Discovering (Lily Dale #4)(17)
“Pennsylvania.”
“I didn’t know that. Don’t you have a regular flashlight?”
“This is better. It leaves the hands free.”
Yeah, for coal mining.
“I have one for you, too,”Odelia says, and the blinding light comes closer. “Put it on and we’ll go downstairs and eat all the ice cream in the freezer.”
“What? Why?”
“So that it won’t melt and go to waste. Here you go.”
Calla obediently puts on the miner’s hat her grandmother hands her, asking, “How long do you think it’ll be before the power comes back on?”
“Oh, you never know . Sometimes just a few minutes. Once in a while, though, we’re out for a few days.”
“A few days?!”
“Hopefully it won’t be that long.”
Hopefully not.
But you’re probably not going to get into the laptop tonight, Calla tells herself, following her grandmother down to the kitchen.
As she scoops Ben & Jerry’s Coffee Heath Bar Crunch into a bowl in the beam of her miner’s flashlight, she can’t help but wonder if she isn’t just a little bit grateful, deep down inside, to put off delving into her mother’s secrets once more.
SIX
New York City
Tuesday, October 9
3:17 a.m.
The dream begins the same as it always has.
She’s walking along a grassy shore beside lapping blue water. It’s not a big lake; she can see the opposite shore not far in the distance, rimmed by rolling hills. The sky is blue and the sun is shining.
There are lots of tall trees to cast dappled shade around her as she walks.
Nearby, she can see clusters of cottages. Victorian-style, with shutters and fish-scale shingles; cupolas or mansard roofs; porches with gingerbread trim.
There are flowers everywhere. The air is heavy with their perfume; they bloom in crowded garden beds, spill from window boxes and hanging pots.
They’re even here, beneath her feet, growing in a clump on the grassy shore.
These flowers have short, slender, sturdy stems fringed with tiny bell-shaped white blossoms.
Lilies of the valley.
She found a photo in a horticulture book months ago, when the dream first began to haunt her.
As she bends to pick one of the fragile blooms, the sun slips behind a cloud. Thunder rumbles in the distance as she raises the flower to inhale its fragrance, and all at once, she can hear voices. Female voices.
She can’t see them, and she can’t hear most of what they’re saying, but what she does hear is disturbing: “. . . because I promised I’d never tell . . .”
“. . . for your own good . . . don’t know how you can live with yourself . . .”
“The only way we’ll learn the truth is to dredge the lake.”
She gazes out over the lake to see that the water has turned black, churning ominously beneath a stormy sky.
Now the women are crying, eerie wails that echo until the storm blows in to drown them out.
Who are they?
Where are they?
Why are they arguing? Why are they crying?
And why, Laura wonders, every time she wakes from the dream, chilled to the bone, do I keep having the same strange dream, over and over?
SEVEN
Lily Dale
Tuesday, October 9
7:50 a.m.
“Morning, Calla!”
Startled to hear a voice as she slips out her grandmother’s front door with her backpack, Calla spins around to see her father over on Ramona’s porch.
“Dad!”
“That was some storm last night, huh?”
She nods. “When did the power come back on?”
“Around midnight.”
“Oh.”By that time, she had eaten herself into Coffee Heath Bar Crunch–induced oblivion, too zonked out to even dream.
Seeing movement out of the corner of her eye, she turns and spots a translucent little boy perched in a tree beside Ramona’s porch. He’s wearing a 1930s-style newsboy hat and knickers, and she’s pretty sure she’s seen him hanging around before.
“Are you wearing that to school?”
She looks down at her jeans, long sleeved T-shirt, and sneakers. “Um . . . yes?”
“Really.”
“It’s a public school, Dad,”she reminds him. As opposed to a private school: at Shoreside Day back in Florida, she had to wear a preppy uniform every day.
“So everyone dresses down for school? Is that it?”
“Pretty much. Why?”
The little boy in the tree crosses his eyes at her and giggles.
“I just want to make sure that with your mother gone you’re not . . . you know . . .”
“Letting my fashion sense go down the tubes?”she asks her father dryly. “That would be tragic.”
He snorts.
“What are you doing out here, anyway, Dad?”
“Guess.”
She descends a few steps and peers closer at him across her grandmother’s unkempt hedges, still glistening from last night’s rain.
Dad is sitting on a wicker rocker, clasping a coffee mug in both hands. His hair stands straight up, he’s got a face full of razor stubble, and he’s wearing a pair of sweatpants and a rumpled T-shirt, looking like he just rolled out of bed five minutes ago.