Nine Lives: A Lily Dale Mystery (11 page)

Fritz is an outsider, just like she is. It’s obvious he doesn’t buy any of this. But he’s not letting them see his skepticism because he needs their cooperation for his book.

And Bella isn’t letting them see hers, because . . .

Because in this moment, maybe I just need the companionship. I need them. All of them.

Who cares that they’re an eclectic bunch of strangers or that she’ll never see any of them again after the weekend? It’s just nice, for a change, not to feel as though she and Max are all alone in the world. It’s nice to feel as though they belong.

Even here.

Still, she squirms when the conversation meanders to the local dating scene—or lack thereof. Kelly asks whether Bonnie had seen a handsome man she’d spotted at last night’s message service, and then again riding his bike past the house this morning. Bonnie doesn’t seem interested, but that doesn’t stop Kelly from speculating about whether he’s available and who else around here might be.

The short answer, according to the others: no one. Apparently, there is a dearth of single, straight, available men in the Dale.

“What about you, Bella?” Kelly asks. “Do you date? Are you interested in—”

The doorbell rings.

“Be right back,” Bella says, hoping the subject will have been dropped by then.

She hurries into the front hall, opens the door, and is startled to see Doctor Bailey standing on the porch.

He, too, looks surprised. “Isabella? What are you doing here?”

“Good question,” she says. “I was just wondering the same thing.”

He blinks. “I thought you were just passing through, returning the lost cat to the owner.”

“I thought I was, too, but—it’s a long story. I did get your message, by the way,” she adds. “But I haven’t had a chance to call back. Sorry.”

“I just wanted to make sure the cat got to where she was supposed to go. After you left, I realized that it was irresponsible of me to give out that information and send you on your way with her. But I was worried about the puppy, and I hadn’t slept in a few days, and . . . I guess I wasn’t thinking straight.”

“It’s okay. I got Chance back here just fine.”

“Good. I’m sure her owner was relieved. I thought I’d better come over here because I tried calling her, too, last night and today, but the voice mailbox was still full.”

“Right. That’s because she, um . . .”

Oddly, Bella’s first instinct is to search for the right phrasing. But there’s no need to mince words now, is there? Doctor Bailey isn’t one of
them
—the Spiritualists who phrase conversations about the dearly departed as if they’d momentarily stepped into the next room.

Why mince words?

“The thing is . . . Leona died.”

His dark eyebrows furrow. “I’m sorry to hear that.”

“So was I. It sounds like she was a wonderful person.”

“You never met her, though.”

“No.”

“And you’d never been to Lily Dale before. You’d never even heard of it.”

She can’t tell whether it’s a statement or a question, but he pauses, waiting for her to acknowledge it.

“No,” she says again, wondering if that’s a gleam of suspicion in his brown eyes. “I was just passing through, remember?”

“I do, but . . . well, here you are in Lily Dale, answering Leona’s door.”

She laughs nervously. “Right, here I am. I know it must seem a little crazy to you.”

And you’re not the only one.

“A little,” he agrees. “Is the cat . . . ?”

“Oh, she’s fine. She’s around here someplace. No kittens yet, but we’re waiting.”

“You’re taking care of her, then?”

“Just for the weekend, because our car is in the repair shop.”

“And Max?”

“
Not
in the repair shop,” she quips, surprised that Doctor Bailey remembers her son’s name—and her own, for that matter.

He chuckles. “That’s good. So he’s around here someplace, too?”

“Upstairs sleeping.”

“Good for him. Everything is okay, then?”

Definitely a question.

She tilts her head, considering it. “I guess that depends on how you define okay.”

“For me,
that
depends on the day. And sometimes, lately, the definition changes minute to minute.”

“Same here,” she says, and their eyes meet in a flash of empathy. “But right now, everything is okay.”

“I’m glad. I just wanted to make sure. If you need me, you know where to find me.”

“I do,” she agrees, “and . . .”

She trails off, realizing she was about to tell him that he knows where to find her, too, if he needs her.

Why would he need you? You’re not friends. You’re barely acquaintances. He only said it because he’s a vet, and you’re . . .

As he sees it, she’s a homeless stranger who found a pregnant stray, volunteered to return her to her owner on the way to a campground that doesn’t exist, and then moved in. No wonder he’s checking up on her. She’s lucky he isn’t calling the cops right now. Or the loony bin.

“Take care,” he says, giving a little wave and then turning back. “Oh, and Isabella? Thanks for doing what you did.”

“You mean the cat? No problem.” Maybe he doesn’t think she’s crazy after all.

Again, he starts away, then turns back. “Tell Max that if I’d known he was here, I’d have brought him some chocolate chip ice cream.”

She smiles. “I will.”

“Not that he remembers me.”

“Something tells me that he might.”

Wearing a bemused smile, she closes the door and then finds herself watching through the window as he walks away.

“Mommy?”

Alone in the kitchen washing out the coffee pot after the guests have dispersed, she looks up to see Max in the doorway.

“Good morning, sweetie.” She turns off the water and goes over to hug him, but he pulls away. “What’s wrong?”

“I can’t find Chance the Cat.”

“She was sleeping next to you when I left the bedroom.” She’d locked the door from the outside with her key and left the duplicate sitting in the inside lock so that Max could let himself out.

“I just woke up and she was gone.”

“Well, the door was locked, and I’m sure she can’t turn a key with her paw, so she must be in there hiding somewhere. Under the bed or—”

“No, I looked everywhere. She’s not there.”

“Cats are really good at hiding. Sit down and eat your breakfast. After that, I’ll help you look.”

Max protests, but eventually agrees to have a bowl of cereal at the table. As he crunches his way through it, he winces.

“What’s wrong, sweetie?”

“My tooth is wiggly. I don’t want it to fall out and get swallowed. Then the tooth fairy won’t come.”

“Here, let me see.” She tips his chin back gently, and he opens his mouth wide. The bottom tooth is crooked, nearly sideways in his
mouth. No wonder he’s having trouble eating. “Do you want me to get it out for you?”

“No! It has to fall out by itself or she won’t come.”

“The tooth fairy? I don’t think that’s the rule.”

“That’s what Jiffy said.”

“Well, I say she’ll come no matter what.”

Clearly, Jiffy’s opinion is all that counts. Max shakes his head, adamant, and clamps his mouth shut. Speaking like a bad ventriloquist, he says, “By the way, it’s not falling out until the Fourth of July.”

Bella smiles. “Whatever you say, kiddo.”

She goes back to washing the rest of the breakfast dishes, still thinking about Doctor Bailey’s visit, and Max goes back to his cereal and fretting about the cat. He’s almost finished eating when they hear a rap on the back door.

Turning, Bella sees Odelia Lauder standing on the back steps, accompanied by a tall African American man who’s holding a big umbrella over them both. He’s handsome, with a square jaw and hair that’s graying at the temples. Bella has only been here for a couple of days, but even she can tell that he’s overdressed for Lily Dale in a dress shirt and slacks.

Both he and Odelia are wearing such serious expressions that she immediately tells Max to go back upstairs and check again for the cat.

“But you have to help me.”

“I will. I’ll be up in a few minutes. Just go look, Max. I think . . . I think I heard kitty footsteps in the closet,” she improvises. “I bet that’s where she is.”

“I already looked there.”

“Here . . .” She grabs a box of kibble from the counter. Last night, the cat heard it rattle and came running. “I bet if you go around up there shaking this, she’ll find you instead of you finding her.”

With her son safely on his way back upstairs, she unlocks the door and opens it.

“Sorry to barge in on you,” Odelia says, “but it’s pretty important.”

“No problem, come on in.”

“Bella, this is Luther Ragland. He’s a good friend of mine, and he was a friend of Leona’s, too.”

His voice is a rich baritone, and his handshake is as fleeting as his smile. Propping the dripping, folded umbrella on the mat, he asks, “Can we have a word in private?”

Taken aback, she looks at Odelia, who leans in to say in a low voice, “Luther has some . . . questions.”

“Questions?”

“About Leona. Let’s talk in the study.” Odelia limps in that direction, trailed by Luther and, after a moment, Bella.

Remembering last night’s hooded visitor, she wishes she hadn’t just sent Max back upstairs by himself.

In the parlor, Odelia is reaching for the knob on the closed French door. “That’s strange.”

“What is?”

“There’s no key sticking out of the lock.”

“Should there be?”

“Yes, just like the doors upstairs.”

“There’s one right here on the ring you gave me.” Bella fishes for it in her pocket.

“Yes, that’s the duplicate. But how did the door get locked in the first place?”

“Maybe Leona locked it,” Luther says.

“She only did that when there were overnight guests in the house, which there weren’t on the night she passed.”

“Are you sure about that?”

“Pretty sure. And when she was home alone, she always left the key in the knob so that she wouldn’t misplace it, because those keys can’t be copied these days.” She turns to look at Bella. “Other than Leona, no one but me has been here—until you.”

“I didn’t lock it,” she protests nervously. “It was that way when I got here.”

“No, I’m sure that it was. I’m just trying to figure out why.” Odelia exchanges a long look with Luther before asking Bella for the master key ring.

She hands it over, and Odelia opens the French door without comment and motions them inside.

The room is exactly as Bella left it the other night. Noticing the appointment book on the table, she wonders if she should mention the missing page.

But it would mean admitting that she snooped around in here. In light of the key discussion they just had, she decides she’d better keep it to herself for the time being.

“It’s funny,” Odelia muses. “This room looks so much bigger to me now than it used to.”

“What do you mean?”

“The walls were a deep shade of blue. But Leona spends so much time here that she decided to give it a makeover this spring and brighten things up. I’d forgotten all about that. I do love the yellow. It’s much more cheerful, don’t you think, Luther?”

Luther, who doesn’t appear the least bit interested in décor, offers a monosyllabic agreement. He motions for the two of them to sit in the easy chairs.

Bella perches on the edge of one of them, conscious of his gaze and wondering if he can tell how anxious she is.

It’s almost as if he’s trying to be intimidating, sitting on the window seat, his spine held military-straight, not touching the three pillows along the back of the bench.

He wastes no time getting down to business. “Odelia has reason to believe that Leona’s accident might not have been an accident. She’s asked me to look into things.”

“What do you mean? Did something else happen?” Bella asks, looking at Odelia in alarm.

“Something
else?
” Luther, too, looks at Odelia.

“I just meant . . .” Bella trails off, wondering what he knows—and
why
he knows. He seems like a no-nonsense kind of guy. Why would he be hanging around someone like Odelia? And Leona, too?

Unwilling to bring up the pirate story unless Odelia already has, she fumbles for the right thing to say.

Odelia bails her out: “I told Luther what Jiffy said about seeing someone carrying something on the pier the night she died. I couldn’t stop thinking about it after he mentioned it.”

“So you think Leona was . . .” She can’t bring herself to say the word
murdered.

“No, I just . . . I don’t know.”

“But if you think there’s even a chance that . . . that someone deliberately did something to her, then shouldn’t you call the police?”

“Luther
is
the police.”

“Was,” he corrects Odelia, and tells Bella, “I’m a retired officer—I live down in Dunkirk—but I do some private detective work now. Odelia and I met when she got in touch with me about a missing persons case I was on a few years back and—”

“And he thought I was off my rocker,” Odelia cuts in.

“I wouldn’t say that.”

“You
did
say that. To my face.” She shakes her frizzy orange head. “But you changed your mind pretty quickly when I led you right to the person you were looking for—in the last place you ever would have thought to look.”

“I’ll admit I was a skeptic,” Luther agrees. “But I couldn’t have solved that case without you.”

“Since then, we’ve collaborated on quite a few others. But I never imagined that Leona . . .” Odelia shakes her head sadly at Bella. “Anyway, last night, I dreamed about it.”

“About . . . the pirate?”

“About Leona.”

“What about her?”

“She showed me that something happened to her that night. Luther already knows this, but . . . sometimes dreams are just dreams, and sometimes they aren’t. You learn to tell the difference.”

“What did she show you?”

“Just—”

Luther curtails Odelia’s reply. “Before we get into that, Bella, can I ask you a couple of questions?”

She nods, looking uneasily toward the door, thinking about last night and about Max and wondering how long this is going to take.

He asks her some basic questions—her full name, her last address, that sort of thing. Then he asks one that makes her breath catch in her throat: “Can you tell me where you were on the night of June eighteenth?”

“June eighteenth?” she echoes. “Is that . . . ?”

“The night Leona died.”

That date would have been included in the missing page from the appointment book.

Looking from the formidable Luther to Odelia, who avoids her gaze, Bella gulps. “I was back home in Bedford, same as every other night of my life since . . .”

Since Sam.

“Why are you asking?” As if she doesn’t know. She swallows hard, trying to hold it together, to sound indignant, even. “Please tell me that you don’t think that I—”

“Were you at home alone?”

“I was with my son.”

Max. Again, she looks at the door, feeling trapped here. As worried about him upstairs alone as she is about the line of questioning, she chews her lip.

“Is there someone who can vouch for that?” Luther asks.

“Besides my five-year-old, you mean?” Of course there isn’t. She never goes anywhere anymore, never sees anyone, never—“Wait a minute, did you say the eighteenth?”

“Yes.”

Relief floods through her. What are the odds? That was the one night all year that she
wasn’t
sitting home.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t realize—I was out at a restaurant with some of the teachers that night.”

“Are you sure about that?” Luther obviously suspects she’d conveniently changed her story.

“I’m positive, because it was the last day of classes. The women I work with had a little going away party for me, and one of them got her daughter to babysit Max. If you don’t believe me, you can check online. My friend posted pictures on every conceivable social media site even though we all told her not to.”

She shakes her head, thinking of Janice, a young and single library aide. She’s one of those women who doesn’t eat lunch, buy shoes, or see a movie without telling the entire world about it—the Internet world, anyway. She’d plastered the web with photos labeled “Girls’ Night Out,” much to the chagrin of Bella and her fellow teachers.

“I can show you,” she tells Luther and Odelia, “if you want to see.”

“I don’t think we need to—”

“I’d like to see,” Luther interrupts Odelia.

Bella pulls her phone from her pocket, presses a few buttons, and locates the incriminating—or rather, the opposite of incriminating—photos, which prominently feature not only the date but the time and the place where they were taken.

“You can talk to Janice—to anyone who was there that night—if you want to.”

“Go ahead and give me the names and contact information.” Luther hands back her phone and picks up a pad and pen from the table. After writing it all down, he tells her that he probably won’t bother to talk to anyone.

“So you believe me?”

“It’s hard not to, given the evidence.” He seems softer now. “But you might want to tell your friend it’s not a good idea to put stuff like that online.”

Don’t worry,
Bella thinks, with a sudden pang for the life she left behind.
I’ll probably never see her again anyway.

Odelia is looking smug. “I told him you weren’t involved in what happened to Leona. But sometimes, my guides aren’t proof enough for Luther, so—”

“Your guides are
never
enough proof for me, Odelia. Ordinarily, online photos aren’t, either. I learned to play by the rules when I was on the force. But in this case, I’m going to go with my gut. I don’t want to waste any more time.”

Bella nods, and he offers a hint of a smile—a one-man good cop/bad cop show.

She should tell him about the person who was lurking in the house last night. Although . . .

Lurking?
That might be too strong a word. In broad daylight—even this gray, stormy daylight—it seems likely she just imagined that the person’s behavior was furtive. Surely it was just one of the guests coming and going.

Going . . . fleeing? Out the back door? Ignoring her when she called out?

That’s furtive. Lurking.

Then again, maybe he—she?—had on earbuds, listening to music, and didn’t hear.

That makes sense. It just happened with Eleanor when she came in from her morning run.

That no guest had on a dark hooded jacket upon returning last night doesn’t mean someone hadn’t worn one earlier.

No, but why take it off? And if you did take it off—wouldn’t you be carrying it?

Besides, the guests were all in the message service when she saw the person in the hoodie. She watched from the porch as they approached the house in dribs and drabs, all coming from the direction of the auditorium.

Was one of them carrying off a charade? Had he or she been prowling through the house and then doubled back to the auditorium and changed clothes?

Why?

It doesn’t make sense.

Unless you throw in the fact that Leona might have been murdered. In that case . . .

In that case, I should get out of here right now, shouldn’t I?

“I really think we should call the police,” she says again. “Nothing against you, Mr. Ragland, but if—”

“Call me Luther,” he says. “And we’ll involve them just as soon as we know whether there’s reason. Right now, we don’t have much to go on.”

“Not as far as they would be concerned, anyway,” Odelia says. “Trust me. I’ve been there, done that too many times to count.”

Bella grasps, then, what they’re up against. Most law enforcement officials probably wouldn’t consider a little boy’s comment or a medium’s dream-that-wasn’t-a-dream—much less her contact with a restless spirit—sufficient evidence to open a murder investigation.