Laid to Rest (A Darcy Sweet Cozy Mystery Book 18) (11 page)

“We’re going to take blood 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.”

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.

Not yet, Darcy thought to herself.  Soon.  Maybe.

Just not yet.

“Okay, so we’ve got the whole message.”  Jon looked over her shoulder at the page.  “That’s great, but we never even saw this Deseret book that our suspect took with him.  How are we going to translate this?”

“Jon.  This is the digital age.  If I want to translate something I pull up a Google search on my computer.”

“Oh.”  He sounded embarrassed not to think of that himself.  “Right.”

“So this is the message.”  She drew two slanting lines, carefully placing them at the start and end of one segment of the repeated message.  “Let’s hop on the internet and find out what Millie was trying to tell us.”

“We probably should have stayed at the library to do this,” Jon said, looking out the front glass windows of the shop where the sky was beginning to brighten.  “Or gone to bed and caught some sleep first.”

She stood up, wrapping herself around him, laying her head against his neck.  “Getting tired, old man?”

“I came to a small town to have a quiet career,” he reminded her.  “Maybe find a lost dog or two.  Break up some neighbor disputes.  I figured it would be a great place to retire, grow a flower garden, and watch my children grow.  You’ll have to excuse me if I feel a little tired after running from one mystery to the next with you.”

Darcy knew what he meant, and knew he wasn’t really complaining.  Jon was the type of man who enjoyed being in the middle of the action.  “You knew what you were getting into when you married me, Mister Tinker.”

“And I did it anyway, Mrs. Tinker.”  He held her tighter, stroking her back with the palm of his hand.  “I love you, Darcy.”

“I love you, too, Mister Sweet,” she said, teasing him about their unofficial name change.  “So…you wanted a nice quiet place to raise your children, did you?”

“Hmm?  Oh.  Yeah, well, sure.  I never said I didn’t want kids.”

“You never wanted to talk about it,” she reminded him.  “Change your mind?”

His warm breath caressed the side of her neck.  “Maybe so.  We should definitely talk about it.”

“After we decode Millie’s message?”

“It’s a date.”

Smudge meowed at them, short and questioning.

“Don’t worry,” Darcy said to him.  “You’ll always be my first baby.”

He dropped his head back down on his paws, a smug expression on his face as if to say,
That’s right I will.  Nobody better forget it.

The thought of having children of her own with Jon was an exciting one.  She had tried to bring it up with him, several times, only to have him say it wasn’t time yet, not now, when we’re ready.  Darcy felt ready.  They were married now, after all.  How did the old rhyme go?  First comes love, then comes marriage, then comes your own little human being to love and care for.

It was something like that.

As much as she wanted to sit down with him now and plan out the rest of their lives and figure out how they could easily afford one or two kids and maybe even a third—not that she hadn’t given this a lot of thought—right now they had to keep investigating this mystery.  They had the next clue.  It was time to see where it would lead them.

The computer at the checkout counter could access the bookstore’s wireless network, SweetReading.  WiFI had been as big a draw for customers as the downloadable e-book section had.  Right now she just needed it to do a Google search.

The alphabet of the Deseret language wasn’t hard to find.  It was easy enough to understand, too.  It just took some time to do the translating.

“Each letter represents a sound,” Darcy explained to Jon as she worked.  “So, it’s kind of like reading hieroglyphics, I guess.  There’s forty characters, each with its own sound.  Look.  This one is a short e, this one is a long e.  That sort of thing.”

“Okay.  Not sure why the Latter Day Saints needed their own alphabet but as a code I think it works fine.”

“There have been lots of alternative alphabets created over the years.  George Bernard Shaw actually left a provision in his will to fund the creation of a phonetic alphabet.  That was in the 1950s.  Esperanto has its own alphabet, too.  The Mormons were setting out to create their own society, separate from everyone else.  It’s not that far-fetched for them to have their own alphabet.”

He looked at her from across the sales counter in a way that almost made her blush.  “What?” she asked him.

“I love you.”

“For my mind, right?”

“Well, the rest of you, too.”

Now she was sure she was blushing.  To cover for the heat rising in her cheeks she concentrated on her notepad and the translation of her aunt’s message.

“So what’s it say?” Jon asked her after a few minutes.

“Hold on.  It isn’t as easy as I made it sound.  A few of these letters look almost identical.  The one for the long a sound and then the one for a hard b.  The ones for b and v are very close, too.  I think I’m getting it, just be patient.”

She scratched out a word she had just written and tried again, sure it was right this time.  It was kind of like using one of those decoder rings from a cereal box.  With only a few more goofs, she had the whole message translated.

Reading it to herself, Darcy tapped the pen against the page, and then read it again.  “Huh.”

“What?” Jon asked her.  “What is it?”

“I’m not sure.”  She picked up the notepad and handed it to him.  “See for yourself.”

Jon read it through, his eyebrows scrunching up as he did.  “You’re sure about this?”

“Yes.  Feel free to double check me, but that’s how it translates.”

He read it one more time before dropping the pad back on the counter.  “Well I guess we shouldn’t have expected any part of this mystery to be easy.  For a woman who passed on a decade ago Millie sure does like to hold onto her secrets, doesn’t she?”

A book went sailing past Jon’s head, in a slow arc, before it landed on the floor and slid to a stop against the wall.

“Well, it’s true, Millie,” Darcy called into the book stacks, defending Jon’s choice of words.  “You could have told me this part in the dream.  You could tell me what it really means right now if you wanted.  I know you think you’re protecting me but you’re not.  I’m a big girl now.  I can take care of myself.”

Millie didn’t answer.  No more books came sailing, nothing fell off the shelves.  Everything was quiet.

“I’ll try talking to her again later,” Darcy offered.  “Maybe I’ll get lucky and she’ll show up in my dream again.  Or I could always try a communication.”

Darcy really didn’t want to do that.  A communication forced a spirit to come talk to you.  Sometimes it wasn’t very pleasant for the ghost.  It was always exhausting for Darcy, although she had gotten better at it with more practice.  Still, the thought of dragging her aunt into the in between space that existed on the edge of life and death, and then forcing her to talk…it wouldn’t feel right.

And either way she would only get so much information.  Ghosts told you what they needed to tell you.  Not always what you wanted to hear.  If the lines of communication between the living and the spirit worlds were easy to understand, everyone would be doing it.

So for now, they were left with one more cryptic message.  Jon read it out loud from the notepad.

“Laid to rest for safekeeping, with the little girl left sleeping.

Stolen stars worth more than stone, better off left all alone.”

They both stood there, thinking it through, puzzling out what the lines could mean, until they heard the front door open.

“Oh.  Hi, Darcy.”  It was Izzy, in a pair of khaki slacks and a white button-up blouse, dressed for work.  “I didn’t think you’d be in today.  Not after…oh hey!  You got Smudge back!”

She went over and got right down with the cat, rubbing Smudge’s belly and scratching under his chin, pushing her long blonde hair back with her other hand.  Darcy checked her watch against the clock on the wall.  Just before seven.  Izzy was here to open up the shop and get things ready for the day.  Hadn’t they decided to keep the place closed today?  No.  She remembered now.  It was something she had told herself she needed to do, one of several hundred things that fell through the cracks as events unfolded last night.

“Yes, he’s back,” Darcy said, unable to keep the smile off her face.  “Safe and sound.”

“Did you catch the guy?” Izzy asked her as she kept rubbing Smudge all over, giving the appreciative cat all the attention he could stand.

“We didn’t catch him.  Yet,” Jon said, in a way that managed to politely convey how they couldn’t answer any more questions.  “Darcy, I need to go down to the police station and check in with my guy delivering the evidence to the State Police crime lab.”

The blood, he meant.  Darcy understood he couldn’t say it in front of Izzy even if she was a friend.  Right now, the friends they could trust would be few until they knew who their bad guy was.  Who he was, and possibly who his accomplice was.  Millie had definitely been writing about a guy in her journal, but could they be right?  Could there be more than one bad guy?

Could one of them be a woman?

Grace had heard a noise behind her, while she was watching the library.  How could she have heard a noise behind her unless someone else was there to cause a distraction for the guy in the library?

Well.  They’d have the blood back from the lab in a day or so, if they were lucky.  Then they’d know.

In the meantime, it would be hard for her to look at her neighbors the same way.

“Do you want me to drop you off at home?” Jon asked Darcy.  “They’re keeping Grace until noon, at least, and Aaron’s already there.  He can bring her back home.  We really don’t have anything else to do.  Except go home and rest.”

“No, thanks.  I think I should stay here today.”