Connecting (Lily Dale #3)(18)

Where can I find Darrin Yates?

Then, thinking better of writing his name, which will probably be familiar to these locals, she erases it. She could just write his initials, but someone might still figure it out.

Instead, she replaces the name with the man who calls himself “Tom”?

That, after all, is the fake name he gave Calla when he came to see Mom back in March. Spirit will probably know that. Spirit knows everything, right?

Wondering if she really believes that, Calla folds her paper as instructed and puts it into the basket Patsy passes around the circle.

Then she turns off the lights and, in the flickering candlelight, passes the basket around the circle again.

“Everyone take a slip of paper. Don’t unfold it. Just hold it in your hands.”

When everyone has a folded billet, she leads the class through a series of relaxation exercises, telling them to open their minds to Spirit and ask Spirit to give them the answer to the handwritten question they haven’t even read.

With her eyes closed, Calla does her best to focus on the paper in her hand.

In her mind’s eye, she sees a train speeding toward a mountain tunnel. She can hear the whistle blaring, then it becomes muffled as the train is swallowed into the darkness, until all is silent.

What does it mean?

Calla has no idea. Maybe the person who wrote the question asked whether there’s a railroad journey in the future. If so, it looks like the answer is yes.

If not, I’m clueless.

She wonders—not for the first time this morning—why she’s here.

They begin.

An elderly woman with puffy dyed black hair begins. “Spirit is showing me a springtime meadow,” she says, eyes closed in concentration. “I know it’s springtime because I see tulips and daffodils growing. I see a woman’s left hand, wearing a gold wedding band and feeding some long grass to a young colt.” She opens her eyes. “That’s all.”

“All right, open the paper and tell us what it says,” Patsy commands.

“It says, ‘Will I carry this baby to term?’ ”

A choking sound, almost a sob, escapes a young woman on the opposite side of the circle. Her hand, wearing a gold wedding band, Calla notices, flutters to her mouth.

“That’s mine,” she manages to say, her voice choked with emotion. “I’ve lost two pregnancies now, and . . . I’m due in April.”

Patsy smiles. “I think you just got good news, Emily.”

Everyone claps.

Calla joins in, but she’s not so sure they should be celebrating just yet. It’s not as if the old woman saw Emily cradling a newborn.

Then again, Patsy has mentioned a few times that often the spirits will deliver a sort of symbolic message, conveyed in what some locals like to call psychic shorthand. Patsy said every medium has her own shorthand symbols.

Calla’s received plenty of messages from Spirit since she got to Lily Dale, but she’s never tried to give an actual reading. She has no idea whether she has shorthand symbols in her repertoire. Maybe she does. Maybe for her, trains stand for something else. Something that doesn’t involve travel. Who knows?

Patsy decides that whoever has just been read will do the next reading.

Emily says that she saw a boat on a choppy sea, taking on water.

Calla listens for the response with interest, wondering if Emily’s boat—and her train—symbolize something else.

The question:

Would it be a mistake to give my brother a loan?

“That’s mine,” says a middle-aged man with a red beard and a blue flannel shirt stretched tightly across a pot belly.

“Wow, that’s good. Freddie—he lives in Rhode Island—he’s a fisherman. His trawler was damaged in a Nor’easter a while back. He wanted to borrow some money for repairs—you know, get back on his feet. He’s never been good with money, and me . . . well, I’ve never had much. I’d have to cash in some stuff to get it for him. I guess it’s a bad idea?”

“That depends on your interpretation of what Emily saw.

What do you think, Emily?”

“I think it means he’s not supposed to lend the money,”

she tells Red Beard. “The boat was sinking.”

“Was my brother on it? Because maybe it means I’m supposed to rescue him with the money.”

“I don’t know. I didn’t see him.”

Either way, Calla realizes, it’s pretty clear that a boat is just a boat. At least this time.

And now it’s Red Beard’s turn.

“I don’t know why,” he says, “but I keep seeing a statue of a bear in a fountain. I mean, not a statue, the statue. There’s only one that I’ve ever seen. It’s up in Geneseo—my cousin’s daughter went to college there, and I saw it when we went to her graduation.”

He pauses, rubbing his beard, eyes squeezed shut.

“I’m seeing a house, too—it’s Victorian, you know . . . with a mansard roof and gingerbread porch and shutters and all that. It looks like something you’d see here in the Dale, but . . . it’s not familiar to me. Maybe it’s up there in Geneseo, I don’t know. The thing about it is, it’s painted purple. Not, you know, lavender. Bright purple. Neon.” He laughs and opens his eyes. “Never saw anything like it.”