9. In Which Aiden Regrets Saying Yes #2
“I know,” she says again. “It will all be over soon, okay? Now I’m going to try to drag you by the ankles.”
As it turns out, the research help Juniper needs is figuring out how her female killer would move a body.
And guess who was stupid enough to agree to be that body?
I’m lying supine in the middle of the living room floor, glaring up at the ceiling.
The fall decorations have all been moved to the couch, so it’s just me down here, feeling ten kinds of foolish.
Juniper has both of my ankles held in her weirdly strong grip.
She’s repainted her fingernails, I notice dully; they were black before, but now they’re a vibrant pink.
“Okay,” she says, taking a deep breath. “Ready?”
“No.”
She ignores this. “Here I go.” She heaves, and with a decent amount of force, she begins pulling me. I slide slowly along the hardwood floor as she moves backward, her face screwed up with concentration. Despite her efforts, though, I continue to move at roughly the rate of a migrating ice cap.
I think I’d rather be the ice cap.
After only a few seconds of this, Juniper stops. She drops my feet without warning, causing both heels to bang painfully against the floor, and then bends over, panting slightly.
“That’s not ideal,” she says.
“No,” I agree, still glaring. I sit up, rubbing my heels. “It’s not.”
“Let’s try the firefighter’s carry.”
My jaw drops. “You’ve got to be kidding.”
“I never kid about dead bodies.” I can tell she says this without thinking, because a second later, her mouth snaps shut, and she looks at me, her eyes widening in horror.
“Aiden,” she whispers, sinking to the floor next to me and looking dazed.
“We saw a dead body last night.” She hesitates, then adds, “Right?” She turns her beseeching gaze on me. “We didn’t imagine that, right?”
“No,” I say heavily. “We didn’t imagine it.” I’m not sure my imagination could conjure up such a vivid mental image.
Juniper settles into a cross-legged position, playing with the hem of her Halloween leggings as she says, “If the body was gone by the time the sheriff went to look for it, that means whoever moved it was probably watching us the whole time, waiting for us to leave.”
I swallow, rubbing my hand absently over my scruff. “I thought of that too,” I admit. How close were we to a potential killer last night? How close did we come to being hurt ourselves?
And what would have happened if Juniper had gone by herself?
Next to me, Juniper shudders—almost like she’s read my thoughts. On her headband, the little pumpkins wave back and forth. Then she claps her hands on her knees. “Nope,” she says. “I can’t sit here and think about this. It will drive me insane. Come on; up. Fireman’s carry.”
I can’t believe this is how I’m spending my Sunday, but I play along anyway—mostly because Juniper is still looking iffy. “If I’m a dead body, shouldn’t I stay on the ground?”
“Oh, good point,” she says without missing a beat. “Right. Okay. Lie down, then.” She considers me for a second before adding, “On your stomach, I think.”
She stands up while I lie face down in the middle of the floor, re-evaluating all my life choices.
“Hang on,” she says, and I turn my head to see her grabbing her phone from the couch.
“I need to look up how to do this properly.” She bites her lip, her eyes narrowed as she begins typing.
I watch as she scrolls and taps for a couple minutes, an image of bizarre contradictions—her face looks so serious, but those pumpkins on her headband are still wobbling to and fro on their springs, and her shirt is still noticeably inside out.
“All right,” she says, and I start.
I’ve been staring at her, I realize, my eyes glued to the dancing pumpkins and the little crease in her forehead and the curve of her jaw. I yank my gaze away.
“Let’s get this over with,” I say.
“So I’m supposed to stand in front of you,” she says slowly, still looking at her phone. She moves until she’s standing next to my head. “And then I’m supposed to pick you up by hooking my arms under yours.”
Ah. I think things are about to get…physical.
“Okay,” I say, feeling unaccountably nervous. I’m not the type to get awkward around women, but then again…Juniper’s not like any other woman I’ve ever known. She’s unpredictable, defying logic at every turn and laughing the whole time.
“So I’ll just…” she says, trailing off. She crouches down, hooks her arms under my armpits with absolutely no warning, and then attempts to stand.
It does not go well.
My head is dangerously placed right now, for one, pressed up against parts of her that are too soft, parts of her I should not be getting familiar with. “Lift with your legs,” I say, an impatient bite to my voice as I close my eyes and focus on any number of unappealing things.
“I’m trying!” she snaps back. “You’re really heavy.”
She smells like citrus.
“Try harder,” I grit out. “Or just drop me.”
“I—I can’t—oh, all right,” she finally says. And then she relaxes her arms, sending me sprawling to the floor.
“No more,” I gasp. “I’m done.”
“Fine,” she says, sounding sulky. “My killer will drag the body, I guess.”
The two of us are quiet for a moment, and somehow I know that we’re both thinking the same thing: How did that girl’s body get moved? Was she carried? Dragged?
It’s a morbid train of thought, one that doesn’t at all fit with this day or this woman or the mess of festive decorations strewn around the room.
“Where do you think she went?” Juniper asks in a small voice.
I sigh, pushing one hand through my hair as I sit up. “I don’t know,” I say. “Garrity was going to search the grounds last night. He said there was only a bit of blood, and it wasn’t near where you vomited.”
“But how is that possible?” she says. She slouches over to the couch and pushes all the unused decorations off, sending them to the floor. Then she flops down in her newly cleared space. “There was a lot of it.”
“There was,” I say, trying to remember. “But most of what we saw was on the front of her head and in her hair. We don’t know where she was injured, exactly. She might not have bled on the ground much.”
“And you didn’t recognize her?” Juniper says, a sad little frown on her face. “I hate that I don’t know her name. I told her I would remember her.”
“I recognized she was a student, but I don’t know her name,” I say, and I’m once again filled with the desire to run over to the school, dig out a yearbook, and memorize every name and face.
“I’m going to figure out who she was. I’ve got access to student rosters and photos and all that.
I think I’ve got a yearbook or two here as well; I’m going to check there in a minute. ”
“That’s good,” she says, nodding distractedly. “That’s good.” Then, in a voice so quiet I barely hear her, she says, “You think she’s the one who sent me the note, right?”
I hesitate, unsure of what to say. In truth, my answer is probably yes; no one else came, and the little heart on the exclamation point seems like something a high school girl might use. “I think it’s possible,” I finally admit.
“I can’t help but feel like she died because of whatever she wanted to tell me about my parents.”
I don’t answer that. That’s what it seems like to me too. But it also seems crazy to be having these thoughts at all; this isn’t a crime show. I’m not a detective. Things like this don’t happen in Autumn Grove, and people like me don’t solve mysteries.
And yet when I finally open my mouth to speak, what pops out is another question. “And you don’t know anything about your father?”
“Nothing,” Juniper says, still looking lost in thought. “Except…”
My heart skips a beat. “Except?”
“Except,” she says, turning to me, and a thrill runs through me at the sudden light in her eyes. “There might be someone who does.”
* ? This was one of the first scenes I had in my head when ideas started flowing for this book—Juniper and the very grumpy man she’d somehow roped into helping her research how to move a dead body.