Dead of Winter Read online

  Then she sings, “Eight maids a milking . . .”

  “The Twelve Days of Christmas!” Dawn shouts, as if they’re playing Name That Tune, the Lily Dale version.

  “Seven swans a swimming . . .”

  Bella’s thoughts whirl back to yesterday afternoon. Jiffy had told her it took fifteen minutes to sing “The Twelve Days of Christmas” five times.

  “Six geese a laying . . .”

  Pandora stops, brows furrowed.

  Is that significant? The geese laying eggs? Is this some roundabout reference to the stolen Fabergé ones?

  Pandora nods and sings on. “Fooooour golden rings . . .”

  Wait, four?

  “Five!” Lauri corrects.

  Pandora looks up, eyes wide open, shaking her head. “Four. Four golden rings.”

  “No, it goes—” Dawn sings, “Five golden rings.”

  “I’m not daft! I’m quite aware of how the song is written, but it’s not what Spirit is telling me. There are four golden rings.”

  “But what does that mean?” Lauri asks.

  “Hard to say, luv.”

  Thinking of her own wedding and engagement rings, tucked upstairs in her jewelry box, Bella asks, “Are you sure there are four? Not two?”

  “Not two and not five. My goodness, Isabella, I’m—”

  She breaks off, startled by a marimba tone coming from the next room. A cell phone is ringing.

  Bella excuses herself and hurries to the breakfast room, remembering that she had had Misty’s phone when she was talking to Lauri and Dawn there before they left for their appointment.

  Sure enough, it’s right on the table, lit up with a call.

  And Bella intends to answer it.

  Chapter Sixteen

  The big black pickup truck with New York plates, parked in the snow-covered parking lot at the edge of the wood, is not what Misty expected.

  “What, no big old Cadillac?”

  He grunts something—probably telling her to shut up again. That’s his favorite phrase, along with “Walk.”

  Oh, they’ve walked.

  Now it appears they’re going to be driving.

  Misty is so cold, so exhausted, so numb that she almost welcomes the thought of getting into that truck. But she knows that if she allows that to happen, she may never get out of it again.

  Not in her physical body anyway.

  “Come on,” Elvis says.

  “I know, I know. Walk.”

  She walks. Her limbs ache with every step, her lungs with every frozen breath as they cover the last bit of ground toward the parking lot.

  Jiffy rides his scooter here when it isn’t covered with snow. It’s not paved, but there are fewer ruts than on the roads. It’s been plowed since the storm started. He wouldn’t have been over here today, would he?

  Could he have had a run-in with this man?

  “You need to tell me about my little boy.”

  Elvis says nothing, perhaps because he can’t muster the breath. He just pushes her along. It’s faster going now that there’s even ground beneath their feet.

  Misty’s physical body is here, moving forward. But Spirit propels her back to her blue-and-white meditation room, back to . . .

  “Ginger.”

  She didn’t mean to say the word aloud.

  But when it slips out, Elvis stops in his tracks and turns to stare at her.

  “Ginger? What about her?”

  * * *

  Grabbing Misty’s ringing phone, Bella sees that the call is from “Mike.”

  Misty’s husband. Jiffy’s father.

  She hesitates only a moment before answering with a terse, “Hello?”

  “Babe?”

  “No, sorry, I—”

  “Oops, wrong number.”

  “No! Wait, it’s the right number!” She glances toward the doorway, expecting to see Pandora lured by her shout, but she remains in the kitchen, presumably still entranced.

  “This is Misty Starr’s phone,” Bella goes on as she hurries to the study, yanking the French doors closed after her.

  “Misty?” She hears a sigh on the other end of the line. “Misty Starr. Got it. Who is this?”

  “I’m a friend of your wife’s. My name is Bella.”

  “Max’s mom.”

  “Yes. You know about Max?”

  “My son talks about him. You said Bella, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “And my wife is . . .”

  She frowns. “Um . . . Misty?”

  He gives a clipped little laugh. “Actually, I wasn’t talking about her name. Which, for the record, is Mary Ellen. That’s not what she calls herself these days, though, is it.”

  He isn’t asking a question. If Bella hadn’t already heard about the tension between the couple, she’d have quickly picked up on it now.

  “I was just wondering where my wife is,” he says, sounding close enough to be in the next room instead of in a desert on the other side of the globe. “I’ve texted her a few times. She usually answers pretty quickly, so I thought something might be wrong. Is she okay?”

  “She’s . . . I saw her a little while ago, and—”

  “Where is she?”

  “I’m not sure, to be honest,” Bella says and waits for him to ask her to put Jiffy on the phone.

  “Figures,” he mutters instead.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Mary Ellen can be . . .” He clears his throat, shifts gears. “Why did you say you have her phone?”

  “I didn’t, but . . . I borrowed it.”

  “Why?”

  Where the heck is Luther at a time like this? Or even Grange? Bella doesn’t know how or if she should tell this man that his son is missing.

  “My own phone is old,” she says, “and the battery keeps dying, and I needed to make a few calls, and I walked away with it by accident, and . . .”

  She’s talking too much, saying nothing of substance. Lying, essentially. Stalling.

  “So you were with my wife.”

  “Yes.”

  “At the house?”

  “Yes.”

  “How long ago?”

  “A few hours.”

  Does he know about Jiffy? There’s something about the way he’s questioning her, almost as if . . .

  But if he knew, would he be doing it so calmly?

  “And where are you now?”

  “Me? I’m home.”

  “Valley View Manor,” he says. “A few doors down from my wife and son.”

  “Yes.”

  “And you’re not a medium, right?”

  Taken aback, she says, “No. How did you—?”

  “Jiffy likes to talk.”

  She forces a little laugh. “No kidding.”

  “He mentions you and your son a lot. He likes coming over to your house.”

  “We like having him. He and my son are good friends.”

  “I’m looking forward to meeting Max. You, too.”

  “Are you . . . visiting? Soon?”

  “I’m sure I will. Eventually.”

  She doesn’t know what to say.

  Maybe he doesn’t either. There’s a long pause.

  He sighs. “Will you ask Mary Ellen—Misty—to call me, please? Whenever she gets back or whenever you see her?”

  She assures him that she will and hangs up the phone, pondering the conversation and revising her opinion.

  Mike Arden obviously doesn’t know Jiffy is missing. If he did, she’d hear a different kind of tension in his voice. But he wasn’t relaxed, exactly. More like all business. The conversation was brisk and unemotional, and—

  Wait a minute. Wouldn’t it be natural, upon calling your wife’s phone and having it answered by a stranger, to ensure your child’s well-being?

  But he only asked about Misty’s whereabouts, Bella realizes with a chill. Not their son’s.

  * * *

  “What about her?” Elvis asks again.

  Her. Not it.

/>   So “Ginger” wasn’t gingerroot or gingerbread. It was a first name.

  Misty’s thoughts whirl back to the redheaded client in the leopard fur coat, the one who’d called herself Barbara.

  “How do you know Ginger?” Elvis demands, grabbing her roughly by the shoulder with one hand and spinning her around.

  “I . . . met her.”

  “Where?”

  “My house. I gave her a reading.”

  “When?”

  “Yesterday.”

  “What did you tell her?” he screams in her face, pointing the gun at her.

  She weighs her answer, not wanting to lose leverage here—or, for that matter, her life.

  “The details of her reading are private.”

  “They’re priv—” The outraged echo transforms into a violent coughing fit.

  He releases her, trying to control the spasms, yet never moving his eyes from her or relinquishing his aim.

  When the spell passes, he shoves the pistol under her chin. “Private? Her reading was private?”

  “Yes,” she manages to say, neck arched back, eyes blinking against the snowflakes falling from the oppressive sky.

  “You’re kidding, right? Do you not see this gun?”

  “Not from this angle.” She swallows hard against the cold, unforgiving metal.

  He jerks it away. His face is red, asthma kicking in again, and he glowers at her. She can hear the air whistling through his lungs, see it puffing white in the frigid air.

  If it hurts her to breathe in the cold right now, it must be agony for him. He doesn’t have much time before he’ll have to use the inhaler again. This time, she’s standing face-to-face with him, not lying helplessly on the ground.

  He’s still aiming the gun at her, but he won’t use it as long as he thinks she has information he can use.

  She rubs her gloved hands together, eyes closed.

  “Hey! What are you doing?”

  “Listening to my Spirit guides. They have messages for you.”

  “What kind of messages?”

  “Shh!”

  He falls silent, but not for long.

  “What are they telling you? Is it about Ginger?”

  “It’s . . .” She opens her eyes. “It’s about your blond friend. A man.”

  His jaw drops. “What . . . what about him?”

  “Does Ginger know you killed him?” she blurts.

  She’s gone too far. Said too much.

  She might have gotten it all wrong. There might be no blond man, or Elvis didn’t shoot him . . .

  Except, if she was wrong, he wouldn’t appear fearful. Only furious.

  She sees both emotions burning in his eyes. He starts to speak but is seized by another harsh coughing fit.

  Time is running out, Misty knows.

  For both of them and for her son.

  * * *

  Still clutching Misty’s phone, Bella sits at the desk in her study, wondering about Mike Arden.

  If parents are the primary suspects when kids go missing, and her gut tells her Misty isn’t behind Jiffy’s disappearance, then it stands to reason Mike might be guilty. Especially when she considers that the marriage is troubled, the holidays are coming, and they’d had a terrible argument this morning.

  Troubling as it is to consider that Jiffy’s father might have abducted him, it would at least rule out the possibility that he met foul play at the hands of a cold-blooded killer—regardless of the timing and what happened to Virgil.

  Odelia might not believe in coincidence, but Bella wants to. Needs to.

  An unwelcome thought barges into her brain, pushy as Pandora.

  Things aren’t what they seem.

  Is Mike Arden really an American soldier serving overseas? Or is that just what he tells his wife and son?

  Or is it what his wife tells their son and the rest of the world?

  What if he has ties to the Amur Leopard syndicate? What if he’s the one who killed Yuri Moroskov and Virgil? What if he’s a fence?

  She considers what she read about the middlemen who accomplish what thieves themselves cannot—money laundering and trafficking stolen goods without attracting attention. They appear to be ordinary people going about their daily business.

  Bella puts down Misty’s phone and grabs the computer mouse, clicking the desktop to life.

  It’s still open to the web page she was reading—was it really only yesterday?—for information on the Easter Egg Heist.

  She clicks the back button to the search window to replace Moroskov’s name with Michael J. Arden, but pauses with her fingers on the keyboard as she spots a headline from the last results.

  AMUR LEOPARD GANG SUSPECTED IN THEFT OF PRICELESS ARTIFACTS

  She follows the link to an article about a brazen gunpoint theft at a British museum just over a month ago. Thieves made off with priceless jewels that had belonged to twelfth-century clergy—including four sapphire-encrusted gold rings.

  Bella gasps.

  Four golden rings.

  This can’t be a coincidence. There’s no way.

  As she sits staring at the screen, a sound reaches her ears.

  Someone is whistling on the other side of the French doors, and it takes only a few bars for her to recognize the song.

  “O Little Town of Bethlehem.”

  * * *

  Misty can see that Elvis is spent from the latest coughing spell. Yet he’s still armed, still dangerous. Even more so now that she’s brought up the blond man and Ginger, whoever they are.

  “What did you tell Ginger?” he asks, still fighting for breath.

  “I didn’t—”

  “Did you tell her that I . . . you know.”

  Shot that man?

  “No. I swear I didn’t.”

  “Then what did you say to her?”

  “Nothing!”

  “I’m not . . .” He pauses to suck in air. “. . . not stupid.”

  “Look, it’s the truth. She gave me a fake name, and she acted like she didn’t know what I was talking about when I said ‘ginger.’” Misty hadn’t known what she was talking about either, but no need to tell him that.

  “So then what did you do when she didn’t say anything?”

  She shrugs. “I dropped it.”

  “You dropped it.”

  He coughs, long and hard.

  “What else did you see? Before that, after that?”

  “Nothing. That’s all I told her. Ginger.”

  “I’m not talking about what you told her! I’m asking what you saw!”

  Money. She saw money. Should she mention it?

  “I saw a school bus,” she tells him. “But it wasn’t for her.”

  “How do you know?”

  “My son was on it. He was—”

  “Your son again?” He shakes his head. “I don’t want to hear about him right now, lady! Tell me about Ginger. Tell me what you saw.”

  “I didn’t see—”

  “Yes, you did! What else?” he shouts.

  She gulps. “Dirty clothes.”

  “What?”

  “I saw a big bag of dirty clothes.”

  “What the hell are you talking about? Whose dirty clothes?”

  “Mine and my son’s. The washing machine is—”

  “What part of I don’t want to hear about your kid do you not understand?”

  Misty clamps her mouth shut, watching him look down at the pistol. He fiddles with it, almost as if he’s getting ready to use it.

  “Money,” she blurts.

  His head jerks up. “Money?”

  “Yes. I saw money.”

  “Anything else connected to the money?”

  “Not unless it’s laundry,” she says, and something clicks in her brain.

  Laundry . . . money.

  Money . . . laundry.

  Money . . . laundering.

  No surprise that Ginger—and Elvis, too—are involved in something like that, but there’s more to it.
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br />   Her thoughts fly like deft fingers working a jigsaw as he shouts, “I don’t care about the damned laundry!”

  “Spirit doesn’t like it when you scream and curse at me.”

  He flinches, still belligerent, but his voice is lower. “What about something else? Something that might be lost?”

  “Like what?”

  “You’re the psychic. You tell me.”

  Focus . . .

  Breathe . . .

  Did Ginger come looking for money?

  Does Elvis know where it is, and he’s hiding it from Ginger? Or is he, too, trying to find it?

  No, wait . . .

  It’s not the money. It’s something else. Something lost. Something . . .

  Breathe . . .

  Whatever it is—whatever they’ve lost—is somewhere nearby, here in the Dale. She can feel it.

  “What do you see? You know where to look, right?” he asks, and she sees the hunger in his eyes, hears the plea in his voice, strangling as his lungs constrict.

  Misty nods slowly, every molecule of her body taut.

  He won’t shoot her if he believes she has information he needs.

  “So where are they?” His words are tight, airless.

  They.

  She closes her eyes.

  An image sparks in her brain and is gone.

  Gold.

  Is it some kind of gold treasure? Gold coins, bars, doubloons, jewelry . . .

  She listens to Elvis struggling to breathe. In her mind’s eye, she sees the knobby-kneed, hunch-shouldered little boy in the schoolyard, clinging to his lunchbox, taunted by bullies.

  A lot of people hurt little boys.

  He coughs, hard and long, gasping. Deep within her, something taut begins to fray.

  “Dude. You need your inhaler.”

  “I’m . . . fine.”

  “No, you aren’t. I promise I won’t try anything. Just get your medicine.”

  “Get . . . into the truck.”

  She stays rooted to the snowy ground.

  “Go on.” He gestures with the gun. “Get in.”

  “I thought you wanted to know about the money.”

  “I do . . . You’re . . .” He stops to cough. “You’re taking me there.”

  “Yes. I will. I promise. Just as soon as you tell me what you know about my son. Okay?”

  He stares at her for a long time.

  Then he nods. “Okay.”

  * * *

  The whistling stops the instant Bella jerks open the French doors.

  Stepping into the parlor, she spots Pandora standing in front of the open window seat cubby.