Believing (Lily Dale #2)(27)

“No way,” Evangeline says firmly. “My aunt is all caught up in some date she has tonight. Something like this will really throw her off, and she really likes this guy. He sounds normal for a change—an accountant from Westfield. She really needs a nice, normal guy. Especially after having her last boyfriend dump her for a Buffalo Jills cheerleader. I told you about that, right?”

Calla nods, distracted. Normally, Ramona Taggart’s disastrous love life interests her, but right now, all she cares about is Erin Shannahan.

“Okay,” she tells Evangeline, picking up her pace a little as the entrance gate to Lily Dale appears around the bend—along with Mason Taggart, who’s walking toward home with a couple of friends. “Let’s go to your house and Google CKT.”

“And then call the police?”

“Depends on what we find.”

“Come on.” Evangeline breaks into a jog. “We have to get there before my brother does, or he’ll cause a big stink and make us wait forever.”

With her father on his way to Lily Dale, Calla can’t afford to wait forever. Every second counts . . . and Erin’s life is hanging in the balance.





Twenty minutes later, Calla and Evangeline are at the pay phone outside the café.

“You’re sure it comes up without a number?” Calla asks Evangeline as she lifts the receiver.

“I’m positive. Go on . . . dial! Do you want me to?”

“No, I’ll do it.” Her hand shaking like crazy, Calla begins punching out the number she scribbled on a piece of scrap paper back at the Taggarts’.

As the phone rings on the other end, Calla quickly rehearses what she and Evangeline decided she should say.

“Erin Shannahan tip line,” a male voice answers on the second ring.

“I believe Erin is still alive, and that she can be found in the Allegheny Gorge, just off the Chuck Keiper Trail, near a firepit ringed by rocks.”

“Good!” Evangeline hisses. “Hang up!”

“Who is this?” the voice asks in Calla’s ear.

For a split second, she’s absolutely frozen. Then she abruptly clamps the phone down, trembling, on the verge of tears.

Evangeline hugs her. “That was so good. You did great.”

“You swear you won’t tell anyone, right?”

“Are you kidding? I’ll carry this to my grave, like we said.”

Calla swallows hard, not wanting to think about graves.

All she wants is to put this behind her.

As she and Evangeline walk back across Cottage Row, she says a quick, silent prayer that Erin will be found in time.





Hearing car tires crunch on the gravel in the street, Calla jumps up and hurries to look out the living room window. She knows even before she lifts the lace curtain that it’s not going to be her father, but she checks anyway. Just in case her intuition, or whatever she’s calling it these days, is off.

Nope. A neighbor’s car pulling a rented U-haul is trundling along Cottage Row, heading toward the gate.

“Is it him?” her grandmother asks from her chair across the room. She’s dressed for the occasion in a pink-and-purple floral-print dress in fairly muted—for her, anyway— colors, with a lacy brown crocheted shawl draped over her shoulders.

Calla drops the curtain. “No, it’s not him.”

Just more summer residents leaving Lily Dale for the off-season.

The place is fast becoming a ghost town in more ways than one—definitely a good thing, with her father coming to visit. The streets are quieter every day, no longer clogged with ailing strangers seeking physical healing, or the recently bereaved longing to make contact with their dearly beloved, or troubled visitors in need of psychic counseling.

Pacing back to the couch, Calla plops down and resumes the impatient wait for her father’s arrival from the airport, all the while wondering about Erin.

Did the tip-line person take her call seriously?

Even if he did, what if she was dead wrong, and Erin is . . . well, dead?

Calla pushes the thought from her mind.

“I wish your father had let me pick him up at the airport instead of renting a car,” Odelia comments.

“I know, but he said that will make things easier, since he’ll have to drive back and forth to the White Inn down in Fredonia.”

“He could have stayed here.”

“I know.” But Calla was secretly relieved when he turned down her grandmother’s offer to take her bedroom for the weekend.

“It’s really no trouble,” she said late last night on the phone to Calla’s dad, with Calla eavesdropping, of course. “I can stay right next door at the Taggarts’. They have a pull-out couch.”

Of course, Jeff wouldn’t hear of that. Nor would he consider sleeping on the Taggarts’ pull-out couch himself, even though Ramona made the offer via Odelia.

“I’ll be more comfortable in a hotel,” he insisted, and it was all settled.

Calla figures that should make his visit a little easier. There’s no telling what Jeff might witness if he hangs around Odelia’s house 24/7. Rarely does much time go by here without some kind of spooky activity or, at the very least, someone popping up at the front door looking for a reading.

Then again, walkins aren’t likely in the next couple of days. When Calla got home from her mission with Evangeline earlier, she immediately noticed that the shingle above her grandmother’s door—the one that reads ODELIA LAUDER,REG-ISTERED MEDIUM—was conspicuously missing. Hanging from its bracket was a basket filled with yellow fall chrysanthemums.