“I’m sorry,” she says. She takes another step back, her eyes falling to the floor. “You’re right. That was weird of me. I’m weird.” Her voice cracks on the words, and they emerge broken from her lips. “I’m genuinely very sorry. It won’t happen again—”
“Stop,” I say, frustrated. I’m melting, just like I suspected I would, but it’s happening in an unexpected direction. It’s her words, the look on her face, that have my sharp, icy edges succumbing to warmth—not the press of her body or the velvet of her tongue. “That’s not what I mean,” I say, pushing my hand through my hair and scowling when I’m reminded of how crusty it is. “I’m not making fun of you or getting angry. I just…want to know. You can’t—you can’t go aroundlickingpeople, Juniper,” I say, sighing.
“And I know that, right?” she says with a bitter laugh. “My mom always said I was an odd duck. Kids at school weren’t that nice.” She leans over, resting her elbows on the countertop and playing absently with the hair clips I’m just noticing for the first time—bobby pins, I think they’re called. There are a bunch of them in a pile there in front of her, and now she begins separating them, pushing them into a line—a little row of soldiers. “I know that. My brain fully realizes that licking people isn’t normal. Neither is hoarding food or killing all my main characters or—or—ugh.” She shakes her head, pushing the bobby pins more aggressively into their little line. Then she looks up and gives me a tight smile. “I’ll do better,” she says.
“What are these for?” I say, pointing to the hair pins.
“Oh, those,” she says, looking down at them. “I was trying to teach myself how to pick a lock. YouTube.”
I raise my eyebrows at her. In truth, though, I’m grateful for the change in subject. “How to pick a lock?”
She shrugs. “Yeah. My detective needs to pick a lock, so I kind of wanted to give it a try. I’m struggling with something about this book; it feels too neat, or something like that. I don’t know. I just want to do something productive, since—oh!” She starts suddenly, her eyes widening, and she stands up straighter. “I was going to tell you. I even called you earlier, but you didn’t answer. I spent a full hour looking for Thomas Freese this morning before I went to Namaste, right?”
I ignore my twinge of discomfort at this; it makes me a little nervous, her working with Gus, now that I know he had some connection to Sandy. It wouldn’t be so bad if he’d just told Juniper what happened, but since he wouldn’t say anything…well, it’s easy for my imagination to run rampant.
But come on. When someone admits that there was an “incident” with a young woman I now know to be dead? Yeah, I’m a little suspicious.
“And Gus was normal today?” I say.
She brushes this off with an impatient wave of her hand. “Yeah, he was fine.”
“He didn’t say anything more about Sandy or what might have happened?”
“No,” she says, “but I didn’t ask. I was…kind of too scared.” She winces. “It’s just, he’s so big—”
“He’s huge,” I say.
She nods. “There was a kid in my foster home—I went for a few months in my senior year,” she explains, and then she goes on, “and I thought he was the tallest person I would ever meet. He was like six-four. But Gus is bigger. I have truly never seen anyone his size.”
“He’s massive,” I say, trying to shrug off my discomfort. “He could bench press your entire body without breaking a sweat.”
“Ew.” She spits the word out, her nose wrinkling with disgust. “Ew. No. We will not be using that phrase in this household ever again, please. The last time someone said that they turned out to be talking about my little brother.”
Fair enough. “Fine. You looked up Thomas Freese?” I say, leaning with my hip against the counter. “What did you find?”
“Nothing,” Juniper says, leaning across the counter. She’s clearly anxious to get this out. Her voice is low and significant when she goes on, “Because he’s dead, Aiden.”
He’s…what?
She nods as though I’ve asked this question out loud. “Yep. He’s dead.Six years ago he was reported missing by his boss at work, and they found him in the shed behind his house. They ruled his death a suicide. I couldn’t find any details.”
Well, that’s sketchy. That’s beyond sketchy.
“And how—” I say, unsure of how to voice this. “How do you—uh—feelabout that?”
Yes, I sound pathetic. A grown man should not struggle asking someone about their feelings. But whatever.
“Um,” Juniper says, her face crumpling. “I think it hasn’t quite sunk in yet.”
“It looks like maybe it’s sunk in a little,” I say without thinking. But the way her face has fallen, the way her teeth dig into her lip as her eyes drop—she looks upset. “You’re allowed to be sad.”
I find it’s remarkable how many people don’t think they’re allowed to be sad.
“I know,” she says. Her voice comes out a little thicker this time. “I just don’t want to get bogged down by a ton of emotion right now, you know? There’s a lot to do and a lot to figure out still.”
I nod; that’s fair, and it’s her choice. So I move on.
“And can we find out any more about him?”