“Are you sure we should be doing this?”
Darcy gave Jon a sidelong look, but didn’t answer him.
He took one hand off the steering wheel to give her a pacifying gesture. “Fine, fine. I guess by now I should know better than to even ask.”
“Yeah!” Zane cheered from the backseat. “I know better! I never ask!”
“Fine, sure, whatever,” Colby grumped. “The great Darcy Sweet and Jon Tinker are doing their thing again. What I don’t understand, is why you had to bring us along. You could’ve brought us back to the Inn first, you know. Or left us at the café. I could’ve maybe run into Raven again. You know, or whatever.”
She was back to being miserable again. Her momentarily brighter mood from earlier had been far too short. Darcy tried not to play into her daughter’s irritability. She’d been a teenage girl once, too, and she remembered what it was like to be angry at everything and not know why. Anything someone said to try to make it better only ever made it worse.
“We brought you with us,” she explained patiently to her daughter, “because the motel where Neil Perkins was staying is in the opposite direction of the Hideaway Inn. It would have taken us another half hour at least to drop you off first and then come back to the motel.”
Colby didn’t have a snarky comeback for that one. She knew it was true. This way, the kids would have to sit in the car for a while, sure, but at least they would get on with their day quicker. They’d already been promised a trip to the Little Bit of Everything Fun Center this afternoon, but the day was getting away from them. Even a short delay might mean that plan would have to wait. Nobody wanted that.
Of course, they were looking into someone else’s death, like they had so many times before. These things had a way of taking up all of their time…and there was no way of knowing what they would find once they got to Neil’s motel.
It wasn’t hard to figure out where Neil had been staying after he was fired from the Hideaway Inn by Sharlene. Julianne, their waitress, hadn’t mentioned the name of the place but a simple Google search told them there was only one motel in Pittsfield. Maxwell’s letter had mentioned Neil had a room at the Hideaway Inn, just like the rest of the staff, but of course Sharlene took that away when she took away his job.
On the further end of town, there was a small brown and white metal sign on the corner of a side street, pointing them in the direction of the All In Motel. Nestled behind a row of hedges trimmed flat and square, the motel was a long single row of rooms. Cheap plastic numbers on the red doors went up to twelve. Cars were parked in angled spots in front of a few of them. The end of the row had a brick addition built on with the same red door but with the word “OFFICE” in place of a number.
“Twelve rooms,” Darcy pointed out.
“Twelve rooms and an office,” Jon said.
“I doubt he’s in the office.”
He gave her a wink. “You’re probably right.”
“What do you think, knock on every door until we figure out which one was Neil’s, or stop to speak with the manager first?”
“No, I think I’ve got a better idea.” Driving at a crawl down the row of motel rooms, he pulled into a parking spot in front of room 8. “This is the place.”
Darcy looked up at the red door through the windshield, at the black number, but didn’t see anything different about this one than any of the others. The curtain was closed over the wide front window giving her no way to see inside. “Why this room? What makes you think this is where he was staying, and not any of the others?”
He shut off the engine with a smile, and then pointed to the car in the spot next to them. Darcy turned to look at the blue four-door. Nothing hanging from the mirror. Nothing on the dash. Nothing special about it at all. It was just a car, sitting there next to them.
She lifted an eyebrow in his direction, demanding an explanation.
“That’s a police sedan,” Jon told her. “They’re meant to be hideously plain on purpose. Most people would look right past it without giving it a second glance. I’ve been a police officer for so many years now that I can recognize one from a mile away. Plain cars like this are used almost exclusively by detectives. There must be one inside now, going over the scene. So, this is the place.”
Zane and Colby both stared at the car through the side window, too. Zane just shrugged. Colby surprised both of her parents with a single word. “Cool.”
“Well, I think it is.” Jon undid his seatbelt and opened his door. “Just remember, kiddo. Your dad is one of the cool ones.”
“Uh, that’s not exactly what I said there, dad.”
“That’s what I heard. I’m pretty sure that’s what I heard.” He winked at her in the rearview mirror. “Must be true, if I heard it. Okay. You guys stay here. Your mom and I are going to go have a talk with the officer inside. If it gets too hot, turn the car back on. We shouldn’t be too long.”
Darcy hoped Colby and Zane would be all right by themselves for a bit. At least Colby had her phone to keep her occupied. Zane didn’t have one of his own yet, because Darcy thought he was still too young, but he did have a book and a little handheld game to play. They should be okay for a few minutes.
They stepped across the narrow walkway between the parking spots and the building, up to the red door of unit 8.
“So what do we do now?” Darcy asked Jon. “Do we knock or just push our way in? I’ve never really been certain what the proper crime scene etiquette is.”
“Well,” he answered thoughtfully, “usually it’s rude to step into another department’s investigation, but I figure we have good reason to be here. The investigator will understand. I suppose we should knock first, announce who we are, ask for permission to—”
In the middle of Jon’s thought, the motel room door opened and a man in a blue suit just as plain as his unmarked blue police sedan stepped out to greet them. “For the love of God, why don’t you two just come in already? All this gabbing you’re doing out here is breaking my concentration. Can’t get any work done.”
An Investigator’s badge was clipped loosely to the lapel of his cheap, rumpled suit. A gun in a concealed holster was sort of—but not really—hidden under one armpit. He was definitely a police Investigator, even if he was eighty or more pounds overweight. Darcy knew that in most police forces, physical fitness standards got pretty lax the further up the chain of command you rose. There was no reason to stay in top shape when you didn’t have to walk a beat anymore.
He shook his head at them and waved them inside with one beefy hand. “We’re done with most of the investigation now anyway. I’m just doing a quick follow up before we close the case. We can talk inside. I’m not an outdoors kind of guy.”
His milky white complexion showed the truth of that. He wiped the back of his hand across his wide forehead, along his receding hairline, as if being out in the sun for just these few seconds was too much sun for him. The only hair on his face was the pair of caterpillar-esque eyebrows. Darcy really wasn’t concerned with how he looked, though. What did have her worried, was the way he talked about the investigation like it was already over.
“You guys are really ruling it a suicide?” she asked him.
“That’s the official word so far,” he said.
“But what proof do you have that he killed himself?”
“Whoa, whoa, we’re getting ahead of ourselves, aren’t we? Before we talk about sensitive police information maybe we should introduce each other. My name’s David Stacker. I’m an Investigator with the State Police. Now. Who are you guys? What brings you here?”
“Jon Tinker,” Jon said right away, holding out his hand for Investigator Stacker to shake. “I’m the chief of police over in Misty Hollow. This is my wife, Darcy Sweet.”
“Good to know you both.” He turned sideways and plopped down in the single chair at the small square table by the window. The legs of the chair creaked with his weight. He didn’t bother asking if they wanted to sit down. “You’re a long ways away from your jurisdiction, Chief. What’s got you so interested in a local suicide?”
Darcy moved around to Jon’s side, barely squeezing in between him and the room’s single bed. There was hardly anything in unit 8, and no space to put it even if there had been. No dresser, no television, just the bed and the table and an empty bathroom on the far side.
“We actually don’t think it’s a suicide,” she told Stacker. “See, we met Neil Perkins yesterday, and when we spoke to him he didn’t sound suicidal. In fact, we had an appointment to meet with him this morning and discuss his job so you can see why it comes as a surprise to us that he would want to—”
She stopped, because from where she was standing now, she could see the body lying on the floor, over by the entrance to the bathroom. Neil’s muscular frame was slumped across the thin rug, lying on his back, his ghostly white eyes staring up at the ceiling. He was obviously dead, but he hadn’t been taken away yet. Maybe that’s why the Investigator was still here, Darcy thought to herself. Sitting here waiting for the coroner to remove the body, or whoever it was who did that job. It was kind of gruesome, but they knew they were walking into a crime scene, so she really shouldn’t be surprised.
As Darcy continued to stare at the dead man, remembering him the way he was so full of life just yesterday, Jon cleared his throat next to her. “We’re, uh, here at the Hideaway Inn,” he said, “we took over running the place at the request of the owner.”
Stacker perked up. “Oh really? Hey, you guys are having a fireworks display out there this year, right? The night of the Fourth? I think that’s great. I love fireworks.”
“Yeah, we like them too, but to get back to the matter at hand? Since we’re here to run the Inn, that kind of makes Neil one of our employees. That’s where our interest in his death comes in.”
“Well, I get that. Except I heard that Neil was fired.”
“Yes, he was,” Jon had to admit. “At least, sort of. That was done by the other person running the Inn, and they fired him before we got here. We were thinking of rehiring him. Actually, that’s what our meeting this morning was about.”
“Well, now I’m confused.” The big man spread his hands wide. “You’re running the Inn, but you’re not, and you were going to rehire him because he was fired. You can see how that’s confusing. What’s this about another person running the Inn with you?”
“Uh, yeah. I guess I could have explained that better.” Jon took a moment and ordered his thoughts before giving the Cliff Notes version of the story. “The owner of the Inn, Maxwell Bylow, is currently in a mental health facility recovering from a sort of breakdown. His distant cousin took over the place. Her name is Sharlene Latham and she has about as much business sense as a garden gnome.”
“Less,” Darcy added.
Jon didn’t argue. “Yeah, in fact that might have been an insult to garden gnomes everywhere. So, Maxwell asked us to come in and coach her through the first week of the busy season or however long it takes for her to catch on.”
Darcy snorted. “So we might be there a while.”
Stacker raised one bushy eyebrow. “What did you say this cousin’s name was?”
“Well, fourth cousin twice removed, actually,” Jon said, quoting Maxwell. “Sharlene is her name. Sharlene Latham.”
“Now that’s interesting. Very interesting indeed.”
He reached down beside the chair to a leather valise that was propped up against the legs. Balancing it on his wide lap he reached inside to take out a plastic bag. It had a red tape seal at the top, and pre-printed spaces on the front that had been filled in with bits of information in a sloppy man’s penmanship. Darcy was familiar with evidence bags from seeing Jon at work. Police used them to protect evidence or other important things from a scene. Inside this one was a cellphone. It must be Neil’s, and even though the police thought this was an ordinary suicide, they had collected it as part of their investigation.
As she watched him, Stacker pressed a button on the side to bring the phone’s screen to life. It opened right up to the home screen, without a security password. Odd, Darcy thought to herself. Hardly anyone left their phone unlocked these days.
Swiping the screen through the plastic of the bag, Stacker found and played a video message.
They were greeted by Sharlene’s face, pinched and angry as she shouted obscenities.
Darcy’s face burned as she heard the colorful swear words turn into threats at the end of the message.
“Don’t you ever come back here!” she screamed. “If you ever come back to the Hideaway again I’ll kill you! Do you hear me? I’ll kill you!”
More obscenities followed, and further threats to harm Neil if he came anywhere near Sharlene or ‘her motel’ again. Apparently it hadn’t been enough for her to fire Neil. She positively hated him for some reason.
Interesting.
If this was the way the woman acted when she didn’t get her way, it was going to be harder than they thought to teach her how to run a business that depended on a friendly face and a pleasant attitude. Not for the first time, Darcy wished they had been able to purchase the Inn themselves. They would still be here in Pittsfield, still doing the work, but at least they would be doing it for themselves and not an ungrateful clod like Sharlene.
Jon watched the short video on the cellphone to the end without comment, and then nodded. “Okay. So does that mean you’re thinking this might be murder? And Sharlene’s a suspect?”
Stacker looked at him blankly. “What do you mean?”
“Well, you’ve got a dead man in a room,” Darcy pointed out, “and you’ve got a video of someone threatening to kill him. I’d say that’s grounds for a murder investigation, wouldn’t you?”
“Uh, well no, not really.” Stacker shook his head again, and traded the bag with the cellphone in it for a different evidence bag from the case. This one had a single page of paper inside. “This is clearly suicide, as evidenced by this note. We found it in the room next to him. There’s no murder here.”
He held it so they could read the words of the short message, written on the page in blocky computer type.
I’m sorry. Without the job I have held for so many years I am nothing. Now that I’ve been fired I don’t know what to do with myself anymore. I can’t go on. Nothing matters. This is the only path forward for me.
I’m going to take a bunch of pills and just go to sleep. By the time anyone finds me it will be over.
Goodbye.
Neil
A suicide note, with Neil Perkins’ final words, found right here in the room by the police. Well. That certainly put a different spin on things. Darcy wondered if they could have been wrong to think this was anything other than suicide?
No. Looking back over at Neil, laying there in his final repose, she could feel it in her bones. This wasn’t what it looked like. Not at all.
“There’s no marks on the body,” Stacker told them as he put away the paper in its plastic sleeve again. “The note says he took pills to go to sleep, so that fits. A lot of people choose that as a way to commit suicide. They think it’s peaceful. I don’t know. Maybe they’re right, but it seems to me killing yourself is killing yourself. You still get the same result in the end.”
“You have anything else in there?” Jon asked, pointing at the leather valise.
“Got the guy’s wallet. Nothing special about it, though. Other than that there really wasn’t anything in the room. Other than the deceased, I mean.”
“That doesn’t strike you as odd?”
Sucking his bottom lip, the Investigator swung his head from side to side. “Not sure what you mean.”
“Where’s his things? All his personal belongings? You sure there was nothing else at all in here?”
“Yeah, I am sure, not that I need to explain myself to you. This is a courtesy to you because of your rank and because of your connection to the Hideaway Inn. Be careful not to push it.”
Darcy looked over at Neil’s body again. He certainly looked peaceful. Still, and lifeless, not moving at all. The big man’s labors were ended. He’d been the head of household staff at the Hideaway Inn for decades now, carrying on the legacy of his ancestors, and now that he’d passed away he could rest at ease. What happened to him? How did he get where he was right now, here in this room, lying there dead—
Neil’s head snapped her way, and suddenly his blank eyes were staring directly at her, silently pleading. He reached out a hand in her direction…and then his whole body started to fall through the floor like it wasn’t really there.
Or rather, like he wasn’t really there.
He threw his arms out to the side, grasping for the floor the way a man in quicksand would desperately clutch at solid ground. Pulling himself back up to the level of the rug again, Neil sat up and looked at his hands like he didn’t know what was happening to him. Then he looked Darcy’s way again. She nodded, because she understood.
Neil’s physical body wasn’t moving anymore. This was his ghost.
The two men, her husband and Investigator Stacker, didn’t see him. With her gift, only she could. Stacker wasn’t sitting here waiting for Neil’s body to be picked up, he was just sitting here giving the room a once over before taking off, just like he said. No wonder they weren’t as weirded out by it as she was.
“Jon?” she said in a soft voice.
He looked over at her, then at the blank spot on the floor that she was staring at. He didn’t have her gift, and never would, but he recognized the look on her face. He knew what she was seeing.
Which meant it was time to go.
“Okay, well, thank you Investigator,” he said to Stacker. “I appreciate you taking time to hear us out. If you need us for anything else, then you can find us at the Hideaway Inn.”
“I appreciate the offer, Chief, but we won’t need anything from you. Not on a suicide.”
When Darcy looked for him again, Neil’s ghost was gone.
Outside, Darcy waited for the door to the room to be closed again, and then whispered to Jon, “This wasn’t suicide. Neil was murdered.”
“I know,” was his surprise answer.
“What? How can you know that?”
He took a moment to lean down and look through the car windows, waving to the kids. This was a conversation they didn’t want them to hear. Zane waved back enthusiastically. Colby lifted a hand, her attention on her cellphone and whatever friend she was texting with. Or Snapchatting. Or Tweeting. Darcy really wasn’t up on what app kids were using now to talk to each other. Hard to believe her generation had gotten by on passing notes to each other.
For the moment they stayed where they were, halfway between the building and the car. Keeping his voice low he answered her question. “There were two things that told me this was obviously a murder.”
Darcy smiled with one corner of her mouth. Her husband was amazing. Without any sort of paranormal gift of his own, he was always able to find the truth through clues most people would simply overlook. “Okay, my smart Mister Policeman. What told you this was murder?”
“The first clue is simple. This is a cheap motel.”
She blinked at that. “Well, yeah. I can see that. It’s nice and all, but these rooms don’t offer much more to their guests than a place to sleep. I didn’t even see a television in there.”
“Exactly. A nicer hotel will have coffee makers, styrofoam cups, water glasses. Maybe an ice bucket. Did you see anything like that?”
“No. Nothing like that at all.”
“Okay, so where’s the water?” When she still didn’t quite get it, he added, “That suicide note said that Neil took a bunch of pills, put himself to sleep, killed himself that way. There’s no way. Maybe he could have dry choked one or two down his throat, but he couldn’t have swallowed enough to kill himself without some water or something else to drink. Remember Stacker said there wasn’t anything else in the room. That means no soda cans, no water bottles, and nothing that would have let Neil swallow some pills.”
That…actually made perfect sense. Darcy hadn’t put the two things together, but Jon was right. No water meant no pills. No pills meant the note was a lie. “Okay. Then what was the second thing you saw?”
“The note itself,” he told her, enjoying the surprise on her face. “It was printed off from a computer somewhere.”
“Yes, Jon, I was in the room. I saw the note the same as you did. It definitely wasn’t handwritten. So what?”
He leaned in with an annoyingly triumphant grin. “We already said there was hardly anything in that room…did you see a computer in there, let alone a printer?”
Darcy was sure her jaw dropped. No, she definitely didn’t see anything like that in there. She would have remembered. It took her a moment longer to realize the meaning of that.
“So you’re suggesting,” she said, “that Neil was killed by someone, that he was killed somewhere else, and then his body was moved here and it was staged to look like a suicide?”
“Well, maybe. More likely he really was killed here, somehow, and the person who did it brought the note with them. That means this was premeditated, and the killer planned it all out ahead of time. This morning the motel staff finds him dead, calls it into the State Police, they arrive and find the note and jump to the obvious conclusion.”
“You mean the wrong conclusion.”
Jon frowned at everything the State Police had missed. “Are we supposed to believe that Neil typed that note out at a computer somewhere else, and then brought it here to kill himself with a bunch of pills in his pocket, but no water? How many suicides do you know who write their note one place and then go somewhere else to kill themselves?”
“I really don’t know, Jon. That’s more your area of expertise than mine.”
“True enough. I can tell you from experience that it just doesn’t happen that way. People certainly don’t type their final words on a computer. If anything, Neil would have written the note out by pen, in his own handwriting. The only reason to do a printed note is to disguise who wrote it.” Taking her hand, he started them back toward the car. “No, this was all staged and it almost worked. If Stacker in there wasn’t being so slow about zipping up the scene, we would have missed him entirely and the paperwork would all be filed already. Of course, there was a third clue, too.”
“Oh yeah? What was that?”
“You’re seeing Neil’s ghost, aren’t you?”
She gave him a secret smile. No need for her to answer that. Not when they both knew it was true.
He made it sound so easy. She knew it was murder, of course, but for her it was a feeling. A sensation that a life had been taken from the world before its time. The way Jon explained it made it sound so obvious. She couldn’t believe the State Police Investigator in there had missed it.
At the car, before getting in, Darcy kissed his cheek. “You’re so smart. So we know the scene in there was faked by the killer.”
“Exactly. Someone killed him, and faked that note, too. We could take the time to check, but I have a feeling a place like this won’t have surveillance cameras. Besides, Stacker might not want to look beyond the obvious, but he strikes me as the kind of guy who at least dots his i’s and crosses his t’s on his reports. I’m sure if there are surveillance cameras, he’ll at least look at them before closing out his report. So, the rest of it is up to us. We have another mystery on our hands. We’ll just have to solve it the old-fashioned way.”
“You mean by walking around and asking people questions?”
He gave her a kiss this time, on her forehead. “Well, sure, but I meant by doing a spirit communication. The police stuff might be my area of expertise, but the ghost stuff is yours. Since Neil’s ghost has appeared to you, I figured he might be willing to talk to you.”
Looking over Jon’s shoulder, she saw Neil’s spirit appear as if he’d been called forth by Jon repeating his name so many times. He floated right through the wall of room 8, turning his head this way and that way, comically searching for something. Darcy felt like raising a hand to wave to him, we’re over here!
When he finally found them at their car he floated their way, pleading with Darcy with blank, ghostly eyes.
“Yeah,” she told Jon. “I saw him. In fact, I’m seeing him right now.”