And she didn’t bother to tell him that her gut pointed her in a very different direction: to the Tate family—the only people who she could discern had a compelling motive. She knew things that nobody else knew, had spent more sleepless nights than she could remember with the weight of those secrets slowly grinding away at her soul. Wrestling with the question she could never answer: Had her silence let a killer walk free?
Selecting Sullivan’s notebook from the coffee table in front of her, Juniper turned to a fresh page and dated it. She entered the information that she had learned—that Sullivan had finally purchased the Murphys’ land—and wrote a series of questions for herself to research later. It was a bit of a half-hearted endeavor. There were lots of empty pages in the notebook dedicated to Sullivan. Mostly because in the weeks leading up to the murders, he had a pretty convincing alibi: her.
But Sullivan couldn’t be discounted entirely. He was intimately tied to the turmoil with the Murphys, and he had gone AWOL for a couple of hours the night of the murders. And in the years between, Juniper had learned so much about the fragile imbalance between small homesteads and big agra that she knew the debate had spilled beyond her own farming community into global markets and discussions of the future of food production itself. It was economic and political, and Juniper had only scratched the surface of the conflict. Still, she had an entire binder dedicated to water contamination lawsuits in the Midwest. It included the documents that the Murphys had filed in court against the Tates, and she supposed she could nearly be considered an armchair expert in civil action environmental lawsuits. Juniper would have to find out what—if anything—had been done to mitigate the runoff that had caused the legal drama in the first place. And how Sullivan was involved.
What if Jonathan had been asking similar questions? Juniper’s pen froze on the page, and a dot of black ink began to spread beneath the place where the point dug into the paper. What if that was exactly why “things were happening”?
She wanted to be dispassionate, an objective observer who could pick the facts out of the case without the handicap of pesky emotions, but everything inside Juniper told her that Jonathan’s accident was linked to the Murphy murders. What had changed? What had Jonathan learned?
Jericho Lake bordered the Murphys’—now Sullivan Tate’s—property. Had Jonathan been caught poking his nose where it didn’t belong? It certainly wasn’t out of the realm of possibility. Juniper still had eight-by-ten glossy prints from the last time that Jonathan played detective. They were safely tucked away in one of her Murphy murder files.
When Juniper’s phone rang, her hand jerked across the page, leaving a long hash line through her notes. It was a local number. She took a steadying breath and answered, half expecting to hear heavy breathing on the other end. Or maybe nothing at all.
“Hey, Juniper. Everett Stokes.” He sounded off. “Sorry, thought I’d get your voice mail. I assumed you’d shut off your ringer at the hospital.”
“I’m home,” Juniper said, cringing at the thought of Jericho as home.
“How’s Jonathan doing?”
Juniper didn’t want to be suspicious, but she couldn’t help but wonder what Everett’s motives were for asking. Did he care? Or did he just want to know if Jonathan was ready to be questioned? “He’s doing okay. Not much has changed, but we’re hopeful.”
“Fingers crossed,” Everett reminded her yet again.
Not everyone is hoping for Jonathan’s recovery, Juniper thought. She wondered for a moment if she should tell Everett about what had been happening to Jonathan. But it wasn’t her place. She reminded herself that for most of the inhabitants of Jericho, the Murphy murders were an unprecedented, vicious incident that had appeased whatever savage god required such a sacrifice. Jericho returned to sleepy-little-town status much the way new shoots grew in the shadows of a scorched forest and life started over, hiding the scars of all that had come before. Jonathan had elected to stay in Jericho. He must have felt some level of acceptance. “That’s the beautiful thing about a small town,” Reb had once told her. “When we fall, we pick each other back up. We begin again.”
“Thanks,” Juniper said when Everett cleared his throat. She had lost the thread of the conversation and wasn’t sure what else to say. “But I don’t think you called to ask me about Jonathan…”
“No. Not just that, anyway. I’m actually calling to apologize. I think I may have given you the wrong impression, and I was hoping you’d be willing to come down to the station on Monday. I told you that we’re taking another look at the Murphy case, and I think you could provide some clarity on a few things.”
Maybe Juniper was imagining it, but there seemed to be an edge in his voice. Did he know that she had seen his incident room? It had struck her as personal—and unprofessional—at the time. If “we” were taking another look at the Murphy case, why had Everett’s home office been turned into the staging ground? Still, this particular invitation seemed official if she was expected at the tiny Jericho Police Station. She knew the place. It was the old post office, a square brick building on the opposite end of Main Street as the library. People would see her going in and coming out. But there was no way to refuse him without making him question why.
“Sure,” Juniper said. “I took the day off to drive down to Des Moines today, so I definitely can’t leave Cora high and dry on Monday. How about over lunch? Does noon work?”
“You bet. I’ll plan on seeing you then. Thanks for helping us out, Juniper.”
“I live to give,” Juniper muttered after they had said their goodbyes and she’d clicked off the phone. She was decidedly unsure about what to think of Everett. Why did he care so much about their small-town tragedy? The rest of Jericho was perfectly content to leave the past behind.
Pulling her computer onto her lap, Juniper flipped it open and connected to the hotspot on her phone. She felt a jolt of anticipation when she typed “Everett Stokes” into a search engine and hit enter. There was something uniquely satisfying about starting a new hunt for information. Juniper was hardly a private detective, but over time she had learned how to follow the breadcrumbs of even the faintest trail. The internet was layered and complex, a hash-marked map to nowhere and everywhere that she could navigate with an agility that surprised her. If Everett was hiding something, she’d find it.
Juniper’s first search didn’t turn up much. A couple of Facebook profiles (none of which were linked to the Everett that Juniper knew), a few obituaries, and the web page for a pediatric dentist in New Orleans. It was time to refine. Flipping to a new page in her general-purpose Moleskine, Juniper began to outline her plan. She’d vary search engines, try different keywords, and focus in on specific regions. A detailed log would help her keep track of which combinations produced results and which ones proved to be dead ends.
She was just jotting down some targeted keywords (police, officer, Jericho, Iowa) when there was a scuffle and the sound of muted words outside her front door. Juniper barely had time to look up from her notebook before the handle turned and Willa surged into the bungalow, dusting snow across the faded hardwood floor and trailing a blond girl in Dutch braids that Juniper had never met.
“She’s home!” Willa shouted over her shoulder.
Juniper froze for a moment, then realized that her unusual fixation was on full display for the girls, who were studying her from the doorway. She snapped her laptop shut and lunged to gather up the journals. They made a fat stack that she tried to cram into her backpack with a casual air. It wasn’t working.
“Willa!” Juniper smiled, standing. “I thought I was supposed to pick you up in”—she glanced at her watch—“fifteen minutes. And I thought you were with…”