All Good People Here(90)

“Oh.” His face wobbled and he pressed his lips together tightly as he accepted the pages.

“Thank you for speaking with me the other day,” Margot said, giving him a moment to collect himself. “And for your quote.”

She wasn’t going to point out that he’d whitewashed the truth about his family during that first interview, because he’d been trying to protect Krissy, who’d been trying to protect Jace. And although the two of them may have unwittingly damaged an investigation that could have led the police to Wallace all those years ago, Margot understood all too well the instinct to protect your family.

Billy looked up from the pages, his eyes blinking furiously. “No.” He shook his head. “Thank you. For everything.”

She nodded. The moment felt both monumental and like nothing at all.

“Would you, um”—he cleared his throat—“would you like a cup of coffee? I know it’s almost dinnertime, but…” He shrugged, looking a bit awkward.

“Coffee would be great.”

Margot stepped over the threshold into the old familiar house, following Billy through the hallway of family photos. As a reporter, she’d always believed that understanding the truth was one of the most important things in the world, but as her eyes flicked over the images of his children, whom he’d not fathered, and his wife, who’d loved another, Margot wondered if sometimes believing a lie was better. There was no point in Billy learning the truth about his family. It would only tear him apart.

They walked into the kitchen, where he already had a pot of coffee on. He pulled an old ceramic mug from a shelf and filled it with coffee then topped off his own. “Milk or sugar?”

“Milk, please.”

They settled at the kitchen table together, and Margot couldn’t help her gaze drifting to the white walls where those terrible words had been written all those years ago. It was ironic, knowing they’d been written out of love rather than hate.

Across from her, Billy cleared his throat. “I can’t believe you figured it out. After all this time. You were just the little girl from across the street. I was here and I couldn’t even see.” His face flared with sudden emotion. “I should’ve seen.”

Margot studied him. Although she’d slept a total of four hours over the past thirty-six, Billy looked more exhausted than she felt. “You know…” she said, keeping her voice gentle. “Wallace kept his distance when he was stalking those girls. Especially with January. It was his first time to do it and he was cautious.”

The plastic box with January’s name had been the sparsest of them all. Wallace had saved a few of her dance programs—the parallel to Luke had sent a chill up Margot’s spine—but other than that, he’d collected nothing that had belonged to her. And the stack of photos in her container had been thin. While he’d probably had two dozen of Natalie Clark, he’d only had five of January, all of which had been taken from afar. Although he’d made enough contact with January that she told Jace his name, it was clear to Margot that, when he was stalking her, he hadn’t yet worked out how to be the predator he’d evolved into. It was why January’s murder was unlike those of the other seven.

Margot had gone over it a hundred times, piecing together what must have happened that night, and what she’d come up with was that Wallace had walked through the unlocked door, planning to simply walk back out with January in tow. But something had gone wrong along the way. Perhaps, as Krissy had always purported, January had fought back or cried out, and Wallace had panicked. He’d either bashed her head in, most likely with a weapon he’d brought with him, then left her body at the bottom of the basement stairs, or they’d scuffled in the kitchen and he’d thrown her down there, where she’d cracked her head on the concrete floor.

It was why January was his only victim not to have sustained sexual abuse before her death. And that made Wallace change his MO. After January, he started taking girls from playgrounds and parking lots, where it was easier to abandon the plan if it didn’t work.

“I think,” Margot said, “especially in January’s case, it would’ve been hard to notice anything was wrong until it was.” She may have been overinflating this—after all, Wallace had made contact with January, probably multiple times—but she felt sorry for the man sitting across from her. He’d had everything taken away from him and she wanted to give some of it back, to erase some of the guilt he’d lived with for the past twenty-five years.

“Do you have kids, Margot?” he asked.

She shook her head.

“Well. When you do, you’ll understand. Your job as their parent is to protect them and…I failed. I failed.” A broken sob hiccupped out of him. He made a fist with one hand, clasping the other around it, and pressed them both to his lips, as if to push the emotion back in.

“I can’t imagine how hard this must be. I’m sorry to dredge it all up again.”

Billy shook his head. “I don’t have much left in the world, but you gave me answers and you brought this asshole to justice and you cleared Krissy’s name. I’m very grateful.”

Margot’s throat tightened. She was gratified to have caught Wallace and solved the mystery of January’s death, but there was still so much she wanted to know about everything else. She wanted to ask Billy if he’d ever looked at his twins and seen the face of another man. She wanted to ask if he’d ever felt his love for Krissy go unreciprocated, either during that summer when she’d been sleeping with Luke, or years later when she’d gotten together with Jodie. But of course, she couldn’t ask any of this. So, instead, she said, “And I’m grateful for this coffee. I haven’t slept in days.”