Believing (Lily Dale #2)(44)

“She is, isn’t she?” Odelia grunts, rubbing the small of her back. “I can’t stay down here like this. See if you can get her out, will you?”

As her grandmother backs her hefty form out from under the table and stands with a loud groan, Calla inches forward. “Here, kitty. Come here, little kitty.”

To her surprise, the tiny creature darts toward her. Calla scoops her into her arms, then quickly ducks out and stands. “Gotcha!”

The kitten cuddles in her arms, blinking up at her.

“Wow,” Calla says. “I think I’m in love. Is she the most precious thing ever, or what?”

“She is that. What should we name her?”

“She looks like a Gert to me,” Calla says promptly.

“Gert? As in Gertrude?”

“Don’t you think?”

Odelia smiles. “Gert it is. How’d you come up with that?”

Calla shrugs. “Sometimes things just pop into my head.”

Odelia looks thoughtfully at her. “Speaking of that . . . we should talk about—”

“I have a pile of homework to do,” Calla interrupts, knowing what Odelia is going to say, and not wanting to get into it now. “And I really need to keep my grades up while I’m here, or, you know . . . Dad will make me leave.”

“Okay. No rush. Your schoolwork comes first. I just know that things are happening to you here—things you can’t possibly understand. I remember when I was your age, trying to deal with my gifts and being scared out of my mind.”

Calla’s hand goes still on the kitten’s soft fur as she contemplates that. She never really wondered what it must have been like for Odelia, coming to terms with her visions of dead people. She just figured her grandmother always took it for granted, the way she does now.

She was once in my shoes, Calla realizes. She gets it.

But what about the whole Kaitlyn Riggs thing? Her grandmother already told her it was wrong for her to get involved in the first place. Remembering Odelia’s reaction to Mrs. Riggs’s visit last week, she knows that her grandmother would freak if she knew about the call from that reporter, much less about Kaitlyn’s visits, and Calla getting caught up in the Erin Shannahan case.

Which she isn’t . . . yet. Not officially, anyway.

What if the killer strikes again . . . and again?

Stop him!

All she has to do is hang on until that class on Saturday, and maybe she can figure out if there’s a way to use her psychic abilities to zero in on the killer.

“Oh!” Odelia slaps her forehead. “I almost forgot to tell you two things. One is, you got some mail today. I put it on the desk in the other room. The other thing is, I have a message for you.”

“From Spirit?” Calla braces herself. Maybe Kaitlyn Riggs has been visiting Odelia, too.

But her grandmother laughs. Hard. Then she says, “No, not from Spirit. From Blue Slayton. And he used the good old-fashioned telephone to get through.”

“Really?” Calla breaks into a grin, wondering if Evangeline was right and he’s going to ask her to homecoming.

“Really,” her grandmother assures her. “He called after school.”

“Really?”

“Really,” Odelia repeats again, with a smile. “Oh, but can you hold off on calling him back until after I order us a pizza for dinner? I was so busy with Gert here that I didn’t have time to cook.”

“Sure. Here, give her to me. I’ll play with her.”

As her grandmother goes to find the takeout menu and the phone, Calla brings the kitten into the living room. So Blue called her. Does he want to ask her to homecoming? Maybe that’s what he was about to do when Ryan hit him in the head with that stupid wad of paper.

On the desk, she finds an envelope addressed to her in Lisa’s loopy handwriting.

“What do you think this is?” she asks the kitten, balancing her with one hand while she opens the envelope with the other.

Inside is an airline voucher. A yellow Post-it note is stuck to it.

Calla, All yours. Let me know when to meet you at the airport! Love, Lisa.

Smiling, she puts the voucher back into the envelope and tucks it into the top drawer. She’ll use it at some point. Just not yet.

The kitten squirms in her arms.

“What? You want to get down? Want to play? Okay.” Calla sets her gently on the floor.

Odelia keeps several skeins of yarn in a basket by her chair, along with several needles, though she doesn’t knit or crochet . . . yet. She says she always wanted to learn and wants to be ready with supplies when she finally gets around to it. Just as she has a guitar she’s never learned to play, and keeps a bin full of scrapbooking supplies for the day she feels like, as she put it, “sorting through and organizing a lifetime’s worth of junk.” Typical Odelia—creative and chaotic, Calla thinks with a smile.

She tosses a ball of yellow yarn across the floor, holding on to one end. Gert trips over her little paws as she scrambles to play with it, and Calla can’t help but giggle.

A few minutes later, Odelia reappears and holds out the cordless phone. “Pizza is on its way,” she says. “Half anchovy and pineapple for me, half mushroom and pepperoni for you.”

“Perfect.” They’ve been getting pizza at least once a week. So far, she’s refused to try Odelia’s unusual combo, unconvinced that it’s as yummy as she claims.