The murders took place on a hot summer night, but to Juniper it would always be winter in Jericho. Bitter and unforgiving as deep February, when frost edged the windows like salt on the rim of a glass.

It seemed fitting, then, that it was dark and profoundly cold when Juniper pulled into town. In the glow of her headlights she could see that the welcome to jericho sign was riddled with bullet holes. Fifteen years ago there had been exactly three: puncture marks with saw-toothed edges that, if connected, would form a nearly perfect isosceles triangle over the yellow block letters of her hometown. They seemed intentional at the time. A warning, maybe, or a vulgar homage to three different bullets that had taken a much deadlier trajectory. But even barreling down Highway 20 at sixty miles an hour in the raw black of a February night, Juniper could see that the sign had become a target of sorts. At least a dozen holes had been punched through the metal, and the indentations of buckshot dimpled the gaping O.

A shot-up welcome sign was certainly an inauspicious reception—she could hardly believe that in all these years the city council had never bothered to replace it—but she harbored no illusions that her return to Jericho would be a happy homecoming. It was why she timed her arrival for the middle of the night and told Cora to slip the house key in the mailbox of the bungalow. Juniper had rented it, sight unseen, on a six-month lease. She doubted she’d make it that long.