Believing (Lily Dale #2)(23)

He has no idea where she is now. Maybe she has a career somewhere, a home, a husband, children. A life. Someday he’ll find her and she’ll get what she deserves. In the meantime, there are so many others to take her place.

He wonders about the seventeen-year-old girl who led the police to Kaitlyn Riggs’s body. Wonders what she looks like. If she has long blond hair.

She has to have long blond hair. They all do.

Then again . . . what if she doesn’t?

“Maybe that will keep you safe,” he purrs softly into the empty room, imagining her, terrified, cowering, right there in front of him. “Then again . . . maybe it won’t.”

He’ll be the one to make that decision. Who lives. Who dies. It’s all up to him.

His lips curl into a smile at the heady sense of power, and the first stirring of a familiar craving begins to creep over him.





Willow York lives with her divorced mother in a small two-story gabled cottage on a narrow, tree-shaded lane a few streets over from Odelia’s place. There’s no shingle above the door, fueling Calla’s suspicion that Willow, unlike some of the other kids here, leads a more “normal” lifestyle, like her friends back home.

When she answers the door to Calla’s knock, she’s wearing a white T-shirt and gray yoga pants that ride low on her slim hips, revealing a flat stomach and tanned belly button. Her long, straight dark hair is pulled back into a neat ponytail (reminding Calla again that her own overgrown bangs could use a cut), her face is scrubbed clean of makeup . . . and she’s absolutely drop-dead gorgeous, Calla decides. As beautiful as Blue Slayton is. No wonder he was drawn to her.

She wonders—not for the first time—why they broke up, and if they’re really over each other.

“Come on in.” Willow holds the door open and steps back into the shadowy hall. “We have to be kind of quiet. My mom’s taking a nap.”

“Now? But it’s so early.” Some unidentifiable emotion flickers in Willow’s expression, and Calla hedges uncomfortably. “I mean . . . it’s kind of late. You know. For a nap.”

Willow busies herself closing the door, her back to Calla. “She’s doing some late readings tonight. She likes to rest up for them.”

“Oh.” So Willow’s mother is a medium.

Okay, is that really any surprise?

Yes. It shouldn’t be, but it is. If only because Calla still isn’t used to the local industry . . . and because, okay, Willow seems so . . . normal.

Evangeline, Jacy, even Blue . . .

Well, they’re all so different from anyone Calla has ever met before. Orphaned Evangeline talks freely about the spirit world and her own gifted heritage; foster-kid Jacy is so quietly, yet obviously, spiritual; Blue, whose mother left when he was little, often refers to his celebrity medium father.

Unlike the others, Willow—beautiful, smart, quiet, sophisticated—would fit in perfectly at Calla’s private school back in Florida, where the other kids’ parents are doctors and lawyers and bankers, like Calla’s mother.

Mom.

Darrin.

Aiyana.

Kaitlyn Riggs.

The phone call from that reporter.

The chain of thoughts clicks through like falling dominoes in Calla’s head. It’s all she can do to come up with an answer when Willow turns around, looking relaxed again, and asks if she wants anything to drink.

“No, I’m good,” she manages, and follows Willow through a small living room that’s similar in size, woodwork, decor, and even clutter to her grandmother’s house, and Ramona’s and Paula’s as well.

The rest of the first floor—dining room, kitchen, and the study—is just as ordinary, from the worn furniture to the dishes piled in the sink.

For some reason, Calla was expecting something a little more . . . upscale. Maybe not along the lines of the Slaytons’ grand home on the knoll above the lake, which Calla has seen only from afar, but she just didn’t picture Willow York living in a regular Lily Dale cottage that has seen better days.

In the study, a computer sits on the desk, humming in quiet activity with a simple blue-patterned screen saver that displays several icons, including, Calla notices, one for the Internet.

She casts a longing glance at it before sitting on a chair Willow offers and taking her math homework and text from her backpack.

“Thanks so much for helping me,” she feels obligated to say as Willow takes a couple of sharpened pencils and a calculator from a drawer. “Not that you had any choice, but . . .”

Willow shrugs. “It’s no problem. Anyway, I like math.”

“Yeah, but I know there must be a million things you’d rather be doing,” Calla says with a faint smile.

Willow returns it. “Maybe one or two. Come on, let’s do the first problem.”

Calla tries to concentrate. Really, she does. But her thoughts keep drifting back to her disturbing conversation with that reporter from the AP.

“What don’t you get?” Willow asks, after showing her for the third time how to arrive at the right answer, which eludes Calla yet again.

“Pretty much everything.”

Willow sighs and flips pages in the textbook. “Okay, let’s backtrack a little.”

Somewhere overhead, a floorboard creaks, and Calla follows Willow’s upward glance.