Believing

by Wendy Corsi Staub

  “I can help you if you want.”

  Yeah, I wish. If only Bombeck had assigned Jacy to be her study partner, instead of Willow. Maybe she can suggest that to—

  No. She’d better not mess with Mr. Bombeck. He’s been human enough so far, but she can tell there’s a steely core underneath. Besides, he said he’d tell Willow to call her after school, so she must already know about being assigned as Calla’s study partner. If Calla backs out now, Willow might think she doesn’t want to work with her because of Blue.

  Which is kind of true, she admits to herself.

  “I was looking for you during lunch,” she tells Jacy. “Where were you?”

  “Outside. I took a walk in the woods.”

  “Really?” She checked the student handbook yesterday and found out the school has a closed lunch rule, meaning you have to stay in the cafeteria. Or so she thought. “So we’re allowed to go outside, then? During lunch?”

  “No.” He shrugs. “What did you want to talk to me about?”

  She looks around, not wanting anyone to see them together.

  Anyone? You mean Evangeline.

  “Calla?”

  She likes the way Jacy says her name. Some people around here, with their Great Lakes accents, make the a’s flat and nasal, drawing it out into Key-alla.

  Not Jacy.

  Who, by the way, is still waiting for her to say something.

  “Uh, sorry . . .” She tries to remember what it was she wanted to talk to him about.

  Oh. Right. That.

  Instantly, she’s plunked right back down to grim reality.

  “Yesterday you said something about my being gifted. Well, not in those words, exactly, but . . . you know what I mean.”

  He nods. “I know.”

  “Can we—” Again, she looks around to see who might be eavesdropping.

  The hallway is filled with the sound of slamming lockers and chattering voices and people are scurrying around, not seeming to pay any attention to Calla and Jacy. Still . . .

  “Are you . . . ,” she begins again, and then, “I mean, do you want to . . . ?”

  “I’ll walk home with you. Yeah. Come on.”

  “Good thing you’re a mind reader.” She grins.

  Again, he doesn’t.

  And this time, it occurs to her that it’s because he doesn’t think she’s joking. Around here, it seems, some people don’t take things like mind reading lightly.

  Calla just hopes Jacy can’t read all her thoughts. Especially the ones about him.

  They head down the stairs and swing by her locker so she can get her stuff. As they step outside into an unexpectedly balmy breeze, Calla notices that the shifting sky is ominously dark in the west, beyond the lake, and wind-driven ripples cover the surface of the gray-black water.

  “It’s going to storm,” she comments, reminded of Florida in the late afternoons.

  Jacy shakes his head. “No. It’ll pass.”

  “How do you know?”

  He ignores the question and asks one of his own as they head down the path toward the road back to Lily Dale. “So what’s been going on?”

  “I don’t even know where to start.” She searches her memory. “I guess the first thing was the clock. This digital one that was in my room—my mother’s old room. When I first got here, it was flashing.”

  “Because the time wasn’t set?”

  “Right. Exactly. I didn’t bother to set it, but then I woke up in the middle of the night and it said 3:17 a.m.”

  “So, someone set it while you were sleeping?”

  “My grandmother said she didn’t. And it started happening every night. I’d go to bed with the clock flashing, and I’d wake up and it was 3:17. Every single night.”

  “Maybe you were dreaming.”

  “I wasn’t,” she says firmly. “Not about waking up. But I was definitely dreaming before I woke up. The same exact dream, every night. It was about my mother and my grandmother, and this argument they had when I was really little. After that, they never saw each other again.”

  “What was it about?”

  “I don’t know, really. They kept saying something about dredging the lake.”

  Both she and Jacy glance again at the dark water. What secrets does it hold?

  Calla shudders and turns away, going on with her story. “I was starting to get really freaked out, so I unplugged the clock, and . . . this is the really creepy part . . . it happened even then.”

  “It was unplugged, and it was showing the time anyway?”

  “3:17. Yeah. So I threw the clock away, and bought a new one, and . . .” She wonders how she’s going to tell him this without sounding like she’s really lost it.

  But she doesn’t have to, because he says it for her. Like he already knew.

  “And it happened anyway.”

  “Yeah. And I found out that spirit energy can supposedly tap into appliances and, you know, manipulate electronic energy. Feed off of it or something.”

  It’s Jacy’s turn to nod. Obviously, this isn’t news to him.

  “The thing is . . . last weekend, when I was at Wal-Mart buying the new clock, this green shamrock bowl somehow fell off a shelf by itself and broke into a million pieces. And then I saw this woman again. This Spirit,” she remembers to say, instead of ghost. Here in Lily Dale, people like to say Spirit. With a capital S. “I think she made the bowl break to get my attention because . . .” She takes a deep breath. “This is going to sound far-fetched.”

  Jacy shrugs.

  “Okay . . . green shamrock bowl. 3-17. That’s not just a time, it’s a date. March seventeenth. Saint Patrick’s Day. That’s what this was all about. I realized I was supposed to be remembering something that happened on Saint Patrick’s Day. Does that make sense?”

  “Yeah,” Jacy says simply, and she wants to hug him. “What happened on March seventeenth?”

  “This man came to visit my mom. I remember the day because she was baking Irish soda bread, and she burned it. She never made careless mistakes like that. She must have been thrown off by seeing him, or maybe something he said, or something he gave her—he had an envelope with him.”

  “What was in it?”

  “I have no idea. I thought it must be work stuff, but it turned out he wasn’t a coworker after all. And his name isn’t really Tom, either. The other thing is, he was whistling this tune. I had never heard it before, but I heard it again, when I got to Lily Dale. It’s the same song that plays in this old jewelry box I found in my mother’s room.”

  Jacy’s black eyebrows raise, just a little. He’s not the kind of guy to react to anything in a big way, Calla’s learning. But he looks surprised.

  “And in the middle of the night last Monday—Tuesday morning, really—at 3:17—it opened by itself,” she hurries on, “and the music woke me up, and I found my mother’s emerald bracelet in there, and it couldn’t have been there, because it fell into her grave at her funeral and I lost it.” She breaks off, breathless, wondering if Jacy thinks she’s crazy. Sometimes, lately, she thinks that herself.

  “What about the woman you saw that day, when the bowl broke?” Jacy asks. “Who was she?”

  “I have no idea. But this word—Aiyana—popped into my head when I saw her. Does that mean anything to you? Is it a name or something?”

  “It can be. It’s Native American. It means ‘forever flowering.’ ”

  Her jaw drops, and she remembers the distinct floral smell that sometimes inexplicably fills her room back at Odelia’s house, and infiltrated the bathroom the other night, when she saw that strange disembodied shadow. The scent belongs to lilies of the valley. Mom’s favorite flower.

  “I think that’s the woman’s name,” Calla tells Jacy. “She keeps popping up . . . even before I came to Lily Dale. And she looks beautiful and exotic, like you.”

  It takes her a second to realize she just told Jacy she thinks he’s beautiful. Oops.

  Open mouth, insert foot, once ag
ain.

  Not that she doesn’t have more important things to worry about right now.

  She says hastily, “I mean, she looks like she might be Native American. Like you.”

  “Where have you seen her? Other than Wal-Mart, I mean.”

  “At my mother’s funeral back in Florida was the first time. Only then, I thought she was real. I mean . . . alive. You know—not in Spirit. And I saw her a few times around my grandmother’s house, and by the lake. I think she’s been trying to give me messages. About my mom.”

  He’s quiet for a minute, just walking along beside her, like he’s lost in thought.

  Then he asks, “Did you ever hear of a spirit guide?”

  Calla nods. “Yeah. They’re kind of like guardian angels. Right?”

  “Kind of,” Jacy agrees.

  “Do you think Aiyana is my spirit guide?”

  “She may be.”

  “That’s it.” I know it.

  He knows it, too, she thinks, watching Jacy bend to pick up a pebble and then resume walking.

  “Do you think I’m the only one who sees her?” she asks him.

  “Depends. Sometimes guides come through clairvoyant vision, sometimes they actually materialize in human form, or sometimes we can only hear or feel them. Sometimes they can even be an animal, or a symbol.”

  “Do you have a spirit guide?”

  “I have a lot of them. We all do. Everyone has them, but not everyone can perceive them. Some are permanently with us from the moment we enter the earth plane until we leave it, and others come and go when we need them.”

  From the moment we enter the earth plane.

  His phrasing strikes Calla as typical of the way people speak here in Lily Dale. Most places, people would just say from the moment we’re born.

  “Are your guides . . . men?” she asks him. “Women? Boys? Animals? Symbols?”

  “All of the above, depending on what kind of guidance I need. They show themselves to me as they want to be seen, based on where I’m at.”

  “What do you mean?”

  He hesitates, as if he isn’t quite willing to open up with personal information.

  Sure enough, when he does speak, he turns the reference back to her.

  “Like, with you, you just lost your mom, so maybe—and I don’t know for sure—Aiyana represents maternal energy and that’s why she appears to you in the form of a woman.”

  She considers that. It makes sense. And seems comforting, in some bizarre way.

  “Spirit guides are here to protect us, right?” she asks Jacy.

  “To guide us.” Jacy is choosing his words carefully. “It’s up to us to decide what to do, though. They aren’t responsible for our choices. We are.”

  “Right. I read that somewhere. And it said—in this book I got from the library here—that if you need their help but aren’t even aware that you do—or that they exist in the first place—they’ll try to get your attention somehow. What I don’t get is, how can they warn someone who doesn’t even know they exist?”

  “They’ll try to make you aware, maybe try to warn you somehow if they think you’re in danger, but it’s up to you to be receptive and heed the warning.”

  “Do you think Aiyana is trying to warn me about something? Or maybe give me some kind of message?”

  “What do you think?” Jacy bends his arm to toss the stone toward the lake.

  Calla hesitates, watching it skip several times across the gray surface of the water.

  If she lets Jacy in on her secret suspicion about her mother’s death, there will be no going back.

  Out on the lapping water, the stone disappears from sight and sinks into the murky depths.

  “I think she wants me to know about something that has to do with my mother,” Calla tells Jacy. “With how she died, or . . . was killed.”

  Jacy stops walking and looks at her.

  Then he nods slowly.

  He gets it, Calla thinks, and on the heels of that, so maybe I’m right about Mom being murdered—and Darrin having something to do with it.

  Just inside the wrought-iron gate to Lily Dale, Jacy points at a two-story cottage similar to most of the others here, with an architectural style typical of the eighteenth century.

  “That’s where Paula lives,” he tells Calla.

  “Do you know her?”

  “This is a small town. You get to know everyone, really fast.”

  “Oh. Well . . . thanks for walking with me, and for . . . listening.”

  He nods.

  “Jacy,” she says, as he turns to head toward home.

  “Yeah?”

  “What do you think? About all the stuff I told you.” He was so quiet while she spoke, but she got the impression he was listening intently, and processing all of it.

  “I’m not sure,” he says slowly, tilting his head.

  “But do you think there might be something to it?” Calla presses him. “Do you think Darrin had something to do with my mom’s death?”

  “I’m not sure. But we’ll have to talk about it some other time. I’ve got to go get ready for track practice, and you’re babysitting right now anyway.”

  What is there to say to that except, “Yeah, you’re right. Thanks.”

  Resisting the urge to watch him walk on down the road, Calla turns back toward Paula’s house.

  “Hey, Calla?” she hears him call, and spins around. She finds him walking backward, gesturing at the sky, which is solidly blue again. “Told you the storm was going to pass.”

  She smiles. “Yeah, you’re right, it did . . . this time.”

  But she has a feeling, as she turns back to Paula’s house, that there will be plenty of other storms to come around here.

  The front yard is overflowing with a riot of blooming flowers, and there are statues of garden gnomes, a little wishing well, a bird bath, a weather vane, and a wrought-iron stand holding a nylon banner dotted with brightly colored falling leaves and the words Welcome Autumn.

  Back in Calla’s Florida neighborhood, sprawling, modern homes were fronted by plain old grass, ornamental shrub borders, and maybe a tastefully placed palm tree or two. There was a definite less-is-more attitude where landscaping is concerned.

  Here, it’s obvious that more is more.

  Paula’s busy yard mirrors many others in the Dale, and Calla finds the overall effect strangely conflicting. Almost as if all that over-the-top outdoor cheerfulness is supposed to offset the genuinely haunted houses beyond—which, with their Victorian architecture and sometimes ramshackle state, actually tend to look like haunted houses.

  This one is painted gray, with trim in various faded shades of green. Like many houses in the Dale, its roof slopes upward, then flattens off at the top—a mansard roof, Odelia calls it. It has old-fashioned scalloped shingles and a gingerbread porch with several spindles missing. There’s a little red tricycle parked beside the door, and a shingle above it that reads MARTIN DRUMM,CLAIRVOYANT.

  Calla climbs the steps and rings the bell.

  Almost immediately, the door is thrown open by a little boy with white-blond hair and solemn eyes. “I’m Dylan,” he announces. “You’re Calla.”

  She smiles. “Right. Nice to meet you, Dylan.”

  He glances over his shoulder and murmurs something.

  “I’m sorry, what did you say?”

  He looks back at Calla. “Oh, I wasn’t talking to you. I was talking to Kelly.”

  “Kelly?”

  “That’s his imaginary friend,” a woman informs Calla as she hobbles into the hall on crutches behind the boy. “You know how kids are, right? Anyway . . . hi, I’m Paula.”

  She’s heavyset but attractive, with short blond hair and a friendly smile.

  Calla wonders about Dylan’s imaginary friend. She does know how kids are. And anywhere else in the world, she’d assume an imaginary friend was just that.

  Here in Lily Dale, however, she’s not so sure.

  “Can you believe I did
this to myself?” Paula asks, gesturing at her bandaged right ankle. “I tripped over my younger son’s toy fire truck and went flying. What a klutz. Come on in.”

  Stepping into the house, Calla can immediately see how that could have happened. There’s stuff everywhere—toys underfoot and on every surface, along with the usual household clutter. A red-cheeked toddler with a headful of blond curls rolls into the living room on a scooter, calling, “Hi! Hi! Hi!”

  “That’s Ethan,” Paula says. “He loves people.”

  She’s not kidding. Ethan rolls right over to Calla’s feet and throws his arms around her legs. “Hi!”

  She laughs. “Hi, Ethan.”

  “So,” Paula says, “what I basically need you to do is keep the kids busy so that I can try and start dinner and my husband can concentrate on his work upstairs. He’s writing a book.”

  “Really? That’s great.” Out of the corner of her eye, she watches Dylan whisper something to an invisible companion.

  “Yeah. It will be if he ever gets his research done. That’s not easy with two little guys in the house, but he’s plugging away. I figured you can take them out back to the picnic table since it’s so nice out. Maybe play a game or something.”

  “Do you like to play games?” Dylan asks Calla, tugging on her arm.

  “I love to play games.”

  “Did you ever play Candyland? It has my name in it on the box. D-Y-L-A-N. That’s why I love it so much.”

  She grins. “Sure. I love Candyland, too, even though it doesn’t have my name in it.”

  “Candyland!” Ethan echoes, clapping his chubby little hands.

  And off Calla goes with them, relieved to have found a reprieve—at least a temporary one—from all that’s been troubling her here in Lily Dale.

  The sun-splashed afternoon with Paula’s kids was so pleasant that Calla finds herself feeling almost lighthearted when she’s back home at her grandmother’s house.

  Odelia has made a delicious eggplant lasagna. As they eat, Calla tells her about school and her afternoon babysitting, careful to leave out her walk home with Jacy. They’re both polishing off their second helpings of lasagna when the phone rings.

  “It’s for you. Willow York,” Odelia tells Calla, passing the receiver to her.