The room is filled with the fragrance.
"Aiyana?"Calla turns in her chair and there she is.
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 pa.s.sword, 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 a.s.sume 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 G.o.d, oh my G.o.d, oh my G.o.d . . .
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 pa.s.sersby.
Old habits die hard.
All her life, she had been teased about living in the neon purple house. As if the paint job had anything 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 superst.i.tious-not like regular people, who might not walk under a ladder or sit in the thirteenth row on a plane.
No, she was superst.i.tious 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.