Believing

by Wendy Corsi Staub

  “Oh . . . hello? Willow?”

  “Hi, Calla. Mr. Bombeck wants me to help you with the math. Are you available tonight?” She doesn’t sound particularly friendly, but she’s not unfriendly, either. More like . . . briskly efficient. Like someone taking a phone reservation from a stranger.

  “I think so. We’re eating right now, but I’ll be finished soon.”

  “Okay. Can you come to my house at seven o’clock?”

  “That’s fine.”

  “Good. See you then.”

  She hangs up to find Odelia watching her, wearing a pleased expression. “I didn’t know you were friendly with Willow. You’re really creating quite the social circle around here, aren’t you?”

  Calla thinks about telling her it’s just a study session. Then again, why burst Odelia’s bubble?

  After dinner, Odelia disappears behind closed doors with a newly widowed elderly client. The phone rings as Calla’s washing the dishes.

  Maybe it’s Jacy, she thinks fleetingly, before dismissing that idea. He said they’d talk tomorrow.

  It’s probably just someone looking for a reading with her grandmother. Calla plucks her hands from the hot, greasy orange dishwater; rinses them quickly; and picks up the phone.

  “Yes, hello. Calla Delaney, please?” The voice in her ear is male, formal, and asking for her.

  Who can it be? Definitely not Jacy or Blue.

  Why would a man be calling her?

  Oh no . . . Dad!

  What if something happened to him in California?

  Please, no . . . no . . . don’t do this to me. I can’t bear it.

  SIX

  “This is Calla.” Her voice trembles and she grips the counter with one hand to steady—and prepare—herself.

  The lasagna roils in her stomach as she wonders if this is what the spirits were warning her about all along.

  Is she an orphan?

  “I’m from the AP in New York, calling about the Columbus Dispatch piece.”

  The Columbus Dispatch piece . . . the Columbus Dispatch piece . . .

  The words are in English, but they might as well be in some exotic foreign tongue for all Calla comprehends. But the most important meaning is crystal clear: this isn’t about her father. Not if this person is calling from New York . . . and the AP? That makes no sense whatsoever.

  Unless he’s calling to take back her AP math status. Can they do that? And so soon?

  “I know I’m having a hard time in math, but it’s only been two days—one, really—and I’m going to work with my study partner tonight, so I hope you’ll give me a chance to stay in the program . . .” She trails off, deciding not to tack on a pretty please?

  Maybe she should have, though, because the man is silent.

  “Hello?” she says after a minute, wondering if he’s hung up on her.

  “Oh!” he says suddenly, and starts to chuckle. “AP. You thought I meant Advanced Placement program!”

  “Didn’t you?” she asks, confused—not to mention resenting the fact that he’s laughing at her, even as she’s relieved that whatever he’s calling about, it’s definitely not bad news about her father, because he wouldn’t find the least bit of humor in that. “What are you talking about, then?”

  He gives a little sigh the way people do after a good laugh, then says in a regular voice, “I’m from the Associated Press.”

  Like that makes any more sense than the Advanced Placement program.

  “You must have the wrong number,” she says, before remembering that he asked for her by name and . . . oh!

  It’s a newspaper: Columbus Dispatch.

  As in Columbus, Ohio?

  That’s where Kaitlyn Riggs lived . . . and not far from where her murdered body was found the other day . . .

  Thanks to me.

  “I’d like to speak to you about your role in the Riggs case,” the man tells her. “You are the girl who helped locate the body, aren’t you?”

  “How do you know about that?”

  “The Dispatch. I didn’t have your name, just your age, where you live, the fact that you’re a new arrival, living with your grandmother . . . It wasn’t hard to track you down by asking around. Small towns are like that.”

  “I don’t—are—you’re a reporter?” Calla asks, trying to keep up with what he’s saying and with her own racing, bewildered thoughts.

  “Yes, and I’m working on a story about police psychics and their role in—”

  “I’m not a police psychic,” Calla cuts in, casting a nervous eye at the closed door to the sunroom where her grandmother does her readings.

  “No, I understand that you aren’t officially working with the authorities,” he’s saying as Calla notices that a telltale chill is creeping into the room, “but according to the Dispatch piece, you—”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Calla interrupts again, shivering and looking around, “and I’m sorry, but I can’t talk to you about this, so—”

  “I just want to ask you a few questions about the Riggs girl and whether you think it might be connected to—”

  Her grandmother’s warning not to tell anyone about her role in the Riggs case ringing in her head, Calla says firmly, “I have to go. I’m sorry.”

  “—Monday’s disappearance in Erie” is the last thing she hears in the instant before she hangs up the phone.

  And there she is.

  Kaitlyn.

  She’s standing a few feet away from Calla, looking as solid as a living human would and wearing the same pleading expression she had the other day.

  “What?” Calla asks, her heart pounding like crazy, her thoughts whirling as she wonders what the reporter was talking about while trying to grasp the fact that a dead girl has materialized in front of her yet again.

  “Look, I found your b—” No, that’s too harsh.

  Calla takes a deep breath, pushes aside her own frustration and fear to start again. “I found you,” she tells Kaitlyn as gently as she can, “in that park. Your mom has closure now. And I know how horrible this all was for you, but . . .”

  I know how horrible this all was for you? her own voice echoes in disdain. Could you be any more understated than that?

  The girl is dead, for God’s sake. Murdered.

  Suddenly, something else Odelia said flits into Calla’s mind, bringing with it a wisp of dread.

  Kaitlyn’s killer is still out there somewhere.

  “I’m so sorry,” Calla says desperately, wearily, forcing herself to look into the girl’s troubled eyes, “but I don’t know how else to help you.”

  Kaitlyn just stares mournfully at her.

  “Please . . . just tell me.” Tell me, or go away and leave me alone because you’re scaring me and I’m feeling weak and strange and I don’t know what to do.

  Kaitlyn is still there, but her form is beginning to seem less solid.

  She’s trying to stay, but she’s too new at this, Calla realizes, remembering something she read in one of the books she took from Lily Dale’s library. Spirits draw energy from various sources in order to materialize—sometimes from electrical sources, and sometimes from people.

  “What do you want from me?” she asks again.

  At last, Kaitlyn speaks. “Help her,” she says cryptically.

  And then, even as she begins to fade, “Stop him.”

  A light, warm rain is falling in Akron, Ohio, tonight. It patters on the rooftop above his rented attic bedroom and pings into the metal gutter. He barely notices the rhythmic noise as he paces. His hands are jammed into the pockets of his jeans, clenched into hard, strong fists. Angry fists.

  It was all going so well.

  Who would ever suspect him of an abduction and murder that took place well over a hundred miles away? And who could possibly connect him to another disappearance in Erie, Pennsylvania, more than two hours’ drive in the opposite direction?

  Who, indeed?

  He stops pacing abruptly and snatche
s the Columbus Dispatch off his desk. It’s folded open to the article that caught him completely off guard when he happened upon it earlier.

  He’s read it so many times since that he’s memorized it by now. Memorized, in particular, the sparse details about the girl, including her age and location.

  Seventeen years old. Just the right age.

  Elizabeth was seventeen—and so was he—when she destroyed him.

  They were supposed to go to the prom together. Blindly in love, he worked up all his courage to ask her, the most beautiful girl in the class. She said yes. She was smiling when she said it.

  No. She wasn’t smiling. How could he not have realized that she was laughing at him? That it was all a joke? She already had a date to the prom, Jack Bicknell, who—with his lacrosse-team pals—put her up to it.

  He showed up at her house that night in a rented blue tux, and there they all were, waiting. Taunting him. Laughing at him.

  Even Elizabeth.

  He cried. He actually cried, in front of all of them.

  That made them laugh even harder.

  Even Elizabeth.

  He ran away, tried to forget, tried to forgive.

  Instead, the gaping wound seemed to grow. Fester.

  Graduation. Summer. College—for her, at least.

  Eventually, he found her there. Destroyed her in return . . . or so he believed. Until he saw the papers the next day.

  Turned out it was her sleeping roommate he stabbed that night in the dorm room. She was blond and beautiful, just like Elizabeth.

  Strangely, it didn’t matter when he realized it was the wrong girl. Revenge was still satisfying—even more so, because no one could possibly connect him to her, or to any of the girls who came after her. But mostly because he could do it again and again, saving the real Elizabeth for last.

  He has no idea where she is now. Maybe she has a career somewhere, a home, a husband, children. A life. Someday he’ll find her and she’ll get what she deserves. In the meantime, there are so many others to take her place.

  He wonders about the seventeen-year-old girl who led the police to Kaitlyn Riggs’s body. Wonders what she looks like. If she has long blond hair.

  She has to have long blond hair. They all do.

  Then again . . . what if she doesn’t?

  “Maybe that will keep you safe,” he purrs softly into the empty room, imagining her, terrified, cowering, right there in front of him. “Then again . . . maybe it won’t.”

  He’ll be the one to make that decision. Who lives. Who dies. It’s all up to him.

  His lips curl into a smile at the heady sense of power, and the first stirring of a familiar craving begins to creep over him.

  Willow York lives with her divorced mother in a small two-story gabled cottage on a narrow, tree-shaded lane a few streets over from Odelia’s place. There’s no shingle above the door, fueling Calla’s suspicion that Willow, unlike some of the other kids here, leads a more “normal” lifestyle, like her friends back home.

  When she answers the door to Calla’s knock, she’s wearing a white T-shirt and gray yoga pants that ride low on her slim hips, revealing a flat stomach and tanned belly button. Her long, straight dark hair is pulled back into a neat ponytail (reminding Calla again that her own overgrown bangs could use a cut), her face is scrubbed clean of makeup . . . and she’s absolutely drop-dead gorgeous, Calla decides. As beautiful as Blue Slayton is. No wonder he was drawn to her.

  She wonders—not for the first time—why they broke up, and if they’re really over each other.

  “Come on in.” Willow holds the door open and steps back into the shadowy hall. “We have to be kind of quiet. My mom’s taking a nap.”

  “Now? But it’s so early.” Some unidentifiable emotion flickers in Willow’s expression, and Calla hedges uncomfortably. “I mean . . . it’s kind of late. You know. For a nap.”

  Willow busies herself closing the door, her back to Calla. “She’s doing some late readings tonight. She likes to rest up for them.”

  “Oh.” So Willow’s mother is a medium.

  Okay, is that really any surprise?

  Yes. It shouldn’t be, but it is. If only because Calla still isn’t used to the local industry . . . and because, okay, Willow seems so . . . normal.

  Evangeline, Jacy, even Blue . . .

  Well, they’re all so different from anyone Calla has ever met before. Orphaned Evangeline talks freely about the spirit world and her own gifted heritage; foster-kid Jacy is so quietly, yet obviously, spiritual; Blue, whose mother left when he was little, often refers to his celebrity medium father.

  Unlike the others, Willow—beautiful, smart, quiet, sophisticated—would fit in perfectly at Calla’s private school back in Florida, where the other kids’ parents are doctors and lawyers and bankers, like Calla’s mother.

  Mom.

  Darrin.

  Aiyana.

  Kaitlyn Riggs.

  The phone call from that reporter.

  The chain of thoughts clicks through like falling dominoes in Calla’s head. It’s all she can do to come up with an answer when Willow turns around, looking relaxed again, and asks if she wants anything to drink.

  “No, I’m good,” she manages, and follows Willow through a small living room that’s similar in size, woodwork, decor, and even clutter to her grandmother’s house, and Ramona’s and Paula’s as well.

  The rest of the first floor—dining room, kitchen, and the study—is just as ordinary, from the worn furniture to the dishes piled in the sink.

  For some reason, Calla was expecting something a little more . . . upscale. Maybe not along the lines of the Slaytons’ grand home on the knoll above the lake, which Calla has seen only from afar, but she just didn’t picture Willow York living in a regular Lily Dale cottage that has seen better days.

  In the study, a computer sits on the desk, humming in quiet activity with a simple blue-patterned screen saver that displays several icons, including, Calla notices, one for the Internet.

  She casts a longing glance at it before sitting on a chair Willow offers and taking her math homework and text from her backpack.

  “Thanks so much for helping me,” she feels obligated to say as Willow takes a couple of sharpened pencils and a calculator from a drawer. “Not that you had any choice, but . . .”

  Willow shrugs. “It’s no problem. Anyway, I like math.”

  “Yeah, but I know there must be a million things you’d rather be doing,” Calla says with a faint smile.

  Willow returns it. “Maybe one or two. Come on, let’s do the first problem.”

  Calla tries to concentrate. Really, she does. But her thoughts keep drifting back to her disturbing conversation with that reporter from the AP.

  “What don’t you get?” Willow asks, after showing her for the third time how to arrive at the right answer, which eludes Calla yet again.

  “Pretty much everything.”

  Willow sighs and flips pages in the textbook. “Okay, let’s backtrack a little.”

  Somewhere overhead, a floorboard creaks, and Calla follows Willow’s upward glance.

  “My mom,” she says, and pushes the book toward Calla. “I’ll be back in a couple of minutes. You can look over this page.”

  She leaves the room.

  Calla waits until her footsteps have reached the second floor before darting a hand toward the computer mouse, well within arm’s reach.

  She clicks on the Internet icon, then swiftly types her own name and “Columbus Dispatch” into the search-engine window.

  The results pop up almost instantly. Sure enough, at the top of the list is a link to an article from today’s newspaper.

  LOCAL GIRL LAID TO REST; GRIEVING MOM CREDITS YOUNG MEDIUM

  The air is squished right out of Calla’s lungs as she glances at the adjoining photo—a black-clad Elaine Riggs following a gleaming casket out of a church—and scans the article.

  “My daughter might never have been found if
it weren’t for a special girl her own age who happens to have an incredible gift,” Ms. Riggs said. According to her, the fledgling seventeen-year-old medium, a recent arrival in the spiritualist colony of Lily Dale, New York . . .

  Footsteps overhead startle Calla, and she hears Willow call her name.

  “Yeah?” Calla reaches for the mouse to click out of the screen.

  “I’ve got to help my mom with something. I’ll be a few minutes.”

  “Okay . . . do you mind if I check my e-mail for a second?” Calla calls impulsively.

  “No, go ahead.”

  Perfect.

  Calla quickly goes to her screen name and signs in so that she can close out the other screen when Willow returns. She really should check her e-mail . . . but not until she’s read the rest of this article. Her grandmother is going to freak when she finds out about it.

  She scrolls down the page and picks up reading the article where she left off.

  . . . contacted her over the weekend with specific information that guided searchers to the location where Kaitlyn Riggs’s remains were discovered early Sunday. Elaine Riggs acknowledged having contacted the girl’s grandmother and guardian, a psychic medium who is registered with the Lily Dale Spiritualist Assembly, after her daughter was . . .

  Without warning, the screen goes dark.

  Calla frowns and looks around. It’s not a power outage, because the computer is still running and the lights are on.

  So what hap—

  Huh?

  The screen is back up.

  Only it no longer shows the article from the Columbus Dispatch.

  Nor does it show Calla’s e-mail.

  Somehow, it’s jumped to a completely different page. She must have accidentally hit something when she was scrolling down. Happens all the— Calla’s eyes widen as she realizes she’s looking at a Web site.

  A Web site that was created for a missing person.

  More specifically . . . a missing girl.

  From Erie, Pennsylvania.

  A girl named Erin Shannahan.

  There’s a big photo of her on the Web site.

  She has long blond hair and freckles that cover her face and her bare arms, and she’s smiling because she doesn’t know what’s going to happen to her.