Nine Lives

by Wendy Corsi Staub

  “Only because he likes to attend the productions over at Chautauqua Institution,” Eleanor clarifies. “He’s a theater buff.”

  “The summer arts colony? I just read about that last night,” Bella remembers.

  “You really should visit while you’re here,” Steve tells her. “Do you like plays? The theater company is kicking off the season with Our Town. I’m hoping to see it tonight.”

  “I thought you were coming with me to the opening message service!” his wife protests, and he sighs.

  “I said I would if you insist.”

  “You have all week to see the show.”

  “But you know how I feel about Our Town. It’s one of my all-time favorites.”

  “They’re all his all-time favorites,” she tells Bella, rolling her eyes. “Especially when the alternative is to hang around with me here in ‘Silly Dale.’”

  “I don’t call it that anymore,” he protests.

  “No, but plenty of people do. And sometimes I think you’re as skeptical as they are.”

  Who can blame him? Bella wants to say, relieved to have found a kindred spirit among . . . well, the spirits and the spirit whisperers.

  But now isn’t the time to engage in a debate about the dubious nature of the local industry. Instead, she asks the logical question.

  “What, exactly, is a message service?”

  “It’s a very large group reading, really. The mediums face the audience and take turns standing up and delivering messages.”

  “From?” she asks, though she has a pretty good idea.

  “From loved ones.”

  “And they give messages to everyone in the room right there in public?”

  “Well, not to everyone. Just to a few people. It’s basically the ones whose loved ones are the pushiest.”

  “Which is why I’m shocked that your mother doesn’t come through to you every single time,” Steve says with a laugh.

  On that note, Max thrusts the plate into Bella’s hands. “I have to go get dressed. Jiffy’s waiting.”

  “Jiffy . . . what?” Great. Now even Max is speaking the inscrutable localese.

  “Jiffy. He’s my friend. He came over for breakfast, too, and we’re going to play Candyland. He lives next door to Odelia on the other side.”

  For a moment, Bella is so taken aback by the realization that Max made a friend—a friend at last!—that she forgets the rest.

  Then it comes back to her: we’re leaving, and these people are waiting, and they need to be told that Leona is dead, and . . .

  Wait a minute. What if . . .

  What if Jiffy isn’t real? What if he’s an imaginary friend, or even . . .

  A ghost?

  “Max, listen . . .”

  He’s already on his way up the stairs, taking them two at a time. “I’ll be right back! I have to get dressed, Mom!”

  Feeling helpless, she turns back to the strangers on the doorstep. “I’m sorry,” she says. “I kind of have my hands full here and I’m just a guest myself, but I think that Odelia can—”

  “Steve! Eleanor!”

  Odelia comes limping across the lawn as if summoned by the mere mention of her name—and who knows, maybe that’s precisely the case, considering the circumstances. Chance trails behind her, belly swaying just above the grass.

  “Odelia! What happened to your leg?” Eleanor asks as Steve descends the steps to take the older woman’s arm.

  “Oh, it’s nothing. I just took a spill.” She brushes off the help, gripping the railing tightly and joking about her clumsiness as she makes her way up the porch steps to greet Eleanor with a warm hug.

  “I can see that you’ve all already met, but I’ll do the formal introductions. Stephen and Eleanor Pierson, meet Bella Jordan.”

  Noticing that Odelia has once again used her nickname, Bella shakes their hands. She’s about to excuse herself to go find Max when Odelia asks if she’s told the Piersons about Leona.

  “No, I was about to . . .” About to send them over to Odelia’s so that I wouldn’t have to break the bad news myself.

  “Tell us what?” Eleanor asks.

  “What about Leona?” Steve looks from Odelia to Bella and back again.

  Odelia sighs. “There’s no easy way to say this. I’m afraid she’s passed on.”

  Eleanor gasps, clasping her hands to her mouth with a jangle of gold bracelets. “But I just talked to her last week!”

  “It was very sudden.”

  Steve settles a protective arm around Eleanor. “What happened?”

  As Odelia explains quickly about the freak accident, he shakes his head grimly.

  Tears fill Eleanor’s eyes. “She was always afraid of the water. She couldn’t swim.”

  “How do you know that?” Steve asks.

  Odelia answers for his wife. “I’m guessing everyone does.”

  Even I know it, Bella thinks.

  “It’s a good thing we got here so early in the day.” Steve takes the car keys out of his pocket, and Bella notices a keychain imprinted with the comedy and tragedy masks dangling from the ring.

  That makes her think of her own key ring, still safely tucked under her pillow upstairs. She hopes.

  “We can go over and see if we can get a room near Chautauqua and see the play tonight,” Steve tells his wife, “and then head back to Boston first thing in the morning.”

  “What do you mean?” Eleanor asks.

  “We’ll go to the Cape, like we had talked about. It’s been years since we’ve been there, and you said yourself you miss it.”

  “We can’t get a place on the Cape at the eleventh hour on a holiday weekend. And probably not tonight near Chautauqua, either.”

  “Maybe there will be a last-minute cancellation. If we can’t find a place to stay, we’ll just go home and do some day trips.”

  “You have a place to stay,” Odelia speaks up. “Right here.”

  Steve blinks. “But we can’t stay here if Leona isn’t . . . if she’s . . .”

  “Of course you can. She would have wanted business to go on as usual, and you know how meticulous she was about keeping notes. I know exactly which room you prefer and it’s all set for you. No feathers. Allergies,” she adds for Bella’s benefit.

  “Leona always took such good care of us.” Eleanor smiles through her tears. “Thank you, Odelia.”

  Leaving them to get checked in and settled, Bella heads upstairs to find Max in the train room. He’s wearing only underpants and fishing through his open duffle bag on the floor. “Do I have a purple shirt, mom?”

  “Purple? I don’t think so, no. Why?”

  “That’s Jiffy’s favorite color.”

  Jiffy again. The ghost kid.

  She doesn’t really believe that, of course.

  “Listen, Max . . . I don’t think we’re going to have time for Candyland this morning.”

  He looks up, crestfallen. “But I told Jiffy I’d be right back!”

  “I’m sorry, sweetie.”

  “I don’t want to go!”

  “I know, but we have to.”

  “Why?”

  “Because this isn’t . . . this is just . . . it’s a place where we stopped to spend the night, that’s all. I’m sure the next place we stop will be just as much fun.”

  “Where? The tent? Grandma’s? Those aren’t fun places.”

  “You don’t know that. You’ve never been camping, and you haven’t been to Grandma’s in years.”

  “I don’t want to go, ever! I want to stay here.”

  “I know you do.” She kneels beside him, touches his bony, pale little shoulder and finds it trembling. “I wish we could stay.”

  “Odelia said we can.”

  Odelia.

  A crazy thought materializes in Bella’s brain. She tries to push it right back out, but it’s as persistent as Odelia herself.

  “I’ll make a deal with you,” she tells Max.

  “Can we stay forever?”

  �
��No, not forever, or even for another night. But let me talk to Odelia, and maybe we can figure out a way to stay long enough for you to play Candyland. Okay?”

  “But—”

  “Candyland is better than nothing, right?” she reminds him, hating that it’s all she can offer. He’s been through so much and has so little.

  He looks up at her with sad, brown eyes. “I guess so.”

  “Good. Now get dressed and let’s go see what we can work out.”

  * * *

  An hour later, Bella finds herself in the cramped waiting room of Valeri and Son Service Station a few miles from Lily Dale, listening in dismay to the mechanic’s verdict.

  “Is that the best you can do?” she asks, clutching a half-finished white foam cup of bad coffee, courtesy of a filmy carafe on a nearby counter.

  “You mean the best I can do on the cost or on the time it’ll take to finish the repair?”

  “Both.”

  “’Fraid so.” He shakes his head, eyes apologetic beneath the blue brim of his Buffalo Bills cap. “It’ll take me at least a couple of days to track down the part, and with the holiday, I probably won’t have it here until after the weekend. And it’ll be expensive because it’s old. But I’ll give you a break on the labor, seeing as how you’re stuck and outa luck.”

  Stuck and outa luck.

  “You’ve pretty much just described the last year of my life,” she says wryly.

  “Yeah? Sorry.” He offers a brief smile and a complicated explanation about how something in the engine isn’t functioning the way it should. The technical details escape her; car maintenance was—like playing board games with Max—Sam’s department.

  Now, however, like everything else, it’s solely her responsibility. She has no choice but to spend money she doesn’t have and time she . . .

  Well, she has time, she supposes. And a place to stay for another four or five days.

  Earlier, when she asked Odelia to recommend a service station, Odelia reminded Bella that she’s welcome to stick around the guesthouse as long as she’d like.

  “I thought it was sold out starting today.”

  “The public rooms are, yes. But the Rose Room is Leona’s private quarters—the closet and bureau are still full of her things, but I’ll clean them out for you tomorrow.”

  “No need to do that. We’re not—”

  “Oh, it’s no problem. I’ve been meaning to get to it. And Max can sleep in one of the smaller rooms with a twin bed. Leona always keeps one open just in case her nephew shows up to visit. He never gives her any notice, but she adores him.” Odelia’s tone indicated that she herself had little affection for the nephew, Grant Everard. “He’s supposedly trying to get here this week, but who knows if he’ll really come?”

  The mechanic—who’s around Bella’s age and whose name is Troy, according to the patch sewn on his coveralls—asks if she needs a ride somewhere.

  “Can I keep my car with me until the part comes in?”

  “You can if you like hitchhiking, because you’re already on borrowed time. I can’t believe you managed to drive it this far without breaking down.”

  Bella sighs. “All right, then, I guess I’ll get a cab back and—”

  “A cab? Around here?” His laugh isn’t unkind, but it’s yet another reminder that she’s a stranger in a strange land. “You’d have better luck flagging down a flying carpet.”

  “Yeah, well, with any luck, there’s a magical genie on board, because I could really use three wishes right about now.”

  “If you find him, send him my way. I have a couple of wishes of my own. Come on, I’ll drive you. Where are you going?”

  Most people—where she comes from, anyway—would have asked that question before offering the ride. Around here, she’s noticed, people are so friendly that they don’t seem to balk at being inconvenienced by total strangers.

  First Doctor Bailey, in the midst of an after-hours emergency, helped her with a stray cat. And Odelia—well, she’s a godsend. After settling the Piersons into their third-floor room, she turned her attention back to helping Bella. She called the service station, talked to Troy the mechanic, and offered to lead Bella over there in her own car.

  “That’s all right, I’m sure I’ll make it,” she said—naïvely, as it turns out. “But Max is talking about a boy named Jiffy—”

  “Jiffy Arden.”

  Okay. So he was a real kid and not . . . imaginary. Or . . .

  There’s no such thing as ghosts, Bella reminded herself as Odelia went on to explain that Jiffy’s real name is Michael.

  “But there are two other Michaels in the Dale, and he loves peanut butter, and the nickname stuck.”

  Jiffy. It could have been worse, Bella thought. Skippy . . . Peter Pan . . .

  But it sure could have been better.

  “He’s a sweet boy. His mom is renting the house next door to me for the season,” Odelia went on, limping briskly around the Rose Room, opening all the windows to let fresh air billow through the screens, “and I thought it would be nice for Max to meet him, so I invited him to breakfast. They hit it off, just like I thought.”

  Bella didn’t know what to say to that. Should she be grateful that Odelia is looking out for her son or infuriated that Max has yet another reason to beg to linger in Lily Dale?

  Moot point now. She agreed to leave Max and Jiffy playing Candyland on the porch at Valley View Manor while Odelia kept an eye on them and waited for additional guests to check in.

  “We’ll be hitting the road as soon as I get back,” she reminded her son before she left.

  Engrossed in navigating toward Gum Drop Mountain, Max merely shrugged.

  He’s going to be thrilled when he finds out we aren’t going anywhere for the next couple of days.

  Maybe she’s just a tiny bit relieved herself. She was so emotionally drained after leaving home that she isn’t yet prepared to see Millicent again. Their previous encounter—at the funeral—was a blur of grief and her mother-in-law’s usual histrionics. Lily Dale will provide a convenient reprieve so that she can get herself together before the next phase of their fresh start.

  “Do you know where Lily Dale is?” she asks Troy.

  “Sure, it’s only a few miles down the road. I have a pickup truck, so we can load everything into the back.”

  “Everything?”

  “I noticed your car’s pretty full.”

  “Oh, right.” Somehow, she’d forgotten about all her worldly belongings stashed in the car. “I’m in the middle of a move.”

  “I figured. You probably don’t want to leave your stuff here for a few days . . . or do you?” he asks, seeing the look on her face.

  Hmm. Her overnight bag and Max’s are back at the guesthouse.

  “I’ll leave it,” she decides. “It’s only a few days, right? And I’ll be close by, so if I need something”—like a tent or a vase?—“I can always come get it.”

  “Sounds good.” Troy grabs a set of keys from a wall hook. “Are you staying with Odelia Lauder?”

  “No, next door.”

  “At the Taggarts’? Or Leona Gatto’s guesthouse?”

  “The guesthouse. So you . . . know it?” And do you know about Leona?

  “I do odd jobs during the slow season, so I get around. I did some painting for Leona last month. I read in the paper that she drowned a few days ago. I was sorry to hear it. She was a nice lady—and she was terrified of water. She couldn’t swim.”

  Bella wonders if there’s anyone in a fifty-mile radius who isn’t aware of that fact.

  Troy moves the hands of the cardboard clock sign hanging in the window, indicating that he’ll be back in an hour. “It won’t take me that long to drop you,” he says as he locks the door after them, “but I might as well grab lunch while I’m out.”

  “Are you the only one working here?”

  “Now I am. It’s a family business, but my dad passed away last year.”

  “I’m sorry.”<
br />
  “Yeah. It’s lonely without him. I miss him every day.”

  Those words resonate as Troy leads her around behind the concrete block building, past a padlocked restroom door, a Dumpster, and an old bicycle pump. A red pickup truck sits in a sunny patch of tall grasses and orange wildflowers.

  He opens the passenger’s side door and gestures for her to climb in. “I asked Odelia if she could put me in touch with him—you know, through a reading,” he says casually, before going around to the driver’s side.

  Bella is intrigued. Troy doesn’t seem like the kind of guy who would buy into talking to the spirit world.

  Climbing behind the wheel, he starts the engine.

  As they begin bumping along a dirt path toward the road, Bella waits for him to pick up the story where he left off, but he doesn’t. He seems lost in thought.

  “So did Odelia do the reading for you?” she asks after a minute.

  “She did.”

  “How did it go?”

  He hesitates. “You know, I never believed in that stuff. Neither did Dad. But then you lose someone you love and you miss them like crazy and you figure . . . well, you hope there’s something to it.”

  “Did she get through to him, then?”

  “Nah. She said she was tapping into a bunch of other dead relatives I’ve never heard of, but not my dad. She offered to try again sometime.”

  “Did she?”

  He shakes his head. “I said thanks, but no thanks.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I don’t want to get my hopes up. Right after Dad died, all I wanted was to connect with him one more time. Now . . . well, I wouldn’t say I’m over it, exactly. But it’s been more than a year, and . . . time really does heal, you know?”

  No. She still endures moments when grief stabs at her like a freshly honed blade. Will that subside in six months? A year? Ever?

  What if she could connect with Sam one more time?

  She never even considered that possibility until now.

  Because it’s not a possibility, she reminds herself.

  Like Troy, she never believed in that stuff. She’s not going to start now just because she’s stumbled across a strange little town filled with people who not only believe in ghosts but also are convinced they can communicate with them.

  And now you’re stuck there for a few days. Terrific.