Nine Lives: A Lily Dale Mystery (6 page)

“Good. Now get dressed and let’s go see what we can work out.”

* * *

An hour later, Bella finds herself in the cramped waiting room of Valeri and Son Service Station a few miles from Lily Dale, listening in dismay to the mechanic’s verdict.

“Is that the best you can do?” she asks, clutching a half-finished white foam cup of bad coffee, courtesy of a filmy carafe on a nearby counter.

“You mean the best I can do on the cost or on the time it’ll take to finish the repair?”

“Both.”

“’Fraid so.” He shakes his head, eyes apologetic beneath the blue brim of his Buffalo Bills cap. “It’ll take me at least a couple of days to track down the part, and with the holiday, I probably won’t have it here until after the weekend. And it’ll be expensive because it’s old. But I’ll give you a break on the labor, seeing as how you’re stuck and outa luck.”

Stuck and outa luck.

“You’ve pretty much just described the last year of my life,” she says wryly.

“Yeah? Sorry.” He offers a brief smile and a complicated explanation about how something in the engine isn’t functioning the way it should. The technical details escape her; car maintenance was—like playing board games with Max—Sam’s department.

Now, however, like everything else, it’s solely her responsibility. She has no choice but to spend money she doesn’t have and time she . . .

Well, she
has
time, she supposes. And a place to stay for another four or five days.

Earlier, when she asked Odelia to recommend a service station, Odelia reminded Bella that she’s welcome to stick around the guesthouse as long as she’d like.

“I thought it was sold out starting today.”

“The public rooms are, yes. But the Rose Room is Leona’s private quarters—the closet and bureau are still full of her things, but I’ll clean them out for you tomorrow.”

“No need to do that. We’re not—”

“Oh, it’s no problem. I’ve been meaning to get to it. And Max can sleep in one of the smaller rooms with a twin bed. Leona always keeps one open just in case her nephew shows up to visit. He never gives her any notice, but she adores him.” Odelia’s tone indicated that she herself had little affection for the nephew, Grant Everard. “He’s supposedly trying to get here this week, but who knows if he’ll really come?”

The mechanic—who’s around Bella’s age and whose name is Troy, according to the patch sewn on his coveralls—asks if she needs a ride somewhere.

“Can I keep my car with me until the part comes in?”

“You can if you like hitchhiking, because you’re already on borrowed time. I can’t believe you managed to drive it this far without breaking down.”

Bella sighs. “All right, then, I guess I’ll get a cab back and—”

“A cab? Around here?” His laugh isn’t unkind, but it’s yet another reminder that she’s a stranger in a strange land. “You’d have better luck flagging down a flying carpet.”

“Yeah, well, with any luck, there’s a magical genie on board, because I could really use three wishes right about now.”

“If you find him, send him my way. I have a couple of wishes of my own. Come on, I’ll drive you. Where are you going?”

Most people—where she comes from, anyway—would have asked that question before offering the ride. Around here, she’s noticed, people are so friendly that they don’t seem to balk at being inconvenienced by total strangers.

First Doctor Bailey, in the midst of an after-hours emergency, helped her with a stray cat. And Odelia—well, she’s a godsend. After settling the Piersons into their third-floor room, she turned her attention back to helping Bella. She called the service station, talked to Troy the mechanic, and offered to lead Bella over there in her own car.

“That’s all right, I’m sure I’ll make it,” she said—naïvely, as it turns out. “But Max is talking about a boy named Jiffy—”

“Jiffy Arden.”

Okay. So he was a real kid and not . . . imaginary. Or . . .

There’s no such thing as ghosts
, Bella reminded herself as Odelia went on to explain that Jiffy’s real name is Michael.

“But there are two other Michaels in the Dale, and he loves peanut butter, and the nickname stuck.”

Jiffy. It could have been worse
, Bella thought.
Skippy . . . Peter Pan
 . . .

But it sure could have been better.

“He’s a sweet boy. His mom is renting the house next door to me for the season,” Odelia went on, limping briskly around the Rose Room, opening all the windows to let fresh air billow through the screens, “and I thought it would be nice for Max to meet him, so I invited him to breakfast. They hit it off, just like I thought.”

Bella didn’t know what to say to that. Should she be grateful that Odelia is looking out for her son or infuriated that Max has yet another reason to beg to linger in Lily Dale?

Moot point now. She agreed to leave Max and Jiffy playing Candyland on the porch at Valley View Manor while Odelia kept an eye on them and waited for additional guests to check in.

“We’ll be hitting the road as soon as I get back,” she reminded her son before she left.

Engrossed in navigating toward Gum Drop Mountain, Max merely shrugged.

He’s going to be thrilled when he finds out we aren’t going anywhere for the next couple of days.

Maybe she’s just a tiny bit relieved herself. She was so emotionally drained after leaving home that she isn’t yet prepared to see Millicent again. Their previous encounter—at the funeral—was a blur of grief and her mother-in-law’s usual histrionics. Lily Dale will provide a convenient reprieve so that she can get herself together before the next phase of their fresh start.

“Do you know where Lily Dale is?” she asks Troy.

“Sure, it’s only a few miles down the road. I have a pickup truck, so we can load everything into the back.”

“Everything?”

“I noticed your car’s pretty full.”

“Oh, right.” Somehow, she’d forgotten about all her worldly belongings stashed in the car. “I’m in the middle of a move.”

“I figured. You probably don’t want to leave your stuff here for a few days . . . or do you?” he asks, seeing the look on her face.

Hmm. Her overnight bag and Max’s are back at the guesthouse.

“I’ll leave it,” she decides. “It’s only a few days, right? And I’ll be close by, so if I need something”—
like a tent or a vase?—
“I can always come get it.”

“Sounds good.” Troy grabs a set of keys from a wall hook. “Are you staying with Odelia Lauder?”

“No, next door.”

“At the Taggarts’? Or Leona Gatto’s guesthouse?”

“The guesthouse. So you . . . know it?”
And do you know about Leona?

“I do odd jobs during the slow season, so I get around. I did some painting for Leona last month. I read in the paper that she drowned a few days ago. I was sorry to hear it. She was a nice lady—and she was terrified of water. She couldn’t swim.”

Bella wonders if there’s anyone in a fifty-mile radius who isn’t aware of that fact.

Troy moves the hands of the cardboard clock sign hanging in the window, indicating that he’ll be back in an hour. “It won’t take me that long to drop you,” he says as he locks the door after them, “but I might as well grab lunch while I’m out.”

“Are you the only one working here?”

“Now I am. It’s a family business, but my dad passed away last year.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Yeah. It’s lonely without him. I miss him every day.”

Those words resonate as Troy leads her around behind the concrete block building, past a padlocked restroom door, a Dumpster, and an old bicycle pump. A red pickup truck sits in a sunny patch of tall grasses and orange wildflowers.

He opens the passenger’s side door and gestures for her to climb in. “I asked Odelia if she could put me in touch with him—you know, through a reading,” he says casually, before going around to the driver’s side.

Bella is intrigued. Troy doesn’t seem like the kind of guy who would buy into talking to the spirit world.

Climbing behind the wheel, he starts the engine.

As they begin bumping along a dirt path toward the road, Bella waits for him to pick up the story where he left off, but he doesn’t. He seems lost in thought.

“So did Odelia do the reading for you?” she asks after a minute.

“She did.”

“How did it go?”

He hesitates. “You know, I never believed in that stuff. Neither did Dad. But then you lose someone you love and you miss them like crazy and you figure . . . well, you hope there’s something to it.”

“Did she get through to him, then?”

“Nah. She said she was tapping into a bunch of other dead relatives I’ve never heard of, but not my dad. She offered to try again sometime.”

“Did she?”

He shakes his head. “I said thanks, but no thanks.”

“Why?”

“Because I don’t want to get my hopes up. Right after Dad died, all I wanted was to connect with him one more time. Now . . . well, I wouldn’t say I’m over it, exactly. But it’s been more than a year, and . . . time really does heal, you know?”

No. She still endures moments when grief stabs at her like a freshly honed blade. Will that subside in six months? A year?
Ever?

What if she could connect with Sam one more time?

She never even considered that possibility until now.

Because it’s
not
a possibility,
she reminds herself.

Like Troy, she never believed in that stuff. She’s not going to start now just because she’s stumbled across a strange little town filled with people who not only believe in ghosts but also are convinced they can communicate with them.

And now you’re stuck there for a few days. Terrific.

Troy pulls out onto the rural highway, heading south toward Lily Dale. She leans back in the seat, gazing at the bucolic countryside until he cuts into her melancholy thoughts with a question.

“Where’s your husband?”

Startled, she glances over at him. He’s looking straight ahead, at the road, one hand on the wheel, the other thoughtfully rubbing his razor stubble.

“My . . . husband?”

“You’re wearing a wedding ring, so I figured . . .”

“Oh.” She instinctively twists the gold band on her left hand. After Sam died, she’d put away his ring to give to Max someday but couldn’t bear to take off her own.

She takes a deep breath and musters the dreaded word. “I’m a widow.”

“I’m sorry.” He’s silent for a moment.

She stares out the passenger’s window at acres of lush, green grapevines trailing over perpendicular fencerows as far as she can see, broken only by the occasional weathered barn.

Then Troy asks, “Is that why you’re in Lily Dale? To try to connect to your husband?”

“No! We were just passing through to drop off a stray cat we found on the road. I never even heard of it until now.”

Maybe he doesn’t believe her. His gray eyes are pensive beneath the brim of his hat. “Well, as long as you’re here, you should see if Odelia will do a reading for you.”

“Why?”

Troy shrugs. “Why not? It can’t hurt. Maybe you’ll hear from your husband.”

Those words stay with her long after he’s left her at Valley View Manor and driven away.

By midafternoon, with the guesthouse filled up and the sun beating down, Bella and Odelia settle into a pair of Adirondack chairs on the lawn behind the guesthouse. The yard is fragrant with flowers and the lake blue and inviting on this first July day.

Chance lies nearby in a shady patch of grass beneath a sprawling apple tree, watching Max and Jiffy climb it.

Rather, Max is watching Jiffy climb to a towering branch that Odelia assures Bella is perfectly safe. “He does it all the time,” she says when he effortlessly hoists himself to that height in a matter of seconds and then casually perches there, legs dangling. “Don’t worry.”

Jiffy is a scrappy kid with wiry ginger hair, a smattering of freckles across the bridge of his nose, and—in addition to the front tooth Odelia mentioned he’d knocked out—an array of bruises and wounds he catalogued for a reverent Max earlier.

“I got this one falling off my scooter into a pothole on East Street—”

“You ride your scooter in the
street?
” Max wouldn’t have looked more astounded if Jiffy had just announced he skydives without a parachute.

“Uh-huh, and I got this one from a fish hook, and this one from a poisonous snake . . .” He pointed to a mosquito bite he’d scratched open.

“A poisonous snake? Wow!”

“Well, I
think
it was poisonous. And I think it was a snake. I didn’t ’xactly see it, by the way. But it bit me right here, and I was bleeding a lot, see?”

Max saw.

And now Bella’s son—who’s never climbed a tree in his life—is eager to keep up with his gutsy new friend. Well, not keep up, exactly.

He cautiously clings to the lowest-hanging bough just a few feet off the ground. His knees are dirty and his face is scratched courtesy of a thorny patch of shrubs between this yard and Odelia’s. But he’s happier than Bella has seen him since . . .

Since Sam was alive.

Sam always wanted Max to be a carefree kid playing outside. He didn’t experience that in his own high-rise urban childhood, nor did Bella in hers. They hoped things would be different for their son, but in this day and age, you don’t let kids wander too far beyond their own suburban backyards. Not even in bucolic Bedford.

Here in Lily Dale, she’s already noticed that things are different. Unaccompanied kids of all ages have been strolling or riding by the house on bikes, scooters, and skateboards all afternoon. A few are swimming off a small pier down the way, well outside the perimeter of the small lifeguarded beach.

Odelia mentions that Jiffy’s dad is overseas with the military and his mom is busy with appointments until dinnertime.

“Appointments? Is she . . . ?”

“She’s doing readings.”

That Jiffy’s mother is a medium shouldn’t be surprising, yet somehow it catches Bella off guard. Maybe it’s narrow-minded of her, but she can’t seem to reconcile the image of mundane maternal life with . . . well, special powers, real or imagined.

Imagined. Of course imagined.

As Odelia forewarned, crowds of visitors have arrived in Lily Dale this afternoon. Bella was amazed that so many of them appear to be . . . normal. There’s an inordinate ratio of women, and they come in all shapes and sizes, with a range of socioeconomic backgrounds and encompassing every racial and age group. There are even a few teenage girls.

“They always want to know who they’re going to marry,” Odelia commented earlier, as they watched a giggly gaggle pass the front porch.

“Do you know?”

“Sometimes. But I guarantee you that it’s never the name they want to hear.”

“Do you tell them anyway?”

“I deliver whatever message Spirit wants them to have.”

“I wonder if that has an impact on their relationship, then. If you tell someone young and impressionable that she’s not meant to be with the person she loves.”

“Most people shouldn’t marry the person they love at fourteen or fifteen,” Odelia responded with a shrug.

“My parents were high school sweethearts.”

“It’s lovely that it worked out for them. But most people aren’t the person they’re going to be a decade later, much less forty or fifty years later. My husband and I weren’t.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. I wouldn’t trade my life now for anything.”

It must be nice to be so content.

Bella was, back when she was living her cozy little life with Sam and Max. Back when she knew exactly where she belonged.

Now . . .

Now, as she and Odelia sit with chicken salad sandwiches and cold lemonade, she’s doing her best to stop thinking about the past.

She asks Odelia about Jiffy’s mother: “So you babysit him while she’s busy, then?”

“Well, she hasn’t been very busy until today. But now that the season is under way, I’ll keep an eye on him. We all will.” At Bella’s dubious look, she adds, “It’s safe here. We trust each other.”

When Bella opts to drop that subject, Odelia promptly introduces an equally disquieting one: she wants Bella to temporarily manage the guesthouse—for pay.

“But I can’t take your money.”

“It’s not
my
money,” Odelia assures her, after popping the last bite of her sandwich into her mouth. “It’s Leona’s. Well technically,
it’s her nephew’s, now. But Grant told me to hire someone to take care of things.”

Attempting to rephrase her protest, Bella sips the lemonade Odelia had poured from a large mason jar she brought from her kitchen. She’d mentioned that several newcomers had arrived in Bella’s absence—a young couple and a single man—and that Leona always liked to greet guests with a glass of freshly squeezed lemonade.

“I don’t mind helping out while I’m here,” Bella says carefully, “but that’s only for a couple of days. And if you won’t charge me for the rooms—”

“Out of the question,” Odelia inserts, shaking her head. Her frizzy orange hair is topped by a lime-green sun visor the same shade as her ruffled sundress, and she’s traded her red cat-eye bifocals for white cat-eye sunglasses. “The beds are vacant. You need a place to stay.”

“Then I guess the least I can do is keep an eye on the place in return.” She adds the most blatant lie she’s ever told in her life: “But I don’t need money.”

“Don’t be silly. Everyone needs money. And you’ll earn every penny. This is a full-time, round-the-clock job, and it can be challenging to deal with some people. You’ve already had a taste of it.”

True. When she returned from the service station, she found Odelia painstakingly climbing the stairs with Opal and Ruby St. Clair, a pair of elderly sisters who had just driven from Ohio in an enormous black car. Though hardly new to the guesthouse, they requested a tour of all the available rooms on the second and third floor. A lengthy discussion/argument ensued before they decided which one they wanted. Five minutes later, they emerged, having changed their mind. No sooner did they move to a different room than they opted to return to their first choice.

They were sweet, if slightly dotty.

But around here, who isn’t?
Bella thinks, having overheard Odelia having a conversation with an invisible companion as she folded towels in the tiny laundry room off the kitchen while Bella made the sandwiches.

“I’m going to pay you,” Odelia says firmly. “It’s what Leona would want. Grant—if I could ever manage to get ahold of him—would agree. Besides, you do need the money.”

Bella doesn’t bother to argue with that or ask how she knows. Having spent so much time with chatty Max, Odelia is undoubtedly privy to their dire financial status and more.

“All right,” she agrees. It does seem like a win-win prospect. How else would she possibly cover the car repair costs?

“Wonderful.” Odelia leans back in her chair, smiling. “And you can use Leona’s car, too, while you’re here, as long as you know how to drive a stick shift.”

“I don’t.”

“I can teach you, but until you learn, you can use my car. It’s a bit of a jalopy, but at least it’ll get you where you need to go.”

She’s making it sound as though this is long term. Bella wants to tell her they don’t need to bother with stick shift driving lessons, but she can’t figure out how to say it in a polite way.

“What if Grant hasn’t shown up before I have to leave?” she asks instead, watching a monarch butterfly hovering above a petunia bed that could stand to be weeded.

“We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.”

“Where does he live?”

“Where
doesn’t
he live?” As always, Odelia’s tone takes on an undercurrent of disapproval when discussing Grant Everard. “He’s a bit of a vagabond.”

Yeah, well, so are we right now,
Bella thinks. The difference is that Grant has a job—he’s a venture capitalist, according to Odelia. He was away at a prestigious college when Leona first moved here fifteen years ago and hasn’t visited much since.

She’s in the midst of telling Bella that it took her a couple of days to track down Grant to let him know about Leona’s passing when Bella notices that Max and Jiffy are on the move. They’re heading from the tree toward the water’s edge—and the small wooden pier where Leona had her tragic accident. The cat has roused herself and is trailing along after them.

Bella sets aside her glass and plate, interrupting Odelia to call, “Guys! No! That’s not a safe place to be!”

“We won’t step in the goose poop. I just wanted to show Max something,” Jiffy returns cheerfully.

Hardly worried about goose poop, Bella hurries toward them, weaving around the obstacle course on the grass.

The yard, like many around here, is heavily ornamented. There’s plenty of outdoor furniture, along with a sundial, a couple of birdbaths, a birdhouse on a pole, and vine-covered trellises and arbors. Glass sun catchers and wind chimes dangle from tree branches and pinwheels randomly dot the grass—all motionless on this still afternoon.

Reaching the boys, Bella puts a hand on each of their shoulders before they can set foot on the pier.

In bright sunshine, there’s nothing ominous about the timeworn wood structure jutting into calm, sparkly water. A small rowboat is tied to one of the two pilings that rise above the plank walkway.

That’s where Leona hit her head.

An icy chill sweeps over Bella as she pictures the elderly woman out here alone in the dead of a stormy night.

“It was right there,” Jiffy tells Max, pointing. “That’s where he threw it.”

“How can we get it?”

“Can you swim?”

“No!” Bella says sharply.

“I can swim, Mommy,” protests Max, who learned to semi-dog-paddle courtesy of lessons last summer at day camp. He squirms out from beneath her grasp, as does Jiffy, who shields his eyes with his hand, gazing out at the water.

“How long can you hold your breath?” he asks her son. “Because, by the way, we have to dig under the water.”

“I’m not sure. A long time.”

“Like five minutes?”

“Probably.”

“What are you two talking about, exactly?” Bella asks Jiffy as the cat sniffs the grass at the edge of the pier. It is, indeed, dotted with droppings courtesy of a small flock of geese floating on the water.

“Treasure,” Jiffy says, as if that explains everything.

“Where? In the lake?”

He nods vigorously. “It’s the sunken kind. And you have to hold your breath for, like, ten minutes to get it. I can do that, by the way. But I don’t know about Max.”

“I can! I can hold it even longer, by the way,” he adds, inserting Jiffy’s favorite catchphrase.

“Nobody can do that.”

Bella, who—
by the way
—feels as though she’s been holding her own breath for months, watches her son inhale deeply. Eyes closed, cheeks puffed out, he begins silently counting on his fingers.

“What’s going on?” Odelia has limped over, huffing a little.

“The other night, in the middle of the night, I saw a pirate drop a big heavy treasure chest into the lake. Me and Max want to get it.”

Determined to nip that plan in the bud, Bella says, “It was probably just a dream. Max has exciting dreams like that sometimes, right, Max?”

Still holding his breath and counting, Max nods.

“No. It was real,” Jiffy insists. “I was wide awake. Well, I was sleeping, but the wind woke me up.”

The wind . . .

“You were outside in the middle of the night?”

“No,” he tells Odelia, as though that’s the craziest thing he’s ever heard. “I was
inside,
in my room. I was in bed, but then I got out of bed, and I sat on the window seat and I looked out the window and I saw the pirate.”

“Which night was it?”

He shrugs. “The windy night.”

The night Leona died, Bella realizes uneasily. Does Jiffy know about that?

She senses the wheels turning in Odelia’s mind as she asks, “Which window was it, Jiff?”

He turns and points at the back of the yellow house on the far side of Odelia’s. “The one in the corner.”

It does look out in this direction.

“That’s your bedroom. There’s a window seat right there.” Odelia turns to Bella with a nod. “I know the house well. That used to be my friend Ramona’s niece Evangeline’s room—she and my granddaughter Calla are like this.” She lifts a hand and crosses her fingers.

Face red, cheeks bulging, Max lets out a sputtering breath.

“Thirty-two!” he announces triumphantly. “I can hold my breath for thirty-two minutes! Is that long enough to get the sunken treasure?”

“I don’t think so. How deep is the water there, Odelia?”

Ignoring Jiffy’s question, she asks him one of her own: “What, exactly, did you see out there on the windy night?”

“I saw a pirate walking on the dock. He was carrying a treasure.”

“Do you mean . . . like, a big box or a chest?”

“Yeah. Maybe. I’m not sure. He was facing the other way, but it was heavy. I could tell by the way he was walking. And he threw it into the water and then he left.”

The summer day goes arctic. Goosebumps prickle Bella’s bare limbs and a chill slides down her spine.

“Jiffy? What did he look like?” Odelia’s tone is gentle, almost casual, but her expression is intent.

“I don’t know. I couldn’t see him.”