Discovering (19 page)

“Thank you, Odelia.”

She nods.

Seeing the faraway look—and hint of tears—in her grandmother’s eyes, Calla knows she’s thinking of the wife and mother she once was, and the husband she loved so very long ago.

NINETEEN

Lily Dale
Thursday, October 11
10:26 p.m.

No wonder nobody uses a dial-up connection anymore. It takes forever to accomplish even the simplest online task.

Waiting for her e-mail to load, Calla can hear the faint sound of Ramona’s laughter coming from downstairs.

They’re still playing poker at the kitchen table. At least, they were, when Calla interrupted her homework an hour ago to go down for a snack. Her appetite had finally drifted back to her as she worked on her math.

Or maybe it was more like, math was so horrible she needed a diversion.

“Come play with us, Calla,”Ramona invited, sitting at the table with Dad, Odelia, and Odelia’s friend Andy, who liked to drop in to check on Gert, a product of his cat’s recent litter.

“I wish I could, but I have a ton of homework.”

Ramona shook her head. “So does Evangeline.”

Calla nodded. She had spoken to Evangeline earlier, to fill her in about the meeting with the detectives. When she ended the conversation with a “See you tomorrow morning,”Evange-line told her she had to be at school an hour early for extra help in chemistry.

“I keep telling her that working on her homework with Russell isn’t a good idea,”Ramona said as Andy shuffled the cards. “I don’t think they’re getting much done, other than mooning around at each other.”

Funny Ramona should mention that, because Calla noticed that was pretty much what Ramona and Dad were doing.

Though he did interrupt his flirtation to say, “Calla, don’t forget to pack a weekend bag tonight so that I can get it in the morning. We’re leaving right from school when I pick you up.”

“I will,”she promised, and made a hasty escape back up to her room with a healthy snack of crackers, baby carrots, and hummus— along with one of the big chocolate brownies Ramona had baked for Dad.

Well, she claimed to have baked them for everyone. But she was looking at Dad when she said it.

Calla finished her homework, then threw some stuff into her duffel bag for the weekend trip. They’re heading first to Penn State in State College, Pennsylvania, then back up to New York State: Cornell in Ithaca and Colgate in Hamilton. The circular route Dad’s mapped out will bring them back home late Sunday night.

As she waits for the screen to load, she wonders when she should break it to her father that she’s pretty sure she wants to stay closer to home— home, as in Lily Dale—next year. She looked over the brochures Mrs. Erskine gave her, and Fredonia State University seems to offer everything she should probably be looking for.

Not that she’s looking for much more than a solid school that happens to be nearby.

Oh, well. She’ll worry about all of that later, because at last, her e-mail has popped up on the screen.

Sure enough, there’s one from Kevin.

No, not one.

One . . . two . . . three?

Frowning, she opens the most recent.

Okay, now I’m being a pain, I know . But I’m really worried about you. You don’t have to write a long note back. Just a quick one to let me know that you’re okay. Otherwise, I might show up on your grandmother’s doorstep to see for myself. Love, Kevin

Calla sits for a moment with her fingers poised over the keyboard.

Then, her mind made up, she begins typing.

I’m fine. Don’t worry.

She pauses.

Should she tell him she and Dad are going to be visiting Cornell this weekend?

No.

She simply types in her name.

It looks funny without anything before the signature.

Anything . . . like
love
?

No way.

She backspaces, erasing her name, then hits Send.

He’ll know who it’s from.

As she suspected, her in-box contains a few other e-mails. One is from Billy Pijuan, an old friend of hers in Florida, a few are from Lisa, the rest are spam.

She clicks on one of Lisa’s.

Come on, hurry up.

It’s taking forever. This is going to be—

Suddenly, a screen pops up—and it isn’t Lisa’s e-mail.

It’s a new sign- on screen— and her mother’s screen name is already typed into the User ID box. The cursor is blinking like a beacon in the password box.

How did this screen pop up?

Puzzled, Calla wonders if she hit some kind of automated button by accident.

Maybe.

Now that she’s here . . .

She finds herself typing in her mother’s password.

Then, inhaling deeply, about to hit Enter . . .

She smells it.

Lilies of the valley.

The room is filled with the fragrance.

“Aiyana?”Calla turns in her chair and there she is.

The spirit guide is dressed in flowing white, as always, her black hair pulled back from her lovely, dark- complected face. She nods at Calla, an approving gleam in her almond- shaped black eyes, almost as if . . .

“Did you do this?”Calla blurts, indicating the screen.

Aiyana lifts a hand, pointing at it.

“You want me to read her e-mail,”Calla says. “Is that it?”

“Find her.”

“Find who? My mother?”Calla asks, but the apparition is fading.

Within moments, she’s gone, and so is the scent of lilies of the valley.

Calla looks back at the screen.

She doesn’t remember hitting Enter after typing the password, but the mailbox icon has loaded anyway.

With a shrug, she goes directly to the archives, scrolling back to last spring.

She skims past the mail she’s already read, and ignores all the correspondence that isn’t between her mother and Darrin.

Dear Stephanie, I understand if you can’t forgive me, but please forgive yourself. You didn’t do anything wrong. Everything is my fault. I’m the one who persuaded you not to tell anyone you were pregnant, because I was a coward. I guess I still am, because I find it much easier to communicate with you this way than I did in person. There are so many things I couldn’t say to you when I saw you in Boston.

I guess the most important is that I still love you, and always will.

I’m not the same person I was back then. I had developed a drug habit to help me deal with all those psychic visions I couldn’t control—but that made everything even worse. I made stupid decisions because of the drugs. That’s not an excuse, it’s just the way things were. The dumbest one of all—even worse than leaving you— was telling you the baby had died.

But what, Calla wonders, was the alternative? Wouldn’t Mom have figured that out anyway? This doesn’t make any sense.

When you went into premature labor before we had even figured out what we were going to do with the baby, I pretty much went off the deep end. I had thought from the start that we were both set on giving it up for adoption, but then you started to seem unsure about it. I realized you probably wouldn’t be able to go through with it once the baby was born. And I honestly believed it was the right thing to do—for selfish reasons, but also for unselfish ones.

I contacted the agency a few months before the baby was born, without telling you. It was the wrong kind of agency, obviously, and I definitely went about it the wrong way, but I guess I couldn’t see past all the money they were offering. Not just to cover expenses, but a big chunk of cash for the baby. I never realized how wrong that was. I never thought to check their credentials and it never occurred to me that they weren’t a legitimate operation. I figured that was how it worked. I figured everybody would win—our daughter would grow up better than we could ever raise her, and we could have our lives back.

The pieces are beginning to fall into place, but Calla doesn’t dare assume anything.

Breath caught in her throat, she reads on, filled with dread— and with hope.

I made myself believe that I was actually doing you a favor, telling you the baby had been stillborn. I know that seems hard to believe, but I figured you would get over it and move on quicker than you would if you thought she was out there somewhere.

Remember how you kept saying you could have sworn you heard her cry? That almost did me in. I convinced you that you were just out of it from all the pain. I hated myself for that. What broke my heart more than anything was finding that memorial you made in the woods, in the spot where she was born, just so you’d have a grave where you could leave flowers. By then, I wanted desperately to tell you that she was alive, but I was too afraid.

Calla gasps, pressing a fist to her trembling lips as she rereads the last line.

So it’s true.

The baby didn’t die after all.

I really do have a sister.

A maelstrom of questions fills Calla’s head.

She seizes upon the most important one: Where is she?

Please, please let the information be here.

She reads on.

Then, a few months later, out of the blue, you confronted me to ask whether I had been telling the truth about the baby being stillborn. You gave me a chance to redeem myself, and instead I lied to you again. That was when I knew I had to get out of Lily Dale. For good.

Leaving you— and my parents—was hard. But I’m ashamed to say it wasn’t as hard as it should have been, thanks to the drugs. I had to hit rock bottom in order to get clean. I had to get used to my psychic visions all over again, and accept them. That took years. By that time, I knew I had to tell you the truth. But finding you, and finding the nerve to do it, took years, too.

Anyway, you should know that I’ve already hired a private detective to find our daughter. I told him the whole story, including date of birth and the name of the agency. I’ll let you know as soon as I find out anything more.

Calla hurriedly and shakily closes that e-mail and clicks on the next. It’s from her mother.

Darrin, you gave me a lot to think about. I don’t know what else to say, other than please let me know when you hear from the detective.

More than two weeks go by without an e-mail between them.

Then comes one from Darrin, dated March 16.

That was the day before he showed up on our doorstep back in
Florida with that manila envelope
.

They’ve found her. They even gave me pictures they shot with a telephoto lens. She’s beautiful. I’ve booked a flight to Tampa first thing tomorrow morning so that I can show you and talk about this in person. Let me know if that’s okay, and where to meet you. I can be there by 11.

Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God . . .

Lightheaded, breathless, Calla moves on to her mother’s terse response.

Just come here. I’ll work from home. Jeff will be on campus and my daughter will be at school.

Mom gave him their address.

And he showed up, Calla remembers. But not until that afternoon. The flight must have been late. Calla was already back from school by that time. And Mom wasn’t working when she got there—she was baking Irish soda bread, for Saint Patrick’s Day.

Mom always puttered in the kitchen when she was stressed out. She said it relaxed her.

She burned the soda bread that day, while she was talking to a man Calla believed was a colleague.

Tom Leolyn.

Darrin Yates.

In his hands was a manila envelope.

It was in Mom’s hands, too, when Sharon Logan pushed her down the stairs. But it wasn’t beside her body when Calla found her.

There’s another e-mail from Mom to Darrin, sent a few minutes later. It reads simply,

I forgot to ask— where did you find her? And what’s her name?

Darrin’s response is even shorter.

In Geneseo, New York. Her name is Laura Logan.

TWENTY

New York City
Friday, October 12
12:08 a.m.

Laura turns onto her stomach and bunches the pillow beneath her cheek, willing herself to fall asleep.

It never works.

Nothing ever has.

She’s had insomnia for as long as she can remember. She’d thought it might get better once she left Geneseo.

If anything, it’s grown worse.

Every night, she lies awake remembering what it was like to live in that house with the woman she’d grown up believing was her mother.

Then along came a stranger who knocked on the door one day last spring and changed everything.

It was a warm afternoon, and Laura had snuck out of the house to soak up the sunshine, sitting in a lawn chair tucked just behind the front porch. She often sat there on nice days, not wanting to be seen by passersby.