All Good People Here(10)

“Margot, hi. How’s your uncle?”

Margot shot a glance at Luke, who was opening cabinets, presumably in search of a mug. She walked over and opened the right one, then retreated to the living room. “Um, yeah. Fine. Thanks.”

“Good, good,” her boss said, but she sounded distracted. “Listen, Margot. You’ve heard about the Natalie Clark case?”

“I was researching it now.” Research was a bit of a stretch for the preliminary Google search she’d done that morning, but she wanted to sound more knowledgeable than she was. She worked on the paper’s crime beat, and it was her job to stay on top of stories like that. The fact that she’d learned about Natalie’s disappearance from a bartender had been a disheartening reminder of just how far she’d let her eye drift from the ball.

“Oh good. Well, let’s have you write it up for tomorrow, yeah?”

Margot pinched the bridge of her nose. She knew she needed to make up for the leeway her boss had already given her these past few months, but she’d been hoping to get to the grocery store today. As it was, all she and Luke had for breakfast was stale Cheerios and almost-turned milk. “No problem.”

“Great. So let’s cover the basics. Police theories, any preliminary evidence. There’s a press conference this evening and I looked it up. You’re right there. Oh, and add some local color too. Talk to the family if you can get to them, someone we can call a close family friend if not—”

“Adrienne, hey,” Margot interrupted with a little laugh. “I have done this before.” It was an understatement. She’d been working at the paper for three years now, covering crime for almost as long.

“I know. But you need to nail this one. Okay?”

Margot’s heart began to beat harder. Her performance at the paper had first begun to suffer a few months after her aunt Rebecca’s death, when her grief had compounded with the dawning understanding of just how much Luke was really struggling. But it was only a few weeks ago, as she got ready for her move and put work on autopilot, that Adrienne had said something about it. “Right. I know. I will. Thanks, Adrienne.”

Margot thought that would be enough, but her boss continued. “Listen. I think you should know that Edgar mentioned you to me the other day. He said he’s noticed a decline in your work. Your output and quality.”

Margot pulled the phone away from her ear to shout a silent Fuck!

Edgar was the paper’s owner, whom she’d only met once at the company Christmas party three years ago, but he had a reputation for being merciless when it came to anything he deemed threatening to the paper’s bottom line.

“…told him about your circumstances,” Adrienne was saying when Margot pressed the phone back to her ear, “but he wants to see improvement. Fast.”

Margot took a deep breath. “I was thinking about drawing some parallels between the Natalie Clark case and the January Jacobs one,” she said. “Pose the possibility of a connection.” This had been percolating in her mind since the moment Linda had announced to her that January’s murderer was back. Margot didn’t know the details of Natalie’s case, but whoever had taken and killed January was out there still, roaming free.

There was a pause on the other line and Margot assumed Adrienne was switching gears, from boss to editor. “Are there parallels?”

“Other than geography and age, I’m not sure yet. But I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch to explore.”

“Okay…Of course, a serial offender is more compelling than a one-off.” Margot recognized her boss’s thinking-aloud voice, the one she used when she began to turn real events into thousand-word stories. “But don’t force anything. We don’t want another Polly Limon.”

Margot winced. Polly Limon had been her first real assignment at IndyNow three years ago. The seven-year-old girl’s story was like so many others: One fall afternoon, she’d disappeared from a mall parking lot in Dayton, Ohio. The missing persons investigation had spun its wheels until five days later when she was found dead in a ditch with signs of sexual abuse. Margot reported on the case for weeks, and although her articles never linked Polly’s death to January’s, in the office it was all she’d been able to talk about. Over the years, the death of her childhood friend had morphed from a source of grief and fear into one of infatuation. Slowly, the girl she’d once thought of as her friend January turned into The January Jacobs. Memories of them playing together were replaced with facts from her murder. So when Polly Limon showed up dead and the police started looking for her killer, Margot’s mind jumped to the case of the girl from across the street.

“Polly was found in a ditch,” she’d kept saying to Adrienne at the time. “Just like January.” The cause of death had been different—strangulation as opposed to blunt-force trauma—but there had been damage done to her head as well. And while January hadn’t sustained any sexual abuse, she also hadn’t been missing as long. The police had never connected the two cases, but neither did they apprehend Polly’s murderer, so Margot’s theory had never been disproven. Though she knew what her boss meant. She couldn’t afford to get obsessed with a side story. Not now.

“Right,” she said. “I’ll look into a connection this morning, but I’ll head to Nappanee a few hours before the press conference for interviews.”