Connecting (Lily Dale #3)(77)

Calla shudders just thinking about it.

But if that explains how Sharon Logan got into the house to kill Mom, it still doesn’t explain why.

“You look exhausted, sweetheart,” Mrs. Wilson observes now, as Dad finishes signing the paperwork at the sargent’s desk. “We have to get you back to our house and into bed. It’s late.”

“But my father—”

“Him, too. He can’t possibly sleep in that house after all that’s happened.”

No. He can’t possibly. Maybe neither Dad nor Calla ever will again.

She’s in no hurry to go back there, that’s for sure.

But she has to.

Riding with her father in the rental car on the way to the Wilsons’, she asks, “Dad? Can we stop at the house? Just so that I can get a few things I need?”

He hesitates. “Okay. I guess I can use some stuff myself. I left California without a bag.”

“What about all your stuff?”

He shrugs. “What about it?”

“Aren’t you going to go back and get it?”

“Someday. It’s not important.”

Calla nods, wondering what this is going to mean to her new life in Lily Dale. She won’t have time to get used to the idea, that’s for sure. Not with Dad flying straight from here to New York with her.

The house feels more deserted than ever when they let themselves in the side door. Together, they walk through the empty rooms.

It’s depressing, Calla thinks. It would be even if she hadn’t just been through an ordeal here.

“Should we go upstairs and get our stuff?” Dad asks. “I don’t really want to stick around here.”

“I don’t, either. Go ahead. I’ll be right up. I have to get a few things from down here.”

Looking reluctant to let her out of his sight, her father goes upstairs.

Calla immediately hurries to the changing room to retrieve her mother’s laptop from beneath the beach towels in the cabinet.

She boots up the computer, and again it seems to take forever.

“Come on,” she mutters. “Hurry!”

“Dad?” she sticks her head out and calls up the stairs.

“How much longer are you going to be?”

“About five minutes.”

Five minutes.

That should be enough.

At last, she logs back into her mother’s e-mail address and scrolls to the note Mom wrote after seeing Darrin in Boston.

Calla picks up reading where she was when Mrs. Logan scared the living daylights out of her, creeping around downstairs.

but I understand why you did what you did.You were a kid, and afraid, and you thought you were doing what was best for me, and for you, and for our child

Calla gasps.

Their child?

Her mother’s . . . and Darrin’s?

A floorboard creaks overhead. “Are you almost ready, Calla?” Dad calls.

Is he even my real dad?

“Almost,” she murmurs, clutching the edge of the counter, holding on for dear life as the room spins around her.

What if Darrin is her father? What if— Wait a minute—he can’t be!

No. Of course he can’t.

Mom and Darrin hadn’t seen each other in over twenty years. Calla is only seventeen.

Thank God . . .

Thank God Dad is my father.

For a moment there . . .

But . . .

Mom and Darrin did have a child together, and that means . . .

Somewhere, Calla has a half sibling.





AUTHOR’S NOTE

Having grown up a stone’s throw from the gates of Lily Dale in western New York, I’ve been familiar with the spiritualist colony for as long as I can remember. My earliest visits were for Sunday drives with my family along the tranquil shores of Cassadaga Lake. Back then, I was more interested in not dripping my ice-cream cone all over the vinyl seats of our wood-paneled station wagon than I was in what went on beyond the mediums’ shingles.

When I reached high school and college, my friends and I started going to the Dale for readings—mostly to find out what was going to happen in our futures. At that age, we— especially I—had little interest in contacting the dead. After all, I hadn’t really lost anyone back then, other than great-grandparents who had been closing in on their nineties when I was born. Yet the spirits always seemed to have messages for me anyway. Messages that often made perfect sense to my Sicilian grandmother, whom I now suspect might just possess more than the standard five senses herself—not that she’ll ever admit it! But it seemed that my grandmother’s mother—my maternal great-grandmother, who had died when my mother was a child—always came through to me. To this day when I go to Lily Dale, she tends to pop up in my readings. Call me crazy, but I almost feel as though I’ve gotten to know her.

About a decade ago, going strong with my writing career, I decided Lily Dale would make a perfect setting for a novel. Though I had long since moved to the opposite end of New York State, I began visiting again at every opportunity, researching my books. Or so I thought.

Coincidentally—or maybe not—that was also around the time I entered the heartbreaking cycle of losing people I loved. First it was my paternal grandfather, the patriarch of our family. He was a strong character, and I was extremely close to him. The loss—though he was in his mid-eighties and had been ill—was devastating to me. Six months later, my paternal grandmother followed, having died (we all believed) of a broken heart. Then, my mother-in-law passed away— breast cancer, and she was far too young. Next, unexpectedly, I lost a close friend. Then my own mother; breast cancer again, far too young again.