All Good People Here(55)

“I just wanna talk.”

He let out a sharp bark of laughter. “Un-fucking-believable.”

“Jace, please—”

“I go by Jay now,” he snapped. “Or didn’t your research tell you that?”

“Jay. I’m just trying to understand if there’s a connection between that barn note and what happened to your sister. I just want to hear your version of what happened that night.”

“It was nice seeing you again, Margot,” he said as he turned to leave.

But Margot couldn’t let him. Not now when she was so close. She wanted a story, yes—she wanted to be a real, credentialed journalist again—but this was so much more than that. This was about understanding what had happened to her friend that night across the street from her bedroom window. This was about unraveling the thread that connected January to Natalie Clark. This was about making sure no more little girls got taken, then showed up a day later, their bodies cold with death. Margot made a fist, brushing her fingertips against her palm’s scattering of half-moon scars.

“Have you heard about Natalie Clark?”

Jace stopped, glanced over his shoulder. “What?”

“Natalie Clark,” she repeated, studying his face for any hint that the name meant something to him, but his expression remained neutral, almost blank. Was he acting or did he really not know anything about the little girl? To Margot, Natalie’s name was almost as familiar as January’s now, but that wasn’t normal. Most people didn’t pay half as much attention to the news as she did.

“She was from Nappanee,” she continued. “Five years old. She was taken from a playground a few days ago and police found her this morning, dead. She was murdered just like January.”

Jace stared at her. Had he had something to do with the death of his sister? With the death of Natalie? So many conflicting images of him swirled in Margot’s mind: Jace playing tag in the Jacobs backyard, Jace pushing his shoe into that dead bird, Jace beating up another kid, Jace putting flowers on his sister’s grave. Margot had no idea what to think about the man in front of her. All she knew was that she needed him to talk.

“Jace—Jay, what happened to your sister, it’s happening again. And I’m trying to figure out who’s behind it before any other girls show up dead.”

If he was innocent, or if he wanted to look innocent, refusing to talk to her now would look bad. Margot knew it and she knew he knew it too.

Jace stood still like that for a long moment, then finally he sighed and turned to face her. “I can’t talk now. I have to get the studio ready.”

“Okay.”

“What about after? Around ten-thirty?”

She nodded. “Do you have a place in mind? A restaurant or a bar or something?”

He glanced down the sidewalk in one direction then the other. “No. I don’t want to talk in public. You can come to my place.”

Margot hadn’t made up her mind about Jace yet, and she didn’t love the idea of going to his apartment alone at night in the middle of a city she didn’t know. But she’d text Pete the details. And anyway, it wouldn’t be her first time to sit across from a potentially dangerous man for a story. She smiled up at him. “Just give me your address.”





TWENTY


    Margot, 2019


Margot knocked on Jace’s apartment door and waited. Her throat felt tight with anticipation, though whether that was because she felt she was on the brink of understanding January’s story or because she was nervous to be alone with Jace, she wasn’t sure.

When the door swung open, Margot tried not to stare, but it felt surreal to be standing in front of the boy from across the street after all these years. And Jace’s face was so like January’s. Though, unlike his sister, there was that unsettling blankness in his expression that he’d had earlier, the same one he got after he’d guessed she was a reporter.

“Hi,” he said. “Come in.”

When Margot passed through the doorway, she was hit with a smell—earthy and a bit floral. On the coffee table, she spotted a stick of incense slowly turning to ash alongside a lighter, a small glass pipe, and a paperback copy of The Bonfire of the Vanities.

“You want a drink or something?” he said. His cadence was slow and flat, almost as if he was taking the time to weigh out every word, as if he’d had a lifetime of holding things in. Perhaps he did.

“That’d be great, thanks. I’ll have whatever you have.”

He turned toward the small, outdated kitchen, then turned back. “You can sit if you want.” He nodded to the couch.

Margot sat, and as he rummaged in the refrigerator, she gazed around. Homes gave away a lot about their inhabitants, and from his—the old, mismatched furniture; the bare, beige walls; the red and orange tapestry hanging over the window as a makeshift curtain—she guessed he lived paycheck to paycheck, spending whatever was leftover on weed.

“Here ya go.” Jace reentered the room with two bottles of beer. He popped the tops off both with an opener, then handed one to Margot.

“Thanks again for agreeing to meet with me,” she said as he settled into the armchair across from her. “Do you mind if I—” She pulled her phone out of her bag to record.