Law waved his hand to shush her. “It doesn’t matter. I’m taking care of it. It’s a blessing, you know? Every day I wondered if you’d remember. If you’d open your eyes one morning and know that it was me.” He smiled softly. “I knew that it was you.”
All at once it was there. Every second downloaded as if Law had pushed a button to make it so. Peering through the cracks in the darkness, nineteen-year-old June had known somewhere deep down that it was Law. His height, his breadth. The lumbering sway of his walk. Crouched against the splintering boards she could smell the reek of the still-damp bone glue that must have coated his clothes, but beneath all that it was him. It had always been him. In her mind’s eye she could see the outline of his leather work gloves curling around the door. That’s why his fingerprints weren’t on the gun. The gloves must have been so easy to dispose of.
And then: “You went back to make sure I hadn’t left anything behind.” Juniper was guessing out loud. She wondered how Jonathan had gotten a hold of the necklace—once, when everything had settled down, she’d confessed that she’d lost it that night. But they never spoke about it again. If Law had returned and found it on the dirt floor… “You were protecting me. You didn’t want the cops to find any evidence of me in the barn and think that I had anything to do with it.”
For just a moment the faintest hint of a smile crossed Law’s thin lips. There was an entire universe contained in that quick curve: the way he used to throw her high and catch her in his unshakable arms, the summer he taught her to ride a bike, each Baker family meal. All his sure instructions about changing a tire, opening a bank account, fixing a leaky faucet. And every awkward hug and dry, papery kiss on her forehead. He had loved her, in his way.
“I shouldn’t have kept it,” he said, the smile gone. “Too sentimental. When Jonathan found it in my toolbox a couple weeks ago, well.” Law shrugged.
Juniper tried to picture the confrontation and couldn’t. What had her brother done when he realized the truth? The only people in the world who knew what happened to her necklace were Juniper and Jonathan. If Law had it, it put him at the Murphy farm that night. It changed everything.
Juniper was quivering, shaking so hard she had dropped her sweater from over her nose and mouth and was fully inhaling the dizzying gas fumes.
“I’m a coward,” Lawrence said. “Always have been. I couldn’t imagine even a day without her. Still can’t.”
“Come on. Come back to the house with me—”
“Get out of here, June,” Lawrence said, turning away.
“No. I’m not going anywhere. You don’t get to tell me what to do.” Juniper sounded bold, commanding, but when Law faced her, she felt a ripple of fear. He was holding a slim cigar, a luxury that he indulged in a couple of times a year. He kept a small box on his workbench and hauled them out for special occasions: graduations, anniversaries, the births of his grandchildren. As she watched, Law put the cigar in his mouth and thumbed a flame to life on the small lighter he was holding. After a few quick puffs, the end glowed red.
“You’re going to want to leave now, June. I’m not going to say it again. Go.”
“No! Don’t do this. Please.” She was frantic, desperate to make Law see reason. Juniper took a few quick steps toward him, but he exhaled a single smoke ring and then held the cigar out over the gasoline-soaked floor.
“It’s better this way,” he said. And then, he let go.
The whoosh of fuel as it caught was so instant, and so ferocious, it sucked the oxygen out of the barn. One moment Juniper could see, could breathe, and the next the world was on fire. There was a wall of flame between her and Lawrence, and already the inferno was feeding on sawdust, old boards, moldy hay. Juniper reached for the only father she had ever known, but instead of stepping toward her, he backed away. In a heartbeat, he was gone, devoured by the black smoke that roiled all around them.
Juniper could feel smoldering fingers claw into her nostrils, her mouth, forcing fumes deep inside her lungs. She didn’t know how long the barn had been burning, but she could hardly see anymore, and what little air she had left was gone. She had tried to save Law and failed, but if she didn’t find the door soon, she wouldn’t make it out herself.
The problem was, Juniper didn’t know which way was out anymore. Everything looked the same, a black and orange living hell. But through the roar, Juniper thought she could hear something that wasn’t the world ending. It was outside the blaze, a sound that was man-made and that heralded help. The sound of sirens.
It didn’t make sense. Had her mother called 911? She wouldn’t do that, would she? Juniper just didn’t know, but in her fevered, smothered state, she believed there were fire engines outside. Water and air and life. When she fell to her knees, she wasn’t sure if she was hallucinating or if it was real, but there seemed to be a breath of cool in the place where her fingertips met concrete. Juniper crawled toward it. Scraping her knees along the floor, dragging a body that wanted nothing more than to just lie down and sleep, she kept going one inch at a time. When Juniper felt something solid, she pushed it with one hand. The wind caught the door and flung it wide, ushering in cold night air and drawing the flames toward the place where Juniper crouched. She gulped a ragged breath and fell down the single step as a wave of firemen leapt off the first truck.
She was lying with her cheek in the snow, fire nipping at her heels, when one of them caught her under the shoulder and flipped her over. Scooping her up like a child, he ran, and Juniper buried her face in the stiff folds of his fire gear.
“I loved him,” she said. Sullivan. Jonathan. Her unknown father. Even Lawrence Baker.
But when he yelled back, “What?” she was already gone.
* * *
It took the volunteer fire department hours to put out the blaze, and nearly as long to comb through the wreckage.
Juniper watched them from the back of the open ambulance where they made her sit with an oxygen mask and a Mylar blanket. The EMTs wanted to transport her to the hospital in Munroe for observation, but after blacking out for a couple of seconds and coming to on a stretcher, Juniper insisted she would be fine and signed a waiver refusing further treatment. She couldn’t leave. Not with Lawrence unaccounted for and her mother sedated on the couch inside the farmhouse. An EMT assured her that Reb was not alone, so Juniper sat on the back deck of the ambulance and bore witness to the Bakers’ barn burning to the ground.
Law wasn’t in it.
Afterward, the emergency workers all gathered in the yard, passing around a thermos of coffee and a sleeve of Styrofoam cups, and Juniper felt gratitude roll off her in waves. It was pure luck that they had come at all. Her mother’s 911 call was incoherent at best, but rather than assuming it was a prank, the emergency operator took a chance and sent the full cavalry, including the ambulance and two local squad cars plus a deputy sheriff. No Everett. And when Juniper told the deputy everything she knew, he placed some calls and brought in the state. They arrived just in time to learn that there was no one in the barn—incinerated remains or otherwise—so they organized a search. Over a dozen law enforcement officers, fire department volunteers, and even a couple of EMTs stood shoulder to shoulder in the purple predawn light and walked the field beyond the barn, hunting for fresh footprints in the snow.
Juniper could see the search and rescue mission framed in the ruined skeleton of the smoldering barn, and she knew the exact moment they found him. One emergency worker raised his hand and they all gathered round at the apex of the hill. Juniper could close her eyes and picture the view from that height: the slow rise and fall of fallow fields, and in the distance, the scrub and trees of Jericho Lake giving way to the Murphys’ barren acreage.