Nine Lives (Lily Dale Mystery #1)(33)
Where Bella comes from, people tend to give a wide berth—and unflattering nicknames like Crazy Jane or Ned the Nutcase—to the neighborhood regulars who wander around talking to themselves. But here, she notices, pedestrians don’t even give Pandora a second glance as they pass.
Karl and Helen Adabner pull their wheeled luggage toward the house. Bella descends the steps to offer a hand getting the bags up to the porch, but the man—a few inches shorter than his sturdy wife and a whole head shorter than Bella—insists on doing it himself.
“Heavy lifting isn’t for beautiful young women like you,” he tells her with a gleam in his eye. Thanks to Pandora’s comment about him, she fights the urge to take a giant step backward as he brushes past her to follow his wife into the front hall.
Helen—remarkably spry for a woman of her heft—is already ringing the little silver bell on the registration desk.
“Oh, you don’t need to do that. I can help you, Mrs. Adabner.”
“You? But aren’t you . . . staying here?”
“Where’s Leona?” Karl asks.
Bella takes a deep breath and introduces herself before delivering the carefully worded and well-rehearsed news of Leona’s demise. To her relief, the couple’s shocked sorrow quickly gives way to acceptance. Like the others here, they seem comforted by the belief that death is merely a transitional phase.
“I was so looking forward to telling her that I finally figured out that the man with the glass eye—the one who kept talking about how much he loved me—was my grandfather,” Helen says, shaking her hand. “She kept insisting I knew him, and I kept insisting I didn’t. He passed when I was a little girl, and that eye was so realistic, I never knew it wasn’t real.”
“I thought it was a fine how-do-you-do that some other man was horning in on the reading I gave Helen as a Valentine’s Day gift,” her husband tells Bella.
“You were here for Valentine’s Day?” she asks, remembering that she’d seen Helen’s name followed by an asterisk in Leona’s appointment book on that day.
“Oh, goodness, no. Lily Dale is buried in snow at that time of year. So is Iowa. We go to Florida for the winter. But Leona does phone readings. I was so looking forward to telling her that, as usual, she was dead on,” she adds, without a hint of irony in her folksy midwestern accent.
“I’m sure you’ll have plenty of opportunities to tell her anyway,” Karl assures her. “Besides, it’s not as though she doesn’t already know.”
As she shows them up to their room, Bella decides there’s something to be said for treating a loved one’s sudden passing almost as you would an unexpected road trip: with regret that you didn’t get to say good-bye but confidence that they’ll be in touch when they get to wherever they’re going.
On the heels of Pandora’s quirky self-importance, she finds the Adabners refreshingly unassuming and ordinary.
But she revises her opinion when they emerge ten minutes later wearing visors and fanny packs and inform her that they’re heading out to hike the Fairy Trail.
“There’s a ferry here?”
“There are many fairies here, my dear,” Karl tells her.
“Where do they go?” she asks with a bittersweet pang, remembering that long-ago Saturday in Port Jefferson. “My son loves boats, and—”
The couple bursts out laughing.
“Not ferries,” Helen says. “Fairies!”
She blinks. “As in . . . tooth?”
They laugh again. Then Helen earnestly tells her about the fairy population and the tiny homes the locals build for them along a woodland nature trail, and Bella wonders why she’s the one who’s feeling absurd in this topsy-turvy conversation.
As the Adabners head out in search of tiny winged creatures, Karl calls back, “Welcome to Lily Dale, Bella.”
Yes. Wow.
Welcome to Lily Dale.
And this is only the first day.
Chapter Eight
The rest of the day passes in a pleasant and relatively uneventful whirlwind, with nary a fairy to flit by and convince Bella that there might be some truth behind the little town’s supernatural lore.
She borrows Odelia’s car—which is, indeed, a jalopy, not unlike many other vehicles in the Dale. She and Max make the fifteen-minute journey to a supermarket in neighboring Dunkirk, where she’s relieved to find that the Dale isn’t as removed from modern civilization as it seems. There are plenty of familiar chain stores and fast food restaurants along this commercial strip adjacent to the Thruway.
She buys a cartload of groceries, including a few things Odelia said she needed—“zucchini, jalape?os, and limes so that I can bake cookies tomorrow.”
“Using those ingredients? Together?”
“Oh, absolutely. They’re delicious. You’ll see.”
Bella and Max make a stop at a busy Walmart to get a few other odds and ends and then wait nearly half an hour to be seated for dinner at Applebee’s. Dinner out in a restaurant is a rare treat for both of them, but she’s glad to return to the quaint serenity of Lily Dale.
They join the line of cars waiting to roll through the gate—the only way in or out of the Dale during the busy summer season.
“I hope Chance the Cat was okay without us,” Max comments. The cat had gone into hiding before they left, and he was worried about leaving her behind.