The Secret Life of Sparrow Delaney

by Suzanne Harper

  I jumped at his touch, and he jerked back; I tried to move out of his way and tripped over my feet; he put out a hand to catch me and knocked over the desk lamp.

  “Sorry, sorry,” I said, flustered.

  “No problem.” He leaned down to pick up the lamp just as I did the same thing.

  “Ow!”

  My hand went to my nose. Jack fell back into his chair.

  “I think I’ll get out of your way,” I said weakly.

  “Good idea,” he muttered, rubbing his forehead. “Safety first.”

  I moved across the room and stared with intense interest at a bookcase, trying to regain my composure. After a few seconds my attention was caught by a collection of figurines on one of the shelves. They all were characters from Star Wars: Darth Vader, Princess Leia, a few random storm troopers. I picked up Yoda.

  “Those aren’t mine.”

  I turned to see Jack, looking embarrassed. His eyes met mine. “I mean, they’re my brother’s. Not that he’s a geek or anything,” he added quickly.

  “No, they’re kind of cool. Really.” I carefully replaced Yoda and patted his head with one finger before sitting down next to Jack at the computer.

  “Yeah.” He frowned at the bookshelf, then looked around and spotted the Luke Skywalker figure on the windowsill. “I don’t know why Mom keeps moving my stuff,” he muttered as he picked it up and brought it over to put it with the others. “They’re all vintage,” he said, nudging Darth Vader and Obi-Wan Kenobi back into line. “The complete collection.”

  “Really. It’s probably worth a lot of money.”

  “I’d never sell it.” Jack’s voice was abrupt.

  “Oh, right. Sentimental value—”

  His frown deepened. “I’m not sentimental!”

  “No, of course not.” I had a terrible feeling that I had just accused him of being unmanly. A quick change of subject seemed to be in order. “So, who was that guy?”

  “What guy?” He managed an expression of honest bewilderment that was almost completely convincing.

  I chose to play along. “The guy outside,” I said patiently.

  Complete and utter incomprehension. “What guy out—”

  “The detective!” I snapped. “The detective who wanted to talk to you, the one your father ran off, the one who kept making mysterious hints, that guy!”

  Unexpectedly he grinned. It lit up his whole face and made him look, for one brief instant, like the person in the newspaper photo.

  “What’s so funny?”

  “I was waiting for you to stamp your foot in frustration.”

  “You what?”

  “I’ve never seen someone stamp her foot in real life, only in the movies,” he explained, still grinning. “I thought if I kept playing dumb, you might do it. You looked like you were on the verge.”

  I grinned back at him. “You do an excellent job of playing dumb,” I said, using the breathless tone of an ardent fan. “I mean, I so can’t believe you didn’t win the Oscar last year!”

  “No, no.” He waved his hand in airy dismissal, pretending to be embarrassed by the praise. “It’s nothing, just an enormous gift that I happened to be born with. I can’t take any credit, really.”

  I laughed just as Jack’s dad knocked on the door frame and stuck his head in. “You guys getting a lot of work done?” he asked mildly.

  Jack sobered up immediately. “Oh, yeah.” He pushed the mouse and his Lucha Libre screen saver was replaced with a Web site about Lily Dale. “Just doing some Internet research.”

  I could see his dad’s eyes flick over the screen. His eyebrows raised in surprise, he asked sharply, “This is for a school project?”

  “Yeah. History.” Jack’s answers were getting shorter. I remembered his dad’s opinion of mediums—con artists, criminals, frauds—and hurriedly stepped in.

  “We have to do a report about local history,” I said. “We picked Lily Dale because it seemed, um, I don’t know, interesting?” My voice trailed off in the face of his tight-lipped expression.

  “Mmm.” He was trying to seem neutral, I think, but that little murmur managed to sound disgusted all the same.

  Jack swiveled his chair around to click the site closed. His back to his father, he said, “We have a lot to do.”

  “Sure thing.” His dad hesitated, but Jack didn’t turn around. “Okay, then. I’ll leave you to it.” His father rapped a couple of times on the door, as if tapping good-bye, and walked away.

  Jack stared at his computer and clicked on one link after another, checking out Web sites on spirit photography, séances, slate writing, spirit trumpets. I watched the screens flash by and tried to think of the best way to reintroduce the topic of Detective Calhoun. Nothing clever or subtle or convincingly offhand came to mind, so finally I just asked him. “Jack. That detective. You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to, but—”

  That “but” seemed to hang in the air for a long time as Jack kept his eyes fixed on the monitor and chewed his bottom lip, clearly trying to make up his mind. After a long moment he said, “Okay, I’ll tell you, but you can’t tell anyone else.” He turned to give me a fierce look. “Nobody. Agreed?”

  “Agreed.”

  He took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Okay,” he said. “See, I have this brother.”

  He stopped, as if replaying what he had just said. “He ran away last year. Or—well, he’s gone. Disappeared.” He was staring down at the floor as he said this, but I still tried to look as if this were news to me.

  “Oh. That’s terrible,” I said. “What happened?” The words sound stilted and false to my ears, but Jack didn’t seem to notice.

  He shrugged and began pushing the toe of his sneaker back and forth on the rug. “I don’t know. Nobody does. I got up one morning . . . it was a Saturday. Luke—that’s my brother—likes to sleep in on weekends. I made myself some cornflakes. I played a couple of video games. My parents came downstairs.”

  He frowned slightly. Maybe he had replayed this memory so many times—for the reporters, for the police, for himself—that he was just tired of telling the story again. “Then it was time to eat lunch, and Luke still hadn’t come downstairs. So Mom went up to check his room. His bed was still made. It didn’t look as if he had slept there. His backpack was gone.”

  I found that I was sitting on the edge of my chair, even though I knew, only too well, how this story ended.

  “Anyway. He never came back.”

  I stood up abruptly. “So where do you think he is?” As soon as I said it, I knew it was a stupid question, but I didn’t care. Because Jack shot me a withering look, which was a hundred times better than looking as if he were about to cry.

  “I have no idea,” he said, adding, very slowly, as if speaking to someone who didn’t understand the language, “that’s the problem.”

  His scornful tone would have made me blush a week ago. But now I ignored it and walked over to the maps. “That’s what these are for,” I said, tracing a road with my finger. “You’re trying to find him.”

  He gave me a sidelong look. “Yeah. Luke and I always talked about working as white-water guides in the summer, and all the best rivers are out West. So I’ve been calling some of the outfitters we found on the Internet, asking if he maybe signed up with them.”

  Jackson Hole, Wyoming. Big Sky, Montana. Deadwood, South Dakota. It was easy to imagine Luke living somewhere in those wide-open spaces, steering a raft through white-water rapids, making a campfire in the crisp evening air, hiking up a snow-peaked mountain. The images were so real that it took a second for me to remember that Luke would never do those things. He would never make it out West.

  “That could take forever.”

  He shrugged. “Not searching for Luke would take the same amount of time.” I heard a faint echo of Luke’s matter-of-fact logic. Jack stood beside me and pointed to a river. “That’s the Shoshone. Supposed to have the best white water in the country.”

&n
bsp; Standing this close to him, I could feel the warmth of his body. It was the exact opposite of standing next to Luke, but I still shivered and moved away.

  He kept his eyes on the map and said softly, “I don’t get why he didn’t tell me he was going.”

  There was nothing I could say to that except a lie (I’m sure he meant to call) or the truth (actually, he didn’t call because he’s dead, and oh, by the way, here’s how I happen to know that). Neither option was possible.

  “So, that detective?” I prompted.

  Jack threw himself back into his chair. “Yeah. Detective Calhoun,” He mimicked the detective’s voice. “‘I just stopped by to see how you were doing.’ I just stopped by to pump you for more information is more like it.”

  “He’s still working on the case? It’s been, what, a year since Luke left, right?”

  “In two weeks.” He smiled at me sardonically. “The anniversary is going to be pretty low-key. No balloons or confetti or anything.”

  I shifted my gaze over his shoulder to several snapshots pinned up in a row on the edge of the map. I got up to look more closely and took in a quick breath. Luke was smiling out at me. His hair was a little too long, just like it was now, and he was wearing an old army jacket.

  I glanced down at Jack. He looked down at his jacket, then back at me. “I don’t know why he left this,” he said. “He used to wear it all the time. Drove my dad crazy.”

  “It’s really cool,” I said, trying to make my tone as colorless as possible. I didn’t want even a hint of what I was thinking to show up in my voice.

  Because what I was thinking was this: Jack knew that if Luke had run away, he would have taken his jacket. He knew that Luke would have told Jack where he was going. He knew that Luke would have made plans for them to get together. He knew that Luke would have called or written or been in touch somehow.

  Which meant that Jack had to suspect that Luke was dead.

  Chapter 20

  “So, you saw Jack today.”

  Luke had taken his usual spot in the window seat. I was sitting in the rocker, trying to concentrate on Pride and Prejudice. Mr. Darcy had finally shown up, and the book was indeed getting much better. I could hear distant yelling and banging and sudden crashes from another part of the house, which meant that Grandma Bee had finally convinced Lark and Linnet to help her practice jujitsu throws in the parlor.

  I turned to look accusingly at his profile. “Were you watching us?”

  He shook his head. “I heard him ask you to come over. I don’t hang out around my family much anymore.”

  “Too sad?”

  He shrugged. “Too frustrating. I try to get through to them, but nothing works. They don’t hear me when I talk. If they feel a sudden cold spot in the room, they just close a window. That day in the museum?”

  I sat up in surprise. “What?”

  “I managed to make my face appear in the spirit painting,” he said, rather proudly. Then his smile dimmed. “It just freaked Jack out.”

  “No kidding,” I said, remembering.

  Luke frowned. “I’ve tried showing up in their dreams, moving stuff around Jack’s room—”

  “Luke Skywalker! That was you!”

  “Yeah.” He rolled his eyes. “You’d think that would be easy enough to figure out. I mean, come on. Luke Skywalker?”

  “Excellent clue.”

  “Thank you.” He nodded in acknowledgment. “Except, you know, for the fact that no one got it. In fact nothing I’ve tried has worked. Which brings me to today’s argument—”

  I groaned and dramatically collapsed on the floor.

  “—for why you should help me.”

  I looked at my watch. “Ten minutes,” I said. “Go.” But he didn’t launch into his case immediately. Instead he leaned his head back and stared at the deepening blue sky. “One thing you should know about Jack. He’s very stubborn.”

  “Really.” My tone was as dry as the desert, and he grinned.

  “We used to wrestle all the time. I’d usually pin him in two minutes, tops, but that kid would never tap out.” He shook his head, remembering. “I mean, I’m two years older, about fifty pounds heavier and”—he shot me a quick grin—“an incredibly gifted athlete.”

  “Not to mention modest.”

  He nodded modestly and went on. “He’d be on the floor, arm twisted behind his back, about to pass out, all scraped and bloody from friction burns—”

  “Excuse me,” I interrupted. “This was in fun?”

  “Yeah, of course,” he said, as if this were self-evident. “But no matter what I did, he would never give up.” He turned to look directly into my eyes. “Ever.”

  I looked away first. “And your point is?” “If he thinks that I’m still alive, roaming around the Wild West in search of adventure—”

  “It’s one of the stages of grief,” I said, more authoritatively than I felt. “Number three, I think. Denial. He’ll get over it.”

  “No, Sparrow.” Luke’s voice was sad. “He won’t. Jack will keep searching for me until the end of his days.”

  I shifted uncomfortably, feeling some sympathy for Jack. Luke had me pinned in—I glanced at my watch—less than five minutes.

  Luke settled into a gracious silence, allowing me (I thought bitterly) a generous amount of time to consider this new argument. He sat in the window seat and amused himself by blowing on the glass and watching ice crystals form into patterns as I frowned down at my book.

  Finally he took pity on me and introduced a new subject. “Did you get that trail map? Maybe we can take a look at it now.”

  I pulled the map out of my backpack with relief and spread it out on my desk.

  “See, here are the trails I usually took.” His finger traced them for me. “That’s where the park rangers searched, of course.” He pointed to another spot. “Now. See here? I had wanted to try this trail for a long time.”

  It led up the other side of the mountain, far away from the other trails. “It looks steep,” I said, eyeing the topographical lines.

  “It is,” he said calmly. “Very.”

  “So you decided to try it at night,” I said sharply. “Alone. Without letting anyone know where you were going.”

  “Stupid,” he said. “Although, in my defense, I’d like to point out that when I started the hike, it was still light outside. But once you’ve made one stupid decision, it gets easier to make even stupider ones. Which is why when I got to this spot”—his finger moved on relentlessly—“I decided to step to the edge of a cliff to get a better view. It was a beautiful night, and I could just about see Orion, but there was this tree blocking my view, so I . . . Anyway. The fact that the ground under my feet was loose shale didn’t give me a moment’s pause.”

  As soon as he said that, I saw it happen. The dark trail up the mountain. The clouds scudding across the moon. The step onto loose rock, casual, just trying to get a better look at a constellation . . . and then the sickening plunge.

  “But why didn’t you just break your legs or end up paralyzed or something?” I sounded argumentative and angry. I felt close to tears. “Why did you have to die?”

  “Because I fell off a forty-foot cliff. You can’t argue with reality, Sparrow.”

  And with that he was gone.

  I didn’t sleep well that night. The next morning I woke up late and got dressed in record time. As I dashed through the kitchen, Grandma Bee blocked my way and thrust a piece of toast in the general direction of my mouth.

  “Hey!” I wiped a smear of butter from my chin.

  “You’re not getting out of this house without eating something!” she said. “I need you in fighting shape tonight!”

  “Um, why?” I asked, knowing I would regret it.

  “I’m learning to extend my ki force so I can do a no-touch throw,” she said, a manic gleam in her eye. “I’ll be able to slam you to the ground through the sheer power of my mind.”

  “Sounds like fun,” I said i
nsincerely as I took the toast from her hand and started toward the door.

  She blocked my way again, staring pugnaciously into my face. “We can start right now!” she cried. “Try to shove me out of your way! Go ahead, push me as hard as you can!”

  “Please, I’ve got to get to school—”

  “Go ahead, try! You’ll see, I’m solid as a rock!”

  “I’m already running late—”

  “You won’t be able to move me an inch! My mind is a mighty weapon—”

  A few moments later, as the door swung shut behind me, I heard her yell, “I wasn’t ready! My thoughts weren’t collected! My feet weren’t planted! Come back, I’ll let you try again.”

  Fiona caught me by the arm just as I was about to go into history class. “Hold on a sec,” she whispered. “I need to talk to you.”

  “What about?” I cast a worried look through the classroom door at Sergeant Grimes, who had just picked up the attendance book from his immaculate desk and was surveying the room with his usual forbidding air. “The late bell is about to ring—”

  “I know, I know, but listen!” Her eyes were sparkling with excitement. “I called Merri last night to ask her about our Spanish homework, you know Senorita Reilly always talks so fast when she gives the assignment that I can’t understand a word she’s saying, especially because it’s always in Spanish—”

  “I know, I know.” I was bouncing impatiently on my toes.

  “—so anyway, Merri and I started talking about other things, you know, like that boy she likes who plays on the JV basketball team and whether Jeannie Bartlett is really going to New York to be a model after graduation—”

  “Uh-huh.” I made a wrap-it-up motion with my hand as I glanced nervously toward the door.

  “—and then we got on the subject of the Halloween dance.” She came to a complete stop and gave me a meaningful look.

  I gave her a puzzled look in return.

  “The Halloween dance,” she said again, with significant emphasis.

  “Yes, you said that already,” I pointed out. We were really going to be late if Fiona insisted on saying everything twice—