6. Chloe
“Do you want the good news or the bad news?”
As soon as I swung open my half-faded, half-painted front door, Pepper brushed past me and joined me inside the house. My relief at seeing her was so strong that I almost started crying.
Almost.The last thing this place needed right now was more tears. Ever since Trixie had come home from school to find me tucking Noodle into bed, she’d been in and out of hysterics. In true Trixie fashion, she’d gnashed her teeth and wrung her hands and otherwise acted out the most melodramatic response humanly possible, but that was only to be expected. In all honesty, I wouldn’t have minded a little teeth gnashing of my own.
Fortunately for the household, Theo hadn’t cried, but he did demand every gory detail of Noodle’s mishap, which was almost as bad. Mostly because Noodle had told him. There were some things an eldest sister was never meant to hear. A fifty-foot fall into a ravine and the tumbling rocks that had pinned him into place at the bottom of it were at the top of the list.
“I don’t want news of any kind,” I said as I ushered Pepper into the living room. The house was even messier now than it had been before, but Pepper was one of the few people I trusted not to judge me for it. “I want a stiff drink and a good night’s sleep, in that order.”
“I thought you couldn’t keep any hard liquor in the house,” she said. “The last time you bought a bottle of vodka, Theo swiped it from the freezer and used it to make a Molotov cocktail.”
“I didn’t.” Theo didn’t look up from the computer screen where he sat in intense concentration. He’d been building the same castle fortress in his Minecraft game for the past three years and showed no signs of flagging. “I was making an ethanol rocket. It’s different.”
Pepper reached over and ruffled his hair. “I hate to break it to you, kid, but flames are flames, no matter what you call them.”
He turned to her with a grin. “It was pretty cool. The fire burned in midair, even though you couldn’t actually see the fuel. Wanna watch me build my underground lava tubes?”
“Absolutely not,” she said good-naturedly. “The only thing worse than playing Minecraft is watching other people play it. Where’s our invalid?”
I hooked a thumb over my shoulder. “Trixie’s in the boys’ room reading him The Lord of the Rings out loud. I can’t decide whether she means it as a special treat or a punishment.”
“That twelve-hundred-page monstrosity?” Pepper asked with a shudder. “Punishment, no doubt. Do you really not want to hear any news? Not even the good part?”
I glanced over at Theo, the tip of his tongue sticking out from between his lips in an effort of concentration. To all outward appearances, he was absorbed in his game, but I knew better. That boy could easily juggle twelve tasks at once, all of it processing through his energetic brain at once.
Lifting a pair of cushioned headphones, I slipped them over his ears before leading Pepper to the couch. “He can read lips, but only if he’s paying attention,” I said. Then, because bad news and I were long-standing friends, I forestalled her before she could speak. “There’s no need to tell me the bad news, by the way. I checked my work email about an hour ago. Gunderson already told me how disappointed he is that I walked out in the middle of a shift.”
Pepper winced. “You know how he gets about following protocol.”
“Yeah,” I agreed. “Only it gets worse. His wife offered to take Noodle for the next few weeks while he rides out his suspension.”
“Oh.”
I nodded and relaxed into the couch cushion. One of the nicest things about having a friend as long as I’d had Pepper was that I rarely had to speak the words between the lines. Like the hasty notes scrawled in the margins of a beloved book, she and I had our own way of communicating. As kids, we’d even had a set of military-grade walkie-talkies that we’d found at the abandoned radar base. The mile between our houses was nothing compared to the range on those things, which meant our late-night conversations about which Hardy Boy we were destined to marry sometimes got interrupted by the people discussing hunting locations or what hour was best to get up and hit the fishing boat.
“What are you going to do?” Pepper asked. She cast a glance at the shut door to the boys’ bedroom, where Trixie could be heard reading aloud in her deepest Gandalf voice. “About the suspension, I mean?”
I splayed my hands helplessly. The thing we weren’t saying—the thing that didn’t need to be said—was that Noodle would rather stand up in front of a crowd of three hundred people and recite “Jabberwocky” from memory than spend his days with Gunderson’s wife. Babs was a lovely woman, and their three elementary-aged kids even lovelier, but no matter how many times I tried explaining that Noodle was just reserved, she insisted on speaking to him in an overly enunciated, painfully slow voice that left little room for doubt about how she viewed him.
“He insists he can stay home and take care of himself, but he can’t even hobble to the bathroom without help,” I said. “Both Trixie and Theo offered to stay home, of course, but Trixie has debate practice and Theo…”
We both glanced over at where my brother was slaughtering pixelated cows with shouts of bloodthirsty glee.
Pepper laughed. “Theo would burn the house and all its contents down before you made it to the end of the driveway?”
I ignored the knot of anxiety that had been lodged in my stomach all evening and focused on Pepper’s laugh instead. As long as she could find something amusing in all this, I felt sure I could, too.
“I’ll call the school first thing in the morning and see what I can do to get him reinstated. He won’t tell me anything about what happened. Just that he hit another boy and the school has a zero-tolerance policy for violence.” Even though I didn’t think Theo was listening, I lowered my voice to a near-whisper. “Poor Noodle. No wonder why he ran into the woods like a bat out of hell. He once accidentally pushed Theo on the swing so hard that he fell off and almost broke his nose. Remember that?”
Pepper nodded. “Didn’t Noodle refuse to come from under the porch for like three days?”
“We had to slip tuna-fish sandwiches underneath just to keep him going. He felt so terrible that he sobbed every time he even looked at Theo’s black eye.” It was so many years ago now that I could even laugh about it. “Meanwhile Theo begged him to do it again so he could get a matching shiner on the other side.”
We sat back then, the two of us thinking through my options and systematically discarding each one. Staying with Babs was out of the question for obvious reasons. I couldn’t leave Noodle here alone, and taking him to work with me was equally impossible. And there was simply no way I could afford to call in sick for the next few weeks. Not only would Gunderson take it as a personal affront for me to reject his wife’s offer and then stay home, but I didn’t have any paid sick leave left.
“What about your grandma?” I asked. “I did steal her all those Harlequins, so she kind of owes me…”
“No can do, I’m afraid. She’s in Spokane for the next week. She’s seeing that specialist again.”
“Not—” I began, but Pepper shook her head in warning.
“It’s just a routine follow-up. Nothing major.”
“But—” I began again. This time, Pepper’s warning was more like a threat.
“Don’t, Chloe. She’d be pissed at me for even mentioning it. Forget I said anything.”
I added that hot brick of frustration to the wall I was currently building inside my gut. Lonnie’s struggles with thyroid cancer were no secret, but the one thing the Pakootas family had been adamant about from the start was that I wasn’t allowed to contribute to their situation in any way. I couldn’t offer a drive to see the specialist in Spokane. I couldn’t make a dish to feed the many guests who paid visits. I couldn’t even bring a bouquet of flowers unless they were wild and I just happened to pick them on a regular walk through town.
Those kids keep you busy enough as it is, Lonnie would say.
You can’t afford anything more, Pepper would add.
They were both right, of course, but that didn’t make me feel any better about it. These days, my friendship with Pepper was almost entirely one-sided. I took and took and took—and until the kids graduated from high school and could stand on their own two feet, taking was all I’d be able to do.
The pair of us fell silent once again.
“I could always use my vacation days,” Pepper began, but I cut her off with a sharp shake of my head.
“Absolutely not. Noodle’s my responsibility, not yours.”
I fell silent again, this time allowing my mind to wander to the emergency phone number I carried in my wallet, nine digits scrawled on a scrap of paper that I hadn’t yet gotten up the nerve to tell my brothers and sister I’d found in the interlibrary loan system. I hadn’t tested the number, so I couldn’t say for sure that the woman on the other end belonged to our mom, but according to the records, that particular Ravenna Sampson had checked out William Goldman’s The Princess Bride no fewer than seven times from various libraries across the state.
That had been, hands down, my mom’s favorite book. Back when it had just been the two of us, when she’d promised me that we could tackle the whole world as long as we did it together, she used to read it aloud to me. I’d loved the swashbuckling sarcasm of it, the layers upon layers of storytelling that my seven-year-old brain hadn’t been able to unravel.
It still sat in the box of her things wedged under my bed. I liked to think that she left the book here on purpose, that she’d wanted to remind me that “Life isn’t fair, it’s just fairer than death, that’s all,” but I think she probably just overlooked it when she’d packed. She’d taken her clothes and the family emergency fund from the cookie jar, a single photo of the five of us on picnic at Crystal Falls, and that was all.
A whole life—four whole human beings—left in the dust.
I’d sworn to myself that nothing short of the direst of circumstances would compel me to call her. Although these circumstances were grim, the literalist inside me refused to call them dire.
“If all else fails, I can cash the check from Jasper and hire a private nurse,” I said with what I hoped was a casual shrug. “It’s not how I wanted to spend that money, but I might not have any other choice.”
“Ooh, speaking of.” Pepper’s eyes lit up as she turned to me, one leg tucked underneath her. “That’s your good news. You don’t have to pack up the kids and find a new place to live. Jasper isn’t a killer. I poured through every news story between 1950 and 1961—all the years the radar base was open. Not one of them mentions a dead girl, an accusation of murder, or even Jasper Holmes at all. Gunderson is full of hot air, as usual.”
Contrary to expectation, I didn’t appreciate the reassurance. The moment my search for Jasper’s sordid history ended, the moment I’d have to focus on the present: mine.
“Technically, that doesn’t prove anything except he didn’t get caught,” I said hopefully.
Pepper grinned and dug around in her pocket. She pulled out a printed page and handed it to me. “True, but I also found this. I thought you might want to have it.”
I wasn’t sure what to expect as I unfolded the page, but it wasn’t a grainy printout of a black-and-white photo from the fifties. Two rows of men stood in front of a pile of felled trees, all of them virtually indistinguishable from one another. In addition to wearing the same rough clothes, they all bore the robust, hungry look of those who regularly performed manual labor. A huge two-man saw was propped up next to them, its metal teeth gleaming in the bright patch of forest sunshine where they stood.
“These look like a bunch of old-timey loggers,” I said.
She tapped one of the men standing off to one side. “That’s because they are a bunch of old-timey loggers,” she said. “But check out that strapping specimen on the end. Look familiar?”
“No way,” I breathed as I drew closer to the image. Sure enough, I recognized the frowning, heavy-featured face, though most of it was hidden behind a scratchy growth of beard. “Is that Jasper Holmes? And is he…hot?”
Pepper’s peal of laughter was loud enough to cause Theo to pull down his headphones and glare us into quieting down.
“I know, right?” she said, lowering her voice to a hush. “Who knew a man like that could’ve been such a dish? If he did kill a girl, it was probably with that smolder.”
“‘The Neilson Logging Corporation celebrates a hundred years with its latest crew,’” I read from the caption. “I guess that makes sense? Almost everyone who lived around here back then was involved with either the radar base or timber in some form or another. He had to make a living.”
“It also explains why he was having a love affair with some random chick in the pages of a library book,” Pepper said. “Try telling me you wouldn’t fall head over heels if a guy like that starting talking Hemingway to you. I know you, Chloe. All it takes is one line of poetry, and your panties practically fly right off.”
“Pepper!” I cast a look over at Theo, but he was once again absorbed in the computer. I lowered my voice to a hiss. “That’s not true. These days, a guy could read me the whole of The Iliad in original Greek, and all it would do is make me annoyed at him for wasting my time. If he brought me a trunk full of groceries, however…”
I thought about Zach as I trailed off. Much to my annoyance, a flush of heat rose to my cheeks. I knew, deep down, that all that flirtatious nonsense from earlier had been his way of putting me at ease, to distract me from the fact that I very nearly lost Noodle today. I also suspected that Zach probably didn’t read anything except the occasional wilderness survival guide. Hemingway quotes were way out of the question.
Pepper grinned. “I’m just saying. The sooner we get our hands on whatever copy of Hemingway that Jasper and his mystery ladylove doodled in, the better. I’m dying to know what happened between them.”
“Knowing Jasper Holmes, he probably grunted and growled at her until she had no choice but to run screaming for her life,” I said, but I was careful to refold the picture and tuck it safely away.
“You think?”
“Absolutely,” I said. “It’s what any sane woman confronted with a curmudgeon like that would do.”