Dead of Winter

by Wendy Corsi Staub

  She hesitates, not wanting to frighten Max.

  But he doesn’t seem the least bit concerned. In fact, he’s grinning. “Mom! That’s because you can’t see Spirit!”

  “Albie is Spirit?”

  “Yep.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Yep. And so is Sanchez.”

  “Tell me about Sanchez.”

  “Um . . . he’s black.”

  “Like Luther?”

  “Like Spidey. Right, Spidey?” Max pats the kitten’s head.

  “So is Sanchez another secret friend?”

  “He’s Albie’s cat.”

  “He’s a cat?”

  “Yep, but don’t worry. Jiffy says some people think black cats are bad luck, but Sanchez is good luck because Jiffy’s dad isn’t allergic to him, so he can come and stay for Christmas and not be sneezy. But if he is, I will say gesundheit.”

  “So Jiffy’s really looking forward to seeing his dad for Christmas, hmm?”

  Max nods vigorously. “I wish . . .”

  Oh, could Bella’s heart ache any more if he’d finished the thought? It’s wrenching enough that he lets it dangle, incomplete.

  “I know.” She hugs him. This time, he lets her.

  She gives his quilt a final tuck, then closes his door behind her and looks down at Misty’s phone in her hand.

  The screen is black. All she’d have to do is press a button, and she’d be able to see if there are any missed calls. Maybe Grange is trying to reach Misty with news. Or maybe her son is trying to call her for help.

  Mind made up, she presses the button. The screen lights up. Sure enough, there’s a missed call.

  Her heart skips a beat. The number is familiar, and—

  It’s your number. You tried to call her upstairs, remember?

  There are no other missed calls, and she’s not going to look at any of her texts. Not until she talks to Luther. He should be here any second now.

  She starts down the stairs and then freezes, hearing music below. Not whistling this time. Electric guitar, but it almost sounds like . . .

  Yes, it is. Some discordant version of “O Little Town of Bethlehem.”

  Not a phantom message from the Great Beyond, though. She finds Lauri and Dawn in the breakfast room, stirring cups of instant hot cocoa with . . . oversized hot pink–striped candy canes?

  The music is coming from the speakers of a phone sitting in the middle of the table. Spotting Bella in the doorway, Lauri grabs it and lowers the volume.

  “Sorry. Too loud?”

  “No, I . . . what is it?”

  “It’s Sean’s album, A Very Von Vogel Christmas,” Dawn says. “Have you ever heard his version of ‘Blue Christmas’? It makes me cry every time.”

  “So does his version of ‘Frosty the Snowman,’” Lauri says. “They all make you cry. Bella, do you want a candy cane? We brought tons of them.”

  “Oh . . . um, sure.” She hasn’t eaten since the cookies she’d gobbled for breakfast hours ago. No wonder her head is pounding.

  Dawn reaches for a large leather purse sitting on a nearby chair. An even larger leather purse is on the opposite chair, and two fluffy white coats are draped over the backs.

  “Looks like we got the last pink lemonade ones. Sorry. Do you want blueberry buckle or Bananas Foster?”

  “I . . . surprise me.”

  “Blueberry buckle matches your outfit,” Lauri says.

  Bella looks down at the worn jeans and old navy cardigan that she’d never in a million years consider an “outfit.”

  Blue . . .

  Bella Blue.

  “You look tired. Why don’t you sit down for a minute?”

  She shouldn’t, but she does, relieved to have found a logical explanation—this time—for the music. Maybe this is what Calla was hearing, instead of phantom strains from the Great Beyond—or a killer or kidnapped kid, whistling somewhere in the walls.

  Dawn hands her a hefty blue-and-white-striped candy cane and mentions that they’re leaving in a few minutes for an appointment with a medium.

  “Who are you seeing?”

  “Pandora Feeney,” Dawn says. “Do you know her?”

  “Oh, I know her.”

  “Is she any good?”

  Frowning, Bella sets down the phone and concentrates on getting the wrapper off her candy cane. They’re not asking about Pandora’s personality, she reminds herself. They’re asking about her mediumship.

  The woman may be an insufferable busybody, but there’s no denying that she’s told Bella things about Sam that no one could have known.

  “I’ve never had a reading myself, but everyone says Pandora’s good.”

  “Maybe she’ll be the one,” Lauri tells Dawn.

  “I hope so. Wouldn’t it be great if we can find out before tomorrow?”

  “What exactly are you trying to find out?” Bella asks.

  “About Sean’s hair,” Dawn says.

  “Sean’s hair?”

  “Years ago, we were in the front row at a Von Vogel concert, and he dove into the mosh pit, you know, like he used to do at every show?”

  Bella nods as if she knows, picking the last bit of cellophane wrapper from her candy cane and thinking about the dead man in the snow.

  “Long story short, we cut his hair with Dawn’s nail scissors.” Lauri makes a cheerful snipping motion with her fingers.

  “But wasn’t that . . .” Bella fishes in the vast adjective pool flooding her brain.

  Bizarre . . .

  Rude . . .

  “It was awesome!” Dawn’s word isn’t the one Bella would have chosen. “But then everything went wrong.”

  “His security team grabbed you?”

  “No, not then. I mean everything went wrong this year when we lost it.”

  “You lost . . . what?” Bella asks, feeling like everyone’s “lost it” at this point, including herself.

  “The locket with Sean’s hair in it,” Lauri explains—sort of. “We share it, and on the last day of every month, whoever has it gives it back to the other person. But we forgot this was leap year.”

  “Right, and we went to lunch on February twenty-eighth instead of the twenty-ninth, but then we realized Lauri could keep the locket an extra day, so she took it back home.”

  “We were going to meet the next day again, but then we all got that awful stomach bug in my house, so I told Dawn I’d just leave it in the mailbox for her. I sprayed it with Lysol so she wouldn’t get germs.”

  “That was considerate,” Bella murmurs.

  “I told my daughter to pick it up,” Dawn goes on, “but she forgot, so I said never mind, I’ll just do it myself the next morning. But by that time, I had the stomach bug, too. Our friend Lisa said she’d go get it, but when she got there, the only thing in the mailbox was mail. At first we thought Brutus stole it, you know?”

  Bella tilts her head, wearily licking her candy cane that really does taste like blueberries. “Um, Julius Caesar’s assassin?”

  “No, Dawn’s mailman. But he passed the lie detector test.”

  “You gave the mailman a lie detector test?”

  “He didn’t mind. Lauri’s neighbor has a polygraph machine. Her kids are kind of wild. She makes everyone take one.”

  “All of her kids?”

  “Her kids, her husband, the neighbors . . . she doesn’t believe anything anyone says. Anyway, Brutus didn’t steal the locket—not that we thought he did. We love Brutus, right, Dawn?”

  “We love Brutus.”

  “What about Lisa?”

  “She loves Brutus, too. He’s the best.”

  “I meant, did Lisa take a lie detector test, too?”

  “No! She’s our friend. We love her.”

  “Love her,” Lauri echoes. “I mean, you know her, Bella. Don’t you love her?”

  “I don’t know her that well, but she does seem like a nice—”

  “She would never steal it. Never. She’s not even a fan! Plus, I�
�ve never seen her wearing it. Have you, Dawn?”

  “No, and that was ten months ago. Although I guess she wouldn’t wear it around us. But still . . .”

  They exchange a long look, and Bella can see the wheels turning.

  “Maybe Lisa should take a lie detector test, Laur.”

  “Let’s just see what Pandora Feeney thinks. We’d better get going. See you later, Bella!”

  With that, Bella is left to digest too much sticky blueberry sugar along with the longest “long story short” she’s ever heard—a momentary diversion from her concerns about Jiffy, Misty, and bloody corpses.

  She goes to the kitchen and tosses the rest of the candy cane into the garbage. Her stomach suddenly hurts. Her head still does. Her brain, too, from working Jiffy’s disappearance from every angle and circling back around to only one conclusion, if you accept that there are no coincidences.

  The body count is rising around here, confirming that a killer remains in their midst, and Jiffy must have crossed paths with him.

  * * *

  So Misty was wrong about the figure in the woods.

  He isn’t a living person at all but an apparition—and an instantly recognizable one. Only this time, he’s not there and gone in an instant.

  He keeps coming closer, plodding through the snow. She hears him cough and wonders what it means. There is no illness on the Other Side. But sometimes Spirit uses it to convey a message.

  Her apprehension escalates with every bit of ground he closes between them.

  It’s not just because the apparition is incredibly solid—no filmy edges and not a hint of transparency.

  And it’s not as if she’s never seen a celebrity, dead or alive. Back in Arizona, one of the other wives on the base had once been a contestant on The Bachelor. And last summer, celebrity medium David Slayton had personalized a copy of his book for her.

  But she’s never met anyone on par with the King of Rock and Roll.

  Is Elvis Presley here to tell her where her son is? Like a celebrity guardian angel appearing out of the mist?

  Only he’s not bathed in a white glow like others she’s encountered, or even like Frankie Avalon’s angel in Grease. His aura is a muddy shade of brown.

  Nor is he wearing white like Frankie Avalon or like Elvis himself in Vegas in later years. He has on a black down jacket, jeans, and big, clunky, practical snow boots.

  Still, he’s easily recognizable, just as he was the other day when she spotted him out in the yard. His jet black hair is combed straight back from his forehead, and sideburns stretch all the way from the sides of his aviator glasses to his chin.

  “Excuse me, um . . . Mr. Presley? Do you know where I can find Jiffy?”

  He’s only a few yards away now, and he must have heard her, but he doesn’t reply.

  “My son . . . he’s been missing since he got off the school bus,” Misty goes on, noticing that he’s not nearly as good-looking as she’d thought he’d be.

  That happens sometimes when you meet celebrities in real life. David Slayton, for instance—his eyes were every bit as blue as in his publicity photos, but he had a bit of a paunch.

  Elvis does, too. It protrudes even in his thick winter coat. Plus, he has double chins that gray razor stubble can’t camouflage, and his dark hairline is receding. She’d always thought Elvis had blue eyes, but close up, they’re a pebbled gray that reminds her of a puddle on concrete. Talk about disillusionment.

  When Misty meets celebrity spirits, they appear as they did in the most flattering era of their mortal lives. She’d have expected to see Elvis looking young and wearing a leather jacket like he did in his teen idol days.

  Then he takes something out of his coat, and she stops wondering about his appearance and starts wondering why he has a gun.

  * * *

  Bella opens the door to find Luther standing on the porch looking dressed up even for Luther.

  Seeing her take in his red-and-black cashmere scarf worn over a long cashmere overcoat dusted in snow, he says, “I wore my parka to shovel, and it was soaked, so I threw this on.”

  Remembering Odelia’s Oh, this old thing? velvet and rhinestones ensemble, Bella asks, “Sure you’re not trying to impress someone?”

  “Are you impressed?”

  “I wasn’t talking about me. You’re going to Odelia’s for dinner, so I thought maybe—”

  “You thought wrong.” He takes off the coat, revealing jeans and a Buffalo Bills hoodie with ragged cuffs and a faint stain above the red emblem.

  “Wow. You weren’t kidding.”

  “This is my lucky Bills sweat shirt for the game tonight. I wear it every time we play Miami.”

  “Squish the fish.”

  “Spoken like a true western New Yorker. Where’s Max?”

  “Still in bed.”

  “Good.”

  The tree wobbles as she hangs his coat. She quickly moves it to the hook opposite Max’s backpack and briefs him on what Max told her, that Misty has also gone missing, and that a dead man was found out on Glasgow Road.

  “I heard. I spoke to Fred on the drive over. Bella, listen. Fred said that the victim out on Glasgow Road was shot.”

  “A hunting accident or suicide?”

  “No. Homicide.”

  Just like Yuri Moroskov. Another noncoincidence.

  “Did they identify him yet?” she asks Luther.

  “Yes.”

  “Is it someone from the Dale?”

  “No.”

  She exhales just a little. It probably isn’t anyone she knows.

  Then Luther says the victim’s name, and her heart stops.

  She was wrong.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Misty probably shouldn’t have been surprised to find that Elvis isn’t Elvis or even Spirit. He’s just an overweight, middle-aged stranger posing as someone he’s not, just like countless others she’s encountered here in the Dale.

  Including Misty who isn’t Misty.

  The nose of the gun propels her back along the trail over her own broken path, jabbing the spot between her shoulder blades even through the layers of her down parka and the fleece sweater beneath.

  When he’d drawn the weapon, terror had flooded every crevice of her body, leaving no room for rationale, let alone Spirit.

  He’d told her what to do, and she’s doing it. Silently, without question, as quickly as she can through deep drifts of snow.

  “Come on . . . come on,” he says, coughing and panting along behind her with a pronounced wheeze, the kind an inhaler would dispel.

  Maybe he doesn’t have one. Or maybe he doesn’t want to juggle the gun to use it.

  “Let’s . . . move it,” he adds as if she’s the one holding things up.

  At last, she finds her voice. “Where are we going?”

  There’s a pause. Well aware that he’s armed, she doesn’t dare turn around, but she can hear him gasping, trying to catch his breath. This forced march is as hard on him as it is on her.

  “Wherever I say we’re going.”

  Caught off guard by his inane response, she perceives the slightest hint of a whine layered within the belligerence, like a petulant child wielding playground power.

  Yet he is no child, and he’s holding a gun on her back as they make a laborious journey to heaven knows where. Even if he has no intention of killing her, he might trip or slip and pull the trigger.

  He doesn’t want to, though.

  The reassuring thought pokes through the dense fear clouding her brain.

  This person is not evil like some she has encountered. His brown aura indicates tremendous stress and confusion. Something has gone terribly wrong in his life. He’s mired in something deeper and more chilling than a few feet of new fallen snow.

  If she could just have a moment’s peace to channel, she might find some information she can use to get herself out of this.

  She glances at the endless white path ahead. No obstacles. The trees are safely to her right
and left. She just has to keep walking straight.

  Closing her eyes, she breathes deeply, searching for her guides.

  For a few moments, there’s nothing.

  Then she hears a coughing fit behind her.

  On its heels comes a sudden flash of clarity.

  Darth Vader?

  She’s never been a Star Wars fan, but even she recognizes the menacing black-helmeted figure looming in her mind’s eye.

  If she were at home and Elvis were sitting across from her in her study, she’d ask him if the image means anything to him. Under the circumstances, that’s the last thing she’s going to do.

  There’s something else, though . . . Spirit wants her to make a connection between Elvis and—

  “Move!”

  The gun nudges, hard.

  She opens her eyes and trudges on.

  * * *

  Bella’s heart is in a freefall as she struggles to absorb the shocking news, no more believable now than it was a few moments ago. She listens as Luther repeats it to Calla, who had joined them in the hall as if summoned by . . . well, Spirit.

  Shaken, she stares at the railroad map on the wall, telling herself to get a grip. It’s not as though she knew Virgil Barbor well enough to mourn him deeply. She had barely known him at all—the burly farmer who’d told Max that he couldn’t count on anything in this world.

  Sadly, he’d been right.

  Now Bella—having spent the past year trying to forget that life can be precarious and capricious—needs to face reality and a fresh bout with dread.

  “He was Misty’s landlord,” Bella tells Luther. “She said she was expecting him over there at noon to collect the rent.”

  “Did you tell Grange?”

  “No, it didn’t seem important until—no wonder he never showed. I can’t believe this is happening.”

  Luther reaches for his coat. “We need to go over to the scene so that you can tell that to the team, Bella.”

  “But Max—”

  “I’ll stay with him,” Calla tells her, giving her a quick squeeze. “Go.”

  She hesitates, remembering Misty’s warning.

  Don’t trust anyone, no matter who it is.

  But this is Calla. And she already left Max with Lauri and Dawn—though that now seems as reckless a maternal move as some of Misty’s.