All Good People Here(48)

“No, Margot, you don’t get it. You left when we were—what? Eight?”

“Eleven.”

“Eleven. Okay. So before any of us really grew up. You didn’t see what Jace was like. He was fucked up.”

Margot frowned. “Fucked up how?”

“Like, he got busted in seventh grade for starting a fire in one of the bathroom trash cans. I don’t think he was trying to burn down the school or anything, but it got out of control and we all had to evacuate. He got into a lot of trouble for it.”

“What?”

“Yeah. And in ninth grade, he beat up Trey Wagner so bad the guy had to go to the hospital.”

She closed her eyes, thinking about how Billy had described his son in the years after January’s death. What had he said? That Jace tended to get into a bit of trouble. Nothing too bad, just boy stuff. She’d gotten the feeling he’d been protecting Jace when he’d said this, but the discrepancy between a bit of trouble and putting a kid in the hospital was a pretty big gulf. “Jesus.”

“And that evidence I told you about? January’s blood on his pajamas? A lot of the older guys here think that means he killed his sister.” By this point, Margot had assumed some of the Wakarusa PD must harbor that theory, but hearing it spoken aloud still unsettled her. “I have no idea what happened that night,” Pete said. “But if they’re right and Jace, at the age of six, did kill someone, accident or not, think about what he could be capable of now.”

“Yeah. Okay.” Margot pinched the bridge of her nose. “Listen, I should go. Thanks again for checking on my uncle.”

She hung up, feeling unnerved. It wasn’t so much that Pete had painted such a violent portrait of Jace, but rather that she’d had no idea about it. There seemed to be endless versions of the boy from across the street. Along with that memory of the dead bird, Margot could also pull up vague, fuzzy recollections from before January’s death of the three of them—she, Jace, and January—running around in the fields behind their home, playing hide-and-seek around the farm. In those memories, Jace had been a regular kid, just a boy. And then to everyone Margot had interviewed at Shorty’s, he was a troublemaker, the product of bad mothering, but not inherently bad. To Eli, he’d been nothing but an outcast.

Margot realized, as she packed her suitcase, that Pete’s warning had backfired. Rather than deterring her from finding Jace, it had only made her need to understand him stronger than ever. Because she didn’t know what his role was in all of this. All she knew was that he was a missing piece of the puzzle and she couldn’t see the greater picture until she understood where he fit in.

The next morning, she filled a to-go cup with coffee, threw her bag into the car, and said goodbye to her uncle, pushing away the guilt building inside her as she did. Then she headed out for the two-hour drive in the early morning light, news radio murmuring softly in the background, her mind whirling with thoughts of Jace. She was so preoccupied, in fact, that as she merged onto US-20, she almost missed the sound of Natalie Clark’s name through her speakers.

When she realized what the announcer had said, Margot gasped and reached over to spin the volume knob all the way to the right.

“The five-year-old-girl’s body was found early this morning,” the voice blared, “in the woods nearby the playground where she disappeared, and she was pronounced dead on the scene. While the police have not yet received the results from the autopsy, they believe that she was most likely sexually abused and that the cause of death was blunt force trauma to the back of her head.”

The announcer continued her report, but Margot was no longer listening. All her brain could do was conjure up images of the young girl, dead. In them, Natalie Clark was lying on the earthen floor, killed the exact same way January had been, her eyes still wide with fear, her head bashed in.





EIGHTEEN


    Krissy, 1994


It was midafternoon on the day after January was murdered when Detectives Lacks and Townsend escorted Krissy, Billy, and Jace from the Hillside Inn back to their house. It had, apparently, been fully inspected, documented, and cleared out—ready to be inhabited once again. In the back of the unmarked police car, Jace sat between his parents, and Krissy spent the ride pressed against the window, simultaneously trying to avoid his touch and trying to appear as if she weren’t.

When they turned the corner onto their street, Krissy’s breath caught in her throat. Both sides of the road were lined with media vans, news channel logos printed on their sides in bold fonts. Krissy read the logos, feeling dizzier with each one. Some she’d never heard of—WRTV, WNDU, Channel 4 News—but there were some anyone would recognize—CBS, ABC. At the start of the long driveway to their house was a wall of media: overweight men with sagging waistbands, enormous cameras perched on shoulders; their on-air counterparts, thin, sleek women with hard eyes and perfect hair, holding microphones and smoothing their blouses with flat palms. They looked like beetles, scuttling around each other, their equipment black and glinting.

Townsend directed the car into the horde, inching forward in sickening lurches, laying on the horn—an annoyed Moses parting the Red Sea. Krissy watched in horror as the swarm of reporters circled the car, swallowing it like a single organism. By the time Townsend shifted into park, they were surrounded once again. From her seat in shotgun, Lacks turned to face them, her gaze flicking between Krissy and Billy. “One of you should hold Jace’s hand. And get ready to run.”