Page 30 of Juniper Bean Resorts to Murder

“We’ll call the sheriff,” I say, bending over. I give Juniper a little tug, urging her to stand, and end up hoisting half of her weight myself as she stumbles. “We’ll call him right now, okay? But we need to get out of here. This would look really bad if someone found us like this. Did you get any blood on you?”

“I don’t know. Maybe,” she says, sniffling. Still, she allows me to lead her away from the student, her steps wobbly as she crunches through the leaves and undergrowth next to me. I steady her with one hand on her elbow, my other hand digging out my phone once again. Two minutes later, I’ve got the sheriff on the phone.

“Garrity? There’s a dead body out here in the woods behind the high school,” I say. My words are short, clipped, and they sound strangely detached. Like my mouth is disconnected from my brain.

Garrity swears. “What do you mean, a dead body?”

“Just what it sounds like,” I say, rubbing my temples. “There’s a girl back there with a ton of blood on her face. I’m pretty sure she’s a student.” I take a seat on the plinth of the Solomon statue, feeling the cold from the stone seeping through the fabric of my pants. Juniper is sitting next to me, shivering uncontrollably; I think she might have gone into shock.

I listen only partially as Garrity shouts out frantic orders on the other end; when Juniper’s teeth start to chatter, I shrug off my suit coat and pass it to her.

“Did you touch anything?” Garrity says when he returns on the line.

“Yes,” I say. “Sorry. I didn’t touch the body, but Juniper—my roommate—she might have; she fell over. She vomited, too. And we definitely walked around the area.”

Garrity grumbles but doesn’t gripe about it; he just tells me to stay where I am until he shows up. So Juniper and I sit there, shivering in the cold, our heads tilted back against Solomon the Spud’s potato body. And when Garrity shows up with a couple of squad cars fifteen minutes later, I recount to him everything that happened—the anonymous note, finding the body, Juniper throwing up and falling to her knees, and coming back here to wait.

By the time I’m done talking, Garrity’s pudgy face is set into a grim frown. He just gives me a nod, casts a sympathetic look at the still-shivering Juniper, and then calls for his people to follow him. They disappear into the trees a few seconds later.

We wait for what feels like an eternity. There are still a few cars in the parking lot, from what I can see, but it will be mostly faculty left behind to clean up. That’s what I’m supposed to be doing right now. And I desperately wish that’s where I was—grumbling as I throw away yards of plastic tablecloths and yanking streamers down from doorways. Instead I’m here, sitting next to Solomon the Spud with my still-in-shock roommate, trying to process the dead body I just witnessed. Judging by the fact that Juniper is barely coherent right now, her brain is already working on the processing thing, but I don’t think mine is yet. It doesn’t quite feel real. I think hearing from Garrity will help.

When he appears from the treeline, I stand up, my hands shoved anxiously in my pocket as I wait for him.

His gaze finds mine, though, and a strange spike of anxiety embeds itself in my lungs. He’s giving me a funny look, one I don’t like. His footsteps fall heavy and slow on the carpet of leaves as he approaches.

“I don’t know how to tell you this,” he says haltingly when he reaches Juniper and me. He looks back and forth between us before his eyes settle on me. “But there’s no body back there.”

I blink, and next to me Juniper shoots to her feet. “What?”

Garrity sighs, sending his mustache fluttering. “We found a bit of blood, but not much. We found the vomit too, in a separate area. But in the trees back there, where you pointed?”

I nod as the fingers of foreboding tiptoe down my spine, and Garrity continues.

“We’ll search the grounds tonight. But nothing is back there. There’s no body, Aiden.”

9

IN WHICH AIDEN REGRETS SAYING YES

Isleep in later than normal the next morning, due to the horror-tinged nightmares that keep me tossing and turning for most of the night. This is my first interaction with a dead body, so I can’t say for certain, but I’d hazard a guess that nightmares are pretty normal in a situation like this; Juniper probably had them too. I was able to keep calm last night—though when I was brushing my teeth before bed, my face was as pale as I’d ever seen it—partly because the reality hadn’t sunk in.

Now, though, in the light of day, the truth seems undeniable: that was a dead body in the woods behind Solomon the Spud. It was a girl. And even though she had vanished by the time Garrity got there, I know what I saw.

I shiver thinking about this; for someone to have moved the body in the fifteen minutes before the sheriff arrived, they must have been there when we found her. That doesn’t sit particularly well with me.

And I think she was a student. Astudent. What was her name? I don’t have keys to the school, but surely I can find out somehow. Right?

I force myself out of bed—and away from these thoughts—and move to the en suite bathroom. I pause partway through brushing my teeth to scrub at a few spots on the mirror with my sleeve; then I continue, splashing an extra bit of cold water on my face when I’m done. Despite the water and the late morning, though, there are still dark circles under my eyes, and my hair looks especially unkempt.

I’m looking a bit more human by the time I get out of the shower, though. I pull on some jeans and a sweater and then head out of my room.

I’m not sure what Juniper is going to be like today, but I’m a little nervous to find out. Everyone reacts to trauma differently. Will she still be in shock like she was last night? Will she be calm? Hysterical? Somewhere in between? I’m not sure I can handle a hysterical Juniper.

I scrub my hand over my scruff as I think about that, my steps slower and warier as I approach the living room and kitchen areas. What would a hysterical Juniper even look like? Similar to how she was when we first saw the girl?

Crying. There would be lots of crying.

By the time I reach the living room, I’m ready for just about anything. She might shout, she might cry, she might be catatonic—I’ve talked myself through all these possibilities, as well as formulated a plan for each one. Most of those plans involve a desperate call to Caroline followed by a swift exit on my part.

---