Believing (12 page)

“Back in high school, they were friends, sort of. Mom was older and Ramona used to look up to her, and she’s been telling me what Mom was like back then,” Calla says in a rush, trying to smooth things over and realizing she’s only making it worse, judging by Dad’s expression.

“Your mother never liked to talk about her past. She didn’t look back. She wasn’t that kind of person.”

“I know. That’s why I like being here. It makes me feel closer to her—well, to a
her
I never knew until now.”

And maybe I don’t even know the Mom we both lived with for all these years.

Again, she thinks of the Saint Patrick’s Day visit from Darrin.

Mom had secrets. Does Dad realize that? Would it hurt him now to know about the visit from her old boyfriend?

Does it even matter if it hurts him, if her death was no accident and Darrin’s visit might be linked to it?

Maybe Dad does know about that, anyway,
Calla reminds herself.
Maybe Dad has secrets too, even. Maybe you’re the only one who’s been in the dark all these years.

Mom was so sympathetic back in April when Kevin broke up with Calla, though. Wouldn’t she have mentioned her own high school romance, especially if she’d seen her ex-boyfriend just weeks earlier?

She might have . . . if the recent visit were innocent. Two old friends catching up on old times.

Come on, Calla! Darrin was using a fake name. How is that innocent in any possible way?

As Ramona had told her, he supposedly vanished from Lily Dale without a trace twenty years ago. Why? What did that have to do with Mom? Or with Mom’s death?

Calla wishes desperately that she’d had the chance to talk to Jacy about all of this. Now it’s going to have to wait until after Dad leaves. And while he’s here, she’d better not say anything more.

“Ready to go inside?” she asks her father.

“Sure.” He puts an arm around her shoulders as they walk together up the steps of Mom’s childhood home.

What on earth would he do without the Internet?

It’s made everything so much easier.

He can use it to keep track of the police proceedings that surround Kaitlyn Riggs’s murder and Erin Shannahan’s disappearance, making sure they’re not coming too close for comfort.

He can scour newspapers online for photos of local high school girls—girls like Hayley Gorzynski, with long blond hair—whose pretty faces beam at the camera. They’re so proud to have landed on the varsity team or in the honor society or whatever it is that brought a photographer to their school. Does it ever occur to them that someone like him might be watching them? Don’t they realize how easy it is for him to find out where they live? To follow them as they go about their daily routines until the time is right to strike?

The Internet is good, too, for atlas information.

Now, sitting in front of his desktop computer in his attic apartment, he clicks the mouse to zero in on the map.

Lily Dale, New York
—that’s not far from Erie. Maybe another half hour’s drive northeast past the Pennsylvania border, an easy trip up the New York State Thruway. He already checked the mileage. The population, too.

He might not have that girl psychic’s name, but Lily Dale is a small town. And small-town people can be surprisingly trusting. Sometimes they don’t even lock their doors.

Never a good idea,
he chides mockingly.

Small-town folks are usually friendly, too.

Even to strangers asking questions—say, about young female newcomers who live with their grandmothers.

“This was fun, tonight.” Calla’s father sounds almost surprised as she walks him to the front door.

“It was, wasn’t it?” She smiles, thinking the evening went much better than she could have hoped.

She and her father and grandmother ate fried chicken and talked easily about food, Odelia’s cooking, Calla’s new school, her father’s new job. Calla kept bracing herself for sticky topics—about her mother and Lily Dale—to pop up, but they never did.

Odelia went up to bed a half hour ago, leaving them to catch up until Dad caught Calla yawning and decided it was time to go.

“Get some sleep,” he tells her now as she opens the door for him.

“You, too.”

“I’ll try. It’s barely eight o’clock in California. It figures— now that I’ve finally set my body clock to the West Coast time zone, here I am back in the East. I’ll probably be up until the middle of the night.”

“Well, don’t oversleep. Gammy wants you here early for her special breakfast, remember?”

“Who could forget homemade blueberry waffles with whipped cream?” Dad kisses her on the cheek. “Okay, see you in the morning, Cal. Sweet dreams.”

Yeah
—
I can only hope.

As she watches him drive away, Calla remembers all those nights she woke at 3:17 after the recurring nightmare about Mom, Odelia, and dredging the lake. That hasn’t happened lately—not since she figured out the Saint Patrick’s Day connection.

And stalled right there.

Again, she wonders what happened between her mother and Darrin, and what that has to do with Mom’s death.

That thought process leads naturally to Erin. Calla was so busy all night, she didn’t have much time to dwell on it.

Now, though, she goes straight for the television remote. Odelia’s cable brings in a local television station from Erie, and the eleven o’clock news should be starting in a few minutes.

There’s going to be news about Erin,
she tells herself as she settles on the couch.
I just know it.

She’s right. It’s the top story.

“A happy ending tonight to a story we’ve been following all week,” the anchor announces over footage of a rural area swarming with people, police cars, rescue vehicles, and satellite trucks. “Seventeen-year-old Erin Shannahan, missing since Labor Day, was found alive just hours ago in the Allegheny Gorge.”

Calla gasps, clasping her hands to her mouth.

“Acting on an anonymous tip, police searched the rugged Chuck Keiper Trail, where the girl was ultimately spotted by a helicopter. She was transferred via ambulance to an unnamed local hospital, where she is listed in critical condition but is expected to survive.”

Expected to survive.Thank God, thank God.

“Relatively warm overnight temperatures this week are credited with helping to keep her alive. With a cold front headed in late tomorrow, the window of opportunity for rescue was rapidly drawing to a close. Police are releasing no further details about the girl’s disappearance, or about the tip that led them to her, and the case remains under active investigation. In other news . . .”

Calla tosses the remote aside and hurries to the front door. She opens it and looks out at the Taggarts’ driveway, noting that the lights are on, and Ramona’s car is still gone. Good.

She slips out into the night and across the yard. She’s halfway up the steps when the front door opens and Evangeline appears, wearing a pair of lavender knit pajamas and sneakers.

“Oh! Calla! You scared me!”

“Evangeline, did you see—”

“Yes! I just saw it. I was about to run over to your house and cross my fingers you were still up. I can’t believe it!”

“I can’t, either!”

Their excited whispers punctuate the hushed night air, marked only by steadily chirping crickets and the occasional croak of a frog.

“You must feel great,” Evangeline tells her. “You just saved a life. I told you calling the hotline was the right move.”

Wrong move,
he silently snarls at the so-called anonymous tipster as he strides angrily across the floor like a caged animal.

He should have been more careful. Made sure Erin Shannahan was dead before he dumped her. Now she’s going to tell the cops all about the so-called detective who abducted her.

That simply can’t happen.

He’ll take care of Erin Shannahan once and for all.

But first, he has to silence little Miss Psychic. There isn’t a doubt in his mind that she’s the one who led the police to Erin. Thanks to his online research, he already knows exactly how far away she is, and exactly where to find her, if the time comes.

No . . .

Not if.

When
the time comes.

You might have saved one life
—
temporarily,
he tells her,
but you just made sure you’re going to lose your own
.

NINE

Saturday, September 8
10:45 a.m.

“More coffee, Jeff?”

“Sure, I’ll take a warm-up. Thanks.”

Stifling a yawn, Calla watches her grandmother fill her father’s cup. He sits comfortably at the kitchen table eating breakfast as though they’ve all done this a thousand times before.

“Tired, Cal?” he asks, catching her yawn.

“I stayed up awhile after you left.”

Awhile? More like hours.
Too exhilarated to sleep after the news about Erin, she watched a couple of bad old movies on television. Today, she’s paying the price with burning shoulder blades and scratchy eyelids—just like all those mornings when she was awakened at 3:17 and couldn’t get back to sleep.

“That was delicious, Odelia.” Dad polishes off his second helping of homemade waffles with fresh blueberries and whipped cream. “I think I’ve got to go walk this off. How about showing me around Lily Dale, Cal?”

“Oh, uh, there’s not much to see, really.”

Conscious of her grandmother looking up, mid-sip, above the rim of her coffee cup, she goes on nervously, “I mean, it’s a small town.”
Which happens to be populated by mediums, channelers, healers, and a whole lot of dead people.
“You know . . . just a bunch of houses . . .”
Yeah, mostly haunted.
“. . . And, uh, you know, some trees.”

Uh-huh. Including one former tree: the concrete-encased Inspiration Stump deep in Leolyn Woods—a hallowed local landmark where the Dale’s spiritual energy is supposedly at its peak.

“I don’t care what we see,” Dad tells her, “as long as we can get out and enjoy a beautiful day.” He gestures at the sun streaming in the window, and Calla curses it for making one of its rare local appearances today, of all days.

“But I was thinking we could go to a movie or something,” she suggests. “I’ve been wanting to see . . . uh . . . uh . . .” Terrific—she can’t come up with one title of a movie that might be playing right now.

That’s what happens when you’re completely out of touch with the electronic world. The only movie that pops into her head is a really old, really stupid comedy from the early eighties that was on late last night.

It’s one she watched with Kevin on a rainy night when he was home last winter break. She still remembers everything about that night—the way they cuddled on the couch in their sweats, eating hot brownies she had baked for them; the way they laughed, not at the lame movie, but at themselves for watching it; the way Kevin looked and smelled and tasted, like molten chocolate, when he kissed her.

She pushes the memory away, telling her father, “I’ve, uh, been wanting to see . . . something funny. A good comedy. There are a bunch of them out now.” Total guess, of course.

Maybe a good one because her father says, “I know, and I could use a good laugh, too.”

“Great. So let’s go to the movies. Want to come, Gammy?”

“Can’t right now . . . I’ve got a meeting.”

Right—for the mediums’ league. Which, of course, she doesn’t mention.

“It’s okay, we’ll go to the movies tonight instead,” Dad says. “For right now, I’d love to get outside since there’s no smog for a change.”

“Smog? In Lily Dale?” Odelia smiles.

“Have I told you how bad the smog is where I am?” Dad asks, and shakes his head.

“I thought you liked California, Dad.”

“I do. Except for the smog. Anyway, the leaves are starting to turn here. We have to get outside. I haven’t seen fall foliage in years.”

Calla hasn’t seen it
ever.

She glances toward the window above the sink and notices, for the first time, a few golden and reddish leaves among the branches. She’s been so preoccupied, she hasn’t even noticed them until now. Or maybe they weren’t there until now?

Whatever, the bright foliage is a blatant reminder that the season is turning at last. Summer, which brought Mom’s tragic death, is almost behind them now.

Back in Florida—and out in California, come to think of it—seasons don’t come and go with much visible change. There’s always sun and green foliage, blooming flowers, and blue skies. No obvious seasonal closure. Not like here.

So. Maybe the changing landscape will help bring some kind of closure to the raw wound.

Yet another reason why it’s good that Calla’s here in Lily Dale . . . and why it’s a good idea for her to stay awhile.

Dad pushes back his chair and picks up his plate, carrying it to the sink.

“Leave it, Jeff. I’ll get the dishes,” Odelia says promptly. “Really. It takes two seconds to wash them.”

“Then I’ll dry and Calla can put away.”

“Oh, we don’t dry or put away,” Odelia says. “That’s a waste of time. Around here, we pretty much just leave them in the dish rack to dry by themselves. Right, Calla?”

“She does,” Calla tells her father. “She says why bother to put stuff away when you’re just going to use it all again later?”

Dad grins and shakes his head.

Less than five minutes later, Calla finds herself walking down sun-splashed Cottage Row with him. Sure enough, the boughs overhead seem to have changed overnight, with lots of yellows and golds tucked among the green leaves, and even a few shades of red.

The sun is bright but not particularly warm today; the air is crisp with a breeze off the lake.

She thinks about Erin. About how she might not have survived another night—a cold night—in the woods.

How did she get there? Was the person who hurt her also responsible for Kaitlyn’s death?

Yes.
There isn’t a doubt in Calla’s mind about that, after the way Kaitlyn urgently told her to “Stop him.”

But did she?

I found Erin,
she thinks uneasily.
I helped her, like Kaitlyn asked.