The Secret Life of Sparrow Delaney

by Suzanne Harper

  For Luke Dawson, an athletic boy who played quarterback for his high school football team, this meant turning his mind to school and sports. An avid hiker, biker, and fisherman, he tended to spend the warm summer months outdoors.

  “That kid really liked to get out in nature,” says Will Grissom, 65, owner of Grissom’s Outdoor Gear. “He was in here all the time, getting information about new hikes he wanted to try. Didn’t buy much, though. He was real practical. Had one pair of hiking boots, one old fishing rod, one beat-up hat, you know, one of everything, and he never traded up.”

  Friends and family say that both Dawson boys loved to hike and camp, but that Luke particularly enjoyed solitary time in nature. He often went on hikes by himself. However, his parents say that he was very safety conscious and always let them know the route he planned to take. They also point out that he did not leave any note or message the day of his disappearance.

  The park service conducted searches along Luke’s favorite trails in case he had decided to go for a spur-of-the-moment hike and been injured or lost. After two weeks, they found no trace of him and had to call a halt to the search.

  “The problem with most wilderness searches is that there’s just too much ground to cover,” said Park Ranger Georgia Keener, 32. “We were out there from sunup to sundown. He may have had an accident, but we didn’t find a trace of him after days of searching.”

  Others strongly disagree with the theory that Luke could have had a hiking accident.

  “That boy knew this area like the back of his hand,” Mr. Grissom says. “No way he had an accident. No way, no how.”

  Some have suggested that family tensions may have made Luke run away from home. A neighbor says that he often heard Luke and his father fighting, “My wife and I would hear them going at it sometimes,” said the neighbor, who asked that his identity be kept confidential.

  The Dawsons say that any arguments were typical family disagreements. However, the number and intensity of arguments had increased noticeably in the months preceding Luke’s disappearance, according to the neighbor.

  Henry Winston, Mrs. Dawson’s second cousin, has also said that he watched the arguments between father and son escalate over the years. He adds that any normal adolescent angst could have been magnified by the fact that Luke was actually Robert and Sarah Dawson’s nephew.

  Sarah’s sister, Merrilee, and her husband, Ben Kelly, were killed in a car accident when Luke was five years old. The Dawsons became his legal guardians and, within a year, adopted him. By all accounts, Luke’s bond with Jack was particularly strong from the very beginning and remained so until his disappearance. “Closer than brothers, if that’s possible,” said Johnny P. Jones, head football coach and civics teacher at Collins High School. “It’s a tragedy. I feel for the family.”

  Mr. Winston says that Luke became more interested in learning about his birth parents as he got older, increasing tension in the family. Mr. Dawson had not gotten along with his brother-in-law Ben Kelly, who had enlisted to serve in Vietnam when he was only 17 years old. In contrast, Mr. Dawson had spent several years protesting the war.

  Their political differences were only one source of disagreement between the two men. Mr. Dawson blamed his brother-in-law for the accident that claimed his life and his wife’s, insisting that Mr. Kelly’s habit of reckless driving had led to the tragedy.

  “Every time Luke stepped out of line, even one little inch, Robert was all over him,” Mr. Winston says. “It was like he was afraid that Luke would turn out like his dad. You know, wild. Then Luke started wearing his dad’s old army jacket from Vietnam. I thought it was kind of nice, sort of a tribute. But it drove Robert crazy.”

  Luke’s friends insist that he was not a reckless person or the kind of person who would run away from his problems.

  “He always volunteered to be the designated driver when we went out,” said one friend, 16, who asked not to be identified because he and his friends have not yet reached legal drinking age. “He said he really didn’t like alcohol, but I think he just liked to be in control.”

  But if Luke did not have an accident and did not run away, the question remains: What did happen to him?

  Speculation is rife in this small town, from the plausible to the frankly unbelievable. Some people insist that Luke was kidnapped, even though no ransom note has ever been received. Rumors persist that drug smugglers sometimes travel through the backwoods of Zoar Valley to avoid detection by the local police. If Luke encountered them while on a hike, some people theorize, he could have been murdered as a result.

  Silas “Skeeter” McGee, 73, owner of the town’s only gas station, insists that Luke was abducted by a Bigfoot-like creature that he says has been spotted dozens of times by hikers and campers over the last fifty years.

  Detective Seymour Calhoun, who is leading the investigation into Luke Dawson’s disappearance, has not yet ruled out foul play. Contacted for comment, he would only say, “We are keeping an open mind at this point about the case.”

  Although friends and neighbors are already talking about Luke Dawson in the past tense, his family refuses to give up hope. In fact they took the unusual, but by no means unheard-of, step of hiring a psychic. Joanne Waters, a close family friend, describes the séance held in the Dawson living room approximately three months after Luke’s disappearance.

  “A woman named Mrs. Rosario called Sarah out of the blue and said that she was getting messages about where Luke was,” Mrs. Waters says. “I guess Sarah felt pretty desperate by that point. So she set up a reading, and they asked a few friends to be there for moral support.”

  Apparently the friends were suspicious of the psychic from the beginning, as were Mr. Dawson and the Dawsons’ son Jack, who was also present. Mrs. Rosario did not offer a first name and refused to talk about any previous successes she had had as a psychic, citing privacy and confidentiality concerns. (Several attempts to reach Mrs. Rosario for comment were unsuccessful.)

  Her appearance also raised eyebrows, according to Mrs. Waters. “She wore tons of makeup—I mean, tons! It wasn’t very warm in the living room, but she was sweating so much that her eyeliner started to run down her face halfway through the reading. And her hair was a mess, just wild, with so much hair spray you could smell it across the room. And she wore a caftan covered with bright red and purple flowers.” Mrs. Waters paused, then added, “She just didn’t seem trustworthy somehow. We all felt it.”

  Mrs. Rosario insisted that all curtains must be closed and only one candle lit, plunging the living room into darkness even on a sunny winter afternoon. She then settled into a trance. For an hour, she told the group about images that were coming to her, including a fast-flowing river, a late-model red Ford truck, and the number 638.

  Unfortunately, none of these clues meant anything to the family. The information was later passed on to Detective Calhoun, who refused to comment on how, or if, it was used.

  Shortly after the séance was held, Mr. Dawson increased the reward he was offering for information about his son’s disappearance to $25,000. So far, no one has come forward to claim the reward.

  For now, that is where the case of Luke Dawson’s disappearance stands. Still a mystery, still a source of bewilderment for this small, tight-knit community, still a matter of deepest grief for his family—

  “Now do you have a better idea of why I contacted you?” asked a voice somewhere behind my left ear.

  I sat up abruptly, spilling the pages onto the floor and somehow banging my elbow on the bedside table.

  “Ow!” I rubbed my arm and glared resentfully at Luke. “Do you always have to sneak up behind me like that?”

  “Sorry. Occupational hazard of being a ghost.”

  I glanced at the papers. “I hope you don’t mind. . . .”

  “No, it helps, actually.” He settled himself in the window seat. “A useful summary and relatively accurate. Although just for the record,” he added, “Henry Winston may be my mother’s s
econd cousin, but she can’t stand him. We saw him maybe once a year.”

  “So all that stuff he told the reporter about you and your dad—that wasn’t true?”

  He sighed deeply. “Oh, it was true, I guess,” he admitted. “I mean, yes, technically we were arguing a lot. But he made it sound so sinister. We didn’t hate each other. We just got on each other’s nerves.”

  “Your father must feel horrible—” I began, without really thinking through where that sentence was going.

  “Exactly the point I’ve been trying to make,” Luke said with an air of triumph. “If you had been willing to listen earlier—”

  “Okay, okay, okay.” I started grabbing the papers from the floor. “I got it.”

  I stacked them in a neat pile, thinking hard.

  “And I guess I could help you,” I said grudgingly. He opened his mouth to reply, and I hurried on. “Not by passing on a message! Not by saying that I’ve talked to you! But maybe there’s something else I could do, something a little more anonymous.”

  “Like passing a note in gym class?”

  I refused to dignify that with a response.

  He shrugged, smiling. “Well, that’s a start. Let’s see.”

  He stood up and walked over to the maps I had pinned on the wall. “Tibet, Patagonia, the Azores,” he said, running one finger across the countries. “Don’t you have any local maps?”

  “Sure. Right there.” I moved behind him to point to the map and jerked back when I felt the freezing cold. I shivered and saw him give me a sidelong glance that was both understanding and a little sad.

  He knew. He knew that if he were still alive, I’d feel a subtle warmth from his body, not that otherworldly chill. It must be heartbreaking, I suddenly thought, when you truly realize that you can never again interact with people the way you used to, that you’ve moved across an invisible border and can’t cross back.

  He very politely took two steps to the left so that I could reach out and show him the county map pasted just over my bedside lamp. “Here’s Lily Dale,” I said.

  He traced a route with his finger, then stopped at a wilderness area about thirty miles south. “And here’s Zoar Valley. That’s where I died.”

  Neither one of us moved. We both stared at the map. I tried to focus on the details—elevation, nearby towns, highway numbers—but my vision was too blurry. I had to blink several times in order to see again.

  I glanced sideways at Luke. His jaw was clenched, but his voice was calm as he said, “I need you to pick up a more detailed trail map.”

  “Okay. Why?”

  “Later.” He ran a hand through his hair, looking uncharacteristically edgy. “Can we get out of here? I need to see some sky.”

  We sat in the far end of the backyard under the branches of an enormous maple tree, safely screened from the house by overgrown bushes and knee-high grass that no one had bothered to cut for weeks. I sat cross-legged, my back against the tree trunk. Luke was stretched out at my feet, his legs crossed at the ankles, his hands behind his head, his eyes closed. By unspoken mutual agreement, we had moved on to lighter topics, carefully avoiding the subject of Luke’s death. I knew we would get back to it eventually, but not now. Not yet . . .

  “I love it when the warm weather lasts until September,” I said, watching as the shadows of leaves shifted on my legs. “This summer was way too short.”

  “Summer always is,” he said. “And winter is always endless.”

  The mere thought of dark days and slushy streets made me scoot out of the shade and lay down on the grass a little distance from Luke. “Aah.” I sighed in satisfaction. “That feels good.”

  Luke watched me wistfully and said, “I wish I could feel the sun again.”

  “You can’t?” I asked, surprised.

  “Faintly. More like the memory of sun.” He shrugged. “Of course, on the upside I don’t feel the cold.” He held up his right hand and started ticking off other points. “I don’t have to worry about losing my keys. I am always appropriately dressed for any occasion. And I don’t have to watch my weight.”

  “Must be nice being a ghost. No worries.”

  “Well, different ones anyway.”

  I closed my eyes, enjoying the sun on my face and trying to imagine never feeling it again. I shivered and sat up. “So what kinds of worries do you have now?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. How to get reluctant psychics to help me pass on a message of vital importance—ow!” He grinned as the pinecone that I threw at him went through his head.

  “Don’t try to act like that hurt you. I know it didn’t.” I flopped back down on the ground.

  “You’re the one who worries too much,” he commented.

  “I worry exactly the right amount,” I protested.

  ”Given all the many troubles in your life,” he said dryly.

  I felt vaguely resentful of his tone but too lazy to react with any force. “Is this what ghosts do?” I asked idly. “Make fun of the living and their problems?”

  “What problems do you have exactly?”

  “My family is nuts, your brother is driving me crazy, and I see dead people.” I reeled the list off promptly.

  “Your life is a little more complicated than most,” he conceded.

  “No kidding,” I said gloomily. Now that I had laid out all my worries end to end, I felt the weight of them pressing down on me.

  “Sparrow.” His voice sounded serious. Surprised, I turned my head a few inches to look at him. “A complicated life is an interesting life.”

  “That sounds very enlightened. Do you have all the answers to life now that you’re dead?” I tried to sound sarcastic but didn’t quite make it.

  “Hardly.” He laughed. “But you do see things in a different way. And you realize that all the stuff you thought you had figured out when you were alive was completely wrong.”

  “In what way?”

  He thought a bit. “Like . . . the things you think are your weaknesses are often really your strengths. The things you think are your strengths are what trip you up. Everything you take seriously doesn’t really matter in the end. Everything important in your life is the stuff you’re not even noticing right now. And”—he paused until I opened my eyes again and looked at him—“you really don’t have to worry so much. Everything’s going to be fine.”

  I watched a cloud drift by. Easy for you to say, I thought. You don’t have to figure out what to wear to school tomorrow.

  But as the minutes ticked by and I listened to the faint hum of bees, and smelled the sun-warmed grass, and watched the leaves move lazily in the breeze, I felt myself relax and found myself thinking that it would be wonderful if what he said was true. . . .

  The cloud moved over the sun. I sat up, rubbing my hands on my arms in the sudden chill.

  “Why did you go hiking by yourself all the time anyway?” I asked, remembering the newspaper article. “That seems like asking for trouble, even if you did let people know where you were going.”

  He gave a slight laugh that ended with a sigh. “You’re right about that,” he said ruefully. “At least that’s the way it turned out in the end. But I loved to be by myself in the middle of nowhere. It’s great just to be quiet, you know, and think about things without other people telling you what they think or what you should think or what most people think.”

  “So,” I asked, “what did you think about?”

  He balanced his right heel on top of his left toe and waggled his foot back and forth. “Oh, you know. School. Girls. Football. The meaning of life.” He hesitated. “And my parents. I thought about them a lot.” He glanced at me and added, “I mean, my real parents.”

  His words were so casual and uninflected that it took me a few seconds to remember that Mr. and Mrs. Dawson were actually his aunt and uncle.

  “So you’d think about your—” I hesitated. “Other” parents sounded too weird. “Real” parents sounded too disrespectful to Mr. and Mrs. Dawson. “Biol
ogical” parents sounded too clinical. . . .

  “My parents,” Luke rescued me. “That’s the way I always thought of them. I don’t remember them very well, but I had a photo of them holding me right after I was born. The way they looked in that picture, that’s the way I imagined them looking forever.”

  “Oh.” I couldn’t think of anything else to say.

  So for a while we stayed like that, quiet, Luke humming a little tune, me watching the clouds drift, both of us thinking our own private thoughts.

  Then a second-floor window flew open, and Raven leaned out to scan the backyard as if she were a prison guard on the trail of an escaping inmate. “Sparrow!” she yelled. “You were supposed to clean the bathroom!” I could see her squinting against the sun, trying to spot me. “I’m not doing it for you this time! It’s your turn!”

  Luke grinned up at her. “But soft!” he said. “What light through yonder window breaks? It is Juliet, and she sounds pissed.”

  “What else is new?” I muttered, trying to edge deeper into the shade of the tree.

  “I can see you, Sparrow! And if you’re not inside in two minutes, I’m coming down to get you!” The window slammed shut.

  “I think I’d better go before your sister gets here,” Luke said.

  “Coward.”

  He laughed. “Always.”

  “Wait.” I took a deep breath and said in a rush, “Have you seen your parents now that all three of you are, um”—I hesitated, then finished tactfully—“on the Other Side?”

  “Not yet. But my spirit guide assures me that once I take care of that unfinished business we’ve been discussing”—he flicked a crooked smile my way, then turned serious again—“and I move on to wherever it is that I’m going . . . well, that’s when I’ll see my parents again.” He lifted one eyebrow and said, “And that’s argument number three for why you should help me. In case you weren’t keeping track.”

  I stared back at him for a few seconds. Then I said, “That’s not fair.”

  “Oh, come on,” he said. “What’s a little emotional blackmail between friends?”