“The paper is sheet music for ukulele,” Matt says. “It’s from Advanced Ukulele Hits.”
“It certainly is.”
Matt’s heart is throbbing in his ears so loud he can hardly hear his own words.
He now holds in his hands the connection he’s been searching for.
A potential miracle in the form of a paper airplane, designed by his father.
“Where did you get this?”
“It was on my front lawn a few days ago,” says Service. “I thought it was so beautiful. And mysterious. A glider made of ukulele music from a book that I myself own? At first, I thought I was being hazed. Maybe I was, but I knew that something quite strange had happened. If you unfold it, you’ll see the song is ‘I Am a Rock.’”
Which Matt remembers as the song from the night he watched his sister around the campfire at Crescent Bay with the older teenagers, lurking in the background to not embarrass her, watching the flames throw orange shadows on her face, listening to the ukulele and her strong, emotional voice through the crackle of the fire.
Now his own voice carries strong emotion: “Exactly when? Exactly what time and day did you find this on your lawn, Mr. Service?”
“I can tell you.”
He goes into a bedroom and comes out a moment later, almost knocking into Bruce, who’s marching back down the hall. Service drops whatever it is he’s carrying, then flinches when Bruce makes a reflexive fist. Bruce quickly apologizes and comes back into the living room with a hard set to his jaw. He looks at Matt and shakes his head just once.
Arnold Service follows Bruce back in with an At-A-Glance desk calendar and a pair of reading glasses in place. He glances worriedly at Bruce then consults the calendar.
“Last Tuesday,” he says. “It was there on the grass when I got up in the morning. Around seven. It was damp from the dew.”
The morning he labored for Sara Eikenberg’s father, Matt thinks, or late the night before. Launched by Jazz as a call for help. Which means there might be more.
An idea forms.
“What’s this all about?” Bruce asks.
“Mr. Service,” Matt says. “Can I have this?”
“If it would help you find Jasmine, please, do. It’s yours.”
“What the hell is all this about?”
“A Little Wing!” Matt hands his father the delicate thing. Bruce turns it in his big hands then gives Matt a gray-eyed stare.
“I’ll be damned,” says Bruce. His face looks pleased and proud. The airplane rocks on his big palm like it’s just landed. “We folded scores of these things.”
“And now it’s going to help us find her, Dad. We’ll show this to everyone we talk to. In the houses, on the street, downtown, at the beaches — everywhere. Jazz is launching these for us. There have to be more. Which means, if we know where and when they landed and figure in the wind, we’ll know where they came from.”
“Hold on, son,” says Bruce. “Not so fast. This thing could have been launched from practically anywhere. You know how they just go and go.”
“No, Dad!” Matt pinches the body lightly, holds the airplane up for his father to see. “The breeze carried it here on a downward path. It’s glider aerodynamics. Jazz’s plane came from the hills above us.”
“We can’t even know that it came from her,” says Bruce.
“It has to be her! Little Wing is a one-of-a-kind design. You taught her to fold it and she sent this out for us to find!”
In a long moment’s journey Matt watches his father’s expression go from disbelief to doubt to bewilderment to a hint of possibility.
Near the end of the night’s door-knocking, at sunset, Matt and his father find another Little Wing. It’s made of ukulele sheet music from the same book. Matt holds it to the lamplight in a small bedroom on Sleepy Hollow Lane.
Sleepy Hollow Lane is far north of Moss. The finder is a Japanese girl — Hinata Saito — who is staying in a vacation rental with her family. She seems proud to own something that Matt owns, too. Her English is good and she says she almost stepped on the glider, then picked it up off the street because she liked origami and wanted to know how the glider was folded.
In the lamplight of the small bedroom, Matt sees the car tire print across one wing of the plane, the paper pocked by nicks and divots made by a two-ton automobile. To him, it’s a miracle there’s anything left of it at all. Another miracle in a miraculous day. Possibly the best day of his life.
Matt, Bruce, Hinata, her mother, father, and two brothers, have all crowded into a cottage bedroom, where Hinata keeps the Little Wing in a small red bucket half-filled with seashells and bits of driftwood. She found the plane two days ago. One of the brothers shows Matt some shells in a plastic coffee cup of brine and his father orders him away.
“This plane was made by my sister, Jasmine Anthony,” says Matt. “She’s in trouble and this is her way of communicating with me. May I have it?”
Hinata nods and smiles, delighted. She’s got shiny dark eyes and a wonderful face. Her family seems delighted as well. Hinata is happy to give Matt the glider, and if she finds another, he can have that, too. They are staying here all summer, Disneyland tomorrow.
Matt and his father head down the busy sidewalk toward the Westfalia. The night is warm and a faint band of orange lingers along the western horizon. Matt stops and looks east across PCH to the city, the houselights scattered across the hills like a tossed handful of diamonds.
He remembers what Jasmine said on the phone that night, the last time he heard her voice: In Laguna! I’m in the...
“She’s launching these things from somewhere up,” Matt says. “So an offshore breeze will take them down toward the ocean — like Moss and Sleepy Hollow. An onshore breeze will give them lift, and scatter them in the hills above town, or even the canyon, where there’s thermals. Like where Kyle and me used to collect hawk feathers and camp out.”
His father is quiet for a moment. “This is a real longshot, Matt. The planes tell us almost nothing, except that it could be Jazz who made them. I’m being realistic.”
“Another ukulele player knowing how to fold a perfect Little Wing? That isn’t realistic, Dad — it’s ridiculous! This is the connection. Something you taught Jazz is going to save her life. It’s a gift or a sign or a miracle or whatever you want to call it.”
They get to the Westfalia and climb in. Matt looks through the windshield at the hills and the moon.
“Sorry I lost my temper today,” says his father. “It won’t be the last time.”
“Maybe you could be easier on people. Everybody’s different.”
“I don’t fit in, but this is my home now. Part of me wants to just hose Laguna off into the ocean. The hippies and the druggies and the bums and freeloaders. Just blast them away and start over. Like God and Noah and the flood.”
“It’s a good city, Dad. It’s live and let live.”
“I hope I don’t mess things up.”
46
Matt sits across from Furlong and Darnell in the LBPD interview room, both paper airplanes on the stainless-steel desk between them. He explains how he found them. He doesn’t want to give them up but he knows he’ll have to. Last night he folded three identical copies, using pages from Jazz’s Advanced Ukulele Hits.
Last night he also thought of the Register doing a front-page story on these airplanes, with a picture of one, so everyone in Laguna who had found one could tell him when and where. He quickly realized that her kidnappers would know what she was up to and keep her from ever launching another one again. Or worse.