The next morning I arrive at work a full half hour earlier than normal—and with a plan to find out who the girl in the woods was.

There are dark circles under my eyes, and I can tell I’m more irritable than usual too. But I didn’t get much sleep last night, and the sleep I did manage to find was colored with dreams of bubblegum pink and bloody red. I woke up with a start at five-thirty, sweaty and out of breath, and puttered around killing time until I finally couldn't stand waiting anymore.

I won’t know until the end of the day if anyone was absent completely. But we keep copies of our school yearbook in the library. The ones we keep aren’t just from recent years, either; we’ve got a whole shelf of them, all the way back to when the school was started. Most of those are covered with dust and haven’t had their spines cracked for years, but they’re there.

That’s the corner of the library I head to now. I can’t wait for the end of the day to look—partly because I know Juniper will ask sooner than that, yes, but also because I don’t want to wait that long. I pass the librarian and give her a stiff nod before hurrying down the rows of shelves, all the way until I’ve reached the back corner.

The Autumn Grove High library isn’t huge, but I’m far enough away from anyone else that it’s quiet back here, the air permeated with a dusty stillness. I grab a step stool from further down the row and carry it to the set of shelves I’m examining, sitting on the skid-proof surface and making myself as comfortable as possible. I have the next two hours free, so I might be in this spot for a while.

I just need to figure out where to look.

I squeeze my eyes shut, returning with reluctance to the memory of the body in the woods behind Solomon the Spud. The girl had blonde hair. I couldn’t say what shade of blonde, and I couldn’t say if it was dyed, but…

Crap.

I pull out my phone, find Juniper’s number in my contact list, and then presscall.

“You’re sure the girl was blonde,” I say when she answers.

“Yes,” Juniper says immediately. “Blonde, but I think maybe it was dyed.”

I blink, staring blankly at the rows and rows of yearbooks before me. “How do you know that?”

“The color didn’t look super natural, but it was hard to tell.”

“All right,” I say, sighing as I push one hand through my hair. How many blonde girls are at this school right now? Tons. “What else do you remember about her? How old did she look to you?”

“Hmm,” Juniper says, and for a second, she’s silent. When she answers, her voice is a little shaky; I think she, like me, doesn’t particularly love delving into these memories. “I’d say maybe a junior or a senior. She definitely wasn’t a freshman, and I don’t think she was a sophomore either.”

“Okay. So a blonde junior or senior,” I say as a feeling of rising desperation hits me. “What about her face? Can you describe it to me?”

There’s another silence, during which I imagine Juniper giving me a disbelieving look. I don’t blame her.

“I just didn’t register a lot of details, okay?” I say impatiently. “There was—it was a lot of blood.” I swallow. “And I didn’t get very far looking yesterday when all I knew was that she was blonde. So do you remember her face?”

“All right, look,” Juniper says finally. “I don’t have any classes to teach until later this afternoon,” she says. “I’ll come over there, okay?”

“Yeah,” I say quickly, relief flooding me. “Okay. I’m in the library, in the corner with all the yearbooks. Hurry. I’ve only got a couple hours.”

Juniper shows up fifteen minutes later. She appears from the end of the row and approaches in a cloud of sweet citrus, her wet hair and fresh face making it clear that she recently showered. She’s wearing an outfit that shouldn’t make sense, but somehow it works—a white shirt with a pattern of quarter-sized red hearts, tucked into a short corduroy skirt in sunshine yellow. The skirt has two heart-shaped pockets on the front, both of them stitched with little black smiley faces.

I think she might be the kind of woman who reaches into her closet without looking every morning but is pretty enough that anything looks good. The kind of woman that petty women hate. Juniper certainly has enough of a presence about her that a lot of people will find her intimidating. She’s bold and unapologetic; sometimes that’s all it takes to bring out the insecurities of the people around you.

“All right,” she says when she reaches me. She gives the shelves a quick once-over before looking back to me. “Since you’re showing no aptitude for this, I’m here to help.”

“I didn’t call you here to badmouth me,” I mutter, but I pass her last year’s yearbook anyway. Then I return to the one from two years ago, scanning the faces with increasing frustration.

“Did you check this one already?” she says as she lowers herself to the floor. I purposely don’t look at her while she does this, because I’m not sure how one sits in a skirt that short, and there are parts of Juniper I have no business seeing.

“I did,” I say with a sigh, “but I may as well not have. All I remember is that she was blonde, and the pictures in these books are small. Too many of the girls in there looked like they could have been the one we saw.”

“I’ll check it out,” Juniper says. When it finally feels safe to look at her, she’s seated with her legs tucked to the side, flipping through the yearbook with deft fingers. There’s a little crease in her forehead, just above her eyebrows, and her eyes are narrowed slightly. She’s in concentration mode.

She’s in concentration mode, and I’m staring at her. Not weird at all. I whip my head back down so fast I’m going to have a crick in my neck later.

For a few moments we search in silence, the occasional turning page the only thing to break the quiet. I keep my eyes on the book in front of me, and I’m doing my best to focus, but it still seems like all the little faces are blurring together in my mind.

When I’ve gone through the senior and junior classes twice, I finally sigh, setting the yearbook aside and looking at Juniper.