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  Also Available in the Lily Dale Mysteries:

  Something Buried, Something Blue

  Nine Lives

  Other Recent Mysteries by Wendy Corsi Staub

  Bone White

  Blue Moon

  Blood Red

  The Black Widow

  The Perfect Stranger

  The Good Sister

  Shadowkiller

  Sleepwalker

  Nightwatcher

  Hell to Pay

  Scared to Death

  For a full list of titles, visit wendycorsistaub.com.

  Dead of Winter

  A Lily Dale Mystery

  Wendy Corsi Staub

  NEW YORK

  This is a work of fiction. All of the names, characters, organizations, places, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to real or actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2017 by Wendy Corsi Staub

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Crooked Lane Books, an imprint of The Quick Brown Fox & Company LLC.

  Crooked Lane Books and its logo are trademarks of The Quick Brown Fox & Company LLC.

  Library of Congress Catalog-in-Publication data available upon request.

  ISBN (hardcover): 978-1-68331-333-5

  ISBN (ePub): 978-1-68331-334-2

  ISBN (ePDF): 978-1-68331-336-6

  Cover design by Melanie Sun

  www.crookedlanebooks.com

  Crooked Lane Books

  34 West 27th St., 10th Floor

  New York, NY 10001

  First Edition: November 2017

  For Anita,

  with wishes for a sunny, beachy, margarita-splashed holiday;

  for Elvis—I mean, Paul—

  with a future dance floor date, ’80s-style;

  for Poppo-Claus,

  with love and gratitude for a lifetime of merry Christmases;

  for the real Chance the Cat, Li’l Chap, and Sanchez;

  and for my greatest gifts, my three wise men: Mark, Morgan, and Brody.

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Epilogue

  Chapter One

  Bella Jordan squints and takes aim. Just as she presses the trigger, a voice bellows, “Mom!”

  Jolted, she misses the target.

  A fat white blob lands in the middle of a newly installed tile instead of in the seam along the countertop. With a sigh, she sets aside the caulk gun and grabs a rag.

  “Mom!”

  “What is it, Max?”

  Her six-year-old son offers an unintelligible response from the small TV room off the front parlor.

  “Max! Come in here if you need something!”

  Hastily wiping her gooey mistake from the gleaming white porcelain, she checks the stove clock, does a double take, and sighs.

  It’s challenging to keep track of time here in western New York in mid-December. Dusk was already falling when Max got off the school bus, and she’d lost an hour to a shopping excursion for social studies project supplies. Back home, they had painstakingly cut out shapes depicting the original thirteen colonies and pasted them to a piece of poster board—another hour gone.

  Now two more have disappeared, and suppertime has all but given way to bedtime.

  Footsteps pad into the room. Max looks just like his dad, with the same brown eyes, same glasses, same sandy brown hair, and even the same cowlick.

  “I just saw a commercial, and it made me hungry for spaghetti and meatballs,” he tells her. “Can we have some?”

  “You were supposed to be watching PBS, kiddo.”

  “I was.”

  “Not if there are spaghetti and meatball commercials.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “I know everything.”

  He doesn’t dispute that, though Bella is one of the few locals whose livelihood doesn’t involve omniscience.

  Like many vintage summer cottage colonies in this rural corner of New York, Lily Dale’s entrance is marked by a small gatehouse. Like the other communities, it’s perched on a small, picturesque lake, with a network of ancient, rutted lanes more suited to foot traffic than automobiles and lined with weather-beaten gingerbread cottages and stands of towering trees. It, too, lies dormant between Labor Day and Columbus Day, nearly deserted for six months as brutal midwestern blizzards barrel across the Great Lakes. And it, too, stirs to life between Mother’s Day and Memorial Day.

  But here, the “season” isn’t dictated by calendar or weather. The Lily Dale season is an official Season—a ten-week schedule of daily events that draw people from around the globe. Visitors aren’t vacationing as much as they’re making a pilgrimage, like gamblers to Vegas or aspiring starlets to Hollywood.

  Lily Dale is an industry town, and its industry is communicating with the dead. Founded in the dawn of the nineteenth-century spiritualist movement, the Dale remains populated by psychic mediums.

  Six months ago, Bella had never even heard of this place. She’d just lost her teaching job, and her landlord had sold the house back in Bedford where she’d lived all her married life. On their last day, as she and Max were packing their belongings, a very pregnant stray tabby had parked herself on their doorstep.

  Max had wanted to keep her, but that was out of the question. They were headed to Chicago to stay with Sam’s mother, Millicent, whom Bella had privately nicknamed Maleficent. She had dreaded the thought of visiting her mother-in-law, let alone moving into her immaculate condo, but she and Max had no other family.

  Eight hours into their road trip, they had come across a nearly identical pregnant tabby. They’d brought her to nearby Lakeview Animal Hospital, where veterinarian Drew Bailey had scanned a microchip. It revealed that her name was Chance the Cat and she belonged to Valley View Manor’s innkeeper, Leona Gatto. With a nasty storm brewing, they detoured to return their feline friend to Lily Dale.

  By the time Bella discovered that the village was populated by spiritualists and that Leona had been murdered, the weather and car trouble had stranded them here.

  Coincidence?

  No such thing, according to the friendly medium next door. Both Odelia Lauder and Max believe Chance is the same stray they’d left behind in Bedford. She bears such an uncanny resemblance that some days, Bella is almost willing to believe it. Most days, being a logical former science teacher, she tries not to.

  “What are you watching on TV, Max?” she asks.

  “It’s a show called Rudolph. It’s about this little reindeer. All the other reindeers laugh at him because his nose is red. Even Santa is not that nice to him.”

  “Yeah, I thought the same thing when I was your age,” Bella admits.

  “You saw Rudolph?”

  “Every year . . .”

  With my dad.

  For Max’s sake, she swallows the rest of the memory. She had always watched Rudolph with her father, snuggled on the couch together. Later, they’d graduated to Hallmark Christmas tearjerkers. Dad always blamed his sniffles on nonexistent allergies. Now that Bella, too, is widowed, she’s just as prone to emotional blindsides and
to protecting her child from reminders of a tragic loss.

  “Don’t worry, Max,” she says. “I’m sure the real Santa is much nicer to Rudolph than the TV one.”

  “Kevin Beamer says there’s no real Santa.”

  “What?”

  They’re having this conversation now? When she’s exhausted and busy and . . .

  Now, right before Christmas?

  Now, when Sam isn’t here to help her figure out how to handle it?

  “Why would he say a thing like that?”

  “Because he’s never seen him. He asked me if I’ve ever seen him and I said, ‘Nope, but just because you can’t see something doesn’t mean it’s not there. Like Spirit.’”

  “That was a good answer, Max.” Bella changes the subject. “I wonder how the TV suddenly started showing Rudolph instead of PBS.”

  “I wonder that, too.”

  Bella bites a smile, wondering how to handle Single-Mom Disciplinary Action Challenge number . . . she’s lost count today.

  Lying is a serious offense, and she censors Max’s viewing because he’s experienced enough darkness already without stumbling across nightmare-inducing TV programming. Which Rudolph isn’t, she reminds herself. The ferocious Bumble might be scary for other six-year-olds, but hers has met more than his share of real-life villains.

  “Maybe Chance or Spidey bumped the remote, Mom.”

  “I don’t think so.” Bella points at the cats curled up in snoozy balls on the back doormat. Spidey was the runt of Chance’s large litter, and Max hadn’t been able to let him go.

  “Well, maybe it was Nadine.”

  Nadine is Valley View’s resident Spirit prankster, according to their neighbor Odelia. Even if Bella believed in that sort of thing, she’s certain Max changed the channel, just as she knows that Max, and not Nadine, ate the gumdrops she was saving for the gingerbread men that he’s been wanting her to bake ever since he started reading “The Gingerbread Man” story in school last week.

  “Is dinner ready, Mom?”

  She glances at the caulk gun, then at her son. “I’m sorry, sweetie. I lost track of time, and I forgot to make it.”

  “It’s okay. We can order pizza.”

  If only.

  Pizza delivery is a forbidden luxury if she’s going to give Max the holiday he should have had last year, with decorations and a heap of presents under the tree. With only twelve shopping days till Christmas, she still can’t afford even one small extravagance.

  Max sneezes—once, twice, three times, just as Sam always did.

  “Bless you. Are you feeling okay?”

  “No. I’m feeling starving.”

  She grabs a clean kettle from the drying rack. “How about some spaghetti?”

  “With meatballs? And cheese? The kind in the green can? That’s what they had on TV.”

  “We don’t have cheese or meatballs.”

  “Did you look in the freezer? Because there’s a lot of stuff in there. I even found all that trick-or-treat chocolate we lost.”

  She sighs. “What were you doing in the freezer, Max?”

  “Getting ice cubes for my milk.”

  “Milk doesn’t need ice cubes.”

  “Yes, it does. Warm milk is disgusting. It makes people barf.”

  “Bet I can guess who told you that.”

  “Who?”

  “Jiffy Arden.”

  “You’re a good guesser, Mom. Jiffy says ice makes the milk nice and cold. What else can you guess?”

  “I can guess that you like spaghetti with butter, right? Because that’s what I’m making for dinner.”

  Maternal guilt assuaged by a cheerful “Yep,” Bella doesn’t tell him to turn the channel back to PBS as he skips back to the television.

  Maybe she’ll even let him eat in there while she finishes caulking the backsplash. She’ll gobble some pasta later, unless she collapses into bed without dinner again.

  That happens a lot now that Valley View’s owner has decided to spruce up his newly inherited property rather than sell it.

  As manager, Bella is grateful that the leaky, needs-to-be-replaced three-story Victorian roof will remain over her head for the foreseeable future—which, here in Lily Dale, is basically infinite. This old house is home, cracks, leaks, scars, and all. When Grant Everard told her about the renovation, she eagerly volunteered to help.

  “Do you have any home repair experience?” he’d asked.

  “A little. I can make curtains, and—”

  He’d cut her off, sounding amused. “I’m going to hire professionals to do the work, Bella, but I appreciate the offer.”

  “No, really, let me help,” she insisted. “What else am I going to do with myself all day every day while Max is in school?”

  “How about relax?”

  “No way.” Relaxing gave a person too much time to think, and when a person thought—when she thought, anyway—it was often about everything she’d lost.

  Standing at the sink, she scrubs her hands. She was never one of those women who considered her fingernails more accessory than tool, but these days, they’re perpetually ragged. Her hands are dry and chapped, gold wedding and engagement rings conspicuously missing. She’d taken them off to paint the other day and had forgotten to put them back on. Though she remembered the next morning, she left them stashed in her jewelry box alongside her special tourmaline necklace. She told herself it was only because she was doing so much work around the house, but maybe that wasn’t the whole truth.

  She changes the tap to cold. As she waits for the kettle to fill for the pasta, she rubs her aching shoulders and realizes that she’s ravenous. She’d love to call it a night right now, but . . .

  “In for a penny, in for a pound,” Sam used to say.

  This time, it really is about pennies, so to speak. Grant pays her extra for the renovation work she’s been doing. She can’t bill him for the backsplash until the job is completed, and she needs the extra cash before Christmas.

  She sets the pan on the burner and turns on the flame.

  Can she caulk the seams while she waits for it to boil?

  That way, she can catch the end of Rudolph and eat dinner with Max, e-mail an invoice to Grant, and get to bed with a full belly at a decent hour.

  You can do anything you set your mind to. You’re the most capable woman in the world, Bella Blue.

  Sam’s pet name for her. Sam’s words, last December, and they came back to haunt her after he was gone.

  Her husband, who’d been right about everything, had been wrong about her. She couldn’t do anything, not without him. She was barely capable of dragging herself out of bed most mornings.

  But look at you now, Bella Blue. Look what you can do. Look what you’ve done.

  She turns away from the stove, and her gaze falls on the new white subway tiles.

  A year ago, she wouldn’t have known a wet saw from a seesaw, and she’s pretty sure Sam wouldn’t have either. He was a lot of things—a businessman, a poetry lover, a loyal husband, a loving son, and a devoted father. But he was no Mr. Fixit.

  Bella, however, has transformed herself into . . .

  Not Miss Fixit, and she’s never been a fan of Ms. She always enjoyed being a Mrs., but that no longer applies.

  Guess that makes me the Widow Fixit.

  I’d rather be Bella Blue.

  When she first came to town, Pandora Feeney, a local medium, had told her that her aura was blue indeed.

  “My what is what?” Bella had asked, thinking she must have misunderstood the woman’s English accent.

  “Your aura, luv. It’s a bioenergy field that surrounds you. We all have them. As we move through our lives and our circumstances change, our auras change. Yours is the most smashing shade of blue.”

  “What does that even mean?”

  “You’re bloody logical. Stubborn. Intuitive and serene. You feel deeply, but you refuse to allow your emotions to impact your decisions. You guard them quite fiercely. You don
’t wear your heart on your sleeve. It takes you yonks to let someone in.”

  “Yonks?”

  Pandora laughed. “That’s a long, long time. But when they’re in, they’re in for yonks. You’re true blue, darling.”

  Unnerved that a relative stranger had just described her to a T, Bella had asked Pandora what color her own aura was.

  “What color do you think?”

  “I have no clue.”

  “Come, now, give it a try. You’re intuitive.”

  Bella had studied her, if only to prove to herself that aura reading was complete and utter BS. There were only so many colors to choose from, and she had a feeling that no matter what she guessed, Pandora would say she was correct.

  They were in Melrose Park at the time, surrounded by lush, verdant foliage. Pandora, a gawky woman with plain, angular features, had a sickly complexion that made Bella want to say green.

  But that might have seemed insulting. Green was the color of nausea, jealousy, mold, the Grinch . . .

  “Pink?” she guessed instead. It was, after all, the color of Pandora’s floral print sundress and matching ribbons at the end of her long salt-and-pepper braid. Her cottage, too, though Bella hadn’t known that then.

  “Brilliant guess, luv. Brilliant!”

  “So I’m right?” Surprise, surprise.

  “No! I do understand why you might think pink. I am utterly loving and generous. But these days, my aura is primarily green. Healthy, vibrant, creative, in tune with nature. That’s me, tra-la!”

  Remembering the conversation, Bella catches her own smile reflected in the window—along with something unexpected.

  For a moment, she thinks the glint of light is coming from behind her in the kitchen. But when she leans into the glass, she sees that it’s out there, piercing the darkness beyond the bare ginkgo tree branches.

  The glimmer isn’t in the broad backyard that lies between Valley View and this narrow swath of Cassadaga Lake. Nor is it in the rolling hills on the opposite shore one hundred and fifty, maybe two hundred yards away.

  It’s out on the water. Maybe it’s a floating chunk of ice catching moonbeams, or . . .

  Can it be a boat? Any other time of year, Bella wouldn’t be surprised to see a night fisherman, but now?