For a moment, as he laughed, Jace looked happy, light. But then he seemed to remember what had gotten him talking about January’s invisible friend in the first place and his smile dropped. He looked weary once again.
“Listen, Margot, I wish I could help you more. But the truth is up until a few years ago, I hated myself so much I couldn’t think straight. I know now that it’s called survivor’s guilt, but when I was actually in it, all I could think was It should’ve been me. I was six, seven, eight years old, and I actually wished I had died instead of her.
“And then, for a long time, I tried burying all of it. I tried drinking and drugs and nothing, nothing made it go away. I’ve been arrested, I’ve lied, I’ve cheated. I mean, I’m better now—well, not totally, but whatever. What I’m saying is that night ruined my fucking life. Of course, I’ve thought about who it could’ve been. I think about it every day. And I don’t know.”
Margot nodded, stayed quiet. She burned with shame for putting him through all of this again. And also, somewhere deep beneath that, something was nagging at her brain. Something he’d said had triggered something inside her, but what it was, she couldn’t quite put her finger on.
“Sorry,” Jace said after a moment. “I don’t mean to be…What happened that night took everything from me. It robbed me of my sister, my childhood—no one was allowed to be friends with me after that. And then when I finally told my mom the truth—the first person I’d ever told—it robbed me of her too.”
Margot shook her head. “Wait. What d’you mean?”
“The day she got my last letter was the day she killed herself. Her suicide was her way of apologizing for getting everything wrong. She’d still be alive today if I hadn’t told her the truth.”
The words of Krissy’s leaked suicide note filled Margot’s mind—Jace, I’m sorry for everything. I’m going to make it right—and another piece of the puzzle clicked into place. Krissy took her own life not out of guilt for killing her daughter, but out of guilt for getting it all wrong, for suspecting her own son of murder.
“And I let her slip between my fingers. In every letter she wrote, she asked to meet up, but I never would. I wouldn’t even give her my address, had her send her replies to a PO box. I was so fucking angry. Now…” Jace’s voice faded and he shook his head. “I hope you find this guy, Margot, whoever he is. I hope you find him and I hope he burns in hell.”
* * *
—
Throughout the rest of the night, Margot continued to feel that strange sensation of something nagging at her mind. But what it was or what Jace had said that triggered it, she couldn’t put her finger on. It felt just out of reach, like an old memory buried beneath layers of junk. It tugged at her brain as she brushed her teeth and as she slipped under the covers of her hotel bed.
Her subconscious had clearly worked at it all night, though, because when she woke the next morning, she realized it was January’s imaginary friend, Elephant Wallace, who meant something to her. The name, the big ears—it all felt familiar. But how could it? Had January mentioned him to Margot? Had Margot been introduced to the invisible stranger all those years ago? Had she, Elephant, and January all sat down to tea together once upon a time? Somehow, she didn’t think so. And yet, what other explanation could there be?
It continued to bother her as she threw her things into her backpack and checked out at the front desk. And then, finally, it hit her, smacking into her consciousness with the force of a semitruck. She was on the highway when it happened, halfway home, and she nearly swerved into the next lane.
Jace had gotten it wrong. Elephant Wallace wasn’t imaginary, nor was his name Elephant. Margot knew because she knew who he was; she even knew where he lived and what he looked like—big ears and all. Three years ago, she’d interviewed him in conjunction with the Polly Limon case. Elliott Wallace had been one of the suspects.
TWENTY-ONE
Krissy, 1994
The interview with Sandy Watters backfired. Far from rehabilitating the Jacobses’ image, it served as ammunition with which the American people used to declare their guilt. Billy had sweat too much, people said. Jace was a creepy kid who looked like he knew something he wasn’t saying. And Krissy was an unfit mother. The media had picked apart the footage of her begrudgingly wrapping her arm around Jace so many times that the three-second clip was famous. Lisa and Bob in the Morning had shown snapshots of Krissy’s face as she’d done it, her eyes hard, her jaw set. “I’m not saying that’s the face of a killer,” Lisa said. “But it does certainly seem to be the face of someone who’s hiding something.” Krissy hadn’t needed any more fodder for her resentment toward Billy, but he’d certainly given it to her by coercing her onto Headline with Sandy Watters. Overnight, casseroles stopped showing up on their doorstep; letters of sympathy stopped arriving in the mail. When Krissy went to the grocery store, people who used to call themselves her friends would cut their eyes away from hers coldly.
The detectives, on the other hand, were as persistent as ever. Townsend in particular seemed suspicious of Krissy, his cold blue gaze always watching. Once, he and Lacks asked her to come to the station to talk, where they dropped the bomb that their cadaver dogs had hit upon her trunk, detecting the scent of decomposition. When forensics searched it later, they found fibers from the nightgown January had been wearing on the night of her death.
Krissy could feel herself sweating through her shirt as she told the detectives that she often put the kids’ things in the trunk, especially January’s stuff for dance. It got funky in the heat, which could possibly explain the scent. As for the fibers, like she’d just said, her daughter’s clothes were in the trunk all the time. “I keep telling you,” she added in a shaky voice. “I had nothing to do with January’s death. Who you should be talking to is all those men who lurked around her competitions.” Since that first day of the investigation, Krissy had never veered from her story. It was an intruder, a stranger, a bad man.
In the days following the interview, Krissy waited like a tightly wound spring for Detectives Townsend and Lacks to knock on their door with a warrant for her arrest. But they never did. The days turned to weeks, and eventually the urgency with which the detectives spoke about the case fizzled into something closer to resignation. Townsend stopped looking at her as if she were an animal he was trying to catch and began looking at her as if she were one that had gotten away. Months went by without any new developments, and then, in a blink, the world was in a new century and the case had gone cold.
For Krissy, the years passed in a blur of Valium and sleeping pills. She continued to dress in the right clothes for church and put on makeup when she left the house, but her mind was perpetually blank, numbness her only relief from the grief of losing her daughter and the torture of living with the boy who’d killed her and a man who’d never been what she’d needed.
And then, in 2004, ten years after losing January, something happened that made the days tolerable again. For the first time in her life, Krissy fell in love.