The letter fluttered from Krissy’s hand, landing on the table, open as a wound. She’d thought about this day for years, the day her son might break his silence. Now it had come and she had no idea how to respond. She didn’t know what he was referring to when he said he’d “messed up.” Was he talking about all the times he’d gotten in trouble—the weed, the school bathroom fire, when he’d punched another boy so many times he’d put him in the hospital because the boy said his family were all murderers? Or had his “mess up” been killing his own sister? Maybe he was right, Krissy thought. Maybe she did need his forgiveness, but what she knew without a shadow of a doubt was that he also needed hers.
Slowly, she folded the letter and tucked it into the back pocket of her jeans. All day, as she moved through her chores in a daze, her hand kept touching the fabric of her jeans as if her son’s letter was a living, pulsing thing. Then, late that night, after Billy had gone to bed, Krissy sat at the kitchen table, pen in hand, and began to write.
Dear Jace,
Thank you for the letter. It was hard to read, but I’m glad you sent it. I will always be your mom, and unlike what you seem to believe, I will always love you.
How could you ever believe otherwise when everything I did that night—everything—I did for you? To protect you. I thought you were going to be taken away from me and thrown into some juvenile institution, or if not that, I thought you’d be labeled a murderer for the rest of your life and I couldn’t bear that. It was the worst thing I’ve ever done, and I would do it again. For you.
I admit that afterward I didn’t know how to be your mom anymore. Every time I looked at you, I thought of what you’d done to January and it broke my heart. I did shut down, but not just because I’d lost my daughter. Because I’d lost my son too. And yet, throughout all those years, I never stopped loving you. So please don’t say I didn’t when my life is a testament to the love I have for you. I’ve made many mistakes, and for those I’m sorry, but not loving you was never one of them.
Could I call you sometime, or maybe we could even meet up? I’d love to see you. At the very least, please write back.
Love,
Mom
Krissy slid her letter into the post office drop box in town the next morning and began checking their mailbox obsessively in the days that followed. She felt so desperate to know what he’d say that it was a physical thing, as real and biting as hunger. And yet nothing could have prepared her for what he did eventually write back the following week, just a few scribbled lines that turned her world upside down.
Mom, your letter made no sense to me. What did you do for me that night? Why did you think people would believe I was a murderer? I don’t know what you think happened to January, but I’m not the one who killed her.
TWENTY-TWO
Margot, 2019
Margot made it home from Chicago in record time. From the moment Elliott Wallace’s name had popped into her head, she’d driven fifteen miles over the speed limit all the way back to Wakarusa. Because this was it: Elliott Wallace was the connection she’d been looking for. As a suspect in Polly Limon’s case, he was the link between her and January and now Natalie Clark. He was the faceless stranger Margot had envisioned her entire life, the man who’d strolled down her childhood street and slipped into the house across from hers.
Margot burst through her uncle’s front door to find Luke at the kitchen table, nursing a cup of coffee and working on a crossword. Despite her buzzing, propulsive need to track Wallace down, the sight made her stop short in relief.
“Uncle Luke,” she said, mortified to feel a stinging in her eyes. She’d only been gone one night, and Pete had texted the previous afternoon to tell her he’d stopped by and all was well, but still, her whole body slackened at the sight of him. “How are you? Are you okay?”
“I think the question is…” Luke said with a wry grin over his cup of coffee. “Are you?”
Margot laughed. No doubt she looked as frantic as she felt. The name Elliott Wallace was thumping in her brain like a drumbeat. “I’m good. I just have some work to do. I know I just got home, but…” She shook her head. “Are you sure you’re okay?”
“Kid, you’re acting a little nuts. Why don’t you go do whatever it is you gotta do.”
She let out another small laugh. “Okay.” She took a few steps toward the hallway, then turned and walked into the kitchen instead, put a hand on her uncle’s shoulder, and kissed his temple. “It’s good to be back.”
In her room, Margot flung herself onto the floor, grabbed her laptop from her bag, and pulled it open. She drummed her fingers against its edge impatiently as it booted up. The moment it did, she opened her storage in the cloud. As she scrolled through her long collection of folders, looking for the one labeled Polly Limon, she tried to remember the details of the little girl’s case.
Polly had been seven at the time she’d disappeared from a mall parking lot in Dayton, Ohio, three years ago. According to the police report made by Polly’s mother, on that fall afternoon, the two of them had been walking back to their car after a shopping trip. Polly had run ahead, but when Mrs. Limon had made it to their car, her daughter hadn’t been there. She’d reported Polly missing within the hour and the official search had lasted five days until the girl’s body had been found in a ditch less than a mile from where she’d been taken. The police reported signs of sexual abuse and injuries to her head, though the cause of death was technically strangulation.
Unlike both January’s and Natalie’s cases, the search for Polly and the subsequent search for her killer hadn’t garnered much attention from the public. Right around the time she was reported missing, Margot remembered, there’d been a mass shooting at a middle school in Columbus, and the faces of those seven gunshot victims were the only thing on the news, local and national. It was why Margot had been able to get so close to the case in the first place, because all the other reporters had been seventy miles away.
During the weeks she’d spent covering the story, she hadn’t been able to get the similarities between Polly’s case and January’s out of her head. They’d been more or less the same age, they’d both been found in a ditch, they’d both sustained trauma to the head. Dayton wasn’t extremely close to Wakarusa, but it was under a four-hour drive away. Neither of their killers had ever been found.
Sitting on the floor of her uncle’s old office, Margot finally located the folder. She double-clicked it open and scrolled through a series of subfolders all the way to the very bottom, where she found the one labeled Elliott Wallace.
The contents of the folder were sparse—one document of notes and a recording of Margot’s interview with him. Although she was disappointed, she wasn’t surprised. The Elliott Wallace lead had been a quick dead end, both in the police’s investigation and in her own. The detectives had been alerted to Elliott Wallace as a possible person of interest by a local woman, a parent of another girl in Polly’s young equestrian program. According to the woman, he had a history of lurking around the stables during the children’s practice. The police had interviewed Wallace multiple times, but lacking any direct evidence linking him to the murder, they eventually let him go.