Page 7 of All Good People Here

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.”Researchwas a bit of a stretch for the preliminary Google search she’d done that morning, but shewanted 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. “Ihavedone 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 silentFuck!

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.”

Margot winced. Polly Limon had been her first real assignment atIndyNowthree 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 thecase 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.

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