Page 9 of The Library of Borrowed Hearts

“Who’s an old devil, and why are you guys talking about me behind my back again? I thought we covered that at the last HR meeting.” Gunderson, our boss and a man who always dressed in a three-piece suit and tie, popped out from behind the checkout desk. He wore a smile to show he was kidding, but neither of us was fooled. Poor Gunderson had never fooled anyone a day in his life. He was both the best and the worst person to run a library in that way.

The best? He loved rules and lists. He was an organizational wizard. And despite his uptight outlook on, well, just about everything, he genuinely cared about serving the community.

The worst? He desperately wanted to be none of those things. In his head, he was one of us: a part-time employee of the library, here for the paycheck and to occasionally get frisky in the stacks. In reality, he was a fortysomething father of three who was so risk-averse that he made his kids wear helmets when they were out walking the dog.

“Don’t worry, Gunderson,” I said as I dried my hands. “We weren’t talking about you.” Since he was watching, I was careful to wipe down the sink and add an extra squirt of sanitizer just to be safe. My job security wasn’t so high that I was willing to get on Gunderson’s bad side. “Can I ask you a quick question?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “Canyou?”

I could hear Pepper groaning behind me, but I didn’t mind Gunderson’s cheeseball attitude as much as she did. There were a lot worse things for a man to be in this world. My mother had dated most of them.

“You’ve worked here for a long time, right?” I asked.

At that, he puffed up. “Fifteen years and counting.”

“Can you remember ever helping a guy named Jasper Holmes? Older gentleman, robust for his age, unpleasant enough to strip paint from a barn?”

“Now, Chloe. That’s no way to talk about a patron.”

“That’s the thing… I don’t think heisa patron. He lives next door to me, but I’ve never seen him set foot inside the library. I don’t think he believes in community services. Or the joy of reading.”

“Or any joy at all,” Pepper muttered.

Gunderson frowned to show what he thought of this levity, but he was too interested in all things library related to chide me for showing an interest. “I think I know who you’re talking about. He drives that vintage truck around town, right? Has a garden like a page out of a landscaping textbook?”

When I nodded, his frown only deepened.

“If you want my advice, I’d steer clear of that one,” he said. “In fact, I’d pack up those brothers and sister of yours and move as far away as you can get. You don’t want anything to do with a man like that.”

“Why?” I asked. I didn’t point out that moving my family of four was not only financially difficult, but laughably impossible. Our roots weren’t very illustrious, but they ran deep. They had to; it was the only way we could remain standing. “What’s wrong with him?”

Gunderson leaned close. His breath smelled like the celery-infused water his wife packed for him every day—not unpleasant, but not exactly pleasant, either. “You know I don’t believe in gossip.”

I did know that. I also knew that he didn’t believe in Bigfoot, crop circles, or the Illuminati, though he was still on the fence about chemtrails. “But?”

“Butyou weren’t too far off about that whole stripping-paint thing,” he said. “From what I understand, he’s done a lot more damage than that in his lifetime.”

I scanned Gunderson’s face for signs that he might be cracking a joke, but he looked the same as he always did—a little stern, a little worried, and so desperate to be liked that he didn’t notice either one.

“They say he killed a girl back in the sixties,” he added in a low voice. “Some girl from the radar base. The reason his garden is so lush is because he buried her on that very land.”

4

1960

Growing up, Catherine Martin was required to follow exactly three rules:

Rule #1:Do what your father says.

Rule #2:Talking back regarding Rule #1 will result in swift and decisive punishment.

Rule #3:Please, Catherine, for the love of everything, just do it and stop arguing. Your father has a lot on his plate right now.

Since these rules had been established early in her childhood (one might even say they’d been establishedswiftlyanddecisively), it was to be inferred that her father always had a lot on his plate—which, as Major Gene Martin would have been the first to tell you, he did.

“Catherine Winifred Martin, at what hour do we breakfast in this house?” he asked the first morning of their first day of his new commanding post. It didn’t occur to him that since they’d arrived in Colville sometime after midnight, at which point Catherine and her mother had been forced to unpack the essentials and make up the beds, sleeping inwould have been a welcome—if not necessary—treat.

“Oh-six-hundred hours,” she said, yawning behind her hand.