Discovering (Lily Dale #4)(38)

“But I feel like such a baby— like I’m afraid to leave home.”

“Calla . . .”The counselor reaches across the desk and touches her hand. “You’ve already left home. Under circumstances much more difficult than most kids your age will face in a lifetime. You’re not a baby. You’re one of the bravest young women I’ve ever known.”

She’s never thought of it that way.

Now the tears are rolling down her cheeks, and Mrs. Erskine hands her a tissue.

“Look, maybe you should just focus on local schools. If you want to transfer down the road, you can, but . . .”She reaches over and opens a desk drawer. “I’m going to give you some information on Fredonia State University. Ever heard of it?”

Calla nods. Her mother went there, for undergrad. She told Calla that she was desperate to go away but couldn’t afford to.

“It’s just a few miles down the road, and it’s an excellent school.”Mrs. Erskine rummages through her drawer, plucking things from folders. “There are a few other good schools in Buffalo— not all that far away, either.”

“Thank you.”Calla gratefully accepts the packets the counselor hands her.

“Look them over, and talk to your father. I think you should go see the schools he wants to show you this weekend, too. You never know— you might fall in love with one of them.”

Yeah, that, or fall in love— all over again—with my old boyfriend who goes to one of them, Calla thinks grimly.

Cornell is out of the question for her. With Kevin there, she’d only be asking for trouble.

That reminds her. She never did check her e-mail. Lisa said he sent her one. She probably has a bunch of others, too.

Later tonight, she decides, she’ll pull out the laptop again.

Just to take care of her own business.

Not to stick her nose further into her mother’s.





FIFTEEN

New York City

Thursday, October 11

8:41 a.m.

According to Liz Jessee— the world’s friendliest landlady— Hell’s Kitchen, in the heart of Manhattan’s West Side, was once a desolate stretch of the city.

Now, Hell’s Kitchen— and thus, Liz Jessee’s no-frills five-story brick building—is in a desirable location, entirely conve-nient to restaurants, theaters, and midtown office buildings.

Laura is headed toward one of them right now, having just received a new short-term assignment from her temp agency.

As she descends the last flight of steps from her top floor studio apartment, she consults the address she scribbled on a scrap of paper when the assignment came in twenty minutes ago.

She’s been in New York long enough to know that she’ll have to head uptown, and east, to get there.

She’ll walk, of course. She doesn’t take the subway unless an assignment takes her all the way down to the financial district. Not just because Laura finds the subway unnerving, but because she can’t afford it. She still has three more days until payday, and she’ll be lucky if she can scrape together enough money to eat.

When Geraldine, her supervisor at the temp agency, told her that today’s assignment was at a company called Overseas Corporate Funds, she expected it to be downtown near Wall Street, too. Midtown was a pleasant surprise.

She arranges her shoulder bag in a cross-chest, mugger-proof position and steps outside to find Liz Jessee sweeping the stoop.

A pleasant woman in her midsixties, she looks up with a smile. “Good morning, Laura.”

“Hi, Liz.”

“It feels like July out here, doesn’t it?”

Laura realizes that the sun is already beaming warmly from a clear blue sky and wonders whether she should have worn her other suit. She only has two, and she wore the other one yesterday. But this one is wool.

“So it’s going to be hot again today?”she asks Liz, who has a way of knowing these things. She’s plugged into the weather, the news, even the neighborhood gossip.

“Near ninety. Of course, where I grew up, that’s nothing.”

“Where did you grow up?”

“Florida.”

Florida.

An image flashes into Laura’s head: palm trees, the ocean . . . and, standing in the sand, an attractive, brown-haired woman wearing a charcoal gray business suit with shiny black buttons, carrying a briefcase.

It’s such an odd image.

Why did it pop into Laura’s head?

Things do, sometimes. Things that don’t make sense.

And, once in a while, things that do make sense, but only later. When something— or someone—she’s imagined in her head or seen in a dream shows up in real life.

When she was really little, she used to find herself inexplicably thinking about a stained-glass window filled with interlocking loops of rose-and-green-colored glass. The window had a distinctive shape: rectangular on the bottom half and curving up to a point on the top half.

It popped into Laura’s head pretty often—particularly when her mother was cruel to her. Somehow, it made her feel better. She even used to draw pictures of it, with crayons.

It wasn’t until she was older that she actually came across it. She was returning from running an errand for Mother— taking the long way back to Center Street to delay having to go home— that she saw that window on the rectory door tucked away beside a church.