Juniper Bean Resorts to Murder

Copyright © 2023 by Gracie Ruth Mitchell All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review. To those who fear that death is the end: the stars do not cease to exist when the sun rises, and we do not stop praising their light. CONTENTS Content Warning 1. In Which Juniper Defeats Inertia 2. In Which Aiden Lays Down the Rules 3. Thirteen Years Ago 4. In Which Juniper Decides Murder Might Be the Best Option 5. In Which Aiden Spots a Spud 6. In Which Juniper Ponders the Sexiness of Leaning 7. Twenty-One Years Ago 8. In Which Aiden and Juniper Find a Very Dead Body 9. In Which Aiden Regrets Saying Yes 10. In Which Juniper Makes a Phone Call 11. In Which Aiden Does Some Digging 12. In Which Juniper Adds to the Murder Board 13. In Which Juniper Makes a House Call 14. In Which Aiden Becomes Acquainted with Juniper’s Wandering Tongue 15. In Which Aiden Remembers 16. In Which Juniper Meets the World’s Most Glorious Abs 17. In Which Aiden’s Heart Does Inconvenient Things 18. In Which Juniper Does Not Call Anyone Papa 19. In Which Aiden Ponders the Human Inclination for Warmth 20. In Which Juniper Refuses to Live in Fear 21. In Which Aiden Asks for Advice 22. In Which Juniper Finds the Fuchsia 23. In Which Aiden Finally Caves 24. In Which Aiden Tells the Truth 25. In Which Juniper Makes Another House Call 26. In Which Aiden Loses Shakespeare Epilogue Acknowledgments Also by Gracie Ruth Mitchell CONTENT WARNING This is a murder mystery, so there are some darker elements to this story. Sexual assault of a side character is mentioned but is not shown on page or discussed in detail. 1 IN WHICH JUNIPER DEFEATS INERTIA At some point I have to stop killing people. I can’t very well carry on like this. Here I am, backed into a corner yet again, with no conceivable way out—another body to bury, another alibi to invent, and absolutely no relevant knowledge to speak of. What’s the best way to dismember a corpse? Who knows. How long before a body starts to stink? Beats me. So why do I keep doing this to myself? And what does it say about me, anyway, that my main characters keep finding creative ways to die? This work in progress is supposed to be a romance novel. It should have swooning and longing, summer afternoons and strawberry sunsets and reckless love. And to be fair, it does have all of those things—right up until my heroine gets poisoned by her friend-turned-lover. So…her friend-turned-lover…turned-murderer? Is there a market for a romance novel where the female lead dies in chapter nine? No. Probably not. This is better than the last manuscript I attempted, I guess, where the hero didn’t make it three chapters before revealing himself to be a villain who bludgeoned his personal trainer to death with a Shake Weight. That particular storyline was fueled heavily by caffeine and the discovery that I’d be unable to cancel my gym membership, since I (wildly optimistically) paid six months in advance. Maybe I’m secretly a serial killer. Is that possible? Maybe I’m a serial killer, and this is my subconscious’s way of getting me to see the light. I figure I’d probably know if I were a mass murderer, and it probably would’ve manifested in other, less-benign ways—a Shake-Weight-bludgeoned body rotting in my garage, for instance—but then again, does anyone ever really know themselves? No. I submit that they do not. I certainly don’t. Just yesterday, for example, I would have sworn up and down that I’d never go on another date while living in this little Wyoming town. I’ve met too many man-children masquerading as adults to have any hope left for this particular dating pool. And yet here I am, parked in the town’s fanciest coffee shop, waiting with my friend Matilda for her boyfriend and her boyfriend’s friend, so that we can double—something I only agreed to because I haven’t seen Matilda in months. We keep in touch, but after we graduated college seven years ago, she moved to the city and got a real big-girl job in a legal office. I, meanwhile, stayed in our little college town, partly because my brother was attending school here too, and he’s some of the only family I’ve got left. Now that he’s graduated, we rent an apartment together on University Street. There’s nothing keeping us here, I guess, but two Bean siblings at rest will stay at rest until acted on by an outside force—and so far we’ve been outside-force-free. Inertia is a tricky thing to overcome. So when Matilda called last week and said she and her boyfriend would be passing through on their way to the West Coast, of course I said I wanted to see her. And when she called this morning to tell me her boyfriend has a friend in town and can we pretty please double date—well, what was I supposed to say? It’s not like I’m swamped, and this way Matilda’s boyfriend will get to meet up with his friend too. I was a good friend. I said yes. “Juniper.” I jump as her voice, loud and slightly nasally, yanks me from my thoughts. “Yeah,” I say. She points to my phone with one finger. “Put that away,” she says as the fingers on her other hand drum restlessly against the tabletop, her manicured nails making little click-click-click sounds. “They’ll be here soon.” I close out of Google docs on my phone; my dying main characters are going to have to wait. “Do I look okay?” I say, turning in my chair to look at Matilda. I guess it wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world if