. Poor cat. She’d have to give him some extra attention when she finally made it back home.
When the cats were gone she rounded on her great aunt
. “How could you not tell me about Jon? You were in my dreams last night, too. You were talking to me like everything was fine while Jon lay dying in a ditch!”
Millie sighed. “I can’t always be giving you the answers, niece of mine. I told you something was coming down the road. If you remember, I also told you things don’t always stay on the road. That’s all I had time for before you woke up. You knew something was wrong yourself. Didn’t need an old woman to tell you that.”
“No, but maybe I needed this old woman to tell me that my husband could be dying!”
“Jon made his path. In fact, he was fine right until the moment you woke up. That’s when the danger started. You have to learn some things without your Great Aunt Millie interfering, Darcy. Like how to trust yourself.”
“I’ve learned plenty,” Darcy grumbled, squeezing her arms tight to her body. All the heartache she and Jon had endured. All the dangers. All the times they had risked their lives for friends and strangers alike. Yes. She’d learned plenty.
“I agree,” Millie said, speaking directly to Darcy’s thoughts. “You’ve grown so much. I’ll always be around, dear, but I’ve gotten to a point where it’s hard to reach across to you. I’m a thought whispered on the wind more often than not.”
Darcy choked off a sob, in her dream, and went over to throw her arms around Millie. “I don’t want to lose you.”
“Oh, child,” Millie said, her voice heavy with emotion. “I’ll be around. Even when you don’t see me throwing a book across the room. I’ll be watching. I see what’s going on in your life. You and that man of yours have a connection strong enough to transcend death. Imagine, reaching out to you like that. Only barely dead, and his spirit was still able to reach out to you. Such a man you have.”
“Yes,” Darcy agreed, even managing a little smile. “He is quite a man.”
“Then you help him now. You figure out this mystery for him while he gets better. Hear me?”
Her fingers wiped away the tears from Darcy’s eyes. Darcy nodded, not knowing what else she could say to this woman who had basically raised her from an angry teenager up to adulthood.
“Good,” Millie said, as if that summed everything up for both of them. “Now. Remember what Smudge and I said.”
And just like that, Darcy’s eyes popped open, and she was awake.
She lay there in the bed of the hotel room, staring at the ceiling with its white popcorn finish, thinking back over everything she had just heard. Her aunt wasn’t going to be around as much, she said. Darcy had been prepared for that, really. Ghosts who were trapped too long hanging around the human world tended to go a bit crazy. There would have to be a very strong reason for a ghost not to move on to the other side this many years after their death. Millie had found her reason. Watching over Darcy.
But, like Millie had just said in that dream, that wouldn’t keep her here forever. Darcy wouldn’t want that for her aunt, either. She wanted Millie to be happy. Like Millie had just said…
Remember.
Millie had told Darcy to remember what she said. What her and Smudge had both said. Remember.
Squinting now, she tried to picture the dream in every detail. She thought back, and remembered Smudge, sitting there with little Tiptoe. He hadn’t said much, but she remembered one thing in particular.
She’s already seen what she needs to.
And then the thing that Millie kept saying, over and over.
Pay attention.
Pay attention… to what she had already seen.
Groaning, she rolled over in the bed and pushed herself up on one elbow. That was fantastic advice. Pay attention to what she’d already seen. Just fantastic. Might as well tell her that the answer was waiting behind door number one.
“Morning,” she heard Ellen say. “You going to get up or stay in that bed all day?”
She was sitting over in the chair by the window, feet up on the desk again like yesterday, dressed and ready.
Darcy felt like she should hate women that were that together all the time, but it was impossible to hate Ellen Gless. Even knowing what she used to do with her life—and what she did now for that matter—Darcy considered Ellen to be part of her family.
That didn’t mean she wasn’t annoyed with Ellen for looking that good this early in the morning.
She ran her fingers through her own long and unruly hair and decided she should take a quick shower. “What time is it?” she asked behind a yawn.
“Six-thirty.”
Darcy blinked at the clock, but Ellen wasn’t lying. “Did you get any sleep at all?”
Ellen shrugged. “An hour, maybe. I don’t sleep much. Never have. Those guests we were waiting for are already downstairs, too. You’re the only one still in bed.”
“Right,” Darcy said, making herself get up from the really soft bed and shamble across the floor. A change of clothes would have been nice. Sleeping in her shirt and panties had been lots of fun, back when she was a teenager. She was too old for slumber parties now. “I’ll be ready in just a few minutes. Don’t let them start without me.”
“Can I ask you something?”
“Hmm?” Darcy was already in the spacious bathroom, finding her pants right where she’d left them hanging on the back of the door. “Yeah, sure. Go ahead.”
Ellen followed her in and hopped up to sit on the edge of the sink while Darcy got the shower nice and hot and stepped into the spray. “This guy you saw in the picture. He’s a bad man?”
Darcy used a bit of body wash from a complimentary bottle and a washcloth to scrub her body. She thought about how to answer Ellen’s question as she washed away the suds. Was the man in the picture a bad man?
Yes. Yes, he was.
“He’s one of the worst people Jon and I ever arrested,” Darcy said, giving her hair a quick rinse. “I didn’t think he’d be out of jail this soon. He told us he would, but I didn’t believe it.”
“So he’s a dangerous man?” Ellen pressed.
Darcy turned the water off. Reaching out through the shower curtain to snag a towel, she dried herself off in the tub before wrapping the short towel around her body and opening the curtain. Ellen was waiting for her answer. “Yes, he’s dangerous. He was involved in a murder case Jon and I investigated. Izzy’s ex-husband.”
Ellen nodded, slowly, light coming on behind her eyes. “So, he’s part of that group. ‘Kay. Looks like Ferguson Gorsky’s case might be more closely associated with what happened to Jon and Grace than we thought.”
Using another towel to pat her hair dry, Darcy nodded. “Looks like.”
The group they were talking about was the same criminal organization that Gorsky suspected of stealing his money. The same group that had nearly killed Izzy to get to her husband.
The Hand.
And one of them was right here, in the Brick Road Casino. Maybe more than one, but definitely one for sure. The one Darcy had seen in that cell phone picture. A man Darcy had hoped to never see again.
“Let me get dressed,” Darcy said, still holding the towel closed, “and we’ll go down to meet everybody else.”
“Darcy…” She trailed off, and Darcy wasn’t sure what she was getting at.
“Ellen, what is it?”
“I think you should stay here. Just for now. Until we meet with the guy. I can call you when it’s done, or I can get one of the—”
Darcy cut her off with a look. It would have included some very expressive hand gestures, too, if her hands weren’t busy keeping the fluffy towel in place around her naked bits. “I am not staying in this room while everyone else does the work. Jon is my husband. Grace is my sister. I’m coming with you.”
“Yeah, I get all that,” Ellen said. “But we can handle this, Darcy. Let me and—”
“How long have you known me?” Darcy asked her.
Ellen shook her head, giving up her argument. “I’ve known you long enough to know that you’re not going to play it safe when it comes to solving a mystery li
ke this.”
“Right. Now. Give me a little privacy so I can get dressed again and we’ll go meet everybody.”
Ellen bounced down from the sink, but she didn’t leave the room. “Darcy… I’m worried, okay? First Grace, then Jon. If this really is The Hand, they could very well be holding a grudge against you, too.”
“I’ve thought of that.” She knew Ellen was right, but that wasn’t going to change her mind. “There’s going to be plenty of people around down there in the casino, and you’ll be there too. How much more protection could I ask for? I’m not staying behind.”
“Fine,” Ellen said, letting her hands fall against her hips with a loud slap. “I gave it a shot. Should’ve known Miss Darcy Sweet is always where the action is.”
“Believe it,” Darcy told her. “Now get out and let me dress in peace.”
But Ellen wasn’t quite done yet. “What about Izzy? If someone is targeting the people involved in her investigation, wouldn’t she be in danger, too?”
“No.” Darcy was confident about that. “They never had any interest in her, except as a way to get to her ex-husband.”
Ellen considered that, not quite convinced. “So why is all this coming back up now, do you think?”
“That’s what we’re going to find out. As soon as I’m dressed.”
Ellen rolled her eyes, and shut the door behind her.
***
Downstairs in the casino, Ellen and Darcy walked through an early morning crowd. Not as many people as there had been at night, maybe, but lots of elderly men and women were getting off a tour bus, and several others were taking advantage of the breakfast buffet.
Workers in their red vests and black slacks were hurrying from place to place, keeping guests happy and the money flowing.
Up at the front desk, waiting patiently while he looked through one of the casino’s brochures, was their guest Ellen had mentioned earlier.
Detective Wilson Barton, acting chief of the Misty Hollow Police Department.
Behind him were two of the other officers from their hometown. They were in plain clothes instead of their uniforms, but Darcy recognized their faces. Shane Wagner, and Kara Larrabee. Darcy had known Shane for a while now. Kara had only been hired a little over a year ago.