Lily Dale: Awakening (12 page)

She might be mine, too,
Calla thinks—before she remembers the strange woman in the cemetery in Florida. She’s pretty sure that wasn’t Miriam, though her recollection of the woman’s features isn’t very clear. She sure would have taken a much harder look if she’d had any clue that she was seeing a ghost.

Maybe you weren’t,
a little voice—a skeptical little voice— pipes up in her head.
Maybe you’re just imagining stuff now that you know about Odelia and Lily Dale.

Then again, she saw the figure in the cemetery—and the one in the mirror here—before she knew there was anything supernatural about the house or town, let alone her family bloodline.

She realizes Evangeline is watching her thoughtfully.

“Listen, Calla, I know it’s not easy to be plunked down in a place like this, and I don’t blame you for doubting, really. I guess I’d feel the same way if I hadn’t grown up here.”

“You’ve never lived anywhere else?”

“Nope. My parents were mediums, like I said. And so were their parents.”

“So it runs in your family.”

Evangeline nods. “But not in yours, right? Is that what you’re thinking?”

Calla shrugs. “Nobody in my family other than my grandmother goes around saying they’re a medium, if that’s what you mean.”

“Well, you never know. Maybe they just don’t want to admit it.”

“They . . . who?”

“The other people in your family.”

“There is no one else. Not on my mother’s side, anyway. My grandmother had a sister, but she died a few years ago. I never knew her, but she didn’t live here, anyway. She lived in Rochester. And I never knew my grandfather—they were divorced years ago. And then there’s my mom, but she definitely wasn’t . . . you know . . . a medium.”

“Are you sure?”

“Positive,” Calla says firmly, remembering how Mom told her to keep her “women’s intuition” to herself. “And I’m not a medium, either.”
Sheesh, Calla, why don’t you just say “So there,” and stick out your tongue?
But she can’t help it. She can’t let herself buy into this whole supernatural scene just because she’s here and it’s apparently a way of life for these people.

Now it makes sense that Mom never brought her and Dad to Lily Dale. The weather is lousy most of the year, but the summer months are “the season.” Mom wouldn’t have wanted Calla and her father exposed to all that.

She was the most pragmatic person Calla’s ever known. And it doesn’t take a so-called gift to know what Mom would say if she were here right now. She would tell Calla to use her common sense. And common sense tells her there’s no such thing as ghosts, and you can’t communicate with the dead no matter how desperately you want to reach your lost loved one.

Even Odelia and Evangeline seem to back up that part of the theory.

“Come on.” Evangeline glances at the sky, then picks up her pace. “We should get moving.We’ve got a lot of ground to cover before it rains again.”

“Maybe it won’t.” Calla spots a few broken patches of blue amid the clouds.

“No, it will.”

“Psychic vision?”

“No, meteorological tradition.” Evangeline smiles demurely. “I’ve lived here all my life, remember? Western New York isn’t exactly known for its balmy weather, Sunshine State Girl.”

Again, Calla is overtaken by homesickness for Florida. But she’s not even going home after the summer. No, instead, she’ll be headed to another strange place. And by the time she gets back to Tampa, she’ll be on the verge of going away to college. All her friends will be moving on, too. And Mom will still be gone. The old life she longs for no longer even exists.

“Are you okay?”

She looks up to see Evangeline watching her, concerned. “Yeah, I’m fine.”

Sorry, Mom,
she thinks silently.
Sometimes you can’t help telling a lie.
She only wishes she honestly believed her mother could hear her.

“I didn’t mean to bring it up.”

“Bring what up?”

“Florida,” Evangeline says simply. “I know it’s hard. And if you ever need to talk . . . I’m a good listener.”

“Thanks,” Calla says, wondering if she’s just made her first friend in Lily Dale.

EIGHT

Ninety minutes and a drenching downpour later, Calla is soaked through, and knowledgeable enough about Lily Dale to understand what Evangeline means when she says, “See you at message circle some night, right?”

“I’ll try.” Calla waves and starts up her grandmother’s porch steps before remembering to add, “And thanks for everything. It was great getting a personal walking tour.”

“Enjoy this place while you can. Once the season ends, it’s desolate around here.” Evangeline said earlier that the local population will shrink drastically after Labor Day. Most of the registered mediums board up their cottages and hang C
LOSED
U
NTIL
J
UNE
signs, spending the cold-weather months in warm-weather places. “Oh, wait, you won’t be here then, anyway.”

No, she won’t. The
season
, Calla now knows, is July and August, when Lily Dale’s gatehouse is occupied. Nonresidents have to pay to come into the town, where they can attend a daily schedule of events: seminars, workshops, services, lectures, group readings. People who want a private reading or healing session but haven’t scheduled an advance appointment are free to wander up and down the streets, knocking on doors of spiritualists in residence here. The streets are filled with people who are grieving or sick or at some crossroads in their lives.

It’s hard for Calla to believe that this is where they turn for comfort, but judging by the number of registered mediums in town, spiritual counseling is a booming business.

“Hey, don’t forget,” Evangeline calls after her, “you can come over to our house whenever you want to get online.”

“Thanks, I will,” she says gratefully.

Calla was dismayed to find out that there’s no public Internet access here in Lily Dale. The Maplewood Hotel’s lobby is wireless. She’s out of luck without a laptop to use there. But Evangeline said Calla can check her e-mail on her aunt’s computer anytime.

“It was really nice of you to show me around, Evangeline.”

“No problem. It was fun.” With a wave, Evangeline disappears into the house next door.

It
was
fun,
Calla thinks as she walks up the path toward Odelia’s porch, wondering if her grandmother ever locks the door. Maybe she doesn’t bother because it doesn’t do much good when you’re dealing with the spirit world. A deadbolt wouldn’t stop the likes of Miriam.

Terrific, now you’re starting to think like they do,
Calla scolds herself. Maybe that’s because Lily Dale has turned out to be more ordinary—at least, on the surface—than she expected.

The locals who were out and about today could live in Anytown, USA, as far as she can tell. She wasn’t sure who was a medium and who wasn’t unless Evangeline pointed it out, and even then, she was often surprised.

The ordinary-looking, balding middle-aged man on a ladder washing the windows of his cottage over on Cleveland Avenue was a world-renowned clairvoyant, which means he can see into the future. The word, Evangeline explained, literally translates from French into “clear seeing.”

Meanwhile, the elderly woman decked out in a black felt hat and some sort of cloak, who looked for all the world like she must live in a haunted house, turned out to be nothing more than a local busybody who works for the post office and supposedly steams open other people’s mail.

The cute, freckled, pigtailed little girl with holes in the knees of her jeans recently channeled a dead president. The dumpy housewife without a shred of supernatural talent is having an affair with a volunteer fireman who does past-life regression in his spare time.

Calla couldn’t help but be fascinated by Evangeline’s accounts of their private lives—paranormal, extramarital, and otherwise. In some ways Lily Dale could be any other small town in the world, if you ignore the shingles that dangle from many of its houses. Calla is almost used to them now.
Almost
.

O
DELIA
L
AUDER
, R
EGISTERED
M
EDIUM

That one still catches her off guard as she passes beneath it on her way up the steps.

She glances at the spot where that girl— Mrs. Riggs’s daughter—was standing the other night, in the middle of Odelia’s flower bed. To her surprise, the dense growth of flowers there shows no sign of being disturbed. You’d think the stems would be snapped or crushed or something.

The front door isn’t locked, as Calla suspected. When she lets herself in, her grandmother is nowhere to be found, and the door to the back room is closed. Hearing the rumble of voices, she figures Odelia must be in there with a client.

All right, then, she’ll go upstairs and do some reading. She heads to her room, a few books from the Lily Dale library tucked under her arm. Evangeline helped her find some local nonfiction titles on the history of Lily Dale and spiritualism. She checked them out on Evangeline’s card, not wanting to get one of her own just yet despite the librarian’s invitation.

There’s just something so . . . permanent about a library card.

Calla isn’t opposed to spending a few weeks here in the Dale, as the locals call it. But it isn’t her home, and she isn’t trying to make it feel that way. She isn’t prepared to make herself at home in a place that counts something called Inspiration Stump as its most sacred landmark.

Evangeline took her out to the site, a spiritual retreat at the end of a trail in Leolyn Woods. As they hiked over, she explained in a hushed, reverent tone that otherworldly energy is stronger at the stump than anywhere else in Lily Dale.

After that buildup, Calla expected to experience something profound there, as they stood staring at the concrete-encased stump, listening to the soft patter of raindrops. But she felt nothing other than slightly chilled and damp. Evange-line, who was hoping to run into Jacy there, seemed disappointed both in Calla’s reaction and Jacy’s absence.

On the way back to Cottage Row, Evangeline confessed that she has a major crush on Jacy. Surprise, surprise. “Does he like you, too?” Calla asked cautiously, telling herself that she couldn’t be interested in Jacy now. Not if she wanted to keep Evangeline as a friend—and she did.

“He’s so quiet it’s hard to tell how he feels. About anything. I wish you could meet him.”

Calla hesitated before saying, “I’m sure I will.”
Why didn’t you tell her you already did?
Maybe because she felt guilty, having been instantly attracted to Evangeline’s crush.

Evangeline invited her to come to a message circle—a regular gathering of mediums and visitors hoping to receive communication from lost loved ones.

“Jacy always goes,” she said, “and Blue, too. Pretty much everyone goes.”

Blue. Okay, that’s one good reason to show up there. Evangeline doesn’t seem interested in him. Just a little awed.

“Is Jacy a medium, too?” she asked Evangeline.

“He’s definitely gifted . . . he’s in tune with nature and animals. But he hasn’t said much about it—about anything, really. Not to me, anyway. Not that he talks to anyone else, either.”

“How many kids our age are there in Lily Dale?” Calla asked, noticing she hadn’t seen many in their travels.

“Maybe a dozen.”

Calla’s jaw dropped. “That’s it?”

“Within the gates, that’s it. Remember, hardly anyone lives here year-round, and a lot of the mediums are single, or older, so . . .” She shrugged.

“Where’s your school?” Calla asked, picturing one of those one-room deals, like they had a hundred years ago. “Is it here in town?”

“No, about a mile away. It’s a centralized district. There are other kids who live on farms around here, and they go to school with us.”

Now, as Calla settles onto her bed with the books, listening to the rain pinging against the gutter above her window, she decides there are worse places to be.

In the house where your mom just died is at the top of the list. Under the same roof with your ex-boyfriend and his new girlfriend ranks not far beneath it.

I might as well be here in Lily Dale for now,
she thinks, opening the first book.
And I might as well find out as much about it
—
and this thing called spiritualism
—
as I can.

Restless, Calla sets aside yet another of the books she took out of the library. This time, she couldn’t get past the third page.

She sets it on top of the stack with the other unread titles and vows to get back to them later today—or, preferably, some other day. Not that she finds local history dull, but she isn’t in the mood to start at the beginning, with the town’s nineteenth-century origins at the dawning of the spiritualist movement, fueled by the Fox sisters’ so-called spirit rappings up in Hydesville.

Intriguing, yes . . . but at the moment, she’s much more interested in the town’s more recent history—say, when her mother lived here.

She gets off the bed and glances at the window, where a steady rain is still falling outside. Oops—it’s blowing in through the cracked window, spattering the sill and the floor with droplets.

She hurriedly yanks it shut and wipes up the moisture with her sleeve.

It already feels stuffy in here, she thinks, as she crosses the room to the dresser. But she knows water isn’t good for wood. Mom was a stickler about wiping things up.

And she wouldn’t be thrilled to see me using my sleeve to do it
, Calla thinks ruefully.

With a sigh, she picks up the nearest picture frame. In this particular snapshot, Mom—with impossibly tall, gravity-defying hair—is wearing a satiny gown and a wrist corsage. She’s posing with some guy in an equally pouffy mullet. Calla smiles at the outdated styles and wonders who he is. An old boyfriend of Mom’s, obviously.

She never mentioned anyone by name, but when she was trying to comfort Calla over the breakup with Kevin, she did hint at having had her own heart broken once. Calla started to ask for details but her father came in right then, and she got the sense that her mother didn’t want to talk about it in front of him.