Page 14 of Shadow Burn

“I am, Mr. Computer Expert. Quietly, though. I’m a professional, you know.”

The corners of his eyes crinkled, making him more devastating than he had a right to be.

“This,” she said, tapping the letter through her glove, “is why print isn’t dead. Why archives still matter.”

“I’ve never argued with that.”

“Technology people usually do.”

“I’m a technology person who learned to read in a small public library in Bremerton, Washington. My mother ran the reference desk there for twenty-six years. She raised me on the conviction that information lived in books and reference material before it lived anywhere else. That the people taking care of those materials were taking care of memory itself.”

“Your mother was a librarian?”

“Yeah.”

“I love that.” She cleared her throat and tried to stuff the unprofessional outburst back where it belonged. “I owe a lot to librarians.”

He tilted his head. “How so?”

She set down the letter and pulled the cotton gloves a little higher on her wrists, her fingers trembling under his scrutiny. “I was an Army brat. We moved every two or three years. By the time I was eleven, I had stopped trying to make friends. The cost of leaving them was higher than the cost of not having them.”

She hadn’t planned to say that. She hadn’t admitted it to anyone besides Emma. “So I read,” she went on. “Every base, every new town, the library was the first place I found, and the books grounded me, became my friends.”

Jasper was quiet for a moment. “That’s a lot of moves for a kid.”

Most of them had blurred together. “My mother made it bearable. She read to my sister, Emma, and me every night, no matter where we were. The three of us shared everything, including books. She passed down the conviction like an heirloom that the written word was the one thing that didn’t move when everything else did.”

“She sounds like a good mom. Do you see her often?”

The old grief made her chest ache. “She passed a few years ago. What about you? Does your mother live around here?”

His gaze dropped to the table. His voice came out raw, as if he, too, were still choking on grief. “She had a stroke last year.”

“I’m so sorry,” she said.

“Like your mom, she read to me all the time, until I got to be six. Then I started reading to her.”

His smile was sad. Katherine wanted to reach over and squeeze his hand.

She didn’t. “I bet she loved that. And your father? Is he still around?”

He drew in a breath, still didn’t look at her. “He was a Navy man, killed in action when I was only two. I never knew him.”

Now she did reach for him, laying her hand over his. “Oh, Jasper. I’m so sorry. Your mother didn’t remarry?”

He tensed slightly at her touch, and she quickly drew it back. “No,” he said, staring at his hand where she’d rested hers. He cleared his throat and sat forward. “We should get back to work.”

Katherine silently cursed herself for being so bold, even though the heat of his skin seemed to linger on her palm, even through the glove. “Yes, of course,” she said, focusing on another letter.

They worked through the afternoon. Barely anyone came in, or maybe Katherine just didn’t notice them. The Caldwell thread became a list of follow-ups Jasper could chase on the digital side. She moved to the next box, which contained Vance’s late nineties material, and pulled out a folder of handwritten notes that turned out to be the man’s travel itineraries, cross-referenced against an internal calendar of Agency briefings he had attended.

Three of the trips had no apparent purpose. Vance had flown to Frankfurt in March of ’98, to Istanbul in July of ’99, to Buenos Aires in February of 2000. There were no briefing references, no corresponding mission codes. Just dates and destinations, written in his own hand.

She read them out. Jasper ran them. Forty minutes later, he sat back and told her none of the three trips were attached to any public Agency event, any embassy function, any flagged operation in the open-source databases he could reach. The trips had happened, but there was no record of why.

Katherine set her pen down on the burgundy notebook and let her shoulders drop. “More absence as data.”

His voice took on that teasing tone again. “Your favorite.”