Neither of them mentioned it.
“Officer Stokes with the Jericho PD,” he said, and then seemed unable to decide if he should shake her hand or hover in the doorway. He elected to hover.
“Look, I’m sorry to be the one to deliver the news… Your brother fell through the ice on Jericho Lake early this morning.”
It was the last thing she expected him to say. She had steeled herself for the worst. Perhaps a hit-and-run, a split second of furious courage when Jonathan went after the car that kept driving by his house in the middle of the night. Or—God forbid—a baseball bat, a bit of poison, a bullet. Something fast and violent, an accident that wasn’t truly an accident. Not this. This, Juniper didn’t know how to process. Jericho Lake? Her brother wasn’t a fisherman, and he wasn’t an idiot. The lake was small and brackish; nothing worth catching lived there anyway.
“I don’t understand.” She was cold with shock—disconnected from her own body. She couldn’t feel her hands on the mug anymore or even taste the bittersweet tea. “What the hell was he doing out there?”
“It’s an ongoing investigation, ma’am. We’re following every lead.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Exactly what it sounds like,” Officer Stokes said. “Jonathan is very lucky that Mr. Linden was training his hunting dogs this morning out at the lake. We believe your brother was in the water for less than twenty minutes and unconscious for an even shorter time. He was airlifted to the nearest ECMO center in Des Moines for emergency treatment. His wife and your parents are en route.”
“And what am I supposed to do?” Juniper snapped.
“That’s between you and your family, ma’am.”
She was irritated at this man and his dispassionate “ma’ams,” but her anger quickly shifted at the mention of her family. The very same family that was at the moment hurtling toward Des Moines without her. Who had sent a stranger to tell her the news of Jonathan’s condition. Juniper was an afterthought, as irrelevant to them as she was to her own daughter. She tried not to let the wave of nausea show on her face.
“Thanks for coming,” Juniper said, because it was the only way she knew to dismiss him. But Officer Stokes didn’t move from his post at the door.
“I’m afraid I need to ask you a few questions.”
Could she say no? Juniper’s memory was viscous and uncertain, but Officer Stokes was already sliding his hand into a hidden pocket at the breast of his parka. He pulled out a plastic bag. It looked just like the kitchen staple, but there was a slip of paper inside that clearly marked it as evidence. Officer Stokes shook the bag to settle whatever was inside, and then held it out toward Juniper.
Because it was obvious that she wasn’t going to reach for it, Officer Stokes stepped closer. “It’s a necklace,” he said unnecessarily; she could see it now.
A silver chain, dulled to black in places. A delicately wrought branch with two tiny, dangling orbs that she knew to be berries because she had spent much of her young adulthood rubbing them between her forefinger and thumb. A good luck charm, a talisman. A hope for what might have been.
Juniper hadn’t seen it since that night.
“I didn’t know what it was,” Officer Stokes said, seemingly oblivious to the change that had come over her: the sudden high flame at her core, heart racing, palms slick. “But one of the medics recognized it right away. Grew up in Nevada and said he knew it the second he saw it. Juniper berries, right?”
She didn’t answer.
Officer Stokes shrugged. “We figured, well… Your name is a bit uncommon, so…”
The question hung in the air between them unvoiced. Is it yours?
Should she lie? Deflect? Pretend that she had never seen it before? But Officer Stokes wouldn’t have to question many people in town to learn that it was, indeed, Juniper’s. She had worn it every day from the moment she found it the summer she turned twelve until the night it was torn from her neck. “It was mine,” she admitted. “I lost it a long time ago.”
“Any idea why Jonathan might have had it in his pocket this morning?”
“No. I haven’t seen it in years.” That much was true.
“See, it’s just that he wasn’t carrying a wallet or cell phone, and he left his keys in the ignition of his truck. The only thing Jonathan had on him was this necklace.”
Juniper took a tiny sip of air. “I don’t know what to tell you.”