Awakening (Lily Dale #1)(18)

“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.

“Think of it like a sensitive radio that’s capable of tuning in to a frequency other radios might not be capable of receiving. A medium is basically just a highly responsive transmitter, receiving signals others can’t pick up and passing them on.”

“Yeah, but radios don’t pick up signals from dead people.”

“Around here, we prefer to say Spirit.”

Around here? We? Her grandmother must have a bunch of imaginary friends—or so-called spirits—living in her house. Or, more likely, in her head.