Nine Lives

by Wendy Corsi Staub

  “I don’t know why I picked it.”

  “’Cause your dad said it would cheer up your mom,” Jiffy says. “Remember?”

  Bella’s heart lurches.

  She sees Pandora give a slight nod and realizes that she’s no longer looking at Max. She’s staring at something beside him, in a spot where there’s nothing but thin air.

  It’s just like the first day Bella met her, when she was conversing with an invisible someone and informed Bella that she’s supposed to be here.

  Really? Because right now, she’d rather be just about anyplace else on the face of the earth. Enough already. She’s got enough problems wrangling the living. The last thing she needs to do is worry about the dead.

  “We have to go,” she says firmly. “Right now.”

  “Bella, wait. Hyacinthoides non-scripta doesn’t bloom in July,” Pandora tells her as she hands the helmets to the boys and starts propelling them away with one hand on each of their shoulders. “It only blooms in springtime.”

  Bella whirls on her. “Stop! I don’t want any more botany lessons! Can’t you see I don’t care? You’re out of line! How can you get so upset with a little boy for picking a stupid flower? And then to insist on talking to him about . . . about . . .”

  “Oh, darling, I wasn’t angry that he picked a bloody flower! Children have been doing it for centuries. Especially those.”

  “What do you mean, especially those?”

  Pandora recites, “‘That such fair clusters should be rudely torn from their fresh beds, and scattered thoughtlessly by infant hands, left on the path to die.’ At least Max left the petals intact,” she adds with a rueful smile.

  He turns around to look at her. “Hey, is that a poem?”

  “Yes. It’s about England, and it’s called ‘I Stood Tip-Toe Upon a Little Hill.’ It’s by Keats.”

  The name hits Bella like a splash of ice water.

  Pandora takes a few steps toward her, as if approaching a skittish animal. After a moment, she cautiously holds out the flower. “Here, love. Please take it. You’re supposed to have it.”

  “What . . . what do you mean?”

  “I’m sorry. I wasn’t trying to give you a botany lesson. I just thought it might have special meaning for you. It must be blooming out of season for a reason.”

  “That’s a poem, too, by the way,” Jiffy observes. “Season rhymes with reason.”

  Everything happens for a reason . . .

  “My dad liked poems.”

  Oh, Max. Your dad especially liked Keats.

  But he wouldn’t know that.

  “We have to go,” Bella says again, and her voice comes out choked.

  “Right, then.” Pandora reaches for her hand, pressing the flower into it. “Just take the bluebell.”

  Bluebell?

  “I thought you said it was a . . . some sort of hyacinth.”

  “Hyacinthoides non-scripta is the botanical name. Back in Britain—and here, too—we just call them bluebells.”

  Bella stares down at the flower.

  Bluebell.

  Bella Blue.

  As she wipes at her stinging eyes with her hand, she hears Jiffy tell Max, “I don’t think that flower cheered her up very good.”

  She hears something else, too.

  Sirens. Louder now, wailing closer by the second.

  “Mom?” Max shrinks a little closer to her. “Is there a fire?”

  “It isn’t a fire truck,” Pandora says, and Bella follows her gaze across the park.

  Now she sees it too. It isn’t a fire truck. It’s an ambulance. And it’s heading down Cottage Row toward Valley View Manor.

  * * *

  Less than ten minutes later, Bella closes the Rose Room door behind her and exhales at last.

  She hustled the boys away from Pandora’s and was relieved when she saw that the ambulance had gone on past Valley View Manor. Down in the grassy common at the end of the lane, she could see the spinning red lights. Paramedics were kneeling there, nearly obscuring a prone figure on the grass at the water’s edge.

  There were a few rubberneckers, but not many. Most everyone was still in the auditorium.

  “What happened?” Max asked.

  She managed to find her voice. “I don’t know. Let’s go inside.”

  Jiffy wanted to investigate, but Bella told him to come along with them.

  “Come on,” she coaxed, “you can have cookies and watch TV.”

  “It’s the middle of the afternoon,” Max reminded her. “And we had ice cream.”

  “I know, but it’s a special treat because Jiffy is a guest. The cookies will be your dessert.”

  Giggling at the hilarious notion of dessert after dessert, they accompanied her into the house. She turned on the television and filled a plate with Odelia’s zucchini-jalapeño-lime cookies and told them to stay put while she fed the kitten.

  As she enters the room, Chance looks up expectantly, almost reproachfully, as if to say, You’re late.

  Well aware that there’s no time to waste getting food into little Spidey, Bella walks over to the dresser and looks down at the flower in her hand. She’d squeezed it so tightly all the way home that its petals are drooping a bit. They aren’t just shaped like upside down lilies. They’re shaped like bells. Little blue bells.

  Bella Blue.

  “Sam?” she whispers, staring at it, trying to focus, trying to hear him, just like Odelia had said. “Sam, are you here?”

  All she can hear are the kittens’ faint mews and more sirens.

  “Sam? Please. I think they’ve pulled someone out of the lake, and I don’t know who it was, and I . . . I’m afraid. I try to be strong, but . . . I need you. Please.”

  No reply.

  She tosses the flower onto the dresser. It lands on the pile of Leona’s financial papers. None of that seems to matter now.

  As she turns toward the box of kittens, she remembers what Odelia said about Chance—that she was born in the spring, in a bed of blooming Wood Hyacinths that weren’t Wood Hyacinths at all. No, Chance, the cat who crossed her path and led her here to Lily Dale, was born in a bed of bluebells.

  “You sent her, Sam, didn’t you? You sent her to me. You knew I’d figure it out sooner or later. Bluebells. Bella Blue.”

  Once again, her eyes are filling with tears. She wipes at them with her hand, but they keep coming.

  “Can’t you just say something, Sam? Can’t you let me hear you, or see you?”

  She reaches into her pocket for the crumpled paper towel that was there a few minutes ago, entangled with the keys when she went to unlock the front door.

  She must have dropped it. But she feels the socks she’d stashed there and pulls one out, not caring if she gets it soggy with tears or even blows her nose on it.

  As she lifts it to her face, though, she realizes it isn’t a sock at all.

  It’s a floral-print scrunchy. Not the same print as the dress Pandora had on this afternoon, but the green-and-yellow one she’d worn the other day.

  How did this get into her pocket?

  Frowning, she reaches back in for her socks. She finds one.

  Only one.

  But she’d dropped two on the closet floor this morning while she was looking in her bag for her other sneaker. She’d picked them up, one right after the other, and put them into her pocket.

  Frowning, she hastily wipes her eyes on the sock and walks over to where her open suitcase sits on the low mahogany rack just inside the closet door. She pulls a chain to illuminate the overhead light.

  Beneath the crisscross of the rack’s wooden legs, on the closet floor, sits the other sock she’d dropped and thought she’d picked up.

  Pulse racing, she looks again at the stack of papers on the dresser. The ones Max had said he’d found scattered on the floor.

  All at once, they matter again.

  I have to tell Luther.

  He’s at the hospital with his sick mother. He said he’d be ba
ck as soon as possible. She shouldn’t call him in the midst of a personal crisis.

  But what if she just sends him a text? That wouldn’t be as intrusive as a phone call, would it?

  He said to holler if I need help. And I need . . .

  She looks back at the wilting bluebell lying beside the papers.

  Sam.

  He’s what she needs. But he isn’t answering her plea. Luther might.

  She grabs his business card and her phone, wondering if he can even receive texts. Oh, well. She’ll soon find out.

  She starts typing with trembling fingers: Sorry to bother you, but I figured out who did it. It’s—

  She pauses, realizing that her heart isn’t the only thing that’s pounding.

  There’s a burst of loud knocking—banging—on the front door.

  “Mom!” Max calls. “Someone’s here!”

  Still clutching the scrunchy and her cell phone, she scurries out into the hall and down the stairs. Through the glass, she can see the outline of a man.

  Has Luther, like Pandora Feeney, materialized at the mere thought of his name? Is that how it works here in Lily Dale?

  For a fleeting instant, in her overworked, overtired brain, it seems entirely possible. Anything seems possible.

  Then she opens the door and sees that it isn’t Luther at all. It’s a uniformed police officer.

  Chapter Seventeen

  For the second time today, Bella sits at the kitchen table with an authoritative man.

  But John Grange isn’t the least bit avuncular, there’s no warmth in his blue eyes, and he isn’t retired law enforcement. He’s a police lieutenant. And she’s pretty sure he’s not trying to determine whether there’s been a crime. More likely, he’s investigating one that brought him to Bella’s doorstep.

  Her legs had nearly given way when she saw him standing there.

  He flashed his badge, asked if she’s the woman who’s taken over for Leona Gatto, and said he needed to speak to her.

  Her voice quaked as she invited him in.

  Conscious of Max and Jiffy watching, wide-eyed, from the parlor, she led him straight to the kitchen.

  Now they face each other. He has a body builder’s physique, a blond buzz cut, and a hint of sunburn on his clean-shaven cheeks.

  He reaches into his pocket.

  Is he going to take out a gun? Handcuffs?

  Pandora Feeney’s matching scrunchy?

  Possibilities fly through her head as she steels herself for whatever is about to happen.

  A pen. He takes out a pen. And a small notepad.

  She attempts to resume breathing, but the boulder has rolled over her ribcage again, as if nudged into place by a barrage of questions.

  Did Luther determine that Leona was murdered?

  Or did Odelia go to the police?

  Had the two of them been conspiring against Bella?

  Has she been a suspect all along?

  Is she going to need a lawyer?

  Millicent—she’ll have to call Millicent. Her mother-in-law can afford to help, but at what price? She already seems to have concluded Bella is an unfit mother. What if she takes Max away, regardless of whether Bella is convicted for a crime she didn’t commit?

  Convicted? Stop getting ahead of yourself.

  She doesn’t even know why Lieutenant Grange is here.

  He’s asking her questions, writing down the answers: her full name, date of birth, address . . .

  She falters.

  The cop rephrases the question. “Where do you live?”

  Aware that stumbling this early in the game doesn’t bode well, she explains, “I’m actually on the move.”

  She immediately regrets her phrasing. Does on the move sound too much like on the lam?

  “That is, we’re moving,” she amends. “My son and I are moving. From New York to Chicago. We just stopped here for a few days when our car broke down.”

  He asks her about that and for her last address and the one in Chicago. Her heart sinks as she provides it. Now Millicent is irrevocably involved.

  After a few final questions, she works up the courage to ask him what’s going on.

  “A woman was found a short time ago lying unconscious in the reeds at the edge of the lake.”

  Her breath catches in her throat.

  “Unconscious? So she’s not . . . ?”

  “She’s alive, but barely. She’d been in the water, and it looks like she nearly drowned but managed to get to shore.”

  “Who is she?” Bella asks. “The woman, I mean.”

  “We don’t know. She had no identification. But we found this in her pocket.” He holds up a key ring that contains an old-fashioned bit key, a deadbolt key, and a silver heart-shaped disk inscribed with VVM. One of the sets Leona had engraved for this season.

  That explains his presence. Wanting to believe that this has nothing to do with Leona’s drowning, Bella’s mind flies through the catalogue of female guests: Eleanor Pierson, Helen Adabner, the St. Clair sisters, Kelly Tookler, Bonnie Barrington . . .

  Bonnie was nowhere to be found earlier.

  “What does she look like?” she asks Lieutenant Grange. “Is she young?”

  “Older.”

  “Elderly?”

  “No. Middle-aged. Short, dark hair.”

  That description narrows it to Helen or Eleanor.

  “What kind of build does she have?” Bella asks, her heart sinking. She likes them both. “Is she more athletic or heavyset?”

  “Neither. She isn’t heavyset—but I wouldn’t say athletic, either.”

  Eyeing his muscular body, she considers his perspective. A man as fit as he is might not describe very many people as athletic—not even a fifty-something woman who jogs most mornings.

  With a stab of sorrow, she says, “I think I know who it is.”

  Eleanor.

  He writes down the woman’s name.

  “When was the last time you saw her?”

  She thinks back. “Last night, around dinner time, when she and her husband left for the message service.”

  “So she’s here with her husband? What’s his name?”

  He writes it down and then asks Bella when she last saw Steve.

  “This morning.” She hesitates, not sure whether to mention what had happened to him while he was out running.

  Before she can decide, the officer asks again about Eleanor—about where she might have been this morning and whether Steve had mentioned her.

  “He said she was still sleeping.”

  But Eleanor, too, runs in the mornings. What if she wasn’t there when Steve went upstairs after Luther left?

  If she were missing, though, wouldn’t Steve have come looking for her?

  He would . . . unless he hadn’t told the truth about having left her in bed this morning.

  He hadn’t wanted to call the police.

  Bella presses a hand to her forehead, wishing it could steady her whirling thoughts.

  “Where is Mr. Pierson right now?” Lieutenant Grange asks.

  “Last I knew, he was upstairs in his room, but I haven’t seen him in a few hours.”

  “Mind if we go take a look?”

  She shakes her head and forces herself to her feet. Max and Jiffy are so absorbed in their program again that they don’t even look up as Bella and Lieutenant Grange pass by on the way upstairs.

  In her haste to answer the officer’s knock, Bella left the door to the Rose Room ajar. Beyond the threshold, she knows, Chance is tending to seven of her kittens, as the eighth goes hungry.

  She’s counting on me.

  Yes, just like Bella’s own mother had long ago asked Aunt Sophie to step in for her. It’s just what moms do—take care of other moms’ children when they can’t do it themselves.

  Can’t—or just don’t, she thinks as she passes Grant’s closed door, thinking of him—and of Jiffy, too. And of Leona and Odelia and Odelia’s medium friend Ramona, all of whom have tended to the o
rphaned, abandoned, or wayward offspring of other women.

  I guess it really does take a village.

  Even Lily Dale, which is perhaps the oddest village in the world, is just like any other caring community when you look beyond its mystical façade.

  Bella leads the police officer down the hall to the Apple Room and steels herself as she knocks on the door. Hearing no movement on the other side, she turns to the officer. He holds up the key ring with a questioning look, and she nods.

  Just as he’s about to insert it into the lock, the door opens.

  Eleanor Pierson looks back at them with red-rimmed eyes that widen when she sees the police officer.

  Hearing a gasp, Bella is uncertain whether it came from Eleanor or herself. Perhaps both.

  She’s startled—albeit relieved—to see Eleanor.

  Eleanor appears equally startled—and anything but relieved—to see a uniformed officer. She braces herself against the doorframe. “Did something happen to Steve?”

  “No,” Bella says, laying a hand on the woman’s arm to steady her.

  Nothing happened to Eleanor, either. So who is the woman barely clinging to life down by the lake?

  “Are you Eleanor Pierson?” Lieutenant Grange asks.

  “Yes. Is it Steve?” Did something happen to him?”

  The police officer assures her that’s not why he’s here and asks where her husband is.

  “He went to fill up the car with gas and get a few things from the store.”

  Bella notices an open suitcase and a pile of clothing behind her on the bed. “Are you leaving?”

  Eleanor’s gaze flicks to the police officer and then back to Bella.

  She nods. “Our daughter called. She’s in labor. We have to get back to Boston.”

  Bella would be certain she’s lying if she didn’t sound so earnest—and if she hadn’t mentioned just yesterday that their daughter is expecting their first grandchild. Besides, how could a fine, upstanding woman like Eleanor Pierson lie to a police officer?

  But she does look upset, Bella realizes, as if she’s been crying.

  Is it just because Steve told her what happened to him this morning, or has there since been another threat?

  Should Bella bring up any of that here and now, in front of a police officer trying to identify a nearly drowned woman?