A Darcy Sweet Mystery Box Set Seven

by K. J. Emrick

It was the doorway on the right that drew her attention. The darkness there just seemed… more dark. That, and somehow less empty.

  The light from her cellphone made the shadows dance as she started down the narrow staircase. The ceiling was low above her head, slanting to follow the drop of the steps, with empty light fixtures secured in place but useless without bulbs. At the end of the stairs the walls ended at a hallway that went right and left. Her light showed her a blank gray, cement wall. Water stains seeped down from the exposed pipes along the ceiling. She could almost feel the cold of the concrete floor through her sneakers.

  All around her, the house was quiet.

  Darcy waited for her extra senses to tell her which way to go. Left? Right? She stood there, moving her cellphone light all around, trying to see everywhere at once. There was something down here. She could feel it. She could sense it—

  Another metallic, crashing sound, like a clanking, this time from behind her. From down here, in the basement.

  Right or left. Maybe either way led around to the back of the basement. Right or left. Right or…?

  On her left, a shadow moved.

  She tensed, and flashed the light that way, and what was at first a dark shadow became a woman in a gray dress with a heavy necklace of silver links. Willamena Duell smiled at her.

  Then disappeared back into the gloom at the edges of her light.

  Darcy scowled at the shadows that kept shifting away from her flashlight app. “I still don’t like you Willa,” she muttered. “Can I call you Willa? You look like a Willa to me. What’s that? I don’t hear any objections. Good. Then you are officially Willa Duell, pain in my neck. Among other, less mentionable places.”

  The ghost did not reappear to answer Darcy’s taunting, but a cold breeze fluttered through the ends of her hair, along the back of her neck.

  “That all you have to say?” Only silence answered her. “Fine. Be that way, Willa. Go haunt yourself, why don’t you?”

  The emphasis she put on ‘haunt’ gave it a very different, very explicit meaning.

  She knew she was talking just to hear her own voice, because the silence that had settled around her like a layer of dust was far too thick after hearing those clanking, rattling sounds. She should know what that is. It was right there, at the front of her brain. Something so familiar.

  The goosebumps on her skin got worse as she followed in Willa’s direction.

  “You are crazy, Darcy Sweet,” she told herself, lowering her voice to a whisper. “You’re a crazy woman and you do crazy things.”

  She kept moving, one step at a time, following the hallway around to find the basement had been half finished with a wall of two-by-fours and plywood on the left. Someone had constructed rooms down here. Cheap hollow-core wooden doors had been framed into the wall, three of them, spaced evenly end to end. Two were open, and her light barely reached inside each to show her the outlines of boxes and things she couldn’t identify.

  The third door was closed, and there was a certain feeling in the pit of her stomach that this was the door she needed to find.

  Her light fell on two sliding bolt locks, one above the door handle, and one below. They were heavy, maybe as thick as her index finger, and she noticed the screws had been sunk in badly. Some of them were at an angle. Most of them weren’t flush to the bolt housing. They had been put in place hastily but what bothered Darcy was that they were on this side of the door. They weren’t there to keep anybody out.

  They were there… to keep someone in.

  From behind the door, she heard the sound again. The distinctive rattle of metal on metal, and metal scraping on concrete, and now there was no mistaking that sound for anything but what it was.

  Chains. That was the sound of metal chains being moved around.

  Darcy fumbled with her phone, sending her light first at the ceiling and then at the floor as she brought her texting app back up and messaged Jon as fast as her thumbs would move.

  In the basement. Hurry. So.ekne hee.

  She realized that last part came out wrong. She’d tried to write out ‘someone here’ but the letter keys were always too small when she was in a rush. Did she even have service down here? Didn’t concrete block cell signal?

  When she heard the rattling again, she didn’t bother to resend the message. She could stand here all day, with her flashlight lighting up the hallway and her screen lighting up her face, totally exposed in the dark, or she could find out what was hiding behind this locked door.

  Well. Curiosity might have killed the cat, but at least he died satisfied.

  Somehow, that didn’t sound as hopeful as she thought it would.

  Keeping her light aimed at the door, Darcy took hold of the sliding lock under the handle and slid the bar back. Then, the one above. The doorknob itself wasn’t locked. It turned easily, and she told herself that it was the adrenaline surging through her veins that was making her hand tremble, and the light spilling out from her phone shake.

  Holding her breath, she opened the door.

  The room inside wasn’t big. Four bare plywood walls. An open space above instead of an enclosed ceiling. It didn’t take her long to see the iron ring that was sunk into the middle of the concrete floor. A black chain was attached to it, each link as big as Darcy’s hand, and even as she watched it shifted under the beam of her light, making its clanking noise again as it was dragged and shifted…

  …by the person tied to the other end.

  The last link in the chain had a thick rope running through it and the rope was tied on either side to both wrists of a slender woman kneeling on the floor. The rope was so tight that it had chaffed her skin raw and drawn blood.

  When she stopped moving, she dropped her end of the chain against the floor.

  Crash.

  That was the sound Darcy had heard from the front step, muffled and indistinct. It wasn’t muffled now.

  The woman blinked against the light and tried to push herself further away, back into a corner, with her bare feet scraping against the concrete. Darcy angled her phone away, keeping the edge of the light just close enough to see the woman’s pale skin, her narrow face and her dirty, kinked hair. Her clothes were torn and filthy and speckled with blood. An odor in the room was the acrid smell of urine. Darcy didn’t think she’d been out of this room for days. Maybe longer.

  Maybe about a week.

  And, she was pretty sure she knew who this was.

  “Annie?” she guessed. “Annie Pellegrino?”

  The woman’s eyes grew wider. Darcy could see the whites all around. “You… you’re not with him. Are you? Who are you?”

  “Well, that’s a little hard to explain. Wait. You said ‘him.’ I’m not with him? Him who?”

  Annie pushed further back into her corner, to the end of the chain, and Darcy could almost feel the fear coming off of her. “He’s keeping me here,” she wailed. “He won’t let me go. He’s gone crazy!”

  “Who?” Darcy asked again. “Do you mean Charlie? Charles Huntsman? Is that who did this to you?”

  She shook her head hard, her scraggly hair flying everywhere. “No. No, you don’t understand! It’s not Charles. It’s… it’s…”

  A tingle ran up Darcy’s spine even as Annie lifted her bound hands to point behind her at the door, and gasp.

  “It’s Samuel!”

  Darcy spun on her heel. Her flashlight app was still on and the beam landed right in the face of the man who had snuck up on her in the basement hallway. He raised his arm defensively to shield his eyes, snarling like a madman, cringing back from her as if she had physically struck him.

  When he did, Darcy saw that his right arm ended in a stump. There was no hand there.

  It’s Samuel!

  Annie’s warning rang through the basement and in Darcy’s mind. This was Samuel Huntsman, the man whose withered hand Darcy had found in the river off Applegate Road. The man who had supposedly died at birth.

  The man whose ghost she h
ad seen while casting through Charlie.

  It was impossible. No matter how she read the clues in this mystery, she was looking at a dead man, running away from her.

  In that moment she had been completely vulnerable, trapped and defenseless, but the light in his eyes had sent him running to get away from her. Darcy’s heart was hammering in her chest. She wasn’t sure she was breathing.

  A dead man had just tried to attack her.

  At the last second, she remembered something else her cellphone could do. She swiped her screen and jabbed the camera icon, and aimed the lens down the hall, and took a picture just as Samuel Huntsman disappeared around the corner.

  In the next moment she heard him running up the stairs, and he was gone.

  Chapter 10

  “I’m telling you it was what I saw, Jon. It was him.”

  Darcy sat across from Jon at his desk in the police department. Between them, her phone displayed the photo she had taken of the man in the basement at Charlie Huntsman’s house. Maybe he’d been spooked by her flashlight app blazing in his eyes, or maybe he’d known the police were almost at his doorstep, but either way he had made sure to get out of the house and disappear just before Jon and Wilson Barton had come racing down the street in Jon’s car. He’d torn up the front lawn at 11 Cedar Street pretty bad, coming to a sliding stop just before it would have rammed the front steps.

  Jon’s only concern had been getting to Darcy, but they hadn’t met anyone coming the other way as they raced downstairs. By the time the two of them got to the basement Annie Pellegrino had passed out, and the shadowy man with one hand had disappeared. Darcy had proudly told them that she caught a picture of the guy.

  Unfortunately, the photographic evidence hadn’t turned out to be the case closer she’d been hoping for.

  “I believe you saw this guy,” Jon promised her. “It’s just that this photo doesn’t exactly capture his good side.”

  Darcy frowned at him, but she knew he was right. The picture was blurry, and dark where it wasn’t excessively bright. It was just a fuzzy image of a man in a long coat. The way he was running all stooped like that he looked short, maybe, but you couldn’t tell. Not for sure.

  “Fine,” she said, “so I’m still no good with a cellphone but look at this.”

  She put her two fingers to the screen and enlarged the right side of the image where it showed his arm. It was swung out to the side as he ran, and even though it was blurry like the rest of him, there was no doubt that the arm was missing its hand.

  Jon nodded. “I saw that, too. It fits with some of our clues but not others, just like everything else we keep running into with this mystery.”

  “Well, I’m just glad I was there to take the photo. It’s Samuel Huntsman, Jon. It has to be him.”

  “You’re right, in one respect, but that doesn’t mean it was very smart. We need to have a little chat about you going into that house all by yourself. It’s great that you got this photo but what would you have done if he hadn’t run away from you? What if he attacked you?”

  That same thought had occurred to her. Several times. “Then I would have stalled for time until my wonderful husband came to rescue me. He’s the chief of police, you know. Very smart. Very strong. And handsome.”

  “Darcy…”

  “Jon,” she said more seriously, “I’m fine. I know it was a risk but… I felt something was wrong. I couldn’t just sit there and wait. Besides. I’ve gotten in and out of plenty of scrapes on my own without my big strong man there to save me.”

  “And a few,” he reminded her, “that you almost didn’t survive.”

  “You knew who I was when you married me.”

  “Are you kidding? It was one of the reasons I proposed.”

  “Well, then…” She wanted to be angry with him, but that was just about the most romantic thing he could have said in that moment. “You can’t expect me to change now.”

  He drummed his fingers on his desk as he leaned back in his chair. She could read him like a book, everything he wanted to say in those wonderful blue eyes of his, but he kept it all to himself. He knew he wasn’t going to win this argument. Especially since he would have done the same thing himself.

  “I’m just glad you’re all right.” With a shrug, he let it go at that. “So what does this mean, do you think? Who is this guy?”

  “Who is he? Jon, that’s Samuel Huntsman. I’m telling you, it’s him. He’s the only one-handed man in this whole mystery and besides, Annie told me that’s who it was. She pointed at him and said his name and everything. I think she should know who kidnapped her, don’t you?”

  “Okay, except according to my wonderful wife—that’s you, by the way—Samuel Huntsman is dead. You saw his ghost, is what you told me.”

  Darcy fidgeted with the antique ring on her right hand, spinning it around her finger. That had occurred to her, too. That rotting, horrible face of Samuel Huntsman’s ghost, rushing at her out of his brother’s soul. That had been the whole point of her casting. She’d seen the severed bonds of love leading away from Charlie that used to connect him to Annie, and assumed Annie was dead. She’d seen Samuel Huntsman’s ghost and been convinced that he was dead.

  Now it turned out she’d been wrong. On both counts.

  “I must have done something wrong,” she muttered, at a loss for an explanation. “It’s not an exact—”

  “Science,” Jon finished for her. “I know. Your gifts have often been confusing, maybe a little bit more so for me than you, but I don’t remember them ever leading us this far astray before.”

  She shrugged, wishing he’d just let it drop until she’d had time to think about it more herself. “I guess there’s a first time for everything.”

  Thankfully, he didn’t push the issue. “Well, at least Zane’s gift is easier to understand. Cha Cha says he’s hungry, Zane relays the message to us, we feed the dog. Hard to get confused with a gift like that.”

  “Oh yeah? Wait until he brings home a chipmunk just because the little critter said he was hungry.”

  “Hmm. Yeah, that’s a good point.”

  She smiled at him, but without much humor. This was heading into a whole discussion about how boys were easier to raise than girls, and she wanted to stick to the topic at hand. “I don’t know how it’s possible, but that was Samuel Huntsman in the basement with me. Did Wilson get to talk to Annie at the hospital yet? What does she have to say about it?”

  “She hasn’t woken up yet. It’s the stress on her body, the doctors are saying. Mental, and physical. She was dehydrated and malnourished and from what I can gather she’d basically been sitting in her own excrement for days. That kind of treatment is hard on a body. I’m surprised she held on long enough for you to find her.”

  Darcy frowned at how cruel it all was. Did Samuel hate Annie that much? Just because she started dating Charlie instead? “Didn’t you tell me the neighbors hadn’t seen Annie in over a week?”

  “Exactly. For all we know, she’s been down in that room for up to seven days, in the dark, chained to the floor. This man—” He pointed down to her cellphone photo. “—probably only fed her when he remembered to, or when he felt like it.”

  “When you say ‘this guy’ you mean Samuel Huntsman,” Darcy reminded him.

  “Okay, sure. For now let’s say it is, somehow, Samuel.” He settled his elbows on the edge of the desk, talking with his hands now. “But Darcy, Samuel Huntsman was reported missing two years ago.”

  “By Annie,” she pointed out. “She knew him personally. They used to date before she and Charlie got together.”

  “Right, and I’ll come back to that in a minute. Samuel Huntsman was reported missing in Boston, but you found his severed hand up on Applegate Road just this week.”

  “Well, yeah, I admit that’s really confusing, but…”

  “And don’t forget the other little detail that Maxwell Dillon and the state police found for us. A death certificate for an infant Samuel Hu
ntsman that says he died at birth. Not after he was reported missing just two years ago, but from the moment he was born.”

  “Sure, that’s got me puzzled, too…”

  “I mean, that hand you found certainly didn’t belong to a baby.”

  “No, I thought of that already…”

  “And dead men can’t hold women hostage in their retrofitted basement.”

  “I know that, Jon…”

  “So all of this adds up to a big load of confusion, if you ask me.”

  It was a load of something, all right. Darcy waited to make sure he was done. When he didn’t have anything else to say, she sat back in her chair. “Jon.”

  “Hmm?”

  “You’re forgetting one thing.”

  His arms folded themselves as he regarded her with a smile. “Oh, am I now?”

  “Yes. You’re forgetting who else lived in that house with Annie.”

  “You mean, Charlie Huntsman?”

  “Yes.” This had been bugging Darcy ever since the EMTs had brought Annie up those stairs on a stretcher, and then out to the waiting ambulance. The room built into the basement, the locks on that door, all of it. “Charlie Huntsman said he was living in that house with Annie. He refused to talk to us about her. He refused to contact his brother. He must have known what was going on in that home. He was living there, for Pete’s sake! He might have even been helping to hide his twin brother for some reason. Maybe he was helping him hurt Annie. I don’t know, but whatever else is going on with this mystery, Charlie is obviously involved. You should find him and bring him in for questioning.”

  A buzzing sounded from the phone on the corner of Jon’s cluttered desk, and a red light flashed on next to one of the internal extensions. The officer at the front desk was calling him.

  Jon put his finger over that extension and held it there as he gave Darcy a wink. “You know, sometimes you’re a very smart woman.”

  Then he pushed the button.

  “Hey, Chief,” Darcy heard Sergeant Fitzwallis say in his usual languid, casual way. “Grace is back. She’s got Charlie Huntsman in the interview room whenever you’re ready.”