Awakening (Lily Dale #1)(51)

Accidents might happen to everyone, but Mom falling down a flight of stairs?

Okay, so if it wasn’t an accident, what’s the alternative?

Calla never allows herself to think past that crazy question, or consider why she alone seems to be wondering about it. The police aren’t suspicious. Dad isn’t suspicious.

And I’m not, either. I can’t be. I won’t let myself be.

So why can’t she completely accept it, as everyone else did?

I just can’t. Especially now that I know I might actually be psychic.

What if her vague, nagging suspicion is intuition, and grounded in reality?

It might mean Mom didn’t just die. Somebody killed her.

Again, Calla casts a thoughtful look at the boy in the picture. Darrin.

“Hello?”

Calla is so shocked to hear Kevin’s voice that she nearly drops the phone.

She shouldn’t be, though. She called his house. He lives there. Why wouldn’t he answer the phone? If she had been thinking straight, she might have prepared herself for that possibility.

But she hasn’t been thinking straight, upset about her growing misgivings about Mom’s so-called accident. She has no proof. Just a hunch. If that’s what you call it in Calla’s case.

“Is . . . is Lisa there?”

“Calla.” He says her name softly. “Hi.”

“Is Lisa there?” she repeats, pressing the phone hard to her ear with a trembling hand.

“No. She’s out with my mother. What’s wrong? Are you okay?”

“No.” It comes out as a half sob. “I mean, yes,” she says in a small, shaky voice.

“No, you aren’t. What’s going on?”

“It’s just . . . I’m homesick, I guess,” she says in a rush. And it’s true. Homesick for Kevin, for her mother. For what can never be again. Homesick. And terrified.

“I know how that feels,” he says unexpectedly. “I was really homesick last fall, when I first got to Cornell.”

“You never told me that,” she murmurs.

“Yeah. Well, it didn’t last for too long. I got used to the dorm, then I got busy with classes and I started meeting people . . . it got better.”

Meeting people. Like Annie.

“Please tell Lisa I called?” she says tightly. “Thanks. Good—”

“Wait . . . guess what? My parents got me this car to take back to school.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, they didn’t really want to. Mostly because they didn’t want me driving from Florida to New York alone.”

Maybe you can take Annie with you, she wants to say. Despite everything else she has to worry about, it kills her to think of him driving around with another girl in the passenger’s seat.

“Anyway, I’m headed back up there to school the day after tomorrow, so if you need . . . anything . . . I mean, Cornell is only a few hours from you, and . . . like I said, I’ll have a car.”

“That’s good. For you, I mean.” It has nothing to do with me because we’re broken up.

“Yeah. So if you need anything . . . ,” he says again.

You’d be the last person I’d call. “Thanks,” Calla says, “but I’m really fine. Just tell Lisa to call me when she gets home, if it’s not too late.” “It might be. They went to Orlando.”

“Well, no big deal. I’ll catch up with her later.”

She hangs up, shaking, glad her grandmother is down at the café having coffee with her friend Andy. Calla needs some time to pull herself together after hearing Kevin’s voice.

If only . . .

No. You can’t start wishing for things that can never be.

It’s just, talking to Kevin, feeling as needy and alone as she has lately—well, it made her feel like maybe he still cares.

But it’s not as if Kevin just asked her to get back together. No, he just told her he can help her if she needs him. Because he’s a nice guy. No other reason. He might be only a few hours from here when he gets to school, but he’s with someone else now. Annie. So what does it matter?

You need to focus on reality. On what is. Not what if.

And reality is, she has far bigger problems to worry about right now than ex-boyfriends.





FOURTEEN

The lake.

How can Calla stay away from the lake when it’s somehow connected to her mother?

I can’t. No matter what Odelia says.

Walking along the deserted, grassy shore in the late-afternoon sunlight, she stares into the water and wonders what to do. About her mother. About Kaitlyn. About California.

Nothing, nothing, and nothing, she tells herself grimly.

She has no proof that her mother’s death was anything but an accident.

She does know she saw Kaitlyn Riggs or someone who looks just like her here in Lily Dale and that she’s still missing, but what is she supposed to do about that?

And she’s going to California Labor Day weekend because that’s the plan, unless she asks permission to stay. Odelia will agree, she’s certain. Her father might, too. But is it what she wants? Just days ago, all she wanted was to leave, and now— Something catches the corner of her eye. She jerks her head around to see a familiar woman standing several feet away, in the shadows of a huge old maple tree. She has a dark bun, dark eyes, a slight build . . . and she’s wearing a strange, flowing, light-colored dress.