Lily Dale Read Online Free PDF Page B

third message went to a woman wearing a baseball cap over what looked to be a bald head—obviously a woman in cancer treatment.
    â€œShe thought she was going to die soon,” Martie told Carol, “and I saw that she wasn’t going to die until November. I needed to tell her to start enjoying the time she has left.”
    Carol received this bit of information with a murmur. Perfectly understandable. Of course. Did she want Martie to give her the message that came to her at Forest Temple?
    She did. Of course. Believing Noel still existed was Carol’s only solace. If she knew that her darling was happy, she could bear the dark stretch of lifeless time before her, but if Martie said something trivial or obviously false, if she turned out to be a faker thinking she could lead grief-addled widows astray with fanciful tales, that would kill all hope.
    Carol took the chance. “Can you give me the message?”
    Martie could, and so she began.
    â€œYour husband was an avid golfer,” she said.
    That could have been a guess. Carol knew that. She is white, middle-class, middle-aged. Someone might have told Martie that she lived in South Carolina, where golfing is a year-round activity. But it was true that Noel had been a passionate golfer. They both were. They had done almost everything together. They worked in the same high school where he taught chemistry. They rode to and from work together. They sometimes lunched together. And they golfed together, although Noel was much better than Carol.
    So yes, he was a golfer. Determined that she would give away as little as possible, Carol nodded.
    â€œYes.”
    â€œWell, he wants you to know that he has made a couple of holes-in-one since he passed over.”
    Is she being flip? Carol thought. Why would he say that? Carol hadn’t spent much time imagining heaven, but holes-in-one were never part of what she did imagine.
    Martie wasn’t laughing. She put her hands out in front of her body, palms down.
    â€œIt’s as though he is sitting at a table,” the medium said, “and he’s working his hands on the table, moving them. He says for me to tell you that you still aren’t placing your feet correctly. He moves his hands to show you how to place your feet.
    â€œIf you don’t, he says, you’re going to…” Martie stopped and flicked her eyes up as though she were thinking. “If you don’t…”
    She pantomimed holding a golf club in front of her body, and she swung to the side in a way that would have made the ball slice.
    Carol began to cry. Martie looked at her with the saddest, most tender expression.
    â€œHe’s telling me that he likes it better when you are laughing.”
    When Carol’s sobs subsided enough for her to speak, she said, “He always said that I was never going to make my shots unless I placed my feet differently, and he always used his hands, not his feet, to demonstrate. I used to get angry, and he would say, ‘Fine, you stand the way you want to stand, but this is what’s going to happen.’” And then he would slice through the air in the same kind of pantomime that Martie had used.
    No one else could have known those things, Carol said. “It was something that Noel and Noel only would say.” Her tears were coming from relief. “Martie was confirming what I had so muchwanted to believe. I felt a sense of peace that couldn’t have been more palpable if someone dropped a sheet over me.”
    The medium wasn’t finished.
    â€œYou spent a lot of time delving into and trying to discover information about your husband’s illness, didn’t you? You became obsessive about it.”
    Carol laughed. “I’m sure there are people who would call me obsessive.”
    â€œI see piles of notes.”
    â€œYou need to look again because I have those notes in three-ring binders.”
    â€œI feel, and your husband feels,