All Good People Here(57)

“Anyway,” he said. “I went downstairs, and when I got to the kitchen, I saw that the basement door was open. The basement door was never open.” He took a deep breath. “I walked to the top of the stairs, the ones that led into the basement, and when I looked down them, I saw her. She wasn’t moving.”

Margot’s eyes widened. Jace had found his sister’s dead body that night? Inside the house? She had always assumed January had been killed somewhere along the way to the ditch.

“I was six,” Jace said. “I had no idea what was going on. At first, I thought she was just sleeping. And I wanted her to get up, because we weren’t supposed to be in the basement. But I was scared to go down there. So I walked to the kitchen table where I’d left my Etch A Sketch from earlier.” He glanced at Margot. “Do you remember those? Etch A Sketches?”

“Of course.”

“Right. So, anyway, I grabbed it and threw it down the stairs. Stupid, I know, but I was trying to wake her up. And it was loud, the Etch A Sketch. God, I remember that sound so clearly. The basement steps were concrete, and with everything else quiet, it was as loud as a gunshot. Still, January didn’t move.

“That’s when I went down the stairs. I remember how peaceful she looked. Like, I still thought she was just sleeping. Her face was…serene, and there was a little scrap of her baby blanket in her hand. Dad gave us both blankets when we were born, and January loved hers. Mom had washed it so many times by then, all that was left was a little square. Anyway, I tried shaking her arm and I remember that it felt weird, like too soft and too hard at the same time? I don’t know how to explain it.” He seemed to get lost in the memory, his eyes glazing over as he stared at a spot on the coffee table.

After a long moment, when he still hadn’t continued, Margot used the opportunity to ask the question that had been nagging her since he’d started. “Do you really remember all this that clearly?”

He shrugged, looking suddenly very tired. “Yes and no. I’ve told this story to myself every day for twenty-five years, but I’m not sure if my brain remembers it all because it was so traumatic or if it just filled in the gaps. Some things are completely clear about that night. The sound of the Etch A Sketch for one, and seeing January at the bottom of the stairs. But it’s not all one long memory. It’s more like splotches of one.”

Margot nodded. “And what do you remember next?”

“I was bent over her, checking if she was asleep, when I saw blood coming from her nose. I assumed she’d gotten a bloody nose and was lying down to stop it from bleeding. That’s what our mom always had us do, like, tilt our heads back. And I remember leaning over to touch it. I don’t actually know why I did this, but I remember it, because when I saw it on my finger, I freaked. I just wanted it off. I’ve never been good with blood. Or maybe I’ve never been good with it since. I don’t know.”

He took a sip of beer, and for the first time in her life, Margot could finally see all the strange pieces of evidence falling into place. She assumed he was about to tell her that he wiped the blood on his pajama pants.

“I wiped it off on my pajamas,” he said. “And that’s when I heard something behind me. I turned to see my mom standing at the top of the stairs and—this part I remember so clearly. The look on her face was—I can’t even describe it. It was terrible, sort of a mixture of horror and rage. So I—” His voice cut out.

“So you…?”

He shook his head. “Nothing. I just. I felt bad for her. I remember wanting to make her feel better, but I didn’t know how. Do you mind if I smoke?”

He said the last so abruptly that for a moment, Margot didn’t understand what he’d asked. “Oh, no, course not.”

He grabbed the pipe from the table, lit the bowl, and took a hit. “Want some?” he asked, smoke curling from his mouth.

She shook her head. It wouldn’t be the worst thing for her to relax, but she wanted a clear head and she was already drinking. “So what happened after that?”

He let out a hollow cough. “What happened after that is…nothing really. The next thing I remember is it being morning. For years, I believed January had been taken by whoever wrote those words on the kitchen wall—because that’s what my parents told me happened. I later learned that wasn’t true.”

He went on to tell Margot that a decade earlier, he’d written to his mom and they’d struck up a correspondence about that night. “She told me that when she found me standing over January’s dead body, she assumed I’d killed her. Pretty fucked up, huh?” He laughed bitterly. “It must’ve looked pretty bad, though, me standing there, January’s blood on my clothes. But I guess my mom loved me more than I realized, because she decided to protect me.

“She staged the scene as a break-in, to divert the police from finding out ‘what I’d done.’?” He said the last part with air quotes. “She found a hammer in the barn to smash in the basement window from the outside, to make it look like that’s where the intruder came in. And when she was putting the hammer back, she found the spray paint and got an idea. She knew writing that message was risky, knew it was complicating the scene, but that’s exactly what she thought she had to do. So she wrote all that shit on the wall, put the spray paint back in the barn, and then…”