On nights when Luther Ragland doesn’t stay over, Odelia Lauder relishes having her full-sized bed to herself. It’s nice to indulge in junk food and reality television shows without input from a man who eats health food, has a personal trainer, and pretty much only watches sports on TV.
Really, Luther is her polar opposite in every way.
He’s a never-married lifelong ladies’ man; she’s long divorced and lost her only child, but she’s a doting grandma and brand-new great-grandma. She’s stout and contentedly sedentary, with gingery hair and freckles; Luther is tall, physically fit, and Black. He’s a retired police detective, organized, punctual, and always looks like a million bucks; she thrives in happy chaos – which also applies to her fashion, decorating and culinary style.
They’d met years ago, when Odelia received a message about an unsolved crime from her spirit guides. It wasn’t the first time she’d ever walked into the police station with a psychic tip, but Luther was the first law enforcement official to take her seriously – after realizing she wasn’t, as he likes to put it, ‘a colorful kook’.
Thanks to Odelia and her guides, he’d solved the case, and many others. They’d been unlikely friends ever since. Even unlikelier romantic partners, but … here they are, dating since spring and settled into a comfortable routine.
Odelia spends her mornings and afternoons doing readings here in the Dale. Luther lives ten miles away in Dunkirk and works as a private investigator and security consultant. Sometimes they get together during the week, but always have date night on Fridays and Saturdays, and he stays overnight.
They often share a wistful moment when they part ways in the morning, but it passes quickly. Luther has to get back to his dogs and the gym, and she has to get back to … well, bed, usually.
They’re compatible in every way – as long as they give each other plenty of space to do their own thing.
Tonight, Odelia had attended the Dale’s Mainstage event, featuring Candace and Tommy, a pair of married-to-each-other ghost hunters. Luther wouldn’t have appreciated three hours in the auditorium listening to supernatural tales sprinkled with corny banter. Nor would he have appreciated Odelia’s bedtime binges back home: the entire first season of The Specter Inspectors, and Doritos dipped into Cool Whip.
The paranormal reality show’s hosts had always struck her more as entertainers than paranormal investigators. But on the heels of Candace and Tommy’s presentation in the auditorium, she’d watched the episodes with renewed interest and far less skepticism. Their Hollywood looks and witty repartee make for good TV, but live and in person, sharing anecdotes to which Odelia can relate, they seem to be the real deal.
Tonight, she has company in bed. Her granddaughter Calla is away on a business trip, and Odelia’s been cat-sitting her Russian blue rescue kitten all week. His name is Li’l Chap because he looks like he’s formally dressed in a tuxedo, courtesy of the white bowtie-shaped marking on his neck.
Odelia had forgotten how nice it is to have a snuggly pet around the house. Huddled under a down comforter to ward off the nippy night air, she and Li’l Chap had drifted off around midnight, contentedly bathed in flickering television light and nacho dust.
Four hours later, she’s jarred awake by Luther talking in his sleep.
She reaches out to poke him, but the bed is empty.
Ah, that’s right. Luther isn’t here, and Li’l Chap seems to have abandoned her sometime after she’d fallen asleep.
The voice hadn’t come from the TV. Luther had programmed it with a sleep timer so that it turns itself off, because ‘if I have to wrestle the remote from your death grip one more time when you’re asleep, someone’s going to get hurt – and I’d bet good money it’s not going to be you.’
Well, then, someone must be talking very loudly outside, which would be unusual. Most residents are early risers during the season, and the Dale has zero nightlife. Anyway, she’s a sound sleeper.
She gets out of bed and crosses to the two windows overlooking the street. They’ve been open ever since the Fourth of July and are now so swollen with humidity that she couldn’t budge the old wooden sills if she tried. Which she had, just before bed, in an evening chill that now seems to have turned positively arctic.
So much for the heatwave Pandora Feeney had warned her is heading this way. Having grown up in this capricious Lake Effect region, Odelia knows better than to heed weather forecasts – and, for that matter, Pandora’s.
And so much for Luther’s warning that she needs to be more careful with home security on the heels of a recent break-in and theft at the Slayton house outside Lily Dale’s gates.
‘Don’t tell anyone. It isn’t public knowledge yet,’ he’d said. ‘The police are still investigating.’
She’s not concerned. The Slaytons are rich, and they flaunt it. No self-respecting thief would waste time and effort breaking into Odelia’s cottage.
Shivering in the wee-hour chill, she leans toward the window and peers into the night, intending to scold whoever’s out there raising a ruckus at this hour – probably teenagers hanging out in Melrose Park.
Darkness shrouds every cottage along the lane. She can hear the wind chimes clanking on the porch at Valley View, and the hum of window air conditioners at Misty Starr’s place next door on the other side.
Strange on a night like this. Misty isn’t the most practical person in the world, but she’s far too frugal to run the air conditioners unnecessarily.
The park is deserted, aside from a filmy little girl with long corkscrew curls tied in pink ribbons. She’s wearing a midi dress with a sailor collar and bow, and leather ankle boots, and she’s swaying on a rope swing dangling from a hickory bough that’s suspended in midair.
The original tree had been struck by lightning many times over the years, and finally destroyed in an electrical storm years ago. Odelia doesn’t recall whether there had ever been a rope swing when it was still standing, but she thinks not. However, the swing, along with the phantom bough and phantom child, have been hanging around – as it were – ever since the final zap that destroyed the tree.
In Odelia’s experience, none of this is unusual. Souls that have passed to the Other Side often manifest by drawing on electromagnetic energy, such as a thunderstorm or even a radio or computer.
Odelia suspects that, like many earthbound spirits she regularly glimpses around the Dale, the girl in the park may not even realize she’s dead. She doesn’t attempt to communicate, merely lingers in – haunts – that spot.
The same is true of Miriam, a spirit who is as much a permanent fixture in Odelia’s home as the 1883 cornerstone Miriam’s husband had placed on the foundation when he built the place. And Nadine, who’s resided next door at Valley View for over a century. Though unlike Miriam, she can be rather mischievous, moving things around the house, knocking objects off shelves, that sort of thing.
Odelia’s spirit guides, on the other hand, are highly evolved beings. Some, like the Native American maiden to whom Odelia was wed in a previous lifetime, were once human, but a few – most notably a Great White Hawk – were not, and some never inhabited the earthly plane at all.
Amid the wind chimes and air conditioners, Odelia again picks up the voice – a distant, muffled murmur.
It hadn’t come from her guides, or Miriam or the swinging girl. It’s most likely a more recently departed soul drawing atmospheric energy to manifest, which would explain the cold that permeates the room on what may indeed have become a warm summer night after all.
‘You’d better have a good reason for barging into my good night’s sleep,’ Odelia informs the newcomer as she shoves a pile of clothes off a chair and sits to meditate.
Bathed in protective white light, she opens herself to Spirit – which is like stepping into a crowded room full of chatty people vying to get your attention.
Odelia focuses, doing her best to zero in on the spirit that had awakened her. And as soon as she deciphers its – his – earthly identity, she smiles.
‘Why, Sam Jordan. It’s about time. Welcome to the Dale.’