Dead of Winter

by Wendy Corsi Staub

  “What are you doing?”

  “Buggering about memory lane whilst our chums mix the cocktails,” she says cheerily, holding up a wall calendar. “Look what I’ve turned up! Truly spectacular photos of the Dale on every page. Oh, ’99 was such a good year, wasn’t it? 1999, that is,” she adds with a merry laugh. “Although back in 17—”

  “Were you whistling, though?” Bella cuts in before she can prattle on about some event that happened—ostensibly to Pandora herself—centuries ago.

  “Whistling? Yes.” She flips through the calendar. “Every date covered with appointments and engagements . . . What a marvelous whirlwind we were living, Orville and I. Pity he was such a wanker.”

  “Pandora! Please.”

  “Pardon my French. But he was.”

  “No, this isn’t about your ‘French.’ I need to know why you were whistling that song.”

  “It just popped into my head.”

  “Because of the star, do you think?”

  “Which star?”

  “You know . . . Bethlehem. The star the wise men followed. I’ve been wishing there were one here to guide Jiffy home even though that’s crazy in this weather.”

  “Well, Isabella, you should know that there are no—”

  “Coincidences. I’m aware. Hey, Pandora, do you know Albie?”

  She sniffs. “Not intimately, if that’s what you mean.”

  Bella winces. “It isn’t. What do you know about him?”

  “He’s a gentle soul. He protects the children.”

  “Jiffy, too?”

  “Of course. All the children.”

  “Do you really think Jiffy is safe?”

  “I do.”

  “And Misty?”

  “She’s gone off after him, has she?” Pandora sighs. “She’s as cheeky as the lad. But good-hearted. I wish she’d understood that things aren’t what they seem.”

  “Is Spirit saying that, Pandora? Because Calla said the same thing.”

  “Yes.”

  “What else is Spirit telling you? Please. This is so important.”

  Pandora sighs, sets aside the calendar, and closes her eyes.

  Bella waits, listening to the ticking clock and the women chatting in the kitchen. No whistling to distract her, jumbling her thoughts. No odd bursts of WDOE oldies or carols. No “Twelve Days of Christmas” with only four golden rings.

  Golden . . .

  What had Max said earlier, about his Christmas gift for her?

  “They’re golden and beautiful.”

  She’d assumed he was talking about the gilded plaster handprint, but wouldn’t he have said, “It’s golden and beautiful”?

  And Jiffy . . .

  “That’s how long it takes to sing ‘The Twelve Days of Christmas’ five times.”

  He and Max were singing it as they went out to the shed after school yesterday.

  “I like ‘The Twelve Days of Christmas’ better, because it has golden rings in it.”

  “Shhhhh! It’s a surprise!”

  “I know! She can’t hear us!”

  Who were they worried about?

  As Bella runs through the possibilities—Mrs. Schmidt, Misty, Bella herself—Pandora murmurs something unintelligible.

  “What is it, Pandora? What is Spirit saying?”

  She’s nodding intently as if listening to a response. Then she opens her eyes and looks right at Bella. “They’re taking him home.”

  “What? Who? Who’s taking who home?”

  “Who’s taking whom,” Pandora corrects her. “I really don’t know. But I feel that he’s in good hands.”

  “All right, girls, the cocktails are mixed, and it’s game time!” Lauri announces, sticking her head in from the breakfast room, holding a gin and tonic. “Want to play Catch Phrase, Bella?”

  “No, thanks.”

  “But we need teams,” Dawn tells her. “We can’t play with three.”

  She apologizes, excuses herself, and hurries upstairs. She needs to find Luther and bring him up to date, but first things first. She peeks into Max’s room. He’s in bed, awake, expectant.

  “Are the TV guys here?”

  “No, they’re not—” About to say coming, she leaves it at that. They’re not here, but for all she knows, they are coming. Certainly, Grange is.

  She sits on his bed and touches his forehead. No fever. “How are you feeling? Does your head still hurt?”

  “Not really.”

  “Okay, good. That’s good. Hey, Max, the other day, you and Jiffy were singing about ‘The Twelve Days of Christmas,’ remember?”

  “Yep. We like to sing.”

  “What’s your favorite part of the song?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “My favorite part is about the ten lords a leaping. What’s yours?”

  He hesitates just long enough for her to know that he isn’t trying to decide. He’s trying to come up with something other than the golden rings.

  “Four turtle doves.”

  “Wait, are you sure it isn’t four golden rings?”

  “No! It’s five!”

  “I thought it went”—she sings—“‘four golden rings.’”

  “Nope. Five. But I don’t want to talk about that.”

  “About what?”

  “Golden rings.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because it’s a . . .” He clamps his mouth shut and shakes his head.

  Surprise. That’s what he was about to say.

  What if her Christmas gift isn’t a gilded handprint, but four golden rings?

  She tells Max that she’ll be back shortly and heads downstairs, not in the mood to face her guests or Pandora. She can hear voices chattering and electronic buzzing in the breakfast room, a lively game of Catch Phrase apparently under way.

  How can they can laugh and play at a time like this? To be fair, Lauri and Dawn don’t even know Jiffy. They’re concerned, yet hoping for the best. As for Pandora . . .

  She still thinks the dead are merely in the next room or some such nonsense. She doesn’t grasp that at any given time, any given person can cease to exist. Bella has known that for a year now. Longer, if you count Sam’s illness.

  Remembering Virgil Barbor’s horrible gaping eyes, Bella knows David Slayton is wrong. Dead is dead.

  And Pandora is a fool.

  She peers out the front window.

  Midafternoon, and dusk is falling fast, along with the snow and her spirits. Luther’s truck is nearly buried again out front, but she can no longer hear the shovel scraping against concrete here or next door.

  Nerves on edge, she turns away, trying not to think that he might have run into danger. He’s wary and probably armed.

  He’ll be back. He probably walked across the park to clear Pandora’s walk. Stupid woman should have known better than to ask that of him, but she’s always competing with Odelia.

  She returns to the study to find Misty’s phone where she left it on the desk beside the computer. She checks the call log, making sure she hasn’t missed any since Jiffy disappeared. Then, feeling only vaguely guilty, she scans back over the past few days. One call jumps out at her.

  It’s from Ontario, Canada.

  Heart pounding, Bella shifts over to Misty’s text inbox.

  There, she finds herself staring at the very same emojis and photograph she’d seen on her own phone. Only on Misty’s, they aren’t from an anonymous number. They’re from one labeled “Jiffy.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  The pickup truck is dark and cold, encased in a thick layer of snow. A shotgun sits propped against the passenger’s seat. Elvis snatches it and tosses it out into the truck’s bed, then orders Misty to climb into the seat.

  Still holding the pistol on her, Elvis closes the door after her and begins to clear the windshield. She wedges her feet into the narrow spot between a duffel bag and a long-handled . . . tool? Weapon?

  It doesn’t look particularly lethal, she decides, ey
eing the pole-like contraption that’s propped from floor to seat. It appears to be electronic with a small windowed screen—a meter of some sort? There’s a handle at the top end and an attachment at the bottom that almost looks like a steering wheel.

  Snow brushed away at last, Elvis climbs into the driver’s seat. Watching him juggle the gun to fasten his seat belt, she remembers to buckle her own.

  Sometimes she forgets to do that. It drives Mike crazy. He’s a stickler for rules. Okay, laws. He’s always reminding her that it’s as illegal to drive without a seat belt as it is to drive under the influence.

  She’d never do that. She’s not stupid or reckless. When she has a glass of wine or two, she stays home.

  But her seat belt . . .

  Yeah, she forgets. So sue her.

  She thinks back to the day Mike had met her and Jiffy in New York after not having seen them for six months. Standing in the street alongside the car she’d just double-parked, he’d grabbed their son and hugged him hard, burying his face in Jiffy’s red hair to breathe him in just as Misty had earlier in his bedroom, hugging his pillow.

  “Hey, Dad, we drove almost all the way from sea to shining sea!” Jiffy had said, wriggling away. “Except there was a shining desert back there, and I haven’t seen the shining sea over here yet.”

  “Did Mommy make you wear your seat belt?”

  “Of course I did!” she’d snapped and hoped Jiffy wouldn’t mention the few times she’d forgotten to remind him until they were well on their way. He didn’t, happily distracted by the bustling city street.

  Now she reconsiders buckling herself into Elvis’s truck. Slippery roads are hardly the biggest threat to her safety right now. If she finds an opportunity to escape after he tells her what she needs to know, she doesn’t need any obstacles.

  As if he’s read her mind, he presses a button and locks the doors with a click that sounds as ominous as the cocking of a revolver to Misty’s ears.

  * * *

  Bella pokes her head into the breakfast room, where Pandora, Lauri, and Dawn are sitting around the table with cocktails and Catch Phrase.

  “This is the song I sang to you that day at Ponderosa when you got that huge tip,” Lauri is urgently telling Dawn.

  “‘She Works Hard for the Money’ by Donna Summer.”

  “No! Geez, all you did was hand the guy a pat of butter, remember?”

  “Oh! That huge tip! ‘Money for Nothing’ by Dire Straits!”

  “Yes!”

  As Lauri and Dawn fist bump, Bella says, “Sorry to interrupt, but I—”

  “Ah, here she is. Now we can play.” Pandora pats the vacant seat beside her. “Come, Isabella. We’re chums, so you’ll be on my team.”

  Any other time, Bella might pause to contemplate—or debate—that assumption. Now she says, “I need to step outside for a few minutes, to, uh, salt the walk.”

  “Splendid idea,” Pandora tells her. “Cheerio, then!”

  “Can you just listen for Max?”

  “No need. Spirit is assuring me that he’s safely asleep.”

  Bella detours upstairs, opens Max’s door, and sees that Spirit and Pandora are indeed correct—about this, anyway.

  With renewed hope that Jiffy, too, is merely dozing somewhere—in between sending texts—she returns to the front hall. As she grabs her parka, the coat tree falls forward. She catches it and pushes it back. It falls toward her again, and this time, the hard plastic end of the extension cord swings painfully into her shin like a nunchaku.

  “Ouch! You . . .” She punches it back, rare Circassian wood, cherub wings, and all. It hits the wall. There she leaves it, precariously balanced, resting against the amber-and-brown brocade wallpaper. Relishing the thought of what Pandora would say, she pulls on a jacket, gloves, and boots and hurries out into the bracing air.

  On the porch, she eyes the shovel propped by the door, then the faint indentations where the three women came up the walk.

  The street is desolate, all but obscured by blowing snow that seems to devour people. One by one, they’ve vanished into the storm.

  Jiffy . . . Misty . . . and now Luther.

  She cups her hands around her mouth and shouts his name. Swept off into the wind, it brings no response. She calls again with growing apprehension, tethered to the porch like a penguin on an ice floe bobbing in a treacherous sea.

  On the third try, his name is met with her own, shouted from the porch next door.

  Odelia is there, shivering in the cold. Her hair, freed from its rollers, bounces about her head in loose coils that beg to be combed through. Her eyes are made up. Her mouth is not. She’s wearing a pleated red chiffon skirt with black velvet heels and a pajama top.

  “Have you heard from Luther?”

  “He’s inside on the phone.”

  Bella heaves a relieved sigh that he, at least, is accounted for.

  “Is everything is all right over there, Odelia?”

  “Nothing is right. Poor Virgil. And our sweet Jiffy, lost in this weather . . .”

  “I know.”

  “And Misty, too.” Odelia shakes her head, shivering.

  “You don’t think she was involved in this mess, do you?”

  “I barely know the woman. Anything is possible. But if I were her, I’d be out looking for my son.”

  “That’s what I thought.”

  “She left her car in the driveway, keys in the house, door unlocked.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Earlier, Calla told me she was missing, so I was keeping an eye out for her.”

  Ah, the good old Lily Dale neighborhood watch—a little more omniscient than most and a little more hands-on as well.

  “Interesting,” Bella says, “that you could see that her door was unlocked from there.”

  “Yes, well, I might have . . . poked around a bit. Just to make sure there was nothing suspicious, no sign of a struggle, nothing like that because . . . oh, I don’t want to worry you, Bella.”

  Already plenty worried, she asks what Odelia is talking about.

  “My guides are concerned for Misty’s safety.”

  Yes, aren’t we all.

  “Did you mention this to Luther?”

  “Of course. He wasn’t pleased that I’d gone over there, but I assured him that I didn’t disturb a thing. Anyway, to me it looks like she just picked up and went out. I only hope she’s careful. And you shouldn’t be out here alone, Bella.”

  “I know. I just needed to tell Luther—” Misty’s phone vibrates in her pocket. “Odelia, I’m going back inside. Just send him over as soon as he’s free, all right? Please?”

  Odelia promises that she will and tells Bella that she can come, too, if Bella needs anything at all.

  Feeling as though she needs everything—other than inevitable conflict between Odelia and Pandora—Bella assures her that all is as well as it can be in this moment.

  What she does need—what she craves now more than ever—is a partner in all this. Someone who will know what to do without being asked. Someone . . .

  Like Drew.

  He’s not her partner, law enforcement, family, even a neighbor . . .

  Yet he’s on his way.

  Fortified by the knowledge, she steps back inside and locks the door. The coat tree is still precariously balanced against the wall, looking like a strong sigh will topple it any second. The extension cord weaves around the garments like a snake.

  She leaves it that way and drapes her snow-soaked jacket over the newel post instead, ignoring the echo of an English-accented, “Do mind the woodwork.”

  Reaching into her pocket, she pulls out Misty’s phone. There’s a new text from Jiffy, this time with a pair of emojis. She enlarges the screen.

  A little sofa and some kind of round . . . is that a potato?

  Stumped, she stares at the little pictures, wondering what they can possibly mean.

  From the corner of her eye, she sees movement outside. Her heart stops and
then reboots as she spies Luther coming up the front walk.

  She opens the door before he can knock and holds a finger to her lips.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Pandora,” she whispers. It doesn’t exactly answer his question—and yet it does.

  He rolls his eyes and shrugs out of his coat. Brushing past the overstuffed coat tree, he follows her up the stairs.

  She peeks in on Max—still safely asleep in his bed. Then she slips into the Rose Room with Luther.

  “Odelia told me you were looking for me. I was trying to get that number traced. It’s—”

  “It’s Jiffy’s. I know. That’s what I came to tell you. He sent his mom the same messages that he sent me. There’s a picture. Here, look, Luther. He’s trying to tell us where he is.” She hands over Misty’s phone.

  As he presses the screen with his thumb and peers at it, Bella goes on, “And her husband called. He was looking for her. He said he’d been texting her but she hadn’t replied. He told me he was worried, but there was something . . . off about him.”

  He looks up sharply. “How so?”

  “He didn’t ask about Jiffy.”

  Luther tilts his head, mulling that. He isn’t a father, Bella thinks. He doesn’t get it.

  “Maybe he was so distracted by the fact that someone else picked up his wife’s phone that he—”

  “Then wouldn’t he be even more likely to make sure his son is okay? Sam would have.”

  Luther appears to weigh his words before saying, “Sam was one kind of father. Jiffy’s dad might be another.”

  “Yes, but . . .” Bella trails off. He’s right.

  She peers at the photo over his shoulder, again noting that if Jiffy is in a car, then his mother isn’t at the wheel. The silhouette of the back of the driver’s head is barely in the picture. It isn’t Misty. She has a wild pile of hair, as did her Canadian client. This person does not.

  “Do you think that’s a man or a woman?” she asks Luther.

  “Hard to tell.”

  “Well, we have to respond to these texts and let that poor child know we’re going to help him. He must be wondering why we’re ignoring him.”

  “We can’t do that, Bella. We don’t know that he’s the one sending these messages. Anyone could have his phone or even be spoofing the number.”