Page 59 of Juniper Bean Resorts to Murder

More interruptions. More pink hair. More insults flung back and forth over the dinner table.

I want more, and I will take that secret to my grave. No one—not Juniper, not my sister, not my solitary friend at work—will ever know that there’s something about this woman that I crave.

I can’t have a relationship with this woman, romantic or otherwise. We’re roommates. She has baggage. And I…

I swallow.

I’m keeping a secret from her.

So no matter how intriguing I find her, no matter how my eyes linger sometimes, it can’t happen.

I press my hand over my chest, frowning as I feel my heart pumping faster. I think I must have had too much caffeine at lunch.

The scraping sound from the lock stops, and I turn to look at the door just as I hear her call, “Hey, wait—no underwear drawer.”

I smirk, my gaze jumping to the small chest of drawers in the corner. “I’m not interested in your underwear.” Is there a drawer where she stores her thoughts? A drawer for her temper, a drawer for the smiles that promise trouble? A drawer where she keeps her utter disregard for personal boundaries?

“Rude,” she says, though it’s muffled. “But also reassuring, I suppose. Have at it, then.”

For a moment I just stand there, looking around, seeing what catches my eye as I listen absently to the resumed clinks and scrapes coming from the door’s lock. The sun streaming through the skylight has a chilled quality to it, a cold brightness that casts the room in a frosty light and leaves a large rectangle of illumination on the neatly made bed.

This room came furnished, bed included, but Juniper has made all the furniture her own. Her comforter is pure white, but her sheets and pillowcase appear to be striped in various shades of blue and orange and red and yellow—a sort of bohemian pattern that suits her well.

The desk, nightstand, and chest of drawers were already here too, but her personal touches make them seem like they belong to her. There’s a pink file box under the desk; I crouch down and crack it open, expecting to find file folders or papers or something similar. Instead, though, I see several sandwich bags with various different foods inside—half of a sandwich, a few dinner rolls I recognize as leftovers from the other night, a handful of baby carrots that will probably start to shrivel soon. I shake my head, closing the box again and standing up. Then I continue my perusal.

I open the closet and peek inside, but there’s nothing of interest; clothes and shoes and a cardboard box tucked back in the corner. So I move my attention to the top of the desk.

A laptop, a little vase of flowers, and an army of sticky notes. Those are the contents. I smile when I see that the vase is a little grinning skull; maybe that’s why she liked the one on my desk so much.

“Does your skull have a name?” I call without turning around.

The grinding and scraping and clinking sounds stop. “Catherine Earnshaw,” Juniper says from the other side of the door.

A bark of laughter escapes me at this. “Is Heathcliff around here somewhere?” I say.

“Just Cathy.” I can hear the smile in Juniper’s voice. “I thought she seemed like a character who would enjoy having her skull turned into a flower vase.”

I nod, still smiling. I run my fingers over a few of the sticky notes, reading the snippets scribbled there.Remember MC’s eyes are green, one of them says—do authors forget that kind of thing?—and another one reads,Foreshadow knife reveal starting chapter three.Yet another has a quote I’ve heard before scribbled on it:Well-behaved women rarely make history.Interestingly enough, though, directly beneath this quote is a line Juniper has added:I have no desire to make history. I want to live a quiet, happy life.

Huh. That’s…unexpected.

Then there are a couple Post-its that simply have little doodles, like a flower with lopsided petals and a few tiny hearts, and still more that have snippets of what I assume are Juniper’s own words.

And it’s there, in my perusal of these last sticky notes, that I make another discovery: Juniper Bean writes poetry.

I don’t know if she calls it that, or if these are simply lines she plans to use in her books later. Regardless of what she names it, though, it’s undeniably poetry. Some of it is short, no more than a line or two; some of it is longer, two or three stanzas.

Up until this moment, my attention has been floating easily around the room; now it anchors firmly to the desk. My eyes dart hungrily over every Post-it I can find, devouring her words.

They’re stark and blunt in places, meandering in others, full of visceral imagery. It’s her naked mind on display, both light and dark, strange and familiar, and she’s done something incredible with it. She sees her shadows; she weaves them through her fingers. She knows their value.

But she doesn’t drown in them. She remains sunshine—not soft, gentle sunshine, but abrasive sunshine with sharp edges. That’s how she channels her demons, both in her poetry and her life: she uses them to make her light shine brighter in contrast.

I read them all. Lines and stanzas and snippets of phrases, words that rise and words that fall, melodic and dreamy and evocatively beautiful. And I can’t believe I’m saying this, but—I rest one hand on my chest, feeling my heart race—I have never been more attracted to anyone in my life than I am to her, here and now, in this moment.

“Get a grip,” I mutter, stumbling away from the desk. I press both hands to my cheeks in an attempt to cool my body down, but it’s not working.

I’ve always been this way. Show me the most beautiful woman in the world and I’ll acknowledge that she’s pretty, but show me a beautifulmindif you want that prettiness to really affect me. Beauty alone is not enough to make my pulse race and my body react.

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