The Buried Book Read Online Free PDF Page A

little critters, that’s what his uncle had said. One of them had killed his last hunting dog. It had rolled under the old boy and ripped his guts to shreds.
    Jasper gave the nest a wide berth as he made his way across the floor to a small chest of drawers on the opposite wall. A wood dollhouse sat on top of the bureau. Between the warped and water-stained boards sat six tiny rooms. All the paint on the little blocks of wood that had served as furniture had worn away. Two blocks shaped like beds sat on the second floor of the dollhouse. Jasper picked one up and looked back at the torn-up beds behind him. The “Jack and the Beanstalk” feeling came back, and he imagined a giant hand reaching in through the hole in the roof and lifting him from the house. He quickly put the little block bed back down into its place.
    He tried to open the drawers of the bureau, but the wood was too swollen with rainwater. The bottom drawer was the only one to give an inch, and he wrestled with it until it finally popped open with a puff of damp, moldy air. Jasper sneezed twice, then held his nose so he could inspect what lay inside.
    A pile of dresses or nightgowns—it was hard to tell which, but whatever they were, they belonged to a girl because they had bows and flowers. He pulled one out and held it up to his chest. He laid it gently on the ground and tried to imagine the girl who had worn it. She would be taller than him. He pictured her long black hair set in braids. For a fleeting moment, he could see her standing in a doorway. Her dark eyes staring into his, pleading with him as though he had something to tell her. Jasper frowned and wadded up the dress.
    In the bottom of the drawer lay a small book and a rag doll.
    He picked up the doll and quickly set it back down. It was sticky and smelled like it had been buried in the dirt. The brown leather binding of the book had grown stiff and brittle. The edges of the pages were wavy and damp, but when he opened to the middle, they weren’t stuck together.
    Jasper couldn’t read the scrawling writing, but he could tell flipping through that the letters were drawn by hand. Someone had filled page after page with swirly words set in narrow, straight lines. He squinted, not able to decipher any of them. The book was only half full. He flipped to the front, and his heart contracted.
    Someone had written Althea in the middle of the first page.
    Jasper looked up to the dollhouse then down to the dresses on the floor. It was her bedroom, he realized, glancing at the two beds behind him. It must be. Back when she was just a girl.
    He tried to picture her again, sitting right where he sat, playing with her dollhouse. But he couldn’t. The girl with the braids and dark eyes he’d imagined watching over his shoulder wasn’t her at all. There were no pictures of his mother as a girl back home, and Jasper realized right then that he’d never seen one.
    “Where did you go, Mom?” he whispered.
    The doll in the drawer just stared up at him with dead button eyes.
    He read the name Althea again, then hugged the book to his chest and cried.

CHAPTER 5
    Let’s start with something simpler then. Any brothers or sisters?
    “Jasper?” a voice called from outside the burnt house. It was Wayne. “Jas? You in there?”
    It took a few seconds to find his voice. “Yep. I’ll be right out,” he called back, wiping his tears. The book was still in his hands. He had to hide it. If Wayne saw it, he might take it away or give it to Uncle Leo. Something told Jasper that his uncle wouldn’t approve of him taking it or snooping inside the burnt-out house in the first place. It felt wrong and not just because the floors were crumbling.
    Footsteps creaked below him. He slipped the book into the back of his pants under his pajama shirt before heading down the stairs.
    Wayne was in the kitchen, waiting. “Whatcha doin’ in here?”
    “I don’t know. Just curious, I guess.”
    “Don’t ever let Pop see you in