Nine Lives (Lily Dale Mystery #1)(80)

“We have to go,” Bella says again, and her voice comes out choked.

“Right, then.” Pandora reaches for her hand, pressing the flower into it. “Just take the bluebell.”

Bluebell?

“I thought you said it was a . . . some sort of hyacinth.”

“Hyacinthoides non-scripta is the botanical name. Back in Britain—and here, too—we just call them bluebells.”

Bella stares down at the flower.

Bluebell.

Bella Blue.

As she wipes at her stinging eyes with her hand, she hears Jiffy tell Max, “I don’t think that flower cheered her up very good.”

She hears something else, too.

Sirens. Louder now, wailing closer by the second.

“Mom?” Max shrinks a little closer to her. “Is there a fire?”

“It isn’t a fire truck,” Pandora says, and Bella follows her gaze across the park.

Now she sees it too. It isn’t a fire truck. It’s an ambulance. And it’s heading down Cottage Row toward Valley View Manor.

*

Less than ten minutes later, Bella closes the Rose Room door behind her and exhales at last.

She hustled the boys away from Pandora’s and was relieved when she saw that the ambulance had gone on past Valley View Manor. Down in the grassy common at the end of the lane, she could see the spinning red lights. Paramedics were kneeling there, nearly obscuring a prone figure on the grass at the water’s edge.

There were a few rubberneckers, but not many. Most everyone was still in the auditorium.

“What happened?” Max asked.

She managed to find her voice. “I don’t know. Let’s go inside.”

Jiffy wanted to investigate, but Bella told him to come along with them.

“Come on,” she coaxed, “you can have cookies and watch TV.”

“It’s the middle of the afternoon,” Max reminded her. “And we had ice cream.”

“I know, but it’s a special treat because Jiffy is a guest. The cookies will be your dessert.”

Giggling at the hilarious notion of dessert after dessert, they accompanied her into the house. She turned on the television and filled a plate with Odelia’s zucchini-jalape?o-lime cookies and told them to stay put while she fed the kitten.

As she enters the room, Chance looks up expectantly, almost reproachfully, as if to say, You’re late.

Well aware that there’s no time to waste getting food into little Spidey, Bella walks over to the dresser and looks down at the flower in her hand. She’d squeezed it so tightly all the way home that its petals are drooping a bit. They aren’t just shaped like upside down lilies. They’re shaped like bells. Little blue bells.

Bella Blue.

“Sam?” she whispers, staring at it, trying to focus, trying to hear him, just like Odelia had said. “Sam, are you here?”

All she can hear are the kittens’ faint mews and more sirens.

“Sam? Please. I think they’ve pulled someone out of the lake, and I don’t know who it was, and I . . . I’m afraid. I try to be strong, but . . . I need you. Please.”

No reply.

She tosses the flower onto the dresser. It lands on the pile of Leona’s financial papers. None of that seems to matter now.

As she turns toward the box of kittens, she remembers what Odelia said about Chance—that she was born in the spring, in a bed of blooming Wood Hyacinths that weren’t Wood Hyacinths at all. No, Chance, the cat who crossed her path and led her here to Lily Dale, was born in a bed of bluebells.

“You sent her, Sam, didn’t you? You sent her to me. You knew I’d figure it out sooner or later. Bluebells. Bella Blue.”

Once again, her eyes are filling with tears. She wipes at them with her hand, but they keep coming.

“Can’t you just say something, Sam? Can’t you let me hear you, or see you?”

She reaches into her pocket for the crumpled paper towel that was there a few minutes ago, entangled with the keys when she went to unlock the front door.

She must have dropped it. But she feels the socks she’d stashed there and pulls one out, not caring if she gets it soggy with tears or even blows her nose on it.

As she lifts it to her face, though, she realizes it isn’t a sock at all.

It’s a floral-print scrunchy. Not the same print as the dress Pandora had on this afternoon, but the green-and-yellow one she’d worn the other day.

How did this get into her pocket?

Frowning, she reaches back in for her socks. She finds one.

Only one.

But she’d dropped two on the closet floor this morning while she was looking in her bag for her other sneaker. She’d picked them up, one right after the other, and put them into her pocket.

Frowning, she hastily wipes her eyes on the sock and walks over to where her open suitcase sits on the low mahogany rack just inside the closet door. She pulls a chain to illuminate the overhead light.

Beneath the crisscross of the rack’s wooden legs, on the closet floor, sits the other sock she’d dropped and thought she’d picked up.

Pulse racing, she looks again at the stack of papers on the dresser. The ones Max had said he’d found scattered on the floor.

All at once, they matter again.

I have to tell Luther.

He’s at the hospital with his sick mother. He said he’d be back as soon as possible. She shouldn’t call him in the midst of a personal crisis.