Nine Lives: A Lily Dale Mystery (9 page)

The auditorium service is still under way, and she should have the place to herself a while longer.

She finds a lighter conveniently sitting alongside a couple of jar candles on the porch rail and lights them. Then, kicking off her sandals, she settles on the swing to read.

According to the first book, the very ground here was charged with spiritual energy long before it was used as a picnic grove for mediums back in the mid-1800s. By the turn of the century, the Dale had evolved into a full-blown cottage colony whose illustrious visitors would later include Mae West, Harry Houdini, and even Eleanor Roosevelt.

Susan B. Anthony was a regular here, as were other prominent suffragettes, whose American movement had been born in the 1840s in a western New York lakeside community: Seneca Falls, 150 miles east of here. The ongoing campaign for women’s equality found a fierce stronghold in Lily Dale.

A passage in the book jumps out at Bella:
As a female-centric society of freethinkers, the community remains a magnet for encumbered women seeking a safe haven in which to nurture budding independence. Surrounded by healing energy and support, many learn to draw upon the inner strength necessary to achieve emancipation.

Bella looks out at the dusky landscape, pondering the words.

Odelia had told her that Leona found her way here after losing her husband. What she’d intended as a short visit became the rest of her life.

“You’d be surprised how often that happens, Bella,” she said, so emphatically that Bella wanted to remind her—yet again—that it won’t be happening to her.

Frowning, she snaps the book closed.

Then, after another long look at the view from the porch, she opens a map brochure to get her bearings. The lake runs behind the house and curves around the shadowy dead end to her left, where Friendship Park boasts a fishing pier, bandstand, and the beach where she saw people swimming this afternoon.

Again, she thinks of the hand she glimpsed out in the water.

Again, she tells herself it was a fish, a bird, anything.

But not a ghost.

Not a pirate, either.

She consults the map and then the view directly in front of the porch. Beyond the parking lot, stands of tall trees rise above low, gabled rooftops. Somewhere among them are the fire hall, a café or two, a few shops, and even a hotel. Judging by the skyline—or lack thereof—Bella assumes it’s not a Marriott. Or even a Motel Six.

To the right, she can see the light spilling from the large auditorium. The post office and the Assembly offices are down around the bend, near the gated entrance.

The Fairy Trail lies on the opposite edge of town, as does Leolyn Wood, the most sacred spot in the Dale. The small, ancient forest is home to nature trails as well as a couple more local oddities: a pet cemetery and Inspiration Stump.

The pet cemetery—okay, she can understand that. People in the Dale love their pets enough to designate a special burial ground for their remains. But the Stump . . .

According to the book, it’s all that remains of a legendary tree that once stood there, and it surges with some sort of mystical vortex. On that hallowed ground, mediums and visitors commune with nature, each other, and, of course, with Spirit.

So if Bella were to believe in any of that—which she doesn’t—what might happen if she went to the Stump? Would Sam—

She tosses aside the map and glares at the carefree fireflies glinting in the dark like ethereal beacons.

This—this false hope isn’t fair. Sam is gone.

Okay, he isn’t
gone,
gone. But he sure as hell isn’t hanging around a magical tree stump or chitchatting with Odelia Lauder or—God forbid—Pandora Feeney.

No, Sam is in heaven. Bella firmly believes in that. When she was a little girl and her father tucked her in at night, she always ended her prayers the way he taught her: “. . . and God bless Mommy in heaven.”

She has no memory of her beautiful mother, but Rosemary Angelo lived vividly in Bella’s imagination as a white-robed angel with gossamer wings and a divine glow, floating in a paradise filled with harp music and wisps of mist.

Maybe she can’t quite picture her rugged father and Sam with robes and wings, but she knows in her heart that they’re there in heaven with her mother and Aunt Sophie, too—all of them watching over Bella and Max.

Someday we’ll all be together again. Together forever.

That’s what her father promised her when she was little, and it’s what Sam promised her in the hospital last winter.

If she’s so willing to embrace that, then why not any of
this?
This Lily Dale stuff? If it makes sense that her lost loved ones are out there somewhere, wouldn’t they want to communicate with her somehow? Wouldn’t they let her know they hadn’t disappeared forever?

If I were there and Sam were here, I’d be desperate to reach him.

And if Sam could find a way to reach me, he would, and . . .

And now, somehow, Bella finds herself
here?

Not just here as in Earth. Here as in Lily Dale.

The town that talks to dead people.

She can’t help but consider the billboard for the campground that doesn’t exist, the cat on the doorstep back in Bedford, and the identical one in the road yesterday—the cat whose decidedly unusual full name Max had mysteriously known.

Pandora Feeney’s cryptic words echo in her head: “You’re supposed to be here.”

She appeared to be talking to someone, Bella recalls. A ghost? Make that
Spirit.
Whose?

And what about Odelia? She claimed that anyone can learn to communicate with lost loved ones. What if Bella concentrates with all her might?

She closes her eyes and listens intently.

The night is alive with humming cicadas. Somewhere, a dog is barking. Faraway voices call to each other. In the distance, car doors slam and tires roll on gravel.

Then another sound reaches her ears: a creaking floorboard somewhere inside the house.

Max must be stirring. There’s no one else around.

She turns to look expectantly at the screen door, waiting for her son to poke out his tousled head and ask for a glass of water. Yes, or tell her the cat just had kittens in her bed.

Another creak from inside the house. A long shadow falls across the porch floor. Someone is in the front hall.

“Max?” she calls, and the shadow moves away. “Max!”

No reply.

She gets up and looks into the house just in time to see someone disappearing through the archway that leads to the parlor. She only catches a fleeting glimpse, but she can see that it’s not Max. It’s an adult wearing a dark sweatshirt with the hood pulled up.

“Hello?” she calls.

There’s no reply, though whoever it is had to hear her. Footsteps retreat to the back of the house and there’s a faint, creaking click as the back door opens and closes.

Frightened, she isn’t sure whether to chase after the person or run upstairs and check on Max.

Her child’s safety takes priority. She hurries up the stairs and is relieved to find that he’s sound asleep.

After closing the door and locking him in, she searches the first floor, looking for some clue as to who might have been there. Nothing is out of place.

She tries to convince herself that it might have been one of the guests. When the message service ends an hour later, she’s sitting on the porch waiting for them as they trickle back to the house one by one or in pairs. First Jim and Kelly Tookler and Fritz Dunkle, the younger couple and middle-aged bachelor who had checked in with Odelia while Bella was gone. They’re followed by Bonnie Barrington, the elderly St. Clair sisters, Karl and Helen Adabner, and Eleanor Pierson, though not accompanied by Steve, who arrives not long after, clutching a program from
Our Town
and raving about the performance.

Bella can’t help noticing, with a tingling of apprehension, that not one of them is wearing—or even carrying—a dark hoodie.

Waking to a rumble of thunder through the bedroom screens the next morning, Bella finds Max still snoring beside her. Snoring loudly. Much too loudly for such a small boy.

She stretches, allowing her sandpapery eyelids to close again just for a moment before forcing them open again. She’s far from rested and refreshed, thanks to Max and Chance, whose furry heft was solidly wedged on her pillow for the first half of the night and on her feet for the second.

To be fair, it would have been a restless night regardless of her disruptive bedmates. After her guests had retired to their own rooms, she’d locked herself into this one with Pandora Feeney’s comment ringing in her ears:
It’s a good thing Leona never bothered to change the locks . . .

Virtually anyone could have the key to the first-floor deadbolts. Not to this bedroom, though. Odelia said the old-fashioned room keys couldn’t be duplicated. All the hardware in the century-old house is supposedly original.

But if there already are two copies of each key—with the apparent exception of the door to Leona’s study—then at some point, even if it was a hundred years ago, someone made a second key for each bedroom. And if there’s a second, is it so unlikely there might have been a third?

Last night, after locking the bedroom door from the inside, Bella removed the other key from the lock and slept with that and the master key ring under her pillow.

When
she slept. The last time she looked at the bedside clock, it was nearly five o’clock in the morning. Now it’s a quarter to seven.

Time to get up and brew the coffee. The posted hours in the breakfast room are seven to nine thirty, though Odelia had mentioned that Leona was pretty lax about sticking to that.

“She never minded if it was dawn or noon,” she told Bella yesterday. “Leona always said, ‘Whenever they get up, I’ll feed and water ’em’—she ran a dude ranch, you know.”

Bella didn’t know that, or much else about her.

But now, as she climbs out of Leona’s bed and glances around her bedroom, she can’t help but feel connected to the woman—so to speak.

The dog-eared paperback novels stacked on the nightstand include several titles she herself read over the last year or so. The sandals sitting just inside the closet door fit her own feet perfectly—she knows because she mistook them for hers when she hurriedly got dressed yesterday morning. And Sam might have called her Bella Blue because of her eyes, but her favorite color has always been the radiant pinkish red in the Rose Room’s décor. Everything about this room feels just right.

She gets out of bed and pads across the floor to find her toiletries bag. It’s inside her suitcase, which sits atop one of those folding hotel suitcase racks inside the large closet.

Reaching for the doorknob, she pauses at the dresser beside the closet door. Like the one in the master bedroom she’d shared with Sam back in Bedford, its long wooden surface holds a jewelry box and a framed wedding portrait.

She leans in to get a better look. The groom is handsome, wearing a black cowboy hat, and the bride, Leona, she presumes, is . . . is . . .

Startled, she picks up the frame and gapes at the image.

The woman in the photo is much younger. Her hair isn’t gray and her face isn’t wrinkled, but it’s the same one Bella glimpsed in the bathroom mirror in her disturbing dream yesterday morning. The dream where the wind chimes were ringing loudly—much too loudly, and she was brushing her hair, only it wasn’t her hair, it was gray and it was . . .

Leona’s?

She doesn’t remember seeing these photos before she went to bed that night, but she must have. How else would this face have worked its way into her subconscious?

Unnerved, she turns away from the photo.

* * *

Half an hour later, as a pleasant rain patters into the shrub border beneath the wall of screened windows, Bella still has the breakfast room to herself. But as she sits at a café table sipping coffee and reading more about Lily Dale, she hears stirring overhead.

Time to greet the guests. She sets aside the brochure, with its list of tips for people preparing for a spiritual reading.

Helpful stuff for anyone who, unlike Bella, intends to visit a medium.

She goes to the kitchen to turn on the tea kettle. Odelia had mentioned that Leona always brewed a full pot in the mornings, but this gray, stormy morning is so muggy that Bella didn’t want to steam up the kitchen before it was necessary.

The gas stove is as ancient as the one back in Bedford. Bella turns one knob after another, but none of the burners ignite, meaning the pilot light is out.

Sam was the one who relit theirs when that happened once. With a pang, she remembers that she spent an entire snow day without using the stove because she wasn’t sure how to light it and she was afraid of blowing up the place. When Sam got home, she apologized for not making the pot roast she’d promised him. He laughed and showed her how to light the pilot and then suggested a snowy walk to the diner for dinner.

It’s as if that happened to some other person
, Bella marvels as she finds a book of matches in a drawer and kneels in front of the open oven door, peering inside. Some stranger who didn’t know how to do much of anything on her own and didn’t have to.

Now you have no choice.

She strikes a match and lifts it to the pilot hole inside the oven. It ignites instantly, singing her fingertips. She drops the match and hurries over to the sink. As she runs cold water over her hand, she hears a key in the back door. Turning, she sees Eleanor Pierson stepping over the threshold. Her face is flushed with exertion; her damp, dark brown hair is spiked with sweat and rain; and she’s wearing jogging clothes.

“Good morning,” Bella calls as Eleanor wipes her muddy sneakers on the mat.

Eleanor doesn’t return the greeting, and Bella realizes she has on ear buds, listening to music.

Spotting her, Eleanor pulls them out of her ears and turns off her iPod. “Good morning,” she says cheerfully. “It’s really starting to come down. I had to stop. Steve is still out there, though. He’s a lot hardier than I am.”

“I didn’t even realize you two were already up and out,” Bella says, drying her still-stinging hand. “I’d have had the coffee ready earlier.”

“Oh, I’m not a coffee drinker. Steve is, and he wanted to make some himself, but I told him it’s not polite to go rummaging around someone else’s kitchen.”

“It would have been fine, but I’m sorry about that. Tomorrow I’ll be up earlier. I’m still trying to get the hang of this.” She turns the knob and this time the burner ignites beneath the tea kettle.

“No worries, you’re doing a wonderful job. My husband gets up much too early, even on vacation, and he doesn’t expect anyone to be at his beck and call at that hour, even though Leona always managed to be.”

“So do you two run together every morning?”

“Steve runs every day, and I try to. We start out together, but I can only do four miles at the most on a good day. He does twice that,
sometimes three times. He’s very disciplined. He says it nurtures the heart
and
the soul. Are you a runner?”

“Me? No.”

Not that her heart and soul couldn’t stand a bit of nurturing.

Eleanor follows her into the breakfast room and puts a blueberry muffin and some fruit onto a plate, chatting the whole time. “I know you’re just filling in here, so what do you ordinarily do?”

“I’m a teacher.”

“So am I. Steve and I are both in education. That’s why we always like to stay in the Apple Room,” she adds with a smile. “What do you teach?”

“Middle school science, but . . . I just got laid off.”

“So you’re looking for a new position?”

I’m looking for a new everything.

Bella nods and asks about Eleanor’s and her husband’s careers.

“I’m a history teacher, and Steve taught English and drama for years, but now he’s in administration. He’s a superintendent, in fact, of a large district where we live in Massachusetts. I’m sure between the two of us, we can help you network, depending on where you live.”

Not wanting to admit that she doesn’t live any place at all, Bella thanks her and guides the subject away from careers. Eleanor lights up when she asks about family. She and Steve are celebrating their silver wedding anniversary next April, and she’s convinced he’s going to surprise her with a trip to Paris. They have three children—a son studying premed in college, another about to start law school, and a daughter who’s expecting their first grandchild.

As Eleanor pulls out her cell phone to scroll through a montage of happy family photos, Bella murmurs all the right things. But it’s difficult not to envy the other woman’s life or to think about what might have been.

Max was supposed to have siblings. She and Sam were supposed to grow old together.

“For better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health . . . ’til death do us part . . .”

“Only ’til death? No, sir,” she remembers quipping at the time. “You’re not getting off that easily. I’m going to haunt you, Mister.”

How easy it was back then to laugh about the future.

How unthinkable that all their vows would be tested within a few short years.

Two sets of footsteps descend the stairs, and the St. Clair sisters enter the room.

They’re not the most attractive older women Bella has ever seen—not by a long shot. Mirror images of each other, they have sharp chins, sallow complexions, and smallish eyes set too close to their aquiline noses. They are fairly snappy dressers—she’ll give them that. But octogenarians in matching outfits—navy-and-white polka dot cardigans, khaki pedal pushers, and blue espadrilles—is a bit much.

Bella introduces them to Eleanor as a pair, apologizing because she can’t tell them apart.

“I’m Opal,” one says, “and she’s Ruby.”

“We’ve met,” Eleanor reminds them. “Last summer, and the summer before.”

“We have? These days I scarcely remember yesterday,” Ruby says, shaking her head.

“We met yesterday, too.” Eleanor smiles gently. “We were talking about names, and I said that it was lovely that you’re both named after gemstones.”

“Oh, yes! Well, Papa was a jeweler, you know.”

Eleanor nods. Clearly, she knows. “I was telling you that my own father was a history professor, and my twin sister Mamie and I were named for first ladies. Fortunately, we don’t look like them,” she adds.

“Look like whom, dear?” Ruby asks.

“Like Mamie Eisenhower and Eleanor Roosevelt.”

“Where?” Opal looks around.

Bella fights a smile. “Eleanor was just saying that she and her twin sister were named after first ladies, just like you and your twin were named after gemstones, but that she’s glad that they don’t—”

“Oh, no, dear, we aren’t twins at all.” Ruby shakes her white bun. “People often make that mistake, though.”

“I suspect it’s because we look exactly alike,” Opal tells her as though they’ve never before considered the prospect, “and we’ve
always dressed exactly alike. Remember, no one could ever tell the three of us apart.”

“The three of you? So . . . you’re . . . you were . . . identical triplets?”

Bella’s question is met with another shake of Ruby’s white bun. “Oh, no. We aren’t twins or triplets at all. Just sisters.”

“I’m sorry, I thought you said there were three of you who looked alike and dressed alike . . .”

“Yes, three. Opal, me, and Mother.” Ruby counts off on her fingers.

“And your mother is . . . here?”

“Where?” Opal looks around.

“I think Miss Jordan is asking whether Mother is alive,” Ruby tells her sister.

“Goodness, no. She’d be a hundred and twenty years old.”

“A hundred and twenty-two,” Ruby contradicts.

“No, a hundred and twenty.”

Eleanor diffuses the bickering. “I think it’s sweet that you still dress alike.”

“Well, it does get difficult at times, because Ruby is always much too warm, even in winter, and I’m always much too cold, even in summer. But Mother is always so pleased that we’ve continued the tradition.”

“And she taught us to dress in layers regardless of the season,” Ruby says. “Opal, I have a feeling that she’ll scold you for leaving your windbreaker in the trunk of the car so that your teeth chattered all the way from Akron yesterday.”

“Well, then, she’ll scold you for running the air conditioning on high,” Opal retorts.

“It was eighty-three degrees out!”

“It was eighty-one. And breezy.”

Again, Eleanor deftly jumps in to redirect the squabbling sisters. “I’m at that age when I’m too warm one minute and too cold the next. It’s all about the layers. Your mother is a wise woman,” she adds, clearly unfazed that the sisters are still in touch with their dead mother.

Such is life—and death—here in Lily Dale.

I wonder if I’d ever get used to it.

Maybe, if Bella stuck around long enough, she’d go around talking about Sam—talking
to
Sam—as if he were still here.

Maybe she’d even believe that he is.

Which is exactly why you can’t stay,
she reminds herself.

It’s hard enough to get over losing the love of your life. If she allowed herself to start imagining that Sam isn’t really gone forever—or, even worse, if Max started to believe it . . .

Well, she doesn’t need Doctor Lex or grief counseling to grasp that such delusional thinking would be a major setback in the healing process.

I have to get us out of here. The sooner, the better.

She’ll make that phone call to Millicent, just as soon as it’s a decent hour in Chicago. She’ll start out by saying that she’s sorry for last night, even though she can no longer recall exactly what she said or did that demands an apology. Does it matter? If Millicent feels slighted—and Millicent
always
feels slighted—then Bella will make amends, because right now, she’s out of options.