A Clatter of Jars

A
LSO
BY
L
ISA
G
RAFF

Lost in the Sun

Absolutely Almost

A Tangle of Knots

Double Dog Dare

Sophie Simon Solves Them All

Umbrella Summer

The Life and Crimes of Bernetta Wallflower

The Thing About Georgie

P
HILOMEL
B
OOKS

an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

375 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

Copyright © 2016 by Lisa Graff.

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Philomel Books is a registered trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.

eBook ISBN 978-0-698-19592-9

Edited by Jill Santopolo.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Many thanks to Isaias Mercado for his help with the Spanish lyrics in this book.

Jacket art © 2016 by Fernando Juarez

Cover design by Kristin Smith

To Aria,
a fizzy grape soda

Prologue

O
N THE DARK WA
TERS OF
L
AKE
A
TROPOS
, JUST OUTSIDE
of Poughkeepsie, New York, there bobbed a single sailboat. At the boat's bow stood a black-haired pixie of a girl. Cadence, her name was. She and her parents were celebrating the one-year anniversary of her adoption.

The sky was offering a dazzling farewell to the sun—a fiery orange nearest the water, edging into watermelon pink farther up, then, at its height, a deep blackberry—and lily pads dotted the shore. Cady stared at the painted sky, passing an object between her hands.

It was a glass jar, sample-size, no larger than a Ping-Pong ball, with the words
Darlington Peanut Butter
embossed on the bottom. The jar was empty, save for the speck of light glowing at its center. Cady had seen the sight many times, and she never tired of it. The lower the sun dipped, the brighter the orb burned—dazzling yellow, like a firefly, smoldering purple at the extremities. The sphere always glowed brightest at the moment the sun set completely, then dulled to nothingness by morning.

When she heard her mother approach from the stern, Cady tucked the jar away.

“Toby and I were thinking of heading back to shore,” her mother told her.

Toby was Cady's father—had always been her father, although they'd only recently discovered each other. Cady fit with Toby as though he were the matching left mitten to her right. Cady had known her mother, Jennifer, much longer, although they'd only recently become family. Cady fit with Jennifer as though she were the right mitten to Cady's left.

Somehow, though, Toby and Jennifer did not match each other, not in the slightest. Whether it was their stitching, or the dye of their yarn, Cady's parents did not make a pair. Toby didn't seem to mind so much, being unmatched. But Jennifer . . .

Sometimes Cady wondered if there wasn't another mitten out there somewhere for her mother. But whenever Cady broached the subject, Jennifer insisted she wasn't interested in mittens.

In the past year, Cady had gained more family than she'd ever dared dream of. A mother, a father, and two grandparents—a grandmother who spoke in music instead of words, and a thieving grandfather who'd left Cady a peanut butter factory, her new home. Most times, Cady felt like the luckiest girl in the world.

But sometimes, like when the sun blazed an orange-watermelon-blackberry trail across the lake, Cady dared dream for just a little bit more. An aunt, perhaps. Or a brother. A sister, even.

It might be awfully nice to have a sister.

“Two more minutes?” Cady asked her mother.

“Two more minutes,” Jennifer agreed, then returned to the stern of the boat.

Alone once more, Cady took out her jar, examining it in the light of the setting sun. The glass glowed with possibility.

A Talent, that's what gave the jar its yellow-purple glow. A mysterious Talent stolen by Cady's grandfather. A Talent for acrobatics, perhaps, or for mending sweaters. It might allow Cady to translate Swahili, or train cats, or even turn raindrops into sparks of lightning. For a girl who just one year ago had lost all but a sliver of her own Talent, those were great possibilities indeed.

The only way to discover what lay inside the jar was to open it.

Cady studied the horizon, letting the jar and its glow of possibility dangle over the sailboat's edge. Then, unclasping her hand, she let the jar fall.

Plop!

The jar hit the water and sank swiftly down.

The things Cady dared dream of, she knew, couldn't be found in a jar.

• • •

Only two living creatures knew which Talent gave that jar its glow. The first was Cady's grandfather, Mason Darlington Burgess, who had Eked the Talent from a woman named Maevis Marvallous some thirty years previous.

The second was a man who knew what was inside most everything.

• • •

The woods of Camp Atropos for Fair Children, situated on the southernmost bank of the lake, were generally reserved for campers. The man in the gray suit was most certainly not a camper, and yet he stood watching the tide lap gently at the pebbly shore. He might have been forty, he might have been older—no one ever seemed able to tell for sure—and he was so large that his head had brushed several tree branches that were not used to being brushed. Bits of knotted rope peeked out from under his suit jacket, dancing with the summer breeze. Mason Darlington Burgess, the infamous Eker, had once tried to steal the man's Talent for knot-tying, trapping it in a jar, as he'd done with so many other Talents. But as Fate would have it, the Talent had not remained trapped.

At the man's foot squatted a frog, bright green on top and white at the throat, with bulby pads at the ends of his toes.

Hdup-hdup!
went the frog.

“The lake should be nice and warm this summer,” the man said. “Prime opportunity for swimming.” Anyone who happened upon the scene would have sworn it was the frog the man was speaking to. “Might be warm for at least five summers to come.”

Hdup-hdup!
agreed the frog.

The sky continued to darken, the frog remained still but for the occasional billowing of his throat, and the man in the gray suit watched the water, wearing the sort of sideways grin that suggested he knew more about the world than he was letting on. When the last rays of light sank below the water, the man left the shore and cut through the thicket of trees. The frog followed. When they reached a sturdy log building at the center of the camp, the man in the gray suit started up the steps.

“We ought to let her know,” he said.

Together, the man and the frog entered the lodge, passing beneath a moose head keeping guard above the doorway. An office was tucked just to the left of the lodge's entrance, with a plaque on the door that read
CAMP DIRECTOR
. The man in the gray suit knocked.

“Ah. My new bread vendor.” The woman who tugged open the door had wild curly black hair, and creases around her mouth from years of frowning. She frowned now. “I thought we scheduled the delivery for tomorrow.”

“It's awfully buggy down at the lake,” the man in the gray suit replied, which was no response at all. “Especially at sunset. Too much brush, I suppose. Ought to be cleared up.”

The woman patted the pocket of her knitted sweater. “Is that a frog?” she asked, of the creature squatting in the doorway.

“Sunset,” the man repeated. “Don't forget.”

And then, without warning, the bright green frog with the white throat and the bulby pads at the ends of his toes leapt—
hdup-hdup!
—directly at the woman, landing on her shoulder.

Ignoring the camp director's squawk of surprise, the frog leapt again. The woman turned to follow the creature's path out the open window, but he was impossible to track in the dark night.

“Well,
that
was odd,” the woman said. But when she spun back to the doorway, the man in the gray suit had disappeared as well.

• • •

As Fate would have it, the small glass jar that read
Darlington Peanut Butter
did not sink to the bottom of the lake entirely undisturbed. Anyone who happened upon the scene—although of course no one would ever happen upon such a scene, not at the bottom of a lake—would have noticed that on its way down, the jar struck a large black stone.

Just a titch.

Just enough.

The stone dislodged the jar's lid.

But, of course, no one saw.