“Whatever.”
“Okay, I’m going to be late.”
“What’s Cora going to do, fire you?”
Juniper rolled her eyes at Willa’s back. “That’s not the point.” She rummaged in the front pocket of her backpack for her car keys and nearly mowed Willa down when the girl stopped suddenly in the middle of the sidewalk. They both stumbled, and Juniper dropped her keys in the snow. “What the—”
“Look,” Willa said, her tone brittle as the February air.
“At what? Seriously, Willa, my keys are buried in eight inches of snow. A little help here?” Juniper crouched down and plunged her bare hand into the snowbank to retrieve them. When she turned her attention to her daughter, she saw what Willa was pointing at.
The tires of her car were flat. And not just flat; they had been slashed.
Juniper had never seen a slashed tire before, but the six-inch gashes in the otherwise smooth rubber of the two passenger-side tires were a dead giveaway. Pushing past Willa, Juniper hurried to the driver’s side. Those tires had been slashed, too. Her first, visceral emotion was fury. Tires were expensive. She could count on two hundred dollars a piece, plus the cost of a tow… The numbers ticked higher in her head even as she began to realize that she was more scared than angry.
Someone slashed her tires. Juniper’s vision spun for a horrifying moment and she put both hands on the hood of the car to steady herself. Violence was always shocking—a reminder that nothing was as it should be—and Juniper couldn’t help but recoil at the thought of someone plunging a knife into the tires of her car and tearing. Methodically, viciously. One by one. And Juniper doubted that the job could have been accomplished by a run-of-the-mill kitchen knife. This was the work of a weapon. Something saw-toothed and evil.
Juniper had been asleep only a few feet away. Willa had been. The reminder that her daughter had been curled up and oblivious beyond a window that could easily be seen from the driveway made Juniper’s stomach pitch. Needing to ground herself in reality instead of the wrenching worst-case scenarios that were playing like a string of horror movie scenes in her mind, she reached down to run her thumb over the jagged line of split rubber. Juniper didn’t flinch when a tiny wire pierced her skin. The pain helped. She could feel her heartbeat in the place where a line of blood quickly bubbled to the surface, and without thinking, she stuck it in her mouth.
“Are you hurt?” her daughter asked, reaching for her.
Juniper hadn’t realized that Willa had followed her around the vehicle.
“I’m fine,” she said, balling her hand so Willa couldn’t see the cut on her thumb. Juniper tried a smile; it didn’t work.
“Who did this?” Willa looked very young in the pale morning light. She had raked back her hair unevenly and her ponytail was lopsided; her bottom lip trembled just a little.
Juniper thought about saying that it was an accident. But that was ludicrous. “I have no idea,” she said honestly.
“What if…”
“Don’t.” Juniper put her arm around Willa and turned her away from the car. “Let’s not speculate. It was probably just some kids. We’ll walk to the library and see if we can borrow Barry’s car.”
“We should check for footprints. Maybe they left something behind.” Willa tried to spin out of her mother’s grip but Juniper held on tighter.
“I’ll call the cops when we get to the library. Everett will know what to do.”
“Everett?”
But she was too distracted to worry that Willa now knew she was on a first-name basis with a town cop. “What time does first period start?”
“Eight-fifteen, but I’m not going to school.”
“A couple of flat tires don’t equal a free pass, Willa.”
They argued back and forth all the way to the library—a welcome distraction that they both automatically indulged—but it wasn’t a long walk, and when Barry entered the picture, the drama was sucked right out of the situation. Juniper snatched a few tissues from the box on the counter to wrap around her cut while Barry listened to a pared-down version of the predicament they found themselves in.
“You probably overfilled them,” he told Juniper with just a hint of superiority. “Tires will deflate in cold air, but a warming trend changes everything.”
Warming trend? The temperature was barely in the teens. But Juniper didn’t bother to challenge him, and when Willa opened her mouth to object, Juniper took her by the wrist and led her away. “Thank you so much for letting us borrow your car,” she said over her shoulder. “I’ll drop my daughter off at school and be back in just a few minutes.”