To argue would have been pointless, and Juno wanted the ice cream. From then on she’d learned that by staying out of sight—say, by the towel closet—they’d be more apt to spill their guts, dirty laundry tumbling out of their mouths a mile a minute. She’d known things about everyone in their town—the local Baptist pastor and her pediatrician, Dr. Mynds, included.

At this moment, she was grateful for the skills she’d honed in the salon.

Juno vibrated with something like anticipation as she lay in her nest. Above her, in the house proper, Nigel pulled open the door to the closet and tossed his work bag inside. She listened as his footsteps clambered up the stairs, calling out for Winnie and Sam. They were going away for a week to ski with Shelly’s family; obviously, Shelly was speaking to Winnie again after the Dakota episode. Though from what Juno had gleaned, Dakota was anything but okay with what had gone down in the Crouch residence that night. He’d left two messages on the house phone, threatening Nigel in gruesome detail, and accusing him of ruining Dakota’s life, in the slurred tones of a man who’d lost his family and was rapidly drinking himself to death.

Drunks seldom looked inward, and when they did, they usually ended up drinking more. Dakota was obviously looking for someone to blame and Nigel was the winner winner chicken dinner. Juno knew a ticking time bomb when she saw one. But Nigel had deleted both of the messages without Winnie ever catching wind of them.

They’d collected their snowsuits and skis from Hems Corner yesterday, loading everything into and onto Nigel’s Subaru. Now she heard all three of them come down the stairs, their voices loud and excited. Juno would have the house to herself, and she had plans.

She’d spent days lying in the crawl space thinking of nothing but her growing suspicions. While her body throbbed around her, she withdrew into thoughts, accumulating theories into an overflowing bin in her brain. It wasn’t good when she got like this; she couldn’t sleep, couldn’t focus on anything else. She ate aspirin (it was aspirin these days), chewing it to a paste and swallowing with a slight gag. She’d taken some of Winnie’s marijuana, too, from a little Altoids tin she kept in her toiletries bag under the sink. Juno had laughed out loud when she saw the six little joints rolled to perfection. She’d taken one without even thinking about it. Her pain these days superseded her caution. With the aspirin still coating her throat, she slipped into a haze of dull pain and unwelcome remembering.