Something Buried, Something Blue

by Wendy Corsi Staub

  “I only want to deliver truth. I’m . . . sensing danger.”

  Bella’s blood turns to liquid nitrogen. “What kind of danger?”

  “If I could just meet the bride, I might be able to tell.”

  Unnerved, Bella turns, looking up at the stairway, wishing Parker or Virginia would appear to handle this. There’s no sign of them, nor of the web that earlier stretched from banister to wall.

  She can’t even see the rainbow that often falls across the landing via the stained-glass window on sunny days, as if to mark the very spot where she found the tourmaline necklace in July.

  She wanted so badly to believe that Sam had sent it from wherever he is. In that moment, she believed—she saw—what she wanted, needed, to see and believe.

  Right now, the angle of the light is all wrong. There’s no rainbow. There’s no intricate web strung across the stairway.

  She turns back to Pandora. “Johneen is resting until the ceremony begins. She gave strict instructions not to be disturbed.”

  Pandora stares at her for a long moment, then nods. “All right. I understand. And you know that barging in here like this just isn’t my style . . .”

  Really? Really? Barging in and confronting a stranger is precisely Pandora’s style.

  “Anyway, I might be mistaken about what Spirit is showing me,” she goes on, turning to leave.

  “Wait—what is it? What is Spirit showing you?”

  “It’s a woodland pond.” Pandora bows her head, closing her eyes. “Beside it, a lovely blonde woman in a white dress, falling. . . .”

  A blonde woman? Lucky guess. A white dress—most brides wear white. Lovely is subjective.

  As psychics go, she isn’t very convincing. “She lands face down.”

  “In the water?”

  “In wildflowers growing not far from the water’s edge.”

  “Are they daisies?”

  “Daisies, goldenrod, sedum, Queen Anne’s lace. . . .”

  Well, of course. Pandora must have seen Bella and Parker picking those very same flowers from her own garden just hours ago.

  “I appreciate your concern, Pandora. I hope you understand why I can’t bother Johneen right now. Thank you for stopping over. Have a good day.”

  “Oh, I’ll be back ’round in an hour to sing at the ceremony,” she reminds Bella. “I’ve already learned ‘Fields of Gold.’” To prove it, she sings a few bars.

  Bella forces a smile. “Very nice.”

  “Yes, well, cheerio!”

  Watching her toddle off across Melrose Park, Bella spots the little blue kitten peeking out from beneath a shrub. When Pandora is out of sight, she descends the steps and crouches down, hoping he won’t scamper away again.

  This time, he doesn’t.

  “Hey there, Li’l Chap!”

  They make eye contact. He offers her a slow blink—a sign of feline affection, according to Drew.

  She offers a blink in return. “I left you some food out back. Come on, I’ll show you.”

  She slowly reaches for him, and he allows her to pick him up. As she carries him around to the backyard, she can feel his bony little body rumbling with a sweet, steady purring.

  The last thing she wants to do is leave him outside. But Drew said she should, so she gently sets him down next to the bowls she left earlier. He dives greedily into the kibble.

  “Listen, if your mama doesn’t turn up, I’ve got someone who’s going to help you, okay? He’s a good guy. He’ll take care of you.”

  Still crunching, the kitten looks at her solemnly.

  Yes, Drew will make sure he’s safe and has everything he needs.

  If only things were that simple in Bella’s world.

  Not that she wants or needs to be taken care of. She’s proud of having gotten this far entirely on her own. But sometimes, it would be nice to let her guard down for a while and let someone else pay the bills and kill the spiders and . . . deflect the mediums’ Spirit warnings.

  She walks over to the Adirondack chairs, searching the ground for a folded note as a light breeze ripples the lake. If she dropped the note here, it could very well have blown away.

  If it was ever even here in the first place.

  She finds herself wondering if the note might be a figment of her imagination. Stress can do crazy things to a person.

  No. It was real. You saw it.

  Then where did it go? Did Spirit vaporize it? Or did someone steal it from her drawer? Either of those scenarios is more believable than the possibility that she made it up.

  How can you even think that?

  Because she’s had two too many confrontations with the mediums today, that’s how. Parker’s paranoia, combined with the coffee and lack of food and sleep, had her jittery enough before Odelia and Pandora spouted their dire warnings.

  Yes, they mean well. They always do. Bella is accustomed by now to mediums popping up to share a message from Spirit. Some are more provocative than others, though she tries to take them all with a grain of salt.

  If only Pandora’s warning weren’t too close for comfort to Odelia’s.

  But what is Bella supposed to do about it?

  The clock is ticking. Everything is ready. If they can just get through the wedding without incident . . .

  Fully staged for the ceremony and reception, the yard is still bathed in splashy sunlight glinting off the blue lake.

  A bar is set up on a rectangular table with mason jar glasses, pitchers of lemonade and Brandy Daisies, and decanters filled with white wine, tawny port, and amber bourbon. A long white tablecloth conceals ice chests and backup bottles beneath.

  Rows of white folding chairs face the white canopy decorated with garlands of English ivy from Odelia’s yard. The round tables are covered in golden linens and topped with wildflower centerpieces, white votive candles, and Odelia’s pretty little jars of lemon-habanero marmalade.

  Fan-shaped school-bus yellow leaves float lazily from the gingko boughs to carpet the grass as if Mother Nature herself had a hand in styling the wedding.

  Bella reaches for her phone to take a few more photos, but it isn’t in her pocket.

  Darn. She left it upstairs, plugged into the charger.

  Hurrying inside, she finds Odelia tossing the last of the purple-smeared paper towels into the garbage can.

  “There,” she says. “You’d never know there was a violent, sticky explosion here, would you?”

  “Thanks, Odelia.”

  “Who was at the door?”

  “Oh, it was . . .” She can’t lie. “It was Pandora Feeney.”

  “What did she want?”

  “She just wanted to ask me something about the wedding.” Changing the subject quickly, she asks Odelia about the food preparation.

  “Just a few more things to take care of and we’ll be all set.”

  “Thank you. Why don’t you run home and change, and I’ll finish up here?”

  Odelia shakes her orange head. “I’m not leaving you until everything is ready. I still feel terrible about this morning.”

  “It’s okay. Really.”

  “No, I’ve got it. You go on upstairs and get yourself ready while Max isn’t underfoot,” Odelia says firmly. “They’ll be back soon.”

  She’s right. Bella wonders how it’s going. Her mother-in-law almost seems human today, courtesy of kids and kittens working their magic.

  Or maybe, courtesy of Lily Dale’s magic?

  Millicent can’t be entirely immune to the convivial warmth of this little village, can she? Surely she must realize by now that Bella and Max haven’t fallen into the clutches of a dangerous cult.

  She thanks Odelia and backtracks to the stairs, stopping to correct minor imperfections along the way: a misaligned area rug, a crooked picture frame, a bunched-up curtain. In the parlor, she adjusts the old photo albums stacked on the coffee table. They’re filled with a remarkably steady stream of vintage images of Valley View and its residents over a century, leaving o
ff before the turn of the new millennium.

  Maybe I’ll reinstate the tradition. I can start with an album of wedding weekend pictures . . . as long as everything goes all right.

  It will. It has to.

  Wishing Parker would come back downstairs, or that Virginia would return, she steps into the front hall.

  The room is aglow with autumn sunlight and vintage amber sconces and infused with floral fragrance. Oh dear. One of the female guests must have used too heavy a hand on the perfume atomizer.

  Bella opens the front door for some fresh air. She props it against the wall with the unsightly boulder of a brass andiron she’d lugged outside before Johneen’s arrival and tucked behind a pot of lavender mums sitting beside the purple welcome mat.

  As the mild, leaf-scented breeze diffuses the cloying scent, she decides to lock both sets of keys into a drawer on the registration desk for safekeeping. They’re too bulky to carry around, but she can keep the only two keys to the drawer in the pockets of the dress she’s planning to wear.

  She pauses to replenish the crystal bowl of M&Ms on the desk. Yesterday’s check-ins depleted the supply, and Leona Gatto would have wanted it to be ready for new arrivals, even though none are scheduled until . . . November?

  Watching the colorful candies fall from the bag like the leaves piling ever higher outside, Bella reminds herself that the Dale’s ancient trees will soon be bare. According to the locals, the ground will be white for nearly six months.

  Sam—who loved “snow and all forms of radiant frost”—died on the first day of winter.

  Subsequent holidays held no joy. Christmas, New Year’s, Valentine’s Day . . . All were so bleak, she can’t fathom ever looking forward to them again. Spring took an exceptionally long time coming. When calendar and climate marked its official arrival, her grief might as well have withered the tulips and lilacs. Its pervasive chill numbed her by day and kept her awake at night, huddled and alone in the dark.

  Only when she arrived in Lily Dale on the heels of the summer solstice did she finally experience a flicker of warmth again. Ironic, because around here, all anyone seems to talk about lately is the harsh weather that lies ahead.

  You can’t scare me, western New York winter. I’ve dealt with far more frightening monsters than the likes of you.

  She shoves the nearly empty candy bag into a drawer and replaces the bowl’s crystal lid, then heads upstairs. Warily opening the Rose Room door, she wonders what she’ll do if someone is there.

  But she sees only Chance and her kittens. They’re scattered around the room, snoozing peacefully wherever patches of sunlight fall across the carpet, the bed, and a slipcover chair.

  Bella closes the door behind her and returns to the nightstand. If she was willing to believe she herself had removed the letter and forgotten about it, then maybe she should also consider that she’d imagined its disappearance.

  But no, it isn’t here.

  She crosses the room, sidestepping a snoozing fur ball consisting of Spidey and Chance, and opens the closet door. Moving the hanging clothing aside, she sees that the panel at the back is precisely as she left it earlier. That’s a good sign.

  She turns her attention to finding the dress she’s planning to wear to the wedding. A relic of the old days, when finances were different and she had a busy, newlywed social life, the simple hunter-green silk sheath is still shrouded in clear plastic from a suburban New York dry cleaner. She hasn’t worn it in years, but it’s a classic designer cut and the nicest thing she owns.

  Quickly pulling it on, she realizes that the dress fits a bit differently now. She might weigh the same as she did before Max’s birth, but she has curves where there were none before. The bustline especially seems a little snug and the V neck is cut lower than she remembers. A bit of décolletage strikes her as perfectly appropriate for a married woman, and Sam undoubtedly would have approved. But now that she’s the hardly merry Widow Jordan . . .

  Oh, well. Too late now. She has nothing else to wear.

  She refreshes her lipstick and brushes her hair. She rarely wears jewelry anymore, other than her wedding ring and the tourmaline pendant. But the simple dress seems to need a little something more, so she adds a silver bracelet-watch and some delicate jade earrings that once belonged to her mother.

  There. Surveying herself in the mirror, she decides she’s good to go. Better than good to go, really, considering that she’s not even a guest. She probably could have gotten away with the dark slacks and sweater she’d been planning to wear . . .

  Until you realized Drew Bailey was going to show up again later?

  She tells herself that this sudden urge to dress up has nothing to do with him. It’s just been ages since she went to a wedding, and when was the last time she threw a party with festive food and cocktails and decorations?

  For her, it almost feels like a welcome back to the land of the living . . .

  Ironic, since some might consider Lily Dale anything but.

  All right. She’s ready. She slips the keys to the downstairs desk into the left-seam pocket of her dress, planning to put her cell phone into the other.

  But when she turns toward the nightstand to grab it . . .

  It isn’t there.

  Did one of the cats knock it off the table?

  Stepping closer, certain she’ll find it on the floor, she sees the charger cord dangling from the outlet, no phone attached.

  But . . . it was here. She definitely plugged it in. She remembers using it to send that e-mail to Grant.

  She gets down on her hands and knees to look for it. The cats might have knocked the phone off the table and . . . and yes, pulled it from the cord and pushed it across the floor . . .

  Under the bed?

  Behind the chair?

  Into a corner?

  No, no, no, and no.

  Heart pounding, she struggles to maintain logic.

  I must have taken it with me when I left, and . . . and I just forgot, that’s all.

  She whirls to grab the jeans she’d been wearing, positive the phone will be in one of the pockets.

  It isn’t.

  It’s downstairs. It has to be downstairs.

  Turning back toward the door, she spots something on the floor beside the bed.

  Virginia’s evening bag. The one she had at the party last night.

  “How on earth . . . ?”

  Bella gazes at the small, black-satin pouch with sequined straps—straps! Of course!

  She turns an accusing eye toward the dozing Chance. “You naughty girl!”

  As Bella picks up the bag, it gapes open. Inside, she sees a pack of cigarettes, a fancy, gold lighter, and a flat, black, rectangular object. A small wallet or a billfold?

  She shouldn’t snoop—she knows she shouldn’t snoop—but the gun weighs heavy on her mind.

  She takes out the billfold. Flipping it open, she instantly realizes what it is: a badge holder.

  It’s from a local police department in a North Carolina town Bella never heard of. Virginia’s face stares solemnly out at her from a laminated identification card.

  So Virginia isn’t a killer. She’s a cop. That’s why she has a gun.

  The answers bring more questions, but Bella is momentarily relieved, despite her missing phone.

  She slips the badge back into the bag. She has to give it right back to Virginia, who may not even realize that it’s gone astray.

  Yes, and you’ll say . . . what? That your purse-snatching cat brought it to you, so you snooped inside?

  She doesn’t have to admit that part.

  Still, Virginia is incredibly intuitive.

  Of course she is! She’s a cop!

  Even if Bella doesn’t confess to taking a peek, Virginia might suspect that she did. Violating someone’s privacy may not be a crime, but it’s a lousy thing to do. Virginia might tell Parker, and the last thing Bella needs is to further alienate the groom before the wedding.

  All right. So Vir
ginia doesn’t even need to know Bella found the bag. She can just slip it back into her room while she’s out. Let her wonder how it got there. She already knows about the kleptomaniac cat, having caught Bella red-handed with the bra yesterday. Let her think Chance was carrying it around the house, or—whatever. Let her think a ghost was playing tricks on her. It doesn’t really matter, as long as Bella can get through this day and marry off the bride and groom as planned.

  She hurries downstairs for the master keys, then back up two flights of stairs, arriving on the third floor panting as much from exertion as from nerves. She hesitates in front of the closed door to Virginia’s room. What if she came back and is in there?

  You can’t just barge in. You have to knock.

  She turns, looking wildly around for inspiration, and spots the cabinet where she stashes extra linens. Tucking the little bag inside for the moment, she grabs a small stack of clean towels. If Virginia is here, she’ll hand them to her, pretending she thought she forgot to leave them earlier when she made up the room.

  Yes, and she’ll see right through you.

  It’s a flimsy ruse, but Bella is fairly certain she isn’t here. She’d been waiting for her.

  Sure enough, no one answers her knock. She unlocks the door, retrieves the purse, and drops it in the middle of the neatly made bed. Then, thinking better of it, she moves it to the floor, not quite hidden by the bed skirt. That’s exactly how she found it in her own room, courtesy of Chance.

  Mission accomplished, she locks the door again, puts back the towels, and hurries back down to the second floor, where she immediately spots . . .

  Nadine? A ghost?

  Seeing the pale, voluminous figure at the end of the hall, Bella stops and stares.

  But this is not her first spooky specter in a town that’s supposedly crawling with them. This lady-in-white is a flesh-and-blood bride named Johneen Maynard.

  Gazing at herself in the full-length antique mirror at the end of the hall, she doesn’t turn around. But her reflection meets Bella’s gaze in the glass, and even from here, Bella can see that her eyes are troubled.

  “You look radiant, Johneen.”

  There’s that word again, handily spilling from the tip of her tongue.

  Johneen’s unembellished white silk-organza gown falls in a narrow column to an inch above her satin pumps. Her golden hair is pulled back in a chignon wreathed in sprigs of fresh white wildflowers. The bouquet in her hand is considerably smaller now, and Bella’s floppy satin bow has blossomed into an elegant and precise pair of loops.