Connecting (17 page)

“We should really get going,” Calla tells Jacy, not wanting the two of them to walk out the door at the same time as Evangeline and Russell.

“Let me just snap a couple of pictures first, and you guys can be on your way.”

“You don’t mind, do you?” Calla asks Jacy.

“Of course he doesn’t mind,” Odelia answers for him as she rummages in a closet. “Homecoming is a big deal.”

Yeah. It is.

And they’re not really going.

“Ah, here it is.” Odelia pulls out a tr ipod.

“Gammy, you’re kidding, right?”

“Kidding about what?”

In the living room, Odelia sets up the tripod with considerable effort, then attaches a camera . . . and attaches an enormous lens to the front of it.

Calla looks at Jacy, who grins. “It’s fine. She’s sweet.”

“Okay, kids, all set! Candid shot. Say cheese!”

Calla tries to smile as a flash explodes in her face.

“Oops . . . lens cap!” Odelia giggles. “Sorry!”

She removes the lens cap and snaps some more.

Then she moves the tripod, poses them in front of the fireplace, moves the tripod again, tells Jacy to put his arm around Calla, and snaps.

“Great!”

She lugs the tripod across the room, poses them in front of the window, tells Jacy to pretend he’s helping Calla to put on her corsage, and snaps again. And again. And again.

“Gammy . . . ,” Calla says in a warning voice.

“You’ll thank me later, when you have photos of this night to treasure for the rest of your life.”

Calla thinks of her mother, going to the long-ago dance with Darrin. Was it Odelia who took the picture that’s in Calla’s bag at this very moment?

Before they can make an exit, Odelia carries her tripod to the front hall, poses them by the door, and tells them to gaze into each other’s eyes.

That does it.

“Gammy, we really have to go!”

“Just this last picture . . . look at Jacy and smile!”

Calla does, but her mouth and jaw feel as strained as his appear to be.

“Oh, I don’t like the light there,” Odelia says, tripod in hand. “Let me try it from over here.”

“I’m sorry,” Calla says to Jacy with bared, gritted teeth.

“It’s okay. She’s just being a grandma.”

Yeah. And he’s just being a sweetheart about the whole thing.

“Now, let me just take it from a different angle,” Odelia calls, removing her camera from the tripod and climbing up a few steps.

“Thank you for being such a good sport,” Calla tells Jacy through her clenched smile.

“No problem.”

“Do you two look beautiful together, or what?” Odelia glows. “Just one more, and then you can go have fun at your dance.”

If only.

Right about now, Calla would give anything if she and Jacy were actually going to do just that, like carefree, normal kids their age.

Normal . . .

God, I miss normal.

It’s such a cliche, not to have appreciated something until it’s gone.

At last, she and Jacy are freed into the brisk, moonlit night, with Odelia calling, “Good-bye! Have fun!” and finally, naturally, “Be careful!”

A glance at the Taggarts’ porch shows no sign of Evangeline and Russell, and Calla has to fight not to make a dash for the car at the curb.

Guilt, guilt, guilt.

Four tires and a steering wheel are about all Jacy’s car has in common with Blue Slayton’s BMW. This older sedan has duct tape on the side mirror bracket and smells faintly of mildew.

But Calla would rather be riding in this car with Jacy, even if they aren’t going to the dance, than in Blue’s car with him, on the way to homecoming.

More guilt. When she called Blue at the hospital today to see how he was, he told her again how sorry he was that he’d miss taking her to the dance. She had to say she was going with Jacy, though of course she was sure to make it sound as though he was doing her a friendly favor.

“That’s good,” Blue said, obviously not the least bit bothered. Maybe he doesn’t consider Jacy serious competition. Or maybe he’s just lost interest in Calla and doesn’t care either way.

“At least you get to go,” he told her. “I wouldn’t want both of us to have to miss it. Have fun.”

She was just glad he didn’t say to be careful.

As Jacy turns up Route 60 toward Fredonia and the entrance to the thruway, she heaves a sigh and leans back in the seat.

He glances at her. “Are you okay?”

“I just feel horrible, doing this to my grandmother. And to your foster dads.”

“I know. They were so great, making me buy the suit and everything . . . the only reason I agreed was because they said I’d need it anyway, for graduation in June.”

“What if they find out we didn’t really go tonight?”

“Peter and Walt?”

“And my grandmother. And everyone else,” she adds, thinking of Evangeline and Blue and Ramona.

“Let’s not worry about that now. You’re only doing what you have to do. I mean, it’s not like we’re out joyriding.”

Far from it.

The joyless drive to Geneseo takes almost two hours.

Calla spends most of it staring out the window, trying to figure out how, in the grand scheme of things, she wound up here.

Not just here with Jacy, tonight, but
here
—motherless, in upstate New York, with a newfound talent for seeing dead people.

If it weren’t for Jacy beside her—and a whole lot of makeup caked around her eyes—she’d let herself have a good cry over the loss of her old, blessedly
normal
life.

“We’re almost there.”

She looks up and sees that the landscape, which had transitioned to more urban and suburban around Buffalo and Rochester, is back to rural, and much flatter here than around Lily Dale.

Geneseo is yet another little town in the middle of nowhere, from the looks of things.

Gazing out at the silos and barns outlined against the night sky, Calla tries to zero in on her mind’s voice, as Patsy taught them in class that morning.

“Listen to your psychic senses,” she advised. “Be receptive to the energy. Look for information and answers to come to you from within.”

Does Geneseo hold the key to what happened to Darrin Yates . . . and Mom?

Yes. It does.

She can feel it. Suddenly, her entire body is tense with apprehension.

“I feel like there’s something here,” she tells Jacy. “Like we’re not wasting our time. What about you?”

“Yeah.” He nods. “I feel the same way.”

They pass SUNY Geneseo campus on the edge of town, and a residential neighborhood lined with century-old houses, many of them now obviously occupied by college students.

Kids are everywhere—alive and dead, from this era and eras past—walking with backpacks, cigarettes, groups of friends.

Main Street, in the heart of town, is dotted with towering oak trees and stretches for a few picturesque blocks, lined with bars, pizza and wing places, cafés and diners, and a couple of small stores.

In the center of it all, smack in the middle of the street, is a large, old-fashioned fountain.

“There’s the bear!” Calla exclaims, pointing at the patinated figure towering on a lamppost pedestal in the middle of the basin. “Jacy, you have to stop!”

He pulls into a vacant spot and she jumps out of the car before it’s in park, barreling right over to the fountain, looking for . . .

What?

God only knows.

It’s not as though she thought Darrin Yates would be standing right here on the street, waiting for her.

Still . . .

“It’s just a fountain,” she tells Jacy when he catches up to her, pocketing the car keys.

“Looks that way.”

“I can’t believe it. I really expected . . .”

“What?”

“I don’t know . . . too much, I guess.”

Why did she have to go and drag Jacy into this?

“Calla, we just got here,” he points out.

Yeah, and he went to a lot of trouble to get her here. She has to at least try to see it through, hopeless as it seems.

“I know. It’s just . . . the way that guy Bob talked about the fountain, I thought it meant something.”

“It does. It got us to Geneseo, right?”

“Maybe we shouldn’t have come.”

In silence, Jacy reaches out and squeezes her hand.

Shoulder to shoulder, they gaze up at the bronze bear in the moonlight.

“What do you think we should do?” Calla asks Jacy, hoping he’ll suggest that they drive back to Lily Dale in time for the last dance at homecoming.

“What do you want to do?”

She hesitates. This seemed like such a good idea when they talked about it last night.

Now . . . not so much.

What does she want to do?

Go home, that’s what.

Her feet hurt in these shoes, and she’s cold, and . . .

And longing for
normal
.

Longing to be held in Jacy’s arms, swaying on a dance floor. That’s what a girl her age should be doing with a cute guy on a Saturday night, right? Not looking for her mother’s killer in the middle of nowhere.

Killer? You’re positive Darrin killed her, then?

It’s not something she’s allowed herself to really think about lately. It’s too painful to think of what happened to Mom on that awful day at the top of the stairs.

Now, she beckons the vision, tries with every ounce of concentration to focus on what her mind’s voice is telling her.

And it’s just not clear.

Logically, she should believe Darrin did it. Who else is there?

Every sign she’s been given points in his direction.

Maybe you just don’t want to believe it because it’s too horrible to
think she was killed by someone she once loved.

Why would Calla even doubt, though, that he’s capable of murder?

Both Odelia and Ramona said Darrin was trouble. He was using a fake name when Calla met him in Florida, and there was something furtive about the way he and her mother were acting that day.

How difficult should it be for an intuitive person like Calla to put two and two together?

It shouldn’t be difficult at all, and yet . . .

I’m just not sure.

If only she could find Darrin, come face-to-face with him, she’d know for sure.

“Okay,” she tells Jacy decisively, “let’s go look for him.”

“Did you bring that snapshot of your mother and Darrin?” “It’s in my purse—I left it in the car.”

“Let’s go show the picture to some people. This is a small town. If he’s been here, or lives here, maybe someone will recognize him.”

“The only thing is, the picture’s so old,” she points out as they scuff through the dry leaves on the sidewalk. “I don’t know if it’s going to do any good.”

“
You
recognized him from it,” Jacy points out firmly, and gives her hand a reassuring squeeze. “Come on. It’s worth a try.”

FOURTEEN

Geneseo, New York
Saturday, September 29
10:16 p.m.

Calla is more ready than ever to call it a night.

Even if they left now, though, they wouldn’t make the last dance.

What a waste of a potentially good—potentially great— evening.

Nobody she and Jacy have asked, mostly college students who are either hanging out or working at the businesses on Main Street, has ever seen Darrin Yates before.

“I guess old Red Beard Bob has a lot of work to do on his psychic abilities,” she tells Jacy as they shuffle down the street again.

“Not necessarily. Maybe we shouldn’t have interpreted his vision so literally. Maybe there’s another statue with a bear in it, in some other town . . . some other country, even. You just don’t know.”

“No, but I really felt like there was something here when we got here.”

“So did I. The funny thing is, I still do.”

So does Calla. That’s the hard part.

She can’t seem to ignore the gnawing idea that this place has some connection to Darrin.

Maybe he’s not here now, but that doesn’t mean he never was.

Regardless, she’s exhausted and her feet are being tortured by these shoes, and it’s really time to go, she concludes as they pass a couple of modern-day hipsters who are very much alive, and a 1960s hippie clad in a headband and bell-bottoms who obviously is not. He gives Calla a transparent peace sign before drifting into oblivion.

“Let’s go, Jacy. Really.”

“Let’s just try this last place,” Jacy suggests, pointing at a small café called Speakeasy, “and then we’ll head back.”