Nine Lives

by Wendy Corsi Staub

  Troy pulls out onto the rural highway, heading south toward Lily Dale. She leans back in the seat, gazing at the bucolic countryside until he cuts into her melancholy thoughts with a question.

  “Where’s your husband?”

  Startled, she glances over at him. He’s looking straight ahead, at the road, one hand on the wheel, the other thoughtfully rubbing his razor stubble.

  “My . . . husband?”

  “You’re wearing a wedding ring, so I figured . . .”

  “Oh.” She instinctively twists the gold band on her left hand. After Sam died, she’d put away his ring to give to Max someday but couldn’t bear to take off her own.

  She takes a deep breath and musters the dreaded word. “I’m a widow.”

  “I’m sorry.” He’s silent for a moment.

  She stares out the passenger’s window at acres of lush, green grapevines trailing over perpendicular fencerows as far as she can see, broken only by the occasional weathered barn.

  Then Troy asks, “Is that why you’re in Lily Dale? To try to connect to your husband?”

  “No! We were just passing through to drop off a stray cat we found on the road. I never even heard of it until now.”

  Maybe he doesn’t believe her. His gray eyes are pensive beneath the brim of his hat. “Well, as long as you’re here, you should see if Odelia will do a reading for you.”

  “Why?”

  Troy shrugs. “Why not? It can’t hurt. Maybe you’ll hear from your husband.”

  Those words stay with her long after he’s left her at Valley View Manor and driven away.

  Chapter Six

  By midafternoon, with the guesthouse filled up and the sun beating down, Bella and Odelia settle into a pair of Adirondack chairs on the lawn behind the guesthouse. The yard is fragrant with flowers and the lake blue and inviting on this first July day.

  Chance lies nearby in a shady patch of grass beneath a sprawling apple tree, watching Max and Jiffy climb it.

  Rather, Max is watching Jiffy climb to a towering branch that Odelia assures Bella is perfectly safe. “He does it all the time,” she says when he effortlessly hoists himself to that height in a matter of seconds and then casually perches there, legs dangling. “Don’t worry.”

  Jiffy is a scrappy kid with wiry ginger hair, a smattering of freckles across the bridge of his nose, and—in addition to the front tooth Odelia mentioned he’d knocked out—an array of bruises and wounds he catalogued for a reverent Max earlier.

  “I got this one falling off my scooter into a pothole on East Street—”

  “You ride your scooter in the street?” Max wouldn’t have looked more astounded if Jiffy had just announced he skydives without a parachute.

  “Uh-huh, and I got this one from a fish hook, and this one from a poisonous snake . . .” He pointed to a mosquito bite he’d scratched open.

  “A poisonous snake? Wow!”

  “Well, I think it was poisonous. And I think it was a snake. I didn’t ’xactly see it, by the way. But it bit me right here, and I was bleeding a lot, see?”

  Max saw.

  And now Bella’s son—who’s never climbed a tree in his life—is eager to keep up with his gutsy new friend. Well, not keep up, exactly.

  He cautiously clings to the lowest-hanging bough just a few feet off the ground. His knees are dirty and his face is scratched courtesy of a thorny patch of shrubs between this yard and Odelia’s. But he’s happier than Bella has seen him since . . .

  Since Sam was alive.

  Sam always wanted Max to be a carefree kid playing outside. He didn’t experience that in his own high-rise urban childhood, nor did Bella in hers. They hoped things would be different for their son, but in this day and age, you don’t let kids wander too far beyond their own suburban backyards. Not even in bucolic Bedford.

  Here in Lily Dale, she’s already noticed that things are different. Unaccompanied kids of all ages have been strolling or riding by the house on bikes, scooters, and skateboards all afternoon. A few are swimming off a small pier down the way, well outside the perimeter of the small lifeguarded beach.

  Odelia mentions that Jiffy’s dad is overseas with the military and his mom is busy with appointments until dinnertime.

  “Appointments? Is she . . . ?”

  “She’s doing readings.”

  That Jiffy’s mother is a medium shouldn’t be surprising, yet somehow it catches Bella off guard. Maybe it’s narrow-minded of her, but she can’t seem to reconcile the image of mundane maternal life with . . . well, special powers, real or imagined.

  Imagined. Of course imagined.

  As Odelia forewarned, crowds of visitors have arrived in Lily Dale this afternoon. Bella was amazed that so many of them appear to be . . . normal. There’s an inordinate ratio of women, and they come in all shapes and sizes, with a range of socioeconomic backgrounds and encompassing every racial and age group. There are even a few teenage girls.

  “They always want to know who they’re going to marry,” Odelia commented earlier, as they watched a giggly gaggle pass the front porch.

  “Do you know?”

  “Sometimes. But I guarantee you that it’s never the name they want to hear.”

  “Do you tell them anyway?”

  “I deliver whatever message Spirit wants them to have.”

  “I wonder if that has an impact on their relationship, then. If you tell someone young and impressionable that she’s not meant to be with the person she loves.”

  “Most people shouldn’t marry the person they love at fourteen or fifteen,” Odelia responded with a shrug.

  “My parents were high school sweethearts.”

  “It’s lovely that it worked out for them. But most people aren’t the person they’re going to be a decade later, much less forty or fifty years later. My husband and I weren’t.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be. I wouldn’t trade my life now for anything.”

  It must be nice to be so content.

  Bella was, back when she was living her cozy little life with Sam and Max. Back when she knew exactly where she belonged.

  Now . . .

  Now, as she and Odelia sit with chicken salad sandwiches and cold lemonade, she’s doing her best to stop thinking about the past.

  She asks Odelia about Jiffy’s mother: “So you babysit him while she’s busy, then?”

  “Well, she hasn’t been very busy until today. But now that the season is under way, I’ll keep an eye on him. We all will.” At Bella’s dubious look, she adds, “It’s safe here. We trust each other.”

  When Bella opts to drop that subject, Odelia promptly introduces an equally disquieting one: she wants Bella to temporarily manage the guesthouse—for pay.

  “But I can’t take your money.”

  “It’s not my money,” Odelia assures her, after popping the last bite of her sandwich into her mouth. “It’s Leona’s. Well technically, it’s her nephew’s, now. But Grant told me to hire someone to take care of things.”

  Attempting to rephrase her protest, Bella sips the lemonade Odelia had poured from a large mason jar she brought from her kitchen. She’d mentioned that several newcomers had arrived in Bella’s absence—a young couple and a single man—and that Leona always liked to greet guests with a glass of freshly squeezed lemonade.

  “I don’t mind helping out while I’m here,” Bella says carefully, “but that’s only for a couple of days. And if you won’t charge me for the rooms—”

  “Out of the question,” Odelia inserts, shaking her head. Her frizzy orange hair is topped by a lime-green sun visor the same shade as her ruffled sundress, and she’s traded her red cat-eye bifocals for white cat-eye sunglasses. “The beds are vacant. You need a place to stay.”

  “Then I guess the least I can do is keep an eye on the place in return.” She adds the most blatant lie she’s ever told in her life: “But I don’t need money.”

  “Don’t be silly. Everyone needs money. And
you’ll earn every penny. This is a full-time, round-the-clock job, and it can be challenging to deal with some people. You’ve already had a taste of it.”

  True. When she returned from the service station, she found Odelia painstakingly climbing the stairs with Opal and Ruby St. Clair, a pair of elderly sisters who had just driven from Ohio in an enormous black car. Though hardly new to the guesthouse, they requested a tour of all the available rooms on the second and third floor. A lengthy discussion/argument ensued before they decided which one they wanted. Five minutes later, they emerged, having changed their mind. No sooner did they move to a different room than they opted to return to their first choice.

  They were sweet, if slightly dotty.

  But around here, who isn’t? Bella thinks, having overheard Odelia having a conversation with an invisible companion as she folded towels in the tiny laundry room off the kitchen while Bella made the sandwiches.

  “I’m going to pay you,” Odelia says firmly. “It’s what Leona would want. Grant—if I could ever manage to get ahold of him—would agree. Besides, you do need the money.”

  Bella doesn’t bother to argue with that or ask how she knows. Having spent so much time with chatty Max, Odelia is undoubtedly privy to their dire financial status and more.

  “All right,” she agrees. It does seem like a win-win prospect. How else would she possibly cover the car repair costs?

  “Wonderful.” Odelia leans back in her chair, smiling. “And you can use Leona’s car, too, while you’re here, as long as you know how to drive a stick shift.”

  “I don’t.”

  “I can teach you, but until you learn, you can use my car. It’s a bit of a jalopy, but at least it’ll get you where you need to go.”

  She’s making it sound as though this is long term. Bella wants to tell her they don’t need to bother with stick shift driving lessons, but she can’t figure out how to say it in a polite way.

  “What if Grant hasn’t shown up before I have to leave?” she asks instead, watching a monarch butterfly hovering above a petunia bed that could stand to be weeded.

  “We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.”

  “Where does he live?”

  “Where doesn’t he live?” As always, Odelia’s tone takes on an undercurrent of disapproval when discussing Grant Everard. “He’s a bit of a vagabond.”

  Yeah, well, so are we right now, Bella thinks. The difference is that Grant has a job—he’s a venture capitalist, according to Odelia. He was away at a prestigious college when Leona first moved here fifteen years ago and hasn’t visited much since.

  She’s in the midst of telling Bella that it took her a couple of days to track down Grant to let him know about Leona’s passing when Bella notices that Max and Jiffy are on the move. They’re heading from the tree toward the water’s edge—and the small wooden pier where Leona had her tragic accident. The cat has roused herself and is trailing along after them.

  Bella sets aside her glass and plate, interrupting Odelia to call, “Guys! No! That’s not a safe place to be!”

  “We won’t step in the goose poop. I just wanted to show Max something,” Jiffy returns cheerfully.

  Hardly worried about goose poop, Bella hurries toward them, weaving around the obstacle course on the grass.

  The yard, like many around here, is heavily ornamented. There’s plenty of outdoor furniture, along with a sundial, a couple of birdbaths, a birdhouse on a pole, and vine-covered trellises and arbors. Glass sun catchers and wind chimes dangle from tree branches and pinwheels randomly dot the grass—all motionless on this still afternoon.

  Reaching the boys, Bella puts a hand on each of their shoulders before they can set foot on the pier.

  In bright sunshine, there’s nothing ominous about the timeworn wood structure jutting into calm, sparkly water. A small rowboat is tied to one of the two pilings that rise above the plank walkway.

  That’s where Leona hit her head.

  An icy chill sweeps over Bella as she pictures the elderly woman out here alone in the dead of a stormy night.

  “It was right there,” Jiffy tells Max, pointing. “That’s where he threw it.”

  “How can we get it?”

  “Can you swim?”

  “No!” Bella says sharply.

  “I can swim, Mommy,” protests Max, who learned to semi-dog-paddle courtesy of lessons last summer at day camp. He squirms out from beneath her grasp, as does Jiffy, who shields his eyes with his hand, gazing out at the water.

  “How long can you hold your breath?” he asks her son. “Because, by the way, we have to dig under the water.”

  “I’m not sure. A long time.”

  “Like five minutes?”

  “Probably.”

  “What are you two talking about, exactly?” Bella asks Jiffy as the cat sniffs the grass at the edge of the pier. It is, indeed, dotted with droppings courtesy of a small flock of geese floating on the water.

  “Treasure,” Jiffy says, as if that explains everything.

  “Where? In the lake?”

  He nods vigorously. “It’s the sunken kind. And you have to hold your breath for, like, ten minutes to get it. I can do that, by the way. But I don’t know about Max.”

  “I can! I can hold it even longer, by the way,” he adds, inserting Jiffy’s favorite catchphrase.

  “Nobody can do that.”

  Bella, who—by the way—feels as though she’s been holding her own breath for months, watches her son inhale deeply. Eyes closed, cheeks puffed out, he begins silently counting on his fingers.

  “What’s going on?” Odelia has limped over, huffing a little.

  “The other night, in the middle of the night, I saw a pirate drop a big heavy treasure chest into the lake. Me and Max want to get it.”

  Determined to nip that plan in the bud, Bella says, “It was probably just a dream. Max has exciting dreams like that sometimes, right, Max?”

  Still holding his breath and counting, Max nods.

  “No. It was real,” Jiffy insists. “I was wide awake. Well, I was sleeping, but the wind woke me up.”

  The wind . . .

  “You were outside in the middle of the night?”

  “No,” he tells Odelia, as though that’s the craziest thing he’s ever heard. “I was inside, in my room. I was in bed, but then I got out of bed, and I sat on the window seat and I looked out the window and I saw the pirate.”

  “Which night was it?”

  He shrugs. “The windy night.”

  The night Leona died, Bella realizes uneasily. Does Jiffy know about that?

  She senses the wheels turning in Odelia’s mind as she asks, “Which window was it, Jiff?”

  He turns and points at the back of the yellow house on the far side of Odelia’s. “The one in the corner.”

  It does look out in this direction.

  “That’s your bedroom. There’s a window seat right there.” Odelia turns to Bella with a nod. “I know the house well. That used to be my friend Ramona’s niece Evangeline’s room—she and my granddaughter Calla are like this.” She lifts a hand and crosses her fingers.

  Face red, cheeks bulging, Max lets out a sputtering breath.

  “Thirty-two!” he announces triumphantly. “I can hold my breath for thirty-two minutes! Is that long enough to get the sunken treasure?”

  “I don’t think so. How deep is the water there, Odelia?”

  Ignoring Jiffy’s question, she asks him one of her own: “What, exactly, did you see out there on the windy night?”

  “I saw a pirate walking on the dock. He was carrying a treasure.”

  “Do you mean . . . like, a big box or a chest?”

  “Yeah. Maybe. I’m not sure. He was facing the other way, but it was heavy. I could tell by the way he was walking. And he threw it into the water and then he left.”

  The summer day goes arctic. Goosebumps prickle Bella’s bare limbs and a chill slides down her spine.

  “Jiffy? W
hat did he look like?” Odelia’s tone is gentle, almost casual, but her expression is intent.

  “I don’t know. I couldn’t see him.”

  “How do you know he was a pirate?”

  “Because he had on a long pirate coat, and it was blowing around his legs in the wind, and he was carrying treasure.”

  “Is there any way it wasn’t a pirate? Maybe it was Mrs. Gatto you saw instead? Maybe she was carrying something out onto the pier?” Bella asks, hoping, praying she wasn’t the object being carried, because that would mean . . .

  “Mrs. Gatto?”

  “Leona,” Odelia clarifies. “Was Leona the person walking on the pier? Could it have been a woman? Maybe wearing a nightgown instead of a pirate coat?”

  Jiffy shakes his head stubbornly. “No. It was a black pirate coat.”

  “So you’re sure it was a man?”

  “Pirates are men,” he informs Odelia, as if everyone knows that. “Ladies are wenches.”

  Under different circumstances, Bella might have grinned at that comment. As it is, she can only edge a little closer to her son, again resting a protective hand on his shoulder.

  “By the way, it wasn’t Leona,” Jiffy goes on. “My mom said Leona crossed over.”

  Odelia hesitates. “Did she tell you what happened to her?”

  “She said she was probably sick. She was an old lady, you know. Older than you, even.” Jiffy pauses and then glances down at Odelia’s cast. “You’re not going to die too, are you?”

  “Not if I can help it.” She ruffles Jiffy’s hair. “Why don’t you two run over to my house and get a couple of Popsicles from the freezer? The doors are unlocked.”

  “Yay! I get grape!” Jiffy is already making a run for it.

  “I get cherry!”

  “Wait,” Bella squeezes Max’s shoulder, holding him in place. “I don’t know if that’s a good idea.”

  “Yes! I want a Popsicle!” Her son—her sweet, obedient child—suddenly sounds like the petulant toddler he never was or the surly adolescent he may one day become.

  “We can go with you,” she offers, afraid to let him out of her sight.

  “By the time I can make it past the apple tree, they’ll have been to my kitchen and back and finished their Popsicles,” Odelia points out. “They’ll be fine. Truly. I promise.”