Page 46 of The Library of Borrowed Hearts

“I know I can,” I admitted. “That’s why I’m trying so hard to piece together the rest of their story.”

I paused then, unwilling and unable to say the unspoken part aloud. The truth was, I was much less like Catherine than I was old, closed-off, hard-hearted Jasper. To know that someone had been able to tear down his walls, to force him to feel the love that every fiber of his being balked at—it meant something to me.

If I was being honest, it meanteverythingto me.

I knew I had to approach my next question carefully. If not for Lonnie’s sake, then for my own.

“If you knew Catherine back then, then you know what happened to her,” I said. The words felt oddly thick inside my mouth, but I gave each one the weight it needed. “Gunderson claimed Jasper killed her and buried her body in his garden, but—”

Lonnie’s bright peal of laughter interrupted me before I could finish. “Gunderson gets nine-tenths of his information from that wife of his. She’s the moderator on half a dozen different conspiracy websites. Don’t believe a word out of their mouths.”

“I don’t,” I said. “But Jasper was always so mean to us, and Catherine’s death was so sudden and tragic. It made a certain kind of sense.”

Pepper nodded along. “And I tried searching the microfiche for stories about disappearing women around that time, but there weren’t any. This place was kind of dull back in the fifties and sixties. All anyone ever seemed to do was clip coupons and hold sock hops at the radar base.”

“Wait.” Lonnie looked back and forth between the two of us, a heavy pucker drawing her brows. “What do you mean, her death was sudden and tragic?”

My own forehead mirrored hers. “Wasn’t it? I mean, any death is tragic, obviously, and since she was so young, I figured it must have happened out of the blue. Otherwise, why would Jasper have been so brokenhearted?”

“Chloe, honey, Catherine didn’tdie.”

My whole body went still, and for the longest moment, I felt sure my heart had, too. “What do you mean, she didn’t die?”

Lonnie looked at me so strangely that I started to suspect I hadn’t spoken the question out loud. Pepper had to step in and repeat it for me.

“If she’s not dead, then what happened to her?” Pepper asked. “What are we missing?”

“You’re not missing anything,” Lonnie said with a tsk. “I never heard the whole story, but there was some sort of scandal with another man—one from the radar base. She gave me this book, told me to protect it, and left. That’s the last I heard from her.”

“What about Jasper?” I asked, feeling faint. “What about their tragic love story?”

A sad smile touched Lonnie’s lips. “It ended, child, as all things do. Their whole story was nothing but a brief, tempestuous chapter in a book that no one ended up wanting to read.”

PART TWO

16

1960

Jasper received a paycheck every Friday afternoon at three o’clock on the dot. By three thirty, he’d already spent half of it.

“Same as usual?” asked the cheerful blond behind the counter at the city hall office. She served as the bank teller, wire transfer operator, and postmistress all in one, which meant she held most of the town’s secrets in the palm of her well-manicured hand. “Forty in cash and forty to Aberdeen?”

“Yes, please,” Jasper said, his attention only partially on the transaction. It was taking every ounce of his self-control not to pull the copy ofThe Haunting of Hill Houseout of his pocket and find where he and Catherine had left off. They were supposed to meet tomorrow night at their usual spot down by the river, but he was itching to hear her thoughts on the passage he’d highlighted yesterday.

The book was scary as hell, and he’d lost hours of sleep to tossing and turning as he tried to shut out the images it evoked, but that was nothing new for him. Jasper had been scared almost every day of his life—of how brightly the sun shone in this part of the state, of the people who smiled and waved and went about their business as though life held nothing butjoy, of beautifully laughing girls who made him feel things he thought he’d taught himself to suppress.

“Earth to Jasper,” the blond said as she slid four crisp ten-dollar bills across the counter.

“What? Oh. Sorry.” He took the money and shoved it into his wallet. “I wasn’t paying attention.”

“No kidding,” she said, but with a smile he assumed was meant to reassure him. “I was just saying that your family must really appreciate everything you do for them. My only brother doesn’t care what becomes of us. He left to work in the stockyards in Spokane a few years ago and never looked back. We don’t even get a Christmas card.”

“Oh,” Jasper said, feeling his cheeks grow warm. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d sent a Christmas card, either. Was that a thing you were supposed to do? When you already sent every available penny home? “That’s…unfortunate.”

The blond—Samantha, he thought her name might be—lifted her brows in a perfect arch. She also slid the receipt for the wire transfer across the counter. “You must get lonely without your family to take care of you,” she said with a pointed look down at the receipt. Jasper followed the line of her gaze to find that she’d scrawled a six-digit number across the top. “If you ever want to talk about it, you can give me a call.”

“Oh. Um. Thanks.” He fought the urge to crumple the receipt into a ball and throw it in the nearest garbage. He was no master of the social graces, but even he knew an insult like that would be hard for her to swallow. “I’ll do that.”