Nine Lives (Lily Dale Mystery #1)(74)

Does it, like the one in the living room, have a storage compartment beneath? Is that why the pillows were moved? Did someone open it, looking for something?

Maybe she should open it now.

But if Luther catches her, he might think she’s hiding something.

So? I’m not.

But if she gives him even the slightest reason to think she’s guilty, he might go to the police after all, behind her back. They’ll come to question her. They might take her away for questioning, and that would mean leaving Max with . . .

Someone else.

I can’t afford to trust anyone, Bella realizes. Not right now. Not even Luther.

He reappears in the doorway, looking harried.

“I have to get to the hospital. My mom isn’t doing very well this morning.”

“I’m sorry.”

“So am I. I don’t like to leave this way, but I’ve got to run. I’ll be in touch as soon as I can. Think you can hang tight for now?”

She assures him that she can.

If “hang tight” means fighting off panic while continuing through the motions of an anything-but-ordinary day, then she’s got it covered.

After seeing Luther to the door, she returns to the study. This time, she locks it behind her from the inside. Going over to the window seat, she tosses the pillows onto the floor and lifts the cushion, feeling around along the edges of the bench.

Sure enough, there’s a concealed hinge and latch. The bench doubles as the lid of a storage area.

Tugging it open, Bella sees that it, like the other window seat compartment, is home to a mishmash of household clutter.

She sorts through it, looking for a torn-out page from the appointment book or the missing notebook or laptop.

They aren’t here.

Either they never were or someone else got to them first.





Chapter Sixteen


Just before ten o’clock, Bella trudges wearily up the stairs to feed Spidey again, wishing she were on her way back to bed instead.

This day has been plenty long enough, and it’s still merely midmorning. How on earth is she going to stay upright for another twelve hours or so?

Even when she finally does finally get to climb under the covers tonight, she’ll still have to set her alarm to wake her every other hour.

Yes, but at least she knows exactly what she has to do to keep the kitten alive.

When it comes to everything—everyone—else . . .

All bets are off.

Surely the driver who tried to run over Steve Pierson on Bachellor Hill Road this morning hadn’t made a road trip from Massachusetts and wasn’t motivated by overinflated school taxes. As disturbing as that scenario might be, it would, in the grand scheme of things, provide Bella some measure of comfort.

But it’s simply too farfetched, isn’t it? Especially when Steve Pierson’s near miss happened so close—in timing and proximity—to Leona’s death.

After replacing the window seat cushion, repositioning the pillows, and locking the study door behind her, she busied herself again with breakfast for her guests, who lingered in the breakfast room chatting and eating.

Still conspicuously missing were the Piersons and Grant Everard.

Less conspicuously: Bonnie Barrington.

Bella hadn’t given her absence a second thought until Kelly Tookler asked if she’d seen her. “We had plans to go to the sweat lodge together. The ceremony starts at ten.”

“Maybe she decided to sleep in instead.”

“Bonnie never sleeps in. She hardly sleeps at all. She has insomnia. I knocked on her door. She wasn’t in there.”

Maybe she’s hiding, Bella thought grumpily. Maybe she just didn’t feel like sweating or . . . or lodging. Or hearing, “Right, Bonnie?” all day long.

Kelly was concerned, but Bella has too many other things on her mind to worry about whether one of the guests is going to be late for some bizarre ceremony.

Sweat lodge ceremonies, aura identification workshops . . .

Business as usual in a place where weird things happen all day—and all night.

Bella can pretend she’s immune to the weirdness, and she can try to resist or ignore it.

But there’s no denying that she herself has witnessed—and okay, experienced—some things she can’t quite explain.

She first dreamed about Leona brushing her hair before she even knew what Leona looked like—and Odelia seemed to have almost the same dream minus the crazy wind chimes.

Wind chimes—just the other day, she witnessed the ones in the backyard moving, clanging, without the slightest gust of wind.

And almost in that very spot, she saw that hand—she swears it was a hand—in the lake.

And what about the identical pregnant cats four hundred miles apart and the nonexistent billboard for the nonexistent Summer Pines Campground?

And what about Max? What about his uncanny knowledge of Chance’s full name and the fact that she’d have seven—or eight—kittens on the exact day?

It—all of it, every strange thing that’s happened here—can be chalked up to lucky guesses or sheer imagination or coincidence, but . . .

There are no coincidences.

Darn you, Odelia.

The medium next door is getting to her.

At the top of the stairs, she notices that Grant’s door is still closed. Is he in there, sound asleep? Is he awake? Is he there at all?