Nine Lives: A Lily Dale Mystery (10 page)

If it comes down to either Millicent or Lily Dale, Millicent wins.

Or loses, as far as she’ll be concerned.

But it’s just until they can get back on their feet. It’s not forever.

Nothing is forever . . .

Except, she reminds herself, for death.

* * *

It’s long past nine o’clock Chicago time, but Bella’s planned phone call to her mother-in-law still hasn’t happened.

When she found a free moment to dial, she found two missed calls, both from western New York area codes.

There were two voice mails. The first was from Doctor Bailey, making sure she’d gotten the cat back where she belonged and asking her to call back to let him know.

That message was very short and straightforward.

The second one was anything but.

“Hi, Isabella, this is Troy. Troy Valeri. The mechanic? I’m just calling to let you know that I ordered the part, and it should be in
first thing Monday morning, so I’ll get it fixed right away, and you’ll be all set, so . . . and if . . . um . . .”

She frowned, holding the phone against her ear, wondering why, if everything is on track with her car, he suddenly sounded so hesitant.

“If you need, uh, a ride anywhere this weekend while you’re stuck without a car, or if . . . if you, um, want someone to show you around the area . . . or you need . . . anything . . . just give me a call. In fact, why don’t you give me a call anyway, just so that I know you got this. Okay? Okay. Bye.”

Taken aback, she listened to the message again.

There was no way she was going to call him back. He should just assume she got the message. That’s what people do. They leave messages for people, and people listen to them. That’s how it works.

Besides, she doesn’t need to be shown around the area, she thought, irritated with Troy for no reason whatsoever. And if she needs a ride, she can just borrow Odelia’s car again, right?

Of course.

Why is Troy Valeri going out of his way to be so nice? What’s wrong with him?

Is he hoping to see her again for some reason? Is he . . . interested?

He might be, but you’re not,
she reminded herself firmly.

Pushing Troy—and Millicent, too—from her mind, she went back to refilling coffee cups, replenishing pastries, cutting up more fruit, and chatting with her guests.

She’s pleasantly surprised to find that she actually enjoys her hostess duties. She certainly knows her way around a household, though she’s never shared one with more than one other adult. Her greatest concern had been the social aspect, but somehow, it isn’t difficult to find common ground even with this diverse bunch.

Jim and Kelly Tookler are about her age and live in the New York City suburbs not far from Bedford. Bonnie Barrington may be as straitlaced as they come, but like Bella, she grew up in the city itself. And Fritz Dunkle is another fellow teacher, a college English professor from Pennsylvania.

As she gets to know more about them, Bella finds herself wondering why they’re here, the ones who seem so . . .

Normal
is the word that keeps coming to mind, but
conventional
might be a better one.

Most of the guests are—on the surface, anyway—people you’d expect to find anywhere else.

There are exceptions, of course.

Certainly the St. Clair sisters—who with little coaxing perform an off-key but well-choreographed espadrille soft-shoe rendition of “Tea for Two”—are as dotty as their sweaters. And the Adabners, who are on their way to an early morning ectoplasm workshop, are more than a little wacky.

But the rest come across as utterly grounded and logical, which Bella finds simultaneously reassuring and disquieting.

She didn’t have to wonder for very long how they all found their way to this strange little town.

Their paths stem from grief to new age curiosity to literary aspirations—Fritz is working on a book about Lily Dale. The others’ stories have a common thread, though. They’re searching. Searching for a connection, for healing, for answers . . .

Not unlike Bella herself.

Except I didn’t realize that I was searching, and I didn’t mean to find this place. It found me.

But Lily Dale, with its wide-eyed “the dead aren’t really dead” philosophy, is no more likely to lift her burden of sorrow than the glass of ice water she’s clasping will erase the angry red burn from her fingers. This serene little town and its residents are nothing more than a soothing, temporary balm—to her loneliness, not her grief.

“It’s strange to be sitting here without Leona,” Kelly Tookler muses, lingering with several others over yet another cup of coffee. She’s tall, pudgy, and blonde; her husband is the exact opposite. Bella has noticed that she frequently punctuates her comments—as she does now—with, “Right, Jim?”

“Right.” Jim barely glances up from his newspaper. He’s a man of few words,
right
being one of his favorites.

“Well, Bella is doing a fantastic job picking up where Leona left off,” Steve Pierson says pointedly, with a smile at Bella.

She smiles back. “Thanks for the vote of confidence.”

Steve is a nice man. As soon as he found out she’s an unemployed teacher, he asked if she’d consider moving to Boston—she said yes, because why not?—and he offered to look into openings in his district back home.

“Oh, I didn’t mean it that way,” Kelly says quickly. “I’m sorry, Bella. You’ve been great. It’s just that I miss Leona.”

“So do I,” Bonnie says. “She always guides me in the right direction and makes me see things I’ve managed to miss even when they’re right in front of me.”

“We all do that,” Eleanor says. “Sometimes I wonder if people like us are so focused on what we can’t see that we forget to see what we can see.”

There’s a pause as her words sink in.

Then Steve puts his arm around his wife and gives her shoulder a squeeze. “I see. I think.”

“You know what I mean,” she says with a laugh.

“We all know what you mean,” Bonnie tells her. “And Isabella, you’re doing such a great job with the guesthouse—who knows? Maybe you can pick up where Leona left off with everything else, too.”

“Wait, do you mean . . . ?” Bella falters. “I’m not . . . I’m just . . .”

“She’s not a medium. She’s just like the rest of us. Well, like
us,
anyway,” Eleanor modifies, indicating her husband and herself. “I know that most of you are involved in mediumship training classes.”

“I certainly am. And you are, too, aren’t you . . . ?” Bonnie asks, looking at whichever of the elderly St. Clair sisters hasn’t nodded off over her tea.

“Yes, we are,” she says, nudging her sister. “Aren’t we, Opal?”

She wakes with a start. “Aren’t we what?”

“Learning to become mediums?”

“Oh, yes. We intend to speak with Mother directly. There are certain things we need to ask her that are rather . . .”

“Delicate,” Ruby says. “And private.”

After waiting a moment or two to let that provocative tidbit settle, Kelly announces, “We’re taking a class too. Right, Jim?”

Nope—not this time. He says, “I haven’t decided yet.”

Until now, Fritz has been sitting at a corner table quietly listening. Stout and swarthy, with a receding hairline and a quiet voice, he’s not the kind of man who commands much attention in a crowd.

Now, steepling his fingertips beneath his gray beard, he asks Jim what’s holding him back.

“I’m just not sure it’s something I want to do. Kelly wants me to, but—”

“It was your idea to come here in the first place.”

“Yes, but that doesn’t mean I—”

She talks over him, telling the others, “We were on our honeymoon in Niagara Falls—we were married at the end of October, so it was around Halloween, and Jim came across an article about Lily Dale in a local newspaper at the hotel.”

“Was it one of those hokey pieces that make it sound like a cross between
Ghostbusters
and a haunted hay ride?” Bonnie asks her.

“How’d you guess?”

“Same thing every Halloween. Most reporters don’t even try to help people understand what goes on here.”

“No, but at least it inspired us to make a day trip to check it out. Even though it was off-season, a few of the mediums were in residence, so we decided to get readings. You know—as a lark. That’s how we met Leona. She told us things she couldn’t possibly have known, right, Jim?”

His
right
isn’t quite as wholehearted this time.

Fritz seems to notice as well. “What kinds of things did she tell you, Jim?”

He opens his mouth to answer, but Kelly does it for him: “She gave him a message from his college roommate. He’d passed away a few months before our wedding. He was supposed to be our best man.”

“What was the message,
Jim?
” Fritz emphasizes the name, and this time, Kelly takes the hint and lets her husband answer.

“She just said Barry—that’s his name—wanted us to know that he was sorry he’d missed our special day.”

“Did she mention him by name?”

“Not exactly.”

Kelly jumps back in. “It was definitely Barry. Leona said the name might be Harold or maybe Harry and that he was young and he’d died suddenly and instantly. It was a car wreck. She was right.”

“That happens all the time with names,” Eleanor contributes. “Sometimes the medium just gets the first letter, sometimes a name that rhymes.”

Fully awake now, Opal is nodding. “When Leona first connected with Mother, it wasn’t by name, and it’s a good thing.”

“Why is that?” Bella asks.

She has a feeling, judging by their expressions, that the other regulars have all heard this before—if not last summer, then last night. The St. Clair sisters tend to repeat themselves.

“Mother’s name was Ann and so was her mother’s, and our other grandmother was Anna, and so were two cousins.”

“All of them are in Spirit,” Ruby says with a nod, “so we’d never have known it was Mother if Leona had just given us her name. Instead, she told us she could smell Mother’s signature perfume, and we just knew it was her.”

“What was it?”

“Jean Nate,” Opal reports.

“It used to drive Papa wild,” Ruby adds candidly.

Bella fights the urge to grin—and to point out that many women of a certain age wear the scent, which can be found on any drugstore shelf. If the sisters want to believe that Leona was channeling their mother, well then . . . where’s the harm in that?

Fritz asks them, “So for you, hearing the medium mention your mother’s perfume was a greater confirmation than her name would have been.”

“Oh, yes. That and the Clark Gable business,” Ruby adds.

Bonnie says, “Now
that
was really something,” as the Piersons and Tooklers nod their agreement and Bella raises a curious eyebrow.

Fritz asks the obvious question: “
What
Clark Gable business?”

When Ruby responds with an utter non sequitur—“We’re from Akron, you know”—Bella grasps that the sisters are merely senile. Obviously, the others are humoring them.

“Clark’s hometown was a stone’s throw away,” Opal elaborates. “Mother had a torrid affair with him when she was young, before she met Father.”

Hmm. Maybe they aren’t senile. Or maybe they are—as it’s difficult to imagine Clark Gable romancing a homely woman doused in Jean Nate.

“And Leona knew about that?” Fritz asks. “Did she mention Clark Gable by name?”

“Of course she did.”

“That’s some validation.”

Yes. Much stronger validation than Jean Nate, Bella has to admit.

“I’ll be interested in hearing all about your experiences, good and bad, if you’re willing to go on record for my book,” Fritz says, looking from the sisters to Bonnie, the Tooklers, the Piersons, and even Bella. “Without Leona’s input, I’m going to have to start from scratch in some aspects of my research.”

“She was helping you?” Bonnie looks surprised.

At his nod, Eleanor comments, “That’s funny. In all the years I’ve been coming here, I’ve never heard her say one nice thing about the press.”

“That’s because when they write about Lily Dale, they don’t get it right. I’m going to, and Leona knew it. She wanted to help me, and she gave me access to everything.”

He may be writing about the Dale and trying to “get it right,” but Bella notices that Fritz uses past tense when he speaks of Leona.

“When you say
everything,
” Bonnie asks, “what do you mean?”

“We did hours of phone interviews, and she answered any questions I had. She even let me listen to recordings of her readings.”

“She recorded them?” Bella is taken aback. “Do you mean . . . on a tape recorder?”

“No, she likes to say she’s high tech. She has an audio recorder hooked up to her laptop. After the session, she’ll e-mail you the file,” Kelly explains.

“Did you have to sign a release, then, so that she could share those tapes with other people?”

“A release?” Kelly laughs. “It doesn’t work that way. At least, not with Leona or any of the other mediums I’ve seen here.”

Maybe it should
, Bella thinks. This little refuge might consider itself immune to the litigious nature of the rest of the world, but it isn’t hard to imagine someone—not Kelly Tookler—slapping Leona with a lawsuit for sharing an audiotape without permission.

“I can’t tell you how many times I’ve gone back and listened to my readings,” Kelly says. “Every time I do, I pick up on something new.”

Bonnie nods. “Same here. It’s so hard, when you’re sitting there getting a reading, to keep track of every detail that comes through.”

“I used to try to write it all down,” Eleanor says, “but that can be distracting. It’s much easier to just have the medium record the session for you. That’s why so many of them do it. Sometimes, messages only make sense later, when you’ve had a chance to go back and listen and really think about it.”

When you’ve had a chance to make the vagaries fit and convince yourself that your dead loved one came through after all?

Naturally, Bella doesn’t say that aloud. They all seem so earnest, so trusting and naïve.

All but Fritz, the guileful fly on the wall, with a barely discernible glitter of doubt in his black eyes.