A Murder of Crows (A Darcy Sweet Cozy Mystery #7) (5 page)

“
You were at the police station here?  What did they say?” Darcy asked.  She couldn’t help herself.  As much as she had told herself earlier to let the matter drop, now that Jon had talked to the police on the case, she wanted to know everything.

“You first,” Jon repeated.  He led them over to the bed and sat down next to her on the edge.  “Tell me everything.”

“All right,” she said.  “But can we order some pizza first?  I’m starving.”

The delivery of a large pizza
, half mushrooms and half anchovies, came twenty minutes later.  By then Darcy had gone through her story twice.  Going to the bar with Marla, having a few sips of a drink while Marla had three herself, seeing the two guys at the end of the bar, and then leaving when Marla wanted to dance with them.

He eyed her, holding his slice of pizza over a napkin
, the cuffs of his sleeves unbuttoned and rolled up.  “There’s something else, isn’t there?”

Darcy lowered her eyes.  “You’re using your police mindtricks on me.”

He smiled, but nodded.  “They aren’t tricks.  You can talk to dead people and I know how to read live people.  We each have our talents.  So, what is it you haven’t told me yet?”

Still she hesitated, but then she realized he wouldn’t let it go unti
l she told him.  He was right.  He was very good at his job as a detective because he understood people, just like he understood her.  “All right.  Um.  I’ve been having visions.”

Those words didn’t even
faze him anymore.  It was such a part of her life to get messages from the other side that he was completely used to it by now.  “Okay.  Visions about Marla?”

“Well, not exactly. 
Sort of.  I don’t know.”  She bit into her pizza, stringing gooey cheese that she had to break off with her fingers.  She chewed to give herself time to think.  “It was Jeff.  I’ve been seeing Jeff’s ghost.”

“Jeff,” he said slowly. 
“Your ex-husband Jeff?  That Jeff?”

She could hear the wariness in his voice.  There were still a lot of unresolved issues there, considering that Jon had come to town just as Jeff was murdered, and at first Darcy had even suspecte
d Jon of being the killer.  Jon didn’t talk about Jeff much.  It was hard to compete with someone who was dead.

“Yes, my ex-husband Jeff.”  Darcy set her pizza aside.  “He keeps showing up at different times, and then last night I had a dream about him and—”

“Wait, you had a dream about him?”

“Not that kind of dream, Jon.  He was in a dream, and he was telling me that he’s sorry.”

“Sorry for what?” Jon asked.

“I’m not sure.  I got woke
n up at that point by the officer coming to say Marla was, well, you know.”

Darcy blinked at what she had just said.  She
hadn’t looked at it that way before.  Jeff saying he was sorry, then the news of Marla’s death coming.  There couldn’t be any connection there, she told herself.  It was just a coincidence.  It had to be.  Didn’t it?

Jon
finished the rest of his slice in silence.  Then he brushed his hands off with the napkin and drank from one of the four cans of soda that had been delivered with their food.  “Okay.  Well.  Jeff’s ghost aside, let me tell you about what I found out from the Ryansburg Police.”

The bathroom door swung shut, softly but firmly.  Darcy set her lips in a thin line.  Apparently Jeff didn’t like it when Jon said to put his ghost aside for the moment.

Jon paused in what he was saying as the door shut.  Darcy saw the pinched look on his face even though he tried to quickly smooth it away.  He understood things like mysteriously closing doors better, now that he was with her.  “Okay,” he said, not taking his eyes off her.  “The police are looking for that man with the blonde streak in his hair that you saw at the bar.  The assumption is that Marla got friendly with him, they left the bar together, and he killed her for some reason.  Maybe she wouldn’t go home with him or maybe she said something that he didn’t like.  Who knows.  But they’re pretty sure that he’s a strong suspect.”

The smoke detector in the room beeped twice and went still again.

“Will you tell him to stop that?” Jon said.

He meant Jeff, obviously.  “It’s not like I can control him,” Darcy argued.  Still, she wished Jeff wouldn’t do that.  It was weird enough having his ghost suddenly hanging around.  Having
him try to talk to them was stranger still.

“So they’re going to identify
that guy and interview him.  If they do it while we’re still here they asked if I could help do the interview, seeing as how Marla was from Misty Hollow.”

“They don’t have any other suspects?” Darcy asked.

“No.  And to tell you the truth, I think their theory makes sense.  Think about it.  Marla lets herself get picked up by the wrong guy, and then he kills her.  That story’s been written any number of times.”

Darcy twisted the ring on her finger. 
She had to admit that it did make sense.  “I guess you’re right,” she said.

The smoke detector beeped twice again, louder
this time.

“Jeff, knock it off,” Jon said
out loud, then blinked at himself, his eyes wide.  He cleared his throat.  “I’m going to use the bathroom.  You want to go out tonight?  Get our minds off this?”

What she really wanted to do was read her aunt’s book, but she supposed that could wait until they got back.  She wanted to show it to Jon, too, but she wanted to look through it first.  “Sure, we can go for a walk or something,” she told him.

He got up, kissing her cheek as he did.  When he got to the bathroom door his hand hesitated over the doorknob, maybe remembering how a ghost’s hand had just closed it shut.  Then he shook his head and went inside, closing the door again behind him.

Darcy stood up, looking around the room.  “Okay, Jeff,” she whispered.  “This has got to stop.  I don’t know what you’re doing here, after you’ve been dead for so long, but this needs to stop.  Jon’s here now.  He can take care of me.”

The smoke detector beeped loudly, over and over, then burbled and went silent.  The little red light that had been steadily lit to show it was working winked out and went dark.

Jeff apparently had his own opinion of whether
she was safe or not.

Jon
came stumbling out of the bathroom now, holding his unzipped pants up with one hand.  “What is it?” he demanded.  “Is there really a fire?”

She smiled at him. 
Her brave protector.

***

Later that night, Darcy cozied up to Jon in the motel bed.  Even if they hadn’t been living together for so long she would have still climbed in with him.  She couldn’t bring herself to look at the other bed, the one that would have been Marla’s.

Jon hadn’t been very talkative after Jeff’s prank with the smoke detector.  They’d gone for a walk around a few blocks,
just wandering around and noticing how the bustling city of Ryansburg changed at night.  Streetlights and neon signs lit the world in eerie colors.  There were still a lot of people out, just walking around like her and Jon, not in a hurry at all.  Back home nearly everyone would be at home at this hour.  Maybe even in bed asleep.  Life here was very different than what she was used to in Misty Hollow.

After a while they
had made it back to the hotel.  Jon had brought pajama bottoms and a single change of clothes in his bag but it was warm enough that he had stripped down to his boxer shorts.  He was behind her in bed, spooning with his warm, bare chest against her back.  His arm was a comforting weight around her.  His body heat felt good through her t-shirt.  It didn’t take long for her to drift off into a comfortable sleep.

She wasn’t sure later if the dream came right a
way or if it waited for her to be deep in slumber.  It felt real, at first.  She was walking next to Jeff again.  Only this time she knew him immediately.  She could feel his presence, smell the scent of that overbearing aftershave he used to wear.  It was as real to her as if he were still alive.

“What do you want from me, Jeff?” she asked.  They were walking down a path in the woods somewhere.  Sunlight slanted through the branches above and unseen birds sang. 
Ahead of them the forest went on forever.  She couldn’t see an end to the path.

“I don’t want anything from you,” he said.  “I’m sorry.”

They kept walking.  In her dream, Darcy knew she wanted to stop walking but she couldn’t.  She needed to find a way out of the woods.  “You’ve said that before, that you were sorry.  What do you mean?”

“I have a lot to be sorry for.  Otherwise our marriage wouldn’t have ended.”

“You didn’t have to leave, Jeff.  You made that decision on your own.”

“I made all the wrong decisions.  I did things you don’t know about.”

That surprised her.  Jeff had done and said a lot of things that had ultimately led up to him leaving, and then to her divorcing him.  She knew the whole story though, step by step.  Every word and everything both of them had done.

Or so she thought.

“What things?” she asked.  The trail through the woods turned, but still kept going with no end in sight.  “What did you do?”

“Bad things.
  Marla knew.”

Now Darcy really did stop. 
She forced herself to stay in that one spot and face him.  The trees still stood tall around her, but up ahead there appeared to be fewer of them, and she thought she could see a clearing.  She might have found her way through.  “What do you mean, Marla knew?  Marla knew what?”

“Why she died.  Marla knew.”

No.  No, Darcy wanted to hear about the bad things Jeff had done.  Marla knew about them, Jeff had said.  Now he was changing the subject.  Pressing a ghost for a direct answer was pointless, though.  She knew that.  You had to go with the things they wanted to tell you.  “Okay, so tell me.  Tell me why Marla was killed.”

“Because I did bad things.”

Circles.  He was talking in circles.  The woods around them started spinning, slowly, slowly spinning until she lost all sense of which way was out.  The sunlight blurred in her eyes and she blinked into it, trying to find Jeff and the path and…and…

It was then that she realized she was
awake, laying in the hotel bed, facing the wall and the window where dawn’s first light had come shining through into her eyes.

Darcy blinked again
and again, rubbing her eyes.  She sat up in shock as her vision cleared.  She couldn’t be seeing this.  The dream was over.  She was awake.

Yet there was Jeff, squatting next to the bed.

“I’m sorry,” he said to her again, making the hair stand up at the back of her neck.

Jon paced the floor of the hotel room from the door to the beds and back again.  “So he’s here. 
Now.”

Darc
y rolled her eyes and raked her fingers into her hair.  She sat on the bed they had slept in, still in her pajamas.  “Yes.  Jeff’s ghost is here.”

“Well, get rid of him.”

She stared at Jon.  She knew that he was frustrated, and so was she, but she did not appreciate the tone in his voice.  “It’s not like he’s a dog.  I can’t just tell him to heel or something.  Spirits need to know that any left over business they had is done.  Their worry and their anxiety about things that happened during life is what holds them here.  Jeff won’t be going anywhere until we figure out what’s bothering him.”

Jon stopped his pacing and
grabbed up his t-shirt and pulled it on.  He sighed heavily as he did.  “Great.  So we have to be his therapist.  Can’t you just ask him what’s wrong?”

From the corner of her eye she saw Jeff standing in exactly the same spot he had been standing in twenty minutes ago when she’d woken Jon up and told him what was going on.  It had sparked an argument between Jon and her that was still going on.

“It doesn’t work that way,” she explained for the third time.  “Spirits, well, they don’t speak the same language anymore.  Sort of.  If you ask a ghost a direct question, you’ll get an answer that might seem totally unrelated.  The answer will be cryptic and hard to understand.  That’s because the ghost is answering the meaning behind the question, not the question itself.”

He crossed his arms and leaned back against the wall.  “I don’t get it.”

Darcy blew out a breath.  It had taken years for her Aunt Millie to explain all this to her, even though Darcy had been using her gift from a young age.  How could she condense it into five minutes for Jon?

“Okay, look at it this way.”  She tucked her feet under her on the bed and used her hands t
o emphasize what she was saying.  “If you ask me if it’s raining outside right now, my answer would be no, because it’s a bright and sunny day.”

Jon looked out the window at the cloudless sky,
then turned back to her with a nod.  “Okay, I get that.”

“Good. 
Now.  Ask that same question to a spirit of someone who has died.  They might give you an answer like, their mother’s favorite color was red.”