Delia Darling Mysteries Box Set, page 7
part #1 of Delia Darling Mystery Series
“Oh, we can phone them next!” I said with the snap of my fingers.
“What if she’s really sick?”
That wasn’t worth worrying over. I didn’t need anything like that circling in my headspace, not a single ounce of it. I shook my head. “Maybe we shouldn’t go down that road,” I said, battling with my own sense of mortality. “I mean, I think we ought to go back to that house.”
“We should,” she said. “We need to make sure there isn’t an address somewhere.”
I hummed. “Perhaps exchange knowledge for light gardening?” I knew being a new parent was hard, and if it encouraged them to find the information for us, we were happy to help.
“And biscuits,” Betsy said. “Billy just baked some chocolate chip ones.”
“Great,” I said.
She hurried off out the back door.
We’d had a busy morning so far, and I was ready to jump into something that would garner greater results. I took a quick shower and dressed in a blue floral dress over my three-quarter cream trousers.
“Got the biscuits,” Betsy called through the house from the back door.
I was standing over the kitchen sink, putting away the dishes when she arrived. “Ready to go?”
“Ready!” She waved a wicker basket of baked goods around in the air. “He’s only happy enough for me to get rid of them,” she said.
“Then why was he baking them?”
“Boredom, mostly.”
As Billy was confined to the house, he would usually be found doing a little bit of everything. It occupied his days and kept him from getting stuck in a rut. I was grateful my mobility hadn’t given in, but I knew it wasn’t the end if I did.
Going to visit the house where Scarlet Jones had once lived, this time we had more information. We knew what had happened, including the all-cash buying. There was more to this, and someone wasn’t telling us what was going on, especially considering her sister hadn’t heard from her.
The fancy car we’d seen previously still stayed parked in the driveway. They had to be home, and if not, they had a child, so they couldn’t be far.
“Hope these work a treat,” she said, sniffing at the basket of food. “I feel a bit like that old lady from Hansel and Gretel, feeding people,” she snorted back in laughter.
“As long as you’re not here to eat anyone,” I laughed back.
The front door opened wide as we stood there before knocking. A man stood, wrapped in a nightgown, sagging bags beneath his eyes and a mug in hand with deep black liquid sloshing around as he moved back and forth. “Can I help you?” he asked, opening his eyes slightly through a squint.
I remembered that part of having a baby. Forgetting the time, and perhaps people too.
“We’ve brought you some food,” Betsy said.
He looked relieved. “Oh—I—”
I bet he’d thought we came back to chew him out over the hedges, which must’ve been trimmed back by now, because neither of us had noticed them on our way over. “Well—we—” he stumbled over his words.
“We just want to welcome you to the neighbourhood.”
He smiled. “We cut the bushes too,” he said. “The estate agents never told us about how house-proud people were here.”
“Garden proud, dear,” I said.
He chuckled before cutting himself off. “Can’t be too loud, the wife’s sleeping,” he said. “Thank you for these.” He accepted the handle of the wicker basket. “If there’s anything I can ever do to help you, tell me.”
I snapped a finger. “Actually,” I said. “Come to think of it, I think there might be something you can do to help.”
“Oh?”
“Yes,” Betsy said.
“You see, we’re still sick to our stomachs with worry about our dear friend Scarlet, who happened to up and leave without telling anyone,” I said, pining a hand to left side of my chest over my heart.
Pressing his lips together into a thin white line he nodded. “Let me see if I can find something for you two.”
He left indoors into the darkness from the doorway. We didn’t follow. I knew exactly how messy a home could become after having a baby. We waited a moment on him, anticipation tickling at our stomachs. I didn’t know what else we could do at that moment but wait.
He arrived a minute later with a small torn piece of paper. “An address,” he said. “Lisa told me after you’d left that we had a return address, and not just write ‘return to sender’.”
I snatched it from his hand in excitement. “Oh wow.”
Betsy grabbed it from me, tearing it in half accidentally. She gasped. “It’s only in two, we can piece it together.”
He shrugged at us. “I can write it down for you again.”
I waved a hand at him. “Not to worry,” I said. “And thank you for this.”
We finally had hard evidence to where she was, now all we needed to do was find her and put our minds at rest.
On our way back to my house, we bumped into Arthur standing around outside my front door.
“Hello?”
“Oh, there you are,” he said.
“Why didn’t you go in?” I chuckled.
“I did, but I—um—well, you weren’t there.” He tugged a little tuft of hair on the back of his neck nervously. “That’s how people get arrested.”
“You should’ve waited inside,” I said. “Look what we’ve got.”
We both waved our scraps of paper. “It’s an address,” Betsy said. “We’re going to find Scarlet.”
“Oh good!” he said. “Is it close?”
Pressing the pieces of paper together, we read the address.
22a Cravendale Court, Sloane, Huntington, HN3 5RJ
“In Sloane,” I said.
He pressed his face closer to the separate pieces of paper.
“Cravendale Court?” he gulped. “You know where that is, right?”
Betsy scoffed. “She just said, it’s in Sloane.”
“Not too far either,” I added, taking Betsy’s wrist to see her watch. “Shouldn’t be much traffic, will only take about fifteen minutes to get there.”
“Oh no,” he said. “Cravendale Court is a retirement estate.”
“Fancy,” Betsy said. “Probably why she got all cash for the house.”
“It’s usually for people who can’t look after themselves,” he added.
“Nonsense,” I grumbled. Scarlet was shopping in high spirits the last time I saw her, there was no way she would have volunteered herself to one of those places, and her sister certainly had no knowledge either. “Well, she never struck me as someone who couldn’t take care of herself.”
A squeak came from Betsy. “I mean—the last time I spoke with her, she had forgotten all about the party I’d thrown for Billy. Remember, she brought the pasta bake over.”
“In all fairness, Bet, that was almost two months ago.”
She shook her head. “Well, she’d left her Pyrex dish, and you know how expensive those can be,” she said. “So, she might have been going through something. Oh, what if I’m the reason she put herself in there. What if I made her think she was having a breakdown by not remembering. I did question her about it a lot as well.”
Arthur patted Betsy’s back. “I’m sure it wasn’t you,” he said. “If anything, I’m sure she’s being treated really well at Cravendale. One of my aunts went there and she had a perfectly happy medicated time.”
I wasn’t sure he was helping, at least not for the internal discourse through me. I didn’t want to get to the age where I would volunteer myself into a home. My daughter would soon take care of me if it came to it. But there was no way I’d be moving up to Scotland, not with all its mountains and whatnots.
“Do you want to come with us?” I asked him.
“No, no, no,” he said. “Those things creep me out.”
The feeling was mutual, and we didn’t have to go, but I wanted to put my mind at ease and see Scarlet for myself.
“If we’re going now, I’ll go and tell Billy,” Betsy said, handing me her torn piece of paper.
“Yeah, I’ll go fetch my car keys,” I said.
Arthur shuddered. “Best of luck,” he said.
“Why? I know how to drive,” I snapped on the defensive.
“Oh, I meant at the home.”
I stuffed my nose into the air. “Right, yes. Thank you.”
My heart raced with anticipation. I didn’t know what to expect. I hadn’t put my own mother in a home. I didn’t know what to expect, but my imagination ran wild as it searched for information. The thoughts of those Dispatches documentaries I’d watched on Channel 4 came flooding back, exposing care homes and all those news articles of carers behaving badly.
I wasn’t sure I could do this.
Before I knew it, I was sat in the driving seat with Betsy tapping my shoulder from the passenger’s side, voicing words that sounded completely alien to me.
“You think she’s happy?” I finally asked.
“Probably,” she said. “That’s why they go those places, to make sure their last days are full of happiness.”
“Okay,” I nodded, keying the ignition.
Sloane was a small town on the way to the next city over. It was a nice place, but there wasn’t much there. I’d only stopped a couple times and that was to fill up the car at the petrol station. It really was only a pitstop place in my memory.
As we pulled up into Cravendale Court, met with a large building pimped out with accessibility ramps and automatic doors, I wanted to turn and run.
“Are you okay?” Betsy asked.
“No,” I admitted. “These places are awful.”
“It doesn’t look too bad,” she said. “Besides, we’re here now.”
She was right. We were here. We needed to go inside and see how Scarlet was doing, or if she even remembered us at all. What an awful thing to forget, the neighbours who’d lived around you for so long.
An awful thought struck. “What if she didn’t tell us because she forgot who we were,” I said, recalling a comment DC Fletcher had said about us not being close friends.
A young blond lady sat at the reception desk when we entered. I look directly ahead at her and didn’t blink away. She must have thought I was a bull charging forward like I was being teased by a red sheet.
“Oh, it’s like a little resort,” Betsy said, pulling my focus.
I finally looked away. I’d been on a couple sea cruises, and as I looked around at the carpet, a certain reminiscent colour of the peppered dark blue and grey crossed my mind. It was fairly open plan with tables and chairs set up to the left and couches with large plasma TVs to the left.
“Can I help you two ladies?” the woman at the desk asked.
I cleared my throat. “Can you point me in the direction of 22A?”
She smiled. “Unfortunately, residential housing is only accessible by residents and immediate family,” she said.
“Well, we’re here looking for Scarlet Jones,” Betsy said, “she’s a friend.”
“Oh, you know Scarlet?” she asked.
We both nodded.
“She’s over there,” she said, pointing into the room with the couches and a large TV playing Bargain Hunt in HD. “She’s fantastic to have around.”
“Thank you.” I sucked in a deep breath.
“Not a problem. Take care.”
Scarlet sat on a couch alongside another lady, painting her fingernails. We watched and waited for a moment, unsure if there was a perfect moment to approach or if we stood there she might notice us, but then again, if she’d forgotten who we were, she might not know who we are at all.
“Scarlet,” my voice strained, looking at all the ageing people around me.
She glanced up and smiled. “I’ll be just a minute,” she said. “Do you want your fingernails painting too?”
“Oh, fudge,” I said, turning to Betsy. “She forgot who we are.”
She looked again. “Delia. Betsy. Goodness, what are you doing here?”
“We were worried,” I said. “You sold your house and didn’t tell anyone.”
“And now you’re here.” Betsy clenched her neckline. “If you were strug—”
“Ladies,” she said, excusing herself from the woman. “I’m not struggling.”
As she stood, I noticed a uniform and a badge attached to the pocket of her light blue shirt.
We’d made a huge mistake.
“You work here?” I asked, my face flushing red.
“Yes, yes,” she said. “I couldn’t sit around all day anymore. I needed to get back to work. An old friend of mine manages this place, she offered me work and a place to stay, so I sold the house.”
“And you didn’t tell us,” Betsy grumbled.
She scoffed. “You’d think I was crazy.”
“You are.”
It was awkward now. Weird. I guess she was going through the same sort of unaccomplished feeling I’d been going through. The many hobbies I’d held, the many times I’d tried something only for it to sit in the garage.
We sat in the dining hall and had a cup of tea.
“So you thought I was a resident here?” she asked.
“Technically, you are,” I reminded her.
“The resident nurse,” she added.
Betsy finished a long slurp of her tea. “The real question, why didn’t you tell your sister?”
“Because she knows better,” she laughed. “She would’ve talked me out of it.”
I wanted to tell her I would’ve done the same, but I held my tongue; an achievement for me, my late husband would have been proud.
“Well, you sold your house for all cash,” Betsy scoffed. “All cash. What are you doing with it?”
“I figured, I have nobody to leave the house to,” she said. “So, with the money, I’m planning to do a little travelling once I’m fed up with working, and whatever is left once I’m gone, it’ll go to charity.”
After the worry of driving here and seeing the worst, I didn’t feel like I’d seen anything to worry me. If anything, I felt relief, like I still had a lot of life and things left to do.
“Don’t be a stranger,” I said. “Come visit us.”
“And make sure to keep your old home in shape,” Betsy said. “That young couple had no clue.”
Scarlet chuckled. “Never change,” she said. “I left the estate agency instructions about the gardening. You never know when the judges will be around to make sure our consecutive wins aren’t a fluke.”
After all the worrying and all the stress, Scarlet was happy and working. In our minds, she’d gone from being dead, to a gambler, and then to living in a nursing home—although the last part was technically true, but she was also working.
“What would you do if you came out of retirement?” I asked Betsy on the drive back.
“Stop claiming my pension,” she chuckled.
Well, there was that, but it meant she wasn’t going anywhere anytime soon, not like Billy would want her to be out of the house for longer than a few hours a day anyway.
The End
Are you ready for another Delia Darling mystery?
Will she uncover the secret cult of women meeting right under her nose?
THE MENACING MONA WILSON
A Delia Darling Mystery
JESSICA LANCASTER
THE MENACING MONA WILSON
Curtains drawn. Several cars parked along the road. Suspicion. It can only mean one thing in Delia’s eye – someone is running a cult out of Huntington, and the only cult Delia has time for is the cult of daytime TV.
As the leader of the neighbourhood watch, Delia knows something is awry and that something is coming straight from recent divorcee Mona Wilson’s house.
Delia Darling and Betsy Bennett must uncover the nature of the secret meetings and why they weren’t invited, using all her skills as an armchair detective and the minimal resources of DC Fletcher, they might just figure it out.
A cozy mystery set in a small English seaside town, featuring an ice cream stand owning amateur female sleuth, her best friend, and her quirky loyal customers.
THE MENACING MONA WILSON
“All secrets become deep. All secrets become dark. That’s in the nature of secrets.”
- Cory Doctorow
ACT ONE
A Parking Peril
Numbers were never high for the weekly neighbourhood watch meeting, not unless there was a real concern in the village; the last large concern was the petition for more street lighting, and ten people showed up.
Tonight, it was held at Arthur’s house. We alternated between four of us; me, Betsy, Arthur, and uh Norma. The host was in charge of snacks mainly, as the leader of the group, I stood before my neighbours and set the agenda—but of course, people were happy to add to it.
There were six of us. Betsy, but without Billy, Arthur, of course, Norma, who brought a friend, Gillian Geoffrey, and DC Finley Fletcher. I knew he was only there as a favour to his mother, but he had his own motives, I’m sure, like keeping an eye on me and Betsy.
This is it. I wondered counting the heads of the people in the room.
“Has everyone already grabbed some food?” Arthur asked, stuffing his cheeks with the jam tarts he’d made.
Everyone made humming sounds, except for Gillian. Gillian Geoffrey was Norma Newton’s best friend, but unlike Norma, Gillian was nice, she was also partially deaf and had thick glasses placed in front of her eyes as she squinted through them.
“Wha?” Gillian asked, scrunching her face.
“He asked if everyone’s eaten?” Norma said, tapping at the empty paper plate on Gillian’s lap.
“Oh. Right. Yeah.”
We were all located in Arthur’s large living room. I stood in the centre, turning to face everyone and smile. DC Finley stood beside me, he had his notepad open like he was investigating a case.
“So,” he said. “Do you have an agenda?”
I cleared my throat. “Only a couple items,” I said.
