Connecting (Lily Dale #3)(50)

“No.”

“You’re not talking about my mother?”

“No.”

“Then . . . who? Who isn’t there? And where?”

Again, Aiyana points at the lilies.

Calla turns to look again at them, and all at once, it dawns on her. “Is this . . . is it a grave or something?”

At that, out of nowhere, a powerful gust of wind swoops around them, bringing a maelstrom of blowing leaves. Startled, Calla raises her elbows to cover her face.

The gust disappears as quickly as it came, and so, she realizes with dismay, has Aiyana.

She looks again at the lilies and notices that the wind has redistributed the surrounding bed of leaves. A solid, monochromatic object juts from the heap of gold-and-red confetti—a rock, Calla realizes.

She brushes away the leaves with a trembling hand. It’s a smooth, oblong gray rock, roughly the size of a shoe box. It’s not lying flat on the ground, but standing straight up as though human hands deliberately placed it there, jutting like . . .

Like a tombstone.

Her blood runs cold.

She sinks to her knees and runs her fingers over the rock.

She’s not there.

Why would Aiyana say that?

Mom’s grave is in a Florida cemetery;Aiyana must be aware of that because Calla saw her there, hovering on the edge of the crowd at the funeral that miserable day in July.

But I asked if she was talking about Mom, and she said no.

Who else would she mean?

“Who isn’t there, Aiyana?” Calla calls out. “I don’t understand!”

No response but the sigh of a gentle wind in ancient trees.

Calla shakes her head in despair, acutely aware that she’s alone again.

She stands rooted to the spot for a long time.

Long enough for Mother Nature to do her work.

The sun climbs higher in the chalky sky and the breeze ebbs and flows. With it, leaves skitter across the earth and drift from laden boughs, coming to obscure, once more, the cold gray rock and the tender white flower blossoms that shouldn’t, couldn’t, be growing in Leolyn Woods.

As Calla turns toward home, she glimpses a face among the moving boughs, watching her.

Darrin.

She freezes, uncertain whether to scream, or run, or call out to him.

Before she can decide, the wind gusts and the branches shift again, obscuring his face and leaving her uncertain as to whether it was really there at all.

But she’s not taking any chances.

She turns and runs, not stopping until she’s safely back home again with the deadbolt locked behind her.




Calla spends the afternoon secluded in her room, unable to face her grandmother and any more questions about the dance last night.

It’s bad enough that she’s apparently lost Evangeline’s friendship over it. The last thing she wants is for her grandmother to find out that she’s a liar. For all Calla knows, Evangeline has already told Ramona, and Ramona will tell Odelia, and maybe Dad, too.

And then he’ll make her leave. Or Odelia will.

What does it matter, anyway?

Lily Dale isn’t good for her, in her state of mind.

She doesn’t need these people feeding her grief or fueling her nightmares and imagination.

Curled up on her bed, Calla tries to read her economics text, but she can’t focus. Her eyes keep leaving the page to ensure that she’s alone in the room. No Darrin Yates lurking . . . yet she can’t seem to shake the eerie sensation that he’s here, watching her.

Is it any wonder, though?

You’re still upset about last night, paranoid . . . and totally wiped out.

Eventually, she goes from propping her head on her hand above a bent elbow to leaning back against the pillows, still trying to focus on the textbook.

Finally, the words on the page begin to swim, and exhaustion overtakes her.




Calla is back in the professionally decorated, tropical-hued master bedroom in their house in Tampa. She’s her mother, humming as she gets dressed for work in a charcoal gray skirt suit and high-heeled black Gucci pumps, spraying on perfume that shouldn’t smell like lilies of the valley, yet somehow does, today.

She pulls a brown manila envelope from beneath the mattress of the king-sized bed and looks at it, troubled.

“I’m sorry,” she whispers. “I have to do this.”

Leaving the room with the envelope in hand, she heads down the hall toward the stairs, past Calla’s bedroom door.

It should be closed, but it’s open. Puzzled, she starts to turn to look back. Too late.

Someone comes up behind her and pushes, hard.

She screams, falling, hurting, dying . . .

Drifting, floating, high above her own broken body now lying in a slowly spreading pool of blood. The crimson stream inches across the tile floor toward the fallen manila envelope.

Blood taints the edge of the yellow-brown paper in the instant before a hand reaches out to snatch it up. A left hand, thick fingers, the pinky adorned with a gold signet ring bearing a coat of arms featuring a heart pierced by three daggers.




“Calla?”

She awakens with a start to the sound of knocking and her grandmother’s voice.

Dazed, she sits up, finding herself on her bed, fully dressed and shrouded in the dim gloom of Sunday dusk.