All Good People Here(22)

Despite everything that was spinning out of control around her, despite the rawness she felt from losing her job and the anxiety bubbling inside her from those ominous words on the barn, Margot laughed. Her uncle’s illness had a way of making her appreciate him more. Every joke, every glimpse of the man he used to be, was a little treasure she wanted to hold in her hands. And he was right, of course. She may have just gotten fired from her job as a reporter, but this was a potential development in a twenty-five-year-old murder investigation. And it had happened less than half a mile from where they now stood. She wouldn’t be able to stay away if she tried. She had a fatalistic way of coming back to January Jacobs, again and again.

“Okay,” she said, “you caught me. I’ll probably swing by the Jacobs place on my way home. But I am going to the grocery store. For real. I want to eat three square meals that are not all takeout for at least one day. Are you…are you gonna be okay for a bit?”

There was a rare flicker of annoyance in his eyes. “I don’t need a babysitter, kid.”

“Right.” It was the same thing he’d told her yesterday, only hours before Pete Finch had found him wandering outside the cemetery. Though in this moment, she believed him. In her past few days here, she’d begun to get a feel for his rhythms, and it seemed he was the most lucid in the mornings. “I’ll have my phone,” she said. “Call me if you need me.”

She grabbed her backpack, phone, and keys from her room, then headed for the front door. As she closed it behind her, she threw one last glance at Luke, but his attention was back on the TV, his face lined with worry once again.



* * *



—

They’d had a rare summer storm the night before; the town was still wet, and Margot drove slowly. As she drew nearer to the road on which she grew up, her palms began to prickle with nerves. All her memories of the place were tainted by January’s death, and now it was a crime scene yet again. The words that had appeared on the Jacobs barn overnight echoed in her head.

As Margot turned onto the road, she was relieved to see it hadn’t transformed into a media circus. There were a handful of bare-bone news crews there, but it was by no means the mob she knew it had been twenty-five years ago. No doubt all the reporters within a twenty-mile radius were in Nappanee, too preoccupied hounding Natalie Clark’s family and Detective Lacks’s team to detour here for a few words on a barn.

She pulled to the side of the road, parking behind a van with a large satellite affixed to its roof. Through her car window, she gazed at her childhood home, the small two-story across the street, and realized she hadn’t been back in two decades. On the rare occasion she day-tripped to Wakarusa in the intervening years, she’d only ever gone to her aunt and uncle’s place. After all, that house, not this one, was where she’d spent most of her childhood. Now, her eyes flicked to the little round window at the top—her old bedroom—and for the millionth time, she imagined a faceless man standing in the middle of the street, his gaze oscillating between that window and January’s, then making a choice.

As she walked on the rain-slicked pavement to the Jacobs driveway, Margot tried to look past it to the barn, but the view was blocked by a line of lush green trees growing on both sides of the drive, so dense they created a wall. Billy must have planted them after January’s death, because Margot didn’t remember them from her childhood. A yellow line of caution tape had been pulled across the mouth of the driveway, and standing in front of it were two uniformed police officers. Though they had their backs to her, she could tell they were both men with brown hair, and like the rest of the population in Wakarusa, both were white. As she approached, she could tell the shorter of the two was clearly in the middle of telling some story, but at the sound of her footsteps, they turned.

“No media beyond this point,” the short one said.

But Margot wasn’t looking at him. “Hi,” she said to the other officer.

Pete grinned. “We have to stop meeting like this.” He turned to his partner and said, “This is Margot Davies.”

The short officer looked to be a few years younger than the two of them, and he clearly didn’t know or care about the older generation’s gossip, because he greeted her blandly, then got distracted by something over her shoulder, and with a quick nod to them both, made his way over.

“Are you covering this now too?” Pete said.

“I was going to, but it looks like you aren’t gonna let me.” Her eyes darted to the caution tape drawn across the driveway entrance.

“Well, it is a crime scene, so we’re treating it accordingly. But between you and me, this won’t be here for long. I think my supervisor’s just being extra cautious because…you know. This is the Jacobs place.”

Margot raised her eyebrows. “That’s all this is—extra caution?”

“As opposed to…?”

“Wait. Are you saying the police don’t think this barn note is connected to January’s murder? They don’t think the timing means it’s connected to the disappearance of Natalie Clark?”

“Well, Wakarusa PD has nothing to do with the Clark girl’s investigation, but the state police just issued a statement saying this message has nothing to do with it. As far as January’s case goes”—he shrugged—“no. Our department is treating this as vandalism.”