10. 1960
Jasper Holmes was the most difficult man Catherine had ever encountered.
After not running into him in the drugstore, she continued not running into him at various locations across town.
Early one Saturday morning, when her mother sent her to the feed store with instructions to pick up the tomato seedlings she’d ordered, Catherine saw him buying a dozen bags of fertilizer. His body was bathed in sweat as he hoisted the heavy ammonia-scented bags into the back of his truck. She’d lifted a hand in greeting, but all he’d done was turn around and start hoisting faster.
With the tomato plants perched in the basket at the front of her bicycle, she’d immediately pedaled over to the library and flipped through the pages of A Farewell to Arms until she found what she was looking for.
It is never hopeless. But sometimes I cannot hope. I try always to hope but sometimes I cannot.
She no longer felt a twinge of conscience when she picked up her pen and wrote in the margins. If Jasper refused to talk to her in anything but the pages of the book, then the pages of the book it would have to be. Half a loaf was better than none.
For a minute there, I thought you were going to wave back. That was silly of me, wasn’t it?
I don’t know what you want from me.
Hope, obviously.
…why?
Their method of communication was a necessarily laborious and time-consuming one, so it took almost a week for the entire conversation to unfold. In the interim, Catherine saw Jasper at the movie theater (he didn’t buy a ticket), the gas station (he was helping old Mrs. Winters fuel up her station wagon), and once, hanging off the back of a logging truck as it wound its way down Main Street with a full load rattling on its bed. (That time, she was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. He’d looked so exhausted, he’d barely noticed the air around him, let alone her furtive attempts to catch his attention.)
In all that time, Jasper never waved, never smiled, never so much as nodded at her in greeting. She’d have suspected she’d fallen prey to a Cyrano de Bergerac switcheroo, if not for how completely he avoided her. That level of disregard could only come from a determined campaign.
As the daughter of a major, she knew a determined campaign when she saw it. One might even say she was waging one. She lifted the pen and scrawled:
Try chapter seventeen. Near the end.
Catherine returned for her shift a few days later to find a gap where the book was usually found. Her heart leapt to her throat as she scanned for any signs that it had been misplaced or put away on the wrong shelf. It beat even faster when she noticed Mrs. Peters watching her every movement like a hawk fixed on its prey.
“If you’re looking for your young man, I asked him to take a peek at the filing cabinet in my office,” she said, her nostrils pinched so tightly they were all but invisible.
“M-my young man?” Catherine asked, trying to not to look as rattled as she felt. Mrs. Peters knew? About Jasper? About the book?
“I don’t approve of him spending all his free time hanging around the library, but he promised to take care of that sticky lock for me,” she said. Catherine could almost feel the warning tone in Mrs. Peters’s voice reverberate in her bones. “So I’ll let it pass. This time.”
Catherine ran her sweat-slicked palms down the tops of her thighs, grateful she’d defied convention and her father’s wishes for the day by wearing a fitted pair of capri pants. If Mrs. Peters had Jasper trapped inside her office, then there was nowhere he could run—and nowhere he could hide.
It was perfect. This was her chance.
“I’ll just see if he needs a hand, shall I?” she asked brightly.
She didn’t wait for an answer, but that didn’t stop Mrs. Peters from calling one out at her anyway. “Keep the door open! One inch for every temptation of the flesh!”
Catherine was careful not to meet Lonnie’s eye as she scuttled past and made her way to the office. She was afraid she might burst into laughter otherwise. She also blamed her distraction for why she spoke up before she got a good look at the man squatting in front of the metal cabinet of Mrs. Peters’s oversized desk.
“Aha! I’ve got you now,” she called in as singsong voice. Then, with a silent apology to Hemingway for the slight alteration, she quoted from their book, “‘We are all cooked. The thing is not to recognize it.’”
The man jumped to his feet, his smile so wide and bright that it shocked her into a state of immobility. Actually, her immobility was due to the smile and the fact that she wasn’t looking into the ruggedly saturnine features of the man who was rapidly coming to haunt her dreams. Nothing about William McBride was rugged, saturnine, or haunting.
“Catherine!” he said. “You’re here at last.”
Catherine fought to keep her dismayed expression from showing. Years of training in the role of the perfect military daughter helped, but she was no match for the sight of A Farewell to Arms sitting askew on the desk behind him.
“What are you doing with that?” she demanded as she reached for the copy. He stopped her with a neat side step.
“It’s my cover story,” he said with a knowing look at the open door. They could both hear Mrs. Peters tut-tutting to herself on the other side. With a carefully lowered voice, he added, “I had to come up with an excuse to keep visiting the library. Mrs. Peters is starting to catch on to us.”
For the longest moment, Catherine’s heart stopped beating and all of her Cyrano nightmares came rushing back. William McBride was the one writing her those notes? William McBride was the one who made her heart go pitter-patter every time she walked by that book on a shelf?
“No,” she whispered, but so quietly she wasn’t sure William heard her.
“I can’t say I’m much of a dab at literature, but there’s no rule that says I have to read the books I check out, is there?” he said. “This one looked pretty short, so I figured it would give me an excuse to come back in a few days to pick out another one.”
“Wait.” Her heart slowly started pumping again. “You haven’t read it?”
He picked it up and glanced at the spine. “A Farewell to Arms?” He grimaced. “No offense, but I get more than enough military drilling at work. Not that your father isn’t a good commander—he is. A great commander. An even greater man.”
Relief rendered her more careless than usual.
“So you just picked it up at random? Oh, thank goodness. You almost gave me a heart attack.” She held out an imperious hand. “Give it to me.”
William McBride may have been a buffoon, but he was no fool. He immediately stepped between Catherine and the desk. “Why? What’s so special about this book?”
“Nothing. It’s not for you, that’s all.”
He tapped the cover. “Have you read it?”
“Of course.”
“And do you like it?”
She took her lower lip between her teeth and considered the question. Truth be told, she’d never been much of a Hemingway fan. In fact, she’d only read this one because someone had told her father it wasn’t appropriate for a young unmarried woman like herself. Nothing piqued her interest faster than a determination to keep her away. She’d immediately converted her mother to her cause, quoting the book’s literary merit and military accuracy until her father had no choice but to give in.
In the end, the book wasn’t nearly as scandalous as she’d been promised. All the love scenes were hinted at rather than shown, and the moral of the story ended up being the exact kind of thing her father approved of.
A loose woman killed in childbirth. A man going on to live a full, active, happy life without any punishment for his half of the sin. Ugh. Give her Bram Stoker’s …tall old man, clean shaven, save for a long white mustache and clad in black from head to foot, without a single speck of color about him anywhere. Range her on the side of Mary Shelley’s …figure hideously deformed and loathsome.
She preferred it when authors had the nerve to give their monsters a physical form.
“It’s fine, I guess,” she said, trying to downplay her interest in the book. “A little pedantic, but perhaps that’s the sort of thing you like.”
William’s bright smile dimmed by a fraction—enough so she felt bad, but not so much that he handed the book over. It was like she’d said; he was no fool.
“If I give this to you, will you do something for me?” he asked.
“Of course,” she replied, the words popping out before she could stop them.
And just like that, the light was back on in William’s eyes. He held the book tantalizingly out of reach. “Then I’d like you to go out with me.”
Her heart gave another one of those convulsive pangs. “What? Why?”
“This book obviously means something to you,” he said, speaking with the smooth, unironic confidence of a man who had no idea he was about to commit what amounted to a moral crime. “And you obviously mean something to me. One date, Catherine. That’s all I’m asking. They’re showing Gidget out at the drive-in. We could grab milkshakes at the diner afterward.”
This was so similar to the bland, unimaginative date she’d pictured him offering that she almost betrayed herself with a laugh. She also realized that she needed to play her hand very carefully if she wanted to keep the book safe.
“Sure. Fine. If you want.”
“Really? This Saturday?” His face lit up with such an ecstatic expression that she almost felt guilty for getting the guy’s hopes up. Fortunately, the blackmail angle stopped her from going too far down that path. A real gentleman would have asked her for some innocuous favor instead, like helping him select a new book to read or telling him the phone number for the weather update. Not her literal flesh.
“Saturday sounds perfect,” she said with a sweet smile. “And to show you I mean business, you can go ahead and check out that book if you really want it. You might even enjoy the read. It’s all about how the main character deserts his post and shames himself as both a soldier and a man.”
To anyone else—say, Jasper Holmes—this would sound like the obvious ploy it was. To William McBride, it worked like a charm.
“Nah. Like I said, it was just my excuse.” He handed her the book, still grinning like the Cheshire cat floating in a tub of cream. “I was starting to run out of ideas for coming in here. Don’t tell anyone, but I’m not actually interested in Egyptian sun goddesses.”
“You don’t say,” Catherine said dryly.
If William caught on to her sarcasm, there was no chance for him to indicate it. A low cough sounded in the open doorway, and Mrs. Peters popped her head inside. From her tightly pursed lips, Catherine was guessing she’d heard that bit about goddesses.
“Is that lock fixed yet, young man?” Mrs. Peters asked.
“As good as new, ma’am,” William said with a polite nod that Catherine prayed her mother would never have a chance to see. Her mom could be counted on to brew clandestine pots of coffee and look the other way when Catherine walked out the door in indecently tight pants, but if there was one thing she loved more than anything else, it was a young man who had manners.
“I should get back to the base anyway,” he added. “But if you have more work that needs to be done around here—any work at all—I’d be happy to pop in during my off time to see what I can do.”
Mrs. Peters tutted and swooned in a way that Catherine took to mean she approved of this offer. However, as she also took William by the arm and started to escort him on a tour of the various rusted hinges and broken bricks that could use a man’s touch, Catherine didn’t worry too much about it. If anything could be used to keep William from haunting the library—and, by proximity, her—it was the length of the library repair list.
As soon as their voices receded in the distance, Catherine shut the door and flipped the pages of the book until she found the end of chapter seventeen—the last place she’d directed Jasper, and to a quote she was more than a little curious to hear his thoughts on.
In a heavy underscore, she’d highlighted the passage she intended for his eyes only. To her relief—and delight—he’d been quick to catch on.
“I’m your friend.”
“I know you are.”
“No you don’t. But you will some day.”
If you really want to be my friend, this is the part where I should probably confess that I don’t like Hemingway very much.
Catherine barely managed to tamp down her outburst of delight in time. He hadn’t actually agreed to a friendship with her—or indicated in the slightest that he felt the same way—but he’d returned her message. That was enough for Catherine. For now.
She dashed off a quick answer before Mrs. Peters could return and demand an accounting of events inside this office.
I won’t tell anyone if you don’t. But if you don’t like Hemingway, why did you pick up the book in the first place?
Her hands trembled as she slid the novel in her pocket to be shelved later, but not with fear. This was anticipation, pure and simple. There was a good chance that one of them was going to get caught in this little game, and that the fault for it would land squarely on her own shoulders, but Catherine didn’t care.
Life in this town might not contain ballets and museums, but it was turning out to offer more excitement than all the glittering cities and their untold mysteries combined.
She had romance and intrigue. She had a job and something to hide.
But most important of all, she had a friend.