When she hung up, Margot hurled her phone across the room, where it bounced against the carpeted floor. She grabbed her pillow, pressed it to her face, and screamed.
She couldn’t believe this was happening. Ever since she was young, before high school even, Margot had known she wanted to be a reporter. Since before she could remember, she’d felt compelled to understand things, to research them, dissect them, then turn them into something comprehensible. And even though IndyNow didn’t have the budget for the level of investigative work she wanted to do, even though they prioritized quick turnover and easily digestible stories over asking questions and digging in, it was a good paper, and until now, they’d always supported her.
But more than the loss of the career she’d worked toward her entire life, what worried her most was the loss of the paycheck. If this had happened a year ago, it would have been devastating, but survivable. She’d live off her savings and ramen until she found the next best step. But she couldn’t afford not to work now—not when she was supporting her uncle as well as herself. Although his house was paid off, she was still paying her rent in Indianapolis until her subletter moved in, the date of which he had yet to confirm. Meanwhile, she didn’t want to use Luke’s credit card for anything until she had a better idea of his finances. So she was paying for his exorbitantly priced medications, food for them both, all their utility bills when those came in, and now, possibly an in-home caregiver whose price had given her heart palpitations when she’d heard it over the phone. What the fuck was she going to do?
A knock on the door brought her out of her thoughts.
“Kid?” Luke called. “Can I come in?”
Margot pulled her face out of the pillow. “Just a second!”
She hastily wiped the tears from her face, and as she did, she noticed a sharp stinging in both her palms. She looked down at them to find bright red indentations scattered among the little half-moon scars. Apparently, she’d been digging her nails into her skin. She dropped her hands and looked away. She hadn’t done that in a long time. Taking a breath, she tucked her hair behind her ears, stood, and walked to the door.
When she opened it, she could tell immediately that something was wrong. Her uncle’s face was clear and lucid, but his eyes were worried. “There’s something you should see.”
Margot followed him into the living room, where the TV was on and tuned to the news. Two anchors, one man, one woman, were looking into the camera.
“…was discovered early this morning by an employee of Billy Jacobs,” the man was saying. Margot’s stomach lurched at the name, and she took an involuntary step closer to the screen. “Apparently, Mr. Jacobs was away at a farming equipment convention these past few days, and when he returned this morning, his employee told him there was something he needed to see, a message written on the side of the Jacobses’ barn.”
As he said this, the screen filled with a photograph of a scene Margot knew well. It was the view she’d had from her childhood bedroom window, the big red barn in the yard across the street. Only now, it was marred by words scrawled in black spray paint. The sight of them sent a shiver up her spine.
“Holy shit.”
Margot stared at the photo on the TV, her heart thumping so hard she could feel it against her ribs. She felt paralyzed, unable to move or even think. Finally, after a long moment, she snuck a glance at her uncle. What would this do to his already fragile state of mind? The news of Natalie Clark’s disappearance two days ago had unraveled him, and this was far closer to home than the little girl of Nappanee.
Margot breathed a sigh of relief when she saw him. He looked concerned—his arms crossed over his chest, his chin dipped in concentration, a hard line between his eyes—but he was very much in control.
“Hey, Uncle Luke?”
He turned his head to look at her.
“I’m gonna go to the grocery store.”
To Margot’s surprise, this elicited a wry grin. “The grocery story, huh? Is that what they’re calling crime scenes these days?”
Despite everything that was spinning out of control around her, despite the rawness she felt from losing her job and the anxiety bubbling inside her from those ominous words on the barn, Margot laughed. Her uncle’s illness had a way of making her appreciate him more. Every joke, every glimpse of the man he used to be, was a little treasure she wanted to hold in her hands. And he was right, of course. She may have just gotten fired from her job as a reporter, but this was a potential development in a twenty-five-year-old murder investigation. And it had happened less than half a mile from where they now stood. She wouldn’t be able to stay away if she tried. She had a fatalistic way of coming back to January Jacobs, again and again.
“Okay,” she said, “you caught me. I’ll probably swing by the Jacobs place on my way home. But I am going to the grocery store. For real. I want to eat three square meals that are not all takeout for at least one day. Are you…are you gonna be okay for a bit?”
There was a rare flicker of annoyance in his eyes. “I don’t need a babysitter, kid.”
“Right.” It was the same thing he’d told her yesterday, only hours before Pete Finch had found him wandering outside the cemetery. Though in this moment, she believed him. In her past few days here, she’d begun to get a feel for his rhythms, and it seemed he was the most lucid in the mornings. “I’ll have my phone,” she said. “Call me if you need me.”
She grabbed her backpack, phone, and keys from her room, then headed for the front door. As she closed it behind her, she threw one last glance at Luke, but his attention was back on the TV, his face lined with worry once again.
* * *
—
They’d had a rare summer storm the night before; the town was still wet, and Margot drove slowly. As she drew nearer to the road on which she grew up, her palms began to prickle with nerves. All her memories of the place were tainted by January’s death, and now it was a crime scene yet again. The words that had appeared on the Jacobs barn overnight echoed in her head.
As Margot turned onto the road, she was relieved to see it hadn’t transformed into a media circus. There were a handful of bare-bone news crews there, but it was by no means the mob she knew it had been twenty-five years ago. No doubt all the reporters within a twenty-mile radius were in Nappanee, too preoccupied hounding Natalie Clark’s family and Detective Lacks’s team to detour here for a few words on a barn.
She pulled to the side of the road, parking behind a van with a large satellite affixed to its roof. Through her car window, she gazed at her childhood home, the small two-story across the street, and realized she hadn’t been back in two decades. On the rare occasion she day-tripped to Wakarusa in the intervening years, she’d only ever gone to her aunt and uncle’s place. After all, that house, not this one, was where she’d spent most of her childhood. Now, her eyes flicked to the little round window at the top—her old bedroom—and for the millionth time, she imagined a faceless man standing in the middle of the street, his gaze oscillating between that window and January’s, then making a choice.
As she walked on the rain-slicked pavement to the Jacobs driveway, Margot tried to look past it to the barn, but the view was blocked by a line of lush green trees growing on both sides of the drive, so dense they created a wall. Billy must have planted them after January’s death, because Margot didn’t remember them from her childhood. A yellow line of caution tape had been pulled across the mouth of the driveway, and standing in front of it were two uniformed police officers. Though they had their backs to her, she could tell they were both men with brown hair, and like the rest of the population in Wakarusa, both were white. As she approached, she could tell the shorter of the two was clearly in the middle of telling some story, but at the sound of her footsteps, they turned.