Nine Lives (Lily Dale Mystery #1)(58)

“But she’s leaving!”

Sure enough, the cat is already marching straight back to the door, where she meows urgently until Bella opens it, then disappears into the night.

“Why did she go?” Max asks in dismay.

“Shh, it’s okay. Just watch.”

Moments later, Chance reappears with another wriggling kitten hanging by its scruff and deposits it into the crate beside its sibling.

This time, Bella and Max follow her outside to watch as she makes a beeline back to the shadows beneath the porch.

“That’s where the babies are,” Max realizes. “There are five more. Maybe six.”

“Maybe. She was probably waiting for the rain to stop before she brought them inside.”

The daylong deluge has finally ebbed. Bordered by dripping boughs and eaves, the narrow, muddy lane beyond the porch lamp is deserted, most of the houses dark. The wind chimes tinkle forlornly, stirred by a wet breeze. Dense fog still hangs over the Dale, drifting in a yellowish cast beneath widely scattered streetlamps.

The scene reminds Bella of a Jack the Ripper movie she’d seen years ago. This may not be nineteenth-century London, but it doesn’t particularly look like twenty-first-century New York, and it isn’t hard to imagine a cloaked man stepping out of the mist.

She hugs Max close to her as they watch Chance emerge from a hole in the porch lattice with another newborn clutched in her mouth. One by one, she transports her litter inside.

There are seven altogether—or so it seems at first.

Seven helpless, hungry, crying kittens, whom Max promptly names in order of appearance: Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday.

“I told you the kittens were coming today!” he crows. “And I told you there would be seven!”

“You sure did.”

But how on earth did you know?

“Or maybe eight,” he adds, as Chance makes one last trip outside, almost as an afterthought. But when she reappears a minute later, she’s alone. She paces around the room, stopping below the window that faces the porch, then looks up at them and meows, almost as if she’s asking a question.

“It’s okay, sweetie,” Bella says, leaning down to rub her head. “You did great. You can rest now.”

As the cat settles into her makeshift nest to nurse her fuzzy little family, Max and Bella watch from a respectful distance, perched on the bottom stair.

“She keeps looking at the door, Mom. Do you think there’s another baby out there?”

“No, she wouldn’t leave any behind.”

“How do you know?”

“The same way I knew she needed a box for them.”

“Is it called psychic?”

“No. It’s called maternal instinct.”

“So that means moms just know stuff?”

“Exactly.”

“Isn’t that the same as psychic?”

“No, not at all,” she says firmly. Psychics—so-called psychics—claim to rely on a sixth sense, while moms rely on . . .

Instinct.

Which is completely different. Of course it is.

One is supposedly supernatural, the other is . . . well, natural.

Don’t all mothers, human and animal, possess the acute need to find a cozy place in which to protect their offspring from the big, bad world?

For now, this is ours, she thinks, looking around at the tawny wallpaper and rich woodwork swaddled in the golden glow of the etched glass ceiling pendant. The room is hushed, other than the ticking clock and the occasional peep of a wayward kitten momentarily losing its latch.

In this moment, the house belongs only to her, Max, Chance, and her babies. Unless you count Leona’s nephew-who’s-not-really-a-nephew, still presumably asleep upstairs.

Thinking of poor Grant, abandoned as a newborn, Bella acknowledges that not all females are natural mothers. She finds herself wondering about the story behind his tragic past—and then, for some reason, wondering if it’s even true.

She’s met men like him before. Smooth, self-assured, and, yes, seductive. Men who aren’t above embellishing or even fabricating details to suit their needs.

To be fair, she doesn’t know Grant well enough to assume that he fits that bill. But there’s no denying that he’s smooth and self-assured. Besides, Odelia has no use for him, and she—

Okay, she doesn’t like everybody.

She has no use for Pandora Feeney. Nor for her ex-husband Orville.

But considering that she’s psychic—or so she claims—she may have a sound basis for her . . . dislike? Mistrust?

A possibility occurs to Bella, so disturbing and frightening that she pushes it away.

No, that would be as preposterous as . . . as Jack the Ripper lurking in the mist that shrouds the Dale.

Still, she can’t help but look over her shoulder, up the staircase. She half-expects to see someone looming there, but the hall above is dark and still.

“I have boy instinct,” Max is saying.

“Hmm?”

“You have mom instinct, and I have boy instinct,” Max tells her. “I told you the kittens would be born today, and I told you how many there would be.”

Yes, he did.

Boy instinct . . . or prophecy?

“One, two, three, four, five, six, seven,” Max counts, as if to make absolutely sure, and then he casts a fretful glance at the door. “I really think she forgot one.”