Discovering (Lily Dale #4)(9)

Are you ready for that, though?

Calla hesitates.

Not yet.

Not right this minute, anyway.

First things first.

With a trembling hand, she dials Jacy’s phone number.





FOUR

Lily Dale

Monday, October 8

3:33 p.m.

“I really can’t stick around for very long,”Calla informs her grandmother and father as the three of them walk out the door and down the front steps beneath an ominous sky. “I’ve got to study, and then I’m meeting Jacy for a little while.”

When she called him earlier, he was headed out the door with his foster dads and couldn’t talk.

“Are they right there with you?”she asked. “Because I can talk, and you can listen. There’s some stuff I want to tell you.”

“Tell me in person. I’ll come over when I get back.”

“How about if we just meet down by the lake at five o’clock or so?”she suggested instead.

She isn’t exactly eager for Jacy to come face-to-face with Gammy and Dad now that they know about his part in her lie.

“Make it five fifteen,”Jacy told her, and she reluctantly agreed, wondering how she’s going to last that long without telling someone the whole shocking story and asking for advice.

“Listen, I know you’ve got a life here, and you’re busy with your friends and schoolwork—hopefully not in that order,”Dad says, patting her shoulder as they cross the yard toward the Taggarts’ porch. “I just wanted you to come over and see where I’ll be staying, that’s all.”

Calla bites her tongue to keep from saying that she’s seen the Taggarts’ guest room plenty of times, and even spent the night in it a few weeks ago when she and Evangeline had a sleepover.

Brat, she scolds herself. What you really want to tell him is that you belong here . . . he doesn’t.

Yeah, but only because you know he’s going to freak and want to leave when he finds out what really goes on in this town.

Which is bound to happen any second now, when Dad notices . . .

Wait a minute.

The shingle that ordinarily hangs beside Ramona’s door— the one that reads RAMONA TAGGART, REGISTERED MEDIUM— seems to be missing.

Calla raises an eyebrow at her grandmother and gestures with her head at the empty bracket overhead.

“I asked her to take it down for a few days.”Gammy’s whisper is muffled by a rumble of thunder in the west. “Just until your father gets settled in.”

Calla—who was grateful when her grandmother did the same thing with ODELIA LAUDER, REGISTERED MEDIUM whenever Dad came to visit— now wonders uneasily whether it’s a good idea to deliberately keep him in the dark.

If he’s going to freak out and leave, it’s better to just get it over with, isn’t it?

Maybe we should all just come out and tell him. About Gammy, and Ramona, and . . . me.

“Hello, hello! Come on in before it rains!”Ramona calls out, and Calla looks up to see that she’s waiting in the open doorway, beckoning them.

Well, she is psychic. She was probably aware they were on their way the very second they finished washing the lunch dishes and headed for the door.

Or maybe she’s been eagerly watching for them since Gammy called her a good half hour ago to say that Dad had accepted her invitation to stay here.

That’s more what it seems like, really.

Ramona, wearing one of her gypsy-style dresses, is all but bouncing with excitement as she holds the door open for them, chattering a mile a minute.

“Welcome back, Calla! And I’m so glad to see you again, Jeff. What happened in Florida? Odelia said something about a problem down there, but—you’ll have to fill me in. Come in, ignore the mess, come right up the stairs,”she says, leading the way up the narrow flight with the three of them trooping behind her. “Watch your head at the landing, there, Jeff. Like I told Odelia, it’s not the Ritz, but it’s a place to sleep and, hey, it’s free.”

“No, please, you have to let me pay you. If I were staying at a hotel, I’d be paying.”

“True, but at a hotel, you’d have maid service. Have you looked around? There’s no maid here,”Ramona says wryly. “No ice machine, no room ser vice, no pool . . .”

“Darn,”Dad says. “How about nightly turndown ser vice with a towel swan and chocolate on the pillow?”

“Hmm . . . maybe that could be arranged.”

They’re flirting. It’s so weird. Calla turns to glance at her grandmother to see if she’s noticed. Yup. There’s a thoughtful expression on Odelia’s face and a gleam in her eye.

They pass the open doorway to Evangeline’s room, then her brother’s. “Company, Mason,”Ramona calls to her nephew, who’s sprawled on his bed with a handheld computer game.

Looking at Mason is like looking at Evangeline—rather, looking at her if she wore owlish glasses, had frizzy, close-cropped red hair, and was perpetually fixated on a book or a screen of some sort.

“Say hello, Mason.”

“Hello.”His hazel eyes never leave the game.

“Remember Calla’s dad, Jeff? He’s going to be staying in the guest room for a while.”

“Uh-huh.”