Connecting (Lily Dale #3)(17)

Okay, it isn’t what Calla was thinking.

But she doesn’t want to let on to Evangeline that she, too, has noticed some kind of connection between her father and Ramona.

Oddly, it isn’t that Calla feels as though he’s betraying her mother in any way . . . though maybe she should.

No, the thing is . . .

They’re wrong for each other.

Dad is a level-headed professor who on his last visit referred to a couple of Lily Dale mediums as “New Age freaks.”

No way would he ever in a million years be interested in Ramona.

Then again . . .

Just months ago, Calla couldn’t have imagined him clean-shaven and wearing loafers without socks, either.

Still . . .

People change their looks far more easily than they change their minds.

No way, Calla thinks stubbornly, settling into the backseat as her father and Ramona laugh together about something. Absolutely no way.





SIX

Saturday, September 22

10:25 a.m.

“Calla Delaney! You’ve decided to join us again, I see. Welcome.” Petite, middle-aged Patsy Metcalf—who, in her trim jeans and beige turtleneck looks more like a suburban mom than a medium and metaphysics class instructor—takes her place among the circle of chairs in the octagonal mediums’ league building.

Calla returns the pleasant smile and wishes she could edge her chair closer to Evangeline, sitting beside her, and ask if people are allowed to leave halfway through the class if they aren’t entirely comfortable.

She tried to get out of it this morning, with her grandmother.

“I wasn’t going to go, with Dad here,” Calla protested in a whisper as they got breakfast ready.

“I think you should. Don’t worry about Jeff. I’ll keep him occupied while you’re gone. I could use a man to do a few things around the house for me.”

“Dad isn’t exactly handy,” Calla pointed out. “And anyway, where are we going to tell him I went?”

“To a study group. That’s what it is,” Odelia said innocently. “Right?”

So that was the story they gave Dad, over Odelia’s rich creme brulee French toast. Calla wasn’t in the mood for it, having had a late, heavy dinner of chicken wings, followed by a gooey dessert, but she ate it anyway.

She definitely wasn’t in the mood to come to class, either, but here she is.

“You liked it last week,” Evangeline pointed out to Calla as they walked over. “And anyway, you need help figuring out how to deal with your gift.”

No denying that, considering how many stray spirits have been popping up around her lately.

Though Calla wishes Evangeline, and everyone else around here, would stop calling it a gift. Mostly, it feels like a curse.

Brooding, she stares at the flickering candle in the middle of the circle, unable to glean much from the class discussion about billet reading. She does learn, though, that it’s a century-old exercise once used by mediums to hone their skills and refute skeptics.

She also catches glimpses of people in the room who aren’t really here, and wonders if she’s the only one who sees them: the matronly woman in a hoop skirt, the gorgeous Hispanic-looking man in the seersucker suit and straw hat, even a ghost dog scampering about beneath the chairs.

No one else comments.

It’s just me, Calla realizes uneasily.

When Patsy announces that it’s time for the class to give billets a try, Calla shifts her weight on the folding chair and raises her hand halfway.

Patsy, busy gathering paper and pencils, doesn’t notice.

“What’s wrong?” Evangeline whispers.

“I need to get going.”

“Home? Why?”

Calla shrugs. “I just have to go.”

“You can’t. We’re in the middle of class.”

“I know, but . . . I don’t know how to do this.”

“What? Billets? It’s really cool. You need to try it.”

The woman on Calla’s other side nudges her. She’s middle-aged, with a pale, drawn face and telltale scarf tied over her head. Cancer, chemo. You see a lot of that around Lily Dale, the desperately ill in search of healing.

She holds out a handful of pencils and smiles. “Hi. I’m Anne. Take one, pass the rest on.”

Calla hesitates.

She’s here. She might as well stay, ghostly visitors and all, rather than disrupt the class by walking out in the middle.

“All right, does everyone have a pencil and a slip of paper?” Patsy asks a few seconds later. “Notice that the papers are all exactly the same size. And we’re going to fold them exactly the same way—in half, and then in half again. Everyone needs to write a question on the paper, then fold it and put it into the basket when I pass it to you. Got it?”

Almost everyone nods.

“What kind of question?” asks Lena, a girl who’s a year behind Calla at Lily Dale High.

Sitting cluelessly with her pencil poised on the paper, Calla was wondering the same thing and is glad she didn’t have to be the one to ask.

“Anything at all,” Patsy tells them. “Something you’ve been wondering about, or wrestling with. Something you’d like Spirit to provide the answer to.”

Whoa. Now she gets it. She knows exactly what question she wants answered.