Awakening (Lily Dale #1)(50)

The one at the prom, with the boy Calla thought looked so familiar but never has been able to place.

“Oh, that’s Darrin,” Ramona says immediately, looking at the framed picture in her sunny kitchen. “Yeah, your mother went out with him for a while. Odelia couldn’t stand him.”

“Really?” Calla asks, trying not to sound too breathlessly concerned. “Why not?”

“Odelia said he gave off negative energy. She was right. I felt it too. We all did.”

“All . . . who?”

“A lot of people around town. You know. Darrin was just . . . trouble. You could sense that from a mile away. Well, the rest of us could, anyway. But not Stephanie.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know. . . . Love is blind?” Ramona offers with a feeble shrug, handing the picture back to Calla. “She just wouldn’t give him up. Not even after her mother told her she had to.”

It’s hard for Calla to imagine laid-back Odelia being that strict.

“Want some Pepsi?” asks Ramona, opening the fridge and peering inside.

“No thanks,” Calla says, thinking it’s kind of early for Pepsi. So early she’s surprised Ramona didn’t bat an eye when Calla popped up at the door at this hour—seven thirty—and asked if she had a few minutes. She merely said, “Sure, come on in,” and mentioned that Evangeline and Mason were still sleeping. She seemed to sense Calla wanted to speak to her alone.

Ramona pours herself a tall, fizzy glassful, then sits at the table and pulls out a chair, patting it for Calla.

“Where is he now?” Calla asks, sinking into the seat, still clutching the picture.

“Darrin? I don’t know. He got into drugs—that happens sometimes around here.”

“What do you mean?”

“Some people I’ve known, especially teenagers, aren’t comfortable with their sensitivity. It can be a frightening, isolating feeling to discover that you have an awareness of spirit energy.”

Yeah, no kidding.

“Unfortunately, some people tend to self-medicate with drugs or alcohol as a means of escaping what they can’t accept.” Ramona sounds like she’s reciting from a medical journal.

“So what happened to Darrin, exactly?” Calla asks, to keep her on track.

“He was spiraling pretty badly, last I knew. But that was years ago, before he . . .”

“Before he what?” Calla prods impatiently when Ramona trails off. She can’t help but be frustrated that she’s discovered so little about her mother’s forbidden love, whom she still believes she might have seen somewhere before . . . if only she knew where that might have been.

Ramona looks her in the eye. “Before he disappeared.”

“He disappeared? What do you mean?”

“One day, he just vanished, and nobody ever saw him again.”

Calla’s jaw drops.

“His parents thought something terrible must have happened to him,” Ramona goes on conversationally, turning back to the easel. “So do I, actually. Maybe he was dealing, and not just using, and a deal went bad . . . who knows?”

“Who knows? It seems like someone would know,” Calla mutters, “with all these psychics around. I mean, isn’t that what you people do?”

She’s conscious of her phrasing, knows that she’s deliberately using you people to set herself squarely across the line from Lily Dale’s psychic population. She can’t help it. She’s feeling cranky again. You’d think that all these people with their special powers would know what happened to Mom’s old boyfriend—or at least would be able to bring Mom through to Calla.

That’s why you’re so angry. Admit it. You’re frustrated that you’re here in a town where supposedly nobody is really dead, and you still can’t reach Mom.

“You mean, do people around here have the ability to find missing persons?” Ramona asks, unflustered by Calla’s attitude. “Some have done that, sure.”

Calla thinks about Kaitlyn Riggs. Am I really going to pretend I never saw her?

“I’m sure Darrin’s parents tried to find him that way, but for whatever reason, they didn’t. It isn’t foolproof,” Ramona points out.

“Do you think he’s dead?”

“Maybe.”

“But wouldn’t you know? Wouldn’t his parents know, if they’re mediums?”

“Nothing is more powerful than the bond between a parent and a child.” Ramona’s hazel eyes bore into Calla’s. “There are some things a parent might not want to see, or accept.”

She nods, thinking not of Kaitlyn now, but of her own mother. If she hadn’t seen Mom with her own eyes, lying there in a pool of blood, she might never have believed she was gone. There was no denial in the face of that evidence, though.

“I should go,” she tells Ramona abruptly. “I have . . . stuff to do.”

“Sure. But listen, anytime you want to talk about your mom, I’m here. Okay?”

Calla nods, then flees.

Outside, alone, she takes a deep, shuddering breath. Try as she might, she can’t block the memory of her mother’s corpse from her mind’s eye. Nor can she erase her troubling questions about what happened to her.