Dead of Winter

by Wendy Corsi Staub

  “Welcome to the club. Mine won’t stay charged.”

  “Maybe Santa will bring you a new phone,” Calla says, plugging her phone into the charger. “I can’t believe how much work you’ve done around this place. Is Grant pushing you?”

  “Grant is in Madrid this week on business, and then he’s heading to the Holy Land for Christmas, London for Boxing Day, skiing in St. Moritz, and St. Bart’s for New Year’s. Or is it the other way around?”

  “Which other way around?”

  “Good question. I can’t keep track of Grant and his world travels. The point is, Valley View is the last thing on his mind. But I need the extra money, so full speed ahead.”

  “I see Nadine is lending a hand.” Calla points at the basement door. It’s ajar with the light on and an electric drill whirring below.

  “That’s Hugo. But Nadine is more than welcome to pitch in with the rewiring. Her rates might be more affordable than his.”

  “Probably, and I bet she learned her electrical skills from Thomas Edison himself.”

  Bella smiles. Then her gaze falls on the window above the sink.

  All is peaceful this morning. Drifts drape like drop cloths over the lakeside Adirondack chairs where she spent many a summer sunset. Evergreens and the towering ginkgo tree sway in the wind, prettily flocked in white. Whooshing snow obscures all but the edge of the lake.

  “I know you’re worried.”

  Bella turns to see that she, too, is looking outside.

  “It’s just that I heard a scream the other night, right around the same time I saw someone on the lake in a boat. I wondered if someone was in trouble, but Drew convinced me it was a great horned owl.”

  “It’s the right time of year for them. They’re trying to lure their mates.”

  “That’s what he said.”

  “Maybe he and the great horned owl have a little something in common.”

  Bella ignores that. “He told me that some people consider them a bad omen.”

  “That’s true, but Jacy believes the opposite.”

  “He thinks the owl’s scream is good luck?”

  “I wouldn’t go that far, but he does say that they’re highly intelligent and spiritual creatures and that they seek out beings who share similar qualities.”

  “And you think that’s true?”

  “Jacy’s the most brilliant, sensitive man I’ve ever met, so . . . yes.”

  Bella is pretty sure that she spots a fleeting wistfulness in her eyes before she turns back to the window, staring out.

  “Calla, I don’t want to overstep, but . . . it sounds like you still love him.”

  “Oh, I do. I always will.”

  “Then do you ever think about getting back tog—”

  “No. No way. Sometimes love isn’t enough. He’s so busy with his residency and volunteer work and training for the next marathon and saving the world . . . there’s nothing left over for me. I got tired of spending so much time alone. And let me tell you, lonely stinks.”

  “Yeah. It does.”

  “I’m so sorry.” Calla hugs her. “I’m glad you have Max and the kitties. Thanks to you, I have Li’l Chap, and thanks to him, I have Blue.”

  The Russian Blue kitten had turned up at Valley View while Calla was visiting back in October, having just broken up with Jacy. She believes it was a sign that she was meant to reconcile with Blue Slayton. Her former high school sweetheart lives beyond the gate in what would pass for a mansion anywhere but around here is a palace.

  “Anyway, Bella, getting back to the owl . . . if one visits you, I really think you should consider it an honor and a blessing, not a curse.”

  “I’ll try, but . . . I just wish I hadn’t been so quick to dismiss the scream. I should have called the police.”

  “If it’s any consolation, it was already too late for Moroskov. He was dead before he hit the water, and I’m sure whoever did it is long gone.”

  Luther’s words, spoken with Luther’s confidence.

  If only Bella felt the same.

  If only this hadn’t happened, especially now when she’s trying so hard to make up for the Christmas Max didn’t have last year.

  If only Sam were here to remind her that they’re safe in their new home and that she’s strong enough to handle anything that comes their way and that—

  “Hey, do you hear that?” Calla asks.

  “The drilling? That’s Hugo.”

  “No, the music.”

  “What music?”

  “Shh.” She holds up a finger, head cocked, eyes closed. “‘Blue Christmas.’ Elvis. Hear it?”

  Bella’s eyes widen. “I heard it the other day on the car radio. But I don’t hear it now.”

  “Then it must be Spirit.”

  “You mean you can’t tell?”

  “Not always. Sometimes I hear something or see something, and I’m not sure if I’m the only one. If I am, it’s Spirit.”

  “But . . . why is Spirit playing ‘Blue Christmas’?”

  “Why do you think?”

  Merry Christmas, Bella Blue . . .

  Your aura is very blue . . . true blue . . .

  Is this a message from Sam?

  Calla dispels that theory before she can voice it. “Guess Spirit approves of my Blue Christmas.”

  Swallowing her own disappointment, Bella asks, “Your new kitten or your new love life?”

  “Both. I just put up a tree in honor of my fresh start with them. It’s a blue spruce, and guess what color the lights are?”

  “Purple?” Bella asks, deadpan.

  “Funny. You know what I’m getting at here.”

  “Spirit likes your holiday decorations?”

  “Blue . . . Blue . . . Blue Christmas. Hard to miss the meaning in that, right?”

  Privately, Bella thinks interpreting the song as a message that Spirit approves of Calla’s rekindled romance is a bit of a stretch. She’s usually one of the more level-headed people around here, but she’s only human. Maybe she’s looking for meaning where it might not exist. When it comes to Blue Slayton, especially, she sometimes sees what she wants to see.

  Then again, maybe you do the same thing, Bella Blue.

  Calla decides she’d better get back over to her grandmother’s and heads out into the storm, leaving Bella to return to her ladder. With luck, she’ll be able to patch and sand the San Andreas ceiling and make the room—and herself—presentable before Lauri and Dawn check in. Painting can wait another day.

  Scoop, spread, repeat.

  Her cell phone buzzes in her pocket. It’s a text alert from the local school district, dismissing the students immediately due to inclement weather.

  Her first reaction is relief that she doesn’t have to venture out in the storm to get Max.

  Her next is, What about Jiffy?

  When she’d locked the door after Calla, she’d seen the aqua-colored Mustang parked in front of the Arden home again. Yesterday, the well-dressed young woman had said Misty had asked her to come back another time; that she’d been distracted by “some weird message about a school bus.”

  Regardless of whether Bella believes in that stuff, Jiffy shouldn’t be out there alone in this storm, especially on the heels of yesterday’s murder investigation.

  I’ll go meet him, she decides. It’ll only take a few minutes.

  The trick is figuring out which minutes, since the bus isn’t running on its usual schedule.

  It’s eleven twenty-five now, and the bus can’t possibly arrive for another fifteen minutes. At eleven forty, she’ll ask Hugo to keep an eye on Max while she goes down to fetch Jiffy. The boy won’t be thrilled, but she’ll ease the humiliation by bringing him cookies.

  Last time she made peanut butter blossoms, she’d left them to cool on the counter, and Jiffy had plucked the chocolate kisses from most of them. He was genuinely contrite when she confronted him with a tray of cookies that had gaping holes in the centers. “Sorry, Bella. I love chocolate. I guess you n
eed to put two kisses in every cookie from now on so they won’t be ruined by me.”

  Smiling at the memory, she moves her ladder back to where she began spackling this morning. Her shoulders, arms, and neck ache as she sands the dried compound. The gritty rhythm mingles with Hugo’s hammering below. He’s whistling a Christmassy tune that’s much jauntier than “Blue Christmas,” and Bella sings along in her head.

  You better watch out . . . you better not cry . . .

  * * *

  Cash poor or not, Misty had been hoping Priscilla Galante wouldn’t show up for her appointment this morning, given the weather. But she arrived right on schedule, wearing a smart tweed coat over a beige cashmere sweater, trim brown velvet pants, and suede boots with a cozy sherpa lining.

  Sitting across from her, feeling most inadequate, Misty asks if she has any questions before they begin.

  “Not really.”

  “Try to relax, okay?”

  “I am, but I’m a little freaked out about the guy in the lake.”

  “What?”

  “You know . . . that man they found out here yesterday. I saw it on the news when I got home.”

  “The drowning victim? Did you know him?”

  “No. He didn’t drown,” Priscilla adds. “Someone killed him. Didn’t you hear?”

  “No, I, uh . . . I guess I didn’t. What happened?”

  “I’m not really sure, but I thought it was safe around here.”

  “It is.”

  Priscilla gives her a dubious look.

  Heart pounding, Misty tells her it’s time to begin. She bows her head and rubs her palms against each other, attempting to quiet her brain.

  It’s been in overdrive ever since the skittish sitter, Barbara, left yesterday. The scary school bus transporting Jiffy and the dead children had stayed with Misty to fester overnight, as did the sense of foreboding and her troubling phone conversation with Mike. Before going to bed, she’d texted him that he’d better call her today.

  He had, while she was brooding over coffee and Jiffy was chomping his way through a bowl of cereal, chattering nonstop as usual.

  The conversation with her husband didn’t start well.

  “You told me to call you back,” he said flatly, “so I am.”

  Their discussion erupted in curses and accusations and ended abruptly, just before Jiffy ran out the door with his backpack. She isn’t sure if he fled because he was late for the bus or because he’d figured out that his dad isn’t coming for Christmas.

  It’s beginning to look as though her son is going to grow up fatherless, just as she had. She was Jiffy’s age when hers drank himself to death. The night he passed, before she found out he was gone, he came into her room and sat on her bed. She smelled the liquor even before she heard his voice and felt the weight of his hand on her shoulder. He wasn’t slurring the way he usually did when he staggered in to say good night—and he wasn’t saying good night. He was saying good-bye.

  “You’re going to be just fine, little girl. I can help you more from here than I ever could there,” he’d said and apologized for not being a good daddy.

  She hadn’t argued. Of course she loved him, and he’d shown glimmers of affection and good humor over the years. But he’d spent his scant six years of fatherhood as an unhappily married, often unemployed drunk.

  Misty had thought that final encounter was just a dream until she’d woken up to her mother sobbing the terrible news.

  “I know, Mommy. I know he’s gone.” She’d known for a long time, somewhere deep inside, that her father wouldn’t live to see her grow up. But how could she have known he was going to die?

  How could she have seen him after he had?

  She hadn’t yet known about Spirit, or Lily Dale, or—

  The young woman sitting across from her makes a huffy sound. Soft, but decidedly impatient.

  Misty opens her eyes. “I’m sorry. I just don’t know if I can get anything. Today is . . . tough.”

  “Because of what happened yesterday?”

  “Because of a lot of things,” Misty shoots back. Least of all that. Yes, it’s troubling, but it’s not as if she knew the man.

  “Can you try again?”

  I wasn’t really trying before, Misty thinks. I was worried about my own problems, not yours.

  Does Priscilla have problems? From where Misty sits, the attractive young woman, with her sophisticated clothing and fancy car, must be pretty carefree. But then, she’s still surrounded by that dark aura, and she doesn’t seem as edgy today.

  “Take your time,” she tells Misty.

  If only she had that luxury. Virgil Barbor is going to turn up at noon looking for his rent. It would be nice if Misty could get out of here before then as she’d planned. Nicer still if she could hand him enough cash to hold him off for a while longer.

  Like the other mediums here in the Dale, she earns a modest fee—considered a donation—for her readings. Back in Arizona, she’d heard about mediums who charged a hundred times more for an hour’s session.

  Unlike other first-timers, Priscilla didn’t ask about cost. Maybe Misty should charge her double. Triple, maybe, or a little more—nothing crazy. But she seems to have money to burn, and Misty only needs enough to make this time, on a very stressful day, worth her while.

  Pushing aside another twinge of guilt, along with the strange trepidation that’s dogged her since yesterday, she bows her head and closes her eyes again.

  * * *

  Turns out metal detectors don’t work in snow.

  At least, this one doesn’t, despite what the old coot told him back at the hardware store yesterday.

  “It’ll do the job,” he’d said, “as long as you can swing it. Snow gets too deep, and that’ll be hard. Got snowshoes?”

  Snowshoes? He has only the clothes on his back and the ones he changed out of after work the other day before . . .

  Yuri.

  The gun.

  Everything.

  Now some old guy—Mitch? Was that his name, Mitch?—wanted to sell him snowshoes?

  That’s the last thing he’ll need where he’s going after this. Someplace where the sun shines year round and the breeze is balmy, a place with tropical trees and warm clear turquoise water . . .

  Mexico? The Caribbean?

  But that would involve a passport and leave a trail.

  Now that Yuri’s body has been discovered, both sides of the law are going to be looking for him.

  Fine. He’d be bored at the beach anyway. He needs some action.

  Vegas.

  It’s out in the desert, and deserts are hot, right? Plus, the Strip will be crowded with the holidays looming. He can lose himself there for a while. No borders to cross, no planes to board.

  There’s no way he can go back to his old existence even if he wanted to. His future—his very life—depends on finding those rings.

  He can only hope he didn’t lose them back on the road outside the gate. It was a lot easier to swing the metal detector on plowed pavement, but he’s pretty sure he’d have found the rings yesterday if they were lying in the road. If he missed them there, it’s too late—they’re now buried in grungy mountains along the shoulder.

  It’s far more likely that he dropped them here, inside the Dale. He concentrates his snowy search in the yards and fields he crossed the other night in his haste to escape.

  The longer he trudges through the snow, the harder it is to breathe. The harder it is to breathe, the more frustrated he becomes.

  A ferocious wind howls off the water and bites through his coat as he plods along a small clearing near the gate. He can barely feel the wand in his gloved hand, let alone sway the device as instructed, back and forth above the rapidly deepening snow.

  Earlier, when the thing was emitting an occasional blast of beeps, he would stop to dig doggedly through the snow. At least he hadn’t had to hack into the frozen earth, but he’d found only bottle caps, hardware, coins . . .

  Pen
nies, mostly. It would have been nice to find rare antique ones. Or any jewelry—say, someone’s long-lost engagement ring he could hock just in case he doesn’t find his gold rings.

  His.

  “Don’t you ever let anyone take what’s yours, boy.”

  His father tops the growing list of those to blame for this situation: Mitch, the cat, the kid, the woman who called the cops . . .

  Especially her.

  If he were to run into her now, after what she did—

  Why wait to run into her? He knows where to find her. She’s a sitting duck in this weather. When he finds his rings, he’ll detour over to Valley View and see that she pays the price.

  When . . . or if?

  Reality is beginning to set in. This task, under these circumstances, is nearly impossible.

  Maybe he should go back to the hardware store and buy some snowshoes. Or—the hell with that—go back, throw this piece of useless garbage at the old coot, and demand his money back.

  But he’s afraid he might not stop at that. And after what happened to Yuri and then again last night . . .

  He isn’t a cold-blooded killer, though. He’s just like anyone else. As long as he keeps his temper under control, everything is—

  Hearing a vehicle approaching out on the road, he ducks into a stand of trees.

  It’s bigger, more cumbersome than a car. Salt truck, maybe, or another plow.

  When it rumbles into view, he sees that it’s a yellow school bus, the kind he used to ride when he was a kid. He’d boarded last, too late to sit up front by the driver. He’d been forced to make his way down the aisle crowded with leering kids who poked and tripped him, kids who stole what was his—his lunchbox, his homework, his dignity, his childhood.

  He clenches the metal detector like a weapon as this bus brakes squeakily, and he thinks about the gun. It’s in his pocket because you never know . . .

  The doors fold open. Little brats waddle off one by one, swaddled like mummies in layers of down.

  All, that is, except the last kid, the smallest of the crew. He’s not wearing a thick winter coat, gloves, hat, or boots. He’s not wearing any of those things at all, just a light sweat shirt and sneakers, head bare—and face recognizable.