Discovering (2 page)

“Well, then, you’re in luck. We have a few of those. In fact, there’s one right in your bedroom.”

“Really?”She’d never noticed it before.

Odelia nods. “Your mother begged me for her own phone when she hit twelve or thirteen. Back then, we didn’t have cordless, and she wanted privacy to talk to her friends. She used to be on it forever.”

Calla finds it hard to imagine her hyperefficient mother lounging around chatting on the phone for hours. Mom wasn’t big on leisurely conversation— telephone or otherwise. She liked to get right to the point and then move on. In both business situations and in personal ones.

“Let’s go into the kitchen,”Odelia suggests. “I made lunch. You haven’t eaten yet, have you, Jeff?”

“We grabbed a couple of bran muffins at the airport earlier this morning, but Calla barely touched hers.”

“Well, they probably didn’t put the Raisinets in, like I do when I make them.”

“What?”Dad’s eyes are wide.

“Didn’t you ever hear of raisins in bran muffins?”

“Raisins, yes. Raisinets, no.”

“Well, chocolate is good in anything,”Odelia tells Dad with a shrug, eyes gleaming behind the pink plastic cat’s-eye frames of her glasses— which, of course, clash violently with her frizzy dyed red hair and her purple sweater.

If Calla were in a chatty mood, she might bring up the “snicker-noodles”her grandmother served for dinner one night—with cut- up Snickers bars as a featured ingredient.

Was that only a few weeks ago? It seems like a year, at least, has passed since that night.

And it seems even longer since Calla’s had any kind of appetite.

“Who am I to question your recipes, Odelia? You’ve always been a great cook.”Dad sniffs the air. “Something smells good. Tuna melts?”

Calla doubts that. Tuna melts would be far too ordinary for a creative chef like Odelia.

“No, but you’re close,”she tells Dad. “Come see.”

Calla smells tuna, too. Tuna . . . and a faint hint of lilies of the valley.

That can mean only one thing.

Aiyana is here.

She takes a quick look around the room for her Native American spirit guide, whose presence is always accompanied by the scent of Mom’s favorite flower.

No sign of Aiyana, but . . .

Calla sniffs again. Yes, the floral smell is real, and of course there’s not a blossom in sight. Fragrant lilies of the valley only bloom in springtime.

Aiyana . . . where are you?

Calla wonders if she’s just too worn out today to connect with the spirit. She’s still new to this—she needs more practice when it comes to tuning in to the energy.

Tuning out, as well. Sometimes she finds herself bombarded with images and voices. It can be frightening.

Her grandmother promised she’d get the hang of it, though. That’s why she enrolled Calla in a Beginning Mediumship course with classes every Saturday morning.

Aiyana, are you trying to tell me something?

“Calla? Are you okay?”

She turns to see Odelia watching her with concern.

“I’m . . . fine. Just a little spacey, I guess. Maybe I need to go upstairs and lie down.”
And see if Aiyana comes to me there.

“You need to eat first. Come on.”Keeping one fleshy arm draped around Calla’s shoulders, her fingers resting on the strap of the bag that contains Mom’s computer, Odelia leads the way through small rooms cluttered with mismatched furniture, books and knickknacks, threadbare carpets, and outdated kitchen appliances.

Funny . . . the ramshackle Victorian cottage is a far cry from the upscale, three-thousand-square- foot house where Calla grew up, but this feels much more like home to her now.

Maybe because the Tampa house is where Mom died.

This is where Mom lived— until she was about Calla’s age, anyway.

Then Stephanie Lauder left, and she never came back. Never, it seems, even looked back.

She didn’t like to talk about her childhood. Calla always assumed that was because she was a child of divorce—her father left when she was young. Or maybe it was because Mom didn’t get along very well with Odelia. Or because she just wasn’t big on nostalgia.

Whatever. You’d think Mom might have mentioned to Calla or Dad that her hometown happened to be populated by psychic mediums—and that her own mother, Odelia, was one of them.

Calla didn’t find out about any of that until she came to visit her grandmother after Mom’s death.

No, not
death
.

Now they all know her fatal fall down the stairs wasn’t an accident.

It was murder. She was murdered
.

That’s not all.

Mom had a deep, dark secret— one Calla stumbled upon a few days ago, when she was snooping through her mother’s e-mail files looking for clues to her death. The secret remains locked in Mom’s laptop, protected by a password Calla managed to figure out—perhaps with a little help from her sixth sense.

She didn’t tell a soul about what she’d discovered. Not Dad, not the police. It was too shocking, too personal, too . . . painful.

Even now, whenever Calla allows herself to think about what she learned, she’s swept by an overwhelming sense of betrayal by the mother she thought she had known—the mother who now feels like a stranger to her.

How could Mom have kept such an important secret for all these years? Why?

The whole truth, Calla is sure, lies in her mother’s e-mail files. But she couldn’t bring herself to go on reading them that day in Florida.

No, she only got as far as to learn the shocking truth: that Mom and her high school boyfriend, Darrin Yates— both of whom were murdered in the last few months— had, over twenty years ago, had a child together.

Which means somewhere out there, Calla must have a half sibling.

TWO

Odelia bustles over to take a casserole dish out of the oven. “You’re going to love this, Jeff. It’ll warm your soul.”

“I take it you’re thinking my soul needs warming?”

“I’m thinking, whose doesn’t? And it’s one of my specialties.”

“Soul warming?”

“Rice ring!”

“Rice ring,”Dad echoes, nodding. “What is it, though?”

“It’s just what it sounds like . . . see?”Odelia drops a crocheted pot holder onto the table and plops the oval dish on top of it.

Calla peers at the contents. Yup. That’s a ring of rice, all right. Mounds of steaming white rice, mixed with peas, line the perimeter of the dish. Pooled in the center basin is something creamy and lumpy with greenish gray flecks.

It doesn’t look particularly appetizing, but it does smell pretty good. Which is the case with many of her grandmother’s specialties.

“What else is in there?”Dad eyes it somewhat suspiciously. “Besides a ring of rice, I mean.”

“Peas.”

“Yup, see the peas. A whole lot of peas.”

Dad hates peas.

He’s not all that crazy about rice, either, Calla remembers. Not the brown rice Mom used to make, anyway. She was really into healthy food. Unlike Gammy.

Funny how Mom and Gammy really were opposites.

Kind of like Mom and me.

“It’s just tuna fish and cream of celery soup, and stop making faces at my rice ring, Jeff.”Gammy swats Dad’s arm with the other pot holder.

Mom made that,
Calla realizes.

Yes, her mother made that pot holder and the matching one beneath the casserole dish. She was a little girl, and she used one of those plastic loom kits; she got it for Christmas.

Calla closes her eyes.

There’s Mom, about ten years old, curled up in a chair beside a tinsel-covered tree, weaving loops of colored fabric as snow swirls beyond the window.

It’s not her imagination. No, this scene— like so many other images that have flashed into her head over the years— really happened.

It’s a psychic vision.

She’s been having them all her life. She just never knew exactly what they were until she moved in with Odelia, in a strange little town populated almost entirely by spiritualists.

This is where Calla first started seeing dead people, too. Well, not just
here
.

Lately, they’re everywhere. Or maybe they always have been, but Calla never realized it, or knew how—or where— to look for them.

She opens her eyes and glances around her grandmother’s kitchen, making it a point to tune in.

Still no sign of Aiyana. And no longer a telltale whiff of lilies of the valley.

But she does spot Miriam—the resident ghost, whose husband built the house well over a century ago— hovering in the corner by the fridge, watching Odelia dish up the casserole.

She’s definitely not the only spirit hanging around this house. And Calla’s ability to see her is about as much a novelty around Lily Dale as the rain is.

It all goes with the local territory. Psychic impressions, apparitions, premonitions, too. She’s had those all her life— has always known things she had no way of knowing.

The first few times it happened, when she was really little, she told her mother. Mom seemed uneasy and made her promise not to tell anybody, so Calla didn’t.

Not until she got to Lily Dale, where everyone and their brother has premonitions.

No wonder Mom had to leave. She was always much too practical for stuff like that. Unlike the rest of the world— or so it seemed to Calla— she didn’t believe in Santa Claus, or even in God. So why would she believe in ghosts?

It must have been hard for her to live in the Dale and not be a part of things. To be one of the few “mere mortals”here— as Calla’s new friend Evangeline jokingly calls outsiders.

Calla—who stepped into those shoes when she arrived back in August— shed them pretty quickly.

It wasn’t that she was eager to be like everyone else here. In fact, it was exactly opposite.

But she had no choice. She discovered that she
was
one of them.

Now there’s a new outsider in the Dale. One who isn’t nearly as likely to find that he belongs here.

“How about a cup of coffee, Jeff?”Gammy asks as he raises a forkful of rice, then stifles a yawn.

“That would be great. I could use some caffeine.”

“I’ll make a pot. Calla? Do you want some? You look a little droopy, too.”

“She doesn’t drink coffee.”

Okay, true. But Calla wishes her father didn’t find it necessary to answer for her.

Is this how it’s going to be from now on? Dad here, in her space, putting words into her mouth, imposing all sorts of rules . . .

“I’d love a cup, Gammy. Thank you.”

“You’re drinking coffee now?”Dad looks totally dismayed.

Instant guilt.

“Just sometimes,”Calla murmurs.

More like
once
, on a date with Blue Slayton, the cute guy she was trying to impress back when she first got here.

Still, she’s almost eighteen. She can drink coffee if she wants to . . . can’t she? Gammy offers it to her all the time. And it’s not like it’s a cigarette or a shot of whiskey or drugs.

“Caffeine is a drug,”Dad says, as if he’s read her mind.

Only—being a mere mortal—of course, he didn’t.

“It’s not good for you, you know .”

“Dad, you can’t go around treating me like a little girl.”

“Sure I can,”he says easily, around a mouthful of rice. “You know, Odelia, this is pretty good.”

“Of course it is.”She pours water into the coffeemaker. “I’m a great cook.”

“Modest, too.”

Odelia cracks a smile, presses a button, and returns to the table.

“Okay,”she says, sitting down. “I’m ready. Tell me everything. First things first, though, Jeff— like I told you on the phone yesterday, you’re welcome to take my room until you find a place of your own around here—”

“Odelia, like I said, I can’t put you out of your bed. The couch will be—”

“Wait, Jeff, let me finish. You don’t have to put me out of my bed or sleep on the couch. You’ve met Ramona Taggart next door— well, she has a spare bedroom, and she says it’s all yours, for as long as you want it.”

“Really.”Dad looks pleased.

He’s met Odelia’s flaky—and beautiful—neighbor a few times when he visited, and Calla definitely sensed sparks flying between the two of them.

Which shocked her. Not just because she can’t imagine her father with a woman who isn’t her mother, but because she can’t imagine her father with a woman like Ramona.

Then again . . . he was married to Mom. A straight-shooting, pragmatic, workaholic businesswoman, she, too, was drastically different from Dad. And from Ramona.

I guess opposites really do attract.

Calla can’t help but think of Jacy Bly. He’s not her opposite—more like a kindred spirit— but they’re definitely attracted.

Like her, Jacy is a relative newcomer to Lily Dale, uprooted from his home on a Native American reservation down on the southern tier. Like her, he moved into a house with a medium’s shingle out front and found himself in the care of strangers— loving strangers, but strangers, nonetheless. Like her, he eventually found himself at home here in the Dale.