Nine Lives

by Wendy Corsi Staub

  “Is that where you live?”

  “I keep an apartment there.”

  Last night, he’d also mentioned a flat in London and a beach house in Southern California. Which of the three, she wonders, does he call home? Or are there other places as well?

  “I thought you were here to settle Leona’s affairs,” she tells him, wanting to point out that those affairs now include a houseful of people—and felines.

  “It’s going to be a long, drawn-out process. I can’t even meet with an attorney this trip because of the holiday weekend. I’ll have to do a lot of back and forth. But that’s fine with me, because I’m used to living out of a suitcase.”

  She nods, rummaging through the cupboard for a platter so that she won’t have to make eye contact as she tells him, “I’m leaving on Monday, too.”

  “What? Monday? Why?”

  “I think I mentioned that I’m just helping out for a few days because Odelia asked me to. I was never planning to stay.” Or even be here in the first place.

  She finds a platter, sets it on the counter, and reaches for yesterday’s leftover pastries.

  “Where are you going?” he asks as she starts setting muffins on the plate.

  “Chicago.”

  “And you’ll be back . . . ?”

  She knows he’s asking for a day or date.

  But her answer is simply, “No.”

  She won’t be back. Ever.

  The guesthouse isn’t her responsibility. It’s his.

  Still, the prospect of turning her back on this place is almost as hard to swallow as the thought of sticking around.

  “That’s too bad,” Grant tells her, tucking the folded newspaper under his arm and depositing the paper cup into the garbage. Clearly, he changed his mind about waiting around for more coffee, telling her he’ll be back down later.

  Left alone in the kitchen, she assembles the tray of day-old pastries. They’re still perfectly edible, but she’ll have to get to the store again later—courtesy of Odelia’s car and not Grant’s, she promises herself.

  Startled by a loud knocking at the back door, she turns to see Steve Pierson gesturing for her to open it.

  She hurries toward him. He’s holding his key in his hand, but it’s trembling violently.

  “I’m sorry,” he says, panting, as she lets him in. He’s wearing running clothes and sneakers, his face flushed and damp with sweat. “When I saw you, I had to—I just . . .”

  “Are you okay?”

  He shakes his head no, pressing a fist against his chest. Is he having a heart attack?

  “Here, sit down.” She hurriedly pulls out a chair at the table.

  “Thanks,” he manages to say, his breath still coming too fast and hard.

  Noting the terrified look in his eyes, she grasps that something is terribly wrong. Something far more serious than overexertion. “Can you speak? Is it your heart?”

  Again, he shakes his head.

  She fills a glass with water and hands it to him. He sips and then wipes his damp forehead on one shoulder and then the other. Seeing a faint streak of pink on his red T-shirt, she realizes his face is bleeding.

  “You have a couple of scratches on your forehead,” she tells him, looking closer. “And on your chin, too. What happened? Did you fall?”

  “No. Well . . . no.”

  What on earth is going on? Her mind flies through the possibilities.

  “Where’s Eleanor?” she asks, wondering if the couple might have gotten into some kind of . . . scuffle?

  “She’s . . . still sleeping, I think. I left her in bed.”

  “I’ll go get her.”

  “Wait!”

  She turns back.

  “I don’t want to . . . she’ll get upset if she sees me like this.” He takes a deep breath, exhales shakily. “Let me calm down first. I need a few minutes.”

  “But what happened?”

  “I think . . .” He shakes his head. “I think someone just tried to kill me.”

  * * *

  In the half hour it takes for Luther Ragland to reach the guesthouse after Bella’s phone call, Steve Pierson has finally managed to regain his composure.

  Bella, however, is just barely hanging onto hers.

  Gone is her perception that everything is going to be all right. That newfound optimism vanished the moment Steve Pierson staggered into the kitchen, bleeding.

  Only from superficial scratches, but still . . .

  Someone tried to kill him.

  Someone might have killed Leona.

  Someone . . . someone . . .

  Who?

  Her initial—and dutiful—suggestion was that Steve call the police.

  “Not just yet,” he said. “I keep thinking I might have been wrong about what happened . . . but I don’t think so. I just need to pull myself together so that I can think things through.”

  She’d persuaded Steve to allow her to summon Luther instead, explaining that he’s a retired detective friend who stops to check on things now that Leona is gone.

  It’s a stretch but not an outright lie.

  She’d called him from upstairs, having gone up to retrieve his business card. With Steve well out of earshot—and Max still snoring in the bed—she hurriedly explained the situation.

  “I’m on my way,” he said immediately.

  Waiting for him, Bella paces the kitchen, trying to stay busy. She cuts up fruit and sets out utensils, cups, and plates for breakfast. Then she sets out even more utensils, cups, and plates—tall stacks of plates and too many cups nested in crazily tilting towers. One of them slips out of her hand, still tender from yesterday’s burn, and breaks on the floor.

  She finds a broom and dustpan. Sweeping up the shards, she remembers the vase she broke in her kitchen back in Bedford on the last day. The day she found a pregnant mackerel tabby with a red collar just sitting on her back step.

  There are no coincidences.

  Darn Odelia. Odelia and her . . . her hidden meanings.

  There’s a reason for everything.

  Bella cuts her finger on a razor sharp triangle of broken pottery. “Ouch.”

  “Are you okay?” Still brooding at the table, Steve looks up in concern.

  “Yes.”

  No.

  Now they’re both bleeding.

  There are no coincidences.

  The wound drips bright-red splotches into the white porcelain sink. She turns on the tap, running water over her finger, watching it dilute the blood. It fleetingly transforms into that brilliant beautiful color she’s always loved, halfway between red and pink, like the wallpaper in the Rose Room, like . . .

  Sushi sky.

  The blood fades to pink and then translucent, swirled down the drain.

  It lasts only a few seconds before it disappears.

  Sam’s voice.

  Oh, Sam. What am I doing here?

  She turns off the water, wraps her finger in a paper towel, and squeezes it tightly.

  Everything happens for a reason.

  Sam’s voice? Or Odelia’s?

  Behind her, Steve is deep in thought, barely sipping the coffee she poured for him.

  He said someone tried to kill him.

  No coincidences.

  There’s a blast of sound, and Bella lets out a little scream as if someone has jumped out at her.

  Oh.

  The doorbell.

  “That’s Luther,” she tells Steve, and hurries to the hall.

  There he is, standing on the front porch. Sturdy, grounded, a welcome flash of everything’s going to be okay . . .

  Except that maybe it isn’t.

  “I had a court reserved for seven thirty.” Luther gestures down at the tennis whites he’s wearing. “You caught me on my way out the door.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be. You did the right thing, calling me. Where’s Mister . . . Pierson, is it?”

  “Yes. Stephen Pierson. He’s in the kitchen.”


  Stepping over the threshold, he asks in a low voice, “You didn’t mention Leona?”

  “No.”

  “Is anyone else around?”

  “Not yet. It’s still pretty early.” She looks toward the stairway. It’s empty, and all is silent above. Pretty soon, though, they’ll be stirring.

  She’d asked Steve if he wanted to go wake Eleanor or if he wanted her to do it. He did not.

  “She’ll just get nervous,” he said.

  Yeah. That happens. Most women get nervous when someone tries to kill their husband.

  She leads Luther to the kitchen. Seeing him, Steve looks wobbly as he rises from his chair.

  “You don’t have to get up,” Luther says, but Steve obviously isn’t the kind of man who fails to stand and shake hands upon being introduced. Nor, she guesses, is Luther the kind of man who wouldn’t expect him to, no matter what he says.

  They’re gentlemen, both of them. But one is in pristine tennis whites and quite used to this kind of thing, while the other is jittery, streaked with blood and sweat, and utterly out of his element.

  After shaking Luther’s hand, Steve sinks into the chair again.

  Bella refills his cup with coffee, pours one for Luther, and finally refills her own.

  “What happened to your hand?” Luther asks Bella, seeing the cone of paper towel, now stained with blood. “And your leg?” he adds, looking down and then up at her face in concern.

  “Nothing,” she says, suddenly conscious of the ache in her stubbed pinky toe. “I mean, I’m just . . . accident prone.”

  As soon as the words leave her mouth, she regrets the phrasing. Her own accidents really are accidents, thank goodness.

  “Should I go into the other room?” she asks Luther.

  “No, you should stay.”

  She’s not sure whether she was afraid he’d say that or afraid that he wouldn’t.

  She doesn’t have the energy for this right now. But she sits at the table with them and watches Luther take out a notebook and pen, in detective mode again.

  “Okay. Tell me exactly what happened.”

  “I’m not sure, exactly.” Steve hesitates, both hands cupped around his coffee as if to warm or steady them. “It doesn’t make any sense at all. I keep going over it in my mind, and now . . . I don’t know what to think.”

  “Okay. Just give me the details. Don’t worry about why it might have happened or question whether it did happen. Just tell me what you remember.”

  Steve explains that he was out running along the shoulder of Bachellor Hill Road, on his way back from circling Bear Lake, which lies a few miles west of here. He describes how a car came up behind him, much too close to him, and he managed to jump out of the way just before he was sideswiped.

  “Maybe the driver didn’t see you?”

  “That’s what I figured. The sun hadn’t been up for long, and it was in my eyes, so it must have been in his, too.”

  “So it was a man driving?”

  “I couldn’t tell.”

  Luther makes a note. “Did you get a description of the car? Make, model, color, plate?”

  “No.”

  “But it was a car? Not an SUV or a truck, something like that?”

  “No.” Pause. “I’m not sure. It happened so fast.”

  “And you couldn’t see the driver at all?”

  “Not at all. Like I said, the sun was glaring.”

  “And what time was this?”

  Steve guesses it must have been around six thirty. He’d left the house, he says, just after five.

  Bella remembers the footsteps she’d heard in the hall before she stubbed her toe . . . or was it after?

  Everything is muddled in her sleep-deprived brain.

  But there were footsteps, definitely. She’d thought she’d heard a cry, too, and then a thud.

  What time would that have occurred?

  Her night had been neatly segmented into time slots for Spidey’s feedings, but it’s all fuzzy now.

  Was it at two?

  No.

  Four, probably. After the four o’clock feeding. She remembers thinking the footsteps belonged to one of the guests and not caring that she wasn’t downstairs to put on the coffee at that hour.

  “What time did you get up?” she asks Steve Pierson.

  “About a quarter to five. Maybe closer to ten of.”

  She’d put the kitten back and returned to bed long before that. She’d heard the footsteps earlier. And the cry, the thud . . .

  If she’d heard those things at all. Maybe she’d been dreaming. Her dreams here have been so vivid. Leona in the mirror, the wind chimes . . .

  Her eyes are burning. She closes them and rubs them.

  Is it all in my head? Is this place getting to me? Is the exhaustion getting to me?

  “After the car drove away, I started running again,” Steve tells Luther. “But the next thing I knew . . . it was back. It was coming straight at me from the opposite direction. And then it swerved. It crossed over the line.”

  Just as Grant did last night when he was driving Bella and Max to the vet with the cat and kittens. Grant swerved around the potholes. He crossed over the line.

  “So the car swerved to miss you? Is that what you mean?”

  “No,” Steve says flatly. “It swerved to hit me. I dove off the road into the bushes. I guess that’s how I got scratched up.”

  “Let me get this straight.” Luther puts down the pen and rests his chin on his fist. “A car passed you from behind, missed you, turned around immediately, came back, and aimed right at you?”

  “Yes.”

  Luther’s eyes briefly connect with Bella’s. Clearly, he doesn’t like this.

  Yeah, well . . . join the club.

  “Is there anyone you can think of who might have reason to harm you?” he asks Steve.

  “You mean besides the president of the teacher’s union back home?” Steve’s staccato laugh is met by Luther’s questioning brow.

  “Look, Detective, I’m a school superintendent. There’s a lot of strife between the union, the administration, and the board. I’ve made a few enemies, I’m sure.”

  “Has anyone ever threatened you?”

  “Plenty of people have threatened to have me fired.”

  “How recently?”

  “Recently. In fact, just last week.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I’m not bowing to pressure from people who don’t believe in diverting funding from other areas of the budget for our drama program. I’ve been involved in plenty of theatrical productions over the years, so yes, I’m a strong advocate for arts education. Stronger than most, maybe. But trust me—no one has ever tried to run me over because of that, and even if they wanted to, I can’t imagine how they’d find me here.”

  “In Lily Dale?”

  Steve nods.

  Luther picks up his pen again. “So you didn’t mention to anyone back home where you were headed on vacation?”

  “Are you kidding?” He shakes his head. “No way. I told them I was going to Niagara Falls—which we did do, on the way here.”

  “Why are you here?”

  “Because my wife insists. This is her thing. She used to come with her sister every summer, but then Mamie moved out west to be near her kids, so Eleanor talked me into coming with her. She doesn’t like to travel alone.”

  “And you told people—your friends? your colleagues?—that you’re on vacation in Niagara Falls? Why?”

  “Why do you think? I’m in a position of authority, and I work with kids. The parents, the teachers—these days, everyone’s a critic as it is. Do you think I want to jeopardize my job by having them buzzing about how Doctor Pierson hangs out with a bunch of Spiritualists?”

  “In other words, you don’t want to jeopardize your job.”

  “In this climate? Does anyone?”

  Bella can answer that question: definitely not. Having been a victim of school budget cuts herself, s
he understands Steve’s point. Like most administrators, his head must perpetually be on the chopping block.

  Steve steeples his fingers beneath his scraped-up chin. “I’m close to retirement with a nice pension and full health insurance coverage for me and Eleanor for the rest of our lives. There are plenty of taxpayers in the district who are looking for any possible way to trim the budget. Believe me, they’d jump at any opportunity to get rid of me and wriggle out of my benefits package.”

  “By ‘get rid of,’ you mean . . .”

  “I mean fire me,” he says with a jittery laugh. “Not . . . kill me.”

  “Are you sure about that?”

  “I . . . I thought I was sure, but . . .” He breaks off and looks up at the ceiling as a floorboard creaks overhead.

  Bella follows his gaze and then turns to glance at the stove clock. It’s nearly a quarter to eight.

  Time for the guests to start trickling down to breakfast. Almost time to feed Spidey again, too.

  “Why don’t we finish this conversation in the study?” Luther suggests.

  “Study?” Steve echoes blankly, still looking shell-shocked at the notion that someone might be out to get him.

  “Leona’s . . . office. Whatever you want to call it.”

  The room that was locked when it shouldn’t have been. The room with the missing key.

  “We can talk privately in there,” Luther tells Steve. “I just don’t want to alarm anyone who’s staying here. We don’t want them to think there’s any danger.”

  Unnerved, Bella gets to her feet, as do Steve and Luther. She pulls the key ring from her pocket as they head toward the study.

  “I’ll unlock the door for you. Then I have a few things to take care of . . . unless you need me?”

  “No, it’s fine,” Luther tells her. “Go ahead. I’ll connect with you afterward.”

  She nods. She has to tell him about Leona’s financial situation. And about Grant.

  Not that there’s anything specific to tell, other than the fact that he’s arrived. And that she’s found herself suspicious of him one moment and convinced he’s a great guy the next.

  A great guy?

  Hardly.

  Sam was a great guy. No one else could ever compare.

  Certainly not Grant. And not Doctor Bailey. Not Troy Valeri.

  As she turns the key and opens the French door, she recalls that Troy mentioned he’d known Leona. He’d recently done some painting for her.