Page 1 of Juniper Bean Resorts to Murder

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IN WHICH JUNIPER DEFEATS INERTIA

At some point I have to stop killing people.

I can’t very well carry on like this. Here I am, backed into a corner yet again, with no conceivable way out—another body to bury, another alibi to invent, and absolutely no relevant knowledge to speak of. What’s the best way to dismember a corpse? Who knows. How long before a body starts to stink? Beats me. So why do I keep doing this to myself? And what does it say about me, anyway, that my main characters keep finding creative ways to die? This work in progress is supposed to be a romance novel. It should have swooning and longing, summer afternoons and strawberry sunsets and reckless love.

And to be fair, itdoeshave all of those things—right up until my heroine gets poisoned by her friend-turned-lover.

So…her friend-turned-lover…turned-murderer? Is there a market for a romance novel where the female lead dies in chapter nine?

No. Probably not.

This is better than the last manuscript I attempted, I guess, where the hero didn’t make it three chapters before revealing himself to be a villain who bludgeoned his personal trainer to death with a Shake Weight. That particular storyline was fueled heavily by caffeine and the discovery that I’d be unable to cancel my gym membership, since I (wildly optimistically) paid six months in advance.

Maybe I’m secretly a serial killer. Is that possible? Maybe I’m a serial killer, and this is my subconscious’s way of getting me to see the light. I figure I’d probably know if I were a mass murderer, and it probably would’ve manifested in other, less-benign ways—a Shake-Weight-bludgeoned body rotting in my garage, for instance—but then again, does anyone everreallyknow themselves?

No. I submit that they do not.

Icertainly don’t. Just yesterday, for example, I would have sworn up and down that I’d never go on another date while living in this little Wyoming town. I’ve met too many man-children masquerading as adults to have any hope left for this particular dating pool.

And yet here I am, parked in the town’s fanciest coffee shop, waiting with my friend Matilda for her boyfriend and her boyfriend’s friend, so that we can double—something I only agreed to because I haven’t seen Matilda in months. We keep in touch, but after we graduated college seven years ago, she moved to the city and got a real big-girl job in a legal office.

I, meanwhile, stayed in our little college town, partly because my brother was attending school here too, and he’s some of the only family I’ve got left. Now that he’s graduated, we rent an apartment together on University Street. There’s nothing keeping us here, I guess, but two Bean siblings at rest will stay at rest until acted on by an outside force—and so far we’ve been outside-force-free. Inertia is a tricky thing to overcome.

So when Matilda called last week and said she and her boyfriend would be passing through on their way to the West Coast, of course I said I wanted to see her. And when she called this morning to tell me her boyfriend has a friend in town andcan we pretty please double date—well, what was I supposed to say? It’s not like I’m swamped, and this way Matilda’s boyfriend will get to meet up with his friend too.

I was a good friend. I said yes.

“Juniper.”

I jump as her voice, loud and slightly nasally, yanks me from my thoughts. “Yeah,” I say.

She points to my phone with one finger. “Put that away,” she says as the fingers on her other hand drum restlessly against the tabletop, her manicured nails making littleclick-click-clicksounds. “They’ll be here soon.”

I close out of Google docs on my phone; my dying main characters are going to have to wait. “Do I look okay?” I say, turning in my chair to look at Matilda.

I guess it wouldn’t be the worstthing in the world if my date didn’t like how I look; he might bow out and leave early, and then I could go home and eat chips and guac in my sweats. But my atrocious dating record hasn’t beaten all of my pride out of me; I do have some left, so at the very least I want to look put together.

“Of course you do,” Matilda says, rolling her eyes. “You have the legs of a yoga instructor. I’ve never met this guy in person, but I doubt he’ll object.”

I frown as I register her words. “I thought you’d met him—Daniel?” I say, checking.

Matilda nods and takes a sip of her nine-dollar latte. “Daniel. And no; he and Ned were roommates Ned’s freshman year. I didn’t know Ned then.”

“But you said he was cute!”

“I’ve seen a picture,” she says, laying a reassuring hand on my arm. “And he is. He’s a total hottie. Muscular, but not toomuscular. Like, he probably couldn’t bench press three hundred pounds, but he could for sure bench pressyou.”

Well. When she puts it like that…

“I have some breath mints. Want one? In case you get a goodnight kiss?” Matilda says, patting her purse. It’s Louis Vuitton, sleek taupe lambskin embossed with the trademark initials, and easily several thousand dollars.

Do you know how much chips and guac I could buy with several thousand dollars?

“Sure,” I say, glancing down at my own bag, which wasnotseveral thousand dollars and which doesnotcontain breath mints. It was seven-ninety-nine at the thrift store on Main, and it contains a pen, a notepad, and the napkin-wrapped croissant I shoved in earlier. Maybe someday I’ll stop hoarding extra food, but old habits die hard.

I hold out my hand, and Matilda drops one tiny, heart-shaped breath mint into my waiting palm. I pop the little white heart into my mouth and immediately feel that sense of regret that comes when you eat something horrible; this is no polite little wintergreen mint. It’s one of those heavy-duty ones, the flavor as subtle as an oncoming semitruck.

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