Free Gypsy of Spirits: Prequel to So Fell the Sparrow by Katie Jennings Page A

you in the paper when I stopped in Gainesville,” Jackie explained, recalling the quaint diner she’d enjoyed before hitting the road. “A year ago today, you lost control of your car and rolled into a tree.”
    Tears fell silently down Rachel’s face, and she rubbed at her neck. For a long moment she said nothing. Jackie drove, not minding the company. In the backseat, Gatsby decided the girl was not a threat and fell back asleep.
    When Rachel spoke, her voice was hollow with fear. “What am I supposed to do now?”
    “I don’t know, darling. Maybe seeing your family again will help guide you on.”
    “Will you take me to them? It’s just up the road a ways.”
    With a kind smile, Jackie nodded. “Of course.”
    Rachel’s face lifted with a small hint of joy at the thought, though sorrow still weighed her down. She tried to reach out and touch Jackie’s hand, only to wince as her ghostly fingers passed right through Jackie’s solid ones. Another sob built in her throat, but she fought it back.
    “So…who are you? How come you can see dead people?”
    Jackie could tell the girl wanted to distract herself. “I go by Jackie. I’m a medium, which means I can communicate with spirits.”
    Rachel shook her head in disbelief. “I can’t believe that’s real.”
    “As real as you are sitting here beside me,” Jackie mused, eyeing her serenely. “There is so much more to this world than black and white, dead and alive. When we die, we do not just vanish. We live on.”
    Rachel fiddled with the frayed tears in her jeans. “Have you always seen people like me?”
    “I saw my first spirit when I was six years old in my hometown of Saginaw.” Jackie smiled, the memory sweet. “I was playing hopscotch with some friends, and I saw an older man standing in the street nearby. He was staring around, lost and confused. When I pointed him out to my friends, they laughed at me. They didn’t see him. So I walked up to him and asked who he was. He looked at me much the same way you did, with complete surprise. No one had spoken to him in the twenty years he’d been wandering around the street even though he’d tried to get people’s attention. He didn’t understand that he was dead until that moment. Then he thanked me, turned around and disappeared.”
    “How did he die?” Rachel’s eyes were on her, filled with wonder.
    “He’d had a cardiac arrest while crossing the street in 1970. He was dead before he hit the ground.”
    “Did you start to see more of them?”
    Jackie’s hands tightened on the steering wheel. “Many, many more. I saw children at school raising their hands and never getting called on. At the little market where we bought fresh eggs I saw a young woman crying in the corner. I even saw spirits in my own home; a young boy and his father. They were killed in the 1940s when a fire broke out and destroyed most of the home.”
    “Did you talk to them?”
    “The boy became somewhat of a friend to me,” Jackie said, that old ache returning to fester in her heart. Not a day went by that she didn’t miss him. “His name was Henry. He shared my room, and we would play hide-and-go-seek together, share secrets, tell stories…”
    Rachel managed a smile. “That sounds nice.”
    Jackie nodded, though a lone tear fell from her eye. Her hand came up to grasp the small, silver cross she wore around her neck. “It was for awhile. Until my father found out.”
    “What did he do?”
    Her fingers tightened around her necklace, the points of the cross digging into her skin. “He tried to exorcise me.”
    Rachel blinked. “Like, from a demon?”
    Jackie let out a long breath, her hand finding the steering wheel again. “Yes, but that came later, when I was thirteen. You see, my parents both came from very long and very old bloodlines of strict Catholics. Italian on my father’s side and Spanish on my mother’s side. When I was very young my mother died of cancer. I was an only child. From that point