Connecting (Lily Dale #3)(47)

It did really happen, she thinks stubbornly. He really was here.

Why?

Maybe he’s lost his mind—he killed someone, he must be crazy, right?—and he really does think Calla is her mother.

Maybe he’s come after her to kill her all over again.

Or maybe he honestly believes she’s her mother’s ghost. He grew up here in Lily Dale and his parents are mediums— he’s no stranger to people seeing the dead; maybe he sees them himself.

“I guess I don’t need this,” Odelia says, gesturing wryly with the table lamp.

Calla says nothing.

“Most people just use a flashlight to see their way around a dark house at night. Leave it to me to go overboard, huh?” Odelia chuckles, then looks closely at Calla. “I’m trying to make you laugh.”

“Oh. Sorry.” She sighs. “Gammy, can you please check the house and make sure there’s no one here? I’m really freaked out about this. I can’t help it.”

“Sure. Let’s do it together. Come on.”

They go through the house from top to bottom. Gert turns up downstairs, looking agitated—at least, in Calla’s opinion.

Odelia scoops her into her arms and carries her around, making a big show of checking behind doors and curtains, under the furniture, even inside the kitchen cupboards, at which point Calla realizes her grandmother is strictly humoring her.

“There’s nobody here,” Odelia says. “Just you and me and Gert . . . and maybe Miriam. You don’t think she’s the one you saw?”

Calla shakes her head. “No. I saw Darrin Yates.” Tom Leolyn. Her mother’s killer.

“In a dream.”

“I wasn’t dreaming. Gert was on my bed, and he scared her, and I opened my eyes and there he was.”

“Gert is down here, though,” Odelia reminds her.

“Now she is. She was on my bed. She ran away when he showed up.”

Odelia says nothing, just pets Gert in her arms.

I wish you could talk, Calla silently tells the kitten, who looks back at her with unblinking green eyes. You know he was there.You saw him, too.

Whatever.

The house really is empty, aside from Miriam, who flits somberly and silently from room to room with them.

“Ready to go back up to bed?” Odelia asks around a monstrous yawn, after checking all the locks.

“I guess so.”

Maybe Odelia is right, and Darrin was never here at all.

Calla was starting to drift off . . . maybe she did fall asleep, without even realizing it. And of course Darrin Yates was already on her mind.

But what if Odelia is wrong?

What if he really was here?

What did he want with her?

And what if he comes back?





FIFTEEN

Sunday, September 30

7:30 a.m.

Ordinarily at this hour on a Sunday morning, a ringing telephone would wake Calla from a sound sleep.

Not today.

She hasn’t slept all night. She just lay there, tense, keeping an eye out for Darrin Yates to prowl into her room again, maybe try to kill her like he killed her mother.

Finally, at about six o’clock, she got up and came down to the living room.

She’s still there, brooding on the couch, fingering the emerald bracelet she can’t take off her wrist, when the phone shatters the silence.

She reaches for it immediately, thinking it must be Jacy. He said he’d call her this morning before leaving for his cross-country meet, and she has to tell him what happened last night in her room. Maybe he’ll agree with Odelia that it was just a nightmare.

The more Calla thinks about it, the more inclined she is to believe it.

Or maybe she just wants to talk herself into it.

“Hello?” she whispers into the phone, not wanting to wake Odelia, asleep upstairs. Not that that’s likely. Her grandmother is such a sound sleeper, as she proved when Calla screamed for her in the night, that a tornado could lift the entire house around her and she’d probably still be there, snoring peacefully.

“Calla? Are you okay?”

“Evangeline?” Her heart sinks.

“Yeah. I hated to call this early, but . . . where were you last night?”

Uh-oh. Calla should have been ready for this. With all the tossing and turning she’s done, there was ample opportunity to have come up with a suitable story about why they weren’t at the dance.

Her grandmother seemed to buy her account of the evening. Probably because she was so groggy at the time.

Evangeline, however, sounds wide awake. And suspicious.

“Why weren’t you and Jacy at the dance?”

“We . . . decided not to go.”

“But I saw his car parked in front of your house before you left, and he was all dressed up.”

Calla cringes at the idea of Evangeline spying on Jacy out her window, even though it’s nothing new.

“We were planning on going, but . . . I just couldn’t do it.”

“Because of Blue?”

“Not really. Because . . .”

Okay, what can she possibly say that would make any sense at all?

“Because of me?” Evangeline asks.

Uh-oh. Definitely not that.

But Evangeline gives her no time to deny it.

“I knew it!” she exclaims. “I knew you felt bad about this! I told my aunt all along that I didn’t think you could do that to me. I mean, you’ve known from the start that I’m in love with Jacy.”