3. Chloe
If I were an intelligent woman, I’d have followed the age-old advice for new parents everywhere and gone to bed when the kids did.
Trixie, Noodle, and Theo were long past the napping age, but they had a tendency to hit their mattresses hard when they went down for the night. I liked to think it was because they lived each day to the fullest, their bodies and minds wearied by the fun they managed to pack inside each twenty-four rotation, but the truth was that we all lived in a state of perpetual exhaustion.
In the general way of things, I strove to keep my anxieties to a minimum—about the bills and the fact that Theo had come perilously close to mixing ammonia and bleach just to see what the fuss is about, about Noodle repeating the sixth grade because his teachers refused to accept that intelligence was more than filling in bubbles on a Scantron. Most days, I managed to do a decent job of it, but the kids must have noticed something off about me when I’d returned empty-handed from Jasper’s house. Again.
Theo had begun wordlessly setting the table. Trixie had grabbed a bag of mixed vegetables from the freezer to make a stir-fry. And Noodle had coaxed Gummy Bear into a corner to work on sitting and staying—an activity that mostly involved Gummy Bear rolling onto his back in a bid for belly rubs.
So, yeah. After dinner, they’d all crashed and fallen into the deep sleep of the weary while I sat in the living room with my old college laptop propped on my legs, a drooling bulldog and Tropic of Cancer sitting next to me.
“Let’s see,” I said aloud as I started typing. “One very old, very used copy, battered and torn, defaced with writing on several pages… Ugh. Who am I kidding? No one is going to jump at the chance to get their hands on that.”
I quickly erased what I’d written.
“Think, Gummy Bear,” I said as I ran my hands over the soft flaps of his ears. He groaned and let me, but I could tell that even he wasn’t impressed by my copywriting skills. Or by me. Since I was the Sampson who forced him to go through the rigorous demands of a daily walk to the mailbox and back again, I’d never been his favorite member of the family. “We need to add panache. How about… One-of-a-kind annotated bootleg copy? A hidden trove of scandal and intrigue just waiting for you to take it home?”
As good as the words sounded, they weren’t exactly truthful. The annotations I’d read had sounded more like a couple of teenagers passing notes in study hall than a deep literary analysis. Setting my laptop aside, I flipped through the book until I found another of the notes scrawled in the margins.
“‘To have her here in bed with me, breathing on me, her hair in my mouth—I count that something of a miracle,’” I read aloud. Next to the line in the book, I could see that same scrawled, almost indecipherable hand from before: Say what you will about the main character’s morals, it sounds as if he really loved his wife. I can respect that.
And, once again, the elegant lines underneath it.
It’s not love if you write about the lice crawling over her hair in the very next paragraph. See?
I look at her again, closely. Her hair is alive. I pull back the sheet—more of them. They are swarming over the pillow.
True love doesn’t care about lice.
You’re just saying that to be contrary.
I’d love you no matter what kind of bugs you carried. I’d give anything to have you breathing on me, your hair in my mouth, your lice lying down to sleep with mine.
The conversation stopped there. Despite myself, I felt a certain kinship with the author of the neat, tidy hand. I liked how matter-of-fact she was, how she didn’t hesitate to call out her lover for being contrary. He did sound contrary. He also sounded kind of sweet, if I was being honest. The whole point of Tropic of Cancer was that the filthy, slovenly animal lust of being a human meant something. Not necessarily something good, but something. And the guy with the scratchy hand seemed to sense it.
Hooked now, I flipped faster, my eyes scanning for more messages between the two. After a few chapters, I found them—and I found myself sitting up straighter as I read through.
She’ll want to look for a studio with a garden attached—and a bathtub to be sure. She wants to be poor in a romantic way. I know her. But I’m prepared for her this time.
I know you in the same way, C. You think there’s romance in poverty, but that’s only because you’ve never lived it.
That’s not fair.
Neither is being forced to watch you go to the dance on W’s arm. Did you think I wouldn’t find out? Try page 131.
“Ohhh, it’s a love affair gone wrong,” I murmured, my eyes wide. I sat back against the couch cushions, my heart doing a strange flip-flop in my chest. Gummy Bear grumbled but allowed me to shift. “What do you think, Gummy Bear? Should we keep going?”
He didn’t have an answer for me. It felt wrong to be reading these private notes, as if I were a voyeur on a wild choose-your-own-adventure ride, but the book had technically been found in the library. Even if someone had shown the foresight to hide it deep in the basement, library books were public property. I had every right to keep turning the pages.
So I did. And once I reached the page 131, there was only one sentence deeply underlined: There’s something perverse about women…they’re all masochistsat heart.
I chuckled aloud at this obvious play, but all communication stopped there. My girl C had no witty comebacks, no page numbers sending her annoyed lover to other quotes by way of reply. My interest in the laptop and my eBay listing now at an end, I settled deeper into the sagging cushions of the couch to read. I had zero interest in the book itself, but the marginalia were starting to seriously intrigue me.
Which was why the sound of a sudden knock startled me into a yelp. Gummy Bear cocked a quizzical ear, but he was so inured to the sounds of a young, chaotic household that he closed his eyes and drifted back to sleep.
I, on the other hand, wasn’t so easily comforted.
“Who on earth could that be?” I asked as I swung my legs down and glanced up at the clock. Ten thirty on a school night. Not dangerously late for visitors, but certainly out of the ordinary.
The knock sounded again, sharper this time. Since the last thing I wanted was all three of my siblings tumbling out of their beds and demanding to know what was going on, I hopped up to answer it. As soon as I swung the door open to find who—and what—was on the other side, I stopped cold.
“Here.” A neon-yellow Frisbee was thrust through the gap at me. “I brought your brother’s thingamajig back.”
I accepted the toy with a blink. I blinked again as I took in the sight of Jasper Holmes standing in his full six-foot-tall glory on my front porch.
In theory, I knew Jasper wasn’t really a hermit. He could be seen buying his groceries every week in town, his black 1940s Ford truck cruising the streets almost as loudly and gas-guzzlingly as my own. He spent quite a bit of time at the garden and seed store, as his flowers could attest, and we’d even seen him at the annual Christmas pageant once, though he’d stormed out as soon as the baby Jesus started screaming for a diaper change. But he didn’t make social calls, and he definitely didn’t make them in the middle of the night.
Yet here we were.
“Do you…want to come in?” I asked, trying not to sound as unwelcoming as I felt. The four of us tried to keep the house in a habitable state, but I hadn’t yet mustered the energy to do the dishes and there were piles of unfolded laundry spilling over the love seat. That didn’t include the schoolbooks lying open on every surface or the dismantled old radio sitting frazzled on the coffee table. Bereft of even his toxic ammonia-and-bleach gas, Theo had been forced to strip the radio of parts to make a lemon-powered battery for his science project. Unless he could be bothered to put it away, the leftover parts would be sitting on that coffee table for months.
Jasper looked over my head and took it all in at a glance.
“Absolutely not,” he said.
I couldn’t help but laugh. Most people would have at least pretended not to notice. “Well, I appreciate this all the same.” I waved the Frisbee. “Next time, you can just toss it over the fence. We’ll figure it out from there.”
Instead of accepting this polite dismissal, Jasper hesitated. He worked his jaw a few times, as if chewing on the words he didn’t want to say.
“That book,” he eventually said. “The one you mentioned from before.”
There was no inflection in his voice, just a curt summation of the facts. I decided to respond in kind.
“What about it?”
“I came to buy it from you.”
“You want to…buy it? From me?” I echoed. I couldn’t have been more surprised if he’d claimed to be Henry Miller rising from the grave to claim its authorship. “What for?”
He grunted. “Does it matter? You said you could get good money for it. I have good money. That’s all you need to know. Name your price.”
I’d been waiting my whole life to hear those words spoken aloud. I’d always dreamed of being the kind of person who could write a figure on a scrap of paper and slide it across the table, the kind of person who could walk into an office and say, “Give us the room,” with a complete absence of irony. In my head, I always played it cool, as if money wasn’t the one thing that I always feel a desperate, clawing yearning to possess.
Naturally, I didn’t play it cool at all. Instead, I said the first thing that came to my mind.
“One million dollars.”
A cracking sound that might have been a laugh escaped Jasper’s mouth. “Nice try. No book is worth that much.”
Ever the literary scholar, I was quick to correct him. “Actually, there are early illustrated Bibles that fetch that much all the time. And several unfinished manuscripts from Jane Austen recently sold at auction for—”
“You know what I mean. Name a reasonable price.” He peeked over my head at the inside of the house again and frowned. “Beggars shouldn’t be choosers. How does five thousand sound?”
“Five thousand dollars?” I practically squeaked. It was no million-dollar windfall, but there were so many things I could buy with that kind of money. A dishwasher. A new roof, no down payment required. All the debate team escapades Trixie’s heart could desire. “Are you serious?”
“Do I look like a man who’s not serious?” He thrust a hand into the breast pocket of his jacket and pulled out a check folded neatly down the center. It was only then that I noticed he’d dressed up for this little meeting of ours. Whenever I normally saw him, he wore the traditional attire for rural Washington men well past retirement age: heavy-duty work pants and flannels, the occasional puffy vest when dignity required. The suit jacket he had on now was out-of-date but well pressed, his slacks equally tidy. “Here. It’s blank but I signed it. Fill it in with whatever you think is fair.”
“But you can’t just give me a blank check—”
“Do you have the book in the house with you?”
“Well, yes. But—”
“Then I’ll take it with me. Now.”
He shoved his hands into his armpits and stood staring down at me, his lips pressed in a flat line. Like the rest of his features, his lips were a little too large even when they were tucked tightly together like that.
I was tempted to tear up the check and tell him that the book wasn’t for sale—that a man couldn’t terrorize his neighbors for twenty-odd years and then start making demands to buy the only thing of value they had. Besides, I wasn’t sure I wanted him to have the book. I was just starting to get to know my star-crossed message writers. He’d take one look at those sentimental, heartfelt ramblings and—
“Well?” he demanded. “I’m not getting any younger.”
That was when it clicked. If I hadn’t been so flabbergasted by the sight of Jasper Holmes standing on my front porch or the dizzying prospect of a blank check with my name on it, I would have put the pieces together much sooner. As it was, I could only stare in wide-eyed astonishment as his words sank in.
He’s not getting any younger.
This was undeniably true, but he had been young. Once upon a time, he’d even been my age—young and hopeful, his head full of dreams, his heart ready for the same. If my mental math was correct, that would have been sometime around the 1950s and 1960s.
The exact time that bootleg copies of Tropic of Cancer would have been floating around a backwoods town like ours. With a gulp, I glanced down at the check in my hand. Sure enough, the scratchy signature grabbed me with its familiarity.
It’s him. He’s the contrary lover.
“Gimme a sec,” I said as I moved inside to grab the book. I picked it up with more care than I’d shown it before, as if I was afraid the whole thing might go up in a puff of smoke if I handled the binding too roughly. I felt a sudden itching to skim through the pages again, this time with a fine-toothed comb, but Jasper was watching me with an intensity that made me itch even worse.
I was pretty sure he knew what was written inside that book—and that he knew I knew it, too.
“It’s all yours,” I said as I handed it over.
Instead of grabbing it with a reverence similar to my own, he snatched it greedily. He then tucked the book under his arm as if he cared no more for its contents than he did the weeds he pulled ruthlessly from his garden every morning. Now that he’d gotten what he wanted, he turned to leave with the same curt disregard he always showed me.
But for some strange reason, I was reluctant to see him go.
“Wait,” I called. He paused but didn’t turn, so I decided to shoot my shot. Well, a shot, anyway. “How do you know I’m not going to write myself a check big enough to take every penny you have?”
“You won’t,” he said as he continued on his way. “If you were actually a thief, you’d be living in a hell of a lot nicer house than this.”
“I think you should take him for the full five grand.”
Pepper handed me the last box from the library basement and wiped her hand across her brow. It left a streak of dust behind, which blended poorly with her winged eyeliner. After trudging up and down the stairs with me for the past two hours, she looked as dirty and exhausted as I felt, but the job was finally done.
One basement, cleared of its ancient trove of old and unwanted books, the mystery of Jasper and Tropic of Cancer sitting unresolved at the center of it.
“I can’t do that,” I complained as I climbed the stairs and tossed the last of the books into the dumpster. “Even if the copy I sold him had been in mint condition—which it wasn’t—it would only be worth about half that.”
“Yeah, but you’re not counting sentimental value. If Jasper Holmes really was the guy who wrote all those love notes, then the book is priceless.” She grinned. Ever since I’d told her about the additional messages I’d found and Jasper’s late-night visit shortly thereafter, she’d been practically thrumming with the romance of it all. Pepper might have been a bit of a hard-ass, but she was a softie at heart. All those Harlequins probably accounted for it.
“To think of him writing secret notes in a dirty book like that,” she added. “Who knew the old devil had it in him?”
I shook my head and went to the sink to wash my hands. I was once again dressed for utilitarian purposes, but not for much longer. Now that the basement was cleared, it was back to my usual not-quite-a-librarian status. Half a degree wasn’t enough to land me the real position. Eighteen bucks an hour and a decent healthcare package were about all I could ask for.
“Who’s an old devil, and why are you guys talking about me behind my back again? I thought we covered that at the last HR meeting.” Gunderson, our boss and a man who always dressed in a three-piece suit and tie, popped out from behind the checkout desk. He wore a smile to show he was kidding, but neither of us was fooled. Poor Gunderson had never fooled anyone a day in his life. He was both the best and the worst person to run a library in that way.
The best? He loved rules and lists. He was an organizational wizard. And despite his uptight outlook on, well, just about everything, he genuinely cared about serving the community.
The worst? He desperately wanted to be none of those things. In his head, he was one of us: a part-time employee of the library, here for the paycheck and to occasionally get frisky in the stacks. In reality, he was a fortysomething father of three who was so risk-averse that he made his kids wear helmets when they were out walking the dog.
“Don’t worry, Gunderson,” I said as I dried my hands. “We weren’t talking about you.” Since he was watching, I was careful to wipe down the sink and add an extra squirt of sanitizer just to be safe. My job security wasn’t so high that I was willing to get on Gunderson’s bad side. “Can I ask you a quick question?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “Can you?”
I could hear Pepper groaning behind me, but I didn’t mind Gunderson’s cheeseball attitude as much as she did. There were a lot worse things for a man to be in this world. My mother had dated most of them.
“You’ve worked here for a long time, right?” I asked.
At that, he puffed up. “Fifteen years and counting.”
“Can you remember ever helping a guy named Jasper Holmes? Older gentleman, robust for his age, unpleasant enough to strip paint from a barn?”
“Now, Chloe. That’s no way to talk about a patron.”
“That’s the thing… I don’t think he is a patron. He lives next door to me, but I’ve never seen him set foot inside the library. I don’t think he believes in community services. Or the joy of reading.”
“Or any joy at all,” Pepper muttered.
Gunderson frowned to show what he thought of this levity, but he was too interested in all things library related to chide me for showing an interest. “I think I know who you’re talking about. He drives that vintage truck around town, right? Has a garden like a page out of a landscaping textbook?”
When I nodded, his frown only deepened.
“If you want my advice, I’d steer clear of that one,” he said. “In fact, I’d pack up those brothers and sister of yours and move as far away as you can get. You don’t want anything to do with a man like that.”
“Why?” I asked. I didn’t point out that moving my family of four was not only financially difficult, but laughably impossible. Our roots weren’t very illustrious, but they ran deep. They had to; it was the only way we could remain standing. “What’s wrong with him?”
Gunderson leaned close. His breath smelled like the celery-infused water his wife packed for him every day—not unpleasant, but not exactly pleasant, either. “You know I don’t believe in gossip.”
I did know that. I also knew that he didn’t believe in Bigfoot, crop circles, or the Illuminati, though he was still on the fence about chemtrails. “But?”
“But you weren’t too far off about that whole stripping-paint thing,” he said. “From what I understand, he’s done a lot more damage than that in his lifetime.”
I scanned Gunderson’s face for signs that he might be cracking a joke, but he looked the same as he always did—a little stern, a little worried, and so desperate to be liked that he didn’t notice either one.
“They say he killed a girl back in the sixties,” he added in a low voice. “Some girl from the radar base. The reason his garden is so lush is because he buried her on that very land.”