Nine Lives (Lily Dale Mystery #1)(6)

Surprised, he asks, “We’re already in Ohio?”

“No, I thought we’d stop earlier than we planned. I can’t wait to camp out. How about you?”

She packed sleeping bags and the two-man tent she and Sam used only once, when they discovered they hated camping.

But this is a fresh start. Maybe it’ll be better this time around.

Come on. Nothing is better without Sam.

“I guess,” Max says. “I wish we could sleep inside, though.”

So do I.

But she can’t even afford a budget motel. Not with gas prices as high as they are and the car acting up. She doesn’t have a choice about the camping—or the fresh start—so she might as well make the best of things for Max’s sake.

And really, after what she’s been through, this is nothing. Camping out? Driving halfway across the country to visit Maleficent with a messy kid and all their worldly belongings on board?

I’ve totally got this.

Or does she? The sky, now rapidly gathering purple-black clouds, was sunny and blue until five minutes ago. She’d expected it to stay that way until dusk, which—this far west and on the cusp the summer solstice—shouldn’t descend until after nine o’clock. But she recognizes an impending thunderstorm when she sees one.

“How are we going to camp if it rains, Mommy?” Max wants to know.

“I’m sure we’ll stay dry in the tent.” She isn’t at all sure about that, and a glance into the rearview mirror reveals that Max isn’t either. He sits pensively wiggling his loose bottom tooth with his thumb.

“I don’t really want to sleep in the tent anymore.”

“It’ll be okay, sweetie. Besides, maybe the storm will pass.” The remark is underscored by a rumble of thunder, and she continues almost without missing a beat, “Then again, maybe it won’t. Let’s look for an exit with a campsite.”

The response is a high-pitched, “I really think we should just get a hotel!”

Oh, Max. Hang in there, kiddo.

“I really wish we could,” she manages to say evenly, “but we just can’t.”

Max wants to know why not and where they’ll camp, and he’s worried about mud and lightning and bears and a host of other potential nature-related calamities that he catalogs for her as she nervously listens to the engine rattle.

Then—yes!—she spots a billboard.

Summer Pines Campground: Next Exit.



Wow. Talk about luck.

“That looks nice, doesn’t it?” She points at the enormous photo of tents pitched on the grassy shore of a sapphire lake beneath a picture perfect summer sky that has nothing in common with the one looming ahead. “Should we check it out?”

“I guess,” he says gamely.

As they rattle north onto Route 60, she checks the odometer. According to that billboard, the turnoff for the campground is ten miles up the road.

She keeps an eye out for a service station. But the two-lane highway runs through hilly, rural farmland. Pastures, livestock, silos—there are few other cars even traveling this stretch. To occupy Max—and keep him from asking more questions she doesn’t want to answer—she challenges him to count the grazing cows on either side of the road and promises him an ice cream cone for dessert later if he can count twenty.

“Can it be chocolate chip?”

“Sure.”

“Can it be two scoops? With sprinkles?”

“Sure—if you can count twenty-five cows.”

That he accomplishes in short order, noting that most of them are lying down.

“That’s because they know it’s going to rain.”

“How do they know?”

“I guess they’re psychic,” she says absently, checking the odometer and then the mile marker at the side of the highway. Six more to go.

Rattle . . . rattle . . .

“What’s psychic?”

“It’s . . . when you can predict the future.”

“Cows can predict the future?”

She smiles, imagining a Guernsey with a crystal ball. “Well, I wouldn’t put it that way. But some animals can be superintuitive.”

“What’s intuitive?”

“It’s knowing something that you can’t really know.”

“That doesn’t make sense. If you can’t know it, then how do you know it?”

“Because you don’t just rely on your five senses to—” She hits the brakes, spotting something ahead in the road as they round a curve.

The car stops just inches from a small animal. For a moment, she assumes that it’s roadkill—a dead possum or raccoon. Then she realizes that it’s a cat—a gray tabby—and it’s very much alive, staring at the car. She waits for it to scuttle off into the tall purple wildflowers along the narrow shoulder, but it doesn’t move.

“Look, Mom! He followed us all the way here!”

“What?”

“The kitty from home! The one with the candy cane tail!”

Indeed, this cat’s tail is similarly striped, standing straight up and hooked into a curve, and its markings are strikingly similar to the one who showed up on their doorstep yesterday.

“Max, he didn’t follow us. And he was a she, by the way, remember? And this cat isn’t the same—”