Yet while the little girl may have been just another cautionary tale or podcast episode to the rest of the world, to Margot, January was real. They’d been the same age, had grown up in houses across the street from one another. Though Margot’s memories of her early childhood were sparse and faded, she could still conjure flashes of summer days in the Jacobs backyard while Luke and Rebecca worked, she and January pretending to be horses or playing tag in the cornfields. The two girls had existed together in that magical age before boundaries, their little bodies always overlapping: hands in each other’s hair as they practiced their braids; sticky fingertips pressed together in a complicated shape, intoning Here is the church, here is the steeple…; limbs intertwining as they collapsed into a heap of giggles.
When January had been taken from her home, Margot had been sleeping only hundreds of feet away, in her own house across the street. Afterward, Margot’s parents told her that her friend wasn’t coming back, and Luke explained that January had died. But it was only later, when an older kid at recess told Margot that January had been murdered, that she’d learned the truth about her friend’s death. Although she must have missed January desperately, it was the fear she remembered most. Margot began to envision a faceless man standing between the two houses, playing eeny, meeny, miny, moe with her friend’s bedroom window and her own. At night she’d lay in bed, squeezing her fists so tight her fingernails drew blood.
And now, with Natalie Clark’s face splashed over the news, it felt as if it were happening all over again. The missing girl may not technically have been a child of Wakarusa, but with Nappanee only a few miles away, she was as good as.
The morning after Margot heard the news at Shorty’s, she sat at her uncle’s kitchen table, her laptop open in front of her, a cup of coffee in her hand. She should have been using the time to catch up on work emails, but instead she was looking for information about Natalie’s missing person case.
As she clicked back to her search page, she heard the creak of a door from down the hallway. A moment later, her uncle appeared in sweatpants and a worn T-shirt, his dark hair wild, his eyes swollen and red. Margot closed her laptop with a gentle click.
“Morning,” she said. “How’re you feeling?”
Yesterday evening, Margot returned from Shorty’s to find Luke standing in the living room, shaking. The moment she saw him, she dropped the to-go bag on the floor and rushed over.
“What’s the matter?” she said, placing a tentative hand on his back. When he didn’t flinch, she moved it in slow, smooth circles. The touch felt foreign to her—the Davies family had never been particularly physical in their affection—but she’d read in some online article that it could help him calm down when he was suffering from an episode.
Luke’s face crumpled and he looked to Margot like a child, his body shaking beneath her hand, tears streaming unchecked down his cheeks. “She’s gone,” he said, his voice a croak. “She’s gone.”
“I know,” Margot said. “I’m so sorry.”
But that’s when she heard the low murmuring from the TV, and when she looked over at it, she saw it was tuned to the news. Natalie Clark was gazing back at her, her smile wide and bright. And suddenly, Margot didn’t know if her uncle was mourning the loss of his dead wife or that of the missing girl.
Now, standing in the hallway, Luke looked up sharply as if her voice had startled him, but when he saw her, he smiled softly. “Kid. Good morning.”
Margot’s chest loosened. She hadn’t anticipated just how hard it would be to live with someone you loved who only sometimes loved you back. “I made coff—”
But before she could finish, her phone vibrated on the table, and when she glanced at it, she saw the name of her boss scrolling across the screen. “Sorry. I should take this.” She stood, pressing the phone to her ear. “Hey, Adrienne. What’s up?”
“Margot, hi. How’s your uncle?”
Margot shot a glance at Luke, who was opening cabinets, presumably in search of a mug. She walked over and opened the right one, then retreated to the living room. “Um, yeah. Fine. Thanks.”
“Good, good,” her boss said, but she sounded distracted. “Listen, Margot. You’ve heard about the Natalie Clark case?”
“I was researching it now.” Research was a bit of a stretch for the preliminary Google search she’d done that morning, but she wanted to sound more knowledgeable than she was. She worked on the paper’s crime beat, and it was her job to stay on top of stories like that. The fact that she’d learned about Natalie’s disappearance from a bartender had been a disheartening reminder of just how far she’d let her eye drift from the ball.
“Oh good. Well, let’s have you write it up for tomorrow, yeah?”
Margot pinched the bridge of her nose. She knew she needed to make up for the leeway her boss had already given her these past few months, but she’d been hoping to get to the grocery store today. As it was, all she and Luke had for breakfast was stale Cheerios and almost-turned milk. “No problem.”
“Great. So let’s cover the basics. Police theories, any preliminary evidence. There’s a press conference this evening and I looked it up. You’re right there. Oh, and add some local color too. Talk to the family if you can get to them, someone we can call a close family friend if not—”
“Adrienne, hey,” Margot interrupted with a little laugh. “I have done this before.” It was an understatement. She’d been working at the paper for three years now, covering crime for almost as long.
“I know. But you need to nail this one. Okay?”
Margot’s heart began to beat harder. Her performance at the paper had first begun to suffer a few months after her aunt Rebecca’s death, when her grief had compounded with the dawning understanding of just how much Luke was really struggling. But it was only a few weeks ago, as she got ready for her move and put work on autopilot, that Adrienne had said something about it. “Right. I know. I will. Thanks, Adrienne.”
Margot thought that would be enough, but her boss continued. “Listen. I think you should know that Edgar mentioned you to me the other day. He said he’s noticed a decline in your work. Your output and quality.”
Margot pulled the phone away from her ear to shout a silent Fuck!
Edgar was the paper’s owner, whom she’d only met once at the company Christmas party three years ago, but he had a reputation for being merciless when it came to anything he deemed threatening to the paper’s bottom line.
“…told him about your circumstances,” Adrienne was saying when Margot pressed the phone back to her ear, “but he wants to see improvement. Fast.”
Margot took a deep breath. “I was thinking about drawing some parallels between the Natalie Clark case and the January Jacobs one,” she said. “Pose the possibility of a connection.” This had been percolating in her mind since the moment Linda had announced to her that January’s murderer was back. Margot didn’t know the details of Natalie’s case, but whoever had taken and killed January was out there still, roaming free.
There was a pause on the other line and Margot assumed Adrienne was switching gears, from boss to editor. “Are there parallels?”
“Other than geography and age, I’m not sure yet. But I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch to explore.”
“Okay…Of course, a serial offender is more compelling than a one-off.” Margot recognized her boss’s thinking-aloud voice, the one she used when she began to turn real events into thousand-word stories. “But don’t force anything. We don’t want another Polly Limon.”