Believing

by Wendy Corsi Staub

  No. But I know what happened to her.

  Calla closes her eyes, seeing the bloodied figure facedown in the woods.

  SEVEN

  Calla takes a few deep breaths, trying to slow her racing heart.

  Then she opens her eyes and forces herself to read the text accompanying Erin’s photo. She was last seen on Monday night, leaving a college party . . . wearing jeans, flip-flops, a pale pink tank top, and a silver— “Sorry about that,” a voice says nearby.

  Startled, Calla looks up to see Willow sticking her head in from the kitchen.

  “Did you check your e-mail?” she asks.

  “I’m just finishing.” With a trembling hand, Calla hurriedly manages to click the X on the top right corner of the screen, praying the Web site will go away.

  It does, giving way to her e-mail again.

  “Are you sure you don’t want something to drink? I’m going to get a glass of pop. Want some?”

  “Sure.”

  Anything to buy time and pull herself back together. Calla mindlessly clicks on the mailbox icon at the top of the page and scans the list of addresses.

  A familiar one jumps out at her.

  KZW88@cornell.edu.

  Kevin.

  When he first left for college at this time last year, her inbox would hold several e-mails from him every day. As the school year went on, they grew fewer and farther between, but Calla blamed that on his being busy with his classes and studying.

  Then came the breakup, and finding out about Annie.

  This is the first time in a while that KZW88@cornell.edu has shown up in her mailbox, and she’s so shocked to see it that everything else is momentarily forgotten.

  She clicks on it and holds her breath.

  Hey, Calla, it was really good to see you last week. I know you’ve been through a lot but it seems like you’re hanging in there. Crazy coincidence that we both ended up only two hundred miles away from each other in New York State, you know? It only took me a few hours to drive from Lily Dale back to Ithaca, so if you ever need anything or whatever, don’t forget I’m pretty close by. Write back when you have a chance and let me know what’s up, okay? xoxo Kevin

  Whoa.

  Out of the clear blue sky, he pops back into her life and signs his note the way he always did—with hugs and kisses? What’s that supposed to mean?

  I wish I could call Lisa right this second, she finds herself thinking. Kevin’s sister might be able to shed some light on what’s up with him, and whether he’s trying to open the door to a renewed—what, friendship? relationship?—with Calla.

  She’ll try Lisa later, if she has a chance.

  Meanwhile, she skims the e-mail again, warning herself not to read too much into it and not to get too worked up over it, either. Still . . .

  I know you’ve been through a lot . . .

  Yeah, no kidding. She knows he’s talking about losing Mom, but he dished her a good helping of trauma when he dumped her in April, too. She grabs the mouse again and scrolls the cursor over the delete button.

  But for some reason, she can’t make herself press it.

  “Okay, here you go.” Willow is back with two glasses. “It’s Diet Pepsi. Is that okay?”

  “Sure, thanks.” Calla hurriedly moves the cursor over to the Keep As New button and clicks it there, preserving Kevin’s e-mail in her box until she can figure out what to do about it.

  She’s got enough to worry about right now.

  Including Erin Shannahan.

  There isn’t a doubt in her mind that the girl who disappeared from Erie on Monday is the same girl whose bloodied body Kaitlyn Riggs showed to Calla.

  She wants me to know there’s a connection.

  She said, “Help her.”

  And she said . . .

  Stop him.

  She was talking about whoever murdered her and Erin.

  “Are you finished?”

  Willow’s voice startles Calla, and she looks up to see her gesturing at the computer screen.

  “What? Oh . . . yeah. Thanks for letting me check my e-mail. I can’t get online at my grandmother’s, and . . . well, that’s really hard to get used to.”

  “I bet. I should check mine for a second, too, if you don’t mind. Sarita is working on some graphics for the homecoming dance flyer—we have to hand it in to the committee tomorrow—and she said she’d send it to me tonight.”

  “Sure, no problem.” Glad for another minute or two of distraction, Calla sits back and sips her pop as Willow leans over her to take the mouse.

  Maybe I should go to the police, Calla thinks, rolling the cold glass back and forth between her clammy palms. Or at least tell Gammy what’s going on. She’ll know what to do.

  Then again . . .

  Dad is coming here tomorrow.

  Odelia might decide to send Calla back to California with him if she thinks she’s getting involved in the Riggs case.

  And if she does that, Calla’s connection to her mother’s past—and to the mystery surrounding her death—will be lost.

  I have to stay here, she tells herself fiercely. At any cost.

  She thinks again of Kaitlyn Riggs and Erin Shannahan and pushes aside a fierce stab of guilt.

  I don’t know how to help you, she tells them silently, and shifts her gaze absently back to the computer screen.

  It takes her a moment to realize she’s looking at Willow’s open in-box.

  The subject line HOMECOMING DANCE jumps out at her.

  “Sarita hasn’t sent me anything yet,” Willow announces, moving the mouse toward the red X that will close out the box.

  Calla glances at the address on the HOMECOMING DANCE e-mail, wondering if Willow somehow missed seeing it.

  But it doesn’t appear to have come from Sarita after all.

  The return address is blues90@aol.com.

  It doesn’t take a genius—or a psychic, for that matter—to figure out it belongs to Blue Slayton.

  Willow clicks on the X and the screen vanishes.

  Calla notices a faint smile on her lips, though, and her mind seems to be lingering someplace else as she says, “Okay, so let’s get back to work on the math or we’ll be here all night. I’m sure you’ve got other things to do.”

  I’m sure you do, too, Calla thinks as she turns back to her textbook. Like e-mailing Blue back about the homecoming dance.

  Another sleepless night.

  He paces across the attic floor to the small diamond-shaped window that faces the east and stares out absently at the sky, beginning to show pinkish orange sunrise streaks.

  For three days now, he’s been trying to forget about that newspaper article.

  The one about the Riggs girl’s funeral earlier this week— and the incredible means by which her body was located in Hocking Hills State Park.

  But he can’t seem to forget.

  If anything, he’s growing angrier and more frustrated with every hour that passes. He can’t sleep, can’t eat, can’t think of anything but that girl.

  He’s spent too much time covering his tracks to have it all come undone because of a seventeen-year-old stranger who claims to have some kind of magical powers.

  Claims? How else could she have directed the police to Kaitlyn Riggs’s body?

  He prowls back and forth across his attic room, not caring that the floorboards creak beneath his feet. Sometimes the second-floor tenants pound on their ceiling with the end of a broom if he paces too much, but this morning all is quiet.

  Glimpsing himself in the mirror on the far wall, he feels fury stirring in his gut. A vivid purple bruise rims his right eye.

  Erin Shannahan put up one hell of a fight.

  In the end, she lost. They always do. He dumped her limp body in the middle of nowhere and fled, left with a shiner he’s had to mask from prying eyes all week.

  Black eye. Obsessive thoughts about some psychic kid.

  He needs some kind of distraction.

  And he might have stu
mbled upon just the thing.

  Abruptly, he turns back to the glowing computer screen, still open to his latest find. Perhaps a little too close to home for complete comfort, but one gets tired of travel.

  Hayley Gorzynski, a junior at Saint Jude’s High School, right here in Akron. She’ll be playing the lead role of Sandy in a local theater production of Grease.

  The newspaper article contains a glowing quote from Jamie Corona, the show’s director.

  “Casting was a no brainer,” Corona says.“Hayley will make a perfect Sandy, with her long blond hair and big blue eyes.”

  EIGHT

  Friday, September 7

  3:06 p.m.

  Mr. Bombeck is writing yet another excruciatingly difficult problem on the board—and Calla is wishing the last bell would hurry up and ring—when it happens. Again.

  She feels the presence before she spots the source. It makes itself known in the now-familiar way: a sudden chill creeps into the classroom.

  She glances toward the window, left open to air the stuffy classroom on this sultry September afternoon.

  The sun is still shining, and she realizes the chill isn’t coming from the window. With it comes a distinct uneasiness and an eerie, tingling sensation that creeps over Calla’s skin.

  Her fingers tighten around her pencil and she keeps her gaze focused on Mr. Bombeck up at the front of the room.

  The presence remains, grows stronger still.

  Finally, no longer able to ignore it, she turns her head. Just slightly. But far enough to spot Kaitlyn Riggs, plainly visible just a few feet away, watching her.

  The dead girl’s ghostly eyes beg Calla to do something.

  Help her. Stop him.

  Stop him.

  Over and over, Kaitlyn’s voice fills Calla’s head, her commands growing louder, more urgent.

  Stop him!

  Calla closes her eyes and grips, feeling sick.

  Go away, she silently begs her ghostly visitor. Don’t do this to me. Not here. Not now.

  In her mind’s eye—or is it?—she sees Erin Shannahan. Not the picture from the Web site, but her body, lying face-down in the woods.

  This time, though, she can see more of the scene. Trees, brush, rugged terrain . . . and a trail marker bearing the letters CKT. A ring of rocks. This time she can see charred black splinters inside the circle—an abandoned campfire site?

  She zeroes in on Erin herself.

  Matted blond hair, freckled arms, silver watch— Her hand . . .

  It’s moving, her fingers clawing at the dirt and leaves.

  She’s alive!

  The pencil snaps in Calla’s own hand and her eyes jerk open again to see one splintered piece flying through the air.

  It lands on the floor across the aisle. Jacy leans over, picks it up, and looks at her. She can feel other eyes on her as everyone sitting in the vicinity looks up to see what happened.

  “Is everything all right back there?” Mr. Bombeck asks from the board.

  “I’m sorry, I just . . . dropped my pencil.”

  She reaches to take the broken piece from Jacy, who shifts his gaze to the spot where Kaitlyn Riggs materialized.

  Can he see her too? Or does he sense something?

  Calla turns to find that the apparition is gone.

  Stop him! Stop . . . him . . .

  Her voice fades to an echo in Calla’s brain before it disappears altogether as the shrill ringing of the last bell shatters the room.

  “All I know,” Evangeline says as they make their way toward home through a gray, muggy afternoon, “is that you have got to do something about this. If this girl is alive out there somewhere, you need to help her.”

  “How?” Calla shifts her backpack, filled with homework for the weekend, to her other shoulder. It seems to weigh a ton, and but it’s nowhere near as heavy as the new burden of figuring out what to do about Erin.

  “Call the police.”

  “And tell them . . . ?”

  “That you think she’s still alive.”

  “And who do I say I am?”

  “You can be anonymous. If we make the call from the pay phone by the café in the Dale, it doesn’t come up on Caller ID.”

  “But I don’t even know where to tell them to look. All I saw is woods, and kind of . . . rough terrain, and a trail marker . . .”

  “With CKT on it,” Evangeline points out. “So let’s go straight to my house and Google that on the computer—if we can beat my brother to it.”

  Calla considers this. “I don’t know . . . my grandmother was really upset that I got involved with Kaitlyn’s case.”

  “And if you hadn’t, she’d still be out there somewhere. Her body, anyway. If Erin’s still alive, you can save her life. Look at it this way—you have nothing to lose. And Erin Shannahan has everything to gain.”

  “Do you think we should just tell my grandmother and let her deal with it?”

  “Not with your dad about to blow into town. She might decide to send you back to California with him, to keep you from getting involved in stuff like this.”

  “I’ve thought about that too,” Calla said. “Well, how about your aunt?”

  “No way,” Evangeline says firmly. “My aunt is all caught up in some date she has tonight. Something like this will really throw her off, and she really likes this guy. He sounds normal for a change—an accountant from Westfield. She really needs a nice, normal guy. Especially after having her last boyfriend dump her for a Buffalo Jills cheerleader. I told you about that, right?”

  Calla nods, distracted. Normally, Ramona Taggart’s disastrous love life interests her, but right now, all she cares about is Erin Shannahan.

  “Okay,” she tells Evangeline, picking up her pace a little as the entrance gate to Lily Dale appears around the bend—along with Mason Taggart, who’s walking toward home with a couple of friends. “Let’s go to your house and Google CKT.”

  “And then call the police?”

  “Depends on what we find.”

  “Come on.” Evangeline breaks into a jog. “We have to get there before my brother does, or he’ll cause a big stink and make us wait forever.”

  With her father on his way to Lily Dale, Calla can’t afford to wait forever. Every second counts . . . and Erin’s life is hanging in the balance.

  Twenty minutes later, Calla and Evangeline are at the pay phone outside the café.

  “You’re sure it comes up without a number?” Calla asks Evangeline as she lifts the receiver.

  “I’m positive. Go on . . . dial! Do you want me to?”

  “No, I’ll do it.” Her hand shaking like crazy, Calla begins punching out the number she scribbled on a piece of scrap paper back at the Taggarts’.

  As the phone rings on the other end, Calla quickly rehearses what she and Evangeline decided she should say.

  “Erin Shannahan tip line,” a male voice answers on the second ring.

  “I believe Erin is still alive, and that she can be found in the Allegheny Gorge, just off the Chuck Keiper Trail, near a firepit ringed by rocks.”

  “Good!” Evangeline hisses. “Hang up!”

  “Who is this?” the voice asks in Calla’s ear.

  For a split second, she’s absolutely frozen. Then she abruptly clamps the phone down, trembling, on the verge of tears.

  Evangeline hugs her. “That was so good. You did great.”

  “You swear you won’t tell anyone, right?”

  “Are you kidding? I’ll carry this to my grave, like we said.”

  Calla swallows hard, not wanting to think about graves.

  All she wants is to put this behind her.

  As she and Evangeline walk back across Cottage Row, she says a quick, silent prayer that Erin will be found in time.

  Hearing car tires crunch on the gravel in the street, Calla jumps up and hurries to look out the living room window. She knows even before she lifts the lace curtain that it’s not going to be her father, but she checks anyway. Ju
st in case her intuition, or whatever she’s calling it these days, is off.

  Nope. A neighbor’s car pulling a rented U-haul is trundling along Cottage Row, heading toward the gate.

  “Is it him?” her grandmother asks from her chair across the room. She’s dressed for the occasion in a pink-and-purple floral-print dress in fairly muted—for her, anyway— colors, with a lacy brown crocheted shawl draped over her shoulders.

  Calla drops the curtain. “No, it’s not him.”

  Just more summer residents leaving Lily Dale for the off-season.

  The place is fast becoming a ghost town in more ways than one—definitely a good thing, with her father coming to visit. The streets are quieter every day, no longer clogged with ailing strangers seeking physical healing, or the recently bereaved longing to make contact with their dearly beloved, or troubled visitors in need of psychic counseling.

  Pacing back to the couch, Calla plops down and resumes the impatient wait for her father’s arrival from the airport, all the while wondering about Erin.

  Did the tip-line person take her call seriously?

  Even if he did, what if she was dead wrong, and Erin is . . . well, dead?

  Calla pushes the thought from her mind.

  “I wish your father had let me pick him up at the airport instead of renting a car,” Odelia comments.

  “I know, but he said that will make things easier, since he’ll have to drive back and forth to the White Inn down in Fredonia.”

  “He could have stayed here.”

  “I know.” But Calla was secretly relieved when he turned down her grandmother’s offer to take her bedroom for the weekend.

  “It’s really no trouble,” she said late last night on the phone to Calla’s dad, with Calla eavesdropping, of course. “I can stay right next door at the Taggarts’. They have a pull-out couch.”

  Of course, Jeff wouldn’t hear of that. Nor would he consider sleeping on the Taggarts’ pull-out couch himself, even though Ramona made the offer via Odelia.

  “I’ll be more comfortable in a hotel,” he insisted, and it was all settled.