A Murder of Crows (A Darcy Sweet Cozy Mystery #7) (2 page)

The highway led them across the state line just before lunchtime.  Listening to music along the way, Darcy and Marla hadn’t had a lot to say to each other.  Darcy had tried to start conversations about the seminar they were going to several times, about what Marla thought might be the best way
to expand the use of the electronic reading devices, but each time Marla had shut the conversation down cold.

She, on the other hand, kept asking Darcy if she’d brought clothes to go out at night, or how much money she’d brought in case they went shopping, and other things like that.  Darcy answered in short sentences, not wanting to be rude, but not wanting to forget the whole reason for the trip either.

As it was nearing noon, they came through a small village named Cementville.  They both laughed at the name, driving slowly through the congested area of small houses huddled around a huge factory that actually produced cement, according to the sign out front.

“Obviously someone put a lot of time and effort into naming this place,” Marla said with a little twist of her lip.  “Want to get a couple of bags of cement and bring them home with us?”

“No,” Darcy laughed.  “I’m good, thanks.  I think this place is kind of quaint though.  Oh, look, there’s a bookstore.  Let’s stop.”

Marla’s face soured.  “Are you sure?  I’m hungry.  There was a sign for a burger place a few miles up the road.”

“I won’t be long, I promise,” Darcy said.  She didn’t like having to justify wanting to stop for a minute.  She was the owner of a bookstore.  Marla was head librarian in the town.  Books were important to both of them.  “Pull in here,” she said, a little more firmly.

Marla didn’t say a thing, but it was obvious that she wasn’t happy.  Darcy tried not to let it bother her.  She just hoped the whole trip wouldn’t be like this.

The place really did turn out to be a disappointment.  The store owner sat behind the sales counter with his feet up the whole time they were in the store, flipping through a magazine about trucks.  Most of what Darcy saw for sale were comic books and romance paperbacks.  A very small selection of maps of the area was set up in the front.  An even smaller selection of children’s books caught Darcy’s attention momentarily, but even that couldn’t justify staying any longer.

“I guess you were right,” Darcy finally admitted.  “Let’s go.”

“Good.”  Marla smiled and made a beeline for the door.  The guy at the counter kept reading his magazine as they left.

As they
drove back onto the main road, Marla wouldn’t stop talking.  She was going on and on about how they had to find the nearest shopping mall to their hotel and how she had a friend who knew this great club.  Darcy tuned her out and watched the city going by out the car window.

Darcy had never really known Marla.  Just from around town.  Apparently riding for hours on end in a car with someone really let you get to know them.

***

The
Restaway Lodge in Ryansburg was part of a small chain of motels that stretched up and down the East coast, and the rates here had been the best Darcy could find in the area.  The conference on electronic media was actually being held in a different hotel a few streets over but that place had been booked solid already. 

Still,
Darcy liked the Restaway as soon as they entered the lobby and went up to the front counter.  It was decorated with irregular gray bricks and wood paneling.  The floor was covered in thin green carpeting.  Paintings on the walls were of rustic scenes, cabins in the woods and salmon jumping in a stream.  Things like that.

For a six story hotel in the middle of a fair sized city, it was
a very cozy and inviting space.

The two of them checked in and Darcy gave her credit card for any incidental charges and then they went up to room 306.  It had two double beds and a tall clothes cabinet
and a flat screen television on top of a set of drawers.  The bathroom was small, and the shower curtain was too short, but the tub was big.  The same motif from the lobby was used here as well, gray bricks along the walls in imperfect lines next to wood paneling.  The purple comforters on the beds clashed a little with the green carpeting.

“Wow,” Marla said.  “Nice room.  A girl could get used to this.”

Darcy set her bags down on the bed closest to the window.  It was four-thirty already, and her stomach was already reminding her how close it was to dinner.  The burger place Marla had stopped at hadn’t really been what Darcy had wanted.  She had a chicken Caesar salad that featured wilted greens and greasy chicken bits.  Most of it had stayed in the bowl.  “Want to go exploring the city a little?” she asked.  “I’m starving.  Maybe we can find a nice restaurant to eat at.”

“Or a bar,” Marla said to her with a wink.  “I wouldn’t mind a few drinks and maybe a man
willing to flirt with me.”

Darcy thought of Jon.  She certainly wasn’t looking for a man to spend any part of the evening with, innoce
nt flirting or not, but she wouldn’t mind a quick drink.  “There was a book store a few blocks back,” Darcy said as she opened her one bag to take out shampoo and perfume and other things.  “It looked like it might have a few older books.  I’d like to check that out.”

“
Really?  After what happened in Concrete Town or Cement City or whatever it was called?  You really are a bookworm, aren’t you?” Marla said with a small twist to the corner of her lip.

Darcy paused on her way to the bathroom.  She looked at Marla in surprise.  “Well, you are too, right?  Being head librarian, I mean.”

Marla seemed to realize what she had said and snapped her head up with an apologetic look.  “Oh, sorry.  Right.  Sure.  You know I didn’t mean anything by that… right?”

As Marla went back to unpacking clothes from her bag Darcy went into the bathroom and shut the door. 
Marla’s words had stung more than a little.  She knew better than to think the people in Misty Hollow thought of her as a bookworm.  She had many friends in that town.  No one called her that.

Except…

She put her things down on the sinktop and then stood there, staring at nothing, remembering.  Jeff used to call her that.  At the end of their relationship, when arguing had become the normal means of communication, he had said it to her several times.  It had been his favorite insult.  It was odd, now, to hear echoes of those heated conversations in Marla’s offhand comment.

Come to think of it, he used to tell her she was being a wet blanket, too.  Just like Marla had done when she’d first picked Darcy up this morning.

Shrugging, she decided things like that were best forgotten.  She was probably just overthinking things because she thought she had seen Jeff’s spirit.  He had been dead for a while now, and hadn’t ever appeared to her.  She was just being silly.  She ran some water to rinse her hands and then checked her face and hair in the mirror.

Darcy gasped.  In the reflection a man
in dark clothing stood behind her shoulder, between herself and the bathtub.  She was so completely freaked out that it took her a moment longer to realize who it was.

I
t was Jeff.

She spun quickly, realizing even as she did it that he wouldn’t be standing there.  He couldn’t be.  He was dead.  This was his spirit come back to speak to her.  Her special ability meant things like this happened at odd times.  Usually at moments tha
t were completely inconvenient.  Like when she was in a hotel room with someone who didn’t know anything about her ability.

In the empty bathroom, Darcy turned back to the mirror.  Jeff’s eyes looked at her from shadows that had nothing to do with the small recessed light in the ceiling.  He raised a hand that would have settled on her shoulder
if he had been corporeal, urgently reaching out for her, like he needed to tell her something.

Th
en just like that, he was gone.

Darcy was shaken by her vision.  The only spirits who could appear to her with
out the assistance of her communication techniques were ones that were truly troubled, truly upset.  Or sometimes spirits who felt so strongly about getting a message through to the living that their urgency transcended the veil between the living and the dead.

“Oh, Jeff,” Darcy whispered.  “What’s wrong?  Why are you appearing to me now?”

There was no answer, of course.  At least not a spoken one.  The temperature in the bathroom dropped several degrees until Darcy could see her breath.  The mirror fogged up and little lines of frost traced their way up the metal shower head and the sink faucet.  Shivering in spite of herself, Darcy watched as words were drawn with squeaky hesitation in the condensation on the mirror.

Beware. 
The.  Crow.

Water droplets ran from some of the letters, leaving irregular lines through the message.  Darcy read it twice more
to make sure she had it right.

Beware the crow? 
What was that supposed to mean?

*
**

Marla sat at the bar next to Darcy, in a short black dress that she obviously hadn’t brought along for the conference.  They had the rest of the night
to just relax and have fun, Marla argued.  The seminar didn’t start until tomorrow, she said.  Tonight was for going out and letting their hair down.  At least, that was how Marla saw it.

After wiping away Jeff’s message in the mirror Darcy had flushed the toilet to cover her reasons for being in the bathroom for so long, and then acted like nothing had happened.  Very few people knew anything about her abilities.  Most people
who knew her thought she was a little odd sometimes, but Darcy kept the fact that she could see and talk to people who were dead to herself.  Not everyone took it well.  Even her wonderful and amazing boyfriend Jon had taken some convincing before he believed that what she could do was real.

Marla had put on dark lipstick and blue eyeshadow and high heeled shoes. 
She was dressed to kill.  Sitting with her, still in her blue jeans and t-shirt, Darcy felt very underdressed.  She hadn’t really wanted to come out to a bar, but she figured that since Marla had stopped at that bookstore with her, she could try sitting here for a while.

Now that she’d tried it she couldn’t wait to leave. 
She had only sipped at her cosmopolitan, and she was already wondering if she should just go back to the hotel and call it a night.  Marla, on the other hand, was on her third drink and already eyeing a couple of men at the other end of the bar.

“I think I’ll ask that one to dance,” she told Darcy, meaning the one on the left with the
glossy brown hair and pressed silk shirt.  His hair had a streak of blonde feathered into the side.  “He’s cute.  It sure would help if someone asked his friend to dance, too.”

She looked at Darcy out of the corner of her eye, her meaning obvious.  Darcy shook her head and took out a five dollar bill from her front pocket
to drop on the top of the bar.  “I don’t really feel like dancing, Marla.  Thanks anyway.  I think I’ll just head back to the hotel.  See you there later?”

Marla caught hold of Darcy’s wrist as she was standing up.  “Come on, Darcy.  Don’t be that way. 
Be a friend.  It’s just dancing, that’s all it is.”

“No, actually it’s more than that.  You don’t have someone back at home.  I do.  I can’t do that to Jon.”

“Come on, Darcy, don’t be such a stick in the mud.”

Darcy frowned.  There it was again, echoes of things Jeff had said to her in the last few months of their marriage. 
Could it be that his spirit was influencing Marla to make her say these things?  She knew possession wasn’t impossible for spirits, even though Darcy had never run into it herself.  That didn’t seem like what was happening here, though.  It was probably just coincidence.

She took her hand back and tried to smile politely.  “I’m going to head back to the hotel.  You’ve got your room key, right?”

Marla had already turned away again.  She waved a hand and raised her glass to her lips.  “Yeah, yeah.  I’ve got it.  Don’t wait up.”

Darcy felt like she had been dismi
ssed.  Sighing through her nose she took one last look at Marla, then one last look at the two men down at the bar, the one with his too-shiny brown hair and the other youngish looking man with a port wine birthmark on his left cheek.  Then she turned in a huff and made her way through the crowd of people to the exit door.

She
reminded herself that she didn’t know Marla very well.  They had met several times, of course.  Hard to run a bookstore in a small town and not know the head librarian.  Their interactions had always been formal, though, and Marla’s private life had never been Darcy’s concern.  Jeff had said something like that about her once, too.  How she was mysterious.  Or something.

There it was again.  Thoughts of Jeff were filling her mind.  She hugged her arms around herself even though the evening air was warm and mild.  People passed by her on the sidewalk without noticing her as thoughts churned through her mind.  Beware the crow, Jeff had said.  For Pete’s sake, what was that about?  Was he trying to warn her?  He couldn’t possibly have come back to tell her to stay away from birds.  Spirits didn’t reach out to people to make sure pigeons didn’
t poop on their heads.