Discovering (Lily Dale #4)(70)

Calla walks toward her.

“Calla,”someone says, “this is Laura. She wanted to meet you.”

“You’re my sister,”Calla tells the girl, just like in the vision— only this time, it’s real.

And just like in the vision, her sister smiles and holds out something.

It isn’t a bouquet.

It’s her hand.

As Calla grasps it, she’s enveloped by the scent of lilies of the valley.

“Welcome home,”a voice says—but it isn’t her own.

And it isn’t her sister’s.

Looking up, Calla sees her mother. Their mother.

She smiles, and then she’s gone.

But not really, Calla reminds herself. She’s never really gone, and neither is the love.

If you look hard enough, you can always find it.





AUTHOR’S NOTE

My widowed father still lives in the big old Victorian house where I grew up, though he’s lonely there without my mom. Everything is exactly as she left it, right down to the book she was reading— an advance copy of my latest, at the time—her place saved with a bookmark and set on the table next to her living room chair, where she always sat at night and read. She not only lived in the house but died there, too, four years ago this spring. It was on her birthday that April that the doctors told us there was nothing more that could be done to treat her breast cancer. She passed away a few weeks later, two days after Mother’s Day.

This past April, my father returned home after a few weeks away to a very strange phenomenon. After it had gone on for a few days, he called me and told me about it.

“Do you have any idea what it means when a bird flies into your window?”he asked.

“It means the bird probably needs glasses,”I joked.

He gave an obligatory laugh, then said, “I was serious. Do you know what it means?”

“Um . . . well . . . did it die?”

“No, no, it’s not like that. It didn’t happen just once. It’s been happening over and over again, for days now. I hear it tapping at the window on the stairway landing, and when I go to look, there’s this bird. It backs off with its wings flapping and it flies headfirst straight into the window. Then it does it again. And again. What do you think it means?”

I told him I had no idea. Frankly, I figured that either the bird was losing it— or maybe my father was.

A few days later we spoke again, and he told me it was still going on. “It starts in the morning,”he said, uncharacteristically unsettled, “and it goes on all day. The same bird. Over and over.”

I’ll admit I thought he had to be exaggerating. Still, I did a bit of research online. I found out that, once in a while, a bird will mistake its reflection in a window as another bird in its territory and fly into the glass, usually injuring or even killing itself in the process. But for it to happen repeatedly, over a series of days? That was definitely far-fetched.

“Do you think it means anything?”my father asked me, and I knew what he was getting at.

He wanted to know if I thought there was anything paranormal about it. He tends to view me as the expert on that sort of thing, because I write books about it. And I tend to view him as a skeptic— though he’s slowly coming around.

“I have no idea what it means,”I told him, and we dropped the subject.

A few weeks later, I made the trip home with my family to celebrate my grandma’s birthday. The first morning, I woke up in my childhood bedroom to a tapping sound. I got up and crept over to the top of the stairs . . . and sure enough, there at the window on the landing was a bird. It backed up, flapped its wings, and dive-bombed the window. Then it did it again. And again.

It went on all day.

“See?”my father said. “I told you. It’s trying to tell me something.”

We were all fascinated— my husband, my kids, my father, and I. But not my grandmother—my mom’s mother. When she heard about it, she pretty much freaked. She’s Sicilian, and superstitious, and apparently a bird hitting the window is not a happy omen.

I decided to call my friend Donna Riegel, who is a medium at Lily Dale. I told her I was in town and that something odd had been happening at my childhood home, but I didn’t tell her what it was. She agreed to make a house call.

My sister, brother, and sister-in-law all wanted to be a part of Donna’s visit, so six of us were there, including my father, my husband, and me. The bird had been doing its thing all day but was nowhere to be seen when Donna arrived. It was just as well, I decided. I wanted to see if she picked up on anything without such a blatant clue.

Donna felt my mother’s energy the moment she walked in— a happy, positive energy. She spent the next few hours relaying messages from my mom. My husband, Mark, and I had seen Donna in action before, but even we were awed by how specific— and dead on— she was.

“You’re going to be visiting the southwest,”she informed my sister. “Not California . . . someplace closer. Texas? Are you going to Texas?”

My sister was, indeed, going to Texas. She and her family and my father had tickets to fly to Houston two days later.

Over and over, Donna told us things she couldn’t have known— things my mother, however, would certainly have known. She mentioned an obscure song that was incredibly meaningful to my father, a letter hidden in the bottom of a drawer, and the fact that my brother—who is tall and lanky like the basketball player he once was— also played quarterback for the high school football team. Mom gave us— her three children—much-needed, specific advice. And she had loving words for my husband and my sister-in-law, both of whom she had adored.