Dead of Winter

by Wendy Corsi Staub

  Ordinarily, the rhythmic shaking and Pandora’s exaggerated Spanish accent would be enough to have Odelia spiking the already-spiked wassail.

  So would the fact that Blue Slayton is here with Calla, helping add a few folding chairs to accommodate the dozen fine china place settings around the table.

  But she’s fretting about Luther, who should have been here long before now.

  “I honestly think he’s avoiding me,” Odelia confides, still stirring the wassail.

  “Why would he do that?”

  “Because the other day when he told me Jiffy was safe, I grabbed him and hugged him.”

  “That seems like a reasonable reaction.”

  “I might have . . . uh, kissed him, too.”

  “You were joyful. I get it.”

  “Not that kind of kiss.”

  “I see.” Bella bites back a smile, and Odelia goes back to stirring so hard that, if the wassail were cream, it would have been butter by now.

  Moments later, the piano playing ceases.

  “Isabella? You have guests!” Pandora calls.

  “Guests?” Odelia echoes. “Then it’s not Luther, unless he brought a date—is he bringing a date?”

  “Of course not,” Bella assures her, tilting her head to listen to the voices in the hall.

  “By the way, I got one, too!”

  Bella smiles. Jiffy, checking out Max’s snowboard.

  She hurries into the hall to greet the Ardens, just in time to hear Jiffy ask Misty if he can keep a puppy.

  “Sure, why not?”

  The reply doesn’t come from his mom, but from his dad.

  Bella was surprised when Misty had said Mike Arden was planning to drive here on Christmas morning from Pennsylvania.

  Having been held for questioning and then released, he’s not charged with any wrongdoing involving his son’s abduction.

  Not officially anyway.

  Unofficially . . .

  “We’ve got a lot of problems to work out,” Misty had told Bella the other night over eggnog as the boys assembled the world’s messiest gingerbread house. “I mean, obviously, he shouldn’t have been messing around with her, even from overseas.”

  Her—his high school sweetheart, the woman who’d called herself Priscilla Galante. Mike Arden had admitted to reconnecting with her on social media last spring and even to what he calls an “emotional affair”—strictly long distance, according to Misty.

  “He’s been telling her I’m a lousy mother and that he worries about Jiffy’s safety and that we’re living in some crazy haunted town,” she’d told Bella.

  “So he sent her here to spy on you?”

  “Pretty much. I should have known something was off about her when I saw that black aura. I figured it was just first-timer nerves. Guess I’m not as good at this as I thought.”

  Poor Misty.

  But Bella is hopeful they can work it out—especially now that Mike is here.

  Priscilla is spending the holidays in jail, reportedly still proclaiming her innocence. Luther—who has contacts everywhere, including Pennsylvania—said she envisions herself as a guardian angel who’d swooped in to save Jiffy after nearly running him over.

  Bella can’t help but think she’s right in some twisted way. If she hadn’t snatched Jiffy off the street, “Elvis” would have. She might have had poor judgment and perhaps some mental health issues, but he was an armed criminal.

  Elvis—not his real name, of course—is spending this Christmas behind bars—and, most likely, every Christmas for the rest of his life for the murders of Virgil Barbor, who’d been in the wrong place at the wrong time, and Yuri Moroskov, who’d tried to double-cross him after he’d smuggled the four stolen sapphire-encrusted rings over the border. The woman who had come to Lily Dale searching for them—“Barbara”—has been arrested, too.

  “She was a key member of the Amur Leopard, like Yuri Moroskov. Elvis was a fence,” Luther had told Bella. “Lived in Niagara Falls, New York, but he performed his act every night in a casino on the Canadian side. You get to know all the border guys, coming and going like that. His costume was jewel-studded, and he wore a lot of heavy gold jewelry. Costume jewelry and fake jewels unless—”

  “Unless he needed to smuggle something!” Bella had said. It made sense—Elvis, transporting gemstones and stolen treasures in plain sight, including the four golden rings that Jiffy had found in the grass behind Valley View.

  “Four . . . golden . . . rings,” Pandora had sung that day in the kitchen. There was no way Pandora could have known about Elvis and his lost treasure.

  Coincidence?

  Spirit?

  It doesn’t matter—not today, anyway.

  “Hey, Bella, this is my dad!” Jiffy says proudly.

  Mike Arden greets her with a warm handshake, thanking her for being a friend to his family while he’s away. Then Pandora presses in with her array of musical instruments.

  “Come, now, we’re singing ‘Frosty, the Snowman.’ Would you prefer a tambourine or bongo drums?”

  Bella heads back to the kitchen, thinking of Dawn and pretty certain she wouldn’t cry over this rollicking rendition of “Frosty” the way she does over the one on A Very Von Vogel Christmas.

  She and Lauri had been aghast when Bella had pointed out a familiar face in their scrapbook photo of Sean Von Vogel’s last concert. There was their friend Lisa, front and center, in the VIP seats reserved for his biggest fans.

  “All these years,” Lauri said, “and I never looked at the crowd. I was just looking at Sean.”

  “Me, too. I can’t believe it was right there under our noses all this time.”

  “It happens,” Bella assured them.

  Boy, does it ever.

  The day after they’d returned home, Lauri had called Bella to confirm that Lisa had, indeed, taken the locket—a closeted Von Vogel fan all along.

  They, too, have some relationship issues to work out. Bella is certain they’ll manage to forgive and forget. Maybe there’s even hope for Odelia and Blue, though when it comes to Odelia and Pandora . . .

  “Ladies,” Pandora calls from the next room, “do come join us for this next song!”

  “Be right there!” Bella calls back.

  “You, too, Odelia! You must!”

  Odelia glowers. “What am I, her sing-along soldier, following commands?”

  “Come on, it’s Christmas.”

  “I know what day it is.” But she allows Bella to steer her into the hall, where Pandora is organizing a group effort of “The Twelve Days of Christmas.”

  “I’m going to assign each of you a day! I’ll lead us off as the partridge in a pear tree . . .”

  “Of course she will,” Odelia whispers to Bella. “It’s in every verse.”

  “By the way, there are only eleven people here, so I can be two days,” Jiffy pipes up . . . just as someone knocks at the front door.

  Bella opens it to find Luther in a red silk shirt and Santa hat.

  “Merry Christmas!” he says breathlessly.

  “Where have you been? We were getting worried.”

  “Last minute road trip to New York City last night, and I just got back.”

  “New York? Spending Christmas Eve with a new lady friend?”

  “Nope. It was the only place I could find this.” He nods at the large gift-wrapped box in his hands. “Sorry I’m late.”

  “You’re actually just in time to be twelve drummers drumming . . . and I’m guessing there are bongos involved.”

  They rejoin the group, and Bella watches him walk over to Odelia and thrust the box into her hands. She peels off the wrapping paper as Pandora plays the opening chords.

  “My Crock-Pot!”

  “Shush now—we’re singing!”

  And they’re off, Odelia now beaming as broadly as everyone else.

  “On the first day of Christmas . . .”

  Feeling an arm around her shoulder, Bella looks up to see Drew. Silently, he po
ints at the ceiling, and she looks up to see . . .

  Mistletoe?

  “How did that get there?”

  “Secret Santa, I guess,” he whispers slyly and pulls her in to steal a kiss as the others sing on, “. . . my true love gave to me . . .”