He realized his mistake the moment that Juniper’s eyes turned to stone.
“What did you say?” she muttered between clenched teeth. The story was shaping up like the first few frames of an old-fashioned movie reel. Juddering and blurry until, suddenly, a picture so clear and obvious it made her gasp. It wasn’t an accident. It wasn’t a suicide attempt. “Oh my God. You poisoned Diesel.”
Everett’s hand whipped out, snake quick, and caught her wrist. “It wasn’t like that. I mean, I didn’t know that it would happen that way.”
Any fear Juniper felt was replaced by a fury so poker hot she could have branded him with it. She ripped her hand from his grip and leapt to her feet so that the coffee table was between them. “You’re crazy!”
“It was an accident.”
“What on earth were you doing?” Juniper screamed. “How could you possibly think that poisoning Diesel would help anything? And how could you possibly know about Baxter?”
Everett was standing now, too, his beer abandoned and hands out in front of him as if he were offering them up as evidence of his blamelessness. Wrists out: cuff me. He chose the last question—the easiest one—to answer. “It’s all in the file. All the misdemeanors against the Murphys are included as background information. Jonathan went along with Calvin to lodge the official complaint when Baxter died, so his name came up in the case notes. I just thought if he started thinking about that time…”
“Maybe it would jar something loose and he’d confess to you?” Juniper’s voice dripped with all the loathing she felt, and for a moment Everett withered beneath it. But just as quickly as he seemed to give up, he squared his shoulders.
“I’m an officer doing my job. I didn’t know that Jonathan would take Diesel for an early morning walk. And there’s no way I could have predicted that stupid animal would run out onto the ice. It’s unfortunate that Jonathan was seriously injured, but he’s going to be okay. Accidents happen.”
Juniper glared at him, speechless, before she spun on her heel and hurried to the door. If she stayed for another second, she knew that she would launch herself at him, that she’d claw his eyes out with her fingernails, or worse. She paused with her closed fist on the handle and whirled so that her back would not be turned to Everett. She didn’t trust him for even a second.
“It was you. It was all you. The phone calls and drive-bys, the harassment that nearly drove my sister-in-law crazy. You’re crazy. Did you slash my tires, too?”
He took a step toward her and Juniper could see the truth in his feral scowl. She wrenched open the front door. “You’ll lose your job over this. Or worse.”
“Maybe,” Everett said. “But I won’t give up.”
She whipped around and jogged down the steps. He lunged after her and shouted from the landing: “This isn’t over!”
Juniper didn’t even break her stride. Within seconds she was behind the steering wheel, car on, no seat belt. She squealed out of Everett’s driveway, hoping the neighbors heard, and that they looked out of their blinds and saw him standing there, framed in the glow of his open doorway, shoulders slumped and brow furrowed. Looking guilty as hell.
CHAPTER 24
THAT NIGHT
Light cuts through the night and fractures into a thousand pieces as it slashes through every crack and crevice in the barn. For just a moment I shimmer gold, a dusty glitter illuminating my skin, my tangled hair, the dank dirt floor. Just as quickly as it sparkles, it’s gone, but that second of dazzle is enough—it sends a jolt of electricity right through me.
When a door slams, a whimper escapes my lips. There are terrors crouching in the shadows, waiting for me. I thought I had given it enough time, that he was gone and wouldn’t come back, but the vehicle in the yard tells a very different story.
My panic is raw and jagged, and though there is much I don’t know, I am sure of two things: Cal and Beth are dead, and I’m next.
Hysteria lifts me to my feet, and my skin stings as something—a rusty nail? a chink in the wood?—snags my necklace and rips it clean off. My hand flies to my collarbone, but the necklace is gone, lost in the darkness and completely irrelevant anyway.
Did I cry out? Did the sudden, terrifying chokehold of the chain make me shriek? I don’t know. Squeezing my eyes shut, I wait for the shout, for the moment when my hiding place is found and the inevitable report of one last gunshot splits the night. But it doesn’t come.