Believing (Lily Dale #2)(2)

The detective rolls up the window and locks her door from the control on the driver’s side.

“There,” he says. “Safe and sound, right?”

“Right. Thanks.”

“What’s your name?” he asks as the car picks up speed.

“It’s Erin.”

“Hi, Erin. I’m Phil.”

Phil? That’s odd. Shouldn’t he be calling himself Detective Something?

He comes to a light and stops the car. When it changes, he turns the corner.

Oops. “Um . . . Detective?” She can’t bring herself to call him by his first name. “East Twelfth is that way.”

He says nothing, just keeps driving as if she hadn’t spoken. Maybe he didn’t hear her.

“Excuse me? I live back that way,” she repeats, and an uneasy feeling begins to creep over her again.

Still, he ignores her. He goes around another corner, again heading in the wrong direction, taking the turn so fast the tires screech.

Should a police officer be driving so recklessly? And shouldn’t he know his way around? And shouldn’t he be listening to her when she tells him he’s going the wrong way?

“You know what? I need to get out,” she blurts, stark fear transforming her voice into a little girl’s, high pitched and vulnerable. “Please. Let me out.”

She realizes that a faint smile is playing at the corners of his mouth. No. Not a smile at all.

A smirk.

He lied, she realizes in a burst of sheer panic. He isn’t a detective at all.

And the danger wasn’t out there on the street . . . it’s right here in the car with him.

And I should have listened to Mom. Never talk to strangers.

Terrified, she begins to pray.





ONE

Lily Dale, New York

Tuesday, September 4

3:19 a.m.

With a trembling hand, eyes still blinking in the sudden glare from the overhead bulb, Calla Delaney turns on the tap at the pedestal sink in the upstairs bathroom. A deafening groan of Victorian-era plumbing sends a rush of water that seems to roar through the old cottage.

Oops—too loud. Calla hurriedly turns it off, not wanting to wake her grandmother. Standing absolutely still, breath caught in her throat, she listens for stirring down the hall.

Nothing.

Right. Odelia Lauder really does—as she likes to say— sleep like the dead.

Talks to them, too, Calla thinks with a glimmer of irony despite the lingering dread still wrapped around her like a clammy towel.

Her grandmother is a medium—and she’s not the only one.

Here in Lily Dale, Victorian cottages with hand-painted signs announcing psychic mediums in residence are as common as glittering neon casinos on the Las Vegas Strip.

Calla had no idea what she was walking into when she first flew to western New York State from Tampa a few weeks ago to visit the grandmother she hadn’t seen in over a decade.

Who ever heard of a town dedicating itself to spiritualism for well over a century?

Okay, plenty of people have heard of it. That’s obvious from the crowds of grieving visitors who wander up and down the streets every day, hoping to connect with their dearly departed.

But Calla was clueless about Lily Dale’s genuine ghost-town status at first. And when she found out, she decided Odelia, and Lily Dale and everyone in it, was . . . well, some kind of freak.

Seriously, who in their right mind would actually choose to live in a place like this?

Calla’s mom hadn’t. The moment she was eighteen, Stephanie Lauder Delaney left Lily Dale and never looked back. Nor did she ever tell Calla about her hometown’s eerie little secret.

No, I had to find that out on my own—the hard way.

A chill breeze off nearby Cassadaga Lake isn’t all that crept over Calla as the overcast days of August wound to a close last week.

Yeah, things have changed pretty drastically since she got here. She now finds herself not only believing in Odelia and the others—and in ghosts—but regularly seeing and hearing them herself.

In other words, Calla seems to be, like her grandmother, spiritually gifted.

It sure has taken her long enough to suspect that Aiyana, the exotic-looking woman with the dark hair; Kaitlyn, the troubled, pretty teenaged girl; and the other strangers who pop in and out of her world these days might actually be . . . um . . . dead.

Psychic awareness is supposedly a hereditary gift, like the dreamy absentmindedness she inherited from Dad, or the slim-hipped, long-waisted build and delicate features she inherited from Mom.

I got this from her, too.

Slowly, she looks down and unclenches her left fist.

Lying in her palm, bathed in the yellow glow from the antique fixture above the sink, is the emerald bracelet Mom gave Calla when her boyfriend, Kevin, dumped her back in April.

“It’s yours to keep,” Mom said, hugging her. “I know it’s just jewelry. It won’t heal a broken heart, but it might make you feel better.”

It did.

Until the clasp suddenly broke as Calla leaned over her mother’s open grave in July. The bracelet fell from her wrist and was swallowed into the gaping hole where Stephanie’s coffin had just been lowered.

Helpless, Calla knew it was lost to her forever—just as Mom was.

To her utter shock, she was dead wrong.