When Sparrows Fall (3 page)

Guardian?
Guardian?

Jack stared around the kitchen as if the sight of his bachelor digs could
anchor him there, safe from startling developments and complicated relationships. A sniffle from his caller prodded him back to less selfish concerns.

“Is she going to be all right?”

“I don’t know.” Timothy sounded younger now. Frightened.

“Is anybody there with you?”

“A man from the sheriff’s department.”

“May I speak with him?”

“He’s outside, talking on his radio.”

“All right.” Jack tried to harness his thoughts as they galloped away. “You’re in good hands, for now. I’ll be there as soon as I can, but it’ll be, say, a two-hour drive. I’ll have my phone, so call again if … if you hear anything.”

“Okay.” Timothy hung up without another word.

Jack snagged his raincoat off the back of a chair and ran out, hardly remembering to lock up. He remembered the way to Miranda’s ramshackle log home though, up in the hills behind a tiny town with only two traffic lights. The route to Slades Creek was seared into his memory with painful clarity, along with the rest of his time there.

This was his chance to make amends for long-ago wrongs. A chance to restore what someone else had stolen.

He climbed into his car with a vague sense of conflicted triumph coloring his sense of impending doom. Carl had hated him. Now, without so much as a by-your-leave, Miranda had put him in charge of Carl’s children.

“Lord, have mercy.” Jack swung the car into the street, shifted into first, and punched the accelerator. “It can’t get any weirder than this.”

Unless she didn’t make it, and then God help them all.

Having missed the morning traffic in Chattanooga, Jack made it to Slades Creek in ninety minutes. That still wasn’t enough time to fully grasp
the situation, but a patrol car at the end of Miranda’s winding driveway was evidence that the call hadn’t been a prank. To Protect and to Serve, read the motto on the car’s door.

A large white van stood there too. Mud-spattered and disconsolate, it warned Jack of the burdens of parenthood. PTA meetings, soccer practice, piano lessons.

If Miranda had died while he was on the road, he had inherited those responsibilities. Those kids. A boy and a girl. To his shame, he couldn’t remember the girl’s name.

“God, I need some time here,” he said under his breath.

His cowardly feet led him around the side of the house, where he spotted a path leading behind the barn. After a five-minute hike, he found cliffs dropping down to a shallow, rock-filled creek.

Two feet from the edge, his vivid imagination took him where he didn’t want to go. She might as well have fallen from a two-story building. Hands in the pockets of his raincoat, he hunched his shoulders, not so much against the cold as against the dire possibilities.

Across the ravine, purple gray mountains faded into a smoky horizon streaked with remnants of morning fog. The vista must have been Miranda’s last sight before she flew past rocks and brush and fallen trees on her way down.

An accident or a deliberate dive? He wasn’t ready to face the answer.

A twig snapped. Jack turned.

A boy stood in the muddy path, his hands balled up in the pockets of a denim jacket. He was twelve or thirteen, his eyes a cold, clear blue. “Are you Jack?”

“I am. You must be Timothy.”

“I heard your car. Why didn’t you come to the house?” Timothy didn’t sound young and scared anymore; the blunt question made him seem oddly adult.

“I needed a few minutes to think, that’s all.” Jack drew a slow breath of chilly air, delaying the news for one more moment. “Your mom.…?”

“She was unconscious when they put her in the ambulance. That’s all I know.”

A pox on the small-town hospital that would keep the family so ill-informed. Maybe they didn’t know who to call though. Especially if they had bad news.

“I’ll keep praying for her,” Jack said.

Timothy nodded, a quick jerk of his close-shorn head. Tears glazed his eyes.

Jack turned away, giving the kid his privacy, then shifted to watch from the corner of his eye. Teaching had given him a sensitivity to young people who were a tad off the track. This one bore watching.

“How do I know you’re really who you say you are?” Timothy asked.

Jack swallowed a phrase that wasn’t fit for young ears and dug in his pocket for one of his cards. Still not quite facing the boy, he held out the card. Timothy took it without comment.

“How’s your sister doing?”

Timothy didn’t look up. “Rebekah? She’s all right. The younger ones don’t really understand what’s going on.”

Younger ones … plural?

“I don’t know, ah, how many of you there are … now.”

The boy picked at one corner of the card with a fingernail and took his time answering. “Six.”

Jack let out a low whistle. Miranda had better pull through.

“Why did Mother choose you to be our guardian?”

Still flummoxed by it, Jack rubbed his chin. “Well, now. I met her when you were two or three years old. I remember sitting on the porch, drinking lemonade. Passing the time of day.”

“But if you’re our uncle, where have you been all this time?”

“In Chattanooga, cramming the joys of literature into the hard heads of college students.”

“That’s not what I meant. You wrote all those letters, but you never came around.”

“Your father strongly encouraged me to stay away, son.”

“I’m not your son.” Timothy took to the trail, his shoulders squared.

Squinting after him, Jack recognized the irascible tone and the inflexible body language. Timothy was only following Carl’s example. Carl, who’d warned that the letters would go straight into the trash. Maybe they hadn’t though, if Timothy knew about them.

Jack faced the ravine and the ever-changing Blue Ridge beyond. Glimmers of light on far-off glass and metal revealed the whereabouts of tiny towns tucked into the hills of Bartram County. Somewhere behind him lay the drowsy streets of Slades Creek. The place had grown to a six-stoplight town.

Somewhere behind him too lay Rabun County, his birthplace. The rainiest corner of Georgia, it snuggled up against the Carolinas and shared their beauty and their poverty.

Straight ahead, the mountains stretched away toward the comparatively flat sprawl of Atlanta, two hours south. The vista was beautiful—the light, the blues and greens, the shreds and patches of drifting fog—and everything held the wet, green scent of spring.

He inched closer to the edge and peered down at an outcropping of rock ledges. Slippery with moss and seeping water, they slanted this way and that, untrustworthy stairsteps that went only partway to the creek. Its banks and waters were muddied from the movements of many feet. The paramedics must have had a devil of a time transporting their patient.

Maybe she’d left the kids sleeping. A widow with six children wouldn’t have much solitude, and sometimes solitude was a soul’s lifeline. Other times, as Jack knew all too well, it was the lead weight that took a drowning soul to the bottom.

Dizzy, he backed up. After one last gander at the view, he returned to the wet, trampled path toward the house, pushing aside damp branches of dogwood and laurel.

A flash of bright white in the mud caught his attention. His card, crumpled.

Jack picked it up for proper disposal and walked on, entering the broad clearing where the wind bent tall grass to earth. On the other side of the clearing stood an ancient barn, a wooden shed of more recent vintage, and finally the boxy, story-and-a-half log home.

Wood smoke warmed the air as he made his way around to the front of the house. The two weathered rockers on the porch were exactly as he remembered them, but years had passed since he’d sat there with Miranda and her toddlers. Nine years.

In the drive, the sheriff’s cruiser still blocked the van. The utilitarian vehicles dwarfed Jack’s black rag top, a toy beside them.

He crossed the weedy lawn under the gnarled branches of a giant oak, then counted five wide steps to the porch where he’d first met Carl and his mean streak. Rooted in unfortunate family history, the animosity had been insurmountable. Miranda had made up for it though, in spades.

The rustic door held a wreath of dried flowers and golden wheat, something the earth-mother type might have handcrafted. Jack knocked, then waited, examining the wreath. Seven bunches of wheat, seven brown rosebuds—

The door creaked open. A large, graying man wearing a khaki uniform and a silver star filled the doorway and studied Jack with sad eyes. “Can I help you?”

“Yes sir, I hope so. I’m Jack Hanford. Carl Hanford’s brother.”

“Timothy told me you’d be here directly.” The man’s thick eyebrows drew together. “I never knew Carl had a brother.”

“Most people don’t know. I’m a half-brother, actually.”

The officer ducked under the low door frame and stepped onto the porch, forcing Jack to retreat. “I’m Tom Dean. May I see your ID, sir?”

“Certainly.” Jack pulled out his driver’s license.

After examining the license, the man studied Jack’s Audi. “Nice car. You aren’t much like Carl, are you?”

“I don’t know. I only spoke with him once.”

“But Mrs. Hanford named you as the guardian?”

“According to Timothy, she did. I had no idea until a couple of hours ago when he called.”

“Come out of the blue, did it?”

“Yes sir. I’m still trying to get a handle on it. I guess I’m the best she can do.”

“Well, then.” The deputy handed the license back. “Come on in.”

Jack stepped inside. The house must have been a hundred years old. Inside, it was warm. Cozy. Directly in front of him, stairs rose to the second floor. To his left, a bright orange fire crackled behind the glass of a black wood burner. For a house full of kids, the place was blessedly quiet.

A long, dark trestle table stood on the far end of the room. He imagined it filled with children. There was an old-fashioned wooden highchair too.

“Any news on Miranda?” he asked.

“She was banged up pretty good. Unconscious. You could call the hospital and find out.”

Jack nodded and continued his survey of the living room. Except for a few modern touches, it could have sprung from the pages of the Little House books he’d read to Ava’s niece and nephews. Sturdy furniture, braided rugs, needlework. Wooden pegs studded the wall by the front door. They were draped with jackets and capes in a variety of sizes but a paucity of color. Shades of gray and blue, all of them.

An eight-by-ten photo of the kids hung above the pegs, and Jack counted six blond heads. He didn’t know why he’d hoped for a lesser number; Timothy knew how many siblings he had. There were two girls, a little one and a big one, in matching dresses. Four boys in blue polo shirts. The smallest boy looked young enough to be in diapers.

A thud shook the wide-beamed ceiling. Feet thumped across a room upstairs, and young voices rose in a muffled argument. Someone else murmured something. The hubbub subsided and a faint tootling began. A recorder, perhaps.

Jack abandoned his study of the photo. “May I see the letter she left for Timothy?”

“Sure, but it looks legit. It’s her penmanship. I found the same writing all through the kitchen, on recipe cards and lesson plans.”

“Lesson plans?”

“For homeschool.” The deputy led the way toward the table.

Jack followed, keeping his thoughts to himself. He gave grudging respect to parents who did the job right, for the right reasons, but he hadn’t much patience with homeschoolers whose driving force was fear of the modern world. From the little he knew of Carl, it was easy to believe the man’s family would have been on the radical fringe of the movement.

The table held a sheet of paper, a blue teacup filled with lavender violets, and a litter of construction-paper valentines in all sizes and all the wrong colors. The wrong colors, nearly the wrong month; it was disorienting, like seeing purple shamrocks at Halloween.

Jack picked up the letter. Written in the perfectly proportioned italics that he remembered from the two notes he’d received from Miranda, it read exactly as Timothy had given it over the phone, except it concluded with:
You have always been a good son. I’m counting on you, Timothy. All my love, Mother
. The boy hadn’t read that part aloud.

She’d signed and dated the letter two weeks earlier. At the bottom of the sheet, she’d included Jack’s full name, address, and cell phone number. All the information was current. He was somewhat suspicious of the timing but attributed his qualms to his overactive imagination.

“I wonder if this is official enough to put me in charge while she’s out of commission,” he said.

“It’ll do for now, while you try to round up her lawyer. That’d be better than bringing in the DFCS folks. Department of Family and Children Services, that is. Once they jump in, it’s hard to pull ’em off again.”

“Do you happen to know the name of her attorney?”

“No, but if it’s somebody in Slades Creek, it won’t take long to track him down.” The deputy hitched up his trousers. “You’ll stay with the kids, then?”