Nine Lives (Lily Dale Mystery #1)(45)

“But you have to help me.”

“I will. I’ll be up in a few minutes. Just go look, Max. I think . . . I think I heard kitty footsteps in the closet,” she improvises. “I bet that’s where she is.”

“I already looked there.”

“Here . . .” She grabs a box of kibble from the counter. Last night, the cat heard it rattle and came running. “I bet if you go around up there shaking this, she’ll find you instead of you finding her.”

With her son safely on his way back upstairs, she unlocks the door and opens it.

“Sorry to barge in on you,” Odelia says, “but it’s pretty important.”

“No problem, come on in.”

“Bella, this is Luther Ragland. He’s a good friend of mine, and he was a friend of Leona’s, too.”

His voice is a rich baritone, and his handshake is as fleeting as his smile. Propping the dripping, folded umbrella on the mat, he asks, “Can we have a word in private?”

Taken aback, she looks at Odelia, who leans in to say in a low voice, “Luther has some . . . questions.”

“Questions?”

“About Leona. Let’s talk in the study.” Odelia limps in that direction, trailed by Luther and, after a moment, Bella.

Remembering last night’s hooded visitor, she wishes she hadn’t just sent Max back upstairs by himself.

In the parlor, Odelia is reaching for the knob on the closed French door. “That’s strange.”

“What is?”

“There’s no key sticking out of the lock.”

“Should there be?”

“Yes, just like the doors upstairs.”

“There’s one right here on the ring you gave me.” Bella fishes for it in her pocket.

“Yes, that’s the duplicate. But how did the door get locked in the first place?”

“Maybe Leona locked it,” Luther says.

“She only did that when there were overnight guests in the house, which there weren’t on the night she passed.”

“Are you sure about that?”

“Pretty sure. And when she was home alone, she always left the key in the knob so that she wouldn’t misplace it, because those keys can’t be copied these days.” She turns to look at Bella. “Other than Leona, no one but me has been here—until you.”

“I didn’t lock it,” she protests nervously. “It was that way when I got here.”

“No, I’m sure that it was. I’m just trying to figure out why.” Odelia exchanges a long look with Luther before asking Bella for the master key ring.

She hands it over, and Odelia opens the French door without comment and motions them inside.

The room is exactly as Bella left it the other night. Noticing the appointment book on the table, she wonders if she should mention the missing page.

But it would mean admitting that she snooped around in here. In light of the key discussion they just had, she decides she’d better keep it to herself for the time being.

“It’s funny,” Odelia muses. “This room looks so much bigger to me now than it used to.”

“What do you mean?”

“The walls were a deep shade of blue. But Leona spends so much time here that she decided to give it a makeover this spring and brighten things up. I’d forgotten all about that. I do love the yellow. It’s much more cheerful, don’t you think, Luther?”

Luther, who doesn’t appear the least bit interested in décor, offers a monosyllabic agreement. He motions for the two of them to sit in the easy chairs.

Bella perches on the edge of one of them, conscious of his gaze and wondering if he can tell how anxious she is.

It’s almost as if he’s trying to be intimidating, sitting on the window seat, his spine held military-straight, not touching the three pillows along the back of the bench.

He wastes no time getting down to business. “Odelia has reason to believe that Leona’s accident might not have been an accident. She’s asked me to look into things.”

“What do you mean? Did something else happen?” Bella asks, looking at Odelia in alarm.

“Something else?” Luther, too, looks at Odelia.

“I just meant . . .” Bella trails off, wondering what he knows—and why he knows. He seems like a no-nonsense kind of guy. Why would he be hanging around someone like Odelia? And Leona, too?

Unwilling to bring up the pirate story unless Odelia already has, she fumbles for the right thing to say.

Odelia bails her out: “I told Luther what Jiffy said about seeing someone carrying something on the pier the night she died. I couldn’t stop thinking about it after he mentioned it.”

“So you think Leona was . . .” She can’t bring herself to say the word murdered.

“No, I just . . . I don’t know.”

“But if you think there’s even a chance that . . . that someone deliberately did something to her, then shouldn’t you call the police?”

“Luther is the police.”

“Was,” he corrects Odelia, and tells Bella, “I’m a retired officer—I live down in Dunkirk—but I do some private detective work now. Odelia and I met when she got in touch with me about a missing persons case I was on a few years back and—”