by K. J. Emrick
“I’m fine,” her sister said when she saw Darcy coming. “It’s just a bump.”
“A bump that’s bleeding,” Jon corrected her, one knee up and his arm resting across it. He was just ending his phone call. “I’ve got the ambulance coming, and you’re going to get checked out.”
“Jon, they’ll have to take me to the hospital over in Meadowood,” Grace complained, turning her head and wincing as the motion shot a spike of pain through her. “They don’t fool around with head injuries. We don’t have that kind of time.”
Darcy understood. If the ambulance crew took Grace to the hospital she’d be a few hours being checked out, and then she’d still have to find a way back. “We can manage here without you, Grace, if you’re hurt. What happened?”
Her sister’s eyes narrowed. “The guy got the drop on me. I was watching the back door and I heard a noise behind me. I turned around to see what it was. I don’t know. Something hit me. Hard. I passed out.” She looked up at Darcy, wincing when the motion caused her a twinge of pain. “I’m sorry. He got away. At least you have Smudge back.”
“Now we just need to catch the man responsible,” Jon growled. “Burglary, taking Smudge, now assault on an officer. I want this guy.”
“Not to mention,” Darcy added, “that he’s probably a murderer.”
“A murderer?” Grace asked. “Who died?”
Darcy and Jon shared a look. Grace didn’t know yet. They hadn’t had the time to tell her. Or their mom either, Darcy realized. Great. That was going to be a hard conversation to have.
For right now, she had to tell her sister that their great aunt had been murdered.
It took a few minutes, and when Darcy was done explaining everything they’d found out from Helen and Sean Fitzwallis and everything else, Grace asked her to go over it all again.
“I can’t believe it.” She moved the cloth against her skull with a sharp intake of breath, and Darcy knew it was worse than she was letting on. “You’re sure about all this? You need to be sure, Darcy. This is Millie we’re talking about.”
All Darcy could do was nod her head. She was sure about everything, as much as she could be. Millie had been murdered ten years ago and now her killer needed that journal to keep his identity secret. “We don’t know who the guy is. I’ve looked through that journal of Millie’s. I’ve talked to…” She almost said she’d talked to Millie, but even though Grace knew about her ability to see and talk to ghosts, Darcy wasn’t comfortable telling her about some things.
Admitting that you talked to your dead aunt was one of those things that just might encourage your family to sign you up for basket weaving classes in the looney bin.
Jon knew it all. He was the only person she’d ever allowed to see that far into her soul.
“We’ve talked to everyone we can think of,” Darcy decided it was better to say. “There’s just no leads. No hints. I don’t know what to do.”
“I do,” Jon said.
Darcy was about to ask him what he meant when the ambulance rolled up, lights flashing but with the siren off. Darcy hadn’t heard the siren go off at the fire station, either. Jon must have asked them to keep this one quiet when he called in. One of the perks of being the police chief.
They waited while Grace griped and argued with the three guys from the rescue squad about how she didn’t need to go for something that was just a scratch. Jon insisted, and then had to pull rank on her, and Darcy just smiled as her sister was put into a neck brace and told to lay down on a gurney. Grace was still complaining as she got loaded into the back of the ambulance.
“I’ll call Aaron for you,” Jon told her just before the doors closed.
“Gee, thanks boss,” Grace said, the sarcasm in her voice laid on thick.
Jon took Darcy’s hand after the ambulance was gone and led her back to the library. “Come on,” he told her.
“Where are we going?”
“Back inside.”
“And why are we going back inside?”
“To catch our bad guy.”
“Wait, what?” Darcy followed him through the front doors and up to the top floor. “You think he’s still in here?”
“If he is,” Wilson Barton said to them from the fantasy section, “then he’s a ghost.”
He was looking through the stacks of books even though there was nothing there to see. His words were probably meant to be funny but Darcy felt a shiver run up her spine just the same. They’d encountered poltergeists before, ghosts who could move objects, leave messages written on mirrors, that sort of thing. This didn’t feel like that, but just the thought of a ghost coming to seek vengeance on Darcy’s family—again—gave her the chills.
“Not a ghost, Will.” Jon squeezed Darcy’s hand, to reassure her. “This guy was flesh and blood. He took those books, made it out of the library, and knocked out Grace during his escape. A ghost wouldn’t need to do that last bit.”
Wilson stopped pushing through the shelved books and came over to them. “Is Grace okay?”
“I sent her to get checked out. Just a precaution. I’m sure she’ll be fine, with that hard head of hers. It runs in their family.”
“Very funny,” Darcy told him. Smudge was still in the same spot where she’d left him. He was holding his paws crossed, which was odd for him. She remembered how he’d been walking earlier. “Smudge, are you okay?”
“I think he’s fine.” Jon actually sat down on the floor next to the cat, reaching out to pick up one of Smudge’s paws. “I noticed this earlier when Smudge first came running up to us. Look at this.”
Darcy knelt down with him, looking over Smudge’s claws. They were dark, like they were covered in mud…
No. Not mud. Blood. Dark red blood.
“He is hurt!” she blurted out.
“It’s all right, Darcy. The blood isn’t his.”
“What? If it isn’t his then who—”
She stopped herself in midsentence. Smudge had scratched the guy.
Smudge had the bad guy’s blood on his claws.
“That’s why he was walking so funny,” she exclaimed. “He knew what he had on his toes and he didn’t want it to rub off before we could get it! He was preserving it for us!”
“Sure,” Jon said, not convinced. “Or it just felt funny to him so he was favoring that foot. Whichever it was, this is the evidence we needed.”
“So the kidnapper probably didn’t just let him go.”
“Looks to me like he fought his way out. He’s a brave cat.”
Thinking of Smudge clawing at his kidnapper was a satisfying image for Darcy. “I hope the guy lost an eye. Or an ear.”
Jon nodded, agreeing with her. “We can collect the blood off his claws and send it to the State Police lab. They can analyze it there. If we’re really lucky, our guy has a police record to match it to.”
“But we thought this man was someone we knew,” Darcy pointed out. “Remember? One of our neighbors who knew where we keep our spare key?”
He looked at her, his expression serious. “Yes. That’s exactly what I think.”
“So one of our friends…?”
“Right.”
Darcy let that sink in, scratching her cat under his chin. It wasn’t every day you found yourself hoping a neighbor would have a police record so you could prove they were a murderer.
Unless, of course, you lived in Misty Hollow.
“Well,” she said. “At least we have a chance to catch our guy now. Good work, Smudge.”
“I’ll say. Our cat’s going to solve the whole case for us.”
Darcy heard how Jon had called Smudge ‘our cat.’ His and hers. Those two had come a long way from when Jon had first moved into her life. From hating each other, to this moment right here. The two men in her life, friends at last.
“What’s the call, Chief?” Wilson asked.
“Go out to one of the cars and get me an evidence bag and a swab kit.”
“We’re going to take bloo
d off a cat’s foot?” Wilson scratched at the top of his ear as he said it.
“We don’t get to choose where the investigation takes us,” Jon reminded him. “Smudge got us a blood sample. Let’s use it.”
“Right, Chief. Gotta say, this is one of the strangest things I’ve done as a police officer. Be right back.”
Linda watched him go, her eyes tracking him. “He’s dating someone, right?”
“Yes,” Jon and Darcy said at the same time.
Pursing her lips, Linda sighed. “Too bad.”
She went downstairs, probably to see how the officers down on that floor were doing. Darcy wasn’t surprised that Linda found Wilson attractive. She didn’t blame her, either. She knew what it was like to fall for a handsome police detective. She’d done the same with Jon.
“So our…friend was in this building,” Darcy asked Jon when they were alone.
“Yes. Here, and gone, with half a dozen police officers watching for him.”
“Then I don’t understand. How did he get out?” Jon was right, the guy must have gotten out because he’d hit Grace upside the head. She hadn’t done it to herself. “How did we miss seeing him inside? Linda did a search of the whole building, she said. It’s not like she would have missed seeing a guy hiding in the closet.”
“I don’t think he was in the closet.”
He handed Smudge over to her arms, and the big tough tomcat gladly rolled over onto his back for her to hold him, licking at her face. “So, what then?” she asked, slowly turning around to take a better look at the room. “Did he crawl through the vents like Bruce Willis in Die Hard?”
“See, that’s mostly Hollywood stuff. In modern buildings like this one, the air ducts are only about eighteen inches wide. Smudge could crawl through there no problem, but a grown man couldn’t.”
“Okay, smart guy, if it wasn’t the vents, then how?”
Jon went over to one of the computer tables and picked up the wooden chair there. He brought it over and set it down in front of her, stepping up onto the seat. Then he put one foot on the edge of the chair’s back to get more height.
He reached up to the ceiling and pushed up one of the ceiling tiles.
“The ceiling?” Darcy asked in surprise.
“The sub-ceiling. Cheaper ones are called drop ceilings.” He set the tile back to square and stepped down, brushing his hands against each other. “This ceiling is held in place with a metal framework incorporated into the roof. An elephant could crawl around up there. Well. A grown man, anyway.”
“A grown man who had scratches on his face or hands or arms or chest.”
“There, see?” he said, his smile now lopsided. “We’ve already narrowed down our suspect pool by half the people in town. Less, if I could get a court order to examine every man for cat scratches.”
“Unless there was an accomplice who was holding Smudge,” Darcy had to point out.
“Who could be a woman.” Now the smile slipped away completely into a scowl. “Well. Then we’re back to square one. It’s someone in town. Or a couple of someone’s.”
At the same time, they both let out a long sigh.
“At any rate,” Jon said, “I believe our guy was here the whole time, hiding up in the tiles. He waited for us to drop the book off and leave, then he came out of his hiding spot, grabbed the book, and left out a window. He distracted Grace so she turned away and then he clubbed her, and ran.”
“So now we know how the bad guy got both books and got out. That’s not much, but it’s something. And we have Smudge back,” Darcy reminded herself. “That’s the important thing. Finding the bad guy—or girl—who took my aunt’s journal and that other book will happen. I know it will. It just burns that we’re still nowhere with—”
“Wait a second,” Jon interrupted her. “You said books. Plural? They took more than one?”
“Yes. They took the book on Deseret, too.”
He turned to stare at the shelf with its empty space. “Why did they take that other book?”
“You can add that one to the list of questions we don’t have answers for.” Darcy had to sit down. Smudge wasn’t a kitten anymore, and he was getting heavier the longer she stood there. “I don’t know why anyone would want an old history book.”
“What was the title again?”
“The Forgotten Land of Deseret. Why?”
“Because,” he said, “I wasn’t paying attention before and I think I should have been. What in God’s name was Deseret?”
Darcy checked the doorway out to the stairs. Where was Wilson? “Deseret,” she explained, still stroking Smudge’s fur, “was supposed to be our thirty-first state, just before California was admitted into the union. At least that’s what Brigham Young and the Mormon settlers wanted. They formed the territory of Deseret when they settled around the Great Salt Lake, and in…uh…1849, I think, they sent a representative to Washington to apply for statehood.”
“You know I married you for that beautiful big brain of yours, right?” He leaned over Smudge and kissed her forehead.
“Hey, I like to read.”
“This I know. So. What happened? With Deseret, I mean. Obviously they never became a state.”
“No. A smaller version of Deseret was created by the government as the Utah Territory, and then eventually Nevada, Utah, and a few other states were carved out of it. Deseret never came to be.”
Jon paced a few steps back and forth. “That doesn’t sound very exciting. Brigham Young tried to make a Mormon state, and the government didn’t go for it. I don’t see how it relates to this case.”
“I don’t think it does,” she agreed. “I mean, it really is more interesting than I’m making it sound. The Mormons maintained Deseret as their own little shadow government after the Utah Territory was formed. They had their own governor, their own laws based on the Book of Mormon, the whole deal. They even had their own written language and their own flag.”
“Why Deseret?” he asked. “Were they trying to say they lived in a desert? Came through the desert like Moses?”
“No, nothing like that. They took the name Deseret from the Book of Mormon. It was a term that meant, um,” she jogged her memory until it came to her. “It meant…honeybee…”
Like bees in a beehive.
A beehive journal.
“Jon, that’s how it connects up.” Darcy’s mind raced ahead. The design on her aunt’s journal had been a beehive with honeybees. That’s why Utah’s nickname was the Beehive State. It was a reference to Deseret, the forgotten land that was almost a state. The Church of Latter Day Saints—the Mormons—had tried to build their own little Kingdom of God there, with their own governor, their own laws.
Even their own language.
As Wilson came in with the boxed kit in hand for swabbing the blood off Smudge’s claws, Darcy looked up at Jon. “I know what I was supposed to see in the journal,” she told him. “It was right there in front of me the whole time.”
Chapter Seven
I’ve already shown you. That was what Millie had told her in that dream. Over and over, that was what she’d said.
And she’d been right. In the dream she’d even shown Darcy the Deseret book. Deseret was the key.
Back at the bookstore now, just before dawn, Jon and Darcy sat at a table with the photocopied pages of the journal laid out in front of them. Each page in order. This time, she wasn’t reading the words her aunt had filled the pages with.
Darcy was running her finger across the scribbled lines at the bottom of the pages.
“I couldn’t see it before,” she said to Jon, not for the first time, “but here it is. This was the message Millie hid in her journal. Only someone who knew about the Deseret book would ever recognize it.”
“Sure,” Jon added, “or a Mormon.”
“Uh, right. I guess. But I was raised Protestant and you’re a Catholic so the message was kind of lost on us.”
“Until now.”
“Right.
Until now.”
Smudge meowed and rolled over on his makeshift bed of stacked boxes over against a nearby wall. His claws had been swabbed thoroughly, and then cleaned once Wilson and Jon were done collecting the evidence, and he looked much happier for it. Darcy could only imagine what it felt like to walk around with your attacker’s blood on your hand.
Gross. On so many levels.
The blood was already on its way to the State Police crime lab, and hopefully it would reach there shortly after they opened for business this morning. With a little more luck the lab technicians would start analyzing the blood today. Jon had written them a very detailed letter explaining why the analysis was needed so quickly.
“This is great and all,” Jon was saying to her, looking at the same squiggly, decorative words she was. “But I don’t see how this helps us. Some of the pages in that journal were stuck together. Some of this secret writing is lost.”
“I don’t think that matters.” Darcy took her yellow notepad and began carefully drawing the Deseret letters one at a time, from the beginning of the first page. They were beautiful, in their own way, flowing and looping and angular, almost like they were crafted to be a shining example of the Mormon faith. Every time she got to a spot in the journal where the border of the page was ruined she put a dash on the page and then started again where she could read the words.
When she got to the fifth line of writing, she stopped. “See this?”
She pointed to the page for Jon to see. From the end of where she had copied the letters over, back to the beginning, back to the end again. “The message is looping itself. Millie wrote the same message over and over. So, if some of the pages were lost or ruined—and they were—we could still get the message by filling in the blank spots from other places.”
The same message, over and over.
It was almost like her aunt had planned it this way. Maybe Millie wasn’t as foolish as Darcy had thought she was for hiding a book in the cellar where the pages were bound to get ruined. She’d planned for that eventuality, obviously.
In the back of the store they heard something shift. A stack of books, falling to the side, maybe. That would be Millie, asking if she was forgiven yet.