Awakening (Lily Dale #1)(53)

“Yes!” Then, hardly daring to breathe, Calla asks, “Is . . . is her brother staying, too?”

“No, he’s dropping her off, then heading to school. Cornell, right? He must be smart.”

“He is.” But not smart enough to hang on to me, Calla can’t help thinking. “Do you mind if I use the phone to call Lisa?”

“Not at all,” Odelia says, “but first let me use it to call your father. I don’t want to waste another minute.”

“When you’re done checking your e-mail, want to hang out for a while?” Evangeline asks twenty minutes later, watching Calla pull the desk chair closer to the keyboard.

“For a couple of minutes,” Calla murmurs, dragging the mouse and clicking on the Internet icon. “I . . . have to be someplace in a little while, though.”

“Really? Hot date?”

Calla looks up sharply. “Who told you?”

“Oh my God! You really have a hot date? With who, Blue Slayton?”

“How did you know?”

“Wait, I was just kidding . . . so you do? With Blue?” When Calla nods, she shrieks. “I can’t believe it! I so knew he was into you! Tell me everything!”

“Just . . . give me a minute online, okay? Then I’ll tell you. Not that there’s much to tell.”

“There must be something juicy if you’re going out with Blue.”

Calla shrugs and flashes Evangeline a distracted smile, hoping she’s not going to stand there in the doorway the whole time and watch her use the computer.

Good. She’s not. Evangeline returns the smile, then goes into the next room, where the television is on. She’s alone; her aunt took Mason to Applebee’s and a movie down in Fredonia.

Waiting for the search engine screen to pop up, Calla thinks again about the whirlwind of action at Odelia’s house just now. First came Odelia’s report that her father is actually going to consider letting her stay. On the heels of that was Calla’s giddy conversation with Lisa.

Calla can hardly believe she’ll be here in Lily Dale by the weekend. She said her parents are probably letting her come only because they don’t want Kevin driving all that way alone, and neither of them can take off work to accompany him.

“But who cares why?” she crowed. “I get to come see you. Isn’t it great?”

Calla has been trying not to picture Kevin slowing his new car in front of Odelia’s house just long enough for Lisa to jump out. Of course he’s not coming here to see her. Lisa is. He’s just the chauffeur.

And she’s not going to give him another moment’s thought.

Definitely not right now, anyway, because the search engine is up and she’s typing the words Rock House in quotes.

A list of links pop up a moment later. She clicks on the first one, reads a few lines, and gasps.

Rock House is a real place, all right.

It’s a cave in Hocking Hills State Park, just outside Columbus, Ohio.

Having coffee with Blue Slayton is the last thing Calla feels like doing, but it’s definitely too late to back out.

Calla knows, because she tried. But when she called Blue’s house, the housekeeper told her he wasn’t home.

She’s lying, Calla thought. Somehow, she sensed that Blue was home but didn’t want to talk to her. Or maybe not to anyone. Whatever. She couldn’t demand that he get on the phone so she could break their date, and it wouldn’t be polite to leave him a message saying she can’t go.

No, the girl who was dumped in a text message would never let anyone down in such an impersonal manner.

She finds herself checking her reflection in the living-room mirror one last time as she hears a car door slam, then footsteps coming up the porch steps, through the screen.

“You look pretty,” Odelia says from her recliner, where she’s reading People magazine with her bare feet up, flip-flops kicked into a distant corner.

“Thanks.” Calla notices that her eyes in the mirror, accented by makeup for the first time in ages, look too huge in her thinner-than-usual face. A generous layer of concealer couldn’t mask the circles beneath them, either.

Other than that, though, she looks fine. Maybe even pretty. She’s wearing jeans and a snug-fitting black tank top with spaghetti straps, and she’s left her hair down to fall around her bare shoulders. Not that she’s trying to impress Blue Slayton or anything.

“Have fun,” Odelia says from her chair as the bell rings and Calla heads for the door.

“Yeah, I will.”

Blue—whose eyes, jeans, and chambray shirt reflect his name—smiles appreciatively when he sees her, jangling keys in his hand. “Ready?”

Not really. She should be having a heart-to-heart talk with Odelia about Kaitlyn Riggs and Rock House Cave in Ohio.

But that will open the door to a whole lot of something Calla isn’t ready to face.

“Ready,” she tells Blue, who’s waiting.

As she follows him out the door, she pats her back pocket to make sure she can feel the outline of her cell phone there. In case she decides to put Plan B into motion.

Ten miles northwest of Lily Dale, Route 60 ends at the shore of another lake, this one much bigger than Cassadaga. The grayish green water looks like the ocean, stretching all the way to the horizon. But Calla knows her geography well enough to realize that the Atlantic is a good four hundred or five hundred miles from here, on the opposite end of New York State.