1 Death Comes to Town Read Online Free PDF Page A

swung inward, seemingly in slow motion, her searching flashlight fell across Anna, lying on the floor. Darcy raced over to her and carefully felt for a pulse in her neck. There wasn’t one. Behind her, Smudge meowed again.
    He was right. Anna was dead.
     

Chapter Four
     
    Darcy tugged the police jacket tighter around her body. The night had turned cold, and not just from the mist settling in like a thick blanket. Inside Anna’s cozy little home, death had visited. She had waited there for the police, for the rescue squad personnel who were too late to do anything, for her sister to come and hold her as the reality of it set in and then tell her she had to come down to the station. She sat now in a hard wooden chair off to the side in Misty Hollow’s police department and watched as her sister went about the professional efficiency of death.
    Darcy had to blink a few times to try and remove the fuzzy edges of tears from her vision. She could see her sister talking on the telephone and knew she was talking to someone from Anna’s family, breaking the news of her death to them. How awful for them all. Darcy knew that Anna had been particularly close to her brother and wondered how he would cope with the news. Poor man.
    Taking a couple of deep breaths Darcy closed her eyes for a moment and tried to calm herself. Instead, she found herself remembering the moment she had found Anna lying on the floor and the sheer horror of realizing that Anna was dead. And then images began flashing through her mind, like scenes from a movie, of herself running to the phone and calling the police. She could see the police arriving and Anna’s body being taken away. She remembered how her body had looked…
    Darcy jumped and her eyes popped open when she felt a hand on her arm. She was surprised to see Jon bending over her with a concerned look on his face.
    “Here,” he said. “I thought you could probably do with some coffee.” He held a cup out to her. In slow motion, she took the cup from him and took a sip. It tasted awful but she felt the warmth seep through her body and chase some of the chill away. Jon sat down on the chair beside her.
    “Thanks. I needed that.” She gave Jon a half smile. He was still gorgeous, and she still noticed. “Do you want your jacket back?”
    “No you keep it for a while.” There was a small pause as he cleared his throat. “I’m really sorry for your loss. Grace told me how close you were to Anna.”
    “Thank you.” She didn’t understand his change in attitude, his suddenly being nice to her like this. They sat in silence then and waited.
    Grace soon came over to where they were sitting. “I was finally able to reach Anna’s brother. He’s going to inform the rest of the family.”
    Darcy saw the look that passed between her sister and Jon before Grace looked back at her. She knew something was up. “What?” It came out sharper than Darcy meant. She blamed it on how frayed her nerves were at the moment.
    Grace put a hand on her shoulder and said, “It’s nothing to worry about Sis. We just need to ask you a few questions about what happened. Um, where you were before you found Anna?”
    Darcy sighed. She knew this was just another part of the process, like the endless paperwork had been when they first got to the station. So she went on to tell them how she had been at the festival and Anna had come up to her saying that there was something important she should know about. How Anna had suddenly looked spooked right when Grace had found Darcy again, and then rushed off to go home.
    Darcy frowned. It hadn’t just been Grace that walked up to her at that moment. It had been Grace and Jon, both.
    Before she could mention that tidbit her sister sat down on the other side of her and prompted her, “What happened then?”
    What happened then was my cat told me something was wrong, Darcy thought to herself. Aloud, she said, “When I got home I had a funny feeling that something wasn’t