Believing (Lily Dale #2)(18)

He nods. “I know.”

“Can we—” Again, she looks around to see who might be eavesdropping.

The hallway is filled with the sound of slamming lockers and chattering voices and people are scurrying around, not seeming to pay any attention to Calla and Jacy. Still . . .

“Are you . . . ,” she begins again, and then, “I mean, do you want to . . . ?”

“I’ll walk home with you. Yeah. Come on.”

“Good thing you’re a mind reader.” She grins.

Again, he doesn’t.

And this time, it occurs to her that it’s because he doesn’t think she’s joking. Around here, it seems, some people don’t take things like mind reading lightly.

Calla just hopes Jacy can’t read all her thoughts. Especially the ones about him.

They head down the stairs and swing by her locker so she can get her stuff. As they step outside into an unexpectedly balmy breeze, Calla notices that the shifting sky is ominously dark in the west, beyond the lake, and wind-driven ripples cover the surface of the gray-black water.

“It’s going to storm,” she comments, reminded of Florida in the late afternoons.

Jacy shakes his head. “No. It’ll pass.”

“How do you know?”

He ignores the question and asks one of his own as they head down the path toward the road back to Lily Dale. “So what’s been going on?”

“I don’t even know where to start.” She searches her memory. “I guess the first thing was the clock. This digital one that was in my room—my mother’s old room. When I first got here, it was flashing.”

“Because the time wasn’t set?”

“Right. Exactly. I didn’t bother to set it, but then I woke up in the middle of the night and it said 3:17 a.m.”

“So, someone set it while you were sleeping?”

“My grandmother said she didn’t. And it started happening every night. I’d go to bed with the clock flashing, and I’d wake up and it was 3:17. Every single night.”

“Maybe you were dreaming.”

“I wasn’t,” she says firmly. “Not about waking up. But I was definitely dreaming before I woke up. The same exact dream, every night. It was about my mother and my grandmother, and this argument they had when I was really little. After that, they never saw each other again.”

“What was it about?”

“I don’t know, really. They kept saying something about dredging the lake.”

Both she and Jacy glance again at the dark water. What secrets does it hold?

Calla shudders and turns away, going on with her story. “I was starting to get really freaked out, so I unplugged the clock, and . . . this is the really creepy part . . . it happened even then.”

“It was unplugged, and it was showing the time anyway?”

“3:17. Yeah. So I threw the clock away, and bought a new one, and . . .” She wonders how she’s going to tell him this without sounding like she’s really lost it.

But she doesn’t have to, because he says it for her. Like he already knew.

“And it happened anyway.”

“Yeah. And I found out that spirit energy can supposedly tap into appliances and, you know, manipulate electronic energy. Feed off of it or something.”

It’s Jacy’s turn to nod. Obviously, this isn’t news to him.

“The thing is . . . last weekend, when I was at Wal-Mart buying the new clock, this green shamrock bowl somehow fell off a shelf by itself and broke into a million pieces. And then I saw this woman again. This Spirit,” she remembers to say, instead of ghost. Here in Lily Dale, people like to say Spirit. With a capital S. “I think she made the bowl break to get my attention because . . .” She takes a deep breath. “This is going to sound far-fetched.”

Jacy shrugs.

“Okay . . . green shamrock bowl. 3-17. That’s not just a time, it’s a date. March seventeenth. Saint Patrick’s Day. That’s what this was all about. I realized I was supposed to be remembering something that happened on Saint Patrick’s Day. Does that make sense?”

“Yeah,” Jacy says simply, and she wants to hug him. “What happened on March seventeenth?”

“This man came to visit my mom. I remember the day because she was baking Irish soda bread, and she burned it. She never made careless mistakes like that. She must have been thrown off by seeing him, or maybe something he said, or something he gave her—he had an envelope with him.”

“What was in it?”

“I have no idea. I thought it must be work stuff, but it turned out he wasn’t a coworker after all. And his name isn’t really Tom, either. The other thing is, he was whistling this tune. I had never heard it before, but I heard it again, when I got to Lily Dale. It’s the same song that plays in this old jewelry box I found in my mother’s room.”

Jacy’s black eyebrows raise, just a little. He’s not the kind of guy to react to anything in a big way, Calla’s learning. But he looks surprised.

“And in the middle of the night last Monday—Tuesday morning, really—at 3:17—it opened by itself,” she hurries on, “and the music woke me up, and I found my mother’s emerald bracelet in there, and it couldn’t have been there, because it fell into her grave at her funeral and I lost it.” She breaks off, breathless, wondering if Jacy thinks she’s crazy. Sometimes, lately, she thinks that herself.