Believing (Lily Dale #2)(19)

“What about the woman you saw that day, when the bowl broke?” Jacy asks. “Who was she?”

“I have no idea. But this word—Aiyana—popped into my head when I saw her. Does that mean anything to you? Is it a name or something?”

“It can be. It’s Native American. It means ‘forever flowering.’ ”

Her jaw drops, and she remembers the distinct floral smell that sometimes inexplicably fills her room back at Odelia’s house, and infiltrated the bathroom the other night, when she saw that strange disembodied shadow. The scent belongs to lilies of the valley. Mom’s favorite flower.

“I think that’s the woman’s name,” Calla tells Jacy. “She keeps popping up . . . even before I came to Lily Dale. And she looks beautiful and exotic, like you.”

It takes her a second to realize she just told Jacy she thinks he’s beautiful. Oops.

Open mouth, insert foot, once again.

Not that she doesn’t have more important things to worry about right now.

She says hastily, “I mean, she looks like she might be Native American. Like you.”

“Where have you seen her? Other than Wal-Mart, I mean.”

“At my mother’s funeral back in Florida was the first time. Only then, I thought she was real. I mean . . . alive. You know—not in Spirit. And I saw her a few times around my grandmother’s house, and by the lake. I think she’s been trying to give me messages. About my mom.”

He’s quiet for a minute, just walking along beside her, like he’s lost in thought.

Then he asks, “Did you ever hear of a spirit guide?”

Calla nods. “Yeah. They’re kind of like guardian angels. Right?”

“Kind of,” Jacy agrees.

“Do you think Aiyana is my spirit guide?”

“She may be.”

“That’s it.” I know it.

He knows it, too, she thinks, watching Jacy bend to pick up a pebble and then resume walking.

“Do you think I’m the only one who sees her?” she asks him.

“Depends. Sometimes guides come through clairvoyant vision, sometimes they actually materialize in human form, or sometimes we can only hear or feel them. Sometimes they can even be an animal, or a symbol.”

“Do you have a spirit guide?”

“I have a lot of them. We all do. Everyone has them, but not everyone can perceive them. Some are permanently with us from the moment we enter the earth plane until we leave it, and others come and go when we need them.”

From the moment we enter the earth plane.

His phrasing strikes Calla as typical of the way people speak here in Lily Dale. Most places, people would just say from the moment we’re born.

“Are your guides . . . men?” she asks him. “Women? Boys? Animals? Symbols?”

“All of the above, depending on what kind of guidance I need. They show themselves to me as they want to be seen, based on where I’m at.”

“What do you mean?”

He hesitates, as if he isn’t quite willing to open up with personal information.

Sure enough, when he does speak, he turns the reference back to her.

“Like, with you, you just lost your mom, so maybe—and I don’t know for sure—Aiyana represents maternal energy and that’s why she appears to you in the form of a woman.”

She considers that. It makes sense. And seems comforting, in some bizarre way.

“Spirit guides are here to protect us, right?” she asks Jacy.

“To guide us.” Jacy is choosing his words carefully. “It’s up to us to decide what to do, though. They aren’t responsible for our choices. We are.”

“Right. I read that somewhere. And it said—in this book I got from the library here—that if you need their help but aren’t even aware that you do—or that they exist in the first place—they’ll try to get your attention somehow. What I don’t get is, how can they warn someone who doesn’t even know they exist?”

“They’ll try to make you aware, maybe try to warn you somehow if they think you’re in danger, but it’s up to you to be receptive and heed the warning.”

“Do you think Aiyana is trying to warn me about something? Or maybe give me some kind of message?”

“What do you think?” Jacy bends his arm to toss the stone toward the lake.

Calla hesitates, watching it skip several times across the gray surface of the water.

If she lets Jacy in on her secret suspicion about her mother’s death, there will be no going back.

Out on the lapping water, the stone disappears from sight and sinks into the murky depths.

“I think she wants me to know about something that has to do with my mother,” Calla tells Jacy. “With how she died, or . . . was killed.”

Jacy stops walking and looks at her.

Then he nods slowly.

He gets it, Calla thinks, and on the heels of that, so maybe I’m right about Mom being murdered—and Darrin having something to do with it.





Just inside the wrought-iron gate to Lily Dale, Jacy points at a two-story cottage similar to most of the others here, with an architectural style typical of the eighteenth century.

“That’s where Paula lives,” he tells Calla.