All Good People Here(89)

“I’d be thrilled to have you back,” Adrienne said.

“And I want a raise.” Margot told her the amount she’d come up with, one that would help cover her uncle’s bills as well as her own.

“I think we can arrange that.”

“And I want to work from here, from Wakarusa, and have more time and more autonomy over my stories. I’d like to cover Wallace’s arrest and trial. Take my time, do it well.”

“Working remotely won’t be a problem. And I’ll talk to Edgar about the other one, but I think he’ll go for it. You’ve proven what you can do when you have the time to do it.”

“Okay. Well…good.” Margot closed her eyes, her heartbeat steadying. Though she’d come out swinging, she’d been terrified to ask for what she wanted. “Let me know what Edgar says. And in the meantime, I’m going to try to get a few more quotes for tomorrow’s piece.”

Margot had included quotes from her interviews with Annabelle and Elliott Wallace, but she wanted to reach out to Townsend, Jace, and Billy too, to give them an opportunity to address the latest developments.

“That sounds great,” Adrienne said. “And I’ll send over some notes too. That is,” she added a bit awkwardly, “if you’d like. It’s in really good shape as is, but we have the time and we want this one to go viral.”

Margot smiled. “I’d love your notes.”

After they hung up, Margot tugged on a pair of sweatpants and padded out of her room. From the hallway, she spotted Luke in his regular morning spot at the kitchen table, nursing a cup of coffee, a crossword puzzle in front of him. The sight of him made her stop short, her throat unexpectedly tightening. After days of feeling estranged from him, Margot finally had her uncle back. And although he’d told lies and kept secrets like everyone else in this town, she now understood why he had. He may not have been perfect, but he was good.

That she’d ever doubted it, that she actually at one point suspected him of murder, made Margot seethe with guilt. Of course her uncle hadn’t killed anyone. January had been Elliott Wallace’s first victim, and although Jodie might not believe it, Krissy had taken her own life, just as everyone had always thought. Margot, for one, didn’t find this sad fact all that surprising. Krissy had lost a daughter, then a husband and a son. Even though they hadn’t all been killed, Elliott Wallace had robbed Krissy of her entire family, and the pain of that had grown too much to bear.

As Margot looked at Luke, a million questions ricocheted through her mind. She wanted to ask him when he realized he was the father of Jace and January, wanted to ask him what it had been like watching them grow from afar. She had so many things she wanted to tell him too, about Elliott Wallace and what had happened to January. And perhaps they’d talk about all this one day, but for now, she just wanted to sit across from him and drink a cup of coffee.

“Morning, kid,” Luke said when she walked into the kitchen.

“Morning.”

“You slept late. You feeling okay?”

She smiled. “Yeah, just had a thing for work.”

“How’d it go?”

“Good. Really good.” She walked over to the coffee maker. “Hey, Uncle Luke, do you wanna do something tonight? Just, like, hang out or something?”

He smiled. “That’d be great.”

“Okay. Cool.” She poured herself a coffee and took a sip.

“Hey, kid?”

Margot looked up.

“I’m really glad you’re here.”

Her throat tightened. “Yeah. Me too.”

Margot spent the rest of the day editing and getting more quotes. She knew that by the time the papers came out tomorrow morning, everyone across Indiana would have some sort of blurb on Wallace’s arrest. But no one would have anything near as extensive as she did, and by the time her piece was finished, she felt prouder of it than she had of anything she’d ever written before. She sent off the final to Adrienne around six that evening, then she printed off a copy, stuck it into her back pocket, and with a quick goodbye to Luke, promising she’d be home soon with a pizza in hand, she slipped out into the waning light of the day.



* * *



—

Five minutes later, Margot had walked to the Jacobs place and was knocking on Billy’s door.

For Margot, finding Elliott Wallace had given her a sense of closure about January’s case, a sense of peace. But for Billy, she knew, the news of Wallace was vastly more complicated. While it gave him the answers he’d no doubt long been seeking, it also inflicted the fresh pain of knowing his only daughter had been stalked in her own town and snatched from her own home by a very depraved man. When Margot told him the news on the phone earlier, Billy had broken down, and she wanted to give him the gift of reading the details early and in private.

After a moment, she heard footsteps approach, then the front door creaked open. In the sliver between the door and its frame, Margot saw Billy’s blue eyes peering out. When he registered her face, he opened the door wide, smiling broadly.

“Margot.”

She smiled back. “Hi, Billy. Sorry to bother you. I just walked over because I wanted to give you this.” She grabbed the printed copy of her article from her pocket and held it out. “It’s the story running in tomorrow’s paper.”