Lily Dale: Awakening (16 page)

Calla opens her mouth to tell her that’s about to change.

“But you said you’d call me. Why haven’t you?”

Mostly because Kevin might answer the phone, but she doesn’t want to admit that. “I feel funny putting long-distance charges on my grandmother’s bill. Listen, Lis’, I need to talk to you. Things have been kind of crazy here.”

“Crazy how? Don’t tell me you’re seeing ghosts or something!”

She hesitates. She was about to tell her exactly that, but Lisa’s tone stops her.

“No, nothing like that,” she says slowly. “It’s . . . a guy.”

Why did she go and say that?

“Two guys, actually,” she hears herself say next.
Huh?

“You’re seeing two guys?”

Not really, but it wouldn’t hurt to have Lisa mention that to Kevin, would it?

“Yeah,” she tells Lisa, feeling only a little guilty. “They’re both cute, too . . . so I’m torn.”

“Hey, there are worse problems you can have,” Lisa says with a laugh.

Yeah, no kidding.

“Listen, Calla, I’m kind of glad you’re seeing someone else—two someone elses.”

Something in Lisa’s tone makes Calla’s heart sink. “You’re glad? Why?”

“Just . . . It’s good you’re over Kevin, that’s all.”

Oh. “You met Annie. And you like her. Right?”

“How’d you know? I mean, I tried not to like her, but she was . . .”

“Likable.”

“Lovable. I’m sorry, Calla. I mean, I wish you and my brother would get back together, but since you’re not even here—and now you’ve got two new boyfriends, anyway— well, I hope it’s okay with you that I don’t hate Annie.”

“No, it’s fine.” Calla paces restlessly across the living room. “I’m glad you like her. I wouldn’t want Kevin going out with some loser.”
Sure you would
. “Is she still down there?”

“No, she went back.” Lisa changes the subject quickly. “Tell me about these two guys!”

Calla does, doing her best to make it sound as though Blue and Jacy are both head over heels about her, and vice versa.

“They sound great. Maybe I can help you make up your mind between them,” Lisa says. “I asked my parents if I can fly up and visit you before school starts and they didn’t say no.”

“They said yes?”

“Not exactly. But they’re thinking about it. I’ll keep you posted.”

Calla wonders if it would be a pleasure or a problem to have Lisa visit. A little of both, she decides, after hanging up with a promise to start checking her e-mail at the Taggarts’.

Odelia won’t be back for at least another half hour. The house feels eerily empty.

But that’s better than eerily
not
empty
, Calla reminds herself uneasily.

She read earlier that spirits don’t hang around just to give people a good scare. They’re usually trying to communicate some kind of message.

Well, whatever it is, I don’t want to know. Not when I’m here alone, anyway
.

Maybe she should go next door to use the computer right now, even though she just talked to Lisa and her e-mail can wait. Evangeline is probably home. Some company would be nice. And reassuring.

Pausing in front of the window overlooking the street, she glances out to see if there are lights on next door. To her surprise, someone is out there, standing directly in front of Odelia’s house, facing it. Watching it.

Feeling exposed, Calla immediately reaches toward the lamp, fumbling for the switch. She finds it and flicks it off, making herself less visible, which, of course, also makes the figure more visible. Calla can see now that it’s a female, with long hair. She’s standing just beyond the streetlight’s glow, shrouded in shadows.

Calla’s skin prickles. Is that the girl from Ohio? The one who was here with her mother?

What’s she doing out there now? Why is she staring at Odelia’s house?

I should call the police
. Calla hurriedly looks around for the telephone receiver she tossed aside earlier. Finding it, she stands poised with it, wondering if 911 works in Lily Dale.

Then she glances out the window again.

The street is empty. The girl is no longer there . . . if she ever was at all.

TWELVE

“Stop it, Mother,” Stephanie commanded Odelia. “Just don’t say another word about it.”

“Stephanie
—”

“Stop!” Stephanie glanced down at Calla, who quickly pretended to be focused only on dressing her new doll. “Just drop the whole thing.”

“How can I drop it? How can you? Don’t you want to know?”

“No, I don’t.”

“That’s unnatural. How can you not
—”

“I’m a freak of nature! Is that what you want me to say?”

“Calm down, Stephanie. You’re hysterical.”

“Well, what do you expect?”

“I expect you to want to know what really happened. And the only way we’ll learn the truth is to dredge the lake!”

Calla awakens with a gasp.

The room is dark. Bewildered, she sits up in bed, her pulse racing frantically.

Oh . . . a dream.
That
dream, the one about Mom and Odelia and dredging the lake. She was having it again, after almost an entire week of sleeping soundly.

They were so angry, both Mom and Odelia, flinging things around the room, glaring and pointing fingers at each other.

With a shudder, Calla squeezes her eyes shut to block out the memory. But she can still hear their shrill voices. Is that how it really happened? Is she reliving the scene in her sleep, or creating it in a dream?

She opens her eyes again and her gaze goes automatically to the bedside table, even as she remembers that she never did set the digital clock. It’s been flashing all week. . . .

Until now.

Bewildered, she notices the time.

3:17
.

With a frustrated cry, she reaches over and yanks the cord out of the socket.

Lying stiffly in bed, wide awake, Calla watches the backdrop beyond the window go from blackish gray to bluish gray to just plain ominous gray as dawn creeps into the room, dark and heavy as a storm cloud.

She’s relieved to see nothing but sky out there, yet she can’t shake the memory of the face she saw that afternoon not long after she arrived here.

Who are you? Where are you? Are you coming back?

Calla rubs her eyes, knowing she should try to get some sleep if she wants to function at all later. She’s never done well on little sleep. A yawn overtakes her, but her body is still clenched and tense. Anyway, it’s morning now. Even if she drifts off again, how many hours could she possibly get in?

Her head turns automatically toward the bedside table to check the clock, just as she remembers that she unplugged it in the night.

Or did she? It’s flashing 12:00 once again.

Calla jerks upright in bed and grabs the clock.
I know I unplugged it. I remember!

She jabs blindly at the buttons on top until the time changes to—and holds at—12:01.

It isn’t 12:01. God knows what time it really is. All Calla cares about is that it isn’t 3:17.

She slowly returns the clock to the table and stares at it.

She read last week that spirit energy feeds on electronic energy to make its presence known. Meaning, spirits can manipulate appliances and electronic devices—according to the author of the book and his pages upon pages of research sources.

Supposedly, spirits can disrupt a radio signal or even send a certain song that has meaning for someone they left behind.

It stands to reason they can also tamper with a clock.

But if that’s the case here,
Calla wonders,
what are they trying to tell me with 3:17?

“Did you find us a place to live yet?” Calla asks her father when he calls that afternoon.

“Not yet. But I’m trying.” He says that every day. She’s beginning to wonder if he’s ever going to find a place for them. . . and what will happen if he doesn’t.

“I’m going to see a place by the beach tomorrow,” he says optimistically. “It sounds perfect for us, and it’s in our price range, and there’s a great public school. Cross your fingers.”

“I will. But . . . I mean, it’s almost September.”

“Not yet.We’ve got plenty of time to find a place.”

“I hope so.”

“Have you been keeping busy? Hanging around with your new friend Evangeline?”

Surprised her absentminded father remembered the name, Calla says, “A little.”

There’s a pause. “Is everything okay there, Calla?”

She wonders if she should tell him what’s been going on, or pretend everything is fine. In other words, should she stay in Lily Dale another ten days as she’s supposed to, or leave right away? If she tells her father the truth, he’ll yank her out of there before she can say boo.

And then what? He doesn’t even have a place for me to stay in California.

“Dad?” she asks. “What happens if you decide not to do the sabbatical after all? Can you go back to your job in Florida this semester instead?”

“Nope,” he says, “can’t do that. I have to do the sabbatical. It’ll work out fine. Don’t worry. Just enjoy the rest of your time there. You’ll be here with me before you know it.”

That,
Calla thinks as she hangs up,
will be a relief.

Then again, will it really? Once she leaves Lily Dale, she’ll be farther away from her mother than ever. And she might never know what’s going on in Odelia’s haunted house, or what the ghosts are trying to tell her.

“You’re going to the message circle after all?” Odelia asks in surprise, about to walk out the door the next night, when Calla walks downstairs in sneakers and a jacket. “I thought you said at dinner that you were too exhausted.”

She shrugs, avoiding Odelia’s gaze. “I was, but I splashed some cold water on my face and woke myself up.” That’s all true. What she doesn’t say is that she’s so exhausted because she had the same dream yet again last night, and it woke her at 3:17 again. She knows, because she saw the clock, which she was certain she’d left unplugged when she went to bed.

Maybe if she gets rid of the clock, the inexplicable, silent 3:17 wake-up call will just go away.

She threw the clock into the kitchen garbage, carrying the bag out to the can behind the shed for good measure. Maybe she can’t control her dreams, but she’s finished with the clock.

“Well, I’m glad you changed your mind.” Odelia opens the front door. “It’s about time you saw what goes on here. Come on.”

Calla follows her out into the night. “Why don’t you ever lock your house?” she asks as Odelia merely pulls the door, and then the screen door, shut behind them.

Calla can’t help but think about the girl who was standing out in front of Odelia’s house the other night. What did she want? Was she casing the place, planning to rob it or something?

For some reason, she never did mention it to Odelia. Maybe because she’s not entirely sure she didn’t imagine it. After all, the girl seemed to be there one minute and gone the next.

At least I know she’s real, though
, Calla thinks wryly,
since she and her mother were here for a reading that first time
. Yeah, ghosts probably don’t need mediums to contact the dead.

“Why would I lock the house?” Odelia asks. “Anything I have in there, people are welcome to take, if they need it that badly. That’s one way to clean out clutter, right?”

They head down Cottage Row along the pavement still shiny from today’s downpour, which is apparently over—at least, for now. The sky is charcoal colored, not just from the gathering dusk. A lake-blown gust stirs leafy branches overhead, foreshadowing more rain.

“You know, it really is dangerous to leave your house unlocked,” Calla persists as they painstakingly make their way toward the auditorium. Odelia, she’s noticed, has a hard time moving quickly because of her weight.

“Dangerous? How so?”

“Robbers aren’t the only ones who might get in.”

“Right. There are mice, too.”

“And murderers,” Calla says darkly.

“Not around here.”

“Murder can happen anywhere.”

“Well, I’m not going to worry about that.”

“Why not? Because there’s no such thing as dying, right? Not really. So what’s the worst that can happen if you run into a psycho killer?”

Odelia gives her a long, hard look. “Sure you want to come to this message circle?”

No. But she’s going anyway. What better way to top off another difficult day—for her, anyway. Odelia was contentedly busy giving readings and making a complicated French casserole for dinner, which might have been appealing, if Calla had any appetite.

She didn’t, especially after spending the bleak, rainy day alone in her room reading more about Lily Dale. Hours of wading through tedious historic detail and endless spiritualist rhetoric yielded some useful—and, all right, scary—information.

That she’s even able to pick up on a spirit’s presence at all indicates that Calla, like her grandmother, has a so-called heightened sense of awareness. In other words . . .

Calla seems to be a psychic medium.

A transmitter of sorts, able to bridge the invisible chasm between the living and the dead.

What if all this has something to do with her mother? The first apparition appeared at Mom’s grave. The next time was in Mom’s girlhood bedroom. And again at the lake.

What if it
is
her mother?

It doesn’t look like her—not in the least bit. But what if Mom has taken on some other physical form in the afterlife? That seems as possible as any other far-out theory Calla has come to accept since arriving in Lily Dale.

Then again, the spiritual energy doesn’t
feel
like her mother.

No? And what do you know about spiritual energy?

Zilch. Except she would think that if her mother were around, she would feel comforted, not apprehensive.

Operating under the assumption that the spirit in question isn’t her mother’s but has some connection to her, Calla has to learn to be receptive to whatever it’s trying to tell her. Which is why she’s going to watch the mediums in action tonight.

“Here we are,” her grandmother says, and Calla looks up to see that they’ve reached the auditorium.