All Good People Here(9)
Krissy’s cheeks burned and she couldn’t meet Townsend’s eye.
“Is this pretty recent, would you say?” he asked, and although his voice was light, Krissy could feel the mocking tone beneath it, judgment practically radiating out of him.
“That recital was a few months ago. She’s six in it. So, yes.”
Detective Townsend glanced at the photo pointedly. “Six, huh?” He let out a little chuckle, threw a look at Detective Lacks. “And here I would’ve guessed she’s sixteen.”
The unspoken accusation cut through Krissy like a switchblade: bad parents. Or perhaps, more to the point, because everyone knew moms were to blame just a little bit more than dads: bad mom. Her mind flashed to those bright red words scrawled messily on her kitchen wall—This is what you get—and in that moment, Krissy felt just how true they really were.
FOUR
Margot, 2019
The murder of January Jacobs, the event that put Margot’s hometown on the map, happened in the middle of a hot July night in 1994. By all accounts, the story was a sensational one and it spread like wildfire, capturing the morbid fascination of Americans across regional, socioeconomic, and political divides. Overnight, the Jacobs family was famous. January became America’s darling, and her elusive killer the country’s most wanted. But the case was convoluted, and months passed without so much as an arrest. Eventually, the investigation grew cold and January’s murder turned into one of the nation’s greatest unsolved mysteries.
Yet while the little girl may have been just another cautionary tale or podcast episode to the rest of the world, to Margot, January was real. They’d been the same age, had grown up in houses across the street from one another. Though Margot’s memories of her early childhood were sparse and faded, she could still conjure flashes of summer days in the Jacobs backyard while Luke and Rebecca worked, she and January pretending to be horses or playing tag in the cornfields. The two girls had existed together in that magical age before boundaries, their little bodies always overlapping: hands in each other’s hair as they practiced their braids; sticky fingertips pressed together in a complicated shape, intoning Here is the church, here is the steeple…; limbs intertwining as they collapsed into a heap of giggles.
When January had been taken from her home, Margot had been sleeping only hundreds of feet away, in her own house across the street. Afterward, Margot’s parents told her that her friend wasn’t coming back, and Luke explained that January had died. But it was only later, when an older kid at recess told Margot that January had been murdered, that she’d learned the truth about her friend’s death. Although she must have missed January desperately, it was the fear she remembered most. Margot began to envision a faceless man standing between the two houses, playing eeny, meeny, miny, moe with her friend’s bedroom window and her own. At night she’d lay in bed, squeezing her fists so tight her fingernails drew blood.
And now, with Natalie Clark’s face splashed over the news, it felt as if it were happening all over again. The missing girl may not technically have been a child of Wakarusa, but with Nappanee only a few miles away, she was as good as.
The morning after Margot heard the news at Shorty’s, she sat at her uncle’s kitchen table, her laptop open in front of her, a cup of coffee in her hand. She should have been using the time to catch up on work emails, but instead she was looking for information about Natalie’s missing person case.
As she clicked back to her search page, she heard the creak of a door from down the hallway. A moment later, her uncle appeared in sweatpants and a worn T-shirt, his dark hair wild, his eyes swollen and red. Margot closed her laptop with a gentle click.
“Morning,” she said. “How’re you feeling?”
Yesterday evening, Margot returned from Shorty’s to find Luke standing in the living room, shaking. The moment she saw him, she dropped the to-go bag on the floor and rushed over.
“What’s the matter?” she said, placing a tentative hand on his back. When he didn’t flinch, she moved it in slow, smooth circles. The touch felt foreign to her—the Davies family had never been particularly physical in their affection—but she’d read in some online article that it could help him calm down when he was suffering from an episode.
Luke’s face crumpled and he looked to Margot like a child, his body shaking beneath her hand, tears streaming unchecked down his cheeks. “She’s gone,” he said, his voice a croak. “She’s gone.”
“I know,” Margot said. “I’m so sorry.”
But that’s when she heard the low murmuring from the TV, and when she looked over at it, she saw it was tuned to the news. Natalie Clark was gazing back at her, her smile wide and bright. And suddenly, Margot didn’t know if her uncle was mourning the loss of his dead wife or that of the missing girl.
Now, standing in the hallway, Luke looked up sharply as if her voice had startled him, but when he saw her, he smiled softly. “Kid. Good morning.”
Margot’s chest loosened. She hadn’t anticipated just how hard it would be to live with someone you loved who only sometimes loved you back. “I made coff—”
But before she could finish, her phone vibrated on the table, and when she glanced at it, she saw the name of her boss scrolling across the screen. “Sorry. I should take this.” She stood, pressing the phone to her ear. “Hey, Adrienne. What’s up?”