The Healing Power of Sugar: The Ghost Bird Series: #9 (The Academy Ghost Bird Series)

by Stone, C. L.

  “Are you extremely tired?” he asked.

  I took a deep breath and let it out slowly through my lips. “Unless there’s been a change, I’ll still be in in-school suspension tomorrow. There’s not much to do; I’ll be fine.”

  “I’m afraid you’ll have to endure another two days of that. I’m glad you suggested staying to Kota. They were all upset over your getting suspended, and are emotional about the situation with Dr. Green. No matter what happens now, we should continue our assignments at Ashley Waters unless it becomes impossible. We shouldn’t abandon this now when we’re so close.”

  “Are we close to answers?” I asked.

  “We hope so,” Mr. Blackbourne said. “Right now, Victor is working overtime to see if Mr. Hendricks and his partners start pulling in large sums of money.”

  “Why is Mr. Hendricks doing this now?”

  “Something’s happened,” he said. “We’re not aware as to what, but it’s making him expedite his plans. According to our information, this wasn’t supposed to happen until closer to the end of the school year.”

  “Was it me returning to school?” I asked.

  “I don’t exactly know, but I don’t think so,” he said. “We do know he was surprised to hear you were back at school. I don’t think that was the single determining factor, but it might have been one of a few last straws that triggered his need to move quickly.”

  “You really think it’s best if I stay in suspension?”

  “I think it’s best that we all follow the rules for now. If we keep the police out of it by making it all look like just school-related trouble and nothing criminal, then it will not be the big distraction Mr. Hendricks was hoping for, and we may save this school yet.” He leaned back a bit, sliding a hand across the bed as he turned more toward me.

  Part of his arm cut across my leg, and his elbow hovered over my knee. It was close enough that I felt the starched material of his shirt tracing over my pajamas. It might have been an unnoticeable thing to him, but for me, it was very close. I froze, fearing he’d pull away.

  “This might be the hardest thing we’ll ever have to do,” he said quietly. “Sitting still, waiting patiently. It won’t be easy.”

  I breathed in slowly, noting his signature fragrance--the spring soap—and how it mixed with the smells of the house and Nathan’s leather scent that lingered in the room. “What about next week? The new schedule?”

  “I don’t want to plan that far ahead,” he said. “Let’s get through the next two days. We’ll talk about Monday over the weekend.”

  It wasn’t like it would be very difficult, but I felt useless to be stuck in in-school suspension. “Let me know if you need anything,” I said.

  The corner of his mouth lifted, a slight millimeter smile forming. “Didn’t you call me here for a reason?”

  My heart fluttered at the way he said that. I suddenly wanted desperately to say something other than have to talk about Luke and the masks. I didn’t want to put more on his shoulders.

  I was tempted to pretend I wanted to talk about him just to talk. It was something we’d never done. Could I ever ask Mr. Blackbourne simple questions about himself? What would I even ask him?

  “You didn’t have to come all the way down if you were busy,” I said.

  He shook his head slowly. “I’m always here for you, Miss Sorenson. I wasn’t busy, so it seemed a good idea to visit you in person.” His head tilted toward me. “How is everything?”

  I pressed my lips together, not wanting to admit things weren’t good. Perfection seemed to be the only acceptable answer for him, and everything I had to say wasn’t even close.

  He waited for me to answer, but the more he looked at me, the more the words jumbled in my brain.

  He lifted his hand from the bed, sitting up. He reached over and touched gently to the underside of my chin, lifting my head, commanding my attention.

  “Tell me,” he said simply.

  It was all the encouragement I needed. I explained quickly about the permanent marker, the small spat between North and Luke, then I told him about the masks, and everyone’s concerns about Luke and how he’d confessed to orchestrating the prank.

  I kept it about Luke and tried to be brief about our date, but I couldn’t help but admit to my own doubts about the plan, and my nervousness in trying to figure out if Luke was for or against it.

  “We’re not sure why he would do it again,” I said when I got to the part about the second set of masks. “Or if it is him.”

  “Did you feel uncomfortable around Luke?” Mr. Blackbourne asked. He’d returned his palm to the bed, his arm close to my knee. “How do you feel about him? What’s your instinct telling you?”

  I pressed my lips together, unsure about trusting my instincts. “He said he did the first set of masks, but he never explained why.”

  “Does that bother you?”

  “A little,” I said. “I didn’t want to press, when there were other things to talk to him about. Like where he goes when he disappears. And why. Well, I know he was on assignment the other day…”

  “He wasn’t,” Mr. Blackbourne said quietly.

  My head rose and I looked at him carefully, wondering if we were talking about different times. “He said he was, maybe…”

  “He lied to you,” Mr. Blackbourne said, his lips pursing into a slight frown before he spoke again. “He wasn’t on assignment. I would have been notified immediately.”

  My heart dipped then. I tilted my head down, hiding the shock and the sudden sweep of emotion. “Why would he do that?” I asked, forcing my voice to be steady.

  “That’s what we’ll have to find out,” he said, his voice soothing. “He may have used it as an excuse for you to not worry about him. I’m afraid he might be having a hard time dealing with the new information you’ve learned.”

  “He kissed me,” I said, still looking at my lap. “I thought meant he was accepting of it.”

  “Perhaps he was,” he said. “However, there were only eight masks.”

  “So you do think it means something?”

  “It might be a coincidence, but there’s nine of us in the original group. That might be significant.”

  My heart started pumping hard, and I began to tremble at the implication. “Do you think it means…that he is telling everyone he doesn’t feel he belongs? Or that he wants out?”

  “It might be a reasonable argument to make as to his meaning, except…I’m not convinced,” he said. He reached again for me.

  I stilled, expecting him to draw me up by my chin again.

  Instead, his palm grazed my cheek. He drew me up, cradling my face with his hand.

  His thumb slid across my skin, over the hairline by my ear.

  My heart, and my breath, stopped simultaneously.

  “He would never leave us, or you,” he said. “I may not understand what he’s up to, but I know Lucian Taylor. There’s something we’re not seeing, or we’re looking too closely at the wrong information. He may be upset right now, but he’s too far smitten by you to ever pull away.”

  My tongue pressed to the top of my mouth. I swallowed back emotion, and begged my eyes not to let the tears I was feeling right then fall.

  He held me a minute longer and then released me his arm returning to lay across my leg. Now, however, it wasn’t just barely touching. It was close, his arm pressed to my knee. It was a comfortable touch.

  It warmed me from the inside out.

  “Do you feel the same for him?” he asked.

  I opened my mouth to answer, but the guilt of admitting it to him, when there were others to think about, made me pause.

  A perfect eyebrow lifted, crossing above the top edge of his glasses. “Miss Sorenson?” he asked in a demanding tone.

  I nodded. “I feel…strongly for him,” I said. I wasn’t going to admit how strongly, especially after tonight, after the kiss. He’d seemed so determined about the first date, and how he talked about a year later. He
thought of the future, he’d been trying to picture me in it. For me, someone so unsure about her future, his day dreaming seemed to help me believe this might work out.

  I’d skimmed over the words Luke had said to me. Luke hadn’t said anything about himself leaving. He was worried about me leaving.

  “Mr. North Taylor mentioned you were a little hesitant about the plan. Did I misinterpret your intent?”

  “I don’t dislike the plan,” I said as honestly as I could. “I fear the result, though. If I agree, and someone isn’t on board, I am afraid I’d have to leave the group. Or the group would break up. I don’t know how it would work.”

  “There’s a thousand factors that could lead to it not working the way we want to. To be honest, the odds are against us.” He took a breath, sighing before he went on. “Maybe we’re thinking too far ahead.”

  “What do you mean?”

  He was quiet for a minute and brushed his palm down his thigh as he seemed to be thinking. “You’re worried about the end. But if the idea is sound and you want to try, maybe we should focus on that—on trying. There’s no harm in trying, right? If it’s not meant to be, we’ll know after we’ve tried. And if we have set parameters and clear boundaries, even if it doesn’t work, we should still be able to maintain our relationships as they are now.”

  It sounded reasonable. “If everyone else wants to.”

  “If you want to, I imagine they will. But you have to tell them you’d like to try, and then give it a good effort.” His gaze drifted over my face. “If you doubt it, they’ll doubt it, too.”

  “I’m scared of what might happen.”

  “Sometimes, you have to fake courage in order to find yours,” he said gently. “You have to put yourself out there and forget about the results. You just have to try your best and trust your instincts.”

  North had seemed to lose his faith when I’d started to doubt. The others seemed reluctant—maybe he was right, maybe they were waiting on me. “So you think if I told them all I wanted to try, they’d believe in it more?”

  That millimeter smile returned. “I don’t think any of them would dare fail in trying to make you happy,” he said. “Including me.”

  My lips trembled as I kept them together, not daring to breathe or say anything that might ruin the moment. While I considered what all of us being together meant, Mr. Blackbourne was the hardest to imagine in that picture. I wasn’t even sure if he included himself in the plan.

  These small slips of affection—a kind word, a gentle touch, his millimeter smile—hinted that he did think of me that way, but it was possible I was misinterpreting his actions.

  “I should get going,” he said suddenly as he leaned away from me and turned to collect his coat. “You should sleep and be ready for tomorrow.”

  “What about Luke?”

  “I’ll talk to him,” he said. He turned, the silver in his eyes appearing to glow from the little light spilling out of the closet into the room. “You, Miss Sorenson, should summon up some courage. Talk to the ones you know have agreed to the plan, and have a strong heart-to-heart with them about trying. Luke should be included, when you get a chance.”

  “I will,” I said, determined, even though I suspected it would take a lot of that fake courage he’d talked about.

  He stood up, moving to the door and opening it before he turned and flicking off the closet light. My eyes took a moment to adjust.

  When they did, Mr. Blackbourne was still standing in the doorway, looking in at me.

  The silence loomed. I waited.

  “Goodnight, Miss Sorenson,” he said in a whisper.

  “Goodnight, Mr. Blackbourne.”

  THANKS

  “Now that two people are missing, things are going to get more complicated,” Kota said to Nathan and me one morning on the way to school. “Now that Hendricks is apparently off on sick leave, he left behind damaging evidence about a lot of the faculty, and even some of the students. There’s memos about pot being sold to students by a teacher. There’s the JH14 that got passed around. Coaches have been caught altering grades.” He shook his head before he went on. “Once someone started pointing fingers, others started firing accusations back. He’s probably off to avoid all the fallout, but I don’t know what his exit strategy is.”

  “There isn’t a Vera at the school board, either,” Nathan said. “Someone got a hold of that stationary and made it up. That Ms. Wright didn’t even know her supervisors’ names, just blindly followed protocol at the very hint she thought she was in trouble. I wonder if Sang wasn’t under Mr. Hendricks’s thumb, and he was the one that might have suggested she compare to the paper books and get to the bottom of Sang being absent out of spite. That might be Mr. Hendricks using Sang to get her into trouble. If she’s in suspension, she’s not around to talk about Mr. Hendricks and what he’s been getting her to do—spy on us. Or to make her look like a bad kid, so no one would believe her.”

  If I was in suspension, would that make me a less reliable person? That didn’t sit well with me. “She also lied to me,” I said.

  “That’s something Dr. Green and Mr. Blackbourne are looking into,” Kota said. “She did seem rather confident, but we need to go over her phone records and see if maybe she called another Mrs. Sorenson and the mix up set off a more complicated case against you. Right now, we just have to seem like we’re behaving. He’s trying to make this as low key as absolutely possible. This is the plan for now. Hopefully, it works.”

  We’d given up on bringing school books after the first day. We did bring our bags, though, with food and supplies. Nathan had been going to bring his Nintendo DS with him, but Kota said it would be too obvious if he was smashing buttons. So instead, Kota had three tablets and had us load games and books onto it. We made sure to mute them ahead of time, and Kota dimmed the screens and slipped covers on them so they looked like actual books. We each had a small paper notebook inside our bags, along with a pencil in case she gave us actual work to do.

  I gave up my real phone and the boys put their fake ones in the basket, though we could use our tablets to communicate. Kota warned us though that we shouldn’t send anything private. We needed to be more careful about our messaging.

  I’d managed to read the Hardy Boys book Silas gave me, and had given it back. I started a couple of the books Kota had loaded on my tablet, but I found I couldn’t really focus for longer than a half hour.

  It was a slow two days. Luke was there, but since we had to sit quietly, and I didn’t want to send him any private messages that might would be upsetting, I simply sent him little smile faces and hearts.

  He sent hearts back.

  I couldn’t tell him about what Mr. Blackbourne told me to do. Not during school.

  We did, however, go over names for the new skunk. Luke sent me pictures. He’d moved the dog house and the makeshift pen into his bedroom. There was a short video of Luke tossing the sunk a tennis ball, and the skunk would scoop it up, and waddle backwards toward the dog house, dragging it inside like he wanted to keep it.

  After a debate that lasted a good portion of the first day and well into the second, we finally settled on Sprinkles. He’d told me why in a message.

  Luke: The back of his tail reminds me of the black and white sprinkles on my favorite kind of cupcake at that one bakery I like.

  I was amused he could associate cupcake sprinkles with a skunk, but every other name after that point didn’t seem as interesting. Sprinkles kept the name.

  After each day, though, I did get to be with Luke at the diner but when we were together, we were also watched by Uncle, who was directing us to make pies and chop vegetables.

  “Thursday will be a big day,” Uncle told us. “It’s Thanksgiving.”

  By the time that night came, I was so tired from chopping and being very careful about pie making that I slipped into bed way before anyone else.

  ♥♥♥

  The sound of water spraying against tile had become familiar
to me since Nathan’s bathroom had been completed. On most mornings, I didn’t pay attention.

  But now, on Thursday morning, the shower sounds were hard to ignore, for some reason. When I closed my eyes, I kept picturing being in Nathan’s bathroom with the shower running—with me actually in the shower.

  I shivered, and covered my head with one of the pillows. It usually didn’t affect me just to listen to the shower, today it felt amplified and raw.

  A lump formed in my throat. I swallowed to push it back, telling myself it wasn’t a big deal. Trying to convince myself that perhaps it was just a heavy rain. Or maybe the television was on loud and there was a waterfall scene in a movie. Was the sprinkler running and hitting the window pane? I closed my eyes tight to avoid looking at the window to keep my imagination going.

  The opportunity to tell the others about being unable to shower had slipped away since Nathan’s new bathroom had been completed. Guilt seeped in whenever I went in that bathroom and realized I should have said something. I often bathed when Nathan was away, or just told him I felt like a bath. As far as he knew, things were normal.

  I knew I’d have to tell them eventually. If life ever settled down, I would.

  I held the pillow over my head, willing myself to forget about showers and wait until he was done.

  “Sang.”

  Through the thickness of the pillow, the voice calling for me was muffled. I ignored it for a moment, mostly out of sheer laziness, not wanting to get up.

  “Sang…”

  I groaned and peeked out from under the pillow. No one at the door. The shower was still running.

  I sat up quickly, suddenly terrified. What if he had fallen in the shower and hurt himself? Was he in there all broken and calling for help?

  I scrambled to get out of bed, quickly padding down the hallway. The door to the bathroom was closed so I touched the handle. Finding it unlocked, I twisted and opened the door a crack so I could peek in.

  The bathroom was steamy but I could still see. The shower was big and took up half the room. The bottom was covered in stone tile, and the top half was a big glass pane. It had an opening wide enough to walk into and no door. Very modern.