4. In Which Juniper Decides Murder Might Be the Best Option #3
I’ve been to the neighborhood where Aiden lives—although I guess his sister owns the house?
—but it’s on the other side of town from where I grew up with my mom.
We lived on the west side of Center, where the houses are smaller and the grass overgrown.
Now, though, I find myself driving down a picturesque lane, lined with trees and houses with white picket fences.
Nothing quite as fancy as the Heights or anywhere over there, but still nice.
It’s the perfect image of suburbia, something I would have scoffed and sneered at when I was in high school.
But I know better now. The reason this kind of neighborhood is the American dream is not that it’s fancy or aesthetically pleasing or whatever.
Human beings like those things, but what we really crave is stability.
We want to go to bed at night and know that things will still be okay when we wake up.
We want to rest easy. And that’s the feeling a white picket fence gives off: safety. Stability.
Sometimes it’s an illusion, of course. But sometimes it’s not.
I find 18 Theabelle Lane? * with ease, thanks to the numbers posted on the picket fence posts.
It’s prettier in person than in the pictures online, although that may just be because the leaves are so vibrant right now; they add splashes of color to the white siding and black shutters.
There’s a porch and a large porch swing, one of those that’s more like a hanging platform bed than a bench.
I’m already planning to turn that into a prime reading spot when the weather warms up.
I smile at it as I walk up the porch steps and to the front door, imagining all the pillows I can justify buying for a swing of that size. Then I check the door handle.
The door is unlocked, so I let myself in and start looking around. My first, immediate thought is that Chip and Joanna would definitely approve. It’s an open floor plan, with hardwood floors and white shiplap on the walls.
Joanna is all about that shiplap.
I wander sort of aimlessly, checking things out. The decor is minimalist but just enough—clean lines, muted colors, lots of light. No seasonal decor, I note, but there’s still time for me to change that.
“Wow,” I say when Aiden emerges from around a corner. He’s lost the blazer, but he’s still in full professor mode, even at home. “This place is nice.” Then I smile at him. “Do I get a tour?”
He raises one brow as he passes by me and moves into the kitchen. “Sure, if you do it yourself.”
I shake my head while also forcing myself not to sniff in his general direction to see what he smells like. “A tour needs a tour guide. That’s a basic rule.”
“They’re called self-guided tours , and I hear they’re all the rage,” he says dryly, pulling a glass from one of the cabinets. I watch as he fills it with tap water and then gulps the whole thing down in four swallows, his throat bobbing.
“All right,” I say. “You win. How do I get to my room? It’s in the loft, yeah?”
He places the glass in the sink, staring out the kitchen window and taking his sweet time answering.
“Aiden?” I say when he doesn’t speak. I wait (less than) patiently as he moves the curtains aside, leaning in until I think he might actually press his face to the glass. He doesn’t, though; he just looks out that window for a second longer and then lets the curtains drop again.
He finally turns to me, leaning back against the counter. “Sorry, thought I saw something weird.”
Something weird? What’s that supposed to mean?
I guess it’s not surprising. My day was a little weird too. Aiden being my roommate—the coincidence to end all coincidences—and the slightly strange yoga instructor and my obvious paranoid hallucination outside Namaste.
Maybe Autumn Grove is just a little weird now.
Or, more likely, maybe I just got a little weird, and it’s affecting how I see the world around me.
Aiden points to the staircase on my left. “Your room is up the big stairs, around the corner, then up the little stairs.”
“Up the big stairs, around the corner, up the little stairs,” I repeat. “I’m excited about the loft. Hopefully this will give me some space and quiet to work.” I head in that direction; I’ll look around a bit on my way there, too.
I take my time going up the steps, mostly because I stop to look at all the pictures hung along the wall as I climb.
They’re a bunch of black and white travel photos, most of them of easily recognizable sites—the Eiffel Tower, the London Eye, the Colosseum.
I examine each one, trying to figure out if Aiden or his sister took them, or if they were simply purchased.
I could ask him, I guess, but that feels like cheating.
“What’s the verdict?” Aiden says from behind me, just as I’m squinting at the foreground of the Eiffel Tower picture to see if I can recognize any identifying factors.
I jump, spinning around and wobbling dangerously as my feet lose themselves on the wooden staircase. I throw my hand out to steady myself, clutching desperately at the first thing I find as the world goes sideways.
And look. It’s not my finest moment, okay? Normally I think of myself as a decently poised woman. My balance is good, thanks to the core strength I’ve developed from doing yoga for the last five years.
But we all have off days, and…well, today seems to be one of mine.
Because as I pitch headfirst down the stairs, my wildly grasping hands find one thing and one thing only: Aiden Milano’s ear.
His ear.
I am a rock climber at a climbing gym, and Aiden’s ear is the finger hold that will stop me from plummeting to my death. But there’s no chalk on my hands, no safety rope, no harness—and Aiden, it seems, is not interested in taking this fall with me.
He jerks his head out of my grip with a yelp, something I feel rather than see as I tumble forward, down the steps—until I land, breathless and smarting, in a crumpled heap at the bottom.
Silence.
Pure silence.
And no matter how hard I rack my brain, no matter how creative I get, I can’t come up with a way to make this less humiliating. I am a marionette whose strings have been cut, and this is probably the worst first—second?—impression I’ve ever made in my life.
It’s tempting to simply stay here, my face squashed against the wood floor, until Aiden leaves.
With a bit of adjustment I could even make myself comfortable—face down sounds pretty good right about now.
But when I hear his footsteps on the stairs, they seem to be coming closer instead of further away. I think he’s coming to check on me.
Where was that concern when I was trying to use you as my human handrail, Aiden?
A sort of morbid curiosity is taking over, though, as I lie here in a heap—the desire to see what happens next.
So I stay where I am, not moving, even though my body is protesting the unnatural angles going on.
I remain still as Aiden’s steps draw closer and closer.
I remain still when I hear him stop inches away from where I lie.
I even remain still when I feel one dress-shoe-clad foot nudge me, right on top of the head.
I do not move.
And then, to my absolute outrage, I hear another sound: Aiden’s footsteps, walking back up the stairs.
“Hey!” I say, maneuvering myself into a sitting position so fast it makes my head spin. “Hey!” I push my hair out of my eyes, sweeping it impatiently to the side.
“Hey…what?” he says. His voice is flat, his expression unperturbed.
One hand is tucked casually into his pocket; the other holds a book.
He looks for all the world like a man who did not just let his new roommate fall down the stairs—and yet there’s a flicker of wicked amusement in his eyes as he stares down at me.
“What if I was dead down here?” I say, frowning up at him. “You nudged me and I didn’t move. What if I was unconscious? What if I needed to go to the hospital?” I rub my lower back, wincing as I poke and prod.
“You twitched,” he says, as though this explains everything.
“I’m sorry?”
“When I nudged you with my foot,” he says. “You twitched.”
“I did not,” I say, narrowing my eyes.
“Yes, you did,” he says blandly. “Your left leg. It twitched.”
“And you just let me fall,” I go on, pointing to him. “I grabbed you to steady myself, and you let me fall.”
For the first time since this conversation started, an easily recognizable expression passes over his face: he looks at me like I’m nuts. Holding up the book in his hand, he says, “This is a collector’s edition , Juniper.”
“What?” I blink at him.
“It’s a collector’s edition ,” he says again, waving the book in my direction—now that he mentions it, I do notice the fancy-pants gold leaf on the cover—and still looking at me like I’m crazy. “An old one, at that. The spine would probably crack if I dropped it down the stairs.”
I roll my eyes and heave myself to my feet, muttering under my breath, cursing his pretentiousness while simultaneously wondering how I can get a closer look at that special edition. I climb all the way up to my attic bedroom and flop down on the bare mattress, staring at the sloped ceiling.
The room is furnished already, but I need to put on bedding and set up my desk and closet and whatnot.
I need to add my own dishes to the cupboards downstairs and hang some of my own art on the walls.
I can make this feel like home. I did it when I moved to the foster home my senior year; I’ve done it in every place I’ve lived since then. I’ll adapt to my surroundings.
And then I’m going to do it. I’m going to write a murder mystery. And if the gruesomely killed victim happens to be a hot young professor named Aiden?
I won’t lose any sleep.
Well, all right. Maybe a little, because I struggle with bouts of insomnia.
But I won’t lose much.
* ? Autumn Grove and Center Street were heavily influenced by the little town where I live in eastern Idaho, around the Idaho Falls area.
* ? Turn on Danse Macabre by Camille Saint-Saens!
* ? This street name is some of my children’s names combined, and the number is the result of adding up their ages at the time this was written.