Connecting (Lily Dale #3)(3)

If only she’d bring Mom with her.

A sorrowful tide of longing sweeps through Calla as she imagines what it would be like to come face-to-face with her mother again right here, right now . . .

Or anywhere, ever again.

She hears another distant boom of thunder and from the corner of her eye, sees a flicker of movement across the room.

Calla turns her head just in time to see a book fly off the stack on the coffee table and land on the floor, pages fluttering open as it lands.

Taken aback, she looks at Aiyana. “Did you do that?”

Aiyana just gazes at her, beginning to look a lot less solid than she did a few moments ago.

Calla read somewhere that it takes a lot of energy for a spirit to move an object around a room. Why would Aiyana even bother with a stupid parlor trick now?

Calla is long past needing proof of otherworldly powers.

She gets it. Aiyana’s from the Other Side. She doesn’t need to throw books on the floor to prove herself.

“Wait . . . before you go . . . I just need to know what happened to her,” she tells Aiyana fervently, realizing she’s fading fast. “You have to help me. Please.”

“Oh, Calla . . .” That’s Lisa, on the other end of the phone line, suddenly sounding somber and emotional. “I will—I’ll help you. Whatever you need. I’m here for you, I promise.”

Calla wasn’t talking to Lisa.

But all at once, Aiyana is gone, and Lisa is offering to help, and God knows she needs it.

“Remember how I told you I’d come to Florida to visit?”

“Yeah . . . please don’t tell me your father changed his mind about letting you come.” Calla’s father, Jeff, is a physics professor on sabbatical at Shellborne College in California, and Lisa knows how overprotective he can be. Especially lately.

“No, it’s just . . . if you really will help me do this . . . I need you.”

“To do what?”

“When I get there, we can go over to my house and see if we can find any evidence that someone was out to get my mother.”

“Evidence?” Lisa laughs nervously. “Who are we, CSI?”

“This isn’t a joke, Lis’!”

“I know, I know, I’m sorry. I know it isn’t. And I want you to come down so I can help you. Just . . . um, well, what about school?”

She’s freaked out, Calla realizes. She doesn’t want to get involved.

And I can’t blame her, really.

“Listen,” Calla says, “you don’t have to do this with me. I know it’s—”

“No, I want to help you,” Lisa cuts in firmly. “Whatever you need. So, when are you coming?”

Calla smiles. Good old Lisa won’t let her down. “I don’t know . . . it’ll have to be on a weekend. Maybe Friday?”

“This coming Friday? That would be—oh, wait, my parents said we might go up to Tallahassee to visit the campus again.”

Florida State, Calla knows, is Lisa’s self-proclaimed “safety” school—though her brother, Kevin, once privately told Calla that with Lisa’s grades, even Florida State might be a “reach” school.

“But—ooh, I know! You can come with us and maybe we can both check out the sororities and—”

“No, I really just need to be in Tampa, to see what I can find out,” Calla says impatiently. Lisa apparently doesn’t grasp that this is a return to the scene of a crime and not a carefree vacation.

“What are you going to do there, exactly?”

“Well, my father said I can get my mother’s laptop to use here, remember? I’m thinking there might be something in her files if I can get into them. She used her laptop for everything—work, paying bills, shopping, making travel arrangements. I feel like I might find out more about what was going on with her toward the end. My father told me she wasn’t herself the last few months—she was really detached from him, but he wasn’t sure why.”

“Yeah, and the other thing is, once you have the laptop, we’ll be able to stay in touch better, and you can get back onto MySpace,” Lisa says excitedly, and Calla fights back a sigh.

Lisa truly doesn’t realize that there’s something far more significant at stake here than the Internet access that was so hard to live without when Calla first came to Lily Dale.

More evidence that Calla really is part of a world far different than Lisa’s—and the one she herself left behind not so very long ago. But it seems like a lifetime has passed since Calla was living in the big, upscale Tampa home with both her parents, going to private school, dating Kevin Wilson . . .

“Well, how about if you come down next weekend?” Lisa suggests.

“Yeah, I guess I—” She breaks off, remembering.

“What?”

“That’s the homecoming dance, and someone asked me to go.” Funny how something that seemed so important just days ago now seems trivial.

Not to Lisa, though. She squeals in Calla’s ear. “Who was it? Blue or Jacy?”

Lisa, of course, knows all about the two local guys who are, sort of, involved in Calla’s love life at the moment. What she doesn’t know is that Calla still hasn’t quite gotten over Lisa’s brother, Kevin, now a sophomore at Cornell. He dumped her back in April, after he found a new girlfriend in college. Last week, though, he popped up in Calla’s e-mail, sounding like he wants to be friends. Or maybe more.