Nine Lives

by Wendy Corsi Staub

“But you have to help me.”

  “I will. I’ll be up in a few minutes. Just go look, Max. I think . . . I think I heard kitty footsteps in the closet,” she improvises. “I bet that’s where she is.”

  “I already looked there.”

  “Here . . .” She grabs a box of kibble from the counter. Last night, the cat heard it rattle and came running. “I bet if you go around up there shaking this, she’ll find you instead of you finding her.”

  With her son safely on his way back upstairs, she unlocks the door and opens it.

  “Sorry to barge in on you,” Odelia says, “but it’s pretty important.”

  “No problem, come on in.”

  “Bella, this is Luther Ragland. He’s a good friend of mine, and he was a friend of Leona’s, too.”

  His voice is a rich baritone, and his handshake is as fleeting as his smile. Propping the dripping, folded umbrella on the mat, he asks, “Can we have a word in private?”

  Taken aback, she looks at Odelia, who leans in to say in a low voice, “Luther has some . . . questions.”

  “Questions?”

  “About Leona. Let’s talk in the study.” Odelia limps in that direction, trailed by Luther and, after a moment, Bella.

  Remembering last night’s hooded visitor, she wishes she hadn’t just sent Max back upstairs by himself.

  In the parlor, Odelia is reaching for the knob on the closed French door. “That’s strange.”

  “What is?”

  “There’s no key sticking out of the lock.”

  “Should there be?”

  “Yes, just like the doors upstairs.”

  “There’s one right here on the ring you gave me.” Bella fishes for it in her pocket.

  “Yes, that’s the duplicate. But how did the door get locked in the first place?”

  “Maybe Leona locked it,” Luther says.

  “She only did that when there were overnight guests in the house, which there weren’t on the night she passed.”

  “Are you sure about that?”

  “Pretty sure. And when she was home alone, she always left the key in the knob so that she wouldn’t misplace it, because those keys can’t be copied these days.” She turns to look at Bella. “Other than Leona, no one but me has been here—until you.”

  “I didn’t lock it,” she protests nervously. “It was that way when I got here.”

  “No, I’m sure that it was. I’m just trying to figure out why.” Odelia exchanges a long look with Luther before asking Bella for the master key ring.

  She hands it over, and Odelia opens the French door without comment and motions them inside.

  The room is exactly as Bella left it the other night. Noticing the appointment book on the table, she wonders if she should mention the missing page.

  But it would mean admitting that she snooped around in here. In light of the key discussion they just had, she decides she’d better keep it to herself for the time being.

  “It’s funny,” Odelia muses. “This room looks so much bigger to me now than it used to.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The walls were a deep shade of blue. But Leona spends so much time here that she decided to give it a makeover this spring and brighten things up. I’d forgotten all about that. I do love the yellow. It’s much more cheerful, don’t you think, Luther?”

  Luther, who doesn’t appear the least bit interested in décor, offers a monosyllabic agreement. He motions for the two of them to sit in the easy chairs.

  Bella perches on the edge of one of them, conscious of his gaze and wondering if he can tell how anxious she is.

  It’s almost as if he’s trying to be intimidating, sitting on the window seat, his spine held military-straight, not touching the three pillows along the back of the bench.

  He wastes no time getting down to business. “Odelia has reason to believe that Leona’s accident might not have been an accident. She’s asked me to look into things.”

  “What do you mean? Did something else happen?” Bella asks, looking at Odelia in alarm.

  “Something else?” Luther, too, looks at Odelia.

  “I just meant . . .” Bella trails off, wondering what he knows—and why he knows. He seems like a no-nonsense kind of guy. Why would he be hanging around someone like Odelia? And Leona, too?

  Unwilling to bring up the pirate story unless Odelia already has, she fumbles for the right thing to say.

  Odelia bails her out: “I told Luther what Jiffy said about seeing someone carrying something on the pier the night she died. I couldn’t stop thinking about it after he mentioned it.”

  “So you think Leona was . . .” She can’t bring herself to say the word murdered.

  “No, I just . . . I don’t know.”

  “But if you think there’s even a chance that . . . that someone deliberately did something to her, then shouldn’t you call the police?”

  “Luther is the police.”

  “Was,” he corrects Odelia, and tells Bella, “I’m a retired officer—I live down in Dunkirk—but I do some private detective work now. Odelia and I met when she got in touch with me about a missing persons case I was on a few years back and—”

  “And he thought I was off my rocker,” Odelia cuts in.

  “I wouldn’t say that.”

  “You did say that. To my face.” She shakes her frizzy orange head. “But you changed your mind pretty quickly when I led you right to the person you were looking for—in the last place you ever would have thought to look.”

  “I’ll admit I was a skeptic,” Luther agrees. “But I couldn’t have solved that case without you.”

  “Since then, we’ve collaborated on quite a few others. But I never imagined that Leona . . .” Odelia shakes her head sadly at Bella. “Anyway, last night, I dreamed about it.”

  “About . . . the pirate?”

  “About Leona.”

  “What about her?”

  “She showed me that something happened to her that night. Luther already knows this, but . . . sometimes dreams are just dreams, and sometimes they aren’t. You learn to tell the difference.”

  “What did she show you?”

  “Just—”

  Luther curtails Odelia’s reply. “Before we get into that, Bella, can I ask you a couple of questions?”

  She nods, looking uneasily toward the door, thinking about last night and about Max and wondering how long this is going to take.

  He asks her some basic questions—her full name, her last address, that sort of thing. Then he asks one that makes her breath catch in her throat: “Can you tell me where you were on the night of June eighteenth?”

  “June eighteenth?” she echoes. “Is that . . . ?”

  “The night Leona died.”

  That date would have been included in the missing page from the appointment book.

  Looking from the formidable Luther to Odelia, who avoids her gaze, Bella gulps. “I was back home in Bedford, same as every other night of my life since . . .”

  Since Sam.

  “Why are you asking?” As if she doesn’t know. She swallows hard, trying to hold it together, to sound indignant, even. “Please tell me that you don’t think that I—”

  “Were you at home alone?”

  “I was with my son.”

  Max. Again, she looks at the door, feeling trapped here. As worried about him upstairs alone as she is about the line of questioning, she chews her lip.

  “Is there someone who can vouch for that?” Luther asks.

  “Besides my five-year-old, you mean?” Of course there isn’t. She never goes anywhere anymore, never sees anyone, never—“Wait a minute, did you say the eighteenth?”

  “Yes.”

  Relief floods through her. What are the odds? That was the one night all year that she wasn’t sitting home.

  “I’m sorry, I didn’t realize—I was out at a restaurant with some of the teachers that night.”

  “Are you sure about that?” Luther
obviously suspects she’d conveniently changed her story.

  “I’m positive, because it was the last day of classes. The women I work with had a little going away party for me, and one of them got her daughter to babysit Max. If you don’t believe me, you can check online. My friend posted pictures on every conceivable social media site even though we all told her not to.”

  She shakes her head, thinking of Janice, a young and single library aide. She’s one of those women who doesn’t eat lunch, buy shoes, or see a movie without telling the entire world about it—the Internet world, anyway. She’d plastered the web with photos labeled “Girls’ Night Out,” much to the chagrin of Bella and her fellow teachers.

  “I can show you,” she tells Luther and Odelia, “if you want to see.”

  “I don’t think we need to—”

  “I’d like to see,” Luther interrupts Odelia.

  Bella pulls her phone from her pocket, presses a few buttons, and locates the incriminating—or rather, the opposite of incriminating—photos, which prominently feature not only the date but the time and the place where they were taken.

  “You can talk to Janice—to anyone who was there that night—if you want to.”

  “Go ahead and give me the names and contact information.” Luther hands back her phone and picks up a pad and pen from the table. After writing it all down, he tells her that he probably won’t bother to talk to anyone.

  “So you believe me?”

  “It’s hard not to, given the evidence.” He seems softer now. “But you might want to tell your friend it’s not a good idea to put stuff like that online.”

  Don’t worry, Bella thinks, with a sudden pang for the life she left behind. I’ll probably never see her again anyway.

  Odelia is looking smug. “I told him you weren’t involved in what happened to Leona. But sometimes, my guides aren’t proof enough for Luther, so—”

  “Your guides are never enough proof for me, Odelia. Ordinarily, online photos aren’t, either. I learned to play by the rules when I was on the force. But in this case, I’m going to go with my gut. I don’t want to waste any more time.”

  Bella nods, and he offers a hint of a smile—a one-man good cop/bad cop show.

  She should tell him about the person who was lurking in the house last night. Although . . .

  Lurking? That might be too strong a word. In broad daylight—even this gray, stormy daylight—it seems likely she just imagined that the person’s behavior was furtive. Surely it was just one of the guests coming and going.

  Going . . . fleeing? Out the back door? Ignoring her when she called out?

  That’s furtive. Lurking.

  Then again, maybe he—she?—had on earbuds, listening to music, and didn’t hear.

  That makes sense. It just happened with Eleanor when she came in from her morning run.

  That no guest had on a dark hooded jacket upon returning last night doesn’t mean someone hadn’t worn one earlier.

  No, but why take it off? And if you did take it off—wouldn’t you be carrying it?

  Besides, the guests were all in the message service when she saw the person in the hoodie. She watched from the porch as they approached the house in dribs and drabs, all coming from the direction of the auditorium.

  Was one of them carrying off a charade? Had he or she been prowling through the house and then doubled back to the auditorium and changed clothes?

  Why?

  It doesn’t make sense.

  Unless you throw in the fact that Leona might have been murdered. In that case . . .

  In that case, I should get out of here right now, shouldn’t I?

  “I really think we should call the police,” she says again. “Nothing against you, Mr. Ragland, but if—”

  “Call me Luther,” he says. “And we’ll involve them just as soon as we know whether there’s reason. Right now, we don’t have much to go on.”

  “Not as far as they would be concerned, anyway,” Odelia says. “Trust me. I’ve been there, done that too many times to count.”

  Bella grasps, then, what they’re up against. Most law enforcement officials probably wouldn’t consider a little boy’s comment or a medium’s dream-that-wasn’t-a-dream—much less her contact with a restless spirit—sufficient evidence to open a murder investigation.

  But what about the person I saw in the house last night?

  She needs to tell Luther and Odelia about that and about the missing page in the appointment book. Then of course they’ll agree to involve the police.

  And the police will note that you’re new in town, skittish, and utterly inexperienced at running a guesthouse, which is . . . well, it’s not as if this is a private home. It’s not as if you found someone ransacking the place or carrying a weapon.

  Still, the person’s furtive movements had made her uncomfortable. Her gut instinct told her something was wrong.

  If she were the one to go to the police, they wouldn’t lump her in with Odelia, who’s probably always calling to report crimes based on psychic hunches.

  She opens her mouth to point that out, but Luther’s next comment stops her cold. “No law enforcement agency would be so quick to dismiss you as a suspect, Bella, if it turns out Leona’s death was no accident. You’d have to be prepared to be front and center in a full-blown, dragged-out investigation, and I’m not sure you want to put yourself—or your son—through something like that.”

  She shakes her head, sickened by the thought of further upheaval for Max after all he’s been through. What if they decided to detain her for questioning?

  That happens all the time, doesn’t it? People are falsely accused, arrested even, for crimes they didn’t commit. She can’t afford a lawyer and . . .

  And who would take care of Max if she went to jail?

  I’m all he has. I can’t let that happen.

  She swallows a rush of panic along with any intention of telling Luther and Odelia about last night’s intruder. Not yet, anyway.

  “Where did you find Leona’s cat the other night?” Luther asks her, getting down to business. “Odelia mentioned that it was out on the highway. I understand that you’re not from the area, and you probably can’t tell me exactly, but . . .”

  It’s Luther Ragland’s lucky day, because her answer isn’t going to be nearly as vague as he might anticipate. She clearly remembers watching the odometer as she drove . . .

  Yes, because you were following the directions on a billboard that doesn’t exist to find a campsite that doesn’t exist.

  She can’t tell him that, can she?

  Maybe she can. It might sound nutty, but it’s the truth.

  Looking from Luther to Odelia and back again, she decides that he’s used to nutty. Besides, every detail she can provide will take him one step closer to figuring out what happened to Leona—and will take the police, should they need to get involved, one step further from suspecting her.

  So she tells Luther exactly what happened, and he nods and takes notes, writing down the mile marker location. She doesn’t feel ridiculous; she feels smart and helpful . . .

  And very glad she didn’t mention the part about an identical pregnant gray tabby showing up on the doorstep back home. Because he might think that she thinks it was Chance, and of course it wasn’t. It just looked like her.

  Exactly like her.

  Luther opens a map in his cell phone and checks the milepost number she gave him—the one she’d noticed right before she saw the cat in the road. “That’s pretty far from here.”

  “Cats can wander miles away from home,” Odelia points out, adding, for Bella’s benefit, “Luther’s a dog person.”

  “I have three,” he says with a nod. “All rescues. An old guy, a middle-aged gal, and a pup.”

  Bella can’t help but think again of Doctor Bailey. Maybe, since she’s here for the weekend, she and Max should stop in to thank him again for helping Chance and see if the injured puppy pulled through. She forgot to ask him tha
t when he was here this morning.

  Then she reminds herself that she has no way of getting there without her car, and that the moment it’s fixed, she and Max will be back on the road to Chicago. The thought fills her with nearly as much dread as she’d felt about leaving Bedford just days ago.

  That was home, though. Lily Dale is just . . .

  A nice place to visit, despite everything, but . . .

  Luther and Odelia are back to discussing cats. “I understand that they can wander,” he says, “but Chance was an indoor cat, right?”

  “For the last year or so,” Odelia confirms. “Except when she managed to escape.”

  “Did it happen a lot?”

  “Often enough—or at least recently enough—for her to be expecting kittens.” Odelia shakes her head. “I always told Leona she needed to get her fixed, because my Gert got pregnant when she was just a kitten herself, before I ever had a chance to spay her. But Leona wouldn’t listen. She was used to barn cats, living out west—you know, letting nature take its course. Then a coyote got one of the neighbors’ cats last summer, and she stopped letting Chance outside.”

  “So she got out and got pregnant . . .”

  “Right. Again. This is her third litter. Maybe her fourth. But Leona loves having kittens around, and to her credit, she’s always managed to find good homes for every last one of them.”

  “That’s great.” Luther patiently steers the conversation back to the topic at hand—a must, Bella has noticed, when you’re dealing with Odelia. “You said earlier that you think the cat got out of the house the night Leona died?”

  “She definitely did. She was inside that evening. I saw her from my porch, in her usual spot in the bay window. The next day, after . . . Leona was found . . . I was the first one who came into the house. I needed to find her nephew’s phone number to give to the medical examiner. I was upset, but I do remember that the cat wasn’t around. Normally, when I came over, she’d show up and rub against my legs because she smelled Gert.”

  “And you’re sure you didn’t inadvertently let her out when you came in?”

  “Positive. She wasn’t here. I filled her bowls and left them outside, because I figured she was hiding back under the porch and would come sniffing around for food. That’s where she usually goes when she gets out.”