Nine Lives: A Lily Dale Mystery (24 page)

“
We?
” He gives a scoffing laugh. “You’re not one of them. How do you know all this?”

Common sense. Educated guesses.

Nothing more. It
can’t
be anything more than that.

Stay focused.

“Everyone has secrets, Steve. Even me.” She stops walking and turns to face him.

Their eyes meet.

He recoils as if from a physical collision.

In that moment, seeing him falter, she makes her move.

She leaps on him, grappling for the gun. They fall to the ground and roll into the moss and mud, entangled in weeds and wet ferns. Fighting for her life, she claws at his hand and the gun.

Wrangling it from his hand into her own, she rolls away and gets to her feet, panting hard.

She’s never touched a gun before in her life, let alone shot one. As she holds it in shaking hands, arms outstretched in front of her, she isn’t sure she’s capable.

He clearly doesn’t think so.

Lying at her feet with the barrel aimed squarely at his chest, he laughs.

“Don’t move!” Her thumb clumsily searches for a way to cock the weapon, like in the movies. “Don’t move, or I swear I’ll shoot!”

“Ladies shouldn’t swear.” With a chuckle, he gets to his feet.

“I said don’t move!”

He reaches out in an attempt to pluck the pistol from her hand, but she holds on tightly.

“I’ll shoot you! I will!”

“Not with that, you won’t. It’s a prop, Bella. We used it in a production of
Arsenic and Old Lace
years ago. I’m a theater buff, remember?” He holds out a hand. “Give it to me.”

Her fingers tremble. She doesn’t believe him. She doesn’t believe a word he says. He’s pathological. He lies about everything.

I have a little girl the same age . . .

He does have a daughter. Bella saw photos of her on Eleanor’s phone. She’s grown, though, expecting a baby of her own.

Why claim she’s a little girl Max’s age?

But it doesn’t matter. All that matters is Bella’s little boy.

He needs me. I have to get back to him.

She struggles to keep her aim steady. Focus. Focus.

She’s no longer relying on Spirit to bail her out of this.

I can do it myself. I’m doing it now.

“All right,” he says. “If you don’t want to hand it over, then just drop it.”

“Step back! Right now!”

“Don’t drop it, then. Don’t hand it over either. Go ahead and shoot me.” He raises both hands. This time when he looks her in the eye, she sees not a hint of misgiving.

She keeps the gun pointed squarely at his chest, but she knows it’s over. The gun is useless. A prop.

Again, he reaches for it.

Again, they wrestle for it.

This time, though, he wins. The moment he grabs the gun, he turns around, takes aim at a nearby tree, and fires.

The sound is deafening. Birds lift from overhead boughs, flapping and squawking.

And Bella spots, with alarm, a splintered bullet hole ripped into the bark.

“Guess I lied.” Steve Pierson gestures at the tree and then at the gun, grinning at Bella. “I’ve never even seen
Arsenic and Old Lace.
”

A strangled, frustrated sound escapes her throat.

“Let’s go. Walk.”

He jabs the gun into her back and pushes her along the path into the woods.

Her ankle throbs as she picks her way along.

“Faster,” he says. “Faster!”

She trips.

Falls.

He bends over, nudging her with the nose of the pistol. “Get up.”

Fury darts through her. “No.”

“I said, get up.”

“No.”

“I’ll shoot you.”

“So shoot me.”

Two,
she thinks,
can play at this game.

He doesn’t want to shoot her. She’s taking a chance—a huge chance—that he won’t.

He’s already told her that he intends to make this look like an accident. If it doesn’t, if she’s found with a bullet in her head in the woods, the cops will leave no stone unturned to find out who did it.

It’s not as if he can go into hiding when he leaves here. He wants to take his wife back to their cushy, respectable, happy life in Boston. He wants to retire with full benefits and a nice salary so that he can
travel to places that aren’t Lily Dale and go to the theater and run miles every morning.

That’s exactly what he’s doing now: preparing to run. He’s been poised to break away from the moment he and Eleanor arrived.

He’d gone through the motions of arriving for their annual vacation, but it was a ruse. He didn’t expect to have to stay here. Even if Eleanor wanted to, he knew they wouldn’t be able to. Not with Leona gone.

He didn’t bargain on my being here to run the place. I put a hitch in his plan. And I’m doing it again right now.

“Nothing happened to you on Bachellor Hill Road this morning,” Bella says boldly. “You made up that story because . . . because you did something to Bonnie Barrington this morning, and then you panicked.”

Again, his eyes widen just enough to let her know she’s on the right track.

“You realized there was only one way to make sure no one suspected you, and that was to make them think you were almost a victim, too. You told Eleanor that someone had tried to run you down, and God knows what else you said, but you scared the living daylights out of her. She thinks the two of you are leaving today because your lives are in danger. The truth is, you’re leaving because you killed Leona. I’m just trying to figure out why.”

“Why do you think?” He gives a brittle laugh. “Oh, wait, I’ll tell you. It’s because I’m sick of coming to Silly Dale. So I killed off our hostess.
That
makes perfect sense.”

“No. You were trying to keep Leona quiet about something.”

Bingo. She’s right. She can see it in his eyes. Slowly, aware of the gun, she gets to her feet.

“It’s why you tore out the page in her appointment book right before she died, isn’t it? Because your name was on it.”

“Nope. Sorry, Nancy Drew. You’re wrong.
My
name wasn’t on it.”

This time, he isn’t lying. The way he says it, with the emphasis on the
My,
drives home the truth.

“Oh, that’s right. You don’t believe in this stuff. But your wife does. Eleanor had the appointment. And Leona told her something
she didn’t want to hear . . . or was it something you didn’t want her to know?”

He laughs. “You can think whatever you want. I don’t care.”

“Sure, you do. Because it’s all true. And if I know what really happened, then who else does?” She shrugs. “You can get rid of me, but what about everyone else?”

He glares at her.

She’s getting to him.

“This town is filled with people who somehow know things, Steve. It doesn’t matter how they know—parlor tricks, magic, spirit guides. But they know. You can run—you’re always running, aren’t you? You love to run. Every single day. But sooner or later, the truth is going to catch up to you. And when it does . . .” She shakes her head sadly. “I just feel sorry for your family.”

“You know nothing about my family.”

“I know that your wife loves you. Eleanor believes in you, no matter what you’ve done to her.”

“What are you saying?”

She isn’t quite sure—but obviously, she’s struck some kind of chord with him.

“Your wife and I had a nice little chat about you.” She almost added
the other morning
but thought better of it. Why pinpoint the time? Why not pull the rug out from under him and let him think it transpired since he last saw Eleanor? If he needs information Bella alone can provide—if only to know what to expect when he returns to the guesthouse—then he’ll have to keep her alive. At least, for now.

“What did she say?”

“What do you
think
she said?” Bella returns.

“So she knows? Is that it?” Panic is creeping over him.

“Did you really think you could keep secrets from her, Steve? After more than twenty-five years of marriage?”

He rakes a hand through his hair. “How much does she know?”

“Everything,” she says simply. “Leona, Bonnie . . .”

He shakes his head impatiently. He knows she’s bluffing.

But somehow, she has to keep him talking, keep him convinced that she knows what they’re talking about when it’s all she can do to maintain her own composure facing a loaded weapon.

“Do you mean your other secrets?” she asks, her thoughts careening through possibilities. “Are you talking about what Leona told her in that last reading, back in June?”

“Of course not. She didn’t tell her ‘everything.’ She barely told her anything. I was sitting right there the whole time.”

“Wait—are we talking about the same thing? When you were in Lily Dale, in June?”

“We weren’t here in June.”

“No, I know, I meant . . . I meant the
phone
reading. In June.”

Bingo.

“I heard Eleanor’s side of the conversation,” he says. “Leona kept talking to her about Paris and April—and of course Eleanor thought she meant the city and the month.”

Paris. April.

Bella remembers now that Eleanor had told her about the trip she was so certain her husband was planning to surprise her for their silver wedding anniversary next spring.

“All that time—six years—Leona never brought them up in a reading. Don’t think I wasn’t worried that she would. Don’t think I didn’t do everything in my power to keep Eleanor away from her—from Lily Dale. But my wife has a mind of her own.”

Good for her. She’s going to need it,
Bella thinks as he talks on.

“And then out of the blue—bang. There they were: Paris. April. Maybe it was because I’d just seen them the night before. Who knows? But how long do you think it would have been before Leona brought them up again? And next time, she might have figured out who they are.”

Who
they are. Not what.

Paris and April are people.

Six years . . .

I have a little girl the same age . . .

One of them is his daughter, she realizes. Her name is Paris. Or April. The other must be his mistress.

A secret like that could destroy a man like Steve Pierson if it ever got out. If his job—his reputation, his livelihood, his future—is on the line because the taxpayers don’t agree with him over the school
budget, imagine what they’d do if they discovered he has a love child with another woman.

“It was only a matter of time before Leona figured it out and told Eleanor. That’s why . . . that’s why I had to make sure that wouldn’t happen.”

“Eleanor knows anyway, Steve,” Bella tells him. “About April and Paris.”

“Who else knows?”

“You mean besides me? And poor Bonnie?”

“Not
poor
Bonnie,” he snaps. “The woman was a nuisance. She should have known better. At that hour, all I wanted to do was drink my coffee in peace and then go for my run. And then
she
shows up and starts telling me that she’d been channeling Leona’s spirit and that she thinks she was murdered. She was insisting that we call the cops. And the more I say that’s crazy—
she’s
crazy—and tell her to shut up, the more she badgers me. And then I see the way she’s looking at me and I know . . .”

He trails off, shaking his head, and Bella absorbs the terrible truth. Bonnie had perceived that Steve was Leona’s killer.

“So you decided to get her out of the way, too,” she says quietly. “You decided she should die to suit your selfish purposes.”

“I’m not the one who gave her the death sentence.”

“What are you talking about?”

Seeing her startled expression, he attempts to gloat. “So there’s actually something Miss Know-It-All didn’t know?”

“There are plenty of things I don’t know,” she tells him. “Like how you could have hurt an innocent woman.”

“Innocent, maybe. But she didn’t have much time left anyway. She told Eleanor yesterday about how she just finished another round of chemo and the doctors are running out of options.”

Bella remembers the wig. To think she’d suspected Bonnie might be using it as a disguise when, in reality, she’d been ravaged by treatments in a fight for her life.

“She’s going to pull through this,” Bella snaps. “And she’s going to ‘go on and on’ about you when she gets to the witness stand.”

“What are you talking about?”

So he doesn’t know.

She’d only told him Bonnie had been pulled out of the lake, not that she was still alive.

“She’s a fighter, Steve. If she wasn’t going to let cancer steal her life away, then she sure wasn’t going to let you do it.”

A shadow slides across his face, nudging the mask out of place. He’s wild-eyed, starting to lose his grip—on his emotions, not on the gun.

“You must know this is it,” she tells him. “You can do whatever you want to me, but it’s not going to change what’s going to happen to you. A lot of people are going to be devastated when they find out who you really are.”

For a long moment, he just stares at her. Then he cocks the trigger and raises the gun.

This is it.

She braces herself.

This is where it happens. This is where it ends.

She fervently hopes Odelia and the others are right, that it is just crossing over. That she won’t just cease to exist. That she’ll still be . . . somewhere. Either on the Other Side with Sam or here on earth with their son . . .

Max. I’m so sorry I have to leave you. I love you so much, and I—

But Steve isn’t pointing the weapon at her.

Wild-eyed, violently shaking, he’s pointing it at his own temple.

Her jaw drops. A word forms on her lips.

“Stop!”

It didn’t come from her own mouth. And the resounding shot didn’t come from the pistol in Steve’s hand. It skitters into the undergrowth as he drops to the ground, bleeding not from the skull but from his shin.

Suddenly, someone is there with them.

“Luther?”

“You okay?” Luther clutches a gun in his right hand and a phone in his left, thumb dialing it as he gives her a quick once-over.

Unable to answer, still trying to catch her breath, she just nods. She may not be okay in this particular moment, but she will be in the next—or the one after that. Soon she’ll be able to speak, able to
breathe
again.

“Yeah, send medics up here, too,” Luther barks into the phone, bending over Steve as he writhes and moans on the ground. “Tell them they’ll see a path right next to my Jeep and to follow it up. Yes, but it’s a superficial wound. Bullet nicked him in the leg. What’s that? No, she’s right here with me. She’s safe.”

He hangs up and pulls a handkerchief from his pocket. He tosses it onto the ground beside Steve, who grabs it and presses it against his bloody leg. Blood smears on the white linen.

Incredulous that he’s actually here, Bella manages to ask him how he found her.

“I heard a gunshot. Saw the maple he hit down there. If he was aiming for you, he’s a lousy shot.”

She cringes. “He was aiming for the tree. He’s an excellent shot. But . . . you couldn’t have heard it from the hospital.”

“I didn’t.” He holds up his phone, a twinkle in his kind, brown eyes. “I got your text.”

“But . . . how did you make it here so fast?”

“Magic.” He winks at her. “This is Lily Dale, after all.”

“You might just have made me into a believer.” She manages a faint smile, shaking her head, and he laughs.

“I was already back here in the Dale when you texted. I got to the house right after you left. Max and Jiffy had heard you leave, and they didn’t know where you were, but—”

“Max and Jiffy? They were
there?
In the house? But I looked for them, and I couldn’t find them.”

“They were locked in the basement with the cat.”

“In the
basement?
”

“They were playing hide-and-seek—with
him.
” He flicks a look of disgust at the man on the ground. “When I got there, I found the front door standing wide open, and I thought something might be wrong.”

Yes. She hadn’t locked or even closed it in her haste to go find Max, never thinking to question Steve when he said the boys had left the house.

He’d sent them to the basement under the pretext of a game, to get them out of the way.

I would never hurt a child.

Thank goodness. Thank goodness he’d told the truth about something.

“I heard them shouting,” Luther says, “and they said they didn’t know how the door got locked behind them.”

She shudders at the thought of her skittish son trapped in the dank, old cellar, but it could have been worse. Much, much worse.

Then she realizes something. “Wait a minute—you said the cat was down there with them?”

“Right. When I opened the door, all three of them came running out. Max brought her right back upstairs to her kittens, though. He was worried they were hungry. And speaking of magic . . . he told me that the cat can walk through walls.”

“I was almost starting to believe the same thing,” she says, knowing that the tunnel must open into the basement. “But I was wrong.”

About so many things.