Margot winced. Polly Limon had been her first real assignment at IndyNow three years ago. The seven-year-old girl’s story was like so many others: One fall afternoon, she’d disappeared from a mall parking lot in Dayton, Ohio. The missing persons investigation had spun its wheels until five days later when she was found dead in a ditch with signs of sexual abuse. Margot reported on the case for weeks, and although her articles never linked Polly’s death to January’s, in the office it was all she’d been able to talk about. Over the years, the death of her childhood friend had morphed from a source of grief and fear into one of infatuation. Slowly, the girl she’d once thought of as her friend January turned into The January Jacobs. Memories of them playing together were replaced with facts from her murder. So when Polly Limon showed up dead and the police started looking for her killer, Margot’s mind jumped to the case of the girl from across the street.
“Polly was found in a ditch,” she’d kept saying to Adrienne at the time. “Just like January.” The cause of death had been different—strangulation as opposed to blunt-force trauma—but there had been damage done to her head as well. And while January hadn’t sustained any sexual abuse, she also hadn’t been missing as long. The police had never connected the two cases, but neither did they apprehend Polly’s murderer, so Margot’s theory had never been disproven. Though she knew what her boss meant. She couldn’t afford to get obsessed with a side story. Not now.
“Right,” she said. “I’ll look into a connection this morning, but I’ll head to Nappanee a few hours before the press conference for interviews.”
“Good. Okay.” Adrienne hesitated, then, after a moment, added, “I’m sorry, Margot. I know you’ve got a lot on your plate right now.”
Margot forced a smile into her voice as she said, “It’s fine. Really. I’ll email you the story tonight.”
After they hung up, she closed her eyes and took three slow, deep breaths.
Back in the kitchen, Luke was sitting at the table, a cup of coffee and his new book of crosswords in front of him.
“Jeez, kid,” he said as she walked in, tapping the eraser end of his pencil against the page. “You got me hooked on these.” He looked up. “Everything okay?”
She nodded. “Yeah, just work stuff. Hey…” She settled back into her chair across from him. “Could I ask you something? Could you tell me what you remember about January’s case?”
They’d talked about it hundreds of times over the years, of course, but she still knew it was a risk asking. She didn’t want to dredge up bad memories when his sickness could make him so mercurial, but at the kitchen table now, her uncle seemed clear-eyed, lucid.
“January’s case?” he said with a frown. “You haven’t asked about that in a long time.”
“I’m covering a similar case for work,” she explained. She’d learned over time that his long-term memory was far better than his day-to-day one. If he didn’t remember Natalie Clark’s name, she didn’t want to make him feel bad or in the dark. “It’s probably not connected, but I thought I’d dig around a bit.”
“What d’you want to know?”
“What do you remember about Billy and Krissy from back then?” Margot knew the details of January’s case like the back of her hand, so she didn’t need his help there. And even though she’d grown up across the street from the Jacobses, these days they were a mystery to her. Her memories of Krissy, Billy, and Jace were vague at best, and they dropped off almost entirely after January was killed, when Margot stopped coming around.
“Well, as you know,” Luke said with a shrug, “I didn’t know them all that well. We didn’t have playdates for you and January or anything—you’d just run over to their yard. And Krissy, Billy, and I may have all been in the same grade together in school, but—you know this place—high school was a little…cliquey.”
She scoffed. “I can imagine.”
“Even so, everyone knew Krissy because she was popular. Wild. She never really gave me the time of day. Billy was more reserved, I guess. And of course, he was a Jacobs, which…you know.”
Margot nodded. He’d told her all this before, but even if he hadn’t, she would’ve known what he meant. You didn’t have to live across the street from them to know the reputation of the Jacobs family. Owning almost all of Wakarusa’s surrounding land, they were the town’s farming tycoons. Every farmer fed their livestock feed produced from the Jacobs crop. The school’s gym was named the Jacobs Gymnasium after one of the men in Billy’s line. He may not have been popular, but he’d been rich.
“How’d they end up getting married? Did they date in high school?”
Luke squinted. “Maybe? Maybe they dated that summer after graduation? I think I saw them around at parties and stuff. But I mean, beautiful girl and rich guy. They didn’t exactly break the mold.”
Margot asked him a few more questions, but there wasn’t much he hadn’t already told her before, and after about ten minutes, she realized she needed to move on. She’d had years to ask Luke about the Jacobs family, but she’d never spent any real time in Wakarusa as an adult. Now she needed to interview the people she hadn’t spoken to before.
“Do you think Billy would be willing to talk to me?” Margot knew she needed to focus on covering Natalie Clark’s case, but an interview with January’s dad would be a huge get.
After all, speaking with Krissy wasn’t an option; she’d taken her own life ten years earlier. There’d initially been some suspicion about her death—Was this January’s murderer come back for her mom?—but it was quickly squashed by the police. It was a cookie-cutter case. Krissy had been on antidepressants for years, it happened in her own home, the gun that had been used to shoot her temple was found in her hand. She’d also left behind a note for Jace, the contents of which had been leaked to the press in the days after her body was found. Like many details of the case, Margot knew it by heart: Jace, I’m sorry for everything. I’m going to make it right. Meanwhile, Jace had disappeared from town at the age of seventeen and had been living in obscurity ever since. Which meant that Billy was the only family member Margot had a shot at.
“Oh,” Luke said, looking slightly surprised. “Well, Billy doesn’t really see many people anymore. But I think he still goes to church, and obviously he has to go to the grain elevator and the store. He may be a hard get for an interview. But”—he shrugged—“worth a shot.”
Margot nodded. “Hey, I need to do some stuff for this article later. Would it be okay if I head out in a bit?”
“You don’t need to babysit me, kid. I’m fine.”
She bit the inside of her cheek. She felt guilty leaving him, but Adrienne’s words were still ringing in her ears. “Are you gonna be okay for breakfast? I can pick up lunch and dinner, but I don’t think we have much food in the house.”
Luke laughed, but there was the slightest glint of frustration in his eyes, and Margot could tell she was embarrassing him. “How do you think I’ve been feeding myself before you got here? Anyway, I usually don’t eat much in the mornings. If I start to think I’m gonna pass out, I’ll walk to…to the grocery store for cereal.”
Margot’s gaze flicked over his face for a moment. She had a feeling that pause meant he’d forgotten the name of Granny’s Pantry—the same grocery store he’d been going to for fifty years—but other than that blip, he seemed completely with-it. And she really needed to nail this article. “Okay. Sorry. Yeah, that sounds good.”
“So, where’re you headed?”
“Well, nowhere yet. I still have some work here to do first.” As Adrienne had very clearly pointed out, Natalie Clark was the centerpiece of this story, so Margot needed to prepare for the press conference and interviews in Nappanee before she spent another minute thinking about January Jacobs. “But after that, Shorty’s, I think. I wanna hear what other people say about January’s case. See if there’s anything that sounds similar to the other one. Do you think I’ll be able to get anyone to talk?”
At that, Luke let out a bark of laughter. “There’s nothing people here love to do more. But…this town crucified the Jacobs family all those years ago and they may not exactly like the way that looks now. So people will talk, sure, but you won’t be able to believe a word they say.”
FIVE
Krissy, 1994
Krissy no longer felt that she was in her own home. The light inside seemed bright and sterile, the sounds of camera flashes and clipped tones unfamiliar. Even the objects didn’t seem to belong to her anymore, and she almost asked permission from Detective Townsend to sit on the couch that had been in her sitting room since before she’d moved in over six years ago.