Discovering (Lily Dale #4)(25)

But it takes her several hours to get anything down, and she’s pretty sure, when she turns off the light and climbs into bed, that it doesn’t make much sense.

Nothing makes sense.

What her mother and Darrin did wasn’t just immoral. It was illegal.

Was that why Mom and Odelia argued over it?

And . . .

Was there really any doubt whether Darrin actually dumped the baby into the lake?

She keeps remembering the spot Aiyana led her to a few weeks ago, in Leolyn Woods. Lilies of the valley were inexplicably blooming there. In October.

And there was a rock, standing upright.

Like an unmarked tombstone.

“She isn’t there,”Aiyana said cryptically when Calla found it.

At the time, she had no idea what her spirit guide meant.

Now, though, she wonders.

She wonders about a lot of things.

Lying in bed, the lace curtains billowing lightly at the open window, she hears the screen door creak below.

Ramona and her father call good night to Odelia.

“Thanks for the banana bread. See you two tomorrow.”

You two.

As if they’re a couple.

Maybe they aren’t yet.

But they will be, Calla acknowledges as the sound of their laughter floats up through the window.





TEN

Lily Dale

Wednesday, October 10

12:53 p.m.

As always, Calla keeps an eye out for Jacy as she goes through the cafeteria line.

She needs to tell him what she learned yesterday. About Mom and Darrin . . . and their dead baby.

The baby they hid in the murky bottom of Cassadaga Lake.

No wonder her grandmother didn’t want Calla to set foot in that water. The warning had nothing to do with any premonition about Sharon Logan trying to drown her.

No wonder she and Mom were talking about dredging the lake.

They were talking about finding the baby’s remains there.

Why, though?

Was there any doubt about the child’s final resting place?

Calla can’t stop thinking about the little grave Aiyana showed her in the woods just last week, in a spot where lilies of the valley was somehow blooming at the wrong time of year.

Jacy . . . where are you?

Calla dumps chickpeas on her salad and scans the big, crowded room.

No sign of him.

They share the same lunch period, but Jacy often skips it in favor of slipping out of school for a while. Of course, that’s against the rules, but he doesn’t seem to care.

“Sometimes, I just need to get outdoors and breathe,”he told Calla when she asked him why he’s willing to risk getting caught and being assigned to in-school detention . . . not that he ever has been.

Yesterday, she skipped with him after finding a note stuck in the vents at the top of her locker door:

Meet me for lunch.

She didn’t have to ask where.

He’d brought them a couple of peanut butter sandwiches. They ate them sitting on a fallen log in the overgrown thicket behind the school. Jacy fed most of his to a chipmunk that came over and actually ate out of his hand.

“You’re like Snow White or something,”Calla had told him with a grin.

“Snow White?”He’d raised a dark eyebrow at her. “Snow White?”

“You know, she was always surrounded by forest creatures.”

“So was Tarzan. And he was a lot more manly than Snow White,”Jacy had said, and they laughed.

Jacy has always seemed most comfortable in the great outdoors, moving through the woods as easily as most people walk through their own living room.

But when he’s sitting across the aisle from Calla in math class, he always seems restless in his seat, and sometimes she catches him staring longingly out the window.

Now, as she pays the cashier and carries her tray toward her usual table, she concludes that he’s not in the cafeteria today. Why would he be?

Indian summer has definitely settled over Lily Dale.

Again this morning, Calla awoke to find the sun shining; again, she left her coat behind.

And again, her father was lounging on the Taggarts’ front porch with a cup of coffee— and Ramona— when she headed off to school.

It was nice to see him there . . . sort of.

But Calla is starting to wonder if she’d rather he stayed at Odelia’s, despite the close quarters. It’s kind of strange to have him around . . . but not around.

This morning when she and Evangeline were walking to school together, Calla almost asked her friend again what she thought about all of this.

But Evangeline had a lot to say.

Most of it about Russell Lancione.

They’d talked on the phone for over an hour last night while she was supposed to be working on her project— which she wound up throwing together at the last minute, before her aunt got home. He’d asked her to study together again tonight, and Evangeline was starting to like him– like him.

Which was great for her, and great for Russell, and great for Calla, too— not just because she wants her friend to be happy, but because it takes some of the pressure off her dating Jacy.

Still, Evangeline in love—or, okay, just in like-like—is even more talkative than the usual Evangeline. Who could be pretty talkative.

Calla has barely gotten a word in edgewise since they made up.