Page 12 of The Library of Borrowed Hearts

Even if shehadbeen the type of girl to dwell on every chance encounter with a man, what she saw would have pushed all thoughts of him into oblivion. There, propped up in the front window, was a sign—and not just any sign. The white cardboard and black block letters spoke directly to her heart.

NOW HIRING. INQUIRE INSIDE.

She gave a small squeak as she propped her broken bicycle against the front wall. Even with the stiffness in her step and the stranger’s handkerchief still tucked in her hand, she lost sight of everything but that sign as she bustled up the library steps.

How could she care about something as silly as a man when the books were what she’d really come to see?

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 SeaandFor Whom the Bell Tollswere in the bookmobile. The rest—The Sun Also Rises,A Moveable Feast, andTo 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 ArmsandThe 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 toThe 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 leastthree 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 findthatin 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, butcome 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 aslookat his garden the wrong way. We should have started digging years ago.”

Pepper plucked the copy ofThe Sun Also Risesout 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 inTropic of Cancersaid, ‘NomoreHemingway,’ 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 itcost $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 sellingiton 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 aliterarylove 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 hardnotto 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 twentythousand 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 therehadbeen 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.