Discovering (Lily Dale #4)(3)

Calla sniffs again. Yes, the floral smell is real, and of course there’s not a blossom in sight. Fragrant lilies of the valley only bloom in springtime.

Aiyana . . . where are you?

Calla wonders if she’s just too worn out today to connect with the spirit. She’s still new to this—she needs more practice when it comes to tuning in to the energy.

Tuning out, as well. Sometimes she finds herself bombarded with images and voices. It can be frightening.

Her grandmother promised she’d get the hang of it, though. That’s why she enrolled Calla in a Beginning Mediumship course with classes every Saturday morning.

Aiyana, are you trying to tell me something?

“Calla? Are you okay?”

She turns to see Odelia watching her with concern.

“I’m . . . fine. Just a little spacey, I guess. Maybe I need to go upstairs and lie down.”And see if Aiyana comes to me there.

“You need to eat first. Come on.”Keeping one fleshy arm draped around Calla’s shoulders, her fingers resting on the strap of the bag that contains Mom’s computer, Odelia leads the way through small rooms cluttered with mismatched furniture, books and knickknacks, threadbare carpets, and outdated kitchen appliances.

Funny . . . the ramshackle Victorian cottage is a far cry from the upscale, three-thousand-square-foot house where Calla grew up, but this feels much more like home to her now.

Maybe because the Tampa house is where Mom died.

This is where Mom lived— until she was about Calla’s age, anyway.

Then Stephanie Lauder left, and she never came back. Never, it seems, even looked back.

She didn’t like to talk about her childhood. Calla always assumed that was because she was a child of divorce—her father left when she was young. Or maybe it was because Mom didn’t get along very well with Odelia. Or because she just wasn’t big on nostalgia.

Whatever. You’d think Mom might have mentioned to Calla or Dad that her hometown happened to be populated by psychic mediums—and that her own mother, Odelia, was one of them.

Calla didn’t find out about any of that until she came to visit her grandmother after Mom’s death.

No, not death.

Now they all know her fatal fall down the stairs wasn’t an accident.

It was murder. She was murdered.

That’s not all.

Mom had a deep, dark secret— one Calla stumbled upon a few days ago, when she was snooping through her mother’s e-mail files looking for clues to her death. The secret remains locked in Mom’s laptop, protected by a password Calla managed to figure out—perhaps with a little help from her sixth sense.

She didn’t tell a soul about what she’d discovered. Not Dad, not the police. It was too shocking, too personal, too . . . painful.

Even now, whenever Calla allows herself to think about what she learned, she’s swept by an overwhelming sense of betrayal by the mother she thought she had known—the mother who now feels like a stranger to her.

How could Mom have kept such an important secret for all these years? Why?

The whole truth, Calla is sure, lies in her mother’s e-mail files. But she couldn’t bring herself to go on reading them that day in Florida.

No, she only got as far as to learn the shocking truth: that Mom and her high school boyfriend, Darrin Yates— both of whom were murdered in the last few months— had, over twenty years ago, had a child together.

Which means somewhere out there, Calla must have a half sibling.





TWO

Odelia bustles over to take a casserole dish out of the oven. “You’re going to love this, Jeff. It’ll warm your soul.”

“I take it you’re thinking my soul needs warming?”

“I’m thinking, whose doesn’t? And it’s one of my specialties.”

“Soul warming?”

“Rice ring!”

“Rice ring,”Dad echoes, nodding. “What is it, though?”

“It’s just what it sounds like . . . see?”Odelia drops a crocheted pot holder onto the table and plops the oval dish on top of it.

Calla peers at the contents. Yup. That’s a ring of rice, all right. Mounds of steaming white rice, mixed with peas, line the perimeter of the dish. Pooled in the center basin is something creamy and lumpy with greenish gray flecks.

It doesn’t look particularly appetizing, but it does smell pretty good. Which is the case with many of her grandmother’s specialties.

“What else is in there?”Dad eyes it somewhat suspiciously. “Besides a ring of rice, I mean.”

“Peas.”

“Yup, see the peas. A whole lot of peas.”

Dad hates peas.

He’s not all that crazy about rice, either, Calla remembers. Not the brown rice Mom used to make, anyway. She was really into healthy food. Unlike Gammy.

Funny how Mom and Gammy really were opposites.

Kind of like Mom and me.

“It’s just tuna fish and cream of celery soup, and stop making faces at my rice ring, Jeff.”Gammy swats Dad’s arm with the other pot holder.

Mom made that, Calla realizes.

Yes, her mother made that pot holder and the matching one beneath the casserole dish. She was a little girl, and she used one of those plastic loom kits; she got it for Christmas.

Calla closes her eyes.