12. In Which Juniper Adds to the Murder Board
IN WHICH JUNIPER ADDS TO THE MURDER BOARD
D ownward-facing dog is my least favorite yoga pose.
It’s not that it’s difficult, necessarily—it requires strength and flexibility, yes, but really I just hate the feeling of blood rushing to my head. I also hate feeling like everyone is staring at my butt in the air.
Which is ridiculous. No one is staring at my butt in the air, because everyone else’s butts are in the air too. We all have blood rushing to our heads right now, and the only things we’re staring at are our yoga mats.
I dislike it anyway. But I do it, because I am being paid by one perpetually smiling man to teach yoga classes every afternoon.
And look. The smiling thing?
It’s getting a little weird.
I don’t have a problem with happy people. In fact, I like them. I like happy people. It’s just…Gus smiles all the time.
All.
The.
Time .
I bet when that man wakes up in the morning, he’s already grinning from ear to ear.
At this point I just don’t see how that wouldn’t be true.
I watched him get a drink from the drinking fountain yesterday, and the only time that smile stopped was when his lips actively had to close to swallow the water.
Never fear, though; those pearly whites showed right back up afterward.
And they stayed. They stayed for the rest of my shift, they were there when I arrived this afternoon, and they’re still there now.
Extra pearly. Extra white.
“All right,” I say, wiping sweat from my forehead with the hem of my shirt. I let it drop and then look at Gus, jumping when I see that he’s already watching me. “That was my last class. Am I good to go?”
“You’re good to go,” he confirms. He’s still smiling, of course.
I get everything back in my bag, rolling up my yoga mat and slinging it over my shoulder. Then I refill my water bottle. You can never be too hydrated.
I stand there at the drinking fountain, staring aimlessly around the small studio while my bottle fills up. The music playing in the background is soft and nondescript, but I like it; I sway along as I listen.
My entire body freezes, though, when my eyes catch on one of the photos on the wall.
It’s a picture I’ve seen every day since I started working here—a group photo taken here in the studio and featuring about fifteen smiling faces, all crammed into this little space.
Gus is kneeling in front, but he’s still as tall as some of the other people surrounding him.
Everyone is sweaty and pink-cheeked, much like me at the moment.
It’s none of these things that catch my attention, though. What catches my attention is the smiling blonde on the far right. She’s as sweaty as the rest of them, and she looks just as happy, too.
“Hey,” I call, my eyes never leaving the photo. “Gus. Come here for a minute.”
Despite Gus’s colossal size, he actually moves quietly; he’s very light on his feet. So I don’t hear him approach; I just jump when he answers me a few seconds later, his voice coming from right behind me.
“Yeah?”
“This girl,” I say, pointing at the blonde. “You know her?”
He leans forward, his head craning over my shoulder just a bit. “Yes,” he says after a second. “That’s Sandy.”
“Sandy,” I repeat. There’s an uptick in my pulse at the sound of her name, a flurry of motion from that muscle in my chest cavity. “Did—” I break off, correcting myself quickly. “Does she come here a lot?”
From the corner of my eye, I see Gus nod. “She was a regular. I haven’t seen her in a week or two, though.”
A red flag begins waving in my mind, subtle but unmistakable, though I can’t quite put my finger on why. It flutters just out of my grasp, taunting, leaving a sour taste in my mouth.
I clear my throat and try to sound normal as I ask another question. “Were you guys close?”
“Uh,” he says uncomfortably. “We weren’t… not close, I guess?”
I blink, frowning. What kind of answer is that? It was a yes/no question. I turn around, intending to clarify, but my words die when I see Gus.
He’s not smiling.
I repeat: he’s not smiling.
“Gus?” I say, my voice hesitant.
This is brand new territory. Nothing I learned when I got certified to teach yoga prepared me for a non-smiling Augustus Flanders. And I get it now—I get why he’s constantly smiling.
Because he’s terrifying when he’s not.
This mountain of a man—I’d put him at probably six-six, honestly, with muscles in places I didn’t know muscles existed—is staring at me, his brow furrowed, his mouth set in a tight line.
“Gus?” I say again. My voice squeaks a little, but I’m past the point of caring. I just want to get out of here and come back tomorrow when hopefully Gus’s smile has returned.
“Sorry,” he says gruffly. He rubs one massive hand over the top of his head. “There was just a bit of an incident. And I would have brought it up with you if Sandy had returned, but…well, she never did.”
“What kind of incident?” I say as my heart continues to thunder along.
We’ve entered a bit of a Twilight Zone area, where I’m not sure which way is up and which way is down or what’s even going on.
Gus knew Sandy? He isn’t smiling? There was an incident?
It’s too many things for my brain to make sense of at one time.
“She—it wasn’t—I never—” he stutters, and strangely it makes me feel better; stumbling over his words makes him feel more human and less like an iceberg-sized muscle monster.
Then he sighs. “Frankly, it’s not relevant to your job here.
If it comes up again, I’ll inform you of anything you need to know,” he says.
What? That’s it? That’s all I’m getting?
“Because maybe I could help—” I say tentatively.
But Gus shakes his head, his face is still pulled into that tense, scary expression. “No need. Appreciate the offer, though.”
I nod my defeat, suddenly feeling very tired. “I’m leaving,” I say with a sigh. “I’ll see you tomorrow. ”
I guess I need to put Gus on the Murder Board when I get home.
Aiden and I have fallen into an easy routine in the last week since we learned the name of the girl in the woods.
The second half of this week was when Harvest Break began, so he hasn’t been at the school; he’s been helping at the food bank instead, throwing himself into his work there with a restless fury.
Meanwhile I write every morning while he’s doing his own thing, or I try to; yes, my characters keep killing each other, but it turns out there’s a lot more to writing mysteries than just murder. There are logistics I know nothing about, and it’s slowing me down.
It’s more than the logistics, though, really. I’m brainstorming ways to figure out that stuff, but the biggest problem I’m having is that the book is feeling so…mechanical, I guess. Lifeless. I’m hitting the beats, but everything feels robotic, and I can’t figure out why.
So I spend a lot of time staring at the screen and shotgunning chips and guac.
Then in the afternoons I teach yoga and fitness classes until six.
After that I go home, and we eat dinner together, usually on the couch while watching something.
Recently it’s been a series of World War Two documentaries.
I complained about this at first, but honestly, it wasn’t long until I was completely engrossed, booing whenever footage of Hitler came on the screen.
And then, once we’re done eating and booing fascist dictators, we go stare at the refrigerator, which is the home of our Murder Board—just like in the detective shows.
Only this isn’t a detective show, and we aren’t detectives.
So instead of lots of pictures with connecting lines and ideas, we pretty much only have two things: Sandra’s name—though it seems clear she went by Sandy more than Sandra —along with what we know about her, and a list of people who knew her or interacted with her at all.
That’s as far as our combined investigative prowess has gotten us.
We spent Monday and Tuesday after the dance waiting for Sheriff Garrity to call and say that we were right, that a girl had been reported missing—but he didn’t.
When Aiden finally called him Tuesday night, Sheriff Garrity said Sandra von Meller isn’t missing, despite what Aiden told him Monday about her being the girl we saw.
“Are you absolutely certain it was Sandra von Meller?” Garrity said, sounding frustrated as his voice echoed over the speaker. “Can you guarantee that’s the girl you think you saw?”
“I—I can’t—I can’t guarantee anything,” Aiden replied, scrubbing his hand down his face. “But she’s been absent, and I really think it was her?—”
But Sheriff Garrity wasn’t having it. He talked to Sandra’s mother, apparently; according to her, Sandra is spending Harvest Break on a solo road trip, looking at colleges.
Her mother did admit that Sandra left early Sunday morning, several days earlier than planned, and that she didn’t see her before she left—but she says she’s been in touch through text since then, sending updates and even pictures.
Which means that someone has Sandra’s phone and is pretending to be her, sending photos that were either photoshopped or already on the phone. That will probably give me nightmares until I die. Plus, what kind of parent lets their teenager go on a road trip by herself?
So from Wednesday on, we’ve just been trying to learn more about Sandra.
We don’t know a ton about her or what she was like, but everything we do know is thanks to Aiden’s position as guidance counselor at the school. He was able to get a hold of some files and learn a bit more. And honestly? It doesn’t paint a great picture.
She was in pageants since she was a little girl; I looked up photos, and all of them involved big hair and blinding, vacant smiles masking disturbingly dead eyes.