Connecting (Lily Dale #3)(38)

Calla tries to relax and get into it, but she can’t. She’s too distracted by the ghosts and worried about tonight.

“You’re so tense,” Leslie comments. “You must be thinking about the dance. I hear you have a hot date.”

“Where’d you hear that?” Calla asks, knowing full well.

“Evangeline told me. Sounds like she wants to switch dates with you.”

Calla tries to laugh, but it comes out sounding kind of strangled.

“Okay, it’s time to make you fancy. Hair, makeup . . . the works. What kind of dress are you wearing?”

“It’s . . . vintage.”

“Vintage—like Victorian? Or more like the seventies? Not that I was around then,” she adds slyly.

No, but the two women in the fat rollers and false eyelashes probably were, Calla thinks, glancing again in their direction.

“Um, more like the eighties,” she tells Leslie.

“Ooh, I love the eighties!” declares Leslie, who couldn’t have been alive for much of that decade either. “What color is it?”

“Kind of a reddish brown.”

“That’ll be gorgeous with your coloring. Do you know what kind of style you want?”

“I’m not sure. I guess you can just surprise me.”

“Are you kidding? Really?”

“Go for it.”

“Okay. I live for customers saying that . . . not that anyone ever does.”

Calla shrugs. Her heart isn’t in this, and she just can’t pretend.

“I’m spinning you this way, okay?” Leslie twirls the chair so that Calla’s back is to the mirror. “If you’re going to give me free license with this gorgeous face and head of hair, I don’t want you to change your mind halfway through. You can see it when we’re done, and believe me, you’ll love yourself.

” Leslie intently paints her face while holding a makeup kit like it’s a painter’s palette, dabbing on a little of this, a little of that.

“You totally look like a supermodel,” she tells Calla, who cringes a little inside. Maybe it wasn’t such a great idea to let Leslie do whatever she wants. Calla usually goes for a natural look.

Oh, well. Too late now. As Leslie combs and curls and teases and gels and sprays her way around Calla’s head, Calla goes over, and over, what’s going to happen later.

Jacy is planning to pick her up at Odelia’s and go along with the homecoming dance charade. Odelia said something this morning about checking to see if she has batteries in her camera so she can take pictures of the occasion, which made Calla feel even more nauseous than she has been.

But she has to do this—has to lie—for her mother’s sake. Maybe this hunt for Darrin Yates in Geneseo will wind up to be a wild-goose chase, but on the off-chance that it isn’t . . .

“Okay. You’re done.” Leslie spins the chair back toward the mirror with a ceremonious, “Ta da!”

Calla catches a glimpse of her reflection and sees her jaw drop in the mirror.

“Don’t you love how retro you are? I thought your look should go with the vintage dress. What do you think?” Standing over her, Leslie proudly surveys her handiwork.

Staring into her own eyes, rimmed by a thick layer of shadow, liner, and mascara, and gazing at the carefully upswept pile of hair riding high over her forehead, Calla struggles to find the right words. Or any words.

“I think . . . I think . . .”

“I know!” Leslie gloats. “Quite a transformation. It’s like looking at a stranger, isn’t it?”

No. It isn’t like that at all.

For Calla, it’s eerily like looking at her own mother, the night she wore the copper-colored dress and went to the dance with Darrin Yates.





THIRTEEN

Saturday, September 29

7:10 p.m.

“He’s here!” Odelia calls up the stairs to Calla.

That’s funny. She didn’t hear the doorbell ring. Dressed and ready, she’s been listening for it, but— Oh.

There’s the doorbell now.

Calla wonders whether Odelia glimpsed Jacy coming up the porch steps or simply “felt” him approaching.

Does it really matter? That sort of thing happens all the time around here.

Yes.Tonight, it matters.

It would be nice to think that Odelia’s having an off night, as far as her psychic abilities and premonitions go.

That way, Calla wouldn’t be wondering if there’s any significance behind her grandmother’s earlier warning to be extra-careful tonight.

“Just make sure you keep your wits about you,” Odelia said as Calla nibbled on the sandwich her grandmother insisted on making her.

“Not that I don’t always do that anyway . . . but why?” Calla asked.

“Because you’re going out alone at night in a car with a boy, even though the dance is almost just around the corner.”

Calla pushed aside a familiar nagging guilt, along with the fear that her grandmother’s warning might stem from something more ominous than pure maternal concern.

Now, that it’s time to go, her misgivings are back full force.

What if something terrible happens to her tonight?

What if she backs out of the whole thing because she’s scared?