12. Chloe
“You know, when you agreed to go out with me, this wasn’t the intimate evening I had in mind.”
I had no idea how Zach managed it, but he looked as much at home at our local bowling alley, Copper Bowl, as he did a hospital, the library, and the great outdoors. Instinct warned me that he did that everywhere—looked good and wholly at ease, his large form relaxing into the seat as he draped an arm almost over the shoulders of the woman he was with at the time—so I was careful not to dwell too much on the heat rising off his bared forearm.
“Yesss! Strike!” Theo came dashing up to us, his hair plastered to his forehead with sweat. “That makes two in a row for me. Don’t forget to write it down. Chloe, are you writing it down?”
“I’m the one keeping score,” Noodle said with a shy look up at Zach. He tapped his small stub of a pencil against the sheet in front of him. “Am I doing it right?”
Zach glanced briefly over it before nodding. “Perfect. You’re a natural scorekeeper. Remind me to take you with me next time I hit the horse races.”
“You go to horse races?” Noodle asked.
“Will you take me?” Theo asked before Zach had a chance to answer. “I’ve always wanted to be a jockey. Hiyah! Giddyup!”
“Nah. You’re too tall to be a jockey. They like ’em small and compact like Aloysius here.”
“I’m small and compact, too,” Trixie said from her seat on the other side of the lane. She batted her eyelashes in a way that made me lose all hope that we’d get out of this evening alive.
Since the moment Zach had pulled up to our house, surprised but not dismayed to find that he wouldn’t be taking just one Sampson out for the night, but all four of us, Trixie had decided she was in love. Any man, she’d said, who could (a) accept the entire Sampson clan with little more than a blink, and (b) call Noodle by his given name and get away with it, was clearly a hero of the highest order. I was no fifteen-year-old schoolgirl with more brains than common sense, but I was inclined to agree.
However, I was also determined not to show it.
“There’s still time for you to run,” I told Zach, but not before shooting a warning glare at Trixie. She feigned having something stuck in the long wings of her fake eyelashes and therefore pretended not to see. “Although I did warn you that I wasn’t a cheap or easy date.”
Zach’s whole body rumbled with suppressed laughter. “I thought that meant you’d order the nachos with extra jalape?os.”
“They have nachos here?” Theo asked. He, too, turned his eyes toward Zach and batted them dangerously. “I’m awful hungry, Chloe. Can’t we get an order? To share?”
Trixie gave an audible scoff. “The only thing you know how to share is germs.”
“That’s not true. I let you use my special dandruff shampoo, don’t I?”
“I don’t have dandruff!” Trixie flushed bright red to the roots of her hair—which, yes, had a tendency to flake whenever the weather got too dry. “I like the way your shampoo smells, that’s all.”
“That’s the zinc pyrithione, and it doesn’t smell good. It smells like wet Gummy Bear.” Theo turned to Zach with triumph. “That’s because it’s killing all the head fungus. I have fungus on both my head and my feet. It’s all over me. Trixie, too, but she likes to pretend it’s just a rash.”
“I can’t believe this is happening to me,” Trixie moaned as she slunk lower in her seat. “Chloe, can’t you make him stop?”
I dug in my purse until I found a handful of change. Most of it was pennies and nickels, and even then they had some kind of unmentionable goo on them, but Theo could work that out later.
“Here,” I said, pouring the change into his hand. “Take your fungus to go play some arcade games. I’m sure it would enjoy going head-to-head with you for a few rounds of Ms. Pac-Man.”
“My fungus prefers Rampage, but whatever,” Theo said.
“Make him take Noodle,” Trixie complained. “Then we can have an actual adult conversation.”
“I’m making him take all of you,” I said with another of those stern warnings. She forgot to blink that time, so she caught the full weight of it. I threw caution to the wind and my last ten dollar bill into her hand. “Get the nachos. Get the jalape?os. Have a contest to see who can eat the most in sixty seconds. I don’t care as long as you don’t come back for at least twenty minutes. You’re giving me a headache.”
Trixie groaned but grabbed Noodle’s crutches and helped him to his feet. “Come on, Noodle. I can tell when we’re not wanted.”
“And I was trying to be so subtle about it, too,” I said, laughing. She shot me a look that indicated she was planning to put her all her newfound debate skills to use later, but she was nothing if not a good sport. Besides, she knew as well as I did that Zach was only on loan to us for a short time. Any minute now, he was going to realize what he’d agreed to and go running back to his hills.
“This is the most fun I’ve had in a long time,” he said, his arm still draped in that casual, carefree way that was so close to touching my shoulder. “Thanks for letting me be a part of it. I had no idea that families like yours existed in the real world.”
I took this for the insult I felt sure it was. “You mean dysfunctional, hell-born babes who are too smart for their own good? Yeah. They can be a real handful. Feel free to abandon them before they get too attached.”
“Before they get attached, or before you do?” he asked. He must have seen my Trixie-like blush because he grinned and added, “Uh-oh. On a scale of one to lamprey, how stuck are you? I feel like I should prepare accordingly.”
“I know this isn’t what you had in mind when you gave me your phone number,” I said, refusing to rise to the bait. “But I really needed the night out, and unfortunately, we’re a package deal.”
He shrugged in a careless way that felt more authentic than any number of reassurances might do. “I don’t mind. I’ve only read about families like yours in books.”
“Which books?” I asked warily.
He raised his hands in a laughing gesture of surrender. “Only good ones, I promise. Little Women, maybe, or I Capture the Castle.”
“You’ve read both of those?”
“I’m not just a pretty face, Sampson. I told you—the nights get long out on the mountain. If I didn’t have books to while away the hours, I’d go full Robinson Crusoe out there.” He paused. “I check out books at the library all the time, but you’re usually too busy to notice me. Once, I read the first page of every single book in the True Crime section hoping to get your attention.”
I didn’t buy this any more than I bought his other nonsense. “Our True Crime section is only like eight books.”
“Well, I had a team coming in from Fairchild, so time was tight. I’ll linger in Westerns next time. That should keep me on-site for at least four hours. People around here seem to really love their cowboys.”
I bit down on my lip to keep from laughing out loud. It was no secret that our Louis L’Amour reading population outnumbered most of the libraries in the country. We were a horse-loving people. “You’ve really read Little Women?”
“I’m a Jo March fanboy,” he said solemnly.
“And I Capture the Castle?”
“Couldn’t put it down,” he vowed.
“What about The Haunting of Hill House?” I asked, unable to resist.
His brow wrinkled in an effort of concentration. Like most of his other expressions, this one seemed calculated to elicit a reaction from parts of my body wholly unaffiliated with books, libraries, and men who desperately needed a shave. “Why that one?”
I aimed for a nonchalant shrug, but I didn’t quite stick the landing. “Just a thought.”
His gaze stayed on me so long that I was starting to fear there must be something stuck in my teeth. “Wait. It doesn’t have anything to do with it being a modern-day Gothic from the fifties written by a certain SJ, does it?”
I gasped aloud, equal parts annoyed and delighted that he’d worked out the same clues as me. “You mean you knew? And you didn’t say anything?”
He held up both hands in a gesture of surrender. “I didn’t know anything until this exact moment. I saw the same notes as you, but I didn’t piece them together until you said something.” He paused only a moment before adding, “Does that mean your two scribblers kept writing in The Haunting of Hill House? Their little love notes? Can I see?”
I could have kissed him for his easy reading of the situation. Truth be told, I could have kissed him for a lot more than that, but I wasn’t going to. I’d already lured him out on false pretenses for a date with my three younger siblings—a privilege he’d cheerfully paid for, and with such a convincing air of good grace that I almost suspected him of meaning it.
“I wish,” I said. “I haven’t been able to track that copy down. We don’t carry it at the library, and all the used bookstores I’ve called only have recent editions on their shelves. I might be able to find it at a thrift store or estate sale, but that’s like searching for a needle in a haystack—without knowing for sure whether or not the needle even exists in the first place.”
“Damn. That’s rough. And there’s nowhere else it could be hidden?”
“Well, there is one place…” My nose wrinkled as I considered a final option. Jasper Holmes. If my neighbor was willing to pay five grand per copy for the books that he and his lost Catherine had written in, then there was a good chance he was sitting on that particular one—possibly even that he’d been sitting on it for decades. “Can I trust you with a secret?”
Zach lifted his hand in an unironic Boy Scout salute. Because of course Zach would have been a Boy Scout on top of everything else. He’d probably carved his Pinewood Derby cars by hand and painted them with crushed wild berries and fermented lichens.
“I’m a vault,” he said. “I carry more secrets than the presidential archives.”
“Why do I get the feeling you’re messing with me again?”
“Because you’re a cynic. A cute cynic, but still.” At my sudden squeak, he laughed and crinkled his eyes at me again. “You do know what I do for a living, right?”
Grateful for a chance to use my voice for something other than girlish nonsense, I was quick to answer. “Yeah. You contract with the Air Force to provide wilderness survival training to their pilots. Like Bear Grylls but with government clearance.”
“Nineteen days,” he said without losing a single crinkle. “That’s how long I get my hands on each trainee. Nineteen days of grueling, labor-intensive work. Nineteen cold dark nights. Nineteen sunrises and sunsets.”
I nodded along, finding myself mesmerized by the way the words were taking shape on his lips.
“You’d be surprised what happens to people after a few days living under those kinds of conditions,” he continued. “It’s like plugging into a different reality—one where the bullshit just falls away. You eat and you struggle. You make it through each moment, hoping it won’t be your last. And when you finally lie down for the night, you turn to the person next to you and say what’s in your heart. You don’t have the energy for anything else.”
I didn’t say anything for the simple reason that I wasn’t surprised. Maybe my daily struggle wasn’t a life-and-death one, but it was close. Juggling the lives of three children, each one of them headstrong and brilliant, took every scrap of energy I had. I made it through each moment, hoping I wasn’t making their lives worse, and when I finally lay down for the night, I turned to…what, exactly? An empty bed? A flattened pillow? A realization that with everything my heart longed to say, there wasn’t a sole living person who wanted to hear it?
“I know you think I come on a little strong, but it’s the nature of the beast,” he said with an apologetic shrug. “I forgot how to pretend a long time ago. When you’ve heard as many life stories as I have—the mistakes and the regrets, the missed connections and wasted opportunities—you learn to just go for it. I like you, and I like your family. I’m interested in seeing more of both. I don’t see any reason to pretend otherwise.”
If I’d been a frank, ruggedly handsome mountain man with the best smile in the world, I might have been able to reply in kind. As an underpaid not-quite-a-librarian college dropout who was holding her family together using nothing but carefully rotating credit card balances and sheer force of will, I changed the subject.
“You must be an only child,” I said.
He looked at me through quizzically teasing eyes. “What makes you say that?”
“If you had siblings, then you wouldn’t spend an evening with mine and want to repeat the experience. The only charm they have is that of novelty.”
“Don’t forget the charm of an older sister who’s determined not to make this easy on me,” he pointed out. He heaved a playful sigh. “But you’re right. I’m the only child of two only children. Life doesn’t get much bleaker than that.”
At that, I felt a flash of triumph—and a stab of something else, something like pity. My siblings were a trial and a menace, but they were everything to me. I couldn’t imagine a world without Trixie’s determination to cut a swath straight through it, Theo’s blithe disregard for convention, or Noodle’s gentle acceptance of it. I couldn’t imagine a life where I woke up alone in that house without their noise and their joy to get me up out of bed.
Sometimes, I wondered if my mom felt that, too—the people she’d left behind, the children she’d been unwilling to see as anything but a burden—or if all she felt was free.
“That sounds lonely,” I said.
“It was. It is.”
A shout of laughter came from the direction of the arcade games. We both glanced over to find Theo tipping a pinball machine so far on its side that it was in danger of falling on top of him.
I sighed. “You can borrow mine whenever you want them. Free of charge.”
“As long as you come with them, I’m in,” he said. I was so flustered by this that I failed to notice when he shifted position. His hand brushed lightly against my shoulder, pushing aside a strand of my hair. “Does this mean you aren’t going to tell me the secret?”
“The secret?” I echoed, distracted by that hand and how close it was to the exposed skin of my neck. “Oh. Yeah. That.”
“You made it sound pretty juicy, like you know where the copy of The Haunting of Hill House might be.”
I was so grateful to have something—anything—else to focus on that I ended up blurting out more than I intended. “It’s our next-door neighbor, Jasper. Jasper Holmes. He’s this horrible, grouchy old man who steals all our Frisbees and soccer balls and gets mad if we accidentally step on one of his roses.”
“He steals Frisbees? The nerve.”
“You laugh, but he’s been my personal white whale for longer than I can remember. Only get this—just last week, I finally bagged him.”
Zach put a hand over his chest and gave a mock swoon. “Moby Dick references? Be still, my beating heart.”
I nudged him with my hip until my thigh pressed up against his. And then, inexplicably, I left it there.
“This is serious,” I said. “It all started when I found a ratty old copy of Tropic of Cancer down in the library basement. It’s this dirty book that—”
“There’s no need to explain Tropic of Cancer to me,” he interrupted, his hands up in a gesture of surrender. “I spend half my life alone on a mountain, remember? If there’s even one mention of a marital bed inside a piece of literature, I’ve read it, placed it under my pillow, and let it carry me off to dreamland.”
A burst of heat rose to the surface of my skin. “No decent human being admits to reading that book, let alone enjoying it.”
“Yet here we are, discussing it like two hot-blooded, consenting adults.” He took pity on my flaming cheeks and pulled his leg away from mine. Only when the press of his thigh was gone could I breathe normally again. “Okay, you found a copy of Tropic of Cancer. So what? Fifty Shades of Grey is way more descriptive, and people read that at their kids’ piano recitals. In this day and age, it’s not a big deal.”
I bit down on the urge to ask him if he’d read the entirety of the Fifty Shades series up there among his trees and focused on what really mattered: the romance of Catherine and Jasper Holmes.
“There were notes inside it,” I explained as I filled him in on the rough details. “Notes written by the same two people who scribbled inside your Hemingway.” In the short amount of time we had, and with the booming clatter of bowling pins falling down around us, I couldn’t go into as much detail as I wanted, but Zach was quick to catch on—about Jasper’s blank check and greedy snatch at the book, about his strange kindness in offering to keep an eye on Noodle, at the hint dropped by Gunderson that something catastrophic happened in Jasper’s past. All of it seemed to indicate that the next page of my personal mystery was behind his closed doors.
“That settles it,” Zach said as soon as I was done.
“Settles what?”
We could see the kids finishing up with their games and heading back with demands to be further entertained, so Zach spoke quickly.
“We have to get inside his house somehow and take a look around. Between the two of us, I’m sure we can uncover something good.”