“Right.” Jim barely glances up from his newspaper. He’s a man of few words, right being one of his favorites.
“Well, Bella is doing a fantastic job picking up where Leona left off,” Steve Pierson says pointedly, with a smile at Bella.
She smiles back. “Thanks for the vote of confidence.”
Steve is a nice man. As soon as he found out she’s an unemployed teacher, he asked if she’d consider moving to Boston—she said yes, because why not?—and he offered to look into openings in his district back home.
“Oh, I didn’t mean it that way,” Kelly says quickly. “I’m sorry, Bella. You’ve been great. It’s just that I miss Leona.”
“So do I,” Bonnie says. “She always guides me in the right direction and makes me see things I’ve managed to miss even when they’re right in front of me.”
“We all do that,” Eleanor says. “Sometimes I wonder if people like us are so focused on what we can’t see that we forget to see what we can see.”
There’s a pause as her words sink in.
Then Steve puts his arm around his wife and gives her shoulder a squeeze. “I see. I think.”
“You know what I mean,” she says with a laugh.
“We all know what you mean,” Bonnie tells her. “And Isabella, you’re doing such a great job with the guesthouse—who knows? Maybe you can pick up where Leona left off with everything else, too.”
“Wait, do you mean . . . ?” Bella falters. “I’m not . . . I’m just . . .”
“She’s not a medium. She’s just like the rest of us. Well, like us, anyway,” Eleanor modifies, indicating her husband and herself. “I know that most of you are involved in mediumship training classes.”
“I certainly am. And you are, too, aren’t you . . . ?” Bonnie asks, looking at whichever of the elderly St. Clair sisters hasn’t nodded off over her tea.
“Yes, we are,” she says, nudging her sister. “Aren’t we, Opal?”
She wakes with a start. “Aren’t we what?”
“Learning to become mediums?”
“Oh, yes. We intend to speak with Mother directly. There are certain things we need to ask her that are rather . . .”
“Delicate,” Ruby says. “And private.”
After waiting a moment or two to let that provocative tidbit settle, Kelly announces, “We’re taking a class too. Right, Jim?”
Nope—not this time. He says, “I haven’t decided yet.”
Until now, Fritz has been sitting at a corner table quietly listening. Stout and swarthy, with a receding hairline and a quiet voice, he’s not the kind of man who commands much attention in a crowd.
Now, steepling his fingertips beneath his gray beard, he asks Jim what’s holding him back.
“I’m just not sure it’s something I want to do. Kelly wants me to, but—”
“It was your idea to come here in the first place.”
“Yes, but that doesn’t mean I—”
She talks over him, telling the others, “We were on our honeymoon in Niagara Falls—we were married at the end of October, so it was around Halloween, and Jim came across an article about Lily Dale in a local newspaper at the hotel.”
“Was it one of those hokey pieces that make it sound like a cross between Ghostbusters and a haunted hay ride?” Bonnie asks her.
“How’d you guess?”
“Same thing every Halloween. Most reporters don’t even try to help people understand what goes on here.”
“No, but at least it inspired us to make a day trip to check it out. Even though it was off-season, a few of the mediums were in residence, so we decided to get readings. You know—as a lark. That’s how we met Leona. She told us things she couldn’t possibly have known, right, Jim?”
His right isn’t quite as wholehearted this time.
Fritz seems to notice as well. “What kinds of things did she tell you, Jim?”
He opens his mouth to answer, but Kelly does it for him: “She gave him a message from his college roommate. He’d passed away a few months before our wedding. He was supposed to be our best man.”
“What was the message, Jim?” Fritz emphasizes the name, and this time, Kelly takes the hint and lets her husband answer.
“She just said Barry—that’s his name—wanted us to know that he was sorry he’d missed our special day.”
“Did she mention him by name?”
“Not exactly.”
Kelly jumps back in. “It was definitely Barry. Leona said the name might be Harold or maybe Harry and that he was young and he’d died suddenly and instantly. It was a car wreck. She was right.”
“That happens all the time with names,” Eleanor contributes. “Sometimes the medium just gets the first letter, sometimes a name that rhymes.”
Fully awake now, Opal is nodding. “When Leona first connected with Mother, it wasn’t by name, and it’s a good thing.”
“Why is that?” Bella asks.
She has a feeling, judging by their expressions, that the other regulars have all heard this before—if not last summer, then last night. The St. Clair sisters tend to repeat themselves.
“Mother’s name was Ann and so was her mother’s, and our other grandmother was Anna, and so were two cousins.”
“All of them are in Spirit,” Ruby says with a nod, “so we’d never have known it was Mother if Leona had just given us her name. Instead, she told us she could smell Mother’s signature perfume, and we just knew it was her.”
“What was it?”
“Jean Nate,” Opal reports.
“It used to drive Papa wild,” Ruby adds candidly.
Bella fights the urge to grin—and to point out that many women of a certain age wear the scent, which can be found on any drugstore shelf. If the sisters want to believe that Leona was channeling their mother, well then . . . where’s the harm in that?
Fritz asks them, “So for you, hearing the medium mention your mother’s perfume was a greater confirmation than her name would have been.”
“Oh, yes. That and the Clark Gable business,” Ruby adds.
Bonnie says, “Now that was really something,” as the Piersons and Tooklers nod their agreement and Bella raises a curious eyebrow.
Fritz asks the obvious question: “What Clark Gable business?”
When Ruby responds with an utter non sequitur—“We’re from Akron, you know”—Bella grasps that the sisters are merely senile. Obviously, the others are humoring them.
“Clark’s hometown was a stone’s throw away,” Opal elaborates. “Mother had a torrid affair with him when she was young, before she met Father.”
Hmm. Maybe they aren’t senile. Or maybe they are—as it’s difficult to imagine Clark Gable romancing a homely woman doused in Jean Nate.
“And Leona knew about that?” Fritz asks. “Did she mention Clark Gable by name?”
“Of course she did.”
“That’s some validation.”
Yes. Much stronger validation than Jean Nate, Bella has to admit.
“I’ll be interested in hearing all about your experiences, good and bad, if you’re willing to go on record for my book,” Fritz says, looking from the sisters to Bonnie, the Tooklers, the Piersons, and even Bella. “Without Leona’s input, I’m going to have to start from scratch in some aspects of my research.”
“She was helping you?” Bonnie looks surprised.
At his nod, Eleanor comments, “That’s funny. In all the years I’ve been coming here, I’ve never heard her say one nice thing about the press.”
“That’s because when they write about Lily Dale, they don’t get it right. I’m going to, and Leona knew it. She wanted to help me, and she gave me access to everything.”
He may be writing about the Dale and trying to “get it right,” but Bella notices that Fritz uses past tense when he speaks of Leona.
“When you say everything,” Bonnie asks, “what do you mean?”
“We did hours of phone interviews, and she answered any
questions I had. She even let me listen to recordings of her readings.”
“She recorded them?” Bella is taken aback. “Do you mean . . . on a tape recorder?”
“No, she likes to say she’s high tech. She has an audio recorder hooked up to her laptop. After the session, she’ll e-mail you the file,” Kelly explains.
“Did you have to sign a release, then, so that she could share those tapes with other people?”
“A release?” Kelly laughs. “It doesn’t work that way. At least, not with Leona or any of the other mediums I’ve seen here.”
Maybe it should, Bella thinks. This little refuge might consider itself immune to the litigious nature of the rest of the world, but it isn’t hard to imagine someone—not Kelly Tookler—slapping Leona with a lawsuit for sharing an audiotape without permission.
“I can’t tell you how many times I’ve gone back and listened to my readings,” Kelly says. “Every time I do, I pick up on something new.”
Bonnie nods. “Same here. It’s so hard, when you’re sitting there getting a reading, to keep track of every detail that comes through.”
“I used to try to write it all down,” Eleanor says, “but that can be distracting. It’s much easier to just have the medium record the session for you. That’s why so many of them do it. Sometimes, messages only make sense later, when you’ve had a chance to go back and listen and really think about it.”
When you’ve had a chance to make the vagaries fit and convince yourself that your dead loved one came through after all?
Naturally, Bella doesn’t say that aloud. They all seem so earnest, so trusting and naïve.
All but Fritz, the guileful fly on the wall, with a barely discernible glitter of doubt in his black eyes.
Fritz is an outsider, just like she is. It’s obvious he doesn’t buy any of this. But he’s not letting them see his skepticism because he needs their cooperation for his book.
And Bella isn’t letting them see hers, because . . .
Because in this moment, maybe I just need the companionship. I need them. All of them.
Who cares that they’re an eclectic bunch of strangers or that she’ll never see any of them again after the weekend? It’s just nice, for a change, not to feel as though she and Max are all alone in the world. It’s nice to feel as though they belong.
Even here.
Still, she squirms when the conversation meanders to the local dating scene—or lack thereof. Kelly asks whether Bonnie had seen a handsome man she’d spotted at last night’s message service, and then again riding his bike past the house this morning. Bonnie doesn’t seem interested, but that doesn’t stop Kelly from speculating about whether he’s available and who else around here might be.
The short answer, according to the others: no one. Apparently, there is a dearth of single, straight, available men in the Dale.
“What about you, Bella?” Kelly asks. “Do you date? Are you interested in—”
The doorbell rings.
“Be right back,” Bella says, hoping the subject will have been dropped by then.
She hurries into the front hall, opens the door, and is startled to see Doctor Bailey standing on the porch.
He, too, looks surprised. “Isabella? What are you doing here?”
“Good question,” she says. “I was just wondering the same thing.”
He blinks. “I thought you were just passing through, returning the lost cat to the owner.”
“I thought I was, too, but—it’s a long story. I did get your message, by the way,” she adds. “But I haven’t had a chance to call back. Sorry.”
“I just wanted to make sure the cat got to where she was supposed to go. After you left, I realized that it was irresponsible of me to give out that information and send you on your way with her. But I was worried about the puppy, and I hadn’t slept in a few days, and . . . I guess I wasn’t thinking straight.”
“It’s okay. I got Chance back here just fine.”
“Good. I’m sure her owner was relieved. I thought I’d better come over here because I tried calling her, too, last night and today, but the voice mailbox was still full.”
“Right. That’s because she, um . . .”
Oddly, Bella’s first instinct is to search for the right phrasing. But there’s no need to mince words now, is there? Doctor Bailey isn’t one of them—the Spiritualists who phrase conversations about the dearly departed as if they’d momentarily stepped into the next room.
Why mince words?
“The thing is . . . Leona died.”
His dark eyebrows furrow. “I’m sorry to hear that.”
“So was I. It sounds like she was a wonderful person.”
“You never met her, though.”
“No.”
“And you’d never been to Lily Dale before. You’d never even heard of it.”
She can’t tell whether it’s a statement or a question, but he pauses, waiting for her to acknowledge it.
“No,” she says again, wondering if that’s a gleam of suspicion in his brown eyes. “I was just passing through, remember?”
“I do, but . . . well, here you are in Lily Dale, answering Leona’s door.”
She laughs nervously. “Right, here I am. I know it must seem a little crazy to you.”
And you’re not the only one.
“A little,” he agrees. “Is the cat . . . ?”
“Oh, she’s fine. She’s around here someplace. No kittens yet, but we’re waiting.”
“You’re taking care of her, then?”
“Just for the weekend, because our car is in the repair shop.”
“And Max?”
“Not in the repair shop,” she quips, surprised that Doctor Bailey remembers her son’s name—and her own, for that matter.
He chuckles. “That’s good. So he’s around here someplace, too?”
“Upstairs sleeping.”
“Good for him. Everything is okay, then?”
Definitely a question.
She tilts her head, considering it. “I guess that depends on how you define okay.”
“For me, that depends on the day. And sometimes, lately, the definition changes minute to minute.”
“Same here,” she says, and their eyes meet in a flash of empathy. “But right now, everything is okay.”
“I’m glad. I just wanted to make sure. If you need me, you know where to find me.”
“I do,” she agrees, “and . . .”
She trails off, realizing she was about to tell him that he knows where to find her, too, if he needs her.
Why would he need you? You’re not friends. You’re barely acquaintances. He only said it because he’s a vet, and you’re . . .
As he sees it, she’s a homeless stranger who found a pregnant stray, volunteered to return her to her owner on the way to a campground that doesn’t exist, and then moved in. No wonder he’s checking up on her. She’s lucky he isn’t calling the cops right now. Or the loony bin.
“Take care,” he says, giving a little wave and then turning back. “Oh, and Isabella? Thanks for doing what you did.”
“You mean the cat? No problem.” Maybe he doesn’t think she’s crazy after all.
Again, he starts away, then turns back. “Tell Max that if I’d known he was here, I’d have brought him some chocolate chip ice cream.”
She smiles. “I will.”
“Not that he remembers me.”
“Something tells me that he might.”
Wearing a bemused smile, she closes the door and then finds herself watching through the window as he walks away.
Chapter Ten
“Mommy?”
Alone in the kitchen washing out the coffee pot after the guests have dispersed, she looks up to see Max in the doorway.
“Good morning, sweetie.” She turns off the water and goes over to hug him, but he pulls away. “What’s wrong?”
“I can’t find Chance the Cat.”
“She was sleeping
next to you when I left the bedroom.” She’d locked the door from the outside with her key and left the duplicate sitting in the inside lock so that Max could let himself out.
“I just woke up and she was gone.”
“Well, the door was locked, and I’m sure she can’t turn a key with her paw, so she must be in there hiding somewhere. Under the bed or—”
“No, I looked everywhere. She’s not there.”
“Cats are really good at hiding. Sit down and eat your breakfast. After that, I’ll help you look.”
Max protests, but eventually agrees to have a bowl of cereal at the table. As he crunches his way through it, he winces.
“What’s wrong, sweetie?”
“My tooth is wiggly. I don’t want it to fall out and get swallowed. Then the tooth fairy won’t come.”
“Here, let me see.” She tips his chin back gently, and he opens his mouth wide. The bottom tooth is crooked, nearly sideways in his mouth. No wonder he’s having trouble eating. “Do you want me to get it out for you?”
“No! It has to fall out by itself or she won’t come.”
“The tooth fairy? I don’t think that’s the rule.”
“That’s what Jiffy said.”
“Well, I say she’ll come no matter what.”
Clearly, Jiffy’s opinion is all that counts. Max shakes his head, adamant, and clamps his mouth shut. Speaking like a bad ventriloquist, he says, “By the way, it’s not falling out until the Fourth of July.”
Bella smiles. “Whatever you say, kiddo.”
She goes back to washing the rest of the breakfast dishes, still thinking about Doctor Bailey’s visit, and Max goes back to his cereal and fretting about the cat. He’s almost finished eating when they hear a rap on the back door.
Turning, Bella sees Odelia Lauder standing on the back steps, accompanied by a tall African American man who’s holding a big umbrella over them both. He’s handsome, with a square jaw and hair that’s graying at the temples. Bella has only been here for a couple of days, but even she can tell that he’s overdressed for Lily Dale in a dress shirt and slacks.
Both he and Odelia are wearing such serious expressions that she immediately tells Max to go back upstairs and check again for the cat.
Nine Lives Page 13