All Good People Here(87)

“You find anything?” Jodie called quietly from the other side of the unit.

“No. Just books. You?”

“Nothing. Clothes.”

The two of them moved through Wallace’s stuff like this for about two hours, freezing every now and then at some far-off sound. Each time, they would lock eyes across the unit and stand motionless, waiting. Margot would squeeze her hands into fists by her sides, her heart in her throat, envisioning the door flinging open to reveal the gruff-voiced manager or the police or Elliott Wallace himself, but no one ever came.

And then, just as Margot was starting to think all of this was for nothing, she opened the last cardboard box and her eyes widened.

“Holy shit,” she breathed, staring down into the box’s contents. For a long moment, she felt paralyzed. Then she blinked, cleared her throat. But even so, when she called across the unit, her voice was little more than a croak. “Jodie! Come here.”

“Did you find something?” Margot heard the woman clamber to her feet and hurry over, stepping carefully through the maze of objects. “What is i—” But as Jodie sidled up next to Margot and looked into the box, her question turned into a gasp. She clapped a hand over her mouth so her next words were muffled and weak. “Oh my god.”





THIRTY-TWO


    Margot, 2019


Margot and Jodie stood side by side, gazing down into the enormous cardboard box between them, both frozen and silent until finally, Margot forced her lungs to take a breath.

“Look at the names.”

“Yeah.” By the choked whisper of her voice, Margot could tell Jodie was crying.

In the box was a neat collection of matching plastic containers, probably four or five layers deep, each one about the size of a shoebox with a white lid and a name written in black. The top four read: Natalie, Hannah, Mia, Polly.

“Oh my god,” Jodie said. “It’s him.”

Margot nodded, her eyes not moving from the stack of containers in front of her. She wasn’t sure what was in them yet, but just the sight of those girls’ names written so cavalierly, so possessively, made her feel sick and sad and full of rage all at once. She swallowed. “Can you hold your light up? I need to take a picture.”

After she snapped a photo, Margot reached into the cardboard box with a shaking hand and grabbed the container labeled Natalie, grateful for the latex gloves. Margot didn’t want her fingerprints anywhere near this. She placed the Natalie box atop the others, then pried open the lid. When she saw what was inside, her eyes stung with tears.

It wasn’t fair, to have a girl’s life reduced to the contents of this little box, this random assortment of things. There was a hairbrush with long brown hair still tangled in its tines alongside a purple water bottle covered in glittery butterfly stickers, NAT scrawled across it in a child’s hand. Beneath these was a smattering of butterfly hairclips, and tucked to one side was a neat stack of photos.

The first picture, Margot saw when she lifted them out, was of Natalie Clark, her face familiar from her headshot on the news. In it, she was in purple leggings and a white T-shirt, swinging from a set of playground monkey bars, her legs midpump, her little face screwed up in concentration. Margot’s chest ached. When she flipped it over, though, her sadness morphed into rage. The words Natalie Clark, age five, 2019 had been written in the same neat letters as the names on the box lids. Elliott Wallace fancied himself a collector—of both classic novels and little girls.

“What a fucking bastard,” Jodie said.

“Yeah.” It was the only thing Margot could think to say.

She flipped to the next photo, which had clearly been taken at the same playground. In this one, Natalie was wearing jean shorts and a neon green shirt. She was going down a slide. On the back again, was her name, age, and date.

Margot went through the rest of the photos, one by one, the images blurring together. It was clear Wallace had taken his time stalking the young girl, sneaking photos and surreptitiously collecting things from the ground where she’d left them. The fastidious way he’d done it all sent a shiver up Margot’s spine.

When she finished going through the little stack, she replaced the photos, snapped a picture on her phone of the box’s contents, then replaced the lid.

“There have to be a dozen boxes here,” Jodie said. “A dozen girls.”

Margot nodded.

“Do you…do you think they’re all dead?”

“I don’t know. I hope not.”

With Jodie holding her flashlight, Margot sifted carefully through the rest of the white-lidded boxes. As she did, the two of them realized the boxes were stacked in chronological order, the dates on the photos descending. And the further she went back in time, the fewer objects and photos there were. It seemed Wallace had evolved over the years, getting more patient and more meticulous with every subsequent victim.

Margot took a photo of everything in each new box, while Jodie did a Google search of its corresponding name on her phone. The girls, they quickly learned, had been located all over the Midwest. Sally Andrews had been from North Dakota, Mia Webster from Illinois, Hannah Gilbert from Nebraska—all places Annabelle Wallace said Elliott had lived.

“You don’t need to look this one up,” Margot told Jodie when they got to Polly’s box. “Her name’s Polly Limon. She’s from Ohio. He killed her.”