Awakening (Lily Dale #1)(14)

Simple. The cemetery is probably haunted as well. It makes more sense for ghosts to hang around their graves than anywhere else. Not that Calla is sure that what she saw was a ghost, either time. One thing is certain, though: it wasn’t her mother’s spirit. That, she’d recognize beyond a shadow of a doubt. The woman in the cemetery in Florida was a stranger, and the face she barely glimpsed just now didn’t seem familiar, either.

“Do you want to help me in the kitchen, or rest a little while before we eat?” Odelia calls as she begins to creak her way down the stairs.

“I’ll help you.” Calla hurries uneasily after her grandmother.

That’s strange. It seems to be a good twenty degrees warmer in the hallway.

Feeling as though she’s being watched as she heads toward the stairs, Calla can’t help but wonder what she might see if she dared to throw a backward glance over her shoulder.





FOUR

After they’ve eaten dinner and washed and dried the dishes— by hand, no dishwasher here—Odelia announces that she’s going upstairs to take a bath.

“I smell like a meatball,” she complains, or rather just observes, because that sort of thing doesn’t really seem to bother her.

Calla smells like a meatball, too, which does bother her. But with only one tub in the house, she’ll have to wait for her grandmother to finish until she can get in there.

“Do you want me to wash the pots?” she asks, eyeing the big skillet and kettle Odelia has soaking in one half of the double sink.

“Nah, let everything soak until tomorrow.”

Calla is struck, once again, by the stark difference between her mother and her grandmother. Mom would have never, ever left a pan in the sink overnight.

In fact, Mom would have never, ever let food get stuck in one of her pans in the first place—she was as conscientious about cooking as she was about everything else she did.

There’s only one occasion that Calla can ever recall her slipping up in that regard. It was recently, too—back in March. Saint Patrick’s Day. Calla is certain of the date because Mom had a soda bread in the oven. She made one every year, in honor of Dad’s Irish roots—but only once a year, because she didn’t like to bake with unhealthy white flour and sugar. Dad and Calla always looked forward to that soda bread, eaten with butter and jam.

This year, though, one of Mom’s coworkers stopped by to give her a packet of information or something, just after she put the bread into the oven. Todd, or Tom—that was his name. Something like that. Calla remembers seeing him at the funeral.

That day, she answered the door when the bell rang, went to get Mom, and then the two of them disappeared into Mom’s home office.

Calla remembers the smoke alarm going off a while later, when she was up in her room doing her homework. She ran downstairs to find that the visitor had just left and her mother was frantically opening all the windows in the kitchen, trying to fan out the smoke.

She was really upset—uncharacteristically so, Calla thought at the time. Mom was usually unflappable. That day, though, she was on the verge of tears as she dumped the burned soda bread, pan and all, into the garbage can.

Probably because she prided herself on paying the same careful attention to cooking that she did to everything else. And because she had no patience for anyone who slacked off—least of all herself.

Unlike Mom, Odelia is—well, not so conscientious. About much of anything, as far as Calla can tell. But she’s wildly creative. She put raisins in the meatballs and a pinch of brown sugar into the bubbling tomato sauce.

“I like things sweet,” she informed Calla, who also likes things sweet . . . but spaghetti and meatballs?

It was surprisingly good, though. As she dug in, Calla found herself thinking she would have to tell her mother about the crazy recipe, before remembering that (a) her mother only makes a meatless sauce using fresh organic tomatoes, and (b) her mother is gone. Not to mention (c) her mother probably wouldn’t be as amused as Calla is by Odelia’s eccentricities.

Calla is really trying not to find her grandmother utterly charming, out of vague loyalty to her mother. Stephanie, after all, harbored some terrible, long-term grudge against Odelia.

But Calla can’t help but get a kick out of some of the things her grandmother does. Not just putting raisins in the meatballs and brown sugar in the sauce, but also throwing a couple of strawberries into the glass of white wine she drank with dinner. Or counting to sixty, nine times—with a Mississippi between each painstaking number—while the pasta boiled to al dente, because her stove clock had broken and she never remembered to buy a new timer.

Now, Odelia is tucking a couple of cookbooks under her arm before heading upstairs to the bathroom. Seeing Calla’s curious glance, she explains, “I do my best reading on the toilet.”

“You read cookbooks on the toilet?”

“Sure,” Odelia replies with a Doesn’t Everyone? shrug. “Listen, help yourself to dessert if you don’t want to wait until I get back downstairs. There are pecan sandies in the cupboard by the stove, and there’s mango sorbet in the freezer.”

Calla, who isn’t quite sure what a pecan sandy is but happens to like mango sorbet, says, “I’ll wait for you.”

“Okay, but I might be a while. I like to soak in a nice, long, hot tub.”