Connecting (Lily Dale #3)(31)

Glancing toward the window, she sees that the newest addition to the parking lot is a large, relatively new SUV. Not what she’d expect him to be driving. Funny how sometimes her instincts are dead-on, like with the sisters, and other times, she’s dead wrong.

“Let’s get down to business, shall we?” Owen asks, draping his coat on the hook above the booth and sitting across from her. He’s wearing a suit with a bow tie.

“Okay,” Calla agrees, not sure how to even begin. She doesn’t see Betty hanging around him today.

“Hello there. What can I do you for?” the waitress, a plump, friendly woman with blond hair and black roots, pops up to ask Owen.

“Just a cup of black coffee.”

“How about some pie to go with that?”

“No, thanks.”

“Or a cinnamon roll?”

He shakes his head.

“Are you sure? They’re delicious. I’ve had two of them myself today,” she adds with a conspiratorial wink.

Calla wishes Owen Henry would at least crack a smile, but he’s obviously impatient for the waitress to leave them alone. She guesses she can’t blame him. He’s focused on Betty, and he wants to get on with it.

“I have a few questions for Betty, if you don’t mind,” he says as soon as the waitress has taken the hint and silently deposited his coffee on the table in front of him.

“I don’t mind, but . . . I mean, I don’t see her spirit here, so I’m not sure I can reach her.”

“You can try, though . . . can’t you?” he asks, and there’s such an air of tense desperation around him that she realizes she’s going to feel terrible if she can’t come up with something.

“Of course I can try.”

“Okay. First, tell her I love her.”

Calla smiles and nods. Then she closes her eyes and tries to meditate, the way Patsy taught them in class. She does see Betty’s face in her mind’s eye, but she can’t tell if it’s just the memory of seeing her the other day.

Whatever. Owen loves you, she silently tells the mental image of Betty, feeling a bit silly.

Opening her eyes, she expects Owen to ask if she got a response.

“I have a question,” he says instead. “Can you see if you can answer it—if not through Betty, then with your psychic abilities?”

She nods. “What is it?”

“I inherited some stock certificates a few years ago from my cousin Elmer, and it turned out they were a lot more valuable than I ever imagined. Betty always kept them under the mattress in the guest bedroom, but after she died, I looked for them, and they weren’t there.”

Okay, this isn’t at all what Calla was expecting. “So you want me to ask her where they are?” she asks slowly.

“Can you? Poor thing was suffering from dementia in her last days and got so paranoid, she thought people were trying to steal things from her.”

Calla nods, remembering. That’s exactly what it was like with her grandfather Poppy Ted, who had Alzheimer’s disease before he died. He was convinced that the nurses were stealing his hospital bed out from under him, piece by piece. Toward the end, when he didn’t recognize his own sons—Dad and Uncle Scott—he even accused them of robbing him. It was horrible.

“I’ll see if I can find out where the stock certificates are,” Calla tells Owen sympathetically, having some idea of what he must have been through with Betty.

“Thank you.” He leans forward in anticipation, his coffee still untouched.

Calla glances around the diner. The two elderly sisters are sipping tea in the next booth, their mother sitting silently beside Dora, who’s still glowing faintly. The waitress is wiping down the counter, oblivious to a pair of truckers who sit eating eggs . . . because they aren’t really there, Calla realizes, noticing that they’re getting a bit transparent before they vanish altogether.

Ghosts.

They’re everywhere.

With a sigh, she closes her eyes.

Just focus on the spirit you need.

Breathe in . . . breathe out . . .

Come on, Betty. Show me where the stock certificates are.

That same house pops into her head. The gothic one on the cliff, overlooking the water.

Okay, maybe she’s getting somewhere.

Is the stock hidden in the house? she asks Spirit.

Nothing new.

Just the image of the house again, stubbornly filling her head. She senses a pointedness to the vision, though.

“It’s in the house somewhere,” she tells Owen, opening her eyes to find him waiting anxiously.

“Which house?”

“Um. . . your house, I’m assuming. Yours and Betty’s?”

He nods. “It’s a brick cape. So the stock is there after all?”

“Brick cape?”

“That’s the house. Brick. Cape Cod–style.”

She shakes her head. “No. The house I’m seeing is more like a mansion. Really old-fashioned. On a cliff above the water.”

He frowns. “Which water?”

“I don’t know . . . I thought it must be the sea, because there’s a widow’s walk.”

“No. Betty’s house—mine and Betty’s house—is on a cul-de-sac, right down the highway in Fredonia. No widow’s walk. Tell me more about the house you’re seeing.”