Believing (Lily Dale #2)(30)

“Back in high school, they were friends, sort of. Mom was older and Ramona used to look up to her, and she’s been telling me what Mom was like back then,” Calla says in a rush, trying to smooth things over and realizing she’s only making it worse, judging by Dad’s expression.

“Your mother never liked to talk about her past. She didn’t look back. She wasn’t that kind of person.”

“I know. That’s why I like being here. It makes me feel closer to her—well, to a her I never knew until now.”

And maybe I don’t even know the Mom we both lived with for all these years.

Again, she thinks of the Saint Patrick’s Day visit from Darrin.

Mom had secrets. Does Dad realize that? Would it hurt him now to know about the visit from her old boyfriend?

Does it even matter if it hurts him, if her death was no accident and Darrin’s visit might be linked to it?

Maybe Dad does know about that, anyway, Calla reminds herself. Maybe Dad has secrets too, even. Maybe you’re the only one who’s been in the dark all these years.

Mom was so sympathetic back in April when Kevin broke up with Calla, though. Wouldn’t she have mentioned her own high school romance, especially if she’d seen her ex-boyfriend just weeks earlier?

She might have . . . if the recent visit were innocent. Two old friends catching up on old times.

Come on, Calla! Darrin was using a fake name. How is that innocent in any possible way?

As Ramona had told her, he supposedly vanished from Lily Dale without a trace twenty years ago. Why? What did that have to do with Mom? Or with Mom’s death?

Calla wishes desperately that she’d had the chance to talk to Jacy about all of this. Now it’s going to have to wait until after Dad leaves. And while he’s here, she’d better not say anything more.

“Ready to go inside?” she asks her father.

“Sure.” He puts an arm around her shoulders as they walk together up the steps of Mom’s childhood home.





What on earth would he do without the Internet?

It’s made everything so much easier.

He can use it to keep track of the police proceedings that surround Kaitlyn Riggs’s murder and Erin Shannahan’s disappearance, making sure they’re not coming too close for comfort.

He can scour newspapers online for photos of local high school girls—girls like Hayley Gorzynski, with long blond hair—whose pretty faces beam at the camera. They’re so proud to have landed on the varsity team or in the honor society or whatever it is that brought a photographer to their school. Does it ever occur to them that someone like him might be watching them? Don’t they realize how easy it is for him to find out where they live? To follow them as they go about their daily routines until the time is right to strike?

The Internet is good, too, for atlas information.

Now, sitting in front of his desktop computer in his attic apartment, he clicks the mouse to zero in on the map.

Lily Dale, New York—that’s not far from Erie. Maybe another half hour’s drive northeast past the Pennsylvania border, an easy trip up the New York State Thruway. He already checked the mileage. The population, too.

He might not have that girl psychic’s name, but Lily Dale is a small town. And small-town people can be surprisingly trusting. Sometimes they don’t even lock their doors.

Never a good idea, he chides mockingly.

Small-town folks are usually friendly, too.

Even to strangers asking questions—say, about young female newcomers who live with their grandmothers.





“This was fun, tonight.” Calla’s father sounds almost surprised as she walks him to the front door.

“It was, wasn’t it?” She smiles, thinking the evening went much better than she could have hoped.

She and her father and grandmother ate fried chicken and talked easily about food, Odelia’s cooking, Calla’s new school, her father’s new job. Calla kept bracing herself for sticky topics—about her mother and Lily Dale—to pop up, but they never did.

Odelia went up to bed a half hour ago, leaving them to catch up until Dad caught Calla yawning and decided it was time to go.

“Get some sleep,” he tells her now as she opens the door for him.

“You, too.”

“I’ll try. It’s barely eight o’clock in California. It figures— now that I’ve finally set my body clock to the West Coast time zone, here I am back in the East. I’ll probably be up until the middle of the night.”

“Well, don’t oversleep. Gammy wants you here early for her special breakfast, remember?”

“Who could forget homemade blueberry waffles with whipped cream?” Dad kisses her on the cheek. “Okay, see you in the morning, Cal. Sweet dreams.”

Yeah—I can only hope.

As she watches him drive away, Calla remembers all those nights she woke at 3:17 after the recurring nightmare about Mom, Odelia, and dredging the lake. That hasn’t happened lately—not since she figured out the Saint Patrick’s Day connection.

And stalled right there.

Again, she wonders what happened between her mother and Darrin, and what that has to do with Mom’s death.

That thought process leads naturally to Erin. Calla was so busy all night, she didn’t have much time to dwell on it.