5. Chloe
“Okay, this is everything we have that’s not checked out right now.” Pepper bounded forward with her arms full of old clothbound books. She dropped them to the counter with a loud bang—a thing she’d never do while Gunderson was around, but he’d already left for lunch. According to the clock above the checkout counter, we had exactly forty-three minutes before he returned and we needed to get everything back where it belonged. “The Old Man and the Sea and For Whom the Bell Tolls were in the bookmobile. The rest—The Sun Also Rises, A Moveable Feast, and To Have and Have Not—were on the regular shelves.”
I started greedily opening the covers and flipping through the pages. “And how many were checked out?”
“Just two. A Farewell to Arms and The Torrents of Spring.” Pepper paused and wrinkled her nose, considering. “I didn’t know people still read Hemingway. Not for fun, anyway.”
“You’d be surprised how timeless and relatable some of his stuff can be.” I stabbed a finger at the opening line to The Old Man and the Sea. “‘He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish.’ I can think of at least three of the regulars at the Acorn Saloon who go fishing every morning without catching a single thing. They might get a real kick out of this.”
Pepper snorted. “If one of the regulars you’re talking about is Freddy Wilson, the reason he never catches anything is because he only goes down to the river to smoke weed without his brother finding out. I don’t think you’ll find that in Hemingway.”
I laughed obligingly, but my interest was taken up in scanning the pages for any sign of the two now-familiar scrawls: one that almost definitely belonged to Jasper Holmes, and one that—maybe, possibly—belonged to the young woman who was dead and buried in his garden.
Which, okay, was a stretch, but come on. If anyone in this town was hiding the bodies of his enemies, it was my grouchy neighbor. Even if I didn’t end up finding literal bones, I was sure my search would yield a skeleton or two in his closet.
I could hardly wait.
“I can’t believe it never occurred to us before,” I cackled as I set aside the first book and reached for another. “Jasper always acts like my brothers and sister are trespassing if they so much as look at his garden the wrong way. We should have started digging years ago.”
Pepper plucked the copy of The Sun Also Rises out of my hands and tossed it aside. I was about to open my mouth to protest, but she spoke up before I could say anything.
“There won’t be anything in that one, remember?” she said. “The note in Tropic of Cancer said, ‘No more Hemingway,’ so they must have been talking about reading a different one together. Besides—this is a reprint from the ’90s. There’s no way your dead girl was writing in this one.”
I plucked it back out of her hands. “It’s still worth checking. It only takes a sec.”
It did only take a second, but Pepper was right. There was nothing inside the book except a receipt for sixteen gallons of gas back when it cost $1.73 a gallon. $1.73? People had no idea how good they’d once had it. I’d paid almost three times that amount this morning. Pretty soon, I was going to have to start farming out my ovaries just to fill the tank.
“This is fruitless,” Pepper said as she jumped up to sit on the counter. That was another thing that only happened when Gunderson wasn’t around, but there weren’t any patrons in the library right now, so it wasn’t as if it mattered. “Even if our two mystery writers had been talking about a Hemingway they checked out from this library, what are the chances it’s still around after all these years? Or even that they wrote similar notes inside it? For all we know, we may have even tossed it out with all those other books yesterday.”
I shook my head. “No, I’d have remembered seeing a Hemingway.” And probably would have tried selling it on eBay, too, but that part went without saying.
In my heart of hearts, I knew that searching an entire library’s worth of books for signs of Jasper’s torrid love affair was a waste of time. I also knew that there was very little truth to Gunderson’s claims of murder. Still, I couldn’t shake the feeling that strange things were afoot.
If I were to take my motivations out and examine them under a microscope, I felt sure the findings would come back inconclusive. Part of me was interested for the sole purpose of being interested—curiosity killing the cat and all that—but I suspected these particular waters ran deeper. That Jasper Holmes, a lonely grouch of a man, could have once fallen headfirst into love, and a literary love at that, touched something deep inside me. And, no, not because I was a lonely grouch of a woman.
At least…not entirely. It was hard to be lonely when you were surrounded by the endless pull of three living, breathing, vibrant kids. Then again, it was hard not to be lonely under those conditions. There was a reason my mom fell into the habit of hooking onto every handsome face to offer her a respite, however brief.
“I still think you should cash that check for something like twenty thousand dollars just to see what happens,” Pepper said, grinning in the way that always pulled me back to reality. “If Jasper finds out and comes at you with a shovel, then you’ll know he’s a killer for sure.”
“That’s very supportive of you, thanks,” I said as I continued searching through the Hemingway books. By the time I was done, my hands were coated in dust and I was no closer to an answer than before. Either my missing notes were in one of the two checked-out copies, or Pepper’s hunch about the book being long gone had been right.
“So what’s next?” Pepper asked. “I know you. You aren’t going to stop until the writing on the wall is in permanent ink.”
“I think we need to shift our focus,” I said, clicking over into fixer mode once again. “If there really was a missing girl from the sixties, shouldn’t we have heard about it before? Especially if she was connected to the radar base? That’s the sort of thing that makes national news.”
Pepper shrugged. “Who’s to say it didn’t? It’s probably buried deep in the police records somewhere. When the base closed, the whole town stopped being relevant. Even if there had been a scandal, it was probably sealed up and forgotten about along with it.”
She spoke no more than the truth. Everyone who grew up in Colville knew about the old radar base that had once stood about twenty miles outside town. Before it closed down in the early sixties, it had been a part of the U.S. military warning system that went up during the Korean War. Terrified of a repeat Pearl Harbor, the government had spent a pretty penny putting up warning stations near any and all international borders. The hope was that they’d catch incoming danger before the damage was done.
To my knowledge, the base had only lasted a little over a decade, but it left a mark all the same. Not only was the abandoned structure a favorite hangout for teens, paintballers, and aspiring graffiti artists, but we still had an Air Force survival school in these parts. Apparently, the Air Force had fallen so much in love with our surroundings—and the many natural hazards, which emulated the worst places a pilot might be forced to land—that they’d decided to set up a permanent training facility.
“Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” I asked suddenly.
Pepper grinned and cracked her knuckles. “If what you’re thinking is digging through a decade’s worth of microfiche, absolutely. I never get to put my librarian skills to good use anymore. Most people only ever ask me how to send documents to the printer.”
I laughed and started stacking up the books to return to the shelves. As much as it pained me to admit it, Pepper was more suited for that kind of research than I’d ever be. In fact, she was a better librarian than me in almost every respect. Not only had she finished her degree, but she understood the technology way better than I did. I could stock a shelf with the best of them, but the additional training needed to move forward in our increasingly digital age always seemed to be just out of reach.
Physically. Financially. Emotionally.
I wanted to care about e-book lending and online content curation, I really did, but I also wanted to sleep sometimes. Everything in this world was a trade-off—at least for me. Pepper, on the other hand, never did anything she didn’t want to. I tried not to be jealous of her, but it was a struggle. She’d actually turned down a research library job in Seattle to start driving around in the bookmobile instead. She’d always preferred the close feeling of life here, the way everyone’s stories played out on a small stage like an intimate off-Broadway experience.
Which, now that I thought about it, was probably why she’d started hanging out with me back in grade school. Every detail of my life had been on display since the moment I’d been conceived.
The phone rang before I could dwell too much on that depressing thought. Pepper jumped down from the counter and reached to answer it before I could snag the handset.
“Colville Public Library, could I interest you in a book by Ernest Hemingway? We have several in search of a good home.”
“Pepper!” I hissed as I kicked playfully at her leg. Pepper was ready for it with a neat sidestep. “What if that was Gunderson calling in to check on—”
“Wait. He did what?” Pepper glanced quickly at me before turning her back so I couldn’t hear her conversation. I recognized the ruse for what it was: right after I got custody of the kids, I used to catch Trixie doing the same thing. Every incoming call had the potential to be Mom with a rational explanation, full of tearful apologies that would make up for the wrongs she’d done us.
She’d never once called, but that hadn’t stopped Trixie from dashing to answer the phone anyway. Or me from wishing there was anything I could do to ease the sting for her.
“You’d better give it to me.” I waggled my fingers in front of Pepper’s face. “Whatever Theo’s done now, it can’t possibly be as bad as the time he set fire to—”
“Yeah. Uh-huh. Yep.” Pepper ignored me and continued with her terse, one-syllable replies. “She’ll be right there. First floor? By the ambulance station?”
At the sound of that word—ambulance—my stomach turned over.
“But it’s lunchtime,” I protested. I didn’t know who I was protesting to, but I felt it needed to be said. “He should be at school. He’s safe there. They don’t let any of the kids near the science equipment unless they’re supervised.”
Pepper hung up the phone and turned to look at me. “It’s not Theo this time. It’s Noodle.” Her lips pulled into a frown so serious that the churning in my stomach stopped cold. “They said you’re going to want to get to the hospital straightaway.”
The hospital was located less than a mile from the library as the crow flies. Even though I was no crow, I got there in record time.
“I’m here for Noodle—I mean Aloysius—Sampson,” I said, breathless as I ran up to the first person in scrubs I could find. She looked to be all of eighteen years old and no more qualified to practice medicine than I was, but her name tag proclaimed her Dr. Letitia Underhill, so she was good enough for me. “He’s twelve years old, has red hair, isn’t very tall, and—”
She held up a hand to cut me off. Since she smiled while she did it, I found it in me to obey.
“You must be the sister,” she said in a voice that sounded as young as she looked. “I’d have recognized that hair anywhere.”
“His sister and legal guardian,” I corrected her, lest there be any confusion. I also fought the urge to put a hand to my head. A flaming head of red hair always sounded good in books, but the real thing wasn’t nearly as glamorous. People could spot my family walking down the street from space. “Is he okay? What happened? Why isn’t he at school? What—”
“Whoa, there,” she said, still smiling. “He’s fine. Just a broken leg, that’s all.”
I felt my knees growing weak. “Just a broken leg?”
“Well, his ribs are pretty bruised, too, but kids tend to heal fast. He’ll feel like he fell off a cliff for a few days, but that’s because, well, he fell off a cliff.”
The weakness in my joints traveled to the rest of my limbs. “I think I need to sit down,” I said.
“I’ll say you do,” a cheerful male voice said from behind me. “You look like you just swallowed a ghost.”
I felt rather than saw a chair materialize underneath me. Too grateful to care how or why it had appeared, I sank into it.
Childhood ailments and injuries were nothing new to me. Trixie had once hit her head so hard on the door of the station wagon that she’d gotten a concussion and five stitches for her trouble. Noodle was prone to sore throats and got them so often that the pharmacist no longer needed a prescription for his antibiotics. And Theo…well. Theo had, in no particular order, burned off his eyebrows and eyelashes (twice), removed the top quarter of his pinkie finger (he claims it was an accident), and gotten his tongue stuck to an icy metal pole (also twice).
But to my recollection, no one had yet fallen off a cliff. Especially not Noodle.
“He’s a tough little chap, I’ll give him that,” the male voice sounded again. This time, it was accompanied by a body as the man squatted in front of me. He was dressed in head-to-toe camouflage, with leather boots up to his knees and a cape that seemed to be made of some kind of thatch. The dark stubble of five days’ growth roughened his jawline, his hair color impossible to determine under the knit cap he wore. He smelled exactly the same way he looked, with wafts of bark and earth rising up from his clothes in ways that would defy explanation, if the explanation weren’t already well known to me.
“You’re from the survival school,” I said—unnecessarily, since the truth was obvious for all to see. If ever a man looked as though he trained crashed Air Force pilots how to survive using nothing but their wits and a single piece of string, it was this guy.
“What gave me away?” he said with a laugh and a flash of teeth that looked incongruously straight and white against his mud-caked skin. “No, don’t answer. I can tell you’re in shock. You’ll say something you’ll regret, I’ll tease you mercilessly about it, and then we’ll be forced to tell our grandkids all about it at our fiftieth wedding anniversary. How boringly predictable.”
If my thoughts had been in a whirl before, they were downright jumbled now. “Our…grandkids?” I echoed with a helpless glance up at the doctor. She smiled with what I thought was understanding, but the man laughed as though he hadn’t a care—or a beloved sibling—in the world.
“I should probably mention that Aloysius has decided you and I are going to be married. Apparently, he likes the way I take charge of a situation. He says you could use more of that in your life.”
The man smiled again, more gently this time. It was a good smile, and I was starting to realize that under the layers of wilderness getup, he was inordinately attractive, but I still bristled under it. I resented any and all implications that I wasn’t fully capable of handling things on my own.
I was handling things. I was always handling things. There was no way I was letting a perfect stranger rob me of the only thing that kept me going.
If the man noticed my annoyance, he didn’t let it show. “I didn’t have the heart to let him down, so I think that makes us officially betrothed. I hope you don’t mind.”
I ignored the part where my heart fluttered uselessly in my chest and focused on what really mattered. “Wait. He said all that to you? Opened his mouth and spoke the words aloud?”
“We had a nice chat while I carried him down the mountain. I gave him a few pointers on training that dog of yours.” He leaned forward and winked—as in, actually winked. I’d never seen a man under the age of eighty do that before. “Between you and me and the lamppost, you can’t teach an elderly bulldog to do much of anything but what he damn well pleases, but the experience won’t hurt Aloysius any. Or Gummy Bear, come to think of it.”
I could only goggle at him, my heart still fluttering wildly. This time, the fluttering wasn’t caused by the man himself so much as the words coming out of his mouth. Noodle didn’t talk to anyone until he knew them for at least three weeks.
The man must have taken my shocked silence as worry because he reached for my hands and chafed them between his own before realizing that he was mostly just transferring dirt from his palms to mine.
“He’s all right, I promise,” he said. “A little shaken up but in excellent spirits, considering. He’s lucky I came along when I did. That part of the forest doesn’t normally see a lot of foot traffic. He could have been down there for a while before anyone thought to look for him.”
“Zach’s right. All things considered, this story turned out pretty well.” The doctor nodded toward the opposite hallway. “Would you like me to take you to see your brother? He’s resting, but I think he’d appreciate a friendly face. He’s not too keen on all the bother of the doctors and nursing staff.”
“He doesn’t like strangers,” I said as I got to my feet. As I stood, the man kneeling at my feet—Zach—got up with me. He towered over me by well over half a foot. I glanced up at him and gulped. “At least, he usually doesn’t. You must have some kind of magic powers.”
“That’s me.” Zach agreed cheerfully. “A genie someone accidentally unleashed in the forest. Sorry about all the dirt, by the way. I didn’t want to waste any time getting your brother to safety.”
At this reminder of Noodle’s close call, a wash of heat rushed to my cheeks. The man saw it, I felt sure, since my freckled skin made every blush stand out like grape juice on a white carpet, but all he did was salute cheerfully before jamming his hands deep in his pockets. Then he took himself off with a whistle on his lips and a spring in his step, pausing just once to wink back at me.
And then he disappeared through the sliding hospital doors.
“Who was that guy?” I demanded of the doctor as she led the way down the sterile hall. Despite her young appearance, she moved with the neat, quick step typical of those with a lot of work to do and no time at all in which to do it.
“Who, Zach?” She laughed and handed me a visitor’s badge to clip to my shirt. “He’s been an instructor at the survival school for about a year. He steps in sometimes when we’re down an EMT. He’s the most capable person I’ve ever met, extremely handy in an emergency, and—in case you couldn’t tell—an incorrigible flirt.”
She accompanied that last one with a sideways look at me—not that I needed the warning. My life was a small one, but I could recognize danger when it winked playfully at me. That Zach guy had a definite whiff of sulfur about him.
“He saved Noodle’s life today, didn’t he?” I asked.
Her smile disappeared. The moment it did, she seemed to age about twenty years. “Almost definitely. It’s only September, but the part of the forest where Zach found your brother doesn’t get much sunshine this time of year. If he hadn’t stumbled across Noodle the way he did, it would have been a very cold, very uncomfortable night.”
I nodded my understanding as we approached a closed door. I tried to keep a shiver from moving down my spine, but there was no hiding the goose bumps that broke out in prickles across the back of my neck. In this part of the state, “very cold” and “very uncomfortable” were code for near-freezing temperatures and bears eagerly stuffing their bodies with enough food to settle them into hibernation.
Several more questions arranged themselves on my tongue—Did she know what Noodle had been doing out there in the woods all alone? How far was the fall from the cliff? What on earth was I going to do about all the co-pays?—but they fled the moment I stepped into my brother’s room.
“Noodle!” I cried. He looked so small in the hospital bed, his lower leg in a cast and bandages wrapped tightly around his midsection. His face was bruised and he had a gash above his mouth, his little expression so woebegone that I knew no word of censure would ever leave my lips. Whatever he’d been through had been punishment enough. “Thank goodness you’re all right.”
I rushed forward to embrace him but he flung up a hand to stop me. He did that sometimes, preferring to indulge in physical affection on his own terms, so I was quick to submit.
“I broke my leg,” he said, and with so solemn an air it almost broke my heart. No kid should have to carry as much of the world as he did—as much as all of us did. “I was running in the woods and I fell.”
“I know you did, love,” I said as I sank to the chair next to his bed. “Don’t do that again, okay? Let’s leave Theo to do all the bone breaking from here on out. He’s had a lot more practice.”
The doctor laughed, but my words didn’t bring so much as a glimmer of a smile to Noodle’s face.
“It gets worse,” he informed me.
I didn’t see how things could be much worse than a near-death experience and all the costs associated with it, but I didn’t say so.
“Whatever it is, whatever’s wrong, we’ll get through it together,” I said as I slipped my hand in his. His fingers lay limply in my own. I squeezed gently. “It’s okay, Noodle. It was just an accident.”
“No, it wasn’t,” he said. He lifted his hand away, leaving only its warm impression behind. “I was running away from school. I hit a boy so hard they suspended me. They said I can’t go back for a month.”