Resorting to Murder (A Darcy Sweet Mystery Book 11) (2 page)

"Sure, you can use our phone," Jon said to
JoEllen, stepping aside to let her in.  "Do you know a good pizza place in town?  We're from out of the area and I doubt Darcy is going to want to eat my cooking the whole weekend."

"Jon, stop it," Darcy scolded
with a playful smile.  She stood up, and extended her hand to JoEllen.  "Hi.  I'm Darcy Sweet.  This humble man is Jon Tinker.  Guess we'll be neighbors for the weekend."

"Hey Darcy, nice to meet you,"
JoEllen answered cheerfully, and took Darcy's hand to shake.

Liquid electricity poured up Darcy's skin from where
JoEllen took her hand.  For a moment the whole world stopped.  When it started again, Darcy wasn't in their cabin anymore.

She was surrounded by trees.  The forest stretched as far as she could see, pine trees standing
like eerie sentinels, blocking out the morning sun.  Darcy wasn't sure how she knew it was morning.  She just did.

Out of breath, sweaty and exhausted, she looked all around, trying to get her bearings. 
She was running.  She had to get there in time.  She had to!  The cabins were up that way…weren't they?

It wasn't like she'd been given a lot of time to gather supplies.  She'd had to move quickly or…

Or, what?  Darcy couldn't catch the thought as she started rushing through the woods again.  Something was making her run.  She didn't have time to think about it.  She only had time to move, and move quickly.

The world shifted around her and she was in another part of the forest where the trees were different but the same, towering behemoths
with spreading branches watching her every move but offering no help.  Darcy turned left, then right, before she spotted the sign.

"Danger.
  Trail closed due to slides," it read, in letters carved into thick wood and then painted yellow.  Only the paint had worn off some of the letters in the last word unevenly so that it actually read, "Danger.  Trail closed due to
lies
."

Darcy ignored the sign's warning, pushing forward through the trees until she found what she wanted not ten feet
away in a wide, cleared space.  It was one of the ski runs.  Now, in the summer, it was exposed dirt and rock, providing a path up to the face of Mount Borealis, or back down to the ski resort.  Darcy sighed out a heavy breath and started down at a jog.  Maybe she'd get there in time after all.

What was she looking for?

The scene had shifted again.  Suddenly, through the filtered sunlight from the branches above, rain was dropping.  Big, fat drops that collected in puddles on the ground around her.  Darcy was on her knees, sobbing.  She didn't understand why she was crying but the sadness gripping her heart nearly crippled her.  The ground had been dug up here and there was something sticking up out of the dark, moist earth.  The soil turned to mud as she watched one of her hands reaching out toward…

A hand.
  His hand.  The hand of the man she loved, buried at her feet.

No.  Darcy tried to make herself stand up, make herself shout, scream for help, something.  She had no control of her body. 
The vision held her fast.  She could only watch as she fell over onto her side in the mud, crying harder.

Only, it wasn't her.  She realized with
a jolt that the reflection looking back at her in the puddle of rainwater wasn't her own.  Distorted though it was, she recognized the face that stared back at her, framed in tight blonde curls plastered to her skin by the rain. 

It was
JoEllen's.

The vision l
eft her in the space between heartbeats and she stumbled back from JoEllen.  Thankfully the woman was already turning away, over to where the phone sat next to the television.  She thanked Jon as she dialed a number and then held the handset up to her ear.

Making sure
JoEllen didn't see him do it, Jon turned to Darcy with a concerned expression.  He'd seen her reaction to the touch of JoEllen's hand and he would know what it meant.  Darcy had certain abilities that made her life, well, interesting.  She was in tune with the other side, able to speak with the dead and know things that her normal five senses couldn't tell her.  Most people who knew her suspected that Darcy was a little different.  They just didn't know all the things she could do.  Like touch a person and suddenly know details about their lives as if she had lived those events herself.

When she had
finally opened up completely about herself to Jon, she had worried that he would turn tail and run, breaking off a very promising budding romance.  It had happened more than once to her, which was exactly why she didn't tell people about that side of her. 

He'd
had a few issues with her abilities at the beginning but he’d also surprised her by asking questions instead of running, watching her perform a few communications instead of shutting her out.  He'd even asked her to help investigate a few cases for the Misty Hollow police force.  He wasn't afraid of her.  He didn't think she was a freak.  He had loved her the same even after he knew her secret.  Possibly, a little more so.

So when he looked at her now, she could tell he knew what had just happened.  She'd had a vision. 
A vision of death.

A vision of murder.

Darcy shook her head, silently telling him to wait.  She couldn't explain it to him now.  Not while JoEllen was standing right here with them.  He dipped his head, a slight nod that was almost impossible to see.  He understood.

They listened while
JoEllen placed her order.  "Yes.  Just the one pizza this time.  No, not two.  One.  I know.  Buried in cheese.  Payment on delivery.  Yup.  Same address as last time.  'Kay.  I'll be waiting."

She hung up the phone
, putting it back into its stand, and turned to them.  There was a look in her eyes that was there and then gone again before Darcy could identify it.  Whatever was going on with JoEllen, Darcy knew she wanted the woman out of their cabin.  At least until she and Jon could talk about what she'd seen in her vision.

Walking over to Jon she nestled her
head against his chest, putting a hand possessively on his arm.  "We were just having our dinner, too," she said to JoEllen, making it obvious she wanted to be alone with her man.  "Maybe we should get together tomorrow?  It would be nice to have some people to pal around with while we're here."

JoEllen's
expression changed again, back to the same friendly smile she'd shown them before.  "That would be excellent.  I'm here for two weeks on a company retreat and I am going out of my mind with boredom.  I would love to have someone to talk to.  Do you guys like to hike?"

They did, as a matter of fact.  She and Jon had spent hours a day up here the last time they had gone on vacation w
alking through the woods.  They'd never gone very far into the trails that led up the mountain.  Just the tamer ones on the more even ground around the resort, meant for hikers and lovers like them. 

Jon caught Darcy's eye, and it was decided just like that.  "That sounds fun.  Have you been on the trails here before?"

"Sure.  Lots of times."  She looked away from them as she said it, making a show of checking the slim wristwatch on her left arm.  "Oops.  Got to go.  I don't want to miss the pizza delivery.  Awesome to meet you, Darcy, Jon."

She waved as she closed the cabin door behind herself.

"What did you see?" Jon asked immediately, keeping his voice low so that there was no chance it would carry outside.  "I know that look I saw on your face.  Did you see blood on her hands?"

Seeing blood on the hands of someone who had committed certain violent acts
—like murder—was another trick Darcy could do.  It required an effort of will channeled through her soul, more or less, and was nowhere near as easy as it sounded.  This had been something else.  Something her gift did without her having to use any special techniques.

"No," she told him. 
"A vision.  I saw a vision.  It was chopped up and confusing, but I think…I think there's a dead man up on the mountain trails somewhere.  A dead man who meant a lot to JoEllen.  She was there."

Darcy
told Jon everything she had seen in the split second she had been touching JoEllen's hand.  Running through the trees.  The sign warning of danger.  The rain.  The dead body.  It took her a while, because he asked lots of questions to get details from her that she wouldn't have thought to mention otherwise.  No, JoEllen didn't seem to be hurt.  No, Darcy hadn't seen a weapon.  Yes, she was sure it was a man buried there in the dirt.  In her vision, JoEllen had known it was a man.

"So," he said
when they had gone over the story from every possible angle.  "Another mystery."

Darcy and Jon had shared so many mysteries together, so many investigations into suspicious deaths and other things, that talking about this now didn't seem strange at all
to her.  It felt oddly normal.  Like they were reclaiming another part of their lives.  They had always worked good together as a team.  Better than good, in fact.

At some point Darcy found herself in Jon's arms again as they sat on the edge of the bed.  They touched each other frequently as they talked, softly and intimately, and before long their dinner was completely forgotten.  Her dress fell to the floor, next to his clothes, and they made an early night of things
, promising to tackle the mystery of JoEllen Meyers tomorrow.

Later, she woke up from a nightmare where shadowy figures chased her through a forest of trees that bent and twisted, trapping her no matter where she turned.

Jon held her close as her heart raced, and told her it would be all right.

The dream
left behind the squirmy feeling in the pit of her stomach that there was a lot more going on than what she had seen in her vision.  A murder in the woods.  A dead man, buried in a shallow grave.  JoEllen, crying in the rain and mud.

Darcy drifted off again,
lying there in Jon's arms, sleeping peacefully the rest of the night.

The sun felt good on Darcy's face as she stepped out of the cabin the next morning. 
Saturday.  Two more days here with Jon.  And, with a neighbor in the next cabin hiding a secret.

She h
ad tied her long dark hair into a pony tail that she pulled forward over one shoulder.  The antique silver ring that used to be her Aunt Millie's rested comfortably on the finger of her right hand.  A purple tanktop and jean shorts would help her keep cool in the day's heat.  It promised to be unseasonably warm, and humid as well, but she was ready for it.

Jon had offered to take her
out to breakfast once he had gotten himself ready.  The resort cabins were about a fifteen minute drive from the nearby town, where restaurants and gift shops awaited the tourists.  Like them, she thought with a smile.  Ski rental businesses were closed for the season but Darcy had seen a bicycle rental place and a few other things that looked like fun.  Not to mention a bookstore that looked a little rustic.  It was little places like that where she always found the most unique books.

Hey,
just because this was a makeup vacation with her boyfriend didn't mean she couldn't still hunt for books.

The cabins of the Lonely Cub Resort were spread out in
a semicircle from the central hub of a main lodge with its coffee bar and a sauna room and the Resort's main offices.  Her and Jon's cabin was near the middle of the line, identical to all the others in every way.  Cut log walls, doors painted brown, fake green shutters screwed into place framing the windows, a red tiled roof.

She looked over at the next cabin in the row.  Cabin seven.  It was just a hundred feet away with some shrubbery between.  Everything was quiet there.  She wondered if JoEllen was up and about yet.  She also wondered what exactly her vision from last night had meant.

In the middle of her thoughts she felt Jon's strong hands on her shoulders suddenly and she leaned back into him.  "Good morning."

"Good morning to you," he said, leaning down to kiss the side of her neck and make her sk
in tingle.  "You look like you've got something on your mind."

"Kind of," she admitted.

"Our visitor from last night?" he guessed.

"What else?"

His hands began rubbing her shoulders and she felt like she could skip breakfast altogether and just let him do that.  Just the right pressure with his thumbs and the heels of his hands and there was a knot right there that he could so—

"Well, let's go over and say hi, then," he suggested, taking his hands away and walking in the direction of cabin seven.

Darcy sighed.  She was definitely going to make him do more of that tonight.  After all, he was working to make up for things, right?

For now she followed him to JoEllen's cabin
, watching him walk in his jeans and black t-shirt.  It was an unusual treat to see him in anything other than the dress shirts and slacks he wore for work.  She definitely appreciated the way he dressed down.  As for what they were going to say when JoEllen opened the door, she wasn't really sure.  Would, "hi we were wondering if you've murdered anyone lately," be too direct?