Believing (Lily Dale #2)(54)

Then again, if that had happened, she would never have been born in the first place.

The thought makes her shudder inwardly as Mr. Yates steps into the porch, peering out at them through the slatted window of the outer door. “Yes? Did you want a reading?”

“No!” Calla replies quickly. “I just wanted to ask you about something.”

He opens the door a crack. “Pardon me?”

“Bob? Who is it?” calls a female voice inside the house. Calla can hear jangling dog tags and paws tapping on the floor, and the woman says faintly, “Be still, Jasmine.”

“I’m sorry . . . how can I help you?” Mr. Yates asks Calla, looking more closely at her. “Have we met? You look familiar.”

“No, we haven’t met.” But some people say I look just like my mother.

My dead mother.

Whom your son might have—

“She’s new here,” Jacy cuts into her grim thoughts.

The man’s faded gray-blue eyes flick in his direction. “You, I recognize,” he tells Jacy. “You’re the boy who’s living with Walt and Peter, right?”

“Right.” Jacy nods.

“Mr. Yates,” Calla speaks up as footsteps sound in the house behind him, “I wanted to ask about your son Darrin.”

She hears a gasp and realizes a woman—Darrin’s mother; she has to be—has appeared behind Mr. Yates.

“Bob!” the woman says sharply. She’s wiry and short, with cropped silver hair and angular features. “Who are these kids?”

“I . . . I’m not quite sure.” The old man levels a thoughtful gaze at Calla. “Why are you asking about my son?”

“Because . . .” She takes a deep breath and prepares to deliver her bombshell. “I think I saw him.”

She waits for the inevitable shocked reaction.

For some reason, it doesn’t come.

Mr. Yates merely blinks behind his thick glasses. Mrs. Yates presses her hands to her forehead. Her bony fingers remind Calla of a bird’s claws.

“Where did you see him?”

“In . . . Florida,” Calla replies to Mr. Yates, realizing he and his wife must have already known their son is out there somewhere, and not . . . dead.

Like Mom, she thinks bitterly, and clenches her fists in her jacket pockets.

“Well, that’s a first, huh, Betty?” Mr. Yates asks with a tight-lipped smile. “Florida.”

His wife doesn’t reply, just shakes her head wearily.

“So, you know Darrin’s alive?” Jacy asks.

“If he isn’t, I’d be surprised,” Mrs. Yates says. “Bob and I have consulted enough of our colleagues over the years who told us they feel that he’s still on the earth plane.”

“What about you?” Calla asks. “You’re mediums yourselves. Couldn’t you figure that out on your own?”

She remembers, then, something Ramona told her soon after she arrived in Lily Dale, when she asked how Darrin’s parents, as psychic mediums, could possibly not know what happened to their son.

“Nothing is more powerful than the bond between a parent and a child,” Ramona replied. “There are some things a parent might not want to see, or accept.”

Yes.And the same thing might be true with a child, Calla admits to herself, remembering what Althea said about her own grief acting as a barrier to her mother on the Other Side.

Neither of the Yateses chooses to answer Calla’s question now.

Instead, Mr. Yates asks one of his own. “When did you see Darrin in Florida?”

“In March. And again in July, at my mother’s . . . funeral.” She stares—or maybe it’s more like glares—from Mr. Yates to Mrs. Yates. “I think he might have had something to do with her death.”

Jacy elbows her.

She ignores him. “Darrin was my mother’s boyfriend years ago, before he disappeared from Lily Dale. And now I’m getting all kinds of signs that seem to be linking him to what happened to her, and—”

“What is your mother’s name?” Betty Yates interrupts, her voice and expression much chillier than they were moments ago.

“It’s—I mean it was—Stephanie Delaney. Stephanie Lauder.”

The Yateses look at each other.

Then, as if in unspoken agreement with his wife, Bob Yates says, “I need to ask you to leave.”

Jacy begins, “Sir, I’m so sorry—we’re so sorry—and we didn’t mean to—”

“Go.”

“But my mother—”

“I’m sorry about your mother,” Betty says stiffly, “but my son had nothing to do with whatever it was that happened to her.”

“How can you know that if you don’t even know where—”

“Darrin would never have hurt Stephanie. He loved her more than anyone else on earth.” Including me.

The last two words are unspoken, but they seem to hang in the air as if Darrin’s mother had actually spoken them.

“God only knows what Stephanie said or did to make our son decide to disappear,” Mrs. Yates goes on, “but—”

“So, you blame my mother for your son’s problems?” Calla cuts in incredulously. “Why?”