Gypsy of Spirits: Prequel to So Fell the Sparrow (3 page)

“I agree.” Jackie pulled onto the road and continued on, tossing back her hair to let the wind rush through it as she picked up speed. “I feel like something special awaits us there.”

As Jackie headed northeast toward the rising sun, a doctor five hundred miles away was receiving a late night phone call that would change her life forever.

And in Seattle, a ghost hunter awoke from a strange dream, the name of a woman he’d never met on his lips.
Grace
. He fell back asleep and forgot the dream, but fate had done its job. Soon he and his partner would hit the road on the hunt for the paranormal.

Four strangers were unknowingly en route to each other, bound for a tiny, seaboard town in Massachusetts.

To a house that had claimed the life of a sparrow.

“We are all wanderers on this earth. Our hearts are full of wonder, and our souls are deep with dreams.”

–Gypsy Proverb

October 1865

Mad Rock Harbor, Massachusetts

HER LIFE WAS
beautiful. Her death was a tragedy.

For Sally Lockwood time moved slower than it had
before.
Clouds lingered, frozen in the sky. The indigo water of the harbor lay unnaturally calm. Dry leaves clung to the spindly branches of towering elms, the wind unwilling to shake them free.

Sparrows no longer sang. Stray dogs refused to bark.

It was as though the world itself had come to a stubborn standstill, though her young mind could not comprehend why.

How was she to know what had happened to her? It had been such a sudden death.

Her family home stood comfortably on its generous plot of land, all white colonial columns and blue siding set against the backdrop of a quaint and quiet seaboard town. The house and the town were all she knew, all she had seen of the world.

In her short five years of life she had been sheltered from many horrific things. A Civil War that pitted brother against brother. The brutal destruction of entire towns. The slaying of over half a million men in the name of equality. The assassination of a prolific president.

It was five years that would change the course of history; years she witnessed with the innocence of a child. They would be the only days she harbored a fluttering, kicking heart.

Safe within the confines of her home, she skipped down the upstairs hallway. A carefree smile brightened her porcelain face as her blonde curls danced. The lacy white dress she wore billowed at her knees, the movement fluid and graceful. She felt lighter and less clumsy. The skinned knee and bruised elbow from a previous fall were now miraculously healed. The inexperience of youth kept her from wondering how or why.

The wooden floorboards creaked beneath her bare feet, the only sound to penetrate the silence. She paused for a moment before the doorway of her parents’ bedroom, her smile falling as she noticed it was empty. No bed, no armoire, no vanity with a dressing stool where her mother would sit and powder her nose. Concern rushed into her mind long enough for a single heartbeat, then flew away like a little, lost bird.

She wandered to the stairway, her hand tracing the banister of the second floor balcony. It dropped off abruptly where the banister was broken, the wood sharp and splintered. She peered nervously over the edge and down to the first floor entryway, a sick feeling washing over her.

On instinct, she backed away and continued to the stairs. She wanted to find her mother and listen to her play the piano.

As if she could already hear the sweet music, Sally began to hum.

She made her way down the stairs, her feet thudding on the wood with each step. Hazy sunlight poured in through the windows, filling the entryway with light. Out of habit, she twirled to the right at the bottom of the stairs and headed for the room where her parents kept the piano.

Something stopped her dead in her tracks, freezing her in place so she couldn’t take another step. Her gaze locked on a dark, spreading stain that marred the wood floor just below the second floor balcony—beneath the broken banister.

Coldness settled over her along with a feeling of dread and discomfort that she didn’t understand. In the blink of an eye, she saw a vision of her own body lying crumpled and lifeless over the stain.

She saw her death with brilliant clarity for one, startling moment.

As rapidly as it appeared, it vanished. The cold feeling escaped with it and she continued on as though nothing had happened.

Her soul was still traumatized. It refused to accept the truth of her fate.

The suspicious lack of furniture in the living area stopped her yet again, and her tiny brow creased with worry as she had the abrupt and horrific thought that she had been abandoned. Her parents had left her there all alone…

She heard the slamming of the front door and immediately followed the sound, calling out for her mother. Her cries fell on deaf ears, as the living rarely hear the pleas of the dead.

Shoving aside the lacy curtains of the parlor window, she watched her parents approach a horse-drawn carriage. She beat her hands against the windowpane, begging them not to leave her. Not to abandon her.

As her father secured a trunk to the back of the carriage, her mother took a final, long look at the house. Her eyes fell on the window and seemed to capture for one last time the image of her angelic daughter’s face.

She only shook her head and climbed into the carriage, tears spilling down her cheeks. The carriage pulled away, never to return to the house that had claimed the Lockwoods’ only child.

Sally crumbled to the floor, heartbroken. That was when she spotted the leather case holding the tintype photograph her father had of her, sitting forgotten on the lowest stair. He had purposely left every last memory of her behind.

She pulled her knees up to her chin and began to cry. Though tears fell, they did not exist. For she did not exist, at least not in the realm of the living.

She was nothing more than a lost specter. A lonely spirit.

A ghost. Fated to drift within the shadows and lose herself in the house. The Sparrow House.

It would be hers for all eternity.

October 2012

Upstate New York

SHE WAS A
woman who knew death. She’d witnessed it, tried desperately to prevent it, and consoled those about to succumb to it. But even with all that, death was a thing she had never truly understood.

Until now.

They say that the death of a parent is one of life’s inevitable tragedies. In fact, that was something she often told others as they accepted the news of their own parents’ passing.

Now she realized just what bullshit that rationalization really was.

It didn’t lessen the blow or soothe the pain. It didn’t provide justification. It was just something people said because it sounded right even though they couldn’t possibly understand the downright uselessness of the words.

Yet they said it anyway because something had to be said at a time like that. She didn’t want to hate them for trying to comfort her, though a part of her did.

Because she hadn’t just lost one parent. She’d lost both.

No words could justify or make sense of such waste. It was just a tragedy, one she still had trouble coming to terms with. Trouble accepting.

And so, instead of facing it, she was running away.

Grace rolled down the window of her black Mercedes as she tore through the backwoods of New York, craving fresh air. It whipped in and prickled her skin with an icy chill, sending her shoulder length waves of russet hair flying around her face. On the radio, Jim Croce was telling an operator about his broken heart.
I’ve overcome the blow
…

For a brief moment, she let her eyes close. She wanted nothing more than to absorb everything surrounding her, to find some kind of relief in the wind, the lilting guitar, the lonely stretch of rain dampened highway. She knew she must be somewhere near Albany, halfway to her destination. Until she got there, she’d simply try and enjoy the drive.

At least while driving, she couldn’t give in to the pain and cry.

She could be alone, and yet not feel so alone. Not with the other cars passing her on the road, few as they were. It troubled her that complete strangers provided more comfort than her own friends, colleagues, or fiancé had. Well, ex-fiancé now.

The bastard.

But none of that mattered. She’d made her escape from Chicago, leaving her job behind for a three-month leave. Not a leave she wanted to take at first, but one she’d been coerced into by her superiors. Men who had known and trusted her father, men who grieved nearly as much as she did. The medical community was a tight knit one.

She was Dr. Grace Sullivan, only daughter of the esteemed and well-loved Dr. Allen Sullivan and his beloved wife Marie. May God rest their souls.

Or, however they said it.

Ever since the car accident claimed her parents, the people around her did nothing but talk about God and Heaven and there being no pain for them any longer. It was all nice, but it literally meant nothing to her.

She didn’t believe in God. It was pretty hard to when you were raised with science; educated on the importance of medicine and the human ability to survive the impossible. It wasn’t God who granted miracles, not in her eyes. People made their own way in this world, created their own fate.