An hour later, Bella is wiping down the vacated café tables, her hair sweat-plastered to her forehead and the back of her neck, when a pair of impossibly beautiful strangers appear in the doorway.
The man has glossy black hair and blue eyes, and he’s wearing black jeans with a black T-shirt that shows off his lean, muscular build. The woman’s red hair hangs down her back in tousled waves and she appears impossibly unruffled and unwrinkled in sleeveless white linen and heeled sandals.
‘You must be Candace and Tommy.’
‘We are,’ Candace says with a smile. ‘And you must be …’
She looks at Tommy. His smile is equally dazzling, his expression equally blank.
‘I’m Bella Jordan. I’m the manager here at Valley View.’ She transfers the damp rag from her right hand to her left and offers them an even damper handshake.
‘Bella – that’s right!’ says Candace, her grasp cool and dry as a brisk autumn day. ‘Your husband said that you’d be back this morning.’
‘My … husband?’ Bella gapes at her, thoughts whirling. ‘You saw my husband? Here … at Valley View?’
They nod, as if that’s unremarkable – but of course it would be, to them. They might be celebrities, but they’re in the ghost business, just like everyone else around here.
‘He said you were at a wedding in – was it Cheyenne?’ Candace asks, helping herself to a couple of bottles of water from the fridge and handing one to Tommy.
‘Cheyenne?’
Clairaudience isn’t like a telephone call, Odelia’s voice reminds Bella, and I heard Kevin Buh … something.
Maybe Sam had told Candace and Tommy that the wedding was in Shuh-something. Cheyenne … Chicago …
‘Whoa, are you all right?’ Tommy asks, peering at her. ‘You look a little … wobbly.’
She nods, feeling more than a little wobbly. Accustomed as she is to the mediums talking to dead people, this is about Sam. And on the heels of Odelia’s message, and Bella herself thinking she’d seen him yesterday …
Or had she?
Everyone has a lookalike …
But why would Sam’s know me?
The baffling facts been rolling around in her head all morning, like pinballs that refuse to drop into place so that she can move on.
‘It’s just … it’s … too much,’ she hears herself say.
‘It’s the heat,’ Candace says simultaneously. ‘Sit down.’
Tommy pulls out a chair from the nearest table and Bella sinks into it.
‘What … what else did he say?’ Hearing familiar footsteps bounding down the stairs, she adds quickly, ‘Was there anything about Max?’
‘Max?’ Tommy echoes.
‘Their son,’ Candace reminds him. ‘Yes, he was saying that Max would be excited to come home to the puppies. It’s so amazing, what he does, isn’t it?’
‘What Max does? Or what Sam does?’
‘What Drew does,’ Tommy says. ‘Are you sure you’re feeling OK?’
‘What Drew does?’ she murmurs, finding it difficult to keep up with the conversation. Maybe the heat really is getting to her.
‘Though I’m sure Max is amazing, too, if he’s anything like his dad.’
‘He’s just like his dad,’ Bella assures Candace.
Then it hits her.
‘Wait – you’re talking about Drew!’
Candace and Tommy look at her, then at each other.
‘Sorry,’ Bella says, ‘but I thought you meant … my husband. Drew isn’t—’
‘Mom!’ Max is in the doorway, flushed and sweaty, wearing the waffle knit pajamas he’d dug out of his drawer in last night’s chill. ‘Mom, why—’
‘Max? Let’s be polite to our guests. Can you say hello, please?’
‘Hello,’ he says politely, then, ‘Mom, why is it so hot here? It’s like Chicago.’
‘Ah, that’s where your dad said you were,’ Tommy says. ‘Chicago.’
‘That wasn’t his dad,’ Bella says quickly.
But before she can elaborate, Max contradicts her. ‘At the airport? Yes, it was my dad. Hey, Mom, can I play with the puppies, and then can I go over to Jiffy’s house?’
‘Not right now.’
‘Which thing can’t I do right now?’
‘Neither.’
‘Why not? I really really really miss the puppies. And the Daddy Dog. I still have to name him.’
‘Later, Max. They’re taking their nap.’
‘Then can I go to Jiffy’s? He has a puppy. Plus, air conditioning. And a cell phone. Also, Playbox.’
Tommy gets a chuckle out of that. ‘Sounds like your friend Jiffy has all the good stuff.’
‘He does. His mom likes to give him good stuff,’ Max says, shooting a pointed look at Bella.
She can’t argue with that.
Misty Starr is one of those overly permissive parents who makes things difficult for parents who try to set reasonable limits. She’d moved to the Dale last year, a few months ahead of Bella’s arrival, from a military base in Arizona.
The boys had immediately become inseparable. Bella’s relationship with Misty had taken much longer to ignite. Twenty-six, impetuous, and as laid-back in her parenting as she is in everything else, Misty was the last person Bella imagined herself befriending.
But, here they are, irrevocably bonded over the challenges of single-handedly parenting seven-year-old boys. Misty’s not widowed or divorced, but she and her husband, Mike, have been going through a rocky patch since she’d failed to consult him about her cross-country move while he’s deployed in the Middle East.
He’s still there, and swears he’ll never live in Lily Dale, but Misty has no intention of leaving when he returns stateside – which will be any day now, according to Jiffy.
‘Mom, can I please, please, please go to Jiffy’s?’ Max asks.
‘We don’t even know if he’s home today.’
‘He is. I just talked to him.’
‘Where? How?’
Max doesn’t have a cell phone. Then again, this is Valley View. If there is a secret passageway in his room, it might not just provide an escape route for a cat, but a means of entry for a small boy.
‘He knocked on my window to wake me up because I was sleeping too long and he was having a boring day,’ Max explains.
‘I think you were dreaming, sweetie. He couldn’t have knocked on your window. Your room is on the second floor.’
Then again, this is Lily Dale. Max might be under the assumption that Jiffy Arden, a child medium, had somehow teleported himself, or astral-projected, or whatever it is the locals call it.
‘I wasn’t dreaming, Mom.’
Remembering that Max’s windows overlook the flat roof above the side-porch-turned-breakfast room, Bella glances outside just in time to see a small, wiry figure descend the adjacent trellis. His foot gets caught in a sweet pea vine and he drops the last few feet to the ground, landing on his back in the pachysandra bed.
So much for magic.
‘Jiffy! Are you all right?’
‘Oh, hey, Bella. Yep, I’m fine. By the way, sometimes I jump out of helicopters with my dad, so this is no big deal.’
Jiffy, whose dad is a paratrooper, is the kind of boy who is always having adventures, even if just in his own imagination. And Max is the kind of boy who believes every tall tale his friend shares.
‘Jiffy’s dad is a real-live hero,’ he informs Candace and Tommy. ‘And Jiffy’s practicing being a hero, too. And so am I. Only my mom doesn’t let me do a lot of hero stuff.’
‘Most moms don’t,’ Candace tells him, looking amused as she opens her water bottle and takes a long sip.
Outside, Jiffy gets to his feet. He brushes himself off, plucks a twig from his wiry red hair and wipes his freckled face with grimy hands that leave fresh smudges. ‘So, Bella, can Max come over?’
‘Why don’t you come in and I’ll call your mom and tell her where you are?’
‘She knows where I am. And it’s too hot here. We have an air conditioner.’
‘And Playbox,’ Max reminds him. ‘We can play Ninja Zombie Battle.’
‘Or some other game.’
‘But we like Ninja Zombie Battle the best.’
‘By the way, I don’t know where that game is,’ Jiffy says. ‘I think I lost it.’
‘How did you lose it?’
‘I just did,’ Jiffy says, avoiding eye contact with Bella in a way that would suggest to any seasoned mother of a seven-year-old that he’s lying. ‘I’m going back to my house now. I’ll wait for you there, Max.’
He takes off, cutting through the shrub border toward home.
Turning away from the window, Bella finds that Candace and Tommy are also beating a hasty retreat.
‘It was nice meeting you, Bella,’ Candace says over her shoulder as she follows Tommy out the door. ‘See you later! We have to get to a Stump reading.’
With any luck, Bella thinks, Spirit will ‘touch in’ to inform Candace and Tommy that Drew Bailey isn’t Bella’s husband or Max’s dad. And if not, well …
At least they hadn’t seen Sam hanging around Valley View, any more than Bella and Max had seen him hanging around O’Hare yesterday. Although …
‘Hey, Max? Yesterday at the airport, when we thought we saw Daddy—’
‘We did see him.’
‘When we saw him,’ she amends, ‘you said it was “the golden car”. Do you remember that?’
‘Yep. It was the golden car. Hey!’ He grabs a mini box of sugary cereal from the counter. ‘I didn’t know we have Chocolatey Oaty-Os! You never buy them for me.’
No, but they’d been included in the assorted pack.
‘Can I have them, Mom? Please?’
Chocolatey Oaty-Os aren’t the healthiest breakfast in the world, but she supposes they’re not the unhealthiest, either.
‘Sure. Sit down. I’ll grab a bowl for you, and the milk, and I’ll cut up some bananas, too.’
‘Can’t I just eat them out of the box?’
That might make them the world’s unhealthiest breakfast, but she relents.
‘Just this once.’ She steers him back to the topic at hand. ‘So you said the golden car. Not a golden car. Right?’
He nods, shoving a handful of cereal into his mouth.
‘Why is that? Because it kind of sounded as if you were expecting to see that car, or maybe as if you’d seen it before.’
‘Is it OK if I talk with my mouth full?’ he asks, doing just that. ‘Because you keep asking me stuff.’
‘Yes. Just this once.’
‘I did,’ he says around exaggerated crunching.
‘You did … what?’
Max, being a seven-year-old boy, shoves more cereal into his mouth before answering, ‘I did see the golden car before.’
‘You did? Where?’
‘It was parked on the street by Grandma’s apartment building when George and me were over at the playground. There was a guy sitting in it the whole time, but he was too far away, and I couldn’t tell he was Daddy.’