Dead of Winter

by Wendy Corsi Staub

  It’s . . . something wrapped in a tarp, something that looks . . .

  Human.

  * * *

  “Is this Mrs. Starr?”

  Technically, she’s Mrs. Arden. But here in Lily Dale, she goes by the name painted on the sign out front.

  Misty Starr, Registered Medium.

  “Yes, this is Misty Starr,” she tells the male voice on the phone and hurries toward the parlor to find her appointment book and a pen. She trips over the mud-covered red sneaker she’d told Jiffy to leave out on the porch after he lost the other one out in the rain. “How can I help you, sir? Are you looking for spiritual guidance?”

  “No. I’m looking for my December rent.”

  Misty stops in her tracks. “Is this . . . ?”

  “It’s Virgil Barbor,” her landlord confirms, and she curses under her breath, wishing she hadn’t answered the phone. “When I stopped by to fix the washing machine, you said you’d have it for me by last Saturday. I’ve been trying to let this slide, but it’s over two weeks late now, and with the holidays coming, January rent will be due before you know it.”

  “I know. I’m sorry, but the washing machine is broken again.”

  “It is? Why didn’t you tell me?”

  Because I knew it would remind you that the rent is overdue.

  “Okay,” Virgil says, “I’ll come take another look this afternoon. That way you can give me the rent check, save a stamp.”

  “I . . . today isn’t good. I have back-to-back appointments all day.”

  It’s not true. She has one, a new client who called over the weekend and is due here any second.

  “Tomorrow morning will be better,” she tells the landlord. She has no appointments scheduled, so she’ll just make sure she isn’t home when he arrives. She’ll leave a note on the door saying she was called away on urgent business. That should hold him off for a while.

  He hangs up with a promise to stop by around noon. Misty writes his name in her appointment book and circles it in red, a reminder that she needs to get out of here before that. She’ll take her heaping pile of laundry to the laundromat. She and Jiffy have sparse winter wardrobes, having recently moved here from the blazing hot Southwest, and they’re both out of clean clothing.

  With that settled, Misty goes into her meditation room to prepare for her visitor.

  Paneled in whitewashed bead board, it had once served as a storm porch off the kitchen. Sometime in the last century, the resident spiritualist medium had converted it, covering the creaky wooden floor in blue indoor-outdoor carpeting, installing baseboard heating, and turning the exterior door into a window. The top three sides of the trim match, but the sill is conspicuously no-frills. Viewed from outside, a crumbling stone stairway rises from the weedy foundation to a clumsily patched rectangle of clapboards that aren’t quite the right shade of mustard yellow.

  Just another little quirk in a quirky little house in a quirky little town.

  As Misty reaches to close the drapes, she glimpses someone in the side yard that separates her cottage from Odelia Lauder’s. He’s stooped over the patch of ground cover alongside the house. Probably a handyman winterizing the flowerbeds or whatever it is gardeners do, Misty concludes, her knowledge of plant life restricted to the white sage she burns to cleanse the place of lingering energy.

  She hears tires crunching up the street out front.

  So does the handyman, who isn’t a handyman at all. He’s . . .

  Elvis Presley?

  She blinks, and he’s gone.

  Huh. Just when she thought she’d learned to distinguish an apparition from a living person.

  A car door slams. Must be her client, Priscilla Galante.

  Misty yanks the curtains closed, lights the candle on the table, and silences her cell phone. Time to earn her keep. She can’t avoid Virgil Barbor forever, and there’s no way Mike will help her pay the rent. Not when she and their son are supposed to be living in perfectly perfect—unquirky—housing back on the Arizona military base.

  She opens the door to see a turquoise Mustang parked at the curb and a pert-looking, pretty brunette on the porch.

  “My husband would go nuts for that car,” Misty says, “especially with those Pennsylvania license plates. Where are you from?”

  “Less than an hour from here. Erie.”

  “Mike grew up near Allentown.” She doesn’t mention that he’s been estranged from his family there as long as she’s known him, stemming from a silly argument that escalated after his mother passed away. She’s never met his father or brothers. For all she knows, they aren’t even aware that she and Jiffy exist.

  Her visitor clears her throat. “Anyway . . . I’m Priscilla Galante. Are you Misty Starr?”

  Shifting her attention from the car to her new client, Misty is struck by a fierce flash of recognition.

  “We’ve met before.”

  “Um, I don’t think so. I’ve never been here, and unless you’ve been in Erie . . . ?”

  “No. That’s not it.”

  Studying her more closely, Misty notes that her aura is black—not necessarily an indication of questionable character. She’s here for a reason, and it might be that she’s entrenched in grief, or anger, or depression. Any of those emotions might cast a dark pall over her energy.

  “Well . . .” Shifting her weight and looking anxiously back at her car, Priscilla says, “I guess I just have one of those familiar faces. People tell me that I look like Anne Hathaway.”

  “Who?”

  “The actress—after she cut her hair for the movie Les Mis. She—”

  “I don’t even know who she is. Must have met you in a past life.”

  At that, Priscilla looks again at her car, this time as though she’s going to jump back into it and flee. Misty rests a hand on her shoulder, and she jumps as if she’s been burned.

  “Try to relax. Is this your first reading?”

  “Yes. Sorry, I’m a little nervous.”

  Stress and uncertainty—a few more possible reasons her aura is showing black.

  “Come on inside, and I’ll explain how it works. Careful, don’t trip.” She kicks a Lego contraption out of their path as she closes the door and sighs when the pieces scatter. Jiffy isn’t going to like that. He spent a long time building it.

  “You have a son?” Priscilla asks.

  “How did you know?”

  “Just, uh, you know . . . the Legos.”

  “Girls play with them, too, you know.”

  “No, I know. Sorry, I shouldn’t have assumed.”

  “That’s all right. My son loves Legos. But so did I at his age. I don’t believe in gender-specific playthings,” she says with a forced smile.

  Mike practically had a heart attack a few years back when she told him she’d bought their son a Barbie doll.

  “Why would you do that?”

  “Because he wanted it.”

  “That doesn’t mean he should have it.”

  “If you don’t approve of my decisions, maybe you should hang around long enough to make some.”

  “I’m serving our country!”

  “You said you’d only be in the Middle East for a year. It’s three going on four.”

  “I’m doing what I have to do,” he’d said tightly.

  Misty had decided it was time she did the same. She’d begun her mediumship studies back in Arizona, joining a Spiritualist Assembly not far from the military base where they’d lived until last spring.

  Mike hadn’t quite given his blessing—far from it. But he seemed to consider it a harmless hobby, like other spouses dabbling in scrapbooking or organizing weekly potlucks.

  He hadn’t been as accepting last spring when she’d rented a cottage in Lily Dale, where she’d spent childhood summers, and carted their kid and most indispensable possessions over two thousand miles. She’d told Mike that it was just for the summer, but she’d known they wouldn’t be going back to Arizona when autumn came.

&nbs
p; Mike had to have known as well, though he’d seemed flabbergasted when she’d enrolled their son in school here in September.

  “How dare you make a decision like that without consulting me.”

  “If you’re going to live halfway around the world, why do you care where we are? What difference does it make whether we’re on the base in Arizona or in Lily Dale?”

  “There’s a difference, and you know it. He’s my son, too.”

  Jiffy might look like his dad, but he’s inherited something far more relevant from his mom. That was obvious as soon as he was old enough to hold what might have appeared to be a one-sided toddler conversation but was clearly—to her, anyway—something more.

  Fearing for his future if he didn’t embrace his gift, Misty had decided to embrace hers. It might not be paying the bills yet, and maybe it never would, but at least she’s finally living an authentic life.

  She leads Priscilla to her dimly lit meditation room and closes the door behind them, tuning out troubling thoughts about her marriage and the faint sound of a siren in the distance.

  * * *

  Waiting on the porch, Bella immediately recognizes the uniformed officer who steps out of the police car at the curb. Lieutenant John Grange showed up at Valley View back in July when one of her guests was pulled from the lake barely alive. That near tragedy, like Leona Gatto’s drowning, hadn’t been an accident.

  Bella had found him thoroughly intimidating on that awful day. He’ll probably be much nicer now that she’s not a murder suspect.

  “I’m Bella Jordan,” she says as he flashes a badge and reintroduces himself. “I’m the one who called.”

  “I know.”

  He knows she’s the one who dialed 9-1-1, or he remembers her name from that awful day last summer? Both, probably. Finding someone in the lake—dead or near dead—is probably pretty memorable. Although perhaps not as uncommon as one might expect in a town this size.

  Grange fixes her with that unnerving gaze of his. “So you found something in the lake.”

  “Yes, I—”

  “What’s going on down there?”

  She looks up to see Odelia leaning out of her bathroom window. She isn’t wearing a stitch of clothing on the part of her that’s visible, which is considerably more than Bella is comfortable seeing. Judging by Grange’s pained grunt, it’s far too much for him.

  “Just here to check out some debris that washed up, Mrs. Lauder,” he calls back, averting his eyes. “Nothing to worry about.”

  “Are you sure? Bella?”

  “It’s fine, Odelia. Don’t worry. You go back to your bubble bath.”

  “Well, you’ll have to come fetch me if you need anything. I was about to plug in my monks, and I won’t hear a thing.” She holds up a pair of headphones, revealing even more of her fleshy, freckled self.

  Grange winces. “Plug in her monks? What does that mean?”

  “She likes to listen to Tibetan chants while she’s in the tub. They relax her,” Bella explains, then calls to Odelia, “It’s fine, go ahead. If we need you, we’ll come get you.”

  “I’ll leave that to you. Not that we’ll need her,” Grange mutters as the window slams shut overhead. “Show me what you found.”

  Bella leads him around the house. The shoreline is deserted, aside from a pair of Canadian geese bobbing in the lake and a few more honking overhead.

  “There.” Bella points to the large black object in the shallow water, mired by mossy rocks. “See it?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Do you think it’s—?”

  “No way of knowing from here, is there?” he snaps.

  She bites her lower lip to keep from reminding him that she’s not a suspect but a good citizen reporting something out of the ordinary.

  “How long has it been there, Ms. Jordan?”

  “I don’t know. It wasn’t there yesterday afternoon.”

  “So it’s been there less than twenty-four hours, correct?”

  “I guess. I probably would have seen it when I was watching my son put out the garbage after school.”

  His eye goes to the rolling can alongside the shed that sits halfway between the house and the water. “You watch your son put out the garbage?”

  “It was getting dark. He’s only six. Anyway, I saw a boat out on the water last night,” she goes on, “and I heard . . . something. I thought it was a scream, but my, uh . . . friend said it was an owl.”

  “She heard it, too?”

  Bella shakes her head. No need to explain that the friend isn’t a she.

  “About what time was that?”

  “After seven. Almost eight. Maybe after eight,” she realizes, “because Rudolph was on.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “My son was watching Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer on TV at the time, so whatever time that aired . . . it was sometime in there.”

  Grange pulls out a notebook and jots that down. “Anything else you want to tell me before I go take a look?”

  She hesitates and shakes her head, feeling like a suspect again.

  He tucks the notebook back into his pocket and strides to the water.

  She can’t help but feel a guilty prickle of satisfaction as he skids in the muck at the shore, arms windmilling before he regains his balance with a curse. This endeavor is more suitable for waders than those shiny black shoes, and he doesn’t seem like the kind of guy who’d want to get his feet wet and dirty.

  However, not only does he proceed through the mud to get a better look at the tarp, but after leaning in, he takes a few steps into the water. Ankle deep, he reaches into his pocket and takes out a pair of gloves. Bella swallows a lump of trepidation as he puts them on.

  He probes at the tarp, and she looks away, afraid of what she might glimpse. She spots a large black bird soaring against the clear blue sky. An owl?

  No, a crow. It lands with a flapping of wings in the ginkgo branches and caws ominously. She turns to see Grange gingerly wading back to dry ground.

  “Lieutenant? What is it?”

  He doesn’t answer her question, holding up a finger as he speaks into his phone.

  “Yeah, I need backup at Valley View in the Dale . . . Yeah . . . Yeah. And the medical examiner. I’ve got a DOA here.”

  Chapter Three

  “Any questions before we begin?” Misty asks Priscilla.

  “Questions for you or for the ghosts?”

  “For me. Not Spirit.” Misty emphasizes the proper terminology.

  “No, no questions.”

  “All right, good.”

  Misty rubs her hands together, preparing to shift her awareness away from this small room filled with shadows and flickering candles. Drawn navy blue draperies obscure the shoreline view and muffle the faint cries of gulls. She does her best to tune them out and tries, too, not to speculate about Priscilla’s place in her past—recent or ancient. Someday, it will probably come to her. Her mediumship training has taught her that soul recognition is quite common, especially in romantic relationships.

  “With more experience,” her Lily Dale mentor, Pandora Feeney, had told her, “you’ll be able to grasp the significance of various familiar strangers you meet.”

  So far, she’s only grasped the significance of one: her husband.

  She’d experienced an undeniable connection to Mike the first time she spotted him at the Cedar Point amusement park back in Sandusky. Misty had never been a fan of rides, and Mike hated crowds, and neither of them had ever visited the theme park before. Dragged along by pals, they were destined to find each other there on that blistering, humid summer day.

  That is, destined to find each other again.

  She and Mike have been together in countless lifetimes, not always as husband and wife. Some might call them soul mates, in that they’re repeatedly drawn to each other. But Pandora had told her that a connection as powerful as theirs isn’t irrevocable in this lifetime or in any other.

  “As long as you have unfinish
ed business, you’ll be together. When you’ve learned all the lessons you’re meant to learn from each other, you’ll evolve.”

  Misty doesn’t like to think about that.

  “Wait,” Priscilla says, “I do have a question. Aren’t you going to use tarot cards, or tea leaves, or . . . something?”

  “No. Every medium works differently. I’m very visual. I pass along whatever Spirit shows me. Sometimes it’ll be a symbol, and I interpret it the best I can.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Let’s say I see white lace. It might mean a wedding, it might mean you have white lace curtains in your house, or it might mean, I don’t know, Karen Carpenter is coming through again.”

  “Karen Carpenter?”

  “You know, the singer? She sang that song, ‘We’ve Only Just Begun,’ about white lace and promises . . .”

  Priscilla looks blank.

  “Oh, well, anyway, she passed years ago, but she pops in once in a while. A lot of musicians do.”

  “Anyone I’ve heard of?”

  “Sean Von Vogel touched in with me this morning.” Seeing Priscilla’s eyes widen, Misty goes on, “And just before you got here, Elvis Presley materialized outside.”

  “Wow. What were they doing here?”

  “Hard to tell. I felt as though Von Vogel might have a message, but I’m not sure yet what it is. And Elvis . . . well, that was different.”

  “Different how?”

  “Different energy. Spirit doesn’t always manifest in a physical form, but I saw him clear as day.”

  “That’s pretty cool. Do you see anyone now?”

  “Only you.” Misty flashes a smile. “Hold out your hands toward me.”

  “Like this?”

  “No, palms up.”

  Priscilla obliges, a little shakily.

  “Try to relax.” Above her outstretched hands, Misty holds her own, face down, rife with hangnails and chapped from dishwater and cold.

  She inhales deeply through her nose. Pungent cottage mildew mingles with freshly burnt white sage. She closes her eyes, visually surrounding the room in protective white light, and invites her spirit guides and other positive energy.

  Hmm.

  She’s getting . . .