Nine Lives (Lily Dale Mystery #1)(46)

“And he thought I was off my rocker,” Odelia cuts in.

“I wouldn’t say that.”

“You did say that. To my face.” She shakes her frizzy orange head. “But you changed your mind pretty quickly when I led you right to the person you were looking for—in the last place you ever would have thought to look.”

“I’ll admit I was a skeptic,” Luther agrees. “But I couldn’t have solved that case without you.”

“Since then, we’ve collaborated on quite a few others. But I never imagined that Leona . . .” Odelia shakes her head sadly at Bella. “Anyway, last night, I dreamed about it.”

“About . . . the pirate?”

“About Leona.”

“What about her?”

“She showed me that something happened to her that night. Luther already knows this, but . . . sometimes dreams are just dreams, and sometimes they aren’t. You learn to tell the difference.”

“What did she show you?”

“Just—”

Luther curtails Odelia’s reply. “Before we get into that, Bella, can I ask you a couple of questions?”

She nods, looking uneasily toward the door, thinking about last night and about Max and wondering how long this is going to take.

He asks her some basic questions—her full name, her last address, that sort of thing. Then he asks one that makes her breath catch in her throat: “Can you tell me where you were on the night of June eighteenth?”

“June eighteenth?” she echoes. “Is that . . . ?”

“The night Leona died.”

That date would have been included in the missing page from the appointment book.

Looking from the formidable Luther to Odelia, who avoids her gaze, Bella gulps. “I was back home in Bedford, same as every other night of my life since . . .”

Since Sam.

“Why are you asking?” As if she doesn’t know. She swallows hard, trying to hold it together, to sound indignant, even. “Please tell me that you don’t think that I—”

“Were you at home alone?”

“I was with my son.”

Max. Again, she looks at the door, feeling trapped here. As worried about him upstairs alone as she is about the line of questioning, she chews her lip.

“Is there someone who can vouch for that?” Luther asks.

“Besides my five-year-old, you mean?” Of course there isn’t. She never goes anywhere anymore, never sees anyone, never—“Wait a minute, did you say the eighteenth?”

“Yes.”

Relief floods through her. What are the odds? That was the one night all year that she wasn’t sitting home.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t realize—I was out at a restaurant with some of the teachers that night.”

“Are you sure about that?” Luther obviously suspects she’d conveniently changed her story.

“I’m positive, because it was the last day of classes. The women I work with had a little going away party for me, and one of them got her daughter to babysit Max. If you don’t believe me, you can check online. My friend posted pictures on every conceivable social media site even though we all told her not to.”

She shakes her head, thinking of Janice, a young and single library aide. She’s one of those women who doesn’t eat lunch, buy shoes, or see a movie without telling the entire world about it—the Internet world, anyway. She’d plastered the web with photos labeled “Girls’ Night Out,” much to the chagrin of Bella and her fellow teachers.

“I can show you,” she tells Luther and Odelia, “if you want to see.”

“I don’t think we need to—”

“I’d like to see,” Luther interrupts Odelia.

Bella pulls her phone from her pocket, presses a few buttons, and locates the incriminating—or rather, the opposite of incriminating—photos, which prominently feature not only the date but the time and the place where they were taken.

“You can talk to Janice—to anyone who was there that night—if you want to.”

“Go ahead and give me the names and contact information.” Luther hands back her phone and picks up a pad and pen from the table. After writing it all down, he tells her that he probably won’t bother to talk to anyone.

“So you believe me?”

“It’s hard not to, given the evidence.” He seems softer now. “But you might want to tell your friend it’s not a good idea to put stuff like that online.”

Don’t worry, Bella thinks, with a sudden pang for the life she left behind. I’ll probably never see her again anyway.

Odelia is looking smug. “I told him you weren’t involved in what happened to Leona. But sometimes, my guides aren’t proof enough for Luther, so—”

“Your guides are never enough proof for me, Odelia. Ordinarily, online photos aren’t, either. I learned to play by the rules when I was on the force. But in this case, I’m going to go with my gut. I don’t want to waste any more time.”

Bella nods, and he offers a hint of a smile—a one-man good cop/bad cop show.

She should tell him about the person who was lurking in the house last night. Although . . .

Lurking? That might be too strong a word. In broad daylight—even this gray, stormy daylight—it seems likely she just imagined that the person’s behavior was furtive. Surely it was just one of the guests coming and going.