“He’s digging into that summer and thought that he could spook Jonathan by replaying the events of the past. He hates my brother. Hates him.”
“Where are you?”
“Safe,” Juniper assured her.
But Cora wasn’t appeased. “He’s insane. You can’t let him get away with this. What if he runs?”
“He won’t run. Everett is convinced he’s right—and that he’s going to catch a killer. He’s too self-righteous to be worried.”
“Sounds dangerous to me.”
“He’s a wannabe detective with a vendetta against my brother.”
“Exactly my point. But we’ll prove him wrong,” Cora said.
“I’ve tried. For fourteen years I’ve been going in circles, coming up empty.”
“The truth is always in the details. What are we missing? Everyone knows the Murphys and the Tates were feuding that summer, but what else was going on?”
Juniper almost dismissed Cora’s question out of hand. But it echoed something that India had said, too. Juniper had never kept a diary, and that summer so long ago was entirely overshadowed by the deaths of Cal and Beth. Sure, she had graduated from high school and fallen in love with Sullivan, dreamed of a life far outside of Jericho and gotten pregnant with Willa, but everything else was obscured beneath the shadow of the Murphy murders.
Except.
The memory was sudden and unexpected: a packed suitcase in her mother’s trunk.
And then there were more: a craving for jam, an unexpected visit from Cal. An easy poolside laugh followed by the hard look in Law’s eyes when he tore his wife away from the Pattersons’ Fourth of July party. There were troubled silences and a feeling of disquiet that suffused Juniper’s every memory of that summer. Tears in the kitchen. Her mother’s bow across her cello like a requiem.
“My mom and Law weren’t home that night,” Juniper said.
“What?”
“The night that Cal and Beth were killed. When I came home from—” She stopped, shocked by how close she had come to revealing her secret, and quickly adjusted her story. She started again: “When I got back from the Pattersons’ party, no one was home.”
If Cora noticed that Juniper had lost her footing for a minute, she didn’t let on. “So they were watching the fireworks like everyone else in town.”
“Law broke his foot,” Juniper said, more to herself than Cora. “They were at the hospital in Munroe.”
“How’d that happen?”
The thing was, Juniper didn’t know.
“What are you saying?” Cora asked.
“I don’t know. Nothing. But you’re right. There was something else going on that summer.”
“Does it have anything to do with Cal and Beth?”
“No,” Juniper said, maybe too quickly. “I— I don’t think so. There’s no way. But I think I missed something really big. I was just a kid…”
“And you didn’t see your parents as human beings. As real people with their own thoughts and emotions and inner lives.”
Cora was teasing, but there was so much truth in her words. Juniper had taken Law and her mom for granted. She had ignored the warning signs, dismissed all the times when her mother was acting strange or inexplicably emotional. Juniper cringed, remembering that she had explained away Reb’s behavior that summer by assuming it was precipitated by her daughter’s impending departure. How selfish and shortsighted. Her mother was a woman who had once crossed the country alone for love. Who had left her own parents behind, started over, and then begun again when her happily ever after turned out to be a terrible lie. What did Juniper really know about Rebecca Baker? About who she was, and how she loved, and why she did the things she did?
“I have to go,” she said.
“How can I help? Should I call the sheriff?”
“Stay put,” Juniper told Cora. “Take care of Willa. Keep the door locked. Call the sheriff’s department if anything happens—not 911. I’ll be there soon.”
It was with a twinge of guilt that Juniper hung up, but the need to talk to her mother was suddenly overwhelming. It was too late to call, and so she sent a text:
I need to talk to you.
Her mother’s reply was almost immediate:
We just got home. Everything okay?
Juniper was stunned. She had left them in Des Moines hours ago. Had it only been that long? It felt like days. Weeks.
Wanted to spend a night in our own bed.