Nine Lives (Lily Dale Mystery #1)(38)

To be fair, it would have been a restless night regardless of her disruptive bedmates. After her guests had retired to their own rooms, she’d locked herself into this one with Pandora Feeney’s comment ringing in her ears: It’s a good thing Leona never bothered to change the locks . . .

Virtually anyone could have the key to the first-floor deadbolts. Not to this bedroom, though. Odelia said the old-fashioned room keys couldn’t be duplicated. All the hardware in the century-old house is supposedly original.

But if there already are two copies of each key—with the apparent exception of the door to Leona’s study—then at some point, even if it was a hundred years ago, someone made a second key for each bedroom. And if there’s a second, is it so unlikely there might have been a third?

Last night, after locking the bedroom door from the inside, Bella removed the other key from the lock and slept with that and the master key ring under her pillow.

When she slept. The last time she looked at the bedside clock, it was nearly five o’clock in the morning. Now it’s a quarter to seven.

Time to get up and brew the coffee. The posted hours in the breakfast room are seven to nine thirty, though Odelia had mentioned that Leona was pretty lax about sticking to that.

“She never minded if it was dawn or noon,” she told Bella yesterday. “Leona always said, ‘Whenever they get up, I’ll feed and water ’em’—she ran a dude ranch, you know.”

Bella didn’t know that, or much else about her.

But now, as she climbs out of Leona’s bed and glances around her bedroom, she can’t help but feel connected to the woman—so to speak.

The dog-eared paperback novels stacked on the nightstand include several titles she herself read over the last year or so. The sandals sitting just inside the closet door fit her own feet perfectly—she knows because she mistook them for hers when she hurriedly got dressed yesterday morning. And Sam might have called her Bella Blue because of her eyes, but her favorite color has always been the radiant pinkish red in the Rose Room’s décor. Everything about this room feels just right.

She gets out of bed and pads across the floor to find her toiletries bag. It’s inside her suitcase, which sits atop one of those folding hotel suitcase racks inside the large closet.

Reaching for the doorknob, she pauses at the dresser beside the closet door. Like the one in the master bedroom she’d shared with Sam back in Bedford, its long wooden surface holds a jewelry box and a framed wedding portrait.

She leans in to get a better look. The groom is handsome, wearing a black cowboy hat, and the bride, Leona, she presumes, is . . . is . . .

Startled, she picks up the frame and gapes at the image.

The woman in the photo is much younger. Her hair isn’t gray and her face isn’t wrinkled, but it’s the same one Bella glimpsed in the bathroom mirror in her disturbing dream yesterday morning. The dream where the wind chimes were ringing loudly—much too loudly, and she was brushing her hair, only it wasn’t her hair, it was gray and it was . . .

Leona’s?

She doesn’t remember seeing these photos before she went to bed that night, but she must have. How else would this face have worked its way into her subconscious?

Unnerved, she turns away from the photo.

*

Half an hour later, as a pleasant rain patters into the shrub border beneath the wall of screened windows, Bella still has the breakfast room to herself. But as she sits at a café table sipping coffee and reading more about Lily Dale, she hears stirring overhead.

Time to greet the guests. She sets aside the brochure, with its list of tips for people preparing for a spiritual reading.


Receive information with an open mind.

Remember that you may not hear from the Spirit you expect.

Remember that free will impacts prophecy.



Helpful stuff for anyone who, unlike Bella, intends to visit a medium.

She goes to the kitchen to turn on the tea kettle. Odelia had mentioned that Leona always brewed a full pot in the mornings, but this gray, stormy morning is so muggy that Bella didn’t want to steam up the kitchen before it was necessary.

The gas stove is as ancient as the one back in Bedford. Bella turns one knob after another, but none of the burners ignite, meaning the pilot light is out.

Sam was the one who relit theirs when that happened once. With a pang, she remembers that she spent an entire snow day without using the stove because she wasn’t sure how to light it and she was afraid of blowing up the place. When Sam got home, she apologized for not making the pot roast she’d promised him. He laughed and showed her how to light the pilot and then suggested a snowy walk to the diner for dinner.

It’s as if that happened to some other person, Bella marvels as she finds a book of matches in a drawer and kneels in front of the open oven door, peering inside. Some stranger who didn’t know how to do much of anything on her own and didn’t have to.

Now you have no choice.

She strikes a match and lifts it to the pilot hole inside the oven. It ignites instantly, singing her fingertips. She drops the match and hurries over to the sink. As she runs cold water over her hand, she hears a key in the back door. Turning, she sees Eleanor Pierson stepping over the threshold. Her face is flushed with exertion; her damp, dark brown hair is spiked with sweat and rain; and she’s wearing jogging clothes.

“Good morning,” Bella calls as Eleanor wipes her muddy sneakers on the mat.