“I know.”
He heaved a tired sigh, then put his hand on her head, squeezed twice in quick succession. “You deserve much better than the likes of me.”
“Don’t I know it,” she said with a small, wry grin. Luke let out an exhalation of laughter, and that was when Margot knew her uncle—the real one—was back.
The two of them cleaned up the beer and glass, then grabbed two fresh bottles from the fridge, which they drank as they ate their sandwiches. Alcohol probably wasn’t a good idea, but Margot felt they both deserved it. After they finished eating, she cleaned up, then retreated to her room, where, sitting on the edge of her futon, she tracked down the number for Pete.
“Hello?” he answered.
“Pete, hi. This is Margot Davies.”
“Oh, Margot, hey.” He sounded pleasantly surprised. “How’d you get my number?”
“I called the station and Deb at reception gave it to me. Didn’t take much convincing, actually.”
Pete laughed. “Ah, yeah, Deb’s not exactly a steel trap. What’s up?”
“I’m calling for a favor.” Margot squished up her face. Asking for help did not come easily to her.
“Okay…What is it?”
“I’m leaving town for a few days and I was wondering…Do you think you could swing by my uncle’s house a couple of times? Just, like, once a day to check on him? I’m sorry to ask, but I suggested a part-time caregiver and it didn’t exactly go over well and I don’t know what else to do.”
“Oh. Sure,” he said. “No problem.”
Margot let out a breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding. “Really?”
“Yeah, of course. Like I said, I went through this with my grandpa and it’s tough. I get it.” The kindness in his voice made Margot’s throat tighten. “Anyway,” he said. “I’m on patrol for the next few days, so it’ll be easy to stop by. Just give me the address.”
“Thank you,” she said after she’d told him the street name and number. “That’s…thank you. And if it’s possible…could you sort of try to be, like, subtle about what you’re doing there? Maybe say you’re looking for me or something? I don’t want him to…”
“Hey,” he said before she could think of how to finish. “I get it. No problem.”
She closed her eyes. “Thank you, Pete. I owe you.”
“You’re good. Anyway, where’re you headed?”
“Chicago. I’m pretty sure that’s where Jace went. I’m gonna try to track him down for an interview.”
There was a brief silence, then, “Wow. Okay…Are you sure you wanna do that?”
She let out a small breath of laughter. “I’ll be fine, Pete. This isn’t the first time I’ve interviewed someone about a crime.”
“No, I know. But it’s more than that. I remember Jace from school. He was…not a good guy.”
Margot thought back to her conversation with Eli. He’d painted a picture of Jace as a regularly angsty teenager, one who stayed out late, smoked weed, and probably did a bunch of other stupid stuff teenagers did. It was no more than she’d done herself. “We can’t all be perfect, Pete.”
“No, Margot, you don’t get it. You left when we were—what? Eight?”
“Eleven.”
“Eleven. Okay. So before any of us really grew up. You didn’t see what Jace was like. He was fucked up.”
Margot frowned. “Fucked up how?”
“Like, he got busted in seventh grade for starting a fire in one of the bathroom trash cans. I don’t think he was trying to burn down the school or anything, but it got out of control and we all had to evacuate. He got into a lot of trouble for it.”
“What?”
“Yeah. And in ninth grade, he beat up Trey Wagner so bad the guy had to go to the hospital.”
She closed her eyes, thinking about how Billy had described his son in the years after January’s death. What had he said? That Jace tended to get into a bit of trouble. Nothing too bad, just boy stuff. She’d gotten the feeling he’d been protecting Jace when he’d said this, but the discrepancy between a bit of trouble and putting a kid in the hospital was a pretty big gulf. “Jesus.”
“And that evidence I told you about? January’s blood on his pajamas? A lot of the older guys here think that means he killed his sister.” By this point, Margot had assumed some of the Wakarusa PD must harbor that theory, but hearing it spoken aloud still unsettled her. “I have no idea what happened that night,” Pete said. “But if they’re right and Jace, at the age of six, did kill someone, accident or not, think about what he could be capable of now.”
“Yeah. Okay.” Margot pinched the bridge of her nose. “Listen, I should go. Thanks again for checking on my uncle.”
She hung up, feeling unnerved. It wasn’t so much that Pete had painted such a violent portrait of Jace, but rather that she’d had no idea about it. There seemed to be endless versions of the boy from across the street. Along with that memory of the dead bird, Margot could also pull up vague, fuzzy recollections from before January’s death of the three of them—she, Jace, and January—running around in the fields behind their home, playing hide-and-seek around the farm. In those memories, Jace had been a regular kid, just a boy. And then to everyone Margot had interviewed at Shorty’s, he was a troublemaker, the product of bad mothering, but not inherently bad. To Eli, he’d been nothing but an outcast.
Margot realized, as she packed her suitcase, that Pete’s warning had backfired. Rather than deterring her from finding Jace, it had only made her need to understand him stronger than ever. Because she didn’t know what his role was in all of this. All she knew was that he was a missing piece of the puzzle and she couldn’t see the greater picture until she understood where he fit in.
The next morning, she filled a to-go cup with coffee, threw her bag into the car, and said goodbye to her uncle, pushing away the guilt building inside her as she did. Then she headed out for the two-hour drive in the early morning light, news radio murmuring softly in the background, her mind whirling with thoughts of Jace. She was so preoccupied, in fact, that as she merged onto US-20, she almost missed the sound of Natalie Clark’s name through her speakers.
When she realized what the announcer had said, Margot gasped and reached over to spin the volume knob all the way to the right.
“The five-year-old-girl’s body was found early this morning,” the voice blared, “in the woods nearby the playground where she disappeared, and she was pronounced dead on the scene. While the police have not yet received the results from the autopsy, they believe that she was most likely sexually abused and that the cause of death was blunt force trauma to the back of her head.”
The announcer continued her report, but Margot was no longer listening. All her brain could do was conjure up images of the young girl, dead. In them, Natalie Clark was lying on the earthen floor, killed the exact same way January had been, her eyes still wide with fear, her head bashed in.
EIGHTEEN
Krissy, 1994