“You did?” My heart breaks for Ashley a little bit, but I can’t say that I’m surprised. What does surprise me is my own reaction, the lift of hope that makes it hard to breathe for just a moment. I try to think back to the bonfire, to Sullivan and Ashley talking across from me. Did she look devastated? Did she cry? My heart wrings at the thought, but I don’t remember seeing her upset. And it’s true that Ashley’s obsessions come and go almost as frequently as she changes the color of her nail polish. How many boyfriends has she lazily flipped through while I helped her pick out cute outfits and dissected their fleeting, would-be relationships? Maybe, just this once, it’s my turn.
But I’m being ridiculous. Irrational. I want nothing to do with Sullivan and never have. I’m leaving for college in a handful of weeks, and I have no intention of ever coming back. At least, not to stay. So what could possibly happen between us? Nothing. And then there’s the drama with the Murphys and what happened with Baxter… I should tell him in no uncertain terms that he needs to take me home. Now.
Except Sullivan has turned over my hand and is tracing the lines in my palm as if by memory. I’m losing my resolve, I can feel it, and when he leans over the console and carefully brushes my hair off my shoulder, I let him.
His mouth is warm and oh so tender on my neck. I try to think logically about what’s happening so that I can justify it in the morning, but it’s harder and harder to concentrate. And by the time Sullivan finds my lips, I’m not thinking at all.
CHAPTER 13
WINTER TODAY
It took Juniper several tries to back her car down the gravel drive of the old Murphy place. There was a sheen of ice over the loose stones, and a thick layer of snow on top of that, and in the end she was forced to clear a path by scuffing up the gravel behind the wheels with the heels of her canvas tennis shoes. She cursed herself for bypassing boots that morning and assuming the only off-roading she’d encounter would be the hospital parking garage. But, inappropriate footwear aside, her low-tread tires eventually caught, and Juniper slid the rest of the way home.
By the time she finally closed the door at the bungalow, she was shaking uncontrollably. It could have been because her sneakers were soaked through and her jeans were damp to the knees, but she knew it had much more to do with the hint of Sullivan still lingering on her lips.
She wanted to yell a string of obscenities, but her teeth were chattering so hard she couldn’t have done it if she tried. Instead, Juniper kicked off her wet shoes, peeled off her socks, and tiptoed on frozen feet to the bathroom, where she sat on the edge of the tub and ran hot water over her lower legs. But she had forgotten that icy extremities required a slow warm-up, and she let herself sob when the water pierced like needles.
It had been a very long time since she had cried over Sullivan Tate.
A sliver of her soul wanted to show up at his door and beg him to change his mind. For just a moment or two she wished there was a way to undo the past, to erase his marriage to Ashley, to put herself in her former best friend’s place. But even as she ran her thumb beneath her swollen eyes, she knew that she didn’t want that. Not really. She didn’t know the man that Sullivan had become, and her starry-eyed memories of those weeks they were in love were a fairy tale that even she didn’t believe. It had been a summer romance, nothing more. Besides, there was no way to forget everything she knew, everything she had learned along the way. Juniper had a life now, a job she adored, an apartment on the fourth floor that boasted a glimpse of the Rockies over the lowlying buildings of her modest, academic neighborhood. She was strong and capable, independent.
Never mind that her brief relationship with Sullivan had changed her life forever.
As she was toweling her feet and then stripping off the rest of her cold, damp clothes, Juniper allowed herself to consider her former best friend. It was like pressing a bruise, but welcome in a way because thinking about Ashley yanked her head out of the clouds. Sullivan and Ashley were married now. They had children and a life together that Juniper knew nothing about. They shared a history—and a future—that she was not a part of, and as much as she wished that things had turned out differently, here she was.
Juniper pulled on leggings and a chunky cable-knit sweater, and layered two pairs of socks over her numb feet. Then she went into the kitchen and quickly spread some peanut butter on a slice of bread. Folding it in half, she ate it while she grabbed her backpack from the hook by the door. Mandy’s sister was expecting her to pick up Willa eventually, but in the meantime, she needed to start collecting her thoughts.
* * *
Juniper was an archival librarian by trade, but her small liberal arts college didn’t boast an enormous collection of precious books and documents that required her to appraise, process, and catalog new finds regularly. Instead, she managed a small library dedicated to the obscure theologian the college was named for—and spent the majority of her time helping students and academics conduct research and find often-esoteric information within the hundreds of thousands of pages she had come to consider her own. In other words, she preserved, maintained, and disseminated a wealth of knowledge and information. Juniper was a researcher. It was a safe, orderly, predictable job that offered a comfortable distance from which to dissect events she longed to understand. And there was nothing she had researched quite so thoroughly as what had happened in Jericho that summer.
Everett’s little incident room seemed paltry in comparison.
While her laptop powered up, Juniper pulled out her notebooks and pens. Her hair was a damp mess, so she stuck the pen she was holding in between her teeth and swept her curls into a tangled topknot. She spread her notebooks and papers out on the coffee table, and when she ran out of room, she used the couch cushions beside her hips.
It was hard to remember when exactly she started digging into the murders, because it seemed to her that for nearly fifteen years she had thought of little else. She gave birth to Willa and left for college and secured a job and went through the motions of a normal, productive life—dates with harmless, unremarkable men, girls’ weekends to Aspen, contributions to a modest 401K—but beneath it all, forever and ever, amen, was the low vibration of what had happened that night. She couldn’t escape it, so she embraced it.
Each notebook represented years of gathered information in the form of everything from conversations that she tried to recall verbatim to notes that she took on the articles, TV news segments, and blog posts she found relating to the murders. There hadn’t been a lot of media attention, and Juniper had to scrape mentions from far-flung corners of the internet. The FBI had never gotten involved—presumably because the case was not high-profile enough—and the media was quick to turn their attention to more salacious stories when nothing immediately shook loose on the case.
Still, she was persistent. She’d managed to track down a former criminal profiler via a Reddit chat room, and learned that most rural or small-town homicides were crimes of passion committed by someone the victim intimately knew. After exhausting Juniper’s patchwork anthology about the murders, he reminded her that the most obvious suspect was usually the right one. He favored Jonathan and wondered why the sheriff’s department hadn’t been able to make a conviction stick. He blamed the ineptitude of local law enforcement and the thunderstorm that had rolled through Jericho only hours after the shots were fired. Evidence was washed away before more capable crime scene technicians had a chance to collect the marks and traces and bits of ephemera that could have led to an arrest.
Bad luck and botched job all around,
he wrote.
I’m sorry the bastard walked free.
Juniper never shared that she was the bastard’s sister.