Lily Dale: Awakening (7 page)

“Er . . . hello.” The woman’s expression is a little strained. Her face is drawn, and there’s a telltale red puffiness around her eyes. Calla recognizes it, having seen the same thing in her own reflection often enough these past few weeks. This woman has been crying.

“Is Odelia Lauder in?” she asks in a way that makes it clear she’s not a friend of Calla’s grandmother’s. Nor does she know much about her, Calla assumes, when she goes on to ask, “You—you’re not her, are you?”

“You mean am I Odelia? No! I’m her granddaughter.” Calla notices then that the woman isn’t alone. Someone is hovering in the shadows beside the porch steps, standing right in Odelia’s flower bed, actually. That strikes Calla as odd, and rude. It might not be the most manicured garden, but that doesn’t mean people are welcome to stomp on the blossoms.

“My name is Elaine Riggs,” the woman says, not bothering to introduce her companion, who appears to be a teenage girl, judging by her slight build, slouchy clothing, and long hair. “Is Odelia here? I was wondering if she could do a reading. My friend Joan sent me. She said she’s really good.”

Calla blinks. “Excuse me?”

Now the woman—is she the girl’s mother?—looks equally confused. She takes a few steps back toward the edge of the porch, leans back, and glances up, toward the eaves, as if checking something. The girl she brought with her doesn’t move.

Calla can feel her stare, though she can’t make out her features in the twilight.

The woman gives a little nod, saying, “This is Odelia Lauder’s place . . . she isn’t in, then?”

“No, she’s in . . . she’s just, um. . . busy.” Calla wishes the woman would tell her daughter to get out of the flower bed. Talk about rude.

But she continues to ignore the girl as she asks, “So she isn’t doing readings tonight?”

Doing readings? What on earth is this woman talking about?

“I just drove five hours from Columbus. I probably should have called first, but . . . I guess it was a whim. Joan said Odelia takes walk-ins . . . and . . .” The woman falters.

Walk-ins? Is her grandmother a hairdresser or . . . a doctor?
If she were, I’d know it
, Calla thinks. On the heels of that, she realizes she has no idea what it is, exactly, that her grandmother does for a living. She must support herself somehow. Odds are, though, that she isn’t a hairdresser or a doctor.

The woman is still waiting, the girl still staring silently from the flower bed. Calla shrugs, for lack of anything constructive to say. She isn’t about to admit that she has no idea what her grandmother’s job is. Nor is she about to invite these strangers inside. Something about the girl is giving her the creeps.

“I . . . she’s really busy right now. I don’t know what to say.”

“All right. I’ll come back tomorrow. I can’t drive all the way back alone tonight anyway.” Dejected, the woman turns and heads down the steps.

The girl stays where she is as the woman walks right past her without acknowledging her. Then, after seeming to give a little nod at Calla, she turns and walks away, right through the flowers, not caring that she’s probably trampling the whole bed.

Standing in the screened door, Calla watches them head down the street. The woman glances from house to house like she’s looking for something or someone. The girl walks a few steps behind her. They aren’t interacting. That’s odd. Maybe they had an argument or something. And the woman did say she’d be driving alone. Maybe the girl lives somewhere else.

Speaking of odd . . . what was the woman looking at above the porch? Curious, Calla unlatches the door and steps out into the twilight. She walks over to the edge of the porch, looks up to see what the woman might have been looking at, and finds herself staring at a wooden sign hanging from a bracket on the porch roof. She hadn’t even noticed it earlier.

Now, peering up into the gathering dusk, she can’t quite make out from this angle what the lettering says, other than her grandmother’s name.

Hmm. Calla goes down the steps to get a better view and looks again at the sign. There. Now she can see the whole thing:

O
DELIA
L
AUDER
, R
EGISTERED
M
EDIUM

It’s all Calla can do to drag herself back into her grandmother’s house after reading that crazy sign out front.

Registered medium
?
Classic whack job
is more like it.

Mom was right about her mother. Odelia is off her rocker—and now Calla’s stuck here with a kook who puts raisins in meatballs and advertises herself as some kind of fortune-teller. Or whatever.

Back in the lamplit living room, Calla paces past the bookshelves and back again, their contents forgotten. She longs to keep on walking, right out the door, but she can’t do that.

Where would she go? She’s stuck in the middle of nowhere. It’s not like she can hail a cab or take a bus or even call someone to come pick her up. Lisa is a thousand miles away. And now her father’s on the opposite side of the country.

In fact, he should be calling any minute now. He promised he would when he lands safely in California. He’s going to want to know how everything is here.

What will she tell him?

That Odelia is a con-artist freak and lives in a haunted house?

What, exactly, does a so-called medium do, anyway? Or
claim
to do?

Calla’s never come across one before, and Mom would never let her watch any of those supernatural television shows or movies about ghosts and hauntings. She said they were ludicrous. And once, when Calla stupidly told her there was going to be a Ouija-board seance at Tiffany Foxwood’s slumber party, Mom made her stay home. Lisa’s mother did the same, which wasn’t surprising because she’s so religious. Calla was surprised Mom wouldn’t budge, though.

“If Ouija boards are so stupid and fake, why do you even care?”
she asked her mother.

“Because I don’t want you to get caught up in ridiculous things like that. You have better things to do with your time and your brain.”

“Last week you let me go to Amber Cunningham’s nail-painting party.That’s just as ridiculous and you had no problem with it.”

“Fine.Then the next time you’re invited to a nail-painting party, you’re not going.”

Talk about an unsatisfactory answer. Sometimes, Calla couldn’t figure out her mother.

But I’d give anything for another chance at it
, she thinks glumly, then drags her thoughts back to the present before the grief can kick in again.

Calla’s pretty sure a medium supposedly has supernatural powers; some kind of paranormal connection to the spirit world. And if Calla had ever stopped to think about what kind of person might make such a claim, Odelia would probably have popped into her head.

Look at her, with those flowing clothes, that wild red hair, and all that jangling jewelry. She looks like some kind of gypsy. Is it so surprising that she’d act the part as well?

Okay, you are so not being fair
, Calla tells herself guiltily.
You can’t decide a person is a freak
—
or a con artist
—
just because of how they look
.

All right, then . . . to give Odelia the benefit of the doubt, Calla wonders if she might actually be able to talk to the dead. Is that really so far-fetched?

After all, weren’t you just thinking you had seen a ghost right here in this house?

A chill slips down Calla’s spine, even as she reminds herself that her mother wouldn’t buy into this ridiculousness—any of it—for a second. Mom had too much common sense. If she were here right now, she’d be telling Calla to use her head and weigh the evidence.

Since there isn’t any evidence that can’t be explained away as a figment of one’s imagination . . .

That’s probably all any of this is. Then again . . .

Wait a minute.

Calla stops pacing, struck by the coincidence. Can there possibly be a connection between the ghost Calla saw—
no, the ghost you
thought
you saw
—upstairs and her grandmother’s claim to be a medium?

Oh, God.What if she really is a medium?

In the grand scheme of things, isn’t it pretty unlikely that Calla, who has never seen—or
thought
she’s seen—a ghost in her life, would suddenly bump into one here, now, today?

It’s not as if she can blame it on the power of suggestion. Until a few minutes ago, she had no idea her grandmother even claimed to be a medium.

Whoa. She paces more quickly, fists clenching and unclenching at her sides.

Okay, so then . . . maybe Odelia
is
a medium. And maybe this place is crawling with ghosts.

Yeah. Good going. Nothing like completely creeping yourself out.

What if there are dead people hanging around her grandmother’s house, waiting for their chance to try to make contact with her?

Why would
I
be able to see them, though? I’m not a medium.
Unless . . .

A thought barges into Calla’s consciousness and refuses to budge. A thought so preposterous that it steals away her breath:

What if that sort of thing
—
talking to ghosts
—
runs in families?
Like height or eye color? What if Odelia really is a medium . . . and
so am I
?

FIVE

“There you are!”

Calla hastily wipes the tears from her eyes, then looks up to see her grandmother, wearing a pink towel turban and a fuzzy orange robe, peeking through the bedroom door. She left it slightly ajar—not because she welcomes Odelia’s company, but because she still can’t shake the memory of the figure she glimpsed here earlier.

“I was waiting for you downstairs—I found the front door open, so I figured you must have gone out for a walk.”

Oh, that’s right. She forgot to close it after that startling discovery about Odelia, and came up here to fight off that troubling suspicion about herself.

But it’s stubbornly managed to stick for the past half hour or so as she lay on her mother’s bed and stared at the ceiling.

“So . . . did you go out?” Odelia asks.

“No.”

“You just opened the door?”

“Right.”

Odelia pauses, then asks, “Mind if I ask why?”

“You mean, why did I open the door?”

Odelia nods.

“Because some lady rang the doorbell.” Calla forces herself to look her grandmother in the eye. “She said she wanted you to do a reading.”

“What did you tell her?”

She can’t read her grandmother’s expression.

“I told her that you were busy.”

Odelia nods. “That’s fine. I was.”

Calla returns her gaze to the ceiling. She can feel her grandmother’s eyes on her.

After a moment, Odelia says, “You’re wondering what a psychic reading is, aren’t you.”

It isn’t a question.

And the straightforward, dead-on comment catches Calla off guard.

“Yes,” she admits. “I mean, I think I know. But I don’t know why the woman thought
you
could do one for her . . . unless . . .”

“I’m a psychic, Calla.”

“I thought you were a medium. That’s what your sign says.”

“All mediums are psychic, although not all psychics are mediums.”

Calla shrugs, not sure what her grandmother expects her to do with this information.

“So you saw my sign, then. Is that how you figured it out?”

She nods.

“I didn’t think you knew before you got here, and I wasn’t sure how to bring it up. Your mother never mentioned it to you, did she.”

Again, not really a question.

“No, she never mentioned it.”

But she did happen to mention that you were a classic whack job.

“Well,” Odelia says with a wistful tilt of her red head, “I’m sure it wasn’t something she was very proud of.”

Calla is sure she’s right about that. Her mother was a straight arrow, which is probably why she and Odelia wound up at odds.

Then again . . .
the lake.

Something about the lake . . . that was why they’d had that last big argument.

She glances out the window, where the water is visible through the trees. Earlier, it was a sparkling, inviting blue.

Now, shrouded in twilight, it’s an ominous shade of purplish black.

What was it about the lake?

“What did your mother tell you about Lily Dale?” Odelia intrudes on her speculation.

“Just that it was a small town. And cold. And it snowed a lot.”

Odelia smiles. “That’s true. Winter settles in by late October and it doesn’t let go of us until April or May.”

“May!”

“It snowed on Memorial Day weekend a few years ago.”

Calla finds herself shivering at the mere thought of that. She’s seen snow only once, when her parents took her skiing in Utah.

Rather,
they
skied. Calla stayed in the chalet with an elderly babysitter who didn’t mind playing Candyland over and over again—though Calla minded. She remembers asking why they couldn’t go outside and build a snowman or make snow angels. The sitter said it was just too cold, and Calla’s disappointment was as pervasive and bitter as the January mountain wind.

“Do you think it’ll snow while I’m here?” she asks her grandmother.

“I doubt it. Then again, you never know.”

“You’re supposed to be a psychic, aren’t you? You must know everything. Don’t tell me you can’t predict the weather.” It comes out laced with sarcasm. Calla can’t help it. This is all just way too much to grasp.

“Oh, psychics don’t pretend to know everything.”

“No? What is it that they do pretend?”

Ignoring that, Odelia continues, “Every human being has psychic potential, you know. Some people are just born ultra-sensitive to earthly energy vibrations around them, and they choose to—or sometimes, inadvertently—learn how to interpret them.”

“So, what’s a medium, then?”

“A medium is tuned in to other kinds of energy as well— not just earthly. Spirit energy is paced differently—faster, higher—if that makes any sense at all.”

It doesn’t. But Calla is fascinated anyway, hanging on her grandmother’s every word—and doing her best not to show it, out of some loyalty to Mom, who would hate this conversation.