Page 51 of All Good People Here

Krissy slid her letter into the post office drop box in town the next morning and began checking their mailbox obsessively inthe 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,hewas the link between her and January and now Natalie Clark.Hewas 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 reportedmissing, 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.

Margot clicked first on the document of notes, which turned out to be little more than the basics of who Elliott Wallace was, or, at least, who he’d been three years ago. At the time of Polly’s murder, Wallace had been forty-eight. Originally from Indianapolis, he’d been living in Dayton, working as a security guard for a gated community. His parents were dead and his only remainingfamily was an older sister living in Indianapolis, with whom Wallace rarely spoke.

Beneath this basic fact sheet, Margot had included a photo of Wallace she’d found on the internet. In it, he had dirty blond hair, parted and combed on the side, a sharp jaw, and smiling brown eyes. But his most prominent feature was his ears. Disproportionately large, they stuck out from his head at an angle, making him look a little like an elephant. Despite them, he was, by all standards, attractive, and the image gave her a jolt of recognition. She remembered sitting across from him in his living room. He’d been tall and slender, with long fingers he interlaced over his lap and long legs he crossed at the knee. He’d seemed completely at ease during their interview and unfailingly polite.

As she gazed at him now, heat crawled up her chest and neck. She felt, deep inside her, that this was the man who’d killed all those girls, that she was staring at the face of a murderer.

She clicked out of the file, selected the recording, and hit play. Within moments, the sound of her own voice filled the room.

“So how long have you lived in Dayton?” Margot heard herself ask.

“Oh, let’s see,” a second voice said. Elliott Wallace had a smooth, almost musical, cadence. He clicked his tongue thoughtfully. “Not long. A year maybe. Actually, I suppose it’d be closer to two at this point. Moved here from Indianapolis.”

“And are you married? Any children?”

“Neither, sadly. I would’ve liked to get married, I think, but the right woman never came along. I date occasionally, but it becomes more challenging the older you get. You get sort of stuck in your own ways, I suppose.” He chuckled. “At least I have.”

Margot closed her eyes to focus on Wallace’s words. She remembered thinking at the time how collected he was, how poised. Here she’d been questioning him in relation to the homicide of a little girl, and yet he’d managed to stay calm and cooperative. Butnow, Margot heard a performative lilt to his words she hadn’t recognized sitting across from him. Was she being biased because of everything she knew now or had she been blind then?

“And you were questioned recently by the police,” her voice continued on the recording. “About the murder of Polly Limon.”

“That’s right.” Wallace’s voice turned suddenly solemn.

“Why did they think you were involved?”

“Oh.” Wallace heaved a sigh. “Because in the past, I’ve visited the stables where the girl practiced and competed. Honestly, I don’t blame the mother who gave the detectives my name. I realize I’m a single, adult man, and in this day and age, it’s a sad reality that the optics of that…aren’t good. Unfortunately, I didn’t consider that when I went. If I could turn back time, I wouldn’t have gone at all, not now that I know I made this woman feel uncomfortable. But the truth is I’m a fan of the sport. And of horses in general. I often visit the stables when no one’s there at all.”

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