A Clatter of Jars (3 page)

Lily dropped her duffel with a heavy
thunk
. “I need to go to the infirmary,” she said.

“You okay?” Del asked, stitching his eyebrows together.

“I have to go,” Lily repeated. And she squeezed past him out the door, racing down the path. Kicking up dirt.

It should have been Max in that sixth bed. It should have been their summer together, while Hannah the housefly was far off in a different cabin, buzzing at someone else. But they weren't together, because three weeks ago, Max had gotten hurt.

Around and around went the length of yarn.

Lily was the one who'd hurt him.

Jo

J
OLENE
M
AL
LORY DUG HER HAND DEEP INTO THE
pocket of her knitted sweater, retrieving her harmonica. The instrument was well used and well loved, silver, scuffed, and slightly dented at one end.

Running her thumb over the harmonica's mouthpiece, Jo let her gaze settle on the smattering of sample-size glass jars that sat on her office shelves. Soon those shelves would be overflowing with hundreds of identical jars, carefully labeled and sorted. At the moment, however, there were a mere half dozen. Each jar was hardly larger than a Ping-Pong ball, with the words
Darlington Peanut Butter
embossed on the bottom. And to most people, they would have appeared empty.

Jolene Mallory was not most people.

Her gaze fixed upon the leftmost jar, Jo put the harmonica to her lips and, ignoring the sounds of the three hundred campers arriving for the first session of the summer, she began to play.

Los golpes en la vida

preparan nuestros corazo—

“You think you'd get sick of that song, after a while.”

Jo swiveled around to face the man in the doorway, who was holding a familiar briefcase. “I thought I locked that door, Caleb,” she growled.

Caleb studied his nails, as though thoroughly bored by the conversation already. “You did. You also sold me a Talent for lock-picking last week.”

Jo drew a deep breath, which resulted in an accidental
waaaaah
from her harmonica. With the note, Jo saw a swirl of color around Caleb's scalp. Sunshine yellow, with streaks of puce.

Lock-picking, indeed.

“Shut the door,” she told him.

“I brought someone along to meet you,” Caleb replied. At his insistence, a boy, about five years old, stepped into the doorway. The child clung to Caleb's side.

“This isn't a day care,” Jo said.

“Danny's my nephew. You'll like him.” When Jo scowled, Caleb let out a truffly laugh. “Well, maybe
you
won't, but most people do. Only one thing.” Caleb mussed the boy's hair. “Hasn't found his Talent yet.”

Danny gazed up at Jo with big, wet eyes.

“I don't do party tricks,” Jo informed them.

“No, of course not. Only business.” Caleb examined the shelf along the wall, his eyes narrowed as though working through careful calculations. “How many jars is that you have to sell me today?” he asked. “Twenty?”

Jo flipped the harmonica end over end. The instrument was shiniest near the edges, where so many fingers had handled it. Her grandma Esther had bought the harmonica at an antique store in Istanbul over seventy years ago, from a fool who didn't realize its value. That and a gold pocket watch, similarly purchased, had been the heart of Grandma Esther's collection. Artifacts, they were called. Rare objects imbued with Talent.

“Twenty?” Jo asked, taking in the six tiny jars. “Have you gone blind? There are only—” When Caleb pulled the thick wad of bills from his pocket, Jo suddenly understood. “There are fifty at least.”

Caleb snorted. “Looks more like thirty to me,” he said, eyes on his cash.

Little Danny took it all in, shifting his attention from one adult to the other.

“There are forty-five jars on that shelf,” Jo said firmly. “And not one fewer.”

Caleb counted off the bills with the speed of a shrewd negotiator. “Forty-five jars.” Jo took the money without bothering to count. Caleb was a crook, but he was no cheat.

Jo opened the top drawer of her desk and pulled out an envelope, tucking the cash inside. “Come in,” she said. “Both of you. And shut the door.”

With the door securely closed, Jo returned her harmonica to her lips. It didn't matter which song she chose—the magic was in the harmonica itself, not the notes it made. But Jo had her favorite tune. As she played, she heard the voice of the man made famous for singing it, the Talented singer they called El Picaflor. The Hummingbird.

Los golpes en la vida

preparan nuestros corazones

como el fuego forja al acero.

Jo never knew quite what she'd see when she played Grandma Esther's harmonica. The colors—different every time, depending on the person she played for—rose with the notes, swirling in a mass of hues that only Jo could see. And somehow, when she was playing Grandma Esther's harmonica, Jo could interpret those colors. The surge of autumn shades with dots of Mediterranean blue she saw when playing for her father, that was a Talent for calligraphy. The bright fireworks of copper and pink that danced above her mother, that was a Talent for plumbing. Catching lizards, growing tomatoes, interpreting dreams, parallel parking, caning chairs, telling lies—Jo had seen them all. Before Jo had discovered those first glowing jars at the edge of the lake, when Atropos had still been a camp for Fair children, playing her grandmother's harmonica had been Jo's greatest joy. Most people who called themselves Fair simply hadn't discovered their Talents yet, and Jo had the tool to change that. There was a thrill in it, but there was a worry, too. Jo felt it every time.

On rare occasion, when she played Grandma Esther's harmonica for someone new, Jolene Mallory saw no colors at all. And Jo knew precisely how unbearable it was to be one of the unlucky few who were truly Fair. These days, most people assumed that it was Jo who had the Talent and that the harmonica was merely the instrument she used to express it. Jo never bothered to correct them. The more mundane her Artifact was thought to be, the safer it was.

Jo was relieved when, with the first notes of El Picaflor's song, colors swam above Danny's head. Rose. Fuchsia. Geranium. Delicate strands, stretching for the sky. She pulled her harmonica to her chest.

“You have a Talent,” she informed Danny—and the boy's body relaxed, before she'd even finished the thought—“for cooking asparagus.”

“
Asparagus?
” It was the first word Danny had uttered, and he uttered it loudly. “Uncle Caleb, she's wrong. I
hate
asparagus.”

Caleb pulled a peppermint from his pocket and whipped it from its wrapper, stuffing the candy into Danny's mouth. “Jo's never wrong,” he informed his nephew. “But don't worry. We'll buy you a better one.”

Danny glared at Jo as he sucked on his candy. She ignored him. Jo was accustomed to the resentment that often came with the truth.

“I do have work to do,” she said, pulling open her desk's middle drawer. She slid a roll of brown tape over her wrist, then tucked a black marker behind one ear, where it disguised itself in her wild dark curls. From the stack of colored bracelets, woven from embroidery thread, Jo plucked six.

“By all means,” Caleb told her.

Jo made her way again to the shelf along the wall. With necessary speed, she—
whift!
—unscrewed the lid of each jar, slipping a single bracelet inside before sealing the container back tight. Then, with bracelets coiled safely at the bottoms of all six jars, Jo returned her harmonica to her lips.

There was, as always, a single Talent in each jar, sparkling and shining beneath the closed lid. Jo labeled all six with a precisely placed strip of tape, writing in her neat, blocky script.
WHISPER
. That was a Talent for calming horses.
QUI
CK
. Speed-reading.
DARK
. Seeing through blackness.
CLOTHES
. Folding laundry.
TONSILS
. Performing tonsillectomies. Her stomach clenched with hope as she played, same as it always did with a batch of new jars. From the moment she'd plucked the first jar from the lake, glowing with possibility, Jo had hoped to discover a certain Singular Talent. But the right Talent hadn't found her yet.

Jo shifted her attention to the sixth and final jar, with its silver bracelet coiled at the bottom.

Los golpes en la vida

preparan nuestros—

Jo stopped.

She had never seen such colors before. For no reason Jo could explain, she was reminded of the man she'd seen canoeing in Lake Atropos the previous afternoon, wearing a three-piece gray suit. He'd looked so like the fellow she'd met five years ago, the man with the bits of knotted rope poking out from under his suit jacket, that she'd flubbed her bunk assignments, grouping a hodgepodge of boys and girls of all different ages into Cabin Eight. Jo hadn't witnessed the man leaping out of the canoe to take a dip in the lake, but perhaps he had.

“This one's not for sale,” Jo told Caleb of the jar with the silver bracelet. She left the jar unlabeled, since she could think of no label for it.

“But I paid for all of them,” Caleb argued.

Without a word, Jo opened her top desk drawer and returned a wad of bills. Then she sealed the envelope, thick with cash, to deposit in the bank that afternoon.

She tossed young Danny the jar with the red bracelet, labeled
DARK
. “That's the one you'll want,” she told him. Then, her business resolved, Jo seated herself at her desk, and began to write a letter.

“How long does it take for the Talent to absorb into the bracelet, Uncle Caleb?” Danny asked, as Jo pulled out a sheet of stationery.

Caleb slipped the remaining labeled jars into the perfectly sized padded slots of his custom briefcase. Most of the slots remained empty, but he'd fill them easily at the next visit. “Talent bracelets aren't Artifacts,” he replied, snapping shut the case. “They don't absorb the Talent, just carry it for you. A sort of”—he tapped his briefcase—“suitcase, if you will. Careful with that now, Danny. That's the real deal, not like those fake bracelets you get in gumball machines. You put that on, you'll be the most Talented kid in your kindergarten. No one will have to know you're also carrying around a Talent for”—Caleb lowered his voice—“
asparagus
.”

“The real deal,” Danny repeated.

Dear Jenny,
Jo wrote. She heard Caleb take one step through the office door, then stop.

“Run off to the car,” Caleb told his nephew. “I'll meet you there.”

Jo swiveled in her chair, leaving her thoughts—
I hope, as always, that my letter finds you well
—unfinished.

When he saw he had her attention, Caleb said, “Jo, you and I have been in business together, what, five years?” Jo set her pen down, already annoyed. “And I've always said your product is the finest in a very thin market.”

“But . . . ?” Jo let her voice rumble, the first warnings of a gale.

“There's been talk among my buyers that your Talents have been . . . fading.”

Jo turned back to her letter. “Caleb, if you're failing to inform your customers that those are Mimics”—she gestured to his briefcase—“then that's your headache.”
You must already know what I'm going to ask you,
she wrote. “Mimics last one year. Everyone knows that.”

“And yet somehow lately they've been fading faster. Jo, last summer I got complaints the Talents dwindled after only ten months. In the spring I heard five. I've been brushing it off as rumor. But yesterday one of my most trustworthy clients comes to me, says the Talents I sold him didn't even last two weeks.”

“You picked that lock just fine, didn't you?” Jo replied. A ruse to stiff her on the next order, that's all this was.
Can't you find a way to forget what happened,
she wrote,
after all this time?

“I'm trying to help you, Jo,” Caleb insisted. “Maybe it's time to find a different source.”

Jo pushed her chair from the desk and strode to the door, pulling it open wider. “Maybe it's time
you
found a different source.”

Caleb sighed. “See you next week, Jo,” he said.

Jo waited until Caleb had followed his nephew through the empty lodge, passing beneath the moose head keeping guard above the double doors. Then she finished her letter.

You know I would love to see you again, and finally meet little Cady.

Your sister,
Jo

Jo folded the letter into thirds, then sealed it shut inside its envelope to give to Del for the afternoon mail run. Jo had sent her sister one letter every week for the past twenty years. Jenny had never once responded.

Most people might have figured, after countless unanswered letters, that it was best to give up. And five years ago, Jo was ready to. But then Fate had led her to those glowing jars, with the words
Darlington Peanut Butter
embossed on the bottom—the name of the very location where Jenny had taken up residence. And when Fate led you somewhere, Jo believed you'd better follow.

Jenny would forget, Jo told herself. One day, the right camper would arrive at Camp Atropos for Singular Talents, and Jenny would forget everything. In the meantime, Jo had work to do.

Her thoughts elsewhere, Jo plucked an envelope off her desk, folding it in half and sticking it in her back pocket for Del's mail run.