All Good People Here(74)

“Kris, look at it from his point of view. You were friends with this guy. You slept with him. And then you excommunicated him from your life with no explanation, cut him off from his best friend. I understand why you did it, but how do you think he’s going to feel when you tell him you’ve been lying to him for two decades? You’re acting like he’s going to be happy to find out twenty years too late that he has a son and a daughter he never even got to know. But what if he’s not? What if he’s pissed?”

Krissy stared back at her partner, the woman she loved more deeply than she’d ever loved anyone, outside her own children. She knew Jodie was just trying to protect her, but Krissy had already made up her mind. She was going to tell Dave the truth.





TWENTY-SIX


    Margot, 2019


Margot stood on her uncle’s front stoop, the piece of paper trembling in her hand, all the messages from this case tumbling through her mind. That bitch is gone. She will not be the last. get out.

The smart thing to do with this note, she knew, would be to drive it over to the police station right now. One note on her car may have been a prank, but a second left on her uncle’s front porch? They’d have to take her seriously. And yet.

Margot glanced over her shoulder through the open doorway to her uncle still sitting on the couch. As she did, she thought she saw his eyes slide from her to the TV. Had he been watching her? Or had that been her imagination?

Surely he couldn’t be the one sending these notes, could he? For starters, the handwriting didn’t really look like his, although, as she glanced down at the words, it was hard to tell. They were in all capitals and looked as though they’d been hastily scrawled. And it was impossible the first note had come from him. It had been left on her windshield outside the Jacobs place, where Luke hadn’t even known she’d been going. But then, Margot realized with a little jolt, he had known she was going to be there. She’d told him before she’d left for church that she was going to approach Billy for an interview.

Margot thought about that stack of programs from January’s recitals, thought about the words he’d said to her only an hour earlier: what really happened to January.

Standing on the front stoop in the hot July night, Margot folded the note in half and then tucked it into her back pocket. Until she figured out what the hell was going on with her uncle, she wouldn’t go to the police.

“Uncle Luke?” she said after she’d closed and locked the front door.

He looked up from the TV.

“It’s past eleven. Let’s go to bed.”

Margot closed up for the night as he got ready, then she went into his room to make sure he’d brushed his teeth and changed clothes.

Back in her room, after she’d bid him a terse good night, Margot leaned against the door and squeezed her hands into fists. She dug her nails into her palms until they stung, then she kept pushing. There had to be an explanation for all this. There had to be some reasonable alternative to the story her brain was churning out. Her uncle was a good man. He wasn’t like Elliott Wallace. He would never, could never, hurt anyone, let alone a six-year-old girl. And yet, for the first time since she’d been there, that night she locked her bedroom door.



* * *



—

The next morning as Margot was making coffee, Luke padded into the kitchen, looking as if he’d aged a decade overnight. She felt the same. His episodes, this case, those notes—everything was taking its toll.

“Morning, kid.”

“Morning.” She flashed him a tight smile. “How’d you sleep?”

What she wanted to ask him was what he knew about January, but she couldn’t force the words from her mouth. It was clear he was lucid this morning, as he was most mornings, but what would an accusation from her do to that precarious state? Worse, what would it do to them?

A vibration from her back pocket made her jump. She pulled out her phone and glanced at the screen: Pete. Margot hesitated. She didn’t want to talk to him. She was still annoyed about how easily he’d found her underbelly and slipped in the knife. She declined the call.

She was grabbing two mugs for their coffee when her phone vibrated again. Again, it was Pete. This time she answered.

“I thought you might be avoiding me,” he said.

She let out something between a sigh and a laugh. “My phone was just in the other room.” She poured coffee into one of the mugs and handed it to her uncle, who settled down with it at the kitchen table.

“Right.” There was something in his tone that told Margot he wasn’t quite over yesterday either. “Well. How’re you?”

“Yeah, I’m fine. You?”

“Fine. Look, I’m calling because I found Elliott Wallace’s sister.” At the name, Margot’s heart lurched. After she’d all but kicked him out yesterday, she didn’t think there was a chance Pete was still planning on helping her. She angled herself away from Luke, who’d begun to work on his book of crosswords. “He’s been harder to track down,” Pete said. “But I’ll keep trying. In the meantime, I thought you might like her address. Her name’s Annabelle Wallace and she lives in Indianapolis.”

“Oh my gosh, Pete. I owe you one. Seriously.”

“No problem.”