Discovering by Wendy Corsi Staub Page B

number.
    Walt, one of his foster dads, answers the phone.
    “Calla, how’s it going?”
    “Pretty good. Is Jacy there?”
    “No, Peter took him to get something to eat after track, and then they were going to go try to buy posterboard somewhere for a social studies project he has due tomorrow but has apparently known about for a week. Nothing like waiting till the last minute, huh?”
    Calla, who had the same project but finished it before she left for Florida, isn’t quite sure what to say to that, other than, “Can you please ask him to call me when he gets back?”
    “Sweetie, I’ll tell him you called, but when he gets back he’s got to work on his project, and I have a feeling he’s not going to be done until midnight. So if it’s not an emergency . . . ?”
    “No,”Calla admits, “it’s not. I just wanted”— more like desperately needed —“to talk to him. But it can wait till school tomorrow.”
    She hangs up, considers calling Evangeline, and decides against it. Ramona mentioned that she, too, is working on her project. And anyway, Calla does have that English essay to write.
    But it takes her several hours to get anything down, and she’s pretty sure, when she turns off the light and climbs into bed, that it doesn’t make much sense.
    Nothing makes sense.
    What her mother and Darrin did wasn’t just immoral. It was illegal.
    Was that why Mom and Odelia argued over it?
    And . . .
    Was there really any doubt whether Darrin actually dumped the baby into the lake?
    She keeps remembering the spot Aiyana led her to a few weeks ago, in Leolyn Woods. Lilies of the valley were inexplicably blooming there. In October.
    And there was a rock, standing upright.
    Like an unmarked tombstone.
    “She isn’t there,” Aiyana said cryptically when Calla found it.
    At the time, she had no idea what her spirit guide meant.
    Now, though, she wonders.
    She wonders about a lot of things.
    Lying in bed, the lace curtains billowing lightly at the open window, she hears the screen door creak below.
    Ramona and her father call good night to Odelia.
    “Thanks for the banana bread. See you two tomorrow.”
    You two.
    As if they’re a couple.
    Maybe they aren’t yet.
    But they will be, Calla acknowledges as the sound of their laughter floats up through the window.

TEN
    Lily Dale
Wednesday, October 10
12:53 p.m.
    As always, Calla keeps an eye out for Jacy as she goes through the cafeteria line.
    She needs to tell him what she learned yesterday. About Mom and Darrin . . . and their dead baby.
    The baby they hid in the murky bottom of Cassadaga Lake.
    No wonder her grandmother didn’t want Calla to set foot in that water. The warning had nothing to do with any premonition about Sharon Logan trying to drown her.
    No wonder she and Mom were talking about dredging the lake.
    They were talking about finding the baby’s remains there.
    Why, though?
    Was there any doubt about the child’s final resting place?
    Calla can’t stop thinking about the little grave Aiyana showed her in the woods just last week, in a spot where lilies of the valley was somehow blooming at the wrong time of year.
    Jacy . . . where are you?
    Calla dumps chickpeas on her salad and scans the big, crowded room.
    No sign of him.
    They share the same lunch period, but Jacy often skips it in favor of slipping out of school for a while. Of course, that’s against the rules, but he doesn’t seem to care.
    “Sometimes, I just need to get outdoors and breathe,”he told Calla when she asked him why he’s willing to risk getting caught and being assigned to in- school detention . . . not that he ever has been.
    Yesterday, she skipped with him after finding a note stuck in the vents at the top of her locker door:
    Meet me for lunch.
    She didn’t have to ask where.
    He’d brought them a couple of peanut butter sandwiches. They ate them sitting on a fallen log in the overgrown thicket behind the school. Jacy fed most of his to a chipmunk that came over and