The porch lights were on when Juniper pulled down the long drive of her parents’ acreage, illuminating the tall, two-story farmhouse and a patch of deep snow in front of it. Her heart bucked behind her ribs at the familiar sight. When she was a teenager, Law and Reb had always left the porch lights on to welcome her and Jonathan home, even if they had gone to bed hours before. The light poured from the generous front windows like a beacon, the glimmer of a lighthouse signaling shelter. A haven.
But tonight was different. It was close to eleven o’clock, but Reb wasn’t sound asleep. Instead she stood framed in the cold flicker of the now rarely used lights. At least one of the bulbs needed to be replaced, and it shuddered out a warning in some incomprehensible Morse code.
“What’s wrong?” Reb shouted, holding open the door with one hand and her cardigan closed with the other.
Juniper had barely stepped from her car and was too far away to attempt a response. So she hurried through the shin-deep snow, trying to keep her feet light as she broke through the thin crust of ice. It was no use. The bottoms of her jeans were caked in white and stiff from cold by the time she reached the place where her mother stood waiting.
“Law hasn’t had time to shovel the walk,” her mom explained, ushering Juniper inside and fussing over her with an old towel that she grabbed from a hook near the door. “You should’ve gone through the garage. What are you doing here anyway?” she demanded, smacking the snow off Juniper’s jeans with one end of the towel. Every slap was more aggressive than the last, and Juniper’s frozen calves began to sting with each new blow. She snagged the towel the next time it came near and gently eased it from her mother’s hands.
“It’s okay,” Juniper said. “I’ll do it.”
“Is Willa okay? Where is she?”
Juniper was surprised by what sounded like raw terror in her mother’s tone. Clearly, almost losing her son had been deeply traumatizing—even more so than Juniper had realized. She tossed the towel back on the hook and pulled Reb into her arms. The older woman was slight, more fragile than Juniper remembered, as if long hours in the ICU had somehow diminished her. She was also trembling—though Juniper couldn’t tell if it was because she was scared or cold. Maybe both.
“Willa’s fine. Everyone is fine,” Juniper said, turning her mother toward the kitchen. She kept one arm firmly around Reb until she could ease her onto a bucket seat stool at the counter. “I’m going to make you a cup of tea. When’s the last time you ate?”
“What?” she sounded confused. “I don’t know. Supper? Did we have supper?”
“That’s what I thought.” Juniper filled the kettle with tap water and set it on the stove to boil. Then she pulled open the refrigerator to rummage around for something to feed her mother. There wasn’t much. Half a gallon of milk that had just passed its expiration date, a couple of wrinkly apples, and some leftovers that were questionable at best. But there were a few eggs nestled in the divots of a cardboard container. Jackpot.
“What are you doing?” Reb asked, plaintive and sounding not at all like her usual unflappable self.
“Scrambling you some eggs.”
“That’s ridiculous,” Reb huffed, but she didn’t say anything more, and in just a couple minutes the nonstick pan was sizzling with butter. The scent filled the kitchen and made Juniper’s stomach rumble. She realized that it had been hours since she had eaten, too.
“Where’s Law?” Juniper asked, stepping away from the stove to fill a mug with hot water. She set it in front of her mother with the tin of teabags and a sprig of mint she pinched from the plant on the windowsill.
“Chores.” Reb waved her hand over her shoulder in the direction of the barn. “I don’t know exactly. He said he needed to take care of some things at home, so we left everything at the Rainbow House and hopped in the car. I could have stayed back, you know. I should have.”
“Well, I’m glad you’re here,” Juniper said carefully, grateful that Law wouldn’t interrupt them for a while at least. “There’s something I want to talk to you about.”
“Oh?” Reb paused with the mug an inch from her mouth. “What’s that?”
But a whiff of sulfur alerted Juniper to the fact that she had left the eggs too long. She lunged for the spatula to scrape the bottom of the pan. They were fine. A little dry at the edges, but salvageable. She clicked the burner off, turned the fluffy eggs a few more times, then slid them on a plate and put it in front of her mother.
Watching Reb carefully, Juniper said: “I want to talk about the night that Cal and Beth Murphy were killed.”
The older woman choked on her tea, eyes watering as she gestured wildly at the flour sack towel hanging over the handle of the stove. Juniper snagged it and tossed it at her mom, watching guiltily as Reb’s eyes watered and she struggled to breathe. It was over in seconds, but shock lingered in the kitchen, sharp as the scent of a struck match.
“Not again,” Reb whispered. Her eyes were bloodshot and her words savage. “You ambushed us in the hospital and now you want to bring this up again? How dare you? Don’t you think we’ve been through enough?”
Juniper felt her resolve fray at the edges. She had once been headstrong and independent, a carefree teenager with the world at her fingertips, but the murders—and everything that happened afterward—had changed all that. When her mother told her to keep still, she did. When she took Willa from her arms, Juniper let her daughter go. And when Reb decided that the best thing for Juniper was to go far, far away from Jericho and leave the past behind, she had done exactly as her mother instructed. “You banished me,” Juniper said, finally giving voice to something she had never been strong enough to name. Or even admit to herself.
“What?”
“And you put Willa in my place. You started over.”
“Oh, June.” Reb shook her head. “Don’t you see? I didn’t banish you. I saved you. I wasn’t going to let you repeat my mistakes.”
My mistakes. Juniper recoiled. Like I was a mistake? she wanted to ask. But she didn’t have time for this conversation right now. The clock was ticking, and she expected Law to walk through the back door any second. Nothing made her mother clam up as quickly as a harsh look from Law. “We’ll get to that,” she said. “Later. Right now I need to know how Law broke his foot.”
“Are you kidding me?” Reb threw the towel down on the counter and pushed back as if she was going to leave the room. “I’m not doing this. I am not having this conversation with you. Not now. Not ever.”
“Stop!”
Juniper didn’t mean to shout. She didn’t even know where all that vehemence came from. But Reb stopped. Sat back in her stool and crossed her arms over her chest.
“Please, Mom.” Juniper leaned with her forearms on the counter, begging her mother to listen with the desperation in her eyes. “Don’t run away from me. We have to talk about this. I was right all along—Jonathan’s accident is tied to what happened to the Murphys. And this will never be over, we will never be okay until we finish it once and for all.”
“What do you want me to say?”
“Let’s start with the truth. How did Law break his foot?”
Reb squeezed her eyes shut and yanked her cardigan tighter across her chest. It seemed to Juniper as if she were trying to disappear, to scrunch herself smaller and smaller until: poof! It was as if she had never existed at all. It made something shrivel in Juniper’s chest. Beautiful, mysterious Rebecca Baker shouldn’t feel the need to make herself nothing.
“Mom,” Juniper said, softer this time. “Please. I think this might be really important.”
For a long moment Reb said nothing, and Juniper was sure that coming home had been futile. But then the older woman’s shoulders began to shake, and Juniper realized that her mom was crying. Nothing could have been worse. Juniper could handle shouting or icy silence, fury or disappointment. But seeing her mother cry made Juniper feel like she was six again and Reb was her sun and her moon. Her mommy who still kissed every scrape and tucked her in at night with an almost ethereally sweet rendition of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” in her lilting soprano. To this day, the first few bars of that tune made Juniper’s soul unfurl like the sail of a ship at sea.
“Mom…” she whispered.
“I was going to leave him.”