Nine Lives: A Lily Dale Mystery (19 page)

Maybe she should open it now.

But if Luther catches her, he might think she’s hiding something.

So? I’m not.

But if she gives him even the slightest reason to think she’s guilty, he might go to the police after all, behind her back. They’ll come to question her. They might take her away for questioning, and that would mean leaving Max with . . .

Someone else.

I can’t afford to trust anyone,
Bella realizes.
Not right now. Not even Luther.

He reappears in the doorway, looking harried.

“I have to get to the hospital. My mom isn’t doing very well this morning.”

“I’m sorry.”

“So am I. I don’t like to leave this way, but I’ve got to run. I’ll be in touch as soon as I can. Think you can hang tight for now?”

She assures him that she can.

If “hang tight” means fighting off panic while continuing through the motions of an anything-but-ordinary day, then she’s got it covered.

After seeing Luther to the door, she returns to the study. This time, she locks it behind her from the inside. Going over to the window seat, she tosses the pillows onto the floor and lifts the cushion, feeling around along the edges of the bench.

Sure enough, there’s a concealed hinge and latch. The bench doubles as the lid of a storage area.

Tugging it open, Bella sees that it, like the other window seat compartment, is home to a mishmash of household clutter.

She sorts through it, looking for a torn-out page from the appointment book or the missing notebook or laptop.

They aren’t here.

Either they never were or someone else got to them first.

Just before ten o’clock, Bella trudges wearily up the stairs to feed Spidey again, wishing she were on her way back to bed instead.

This day has been plenty long enough, and it’s still merely midmorning. How on earth is she going to stay upright for another twelve hours or so?

Even when she finally does finally get to climb under the covers tonight, she’ll still have to set her alarm to wake her every other hour.

Yes, but at least she knows exactly what she has to do to keep the kitten alive.

When it comes to everything—
everyone
—else . . .

All bets are off.

Surely the driver who tried to run over Steve Pierson on Bachellor Hill Road this morning hadn’t made a road trip from Massachusetts and wasn’t motivated by overinflated school taxes. As disturbing as that scenario might be, it would, in the grand scheme of things, provide Bella some measure of comfort.

But it’s simply too farfetched, isn’t it? Especially when Steve Pierson’s near miss happened so close—in timing and proximity—to Leona’s death.

After replacing the window seat cushion, repositioning the pillows, and locking the study door behind her, she busied herself again with breakfast for her guests, who lingered in the breakfast room chatting and eating.

Still conspicuously missing were the Piersons and Grant Everard.

Less conspicuously: Bonnie Barrington.

Bella hadn’t given her absence a second thought until Kelly Tookler asked if she’d seen her. “We had plans to go to the sweat lodge together. The ceremony starts at ten.”

“Maybe she decided to sleep in instead.”

“Bonnie never sleeps in. She hardly sleeps at all. She has insomnia. I knocked on her door. She wasn’t in there.”

Maybe she’s hiding,
Bella thought grumpily.
Maybe she just didn’t feel like sweating or . . . or lodging. Or hearing, “Right, Bonnie?” all day long.

Kelly was concerned, but Bella has too many other things on her mind to worry about whether one of the guests is going to be late for some bizarre ceremony.

Sweat lodge ceremonies, aura identification workshops . . .

Business as usual in a place where weird things happen all day—and all night.

Bella can pretend she’s immune to the weirdness, and she can try to resist or ignore it.

But there’s no denying that she herself has witnessed—and okay, experienced—some things she can’t quite explain.

She first dreamed about Leona brushing her hair before she even knew what Leona looked like—and Odelia seemed to have almost the same dream minus the crazy wind chimes.

Wind chimes—just the other day, she witnessed the ones in the backyard moving, clanging, without the slightest gust of wind.

And almost in that very spot, she saw that hand—she swears it was a hand—in the lake.

And what about the identical pregnant cats four hundred miles apart and the nonexistent billboard for the nonexistent Summer Pines Campground?

And what about Max? What about his uncanny knowledge of Chance’s full name and the fact that she’d have seven—or eight—kittens on the exact day?

It—all of it, every strange thing that’s happened here—can be chalked up to lucky guesses or sheer imagination or coincidence, but . . .

There are no coincidences.

Darn you, Odelia.

The medium next door is getting to her.

At the top of the stairs, she notices that Grant’s door is still closed. Is he in there, sound asleep? Is he awake? Is he there at all?

Was he walking down the hall at four thirty in the morning?

Was he speeding down Bachellor Hill Road two hours later?

But what could he possibly have against Steve Pierson?

What would Grant stand to gain from harming him?

The questions pelt like buckshot in her gut. Reeling, she unlocks the door to the Rose Room.

Stepping inside, she braces herself to find that something is off here, too.

But as she casts a wary eye around the room, her topsy-turvy world gradually rights itself again.

There’s Max, snug and safe, asleep in the big bed. There’s Chance, placidly licking one of her kittens—not Spidey—as the others suckle, wriggle, cry, and nap at her side.

The room is sun drenched and serene. A gentle breeze billows the lace curtains. Summer sounds seep through the screen: kids’ voices calling out to each other, the hum of a Jet Ski on the lake, cars passing on the road with the windows rolled down and music playing.

If only this—the sheer ordinariness of a warm July morning—could be Bella’s real life.

If only this place were some other place, some mundane small town where people don’t die under mysterious circumstances—and once they’re dead, they stay dead. A place where the living talk only among themselves.

Then Max and I would be able to make our fresh start here.

The sudden longing doesn’t make any more sense than anything else that’s happened today. A minute or two ago, she wanted nothing more than to flee Lily Dale.

Now more than anything in the entire world, she wants to stay here?

It’s only because she’s not ready for more good-byes. Not even to people she’s just met and a place she’s just discovered.

She’s tired of making difficult decisions and even more tired of having them made for her.

She pushes away the troubling thoughts and rubs the ache between her shoulder blades.

Surely once she’s caught up on sleep and capable of rational thinking, she’ll find herself looking forward to moving on again. And if not . . .

One thing at a time. First, feed the kitten. Then wake the kid. Then . . .

Catch the killer?

Sure. Something like that.

She wearily plucks Spidey from the litter and looks down at his precious little face.

Why, she wonders, did she, of all people, wind up with this little guy who needs so much more than she can possibly give? Why wasn’t he born to some other stray cat? Why here? Why now?

Everything happens for a reason.

In Bella’s lifetime—in the whole history of the world, for that matter—Odelia isn’t the first person who ever said those words. But they keep coming back to her. She keeps looking for meaning in the smallest things.

“Why did Chance find her way to me? And why did you find your way to her?” she asks the little cat as she settles into the chair with him on her lap. “Is it because it’s so much harder for me to walk away from someone who needs me so much?”

He only mews in response to her questions, as starved for nourishment as she is for some answers.

She swaddles him the way Doctor Bailey showed her, making him feel safe, and the kitten ingests the formula drop by drop, courageously determined to eat, to survive.

“Good job,” she whispers, running a fingertip along his fragile little spine, stroking the downy black fur between his folded ears.

“Mom?”

Max has awakened at last.

“Good morning.” She forces a jaunty note into her voice, but Max isn’t fooled for a second.

“Why are you sad?” he asks.

“Sad? What makes you think I’m sad?”

“I just know.”

Here we go again.

“Do you want me to cheer you up?”

“I’m fine, Max. Really. How’d you sleep?”

“I had a bad dream.”

Her hand goes still on the kitten’s toothpick of a spine. “What was it about?”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

“That’s okay.”

I don’t think I want to hear about it. Not right now.

“How’s Chance the Cat? And the kittens? How’s Spidey?”

“Everyone is doing great. Growing big and strong.”

“Really?” Max gets out of bed and pads over.

His hair, in desperate need of a barber, is sticking straight up, his eyes are rimmed in dark circles, and his pajama top is on inside out. It’s all testimony to the long, late night—and perhaps, Bella thinks with a pang, to bad mothering on her part.

“You’re a good boy, Spidey,” Max croons, gently stroking the kitten’s head. “I’m so glad you’re our kitty. Don’t worry, Mom’s going to take good care of you.”

Bella swallows a hard lump of regret. She can’t bring herself to tell Max that she can barely take good care of
him,
let alone this forlorn little creature.

“Hey,” he says. “You cleaned up the mess.”

“What do you mean?”

“The papers.” He gestures at the stack on the dresser. “The ones that were on the floor.”

“Where did you find them, Max?”

“On the floor.”

“No, I mean before you dropped them on the floor. Where were they?”

“I didn’t drop them on the floor. They were there.”

“What do you mean?”

“Yesterday, when I came upstairs to look for Chance the Cat. There were papers all over the floor.”

“So you didn’t take them out of the closet? Off the shelf?”

“I can’t reach that high.”

“I thought you climbed on a chair.”

“You said never to do that.”

That doesn’t necessarily mean he wouldn’t. But something tells her that he didn’t.

Who did?

* * *

“Boys! Slow down!” Bella calls, her stubbed pinky throbbing as she chases after Max and Jiffy, who roll along the bumpy road on a pair of scooters.

No surprise that the sleeker one is in the lead. It’s red and belongs to Jiffy. Barefoot, he rides along with carefree abandon—as carefree as he can be, anyway, after grudgingly putting on the helmet Bella made him wear.

That helmet, like the one on Max’s head, was found in the garage of the Ardens’ rental house. So was the scooter Max is riding. It’s a decidedly older model with faded blue paint, but he was thrilled when Jiffy brought it to the door at lunchtime and asked if he wanted to ride it.

“Can I, Mom?”

“Not outside by yourself.”

“Don’t worry. I’m going with him.”

“I mean an adult,” she told Jiffy. “I’ll come, too.”

“Is that okay?” Max asked Jiffy, who shrugged.

“You can’t ride a scooter without a helmet,” she added.

Jiffy shook his gingery head, his hair as badly in need of a haircut as Max’s. “I don’t think it’s against the law.”

“It’s against mine. We’ll have to pick one up at the store later on.”

From the ever-resourceful—or just increasingly impatient—Jiffy: “I think there are some helmets in my garage. Odelia said some kids used to live there a long time ago. So let’s go get one.”

They did just that—although they got
two
helmets. Jiffy was slightly less accommodating when he discovered that Bella’s law applies to him, too. But one of his finest qualities is that he’s resilient.

That must come in handy in a place like this, with a life—and a mom—like his. When Bella suggested that Jiffy tell her they were
off to ride scooters, he explained that she was behind closed doors with a client.

“I’m not s’posed to disturb her unless I’m bleeding,” he said cheerfully.

That comment reminded Bella of the morning’s stressful events, but she was determined to put it all aside for a little while. Steve and Eleanor had yet to reemerge from behind their closed bedroom door when she left. Nor, for that matter, had Grant.

She was glad for an excuse to get out of the house with Max. It was starting to feel claustrophobic as the day wore on. She’d gone over to Odelia’s earlier, planning to ask to borrow her car to make a quick supermarket trip, but a sign was hanging on the door:

It was just as well. She was afraid she might slip and mention what had happened to Steve or that she’d seen Luther this morning. She isn’t sure that it’s a good idea to tell even Odelia about that—if she doesn’t already know.

The cold shower and coffee overload might not have banished her exhaustion, but this fresh air and exercise have done her a world of good.

In an effort to avoid the pedestrians and traffic streaming toward the auditorium for the much-anticipated afternoon speaker, she’d initially guided the boys and their scooters to a playground at the end of Fourth Street. They played for a while on the swings and slide and then hunted for signs of buried treasure in an adjacent field bordered by woodland.

Watching them—kids acting like kids—she almost managed to forget about all the drama back at the house. But now it’s time to head back, with only another twenty minutes to go until the next kitten feeding. At least the crowd has thinned considerably along these sun-dappled streets—many of which are little more than narrow pathways between abbreviated rows of cottages.

She catches up with the boys at the corner as they’re studying a sign outside a small café. It shows a double-scoop waffle cone emblazoned with the words “Perry’s Ice Cream.”

“Can we get some, Mom?” Max asks.

“I don’t know if I even have money with me.”

“Don’t worry, I have some.” Jiffy fishes in the pocket of his shorts and comes up with a dime and a couple of pennies.

Bella feels around in her own pockets. Along with her cell phone and key ring, she finds evidence of her chaotic morning: Luther’s business card, the crumpled bloody paper towel from her cut finger, and the socks she didn’t need after all. She also comes up with a couple of dollars and some loose change, which Jiffy, who seems to be a regular at the café, assures her is enough to buy two ice cream cones.

One nice thing about Lily Dale is that he’s probably right. After living in one of the costliest areas in the country, Bella is noticing that she’d be able to afford a much nicer lifestyle here than she ever could back in Bedford.
If
she had a job, that is. And
if
she could possibly live here.

One nice thing . . .

There are other nice things, she notices as she stands around beside the parked scooters, holding the two helmets and waiting for the boys to emerge with their ice cream.

Like the weather—today, anyway—and the easy, indoor-outdoor lifestyle. Open windows, screen doors. When it’s this warm back in the New York City suburbs, you seal off the house and turn on the air conditioning. Here, nobody seems to bother with it, thanks to a perpetual breeze off the lake.