Willa was shrinking before Juniper. Wrapping herself tight with the thin whips of her dancer’s arms, ducking her head so that her hair hid her face, pulling everything close. Juniper knew exactly what she was doing. She had done it a thousand times herself. Shrink. Be small. Make yourself tiny, invisible, insignificant. Maybe if you contract to the size of a pinprick, no one will notice that your heart has shattered and scattered in the wind. Maybe no one will realize that you have ceased to exist.
Juniper wanted to say: “I see you. I understand.” But she didn’t. Instead, she reached into her backpack and took out the entire stack of notebooks. Balancing them on her lap, she asked, “What do you want to know?”
This was Willa’s history, too, and she deserved to know. Juniper remembered all too well what it felt like to be carved out of her own story.
Willa’s eyes widened. First in suspicion, and then in shrewd calculation. “Everything.”
“I don’t know everything,” Juniper said honestly. “Sometimes I think I don’t know much of anything.”
“Well that’s definitely not nothing.” Willa dipped her chin at the stack of notebooks and cautiously slid from the arm of the couch to the cushion.
It felt a bit like taming a wild animal. Or at least trying. Every move mattered, every word required careful measure. Juniper was well aware that there were some things Willa should never know, but surely she deserved better than whatever scraps she could salvage from a furtive Google search on the school’s firewalled computers. Accurate information was always preferable to the theories of armchair detectives and crackpot conspiracists. And it was sobering to think that no one had ever sat down with Willa and had this conversation. Difficult as it would doubtless prove to be.
“Okay.” Juniper exhaled hard. “Calvin and Elizabeth Murphy were murdered on the Fourth of July the summer before you were born. Cal was shot twice at nearly point-blank range, and Beth was shot once in the back.”
Willa didn’t flinch.
“No one was ever charged with their murders, but there are more than enough suspects to keep me constantly guessing.”
“No witnesses?”
Juniper’s teeth grazed the inside of her bottom lip, but she managed a thin smile. “No.”
“But Uncle Jonathan was found at the scene of the crime.” Willa sounded so adult.
“He made the 911 call.” Juniper nodded. “When the police came, he was holding Cal’s gun.”
“And standing over his body.”
“It wasn’t like that.”
Willa’s eyes narrowed almost imperceptibly.
“He loved them, Wills. Cal and Beth were like a second family to him. Jonathan was wrecked when they died. I didn’t think we’d ever get him back.” In many ways, they never did.
“But why was he there? How did he know?”
It was exactly what Juniper kept asking herself over and over again. That summer had unraveled so spectacularly and then spun into such a complicated knot of deception and scheming, it was nearly impossible to tease out the truth from lies. “I’m not sure,” Juniper finally said. “He says he heard the gunshots from our farm, and I have to believe my brother.”
Willa glanced at Jonathan’s notebook still on top of the stack, but she didn’t press it. “What about everyone else?”
“It could have been a murder-suicide.” Juniper tugged that notebook out of the stack—it was black and nearly empty—and held it up. “But not likely.”
“Why not?” she pressed.
Juniper inhaled. Willa wasn’t going to let her off easy. “Well, Cal’s back was to Beth, so if he shot her first and then shot himself, he would have had to turn away from her to do it. Seems improbable.”
“And two shots? How do you shoot yourself twice?”
“Exactly.” Juniper tossed the notebook on the coffee table.
“But Cal’s fingerprints were on the gun.”
“It was his gun; of course his fingerprints were on it.”
Willa’s eyes were a little too wide, her breath high and quick in her throat.
“Is this too much?” Juniper chanced a touch and put her hand lightly on her daughter’s knee. Willa didn’t shake her off. Nor did she budge even an inch.
“I know a lot already,” she said with a calm that belied her age and contradicted the slightly panicked glint in her eyes. “The gun was taken from the glove compartment in Mr. Murphy’s truck. It was parked beside the shed and unlocked. There were only two sets of fingerprints on the gun: Mr. Murphy’s and Jonathan’s.”