Connecting

by Wendy Corsi Staub

  “Why she came after you?”

  “No . . . Mom.”

  “Maybe we’ll never know.” Her father squeezes her shoulders. He hasn’t let go of her since he got here.

  “Ah think she’s just a crazy person,” Lisa drawls. “You know, one of those nuts who goes off the deep end.”

  Beside her, Kevin, who has been a quiet presence at Calla’s side, shakes his head. “People don’t just kill for no reason.”

  “Unfortunately, son, sometimes, they do,” Mr. Wilson says somberly, and Calla is reminded of something Odelia told her.

  “Evil reigns in some souls. We can’t explain it. We can only beware. ”

  “We’re just lucky Calla managed to get away,” Mrs. Wilson says, giving her another hug.

  “Yeah, thanks to your friend back in Lily Dale.” Dad looks at Calla. “Jacy, was it?”

  “Yeah. Jacy.” Thank God for Jacy.

  “You should thank him.”

  “I . . . I have.” She spoke to him only briefly, though. Just to tell him she was okay.

  “Are you sure?” Jacy had asked.

  “I’m sure.”

  “What happened?”

  “I’ll explain it when I get home, but . . . what you said about the water . . . me, almost drowning . . . that’s what happened, Jacy. In the pool.”

  “I told you to be careful.”

  “I was careful.”

  “No, you weren’t.”

  “No. I wasn’t. I was just so scared and I just had to get out of the house,” she agreed. “And I just had to know what happened to my mom.”

  “And now you do. So come home.”

  She promised him that she would. And then she made him promise not to say anything to Odelia just yet about what had happened.

  “I won’t. I won’t tell anyone.”

  As it turned out, Dad, whom the police called immediately after rescuing her, did get in touch with Odelia on his way to the airport. Gammy was reportedly horrified, of course, and wanted to jump right on a plane and come down here, but Dad convinced her to stay home.

  “I told Odelia we’ll both be back in Lily Dale in a couple of days,” Dad tells Calla now.

  “Both of you?” Mrs. Wilson asks, raising a professionally waxed, finely penciled eyebrow.

  Dad nods. “Both of us. To stay. For now, anyway.”

  “You’re not going back to California, then, Jeff?”

  “Nope. I’m never letting Calla out of my sight ever again.”

  “You can’t do that to her!” Lisa blurts out.

  Calla has to laugh at her tone and expression; even Dad flashes a smile.

  But he meant what he said. Calla can tell he’s shaken up by what happened.

  He’s not the only one.

  And he still doesn’t know about Darrin. Or that Calla first saw Sharon Logan back up north, in Geneseo. For all he knows, the woman was just lying in wait for her at the house.

  “How did she get here?” she asked Jacy on the phone earlier. “How did she even know I was here?”

  “You said something about it when we were on her porch last weekend. She must have heard you. And she was obviously trying to keep you from finding something incriminating there.”

  Something in the laptop?

  Could be.

  There’s still so much that isn’t clear. Sharon Logan didn’t immediately confess to Mom’s murder, but the police are questioning her right now, somewhere in this building. They said they found a key to the Delaneys’ house in her possession. She could very well have had it back in July, when Mom died.

  When Dad heard about that he remembered, looking back, that he misplaced his own keys for a day or two last spring in his office on campus. And when they turned up, they were in the pocket of a jacket hanging on the back of the door.

  “Your mother accused me of being my usual absentminded self,” he said. “But I know I checked that jacket pocket a couple of times. And suddenly they were there. Who knows? So many people come and go in the science building. . . . Anyone could have borrowed them, made a copy of the house key, then put them back.”

  Calla shudders just thinking about it.

  But if that explains how Sharon Logan got into the house to kill Mom, it still doesn’t explain why.

  “You look exhausted, sweetheart,” Mrs. Wilson observes now, as Dad finishes signing the paperwork at the sargent’s desk. “We have to get you back to our house and into bed. It’s late.”

  “But my father—”

  “Him, too. He can’t possibly sleep in that house after all that’s happened.”

  No. He can’t possibly. Maybe neither Dad nor Calla ever will again.

  She’s in no hurry to go back there, that’s for sure.

  But she has to.

  Riding with her father in the rental car on the way to the Wilsons’, she asks, “Dad? Can we stop at the house? Just so that I can get a few things I need?”

  He hesitates. “Okay. I guess I can use some stuff myself. I left California without a bag.”

  “What about all your stuff?”

  He shrugs. “What about it?”

  “Aren’t you going to go back and get it?”

  “Someday. It’s not important.”

  Calla nods, wondering what this is going to mean to her new life in Lily Dale. She won’t have time to get used to the idea, that’s for sure. Not with Dad flying straight from here to New York with her.

  The house feels more deserted than ever when they let themselves in the side door. Together, they walk through the empty rooms.

  It’s depressing, Calla thinks. It would be even if she hadn’t just been through an ordeal here.

  “Should we go upstairs and get our stuff?” Dad asks. “I don’t really want to stick around here.”

  “I don’t, either. Go ahead. I’ll be right up. I have to get a few things from down here.”

  Looking reluctant to let her out of his sight, her father goes upstairs.

  Calla immediately hurries to the changing room to retrieve her mother’s laptop from beneath the beach towels in the cabinet.

  She boots up the computer, and again it seems to take forever.

  “Come on,” she mutters. “Hurry!”

  “Dad?” she sticks her head out and calls up the stairs.

  “How much longer are you going to be?”

  “About five minutes.”

  Five minutes.

  That should be enough.

  At last, she logs back into her mother’s e-mail address and scrolls to the note Mom wrote after seeing Darrin in Boston.

  Calla picks up reading where she was when Mrs. Logan scared the living daylights out of her, creeping around downstairs.

  but I understand why you did what you did.You were a kid, and afraid, and you thought you were doing what was best for me, and for you, and for our child

  Calla gasps.

  Their child?

  Her mother’s . . . and Darrin’s?

  A floorboard creaks overhead. “Are you almost ready, Calla?” Dad calls.

  Is he even my real dad?

  “Almost,” she murmurs, clutching the edge of the counter, holding on for dear life as the room spins around her.

  What if Darrin is her father? What if— Wait a minute—he can’t be!

  No. Of course he can’t.

  Mom and Darrin hadn’t seen each other in over twenty years. Calla is only seventeen.

  Thank God . . .

  Thank God Dad is my father.

  For a moment there . . .

  But . . .

  Mom and Darrin did have a child together, and that means . . .

  Somewhere, Calla has a half sibling.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Having grown up a stone’s throw from the gates of Lily Dale in western New York, I’ve been familiar with the spiritualist colony for as long as I can remember. My earliest visits were for Sunday drives with my family along the tranquil shores of Cassadaga Lake. Back then, I was more intere
sted in not dripping my ice-cream cone all over the vinyl seats of our wood-paneled station wagon than I was in what went on beyond the mediums’ shingles.

  When I reached high school and college, my friends and I started going to the Dale for readings—mostly to find out what was going to happen in our futures. At that age, we— especially I—had little interest in contacting the dead. After all, I hadn’t really lost anyone back then, other than great-grandparents who had been closing in on their nineties when I was born. Yet the spirits always seemed to have messages for me anyway. Messages that often made perfect sense to my Sicilian grandmother, whom I now suspect might just possess more than the standard five senses herself—not that she’ll ever admit it! But it seemed that my grandmother’s mother—my maternal great-grandmother, who had died when my mother was a child—always came through to me. To this day when I go to Lily Dale, she tends to pop up in my readings. Call me crazy, but I almost feel as though I’ve gotten to know her.

  About a decade ago, going strong with my writing career, I decided Lily Dale would make a perfect setting for a novel. Though I had long since moved to the opposite end of New York State, I began visiting again at every opportunity, researching my books. Or so I thought.

  Coincidentally—or maybe not—that was also around the time I entered the heartbreaking cycle of losing people I loved. First it was my paternal grandfather, the patriarch of our family. He was a strong character, and I was extremely close to him. The loss—though he was in his mid-eighties and had been ill—was devastating to me. Six months later, my paternal grandmother followed, having died (we all believed) of a broken heart. Then, my mother-in-law passed away— breast cancer, and she was far too young. Next, unexpectedly, I lost a close friend. Then my own mother; breast cancer again, far too young again.

  With each loss, I found myself regarding my visits to Lily Dale and my readings with the mediums there in a whole new light. But I still wasn’t sure what—or whether—to believe. I, after all, was there in the name of research.

  A funny thing happened when I visited around the time I lost my grandfather. The medium—who of course was a complete stranger, with no advance knowledge of my loss— claimed to be bringing through my grandfather. Her physical description was pretty unmistakable. She said he had a message for my father, and it had something to do with the song “Zippity Doo Da.” She said he kept singing it, over and over, and wanted to know what it meant. I had no idea.

  I later asked my father, who prided himself on being the ultimate skeptic. He was taken aback. Turns out the song “Zippity Doo Da” did have personal significance between him and his late father—and no one other than the two of them really would have known about it. He was shaken but insisted that if it were really my grandfather, he would have come through with his name.

  “If he doesn’t come through with his name, I don’t believe it’s really him,” he said illogically, having disregarded the fact that the information I had been given was much more specific than a name.

  “Anyone could come up with a name,” I protested. The way I saw it, a charlatan could conceivably have somehow connected me to the late Pasquale “Pat” Corsi, but “Zippity Doo Da”? Even I hadn’t known about that.

  A year or so later, I went back to Lily Dale, to a different medium, for a group reading with my husband’s sister and brother. Right before we went I had lunch with my father, still a die-hard skeptic. He said he wouldn’t believe I’d heard from anyone on the Other Side unless they specifically came through by name. He was laughing about it, teasing me, really— but I knew darn well he meant it.

  That reading began with some information for my sister-in-law. Then the medium said abruptly, “I have a Pat or Patrick here, and he’s very persistent . . . ,” and she turned to me. “I think he’s here for you.” She went on to tell me that he had a message for “his son.” And the message was that he had to stop being such a “bullhead.” I had to laugh at that. On my father’s side of the family, people were always accusing each other of being bullheads. My father and grandfather were the two biggest offenders, and believe me, the shoe fit both of them!

  In any case, I went home and told my father that my grandfather had done just what he’d asked—he’d come through by name. Not even by his formal name, but by his family nickname. “Bah,” said the skeptic. “His name wasn’t Pat or Patrick. It was Pasquale.”

  “But everyone called him Pat—and Grandma called him Patrick!”

  “Bah. You told me last time that anyone could come up with a name—a name isn’t proof.”

  Oh, for Pete’s sake. He was still determined to be a skeptic.

  “What else did my father say?” my father asked me, after awhile.

  “He told you to stop being such a bullhead.”

  My father’s eyes widened and he thoughtfully rubbed his chin. Hmm. Maybe he did believe in this stuff, after all.

  As for me, the tide had begun to turn the day I heard “Zippity Doo Da” from the Other Side. Since then, too many inexplicable things have happened to me in Lily Dale for me not to have an open mind.

  I’ll tell you another ghostly tale from the Dale next time!

  CAN CALLA FINALLY SOLVE

  THE PUZZLE OF HER MOTHER’S HIDDEN PAST?

  READ ON FOR A SNEAK PEEK

  AT WHAT HAPPENS NEXT IN LILY DALE

  “How about that coffee now, Jeff?” Gammy asks, pushing her chair back from the table.

  “Sure. Thanks.”

  “And you need something sweet to go with it.”

  “You know me, Odelia.”

  She does know him. Somehow Calla is surprised to hear her grandmother acknowledge Dad’s little quirk: that he always likes to have a cookie or sweet roll with his coffee.

  But then, Dad was Odelia’s son-in-law long before he was Calla’s father. She probably knew him well, way back when.

  She used to visit them a lot in the old days, before the rift.

  “You know, Jeff,” Gammy bustles over to the counter, “you look light years younger without that gray beard. I’m glad you finally shaved it off.”

  “It wasn’t all gray.”

  “Mostly gray.”

  “Well . . . yeah.”

  “What made you decide to get rid of it? You’ve had it forever.” “Not forever. Only since the third grade.” Dad winks at Calla across the table as Odelia chuckles.

  He does look light years younger, Calla notices. His black hair is still slightly shaggy, but it actually has some shape to it now, thanks to some fancy LA barber.

  He’s also exchanged his wire- rimmed glasses for contact lenses, bringing out his dark brown eyes. His T-shirts haven’t been as ratty as usual, either.

  It’s so ironic. Mom would have been pleased to see him spruced up. She was always nagging him about the way he looked.

  Now that she’s gone, he’s grooming himself and dressing the way she wished he would have.

  Calla can’t help but wonder whether it’s just a sad coincidence . . . or whether the way he looks now has something to do with Mom being gone.

  Maybe he’s dating again already.

  Or maybe he just wants to.

  She can’t help but think again of Ramona.

  “You know, I never really spent much time worrying about stuff like that,” he says, mostly to her grandmother. “You know . . . the gray beard. It was just there. Like everything else. But lately, I’ve had a lot of time to think about things, the way they’ve been, and decided to try to change whatever needs changing.”

  “Like shaving.” Gammy shoots a glance in Calla’s direction.

  So does Dad. “Like a lot of things.”

  “Well, I’m really going to like having you around for a while, Jeff. We haven’t spent much time together since . . . Florida.”

  Florida. Gammy means the funeral. She flew down, of course, and stayed with them. Before that, Calla hadn’t seen her in years.

  That’s the other thing . . .

  The argument
that’s been haunting Calla since she arrived here, in a recurring dream. The scene is always the same: her mother and grandmother are emotional, angry, screaming at each other.

  Calla has no doubt that the argument actually took place years ago, though she’s not sure whether she witnessed it herself, or is psychically channeling it.

  “. . . because I promised I’d never tell . . .” Mom sobs.

  “. . . for your own good . . .” Odelia says, and then,“. . . how you can live with yourself . . .”

  Then one of them—Calla isn’t sure which— declares, with chilling certainty: “The only way we’ll learn the truth is to dredge the lake.”

  Now that she knows what she knows about Mom and Darrin’s past . . .

  Calla thoughtfully watches Odelia pour coffee, chatting easily with Dad.

  Does she know about the baby?

  And what does dredging the lake have to do with anything?

  Calla no longer smells lilies of the valley, but maybe Aiyana will come to her with some kind of message, like she has in the past.

  Abruptly, she pushes back her chair.

  Gammy asks, “Where are you going?”

  To find Aiyana.

  “Can I call Jacy?”

  Seeing the dubious expression on both their faces, Calla realizes she probably should have said she was calling Evangeline instead.

  But she and Evangeline aren’t exactly on friendly terms these days— all the more reason Dad’s stay next door will be awkward.

  Well, if not Evangeline, then Calla should have said she was calling someone else. Someone who wasn’t an accomplice in her mission to Geneseo and her lie to her grandmother.

  Now, whenever she’s with Jacy, the two of them, Gammy and Dad, are going to think she’s sneaking around behind their backs. Great.

  It’s her father who speaks up first. “Go ahead. Go call Jacy.”

  “Thanks.”

  As she leaves the kitchen, she realizes she was really asking her grandmother’s permission— not his. She’s been answering to Gammy ever since she moved here. Dad, living thousands of miles away, hasn’t had much say over what she does on a daily basis.