Connecting

by Wendy Corsi Staub

  Darrin looks up, his face ravaged with remorse. “I’m so 170 sorry for what I did to you. You had everything to live for— a husband, a daughter, a house, a job . . . you had a life.”

  Emotion clogs Calla’s throat; tears blind her eyes.

  So he did do it. He killed her.

  “If I hadn’t sent you that first e-mail, none of this would have happened. You’d still be alive. But—I don’t know . . . it was Valentine’s Day, and I was thinking of you, and . . . I just never meant to start anything. I never meant to hurt you. I never imagined where it would lead. Can you ever forgive me?”

  He reaches toward her with trembling, pleading hands. She inches closer to Jacy, a shudder running down her spine.

  “Darrin—”

  “No! No, don’t call me that!”

  “But—”

  “It’s Tom, Stephanie. Tom Leolyn. Remember? You’ll get used to it. I did.”

  Calla gulps, manages to say obediently, “Tom, you have to tell me what you did. You have to tell me why I should forgive you.”

  She feels Jacy’s arm tensing up on her shoulder.

  He doesn’t like this. He doesn’t want her to go along with it, to let Tom think she’s her mother.

  But somehow, she’s certain that the man kneeling before her isn’t going to hurt her. Not now.

  He already has.

  All he wants is forgiveness.

  “You know what I did,” he tells her, his voice laced with despair. “I should have left it all alone. All those years . . . you never would have had to know. But it was eating away at me. I couldn’t let you go on thinking she was dead, when all along she was right here.”

  “What? What are you talking about? Who was right here?” Calla asks, heart pounding, trying not to strangle on the lump of dread in her throat.

  But he’s too far gone to even hear her. Words are pouring out of him, a heartfelt confession Calla knows she has no business hearing, and yet . . .

  He blames himself for what happened to Mom.

  He pushed her down those stairs. Why?

  “I couldn’t carry that secret with me for the rest of my life, Steph. I couldn’t live with myself. I had to tell you, and I told myself I was willing to take the consequences. Now . . .

  look at me. I’ve paid the price. But so have you.”

  “What did you do, Tom?” Calla asks raggedly. “What did you do to me?”

  “I never meant for it to happen. I’ve always loved you. There was never a day that went by that I didn’t miss you, and wonder about you, and need you.”

  He’s sobbing now, reaching for her.

  Jacy steps between them. “No. Don’t touch her.”

  It’s as if Tom is noticing him for the first time, and his eyes narrow. “Who are you?”

  “She’s not who you think she is. Calla, come on. Let’s go.”

  “But—”

  “We have to go. I don’t like this.”

  Jacy grabs her arm and pulls her to the car, all but shoving her into the passenger’s seat before he jumps behind the wheel.

  As they pull away, she looks back at Darrin, standing alone.

  Then she turns on Jacy. “Why did you do that? He was telling us what he did to her!”

  “He thought you were her.”

  “So?”

  “I told you. It wasn’t safe.”

  He’s probably right.

  Looking back on what just happened, Calla knows it probably wasn’t smart to let Darrin believe she’s her mother.

  But she came here looking for answers. Darrin was giving them to her.

  “What more do you need to know?” Jacy asks. “He said he was responsible.”

  “But he didn’t say why.”

  “Does it matter?”

  Yes. It does.

  And she has the feeling she’ll be haunted by Darrin Yates’s ravaged face for a long, long time.

  But . . .

  Not Darrin Yates. Tom Leolyn. That was the name he gave. Apparently, it’s the name he’s been going by for all these years.

  Leolyn, as in . . .

  Leolyn Woods.

  Odelia was dozing in her chair when Calla came in the door, but she stirred enough to ask about her night.

  “It was great!” Calla told her, around an enormous yawn.

  She didn’t have to feign exhaustion—she was utterly depleted by that time—but when Odelia started asking questions, she did have to work up a convincingly enthusiastic, and pathetically generic, description of the evening she and Jacy had supposedly just shared.

  She talked about a punch bowl and crepe paper streamers and how a DJ would have been better than a live band. She said she and Jacy danced to a few slow dances, and she danced to the fast ones with her friends.

  Every single school dance she’s ever been to is the same old story. For all she knows, this one was drastically different, but she wouldn’t bet on it.

  Finally, carrying Gert up to her room with her as usual, she dropped into bed, exhausted, wanting only to sleep.

  But sleep refused to come.

  She’s been lying here for hours now, staring at the shadows on the ceiling as the kitten purrs peacefully at the foot of the bed. She can’t seem to stop her mind from working; she keeps going over and over what happened in Geneseo: the confrontation with the sinister Sharon Logan, and finding out that Darrin really did kill her mother, and wondering what she’s going to find out in Florida next weekend.

  At last, she feels sleep beginning to overtake her. Her eyelids close.

  One thing is certain: first thing tomorrow, she’s going to go next door to use the Taggarts’ computer and check the name “Tom Leolyn.”

  She burrows into her quilt, absently wishing she had on warmer pajamas. It’ll be good to get to Florida on Friday and feel warm again for a change.

  For the first time, she allows herself to think past her obsessive mission there and considers the fact that she’s about to step back into her old life. What will it be like, weather aside, to be back in Tampa?

  Again, she thinks of Kevin, missing him, remembering the good times . . .

  Hearing Gert’s startled meow and abrupt scrambling at the foot of the bed, Calla opens her eyes.

  What the—?

  Gert has fled the room.

  And Darrin—Tom—is standing across the room, looking directly at Calla.

  With a terrified scream, she bolts from the bed.

  “Stephanie!” he calls after her. “Wait!”

  “Gammy! Gammy!” Calla shrieks, and bursts into her grandmother’s room to find Odelia sound asleep.

  “Gammy!”

  “Wh-what?”

  “Wake up! Someone’s in my room!”

  “What?!”

  “Someone’s in my room!” Frantic, Calla looks around for a phone. “Call the police! Hurry!”

  “There’s no phone up here.” Odelia grabs the table lamp from the nightstand, casts the paper shade aside, and yanks the plug from the wall, then barrels fearlessly toward the hall with it, Calla dogging her heels.

  She pictures her grandmother hitting Darrin over the head with the lamp and can only hope he won’t retaliate. Remembering the scene with the intruder—who meant to kill her— she has to force herself not to turn and run right down the stairs and out of the house.

  Instead, she follows Odelia into her room . . . and stops short.

  “There’s no one here,” her grandmother says, and bends to peek under the bed.

  “Careful, Gammy!”

  “No one.” Odelia opens the closet. “No one here, either.”

  “But he was! He was here! I saw him!” He must have escaped from the room while she was across the hall. Either he ran off into the night, or he’s still lurking somewhere in the house.

  “Who was here?” Odelia asks.

  “Darrin Yates.”

  Her grandmother’s mouth tightens into a straight line.

  “I’m sure it was just a dream. A nightmare.�
��

  “No, Gammy, he was here. He must have . . .”

  Followed me home from Geneseo, is what she was going to say. But she can’t.

  Her grandmother doesn’t seem to notice. “It’s only natural that you’d be having nightmares, after what you went through a few weeks ago with that maniac who tried to kill you.”

  “But it wasn’t a nightmare. He was here.”

  Her grandmother hugs her. “I know how real it seems when you wake up from something like that—you think it really happened.”

  It did really happen, she thinks stubbornly. He really was here.

  Why?

  Maybe he’s lost his mind—he killed someone, he must be crazy, right?—and he really does think Calla is her mother.

  Maybe he’s come after her to kill her all over again.

  Or maybe he honestly believes she’s her mother’s ghost. He grew up here in Lily Dale and his parents are mediums— he’s no stranger to people seeing the dead; maybe he sees them himself.

  “I guess I don’t need this,” Odelia says, gesturing wryly with the table lamp.

  Calla says nothing.

  “Most people just use a flashlight to see their way around a dark house at night. Leave it to me to go overboard, huh?” Odelia chuckles, then looks closely at Calla. “I’m trying to make you laugh.”

  “Oh. Sorry.” She sighs. “Gammy, can you please check the house and make sure there’s no one here? I’m really freaked out about this. I can’t help it.”

  “Sure. Let’s do it together. Come on.”

  They go through the house from top to bottom. Gert turns up downstairs, looking agitated—at least, in Calla’s opinion.

  Odelia scoops her into her arms and carries her around, making a big show of checking behind doors and curtains, under the furniture, even inside the kitchen cupboards, at which point Calla realizes her grandmother is strictly humoring her.

  “There’s nobody here,” Odelia says. “Just you and me and Gert . . . and maybe Miriam. You don’t think she’s the one you saw?”

  Calla shakes her head. “No. I saw Darrin Yates.” Tom Leolyn. Her mother’s killer.

  “In a dream.”

  “I wasn’t dreaming. Gert was on my bed, and he scared her, and I opened my eyes and there he was.”

  “Gert is down here, though,” Odelia reminds her.

  “Now she is. She was on my bed. She ran away when he showed up.”

  Odelia says nothing, just pets Gert in her arms.

  I wish you could talk, Calla silently tells the kitten, who looks back at her with unblinking green eyes. You know he was there.You saw him, too.

  Whatever.

  The house really is empty, aside from Miriam, who flits somberly and silently from room to room with them.

  “Ready to go back up to bed?” Odelia asks around a monstrous yawn, after checking all the locks.

  “I guess so.”

  Maybe Odelia is right, and Darrin was never here at all.

  Calla was starting to drift off . . . maybe she did fall asleep, without even realizing it. And of course Darrin Yates was already on her mind.

  But what if Odelia is wrong?

  What if he really was here?

  What did he want with her?

  And what if he comes back?

  FIFTEEN

  Sunday, September 30

  7:30 a.m.

  Ordinarily at this hour on a Sunday morning, a ringing telephone would wake Calla from a sound sleep.

  Not today.

  She hasn’t slept all night. She just lay there, tense, keeping an eye out for Darrin Yates to prowl into her room again, maybe try to kill her like he killed her mother.

  Finally, at about six o’clock, she got up and came down to the living room.

  She’s still there, brooding on the couch, fingering the emerald bracelet she can’t take off her wrist, when the phone shatters the silence.

  She reaches for it immediately, thinking it must be Jacy. He said he’d call her this morning before leaving for his cross-country meet, and she has to tell him what happened last night in her room. Maybe he’ll agree with Odelia that it was just a nightmare.

  The more Calla thinks about it, the more inclined she is to believe it.

  Or maybe she just wants to talk herself into it.

  “Hello?” she whispers into the phone, not wanting to wake Odelia, asleep upstairs. Not that that’s likely. Her grandmother is such a sound sleeper, as she proved when Calla screamed for her in the night, that a tornado could lift the entire house around her and she’d probably still be there, snoring peacefully.

  “Calla? Are you okay?”

  “Evangeline?” Her heart sinks.

  “Yeah. I hated to call this early, but . . . where were you last night?”

  Uh-oh. Calla should have been ready for this. With all the tossing and turning she’s done, there was ample opportunity to have come up with a suitable story about why they weren’t at the dance.

  Her grandmother seemed to buy her account of the evening. Probably because she was so groggy at the time.

  Evangeline, however, sounds wide awake. And suspicious.

  “Why weren’t you and Jacy at the dance?”

  “We . . . decided not to go.”

  “But I saw his car parked in front of your house before you left, and he was all dressed up.”

  Calla cringes at the idea of Evangeline spying on Jacy out her window, even though it’s nothing new.

  “We were planning on going, but . . . I just couldn’t do it.”

  “Because of Blue?”

  “Not really. Because . . .”

  Okay, what can she possibly say that would make any sense at all?

  “Because of me?” Evangeline asks.

  Uh-oh. Definitely not that.

  But Evangeline gives her no time to deny it.

  “I knew it!” she exclaims. “I knew you felt bad about this! I told my aunt all along that I didn’t think you could do that to me. I mean, you’ve known from the start that I’m in love with Jacy.”

  “Come on, Evangeline . . . you’re not ‘in love’ with him.” Calla tries to keep the edge out of her voice, but she’s still upset about last night, and she just doesn’t have the patience for this. “It’s just . . . a crush.”

  “Ex-cuse me?” Her friend sounds indignant.

  Which, Calla realizes, is pretty unfair.

  “Love,” after all, is a strong word.

  Maybe if Calla weren’t so exhausted—physically, emotionally—she’d be able to go along with it. But the lack of sleep and all the stress are catching up with her, and she finds herself pointing out, “It’s not like you and Jacy are—or even were—you know, going out.”

  For a moment, Evangeline is silent.

  She must realize how ridiculous it is for her to expect Calla to stay away from Jacy because of her own crush—unrequited, at that.

  “Well, it’s not like you and Jacy are, either . . . is it?” Evangeline asks, not exactly sounding as if she’s seen the light.

  “I told you . . . we’re friends.”

  “I know what you told me, but I’m not sure I believe you. In fact, maybe I don’t. Are you?”

  “Am I what?”

  “Are you and Jacy really just friends, and that’s it?”

  Guilt twists Calla’s stomach into a leaden knot. “Evangeline . . .”

  “I’m right, then?” she asks shrilly. “There’s something going on between you two?”

  “It’s not what you think.”

  “I don’t even know what I think. What is it? Tell me.”

  Calla wearily examines her options, which are pretty straightforward.

  You can lie again . . .

  Or you can tell the truth.

  Not the whole truth, though.

  She can’t risk telling anyone about Geneseo. If it ever got back to her grandmother, well, Calla hates to think of how Odelia would react to that.

  All Calla can share is the tru
th about herself and Jacy: that they have feelings for each other.

  But if she does that, her friendship with Evangeline might crash and burn.

  Might?

  Evangeline’s made it pretty clear where she stands on this—fairly or not.

  “It’s not like you think,” Calla tells her. “I mean, it’s not like Jacy and I are going out or anything like that. We’re just . . .”

  “You said you were just friends.”

  Calla says nothing.

  “You’re more than that, aren’t you?”

  “Maybe. I don’t know.” Frustrated, Calla starts to rake a hand through her bangs, then encounters the hardened mass of goo that remains from last night’s hairdo.

  “Did you kiss him?”

  She can’t answer that. It will be too painful for Evangeline to hear it.

  But she doesn’t have to.

  She can hear the tremor in her friend’s voice as she says, “Whatever. I have to go.”

  “Evangeline—”

  There’s a click in her ear, followed by a dial tone.

  Hearing the groan of old pipes upstairs, Calla knows that Odelia is running water for a morning bath.

  Good.

  Time to escape the house and check out Leolyn Woods, even if she has to go alone.

  She doesn’t have much choice, with Jacy at a track meet and Evangeline apparently no longer speaking to her. There’s no one else she can ask.

  But if what happened last night in her room was just a nightmare—and she’s almost convinced now that it was— then there’s no reason, really, for her to be wary of going into the woods alone.

  And even if it wasn’t a nightmare, even if Darrin really did follow her here to Lily Dale, she still has to go. She has to.

  Maybe the circled X on the map has nothing to do with her, or her mother, or Darrin calling himself Tom Leolyn. Maybe it was pure coincidence that the book opened to that page when it fell. Maybe Aiyana wasn’t even responsible for the book falling off the table in the first place. Except . . .

  There are no coincidences, remember?

  Calla hurries up to her room and grabs a jacket and her iPod, along with the now overdue library book containing the marked map.

  “I’m going out for a walk, Gammy,” she calls, knocking on the bathroom door.

  “A walk? Right now?”