Connecting (Lily Dale #3) by Wendy Corsi Staub
ONE
Lily Dale, New York
Wednesday, September 19
4:19 p.m.
“So, wait, let me get this straight—you’ve been dreaming about your mother, and now you’re convinced she was murdered? Is this what you’re trying to tell me?” On the other end of the phone line, Lisa Wilson’s heavy southern accent is laced with disbelief.
“Not exactly.” Calla Delaney paces across the creaky floorboards of her grandmother’s northern living room, stepping around the sleeping pile of gray fur that is Gert, her new pet kitten. “I’ve been dreaming that I am my mother, and now I’m convinced she was murdered.”
“Huh? You are her?”
Hearing a rumble of thunder in the distance, Calla notices that the room has grown dim. Another autumn storm, rolling in from the west.
Fine with her. The gloomy weather suits her mood.
“I know it sounds crazy,” she tells Lisa, “but in my dreams the past few nights, I’ve been reliving my mother’s last moments—getting dressed for work, taking this manila envelope out from under the mattress, walking down the hall with it . . . then someone sneaks up and pushes me—her— down the—”
A hard lump of grief clogging her throat, Calla can’t go on. She tries not to picture it all over again—from her mother’s viewpoint in the dream, or from her own, in the real-life aftermath.
She, after all, was the one who found Stephanie Lauder Delaney on that nightmarish July afternoon, her broken corpse lying in a pool of blood at the bottom of the stairs.
There was no manila envelope near her body. Calla would have seen it.
“So, uh, what was in this envelope?”
“I have no idea,” she says, well aware that Lisa’s just trying to humor her, and wondering why she bothered to bring this up in the first place.
But when Lisa happened to call just now and asked how she’s been, Calla found herself blurting it out.
“So the only place you ever saw this envelope was in your dream last night?” Lisa asks, and Calla hesitates.
Should she tell Lisa the rest of it—about the mysterious man who popped up on their Tampa doorstep back in March, carrying the envelope and asking for Mom? About how he was whistling the same unfamiliar tune Calla would later hear 2 again here in Lily Dale—coming from Mom’s girlhood music box, which, oh yeah, plays without being wound, has been known to open all by itself, and somehow contained Mom’s emerald bracelet, which, the last time Calla saw it, was dropping off her own wrist and falling into Mom’s grave?
No, she can’t tell Lisa any of that. Not yet. And not over the phone. The whole thing is just too bizarre and complicated. “The thing is, I know my mother had the envelope when she fell,” she tells Lisa simply. “I saw it.”
“In your dreams. And you saw someone push her down the stairs. Also in your dreams.”
“I felt someone push her down the stairs.”
“Because you were her.”
“Right.” Calla tries not to resent Lisa’s skepticism. After all, if she were in her friend’s shoes—which she was just a few months ago, before her own life back home in Florida was shattered—she’d probably react the same way.
But now, here in Lily Dale—a legendary open portal between the living and the dead—anything seems possible.
Lisa sighs. “I know the last few months have been really hard for you, and what happened to your mom was so totally unfair, no wonder you’ve been looking for some kind of—”
“No, Lisa—it’s not that. I haven’t been looking for anything. I wasn’t even awake!” Agitated, she paces across the floor again, brushing against a towering stack of Odelia the packrat’s books on the coffee table. “I mean . . . come on, haven’t you ever dreamed that you were someone else?”
“Maybe Britney Spears back when I was, like, eight, and she was, like, famous for her singing instead of—”
“Come on, I’m serious.”
“Sorry.” Lisa sighs. “I mean . . . I don’t know, Calla. It’s not like I remember my dreams in all this major detail.”
That, Calla figures, is because Lisa’s dreams are only dreams.
Her own dreams—at least, the ones she’s had since she arrived in Lily Dale—are actual visions.
She supposes she could try to explain to Lisa that when you’re completely relaxed and asleep, you’re much more open to spirit energy than during waking hours. So the dearly departed might take advantage of that state to pop in for a visit or send a message—like, you might witness something that happened in the past or will happen in the future.
When you think about it, it makes a lot of sense. To Calla, anyway.
It probably wouldn’t to Lisa, a thousand miles away in Florida, where the veil to the Other Side is thicker than the southern sky before an afternoon thunderstorm.
“Lisa? You still there?”
“I’m here . . . just trying to figure out what else to say. I mean . . . oh my God, Calla. You’re talking about murder. ”
“I know, but . . .” Calla trails off, her breath catching in her throat as she spots a flicker of movement in the next room and realizes she’s not alone in the house. A shadowy figure is—