Dead of Winter Read online

  “No wonder my kid is so drawn to you. You’re peaceful. A survivor. And Jiffy is an indigo child.”

  “What, um . . . what does that mean?”

  “You’re compatible. He craves what you are, what you have to offer.”

  “I don’t think that’s the case at all.” Bella smiles faintly. “He’s not big on rules, helmets, boundaries, curfews . . .”

  “No. But he needs them just the same.” She shakes her head. “I’m a magenta, myself. I’m suited to yellows—my husband is a yellow—but then, he’s not here either, is he? Looks like everyone’s abandoning me.” The words are meant to be light, but she chokes on what was supposed to be a chuckle.

  Bella touches her hand. “Maybe you should call your husband before Grange does.”

  “He’ll blame me or Lily Dale.”

  “You said you stopped here on the way to Niagara Falls for your honeymoon?”

  “Yes. I used to spend summers here with my aunt, and I thought . . .” She gives a little laugh, shaking her head. “I don’t know what I thought. I guess that Mike might like it. Boy, was I wrong. It was during the season, crowded, and we had to pay a gate fee. Long story short, Mike got the wrong idea about Lily Dale.”

  “Is that why he’s not coming for Christmas? Because he doesn’t like it here? Or because he can’t afford to travel? Or is it that you’re having marital difficulties?”

  “D. All the above.”

  “Maybe you can spend Christmas with him someplace else.”

  “That’s what he said. But there is no place else. The base is too far away. New York is too expensive. My family is in Cleveland, and well . . .” She makes a face, shaking her head. “They’re difficult.”

  “What about his family?”

  “Pennsylvania. Just outside of Allentown. I’ve never even met them. Mike hasn’t spoken to them for years. Look, I need to go meditate. Maybe I can get something now. Make sure you keep a good eye on your kid, okay? And don’t trust anyone, no matter who it is.”

  “I’m here if you need anything. And Jiffy’s going to be all right. I know he is.”

  “Yeah? How do you know?”

  Bella taps her coat, indicating her heart.

  Yeah, well, she’s not a medium.

  Swallowing a lump in her throat, Misty allows Bella to give her a quick hug before she trudges back out into the blowing snow.

  Chapter Eleven

  The Dale is hushed, Cottage Row draped in fleecy white. Barren cottages are enveloped in drifts. Already, a robust west wind is attempting to obliterate Grange’s tire tracks, and Bella hears the eerie echo of the fading siren.

  The lieutenant reminds Bella of Sam’s first oncologist. Dr. Stacey Fischer was highly regarded, but her bedside manner had left something to be desired.

  Grange knows what he’s doing, but he’s so cold he makes people nervous.

  She remembers the way he was watching Misty as if he doesn’t trust her. That’s his job, Bella knows. Luther once told her that when a child goes missing, the parents always fall under suspicion.

  But he’d probably handle this investigation very differently. He knows Jiffy well and might even have some idea where to find him. He wouldn’t dismiss Misty’s concerns, her instincts, or even her psychic visions. Then again, he wouldn’t rely on them either.

  Bella doesn’t know about meditation, but if her own son were lost, she’d be doing whatever it took to find him. Misty’s introspection is unnerving, sitting around meditating and analyzing auras when she could be mobilizing search parties and combing the area, putting up posters, making calls . . .

  That’s not who Misty is, though. It’s not what she does. She’s magenta. Whatever the hell that means.

  Magenta, a medium, mother, wife . . .

  Friend.

  Bella was surprised Misty used that word to describe her. But it did the trick, just like the other night with Drew. It made her stay.

  That’s what friends are for . . .

  “Calla?” Bella calls. “Calla!”

  Her friend, like Jiffy Arden, seems to have been swallowed by the maelstrom.

  She looks toward Calla’s rented cottage across Melrose Park. It’s lost in the whiteout, but now that the wind has shifted, she can see Pandora Feeney’s fairy lights. Flashing bulbs illuminate the tree in the window, outline the roof, and snake around pillars.

  “It looks like Snoopy’s damn doghouse in the Charlie Brown special,” Odelia declared when Pandora first plugged them in.

  “I think it’s pretty.”

  “Just you wait. You’re going to go crazy looking at that for the next six weeks.”

  Odelia was right, of course. Yet in this moment, Bella welcomes the garish blinking display, casting bright reassurance into this bleak afternoon.

  “Calla! Blue! Where are you guys?”

  Unnerved by the silence, Bella starts home. Valley View’s third-story turrets are barely visible through the billowing snow.

  What’s happened to her warm and inviting little village? Does the Dale have a dangerous underbelly? Is it brimming with ominous secrets? Who killed Yuri Moroskov? Could he have had local ties? Could it have been someone here? Someone she knows?

  She wonders if Misty heard the scream the other night out on the lake—the great horned owl’s cry or Moroskov’s. Either way, it was blood-curdling. Maybe that’s what triggered the vision Grange so readily dismissed.

  Bella may only be an amateur detective, but she understands the skepticism. She, too, relies on logic when it comes to solving a crime.

  Still, what about maternal instinct? She’d known Max was coming down with something long before he had a fever or started sneezing. It wasn’t about logic. Something just felt off about his energy the other night. So if Bella, who isn’t the least bit psychic, can sense when something isn’t right with her child, why wouldn’t Misty have the same feeling about Jiffy?

  Especially Misty.

  Luther says that mediums tend to be in tune with other people’s moods and emotions, regardless of whether you believe they’re getting their information from Spirit guides. He, unlike Grange, is open-minded about using psychic assistance on a case and would probably have asked Misty for more detail.

  And Bella can tell him about Barbara, Misty’s client. She’d intended to tell Grange but hadn’t been able to find the right opening before he blew out of there. She pulls off her glove and dials, praying Luther will pick up. He may be retired, but he never sits idly waiting for the phone to ring. He might be on an indoor tennis court, getting a massage, or at a matinee with one of his many female companions.

  He answers with his full name as if he’s still on the job.

  “Hi, Luther.”

  “Bella? Is that you?”

  “It’s me.”

  “Good. I can’t find my reading glasses so I took a chance picking up. I was hoping you weren’t . . . oh, never mind.”

  “Who is she?” Bella asks, smiling as she pulls her glove on again.

  “You don’t know her. Everything okay?”

  “Max and I are fine.” That’s not entirely true, but Max’s flu bug is insignificant in this conversation. “But Jiffy’s out there somewhere in the storm. We can’t find him.”

  “Did he go out to build a snow fort and forget to come home?”

  “I hope so, but . . . Misty’s worried. She had a vision. And . . . the murder.”

  Luther expels a curse. “Tell me what happened.”

  Bella explains the situation as she trudges toward Valley View, her aching head bent against the wind as icy crystals encrust her hair.

  “The good news is, kidnappings are extremely rare,” Luther tells her. “Especially when you’re talking about the ones committed by a stranger. When kids disappear, a lot of times, they turn out to be runaways. Or a parent or close relative is responsible. Especially a noncustodial parent.”

  “Jiffy’s parents aren’t divorced.”

  “I’m aware. And I am concerned.
”

  “I keep wondering if he might be hiding in Valley View. This morning, I thought I heard . . . someone. Maybe it’s him, hiding.”

  “Let’s hope so. I’ll be there as soon as I can shovel out.”

  “Luther, no. The roads are bad, and it’s dangerous for you to be shoveling at . . . uh, you know.”

  “At my age? I may be an old coot, Bella, but I do it all the time. And I was coming to the Dale anyway.”

  “Right, I heard you have a date with Odelia.”

  “Date? Did she say that?”

  “No, I did, just meaning that when two compatible, eligible adults get together, it’s a date.”

  “So that would make you and Drew Bailey—”

  “We’re not talking about Drew and me!”

  “We’re not talking about Odelia and me either,” Luther returns. “I’m on my way. Sit tight and stay positive.”

  “I will . . . and, Luther?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Do you think he’s going to be okay? Or are you coming because you think this has something to do with what happened to that man?”

  “Yuri Moroskov?” He hesitates. “All I know for sure is that in weather like this, all missing persons are considered endangered.”

  “I hate hearing that.”

  “I hate saying it. I’m going to make some calls and loop in a couple of old colleagues. We need as many people as possible aware that Jiffy’s missing and trying to find him.”

  As she hangs up and pockets her phone, she hears a staticky snatch of familiar music.

  Elvis Presley, singing “All Shook Up.”

  Not as fitting for the season as “Blue Christmas” but an apt choice for this particular moment. The world, beneath its hoary dome, looks like a violently shaken snow globe. Similarly jarred within, Bella looks toward Odelia’s cottage. She often listens to golden oldies’ hour on WDOE, the music floating through her screens in the summer. Today, there are no screens, and right now WDOE is all Christmas music, all the time. Anyway, Bella can no longer hear the song. It was just a blast of sound . . . in her own head?

  Uneasily thinking of Calla and “Blue Christmas,” Bella covers the last few yards to Valley View. She sees that the walkway and steps need shoveling again. That could take her ten or fifteen minutes, and the snow is coming down so fast it’ll be buried again in no time.

  It can wait. Her head is pounding, she needs to check on Max, and no, she doesn’t like hearing music when she has no way of knowing if anyone else can hear it.

  “All shook up . . .”

  She hurries inside and pulls the door shut behind her. Leaning back against it, she closes her eyes and exhales. Yet as she relishes the warm, dry tranquility, the faint sound of a siren reaches her ears.

  It’s probably the police responding to a fender bender. That wouldn’t be surprising in this weather. Or maybe it’s a fire truck—could be a false alarm. Or an ambulance going to help an elderly person who slipped and fell.

  Any of those explanations, while not entirely pleasant, would allow her to go on thinking that Jiffy is fine, wherever he is.

  She hears a floorboard creak. Her eyes fly open, and she looks around to see who’s lurking.

  Jiffy?

  Santa?

  “Lauri!”

  “Bella! You scared me!” The tiny redhead lowers her weapon—a hair-flattening iron brandished like a bayonet. “Geesh. I thought someone was trying to kidnap Max.”

  A thought—a memory?—dances at the edge of Bella’s mind and is gone.

  “Why would you think anyone would kidnap him?”

  “Don’t worry, it won’t happen with me here. I’m a tough mama bear,” Lauri says, though she looks like anything but. She’s still wearing her Santa cap, plus fuzzy pink legwarmers and a red Christmas sweater with a green sequined tree across the front.

  “Well, thanks for keeping an eye on him. Did he wake up?”

  “Not at all. I looked in on him a few times. He’s out cold.”

  Under the circumstances, the innocuous phrase strikes her as sinister. She hurries toward upstairs, still wearing her snowy boots, still hearing those sirens in the distance and Misty’s parting words in her head.

  Don’t trust anyone . . .

  “Hey, where are you going?”

  “To check on Max. Can you hear sirens?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good.”

  “Good?”

  “How about fifties music? Can you hear that?”

  “What? No. Why?”

  “Never mind.” Bella can’t hear it either now.

  She peeks into Max’s room and sees that he is, indeed, out cold. Closing the door again with a quiet click, she turns to see Lauri in the hallway.

  “Is everything okay with your neighbor?”

  “It’s . . . no. Not exactly. You didn’t happen to see a little boy hanging around the house while I was gone, did you?”

  “You mean Max?”

  “No, his friend Jiffy. My neighbor’s son. He got off the bus and never showed up at home. He’s probably out playing somewhere.”

  Lauri follows her gaze to the raging white cloud beyond the window at the end of the hall. “In that?”

  “It’s a novelty for him. They just moved here from Arizona.”

  “Wait, is his mom Misty Starr?”

  “How did you know?”

  “Dawn and I booked appointments with her for tomorrow. We met her at a Stump session over the summer. She gave me a message from my Aunt Sassy, right, Dawn?”

  Bella turns to see Dawn standing on the steps. She’s still wearing her Santa hat, and there’s another Santa etched in red and white sequins across her green sweater.

  “Right,” she says. “I hope Jiffy’s okay.”

  “I’m sure he will be. He’s a mischievous kid. I’m hoping he’s just hiding somewhere right in this house.”

  Hiding, whistling, and maybe even pranking her by moving her boots around. By now, though, surely he’d have grown restless and made himself known by jumping out at her and shouting boo or something.

  “Want us to help you look for him?” Lauri offers.

  “That would be great. If you two can just check the rooms on the second and third floors, I’ll look down here and in the basement.”

  She’ll also peek into the secret passageways tucked behind walls and beneath old floorboards. If Jiffy’s hiding, chances are that he’s in one of those concealed cubbies.

  She tells them not to bother looking in Max’s room. Like most of the vintage Victorian bedrooms at Valley View, it lacks a closet. The only possible hiding place there is beneath the bed, and she’d already checked it when she was looking for Chance.

  Downstairs in the parlor, she calls, “Jiffy? Are you here?”

  No reply.

  She can still hear that siren outdoors.

  She checks beneath drop cloths and behind draperies. “Jiffy?”

  Chance is still sitting on the window seat looking out at the storm.

  Bella nudges her to the floor and moves the cushions aside to open the hinged top.

  You never knew what you were going to find in Valley View’s hidden compartments. Back in July, she lifted a stair tread and found a tourmaline necklace like the one Sam had meant to give her last Christmas.

  Intellectually, she knows it’s not the same necklace they’d seen while browsing in a gift shop the summer before. Even if he’d bought it for her that day, he couldn’t have left it here for her. Not without anticipating the bizarre series of events that led her to Lily Dale and Valley View without him.

  Sam was no psychic. He couldn’t have imagined, in the middle of a typical happy, healthy summer, that he wouldn’t live to see Christmas. Or that Bella would lose both her job and the apartment by spring, or that a stranger named Leona Gatto would be murdered in a faraway town they’d never heard of, or that Chance the Cat would turn up on their Bedford doorstep and a highway four hundred miles away, and . . .

&nb
sp; But Chance didn’t, Bella reminds herself. There were two identical cats, just as there were two identical tourmaline necklaces. Still, she likes to pretend that Sam left it for her here in the house. Every time she opens a hidden nook like this window seat cubby, she half expects another gift from heaven.

  Today, she’s keeping an eye out for a six-year-old boy as well, but finds only household clutter.

  She replaces the cushions and pats one. “Sorry to disturb you, Chance. You can go back to doing whatever you were doing.”

  The cat leaps back onto the bench to perch in precisely the same spot, her green gaze again focused on the window. Maybe she’s pondering the lacy white curtain that seems to billow on the wrong side of the glass. Or maybe she’s looking for the missing child. Or she senses danger—Yuri Moroskov’s murderer.

  Bella turns away with a shudder.

  Her gaze falls on the undisturbed spackle and paint supplies that Hugo had left neatly stacked near the ladder. Jiffy would be incapable of walking past any of it without dabbling, toppling, or climbing.

  And there’s no way he’d have passed up the peanut butter cookies, she thinks when she reaches the kitchen, hoping to find that someone has pillaged a few dozen chocolate kiss centers. But all the candies remain intact.

  Trying to ignore the sirens outside, she opens the door to the basement. Everything is dark and still below.

  “Jiffy? If you’re down there, you need to let me know.”

  Silence. Bella flicks on a light. The bare bulb throws off a sickly yellow glow. She grasps the rickety railing tightly, the rough old wood clammy in her hand.

  As she descends, she thinks of Max and Jiffy, imprisoned here last summer by Leona Gatto’s killer. For every frantic moment her son was missing, Bella had endured a lifetime’s burden of stress. Misty is going through the same thing now.

  “Jiffy! Where are you?”

  On the far side of the basement, she tugs the barely visible cast-iron ring from its groove in a wood panel embedded in the stone wall. The hidden door creaks toward her. Using her cell phone’s glow, she illuminates the cobwebby opening and peers at the crude ladder that disappears into the shadows above.

  “Jiffy?”

  The whisper echoes around her, as does the rasp of wood against hard earth as she pushes the door closed.