Discovering

by Wendy Corsi Staub

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.

  Old habits die hard.

  All her life, she had been teased about living in the neon purple house. As if the paint job had anythin
g to do with her.

  “It’s my mother’s favorite color,”she would explain, as if that made it better, somehow.

  But it beat the truth: that Mother had always believed for some reason that the purple would ward off evil spirits.

  She had always been superstitious—not like regular people, who might not walk under a ladder or sit in the thirteenth row on a plane.

  No, she was superstitious to the extreme, paranoid about everything—just plain crazy, Laura eventually realized.

  That’s why she had escaped every chance she got—even if just to sit outside in the sun and pretend, for a while, that she was a normal person living a normal life.

  If she hadn’t been out there on that beautiful day last spring, she never would have overheard the conversation between Mom and the man who came to the door.

  She never would have discovered that she, Laura Logan, wasn’t the daughter of a crazy woman and the nameless, faceless man who had supposedly run off and left her mother before Laura was even born.

  Her real father was the stranger on the porch.

  He introduced himself as Tom Leolyn and said he had given up his newborn daughter to an illegal adoption ring more than twenty years ago. Her real mother had been told the baby hadn’t survived.

  They were just kids at the time, he said. He hadn’t known any better. It had all been a terrible mistake.

  Laura sat in stunned silence, listening—and waiting for the inevitable violent reaction from Mother.

  Who really wasn’t her mother at all.

  For Laura, that discovery was the answer to her most fervent prayer—that she would somehow find a way to escape her oppressive existence.

  Father Donald, the kindly parish priest in town who had befriended her when she was a forlorn little girl, had always promised that her prayers would be answered one day, if she only had faith.

  Faith, and hope. Those were the two things he wanted her to have. She clung to both in all those miserable years of abuse at the hands of a mentally ill woman who should never have been allowed to raise a child.

  That, Laura realized as she sat there eavesdropping, must have been why Sharon Logan had resorted to illegal adoption. No one in their right mind would entrust a baby to her.

  “I’ll need to think about this,”she told Laura’s real father that day at her doorstep, after a long silence. “Tell me where to reach you.”

  Laura—who had witnessed a lifetime of ranting fits over the slightest mishap— was shocked by the response.

  “I’ll give you my phone number,”Tom began, but Mother interrupted him.

  “I’ll take that, and your address, too. So that I know where you are, when it comes time to find you.”

  It was an odd thing for her to say, Laura thought.

  But then, Mother was nothing if not odd.

  The stranger gave her his address, somewhere in Maine, and went on his way, and Mother never said a word about it.

  Laura waited until Mother left the house to run errands, then searched the house until she found—under Mother’s mattress—the papers that proved the stranger correct.

  Standing there holding the proof that she had been bought, as an infant, like a piece of livestock, Laura sobbed.

  Not sorrowful tears.

  Tears of sheer relief.

  And the blanket of guilt that had smothered her for as long as she could remember—guilt for not loving her own mother— began to lift at last.

  Now it all made sense.

  Now she was free to run away and never look back.

  She huddles deeper into the blanket, trying to forget what she’d had to do in order to make that happen.

  Stealing all that money from Mother was probably wrong.

  Probably?

  Of course it was.

  But it was her only option. She had no money to her own name. Mother demanded that she hand over every cent she earned at the data-entry job she’d been working since high school graduation. Laura had always been well aware that all that cash was hidden around the house. Mother was much too paranoid to keep it in a bank.

  When she helped herself to thousands of dollars from the stash, Laura reminded herself that she was only reclaiming what was rightfully hers.

  Without it, she couldn’t have fled to New York City, found an apartment, bought a decent wardrobe so that she could find work.

  Before she left, she went to see her old friend, Father Donald.

  “I’m leaving,”she told him. “Please don’t tell my mother if she asks.”

  He nodded with understanding. “Where are you going, child?”

  “To New York City. I have to get away from her. I just found out—she’s not even my real mother.”

  He raised an eyebrow, but didn’t ask for an explanation, and she didn’t offer one. The less he knew, the better.

  “I just wanted to thank you for all you’ve done for me,”she told him, “And to say good- bye.”

  He hugged her, then blessed her, praying over her with a gentle hand on her forehead.

  She went into the confessional on her way out. It made her feel a little better about stealing the money.

  Still, it’s bothered her ever since— and not just because of a guilty conscience.

  For all she knows, Mother reported the theft to the police. They could very well be looking for her now.

  She was convinced Mother herself was looking for her until the day she read about Sharon Logan being jailed for murder in Florida.

  That doesn’t mean Laura won’t be found by the authorities and arrested for stealing the money. Or, at the very least, stripped of the fragile new life she’s attempting to build here, three-hundred- odd miles and a world away from Geneseo.

  That can’t happen.

  She can’t let that happen.

  For the first time, she’s living life on her own terms.

  Sleep. . . . I need to sleep.

  But it’s so cold.

  Shivering even beneath the weight of two blankets, Laura contemplates getting out of bed to turn up the thermostat. It was already on seventy-two when she went to bed, though. How much warmer can she set it?

  The strange thing is . . .

  It doesn’t feel like seventy-two in this room. More like a good thirty or forty degrees colder.

  Curling onto her side in an attempt to use her own body heat for warmth, Laura spots something a few feet away from her.

  Not something.

  Someone.

  A male figure is standing in the shadows near the foot of the bed.

  Even as Laura lets out a blood- curdling scream, she recognizes him.

  It’s her father.

  Her real father: Tom Leolyn.

  Paralyzed with fear, she stares at him.

  How did he get in?

  What does he want?

  Is he here to hurt her?

  No. He can’t be.

  Somehow, she senses that he doesn’t mean her any harm.

  But that doesn’t make it any less disturbing to find someone standing over your bed in the middle of the night.

  Summoning every shred of courage she possesses, Laura manages to speak at last. “Wh-what are you doing here?”

  “She’s looking for you.”

  “But—she’s in jail.”

  “No.”He shakes his head vehemently. “Not—”

  The piercing ring of the telephone shatters the night.

  Laura instinctively looks toward the receiver on her bedside table.

  As she reaches for it, she glances back at her midnight visitor.

  He’s gone.

  How can it be?

  She flips on the lamp, looks wildly around the room, leans over the edge of the bed to see if he’s dropped to the floor; looks under the bed to see if he’s hiding there.

  No sign of him.

  And the phone is still ringing.

  You must have been dreaming. You fell asleep without realizing it, and you dreamed he was here.

  Of
course.

  That makes perfect sense.

  Rather, it would make perfect sense . . . if she hadn’t felt as though she were wide awake the whole time.

  Well, that’s how it is with some dreams, she reminds herself as she picks up the phone at last. They seem so real you could swear they actually took place.

  She looks at the Caller ID window. It’s a local 212 number.

  “Laura, it’s Liz,”a voice says in her ear. “Are you okay?”

  Liz . . . ?

  “I heard you scream!”

  Oh. Liz Jessee. The landlady.

  Her apartment is right across the hall from Laura’s.

  “I’m fine. I just saw . . . a roach.”

  “A roach! Oh, no! Please tell me you didn’t.”

  But then Laura would have to come up with some other reason she’d be screaming in the night.

  “It’s New York,”she murmurs. “These things happen.”

  “Not in my building.”

  As Liz Jessee assures her that she’ll send an exterminator to take care of the problem first thing in the morning, Laura looks again at the spot where she saw the stranger who claimed to be her father.

  Still empty.

  Of course it is.

  And, she realizes, the room is comfortably warm now.

  Now?

  It was always warm.

  Of course it was.

  Because she dreamed about the chill, and she dreamed about the intruder.

  Just as she keeps dreaming about the argument between those two women, and the little Victorian cottages by an unfamiliar lake, and the fragrant white flowers.

  TWENTY-ONE

  Lily Dale

  Friday, October 12

  12:33 a.m.

  “Goodnight, Odelia. Thanks for everything!”Ramona’s voice carries from the front hall up to where Calla sits, knees bent and back against the wall, in the shadows at the top of the stairs.

  “I’m the one who should be thanking you! If we play poker every night like this, I’ll be able to afford a fancy vacation this winter.”

  “If we play poker every night like this, I’ll have to stay in your house while you’re on your fancy vacation this winter,”Ramona returns with a laugh, “because I’ll be living out on the streets.”

  “I’ll be right there with you,”Dad says. “I don’t know why I thought it would be a good idea to play poker with a bunch of psychics. All I’ve got left are the clothes on my back.”