Nine Lives: A Lily Dale Mystery (21 page)

“Yes. It’s about England, and it’s called ‘I Stood Tip-Toe Upon a Little Hill.’ It’s by Keats.”

The name hits Bella like a splash of ice water.

Pandora takes a few steps toward her, as if approaching a skittish animal. After a moment, she cautiously holds out the flower. “Here, love. Please take it. You’re supposed to have it.”

“What . . . what do you mean?”

“I’m sorry. I wasn’t trying to give you a botany lesson. I just thought it might have special meaning for you. It must be blooming out of season for a reason.”

“That’s a poem, too, by the way,” Jiffy observes. “
Season
rhymes with
reason
.”

Everything happens for a reason . . .

“My dad liked poems.”

Oh, Max. Your dad especially liked Keats.

But he wouldn’t know that.

“We have to go,” Bella says again, and her voice comes out choked.

“Right, then.” Pandora reaches for her hand, pressing the flower into it. “Just take the bluebell.”

Bluebell?

“I thought you said it was a . . . some sort of hyacinth.”

“
Hyacinthoides non-scripta
is the botanical name. Back in Britain—and here, too—we just call them bluebells.”

Bella stares down at the flower.

Bluebell.

Bella Blue.

As she wipes at her stinging eyes with her hand, she hears Jiffy tell Max, “I don’t think that flower cheered her up very good.”

She hears something else, too.

Sirens. Louder now, wailing closer by the second.

“Mom?” Max shrinks a little closer to her. “Is there a fire?”

“It isn’t a fire truck,” Pandora says, and Bella follows her gaze across the park.

Now she sees it too. It isn’t a fire truck. It’s an ambulance. And it’s heading down Cottage Row toward Valley View Manor.

* * *

Less than ten minutes later, Bella closes the Rose Room door behind her and exhales at last.

She hustled the boys away from Pandora’s and was relieved when she saw that the ambulance had gone on past Valley View Manor. Down in the grassy common at the end of the lane, she could see the spinning red lights. Paramedics were kneeling there, nearly obscuring a prone figure on the grass at the water’s edge.

There were a few rubberneckers, but not many. Most everyone was still in the auditorium.

“What happened?” Max asked.

She managed to find her voice. “I don’t know. Let’s go inside.”

Jiffy wanted to investigate, but Bella told him to come along with them.

“Come on,” she coaxed, “you can have cookies and watch TV.”

“It’s the middle of the afternoon,” Max reminded her. “And we had ice cream.”

“I know, but it’s a special treat because Jiffy is a guest. The cookies will be your dessert.”

Giggling at the hilarious notion of dessert after dessert, they accompanied her into the house. She turned on the television and filled a plate with Odelia’s zucchini-jalapeño-lime cookies and told them to stay put while she fed the kitten.

As she enters the room, Chance looks up expectantly, almost reproachfully, as if to say,
You’re late
.

Well aware that there’s no time to waste getting food into little Spidey, Bella walks over to the dresser and looks down at the flower in her hand. She’d squeezed it so tightly all the way home that its petals are drooping a bit. They aren’t just shaped like upside down lilies. They’re shaped like bells. Little blue bells.

Bella Blue.

“Sam?” she whispers, staring at it, trying to focus, trying to hear him, just like Odelia had said. “Sam, are you here?”

All she can hear are the kittens’ faint mews and more sirens.

“Sam? Please. I think they’ve pulled someone out of the lake, and I don’t know who it was, and I . . . I’m afraid. I try to be strong, but . . . I need you. Please.”

No reply.

She tosses the flower onto the dresser. It lands on the pile of Leona’s financial papers. None of that seems to matter now.

As she turns toward the box of kittens, she remembers what Odelia said about Chance—that she was born in the spring, in a bed of blooming Wood Hyacinths that weren’t Wood Hyacinths at all. No, Chance, the cat who crossed her path and led her here to Lily Dale, was born in a bed of bluebells.

“You sent her, Sam, didn’t you? You sent her to me. You knew I’d figure it out sooner or later. Bluebells. Bella Blue.”

Once again, her eyes are filling with tears. She wipes at them with her hand, but they keep coming.

“Can’t you just say something, Sam? Can’t you let me hear you, or see you?”

She reaches into her pocket for the crumpled paper towel that was there a few minutes ago, entangled with the keys when she went to unlock the front door.

She must have dropped it. But she feels the socks she’d stashed there and pulls one out, not caring if she gets it soggy with tears or even blows her nose on it.

As she lifts it to her face, though, she realizes it isn’t a sock at all.

It’s a floral-print scrunchy. Not the same print as the dress Pandora had on this afternoon, but the green-and-yellow one she’d worn the other day.

How did this get into her pocket?

Frowning, she reaches back in for her socks. She finds one.

Only one.

But she’d dropped two on the closet floor this morning while she was looking in her bag for her other sneaker. She’d picked them up, one right after the other, and put them into her pocket.

Frowning, she hastily wipes her eyes on the sock and walks over to where her open suitcase sits on the low mahogany rack just inside the closet door. She pulls a chain to illuminate the overhead light.

Beneath the crisscross of the rack’s wooden legs, on the closet floor, sits the other sock she’d dropped and thought she’d picked up.

Pulse racing, she looks again at the stack of papers on the dresser. The ones Max had said he’d found scattered on the floor.

All at once, they matter again.

I have to tell Luther.

He’s at the hospital with his sick mother. He said he’d be back as soon as possible. She shouldn’t call him in the midst of a personal crisis.

But what if she just sends him a text? That wouldn’t be as intrusive as a phone call, would it?

He said to holler if I need help. And I need . . .

She looks back at the wilting bluebell lying beside the papers.

Sam.

He’s what she needs. But he isn’t answering her plea. Luther might.

She grabs his business card and her phone, wondering if he can even receive texts. Oh, well. She’ll soon find out.

She starts typing with trembling fingers:
Sorry to bother you, but I figured out who did it. It’s—

She pauses, realizing that her heart isn’t the only thing that’s pounding.

There’s a burst of loud knocking—banging—on the front door.

“Mom!” Max calls. “Someone’s here!”

Still clutching the scrunchy and her cell phone, she scurries out into the hall and down the stairs. Through the glass, she can see the outline of a man.

Has Luther, like Pandora Feeney, materialized at the mere thought of his name? Is that how it works here in Lily Dale?

For a fleeting instant, in her overworked, overtired brain, it seems entirely possible. Anything seems possible.

Then she opens the door and sees that it isn’t Luther at all. It’s a uniformed police officer.

For the second time today, Bella sits at the kitchen table with an authoritative man.

But John Grange isn’t the least bit avuncular, there’s no warmth in his blue eyes, and he isn’t retired law enforcement. He’s a police lieutenant. And she’s pretty sure he’s not trying to determine whether there’s been a crime. More likely, he’s investigating one that brought him to Bella’s doorstep.

Her legs had nearly given way when she saw him standing there.

He flashed his badge, asked if she’s the woman who’s taken over for Leona Gatto, and said he needed to speak to her.

Her voice quaked as she invited him in.

Conscious of Max and Jiffy watching, wide-eyed, from the parlor, she led him straight to the kitchen.

Now they face each other. He has a body builder’s physique, a blond buzz cut, and a hint of sunburn on his clean-shaven cheeks.

He reaches into his pocket.

Is he going to take out a gun? Handcuffs?

Pandora Feeney’s matching scrunchy?

Possibilities fly through her head as she steels herself for whatever is about to happen.

A pen. He takes out a pen. And a small notepad.

She attempts to resume breathing, but the boulder has rolled over her ribcage again, as if nudged into place by a barrage of questions.

Did Luther determine that Leona was murdered?

Or did Odelia go to the police?

Had the two of them been conspiring against Bella?

Has she been a suspect all along?

Is she going to need a lawyer?

Millicent—she’ll have to call Millicent. Her mother-in-law can afford to help, but at what price? She already seems to have concluded Bella is an unfit mother. What if she takes Max away, regardless of whether Bella is convicted for a crime she didn’t commit?

Convicted? Stop getting ahead of yourself.

She doesn’t even know why Lieutenant Grange is here.

He’s asking her questions, writing down the answers: her full name, date of birth, address . . .

She falters.

The cop rephrases the question. “Where do you live?”

Aware that stumbling this early in the game doesn’t bode well, she explains, “I’m actually on the move.”

She immediately regrets her phrasing. Does
on the move
sound too much like
on the lam?

“That is, we’re moving,” she amends. “My son and I are moving. From New York to Chicago. We just stopped here for a few days when our car broke down.”

He asks her about that and for her last address and the one in Chicago. Her heart sinks as she provides it. Now Millicent is irrevocably involved.

After a few final questions, she works up the courage to ask him what’s going on.

“A woman was found a short time ago lying unconscious in the reeds at the edge of the lake.”

Her breath catches in her throat.

“Unconscious? So she’s not . . . ?”

“She’s alive, but barely. She’d been in the water, and it looks like she nearly drowned but managed to get to shore.”

“Who is she?” Bella asks. “The woman, I mean.”

“We don’t know. She had no identification. But we found this in her pocket.” He holds up a key ring that contains an old-fashioned bit key, a deadbolt key, and a silver heart-shaped disk inscribed with
VVM.
One of the sets Leona had engraved for this season.

That explains his presence. Wanting to believe that this has nothing to do with Leona’s drowning, Bella’s mind flies through the catalogue of female guests: Eleanor Pierson, Helen Adabner, the St. Clair sisters, Kelly Tookler, Bonnie Barrington . . .

Bonnie was nowhere to be found earlier.

“What does she look like?” she asks Lieutenant Grange. “Is she young?”

“Older.”

“Elderly?”

“No. Middle-aged. Short, dark hair.”

That description narrows it to Helen or Eleanor.

“What kind of build does she have?” Bella asks, her heart sinking. She likes them both. “Is she more athletic or heavyset?”

“Neither. She isn’t heavyset—but I wouldn’t say athletic, either.”

Eyeing his muscular body, she considers his perspective. A man as fit as he is might not describe very many people as athletic—not even a fifty-something woman who jogs most mornings.

With a stab of sorrow, she says, “I think I know who it is.”

Eleanor.

He writes down the woman’s name.

“When was the last time you saw her?”

She thinks back. “Last night, around dinner time, when she and her husband left for the message service.”

“So she’s here with her husband? What’s his name?”

He writes it down and then asks Bella when she last saw Steve.

“This morning.” She hesitates, not sure whether to mention what had happened to him while he was out running.

Before she can decide, the officer asks again about Eleanor—about where she might have been this morning and whether Steve had mentioned her.

“He said she was still sleeping.”

But Eleanor, too, runs in the mornings. What if she wasn’t there when Steve went upstairs after Luther left?

If she were missing, though, wouldn’t Steve have come looking for her?

He would . . . unless he hadn’t told the truth about having left her in bed this morning.

He hadn’t wanted to call the police.

Bella presses a hand to her forehead, wishing it could steady her whirling thoughts.

“Where is Mr. Pierson right now?” Lieutenant Grange asks.

“Last I knew, he was upstairs in his room, but I haven’t seen him in a few hours.”

“Mind if we go take a look?”

She shakes her head and forces herself to her feet. Max and Jiffy are so absorbed in their program again that they don’t even look up as Bella and Lieutenant Grange pass by on the way upstairs.

In her haste to answer the officer’s knock, Bella left the door to the Rose Room ajar. Beyond the threshold, she knows, Chance is tending to seven of her kittens, as the eighth goes hungry.

She’s counting on me.

Yes, just like Bella’s own mother had long ago asked Aunt Sophie to step in for her. It’s just what moms do—take care of other moms’ children when they can’t do it themselves.

Can’t—or just don’t,
she thinks as she passes Grant’s closed door, thinking of him—and of Jiffy, too. And of Leona and Odelia and Odelia’s medium friend Ramona, all of whom have tended to the orphaned, abandoned, or wayward offspring of other women.

I guess it really does take a village.

Even Lily Dale, which is perhaps the oddest village in the world, is just like any other caring community when you look beyond its mystical façade.

Bella leads the police officer down the hall to the Apple Room and steels herself as she knocks on the door. Hearing no movement on the other side, she turns to the officer. He holds up the key ring with a questioning look, and she nods.

Just as he’s about to insert it into the lock, the door opens.

Eleanor Pierson looks back at them with red-rimmed eyes that widen when she sees the police officer.

Hearing a gasp, Bella is uncertain whether it came from Eleanor or herself. Perhaps both.

She’s startled—albeit relieved—to see Eleanor.

Eleanor appears equally startled—and anything
but
relieved—to see a uniformed officer. She braces herself against the doorframe. “Did something happen to Steve?”

“No,” Bella says, laying a hand on the woman’s arm to steady her.

Nothing happened to Eleanor, either. So who is the woman barely clinging to life down by the lake?

“Are you Eleanor Pierson?” Lieutenant Grange asks.

“Yes. Is it Steve?” Did something happen to him?”

The police officer assures her that’s not why he’s here and asks where her husband is.

“He went to fill up the car with gas and get a few things from the store.”

Bella notices an open suitcase and a pile of clothing behind her on the bed. “Are you leaving?”

Eleanor’s gaze flicks to the police officer and then back to Bella.

She nods. “Our daughter called. She’s in labor. We have to get back to Boston.”

Bella would be certain she’s lying if she didn’t sound so earnest—and if she hadn’t mentioned just yesterday that their daughter is expecting their first grandchild. Besides, how could a fine, upstanding woman like Eleanor Pierson lie to a police officer?

But she does look upset, Bella realizes, as if she’s been crying.

Is it just because Steve told her what happened to him this morning, or has there since been another threat?

Should Bella bring up any of that here and now, in front of a police officer trying to identify a nearly drowned woman?

Can the victim be Helen Adabner after all? She, too, has short, dark hair. Maybe Lieutenant Grange interpreted
heavyset
to mean something more drastic. Helen Adabner isn’t morbidly obese; she’s just . . . pleasingly plump.

Or maybe the woman at the lake isn’t someone who’s even currently staying here.

“We’ll leave you to your packing, ma’am,” Lieutenant Grange tells Eleanor Pierson. “Have a safe trip.”

“Thank you.” She closes the door.

As Bella and the police officer step away, she hears, after a moment, the distinct click of the lock being turned.

Pushing back her growing trepidation and trying not to think of the starving newborn kitten, she leads the police officer up another flight to the third-floor room Helen and Karl Adabner share. There’s no answer to their knock on the door.

After a lengthy wait, just in case, Lieutenant Grange inserts the key into the lock.

It doesn’t turn.

Bella exhales, again relieved.

“I can’t think of any other guest who fits your description,” she says.

“But the key is all I have to go on. It must fit one of the doors in this guesthouse. Let’s find out which one,” the police officer decides.

They work their way from the third floor back to the second, knocking on every door. The afternoon sessions are under way. No one is here. The house feels empty.

Lieutenant Grange inserts the key into one lock after another, but it won’t turn.

Bella is now certain she knows which door it opens—and it isn’t any of the three they have yet to try on the second floor.

The Teacup Room. The Train Room. The Rose Room.

As Lieutenant Grange inserts his key into the first of the final three locks, Bella wants to tell him not to bother. She has to take him back downstairs. And when that key opens the lock to Leona’s study, it might also open the door to more trouble than she can possibly handle.

“Lieutenant Grange . . .”

She breaks off.

The key turns in the lock.

The door opens.

The pink-and-white-wallpapered room is hushed and empty. And the first thing she sees, beside the bone china cup collection on the white bureau, is a Styrofoam wig form.

It had entirely slipped her mind amid the exhaustion and confusion.

Bonnie Barrington, she realizes, might have short, dark hair after all. And Kelly Tookler had been worried about her this morning.

As she tells Lieutenant Grange about that, she finds herself wondering whether the blond wig was some kind of disguise. She doesn’t
mention that, though. She just volunteers to see if Bonnie left any photo ID behind in the room.

Finding her driver’s license in her purse, Bella sees that the photo is indeed of a brunette—but with long hair, not cropped, as the officer described.

Still, the moment he glances at the photo, he offers a grim nod. “That’s her. I’ll need to take this with me. The wallet, too.”

Is he supposed to have some kind of search warrant? Or are they lax about such things around here?

As she hands it over, she realizes that she never even looked closely at his badge when he flashed it. Walking him back downstairs to the door, she wonders if she should ask to see it again.

Then she notices Max and Jiffy hovering in the archway.

“Is that a real gun?” Jiffy asks, pointing at the officer’s holster.

He doesn’t answer the question, just thanks Bella and tells her that he’ll be in touch shortly.

“Thank you. And tell Bonnie . . . tell her we’ll all be thinking good thoughts for her.”

“I will,” he says, but something in his expression tells her that he doesn’t expect to be having a conversation with Bonnie Barrington anytime soon.

As he steps out onto the porch, she notices that the sun has slid behind a cloud and the air feels cooler.

He gives a wave and is gone, leaving her to deal with two curious little boys.

“Why was the policeman here?” Max asks worriedly.

Jiffy answers before Bella can come up with a reasonable explanation. “Because he’s looking for the bad guy.”

That gives her pause. “Which bad guy?”

“The bad guy. You know.”

“I’m not sure who you mean.” She holds her breath, waiting for him to say it.

When he merely shrugs, she hears herself ask, “Do you mean the pirate? Was there a pirate?”

“I guess. By the way, can we have more cookies?”

“You forgot to say please,” Max hisses into his ear. “Remember? I said she doesn’t give things to people unless they say please.”

“Can we please have more cookies?” Jiffy amends.

“Guests need extra treats sometimes,” Max tells her.

She can’t help but smile at their little cookie conspiracy as she tells them that unfortunately, there aren’t any left.

“Odelia has a lot more. We can go get some.”

“No!” Bella says, a little too sharply.

“But—”

“Max, no means no,” she tells him.

“I can go.” Jiffy takes a step toward the door.

Her first thought is that she can’t very well stop him. Her next is that she has to. It isn’t a good idea to let him wander, given what’s going on down by the water . . .

Or overall.

“I’ll tell you what, boys. We’ll borrow Odelia’s car and go to the store and buy lots of treats.”

“Can Jiffy come?”

“If his mom lets him.”

“She’ll let me.”

“We’ll have to check.”

“Okay, let’s go.”

“First, I have to feed the kitten.”

“You already did that,” Max says.