Page 43 of All Good People Here

“I don’t like to talk about it,” Jace finally said, “because I don’t wanna get in trouble.”

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That night, as she, Billy, and Jace slept in their shitty hotel room near the Newark airport, Krissy awoke with a start. She thought something had touched her neck—cold, soft fingertips. She swiped her hand at it, but there was nothing there. Blinking into the darkness, she saw a figure standing by her bed, and when her eyes adjusted, she realized it was Jace.

She inhaled sharply. “Jace? What’re you doing?”

But he just stood there. If she couldn’t feel his breath on her face, she might’ve thought he wasn’t there at all—just a figment of her imagination, a specter come to haunt. “Jace?”

“I’m sorry about January, Mommy.”

The words sliced into her, her chest and stomach contracting with their force. In the five days since January had died, Krissy had done so well at keeping the memory of that night buried deep in the recess of her mind. But now, in the darkness and in the wake of her son’s apology, it all came flooding back.

—

The first thing Krissy remembered was the sound of a crash.

Hours earlier, as she’d gotten ready for bed, she had taken a sleeping pill—just as she had almost every night for the past four years. Before marriage and motherhood, she never used to have trouble sleeping. At night, she’d fall into the unencumbered rest of a teenager, and in the morning, she’d wake full of energy and possibility. But then, in a blink, she was a wife to a man she hardly knew and a nineteen-year-old mom with two infants. Suddenly, the sheer act of existing felt like a burden she wasn’t capable of carrying on her own. Loneliness, like teeth through her chest, was her constant companion. Wine helped dull the edges, but pills, she discovered, were best: Valium to get her through the days and sleeping pills for the nights. Maybe, after all these years, she’dgrown inured to the little white pill, or maybe the sound of the crash was so out of the ordinary, but whatever the reason, in the early hours of that morning, Krissy woke from her medicated fog.

She sat up in bed, heart beating fast. The farmhouse sometimes seemed alive, creaking and groaning in the night, but the crash had been different. She glanced over at Billy’s back, but he was silent and unmoving.

Quietly, she slipped out of bed, tiptoed into the bathroom, and tugged her robe over her pajamas. She padded down the hallway toward the stairs, stopping outside the twins’ rooms. The crash had sounded far away, from somewhere in the depths of the house, but she’d feel better knowing her children were safe and sleeping. And yet, when she poked her head through the doorway to January’s room, the bed looked empty. Krissy blinked, trying to clear the lingering sleep from her mind. January’s nightlight was one of those revolving ones, slowly projecting shapes onto a paper box around it, horses and flowers and rabbits retracing their steps night after night. The images danced around the room, distorted and flickering, making it hard to see. Krissy stepped closer to the bed, but January was still not in it. Nor was she under it or inside her closet or in the hallway bathroom. When Krissy discovered that Jace was also missing from his room, she began to panic.

She hurried down the stairs, the old wood creaking beneath her feet, shadows gathering and shifting around her. When she stepped into the kitchen, something unusual caught her eye: The basement door was open, the blackness beyond a yawning mouth. She thought briefly of retrieving one of Billy’s guns from the case in the sitting room, but that was so far away. Plus, if the kids were down there, she didn’t want them to see their mom materialize out of the darkness, a shotgun in her hands.

At the top of the basement stairs, Krissy felt unease like a cold fingertip crawling up her spine. Something felt…wrong down there. She forced herself to breathe, then peered into the stairwell,but the three horizontal windows at the bottom were black with night. She took a few slow, tentative steps into the depths of the old house. As she did, the moon came out from behind the clouds, and suddenly, the room was illuminated. That’s when she saw it.

There, lying at the bottom of the stairs, was January.

The breath kicked from Krissy’s lungs. Her daughter’s eyes were closed, her body straight and unmoving. Her white nightgown was incandescent in the moonlight, her chestnut hair pooling around the nape of her neck. But her face looked all wrong. The skin was puffy and ashen, her lips strangely stiff. Gazing down at her, Krissy could feel the truth like a stone in her stomach: Her darling daughter was dead.

And crouching over her lifeless body was Jace.

As Krissy stared at the horrific tableau beneath her, her mind felt scrubbed except for one word:No.She heard a sound—a soft, guttural moan—and realized it had come from her own mouth.

Jace must’ve heard it too, because he straightened and slowly turned his head over his shoulder, his impassive gaze pinning her like a butterfly to a corkboard. He stared at her quietly for a moment before opening his mouth, and his words, spoken in his small little-boy voice, were a blade across Krissy’s stomach, slicing into skin, intestine, womb.

“Can we play tomorrow, Mommy? Just you and me?”

NINETEEN

Margot, 2019

In her hotel room, Margot slid the chain lock into place. She was fairly sure the woman with the auburn hair hadn’t followed her all the way to Chicago, but the words that had been written on the Jacobs barn and those of the note left on her windshield still filled her brain.She will not be the last. It’s not safe for you here.Especially now, after the news of Natalie Clark’s body being found, Margot took comfort in being locked safely inside her room. She knew she wasn’t in the same danger as Natalie or January had been, but she’d clearly attracted the attention of someone, and she wasn’t sure what they wanted or how far they’d go to get it.

Margot grabbed her laptop and settled onto the bed, her back against the pillows, the cheap bedspread rough against her legs. Since she’d begun digging into January’s case days ago, she’d spent countless hours trying to find Jace online to no avail. Once she’d discovered he’d gone to Chicago, she’d been able to narrow that search, but still, it had been fruitless. Which was why the first thing she did, once she’d made it to the city and checked into a hotel, was visit the courthouse to request all the legal documents containing Jace’s name. It wasn’t a sure thing, but it could yield results Google couldn’t.

And sure enough, it did. The first set of documents she received from the clerk at the courthouse, at only two pages long, was made up of one report—an arrest of Jace Jacobs for battery and assault back in 2007—which was proof, at the very least, that Jace had been in Chicago, but little else. But then, as she read over the pages again, more slowly this time, she saw it. On the second page, in a section she’d previously skimmed over, was a line titled “Known Aliases.” Typed beneath was the name Jay Winter. As she stared down at it, finally all those futile searches made sense. Jace had changed his name.

So Margot ordered all the documents containing the name Jay Winter, and this time, the stack of papers that came back was thick. Flipping through them, she could see they covered two years’ worth of crimes, everything from public intoxication to disturbing the peace. And there, on page three, was a mugshot. Standing in front of a white concrete wall, dark hair in disarray, green eyes unfocused, Jace Jacobs stared back at her, his mouth twisted in a strange smile.

On her hotel bed, Margot tapped her fingertips impatiently against the keyboard as she waited for it to come to life. Since leaving Wakarusa, a part of her mind had been perpetually on her uncle, and although she’d told herself that coming to Chicago was the right thing to do for the story and her career, and therefore the best way to help him, guilt gnawed at her. She just wanted to find Jace, talk to him, and get back home as soon as she could. Luckily, with his new name, tracking him down should be easy. These days, it was almost impossible to disappear without a trace.

Margot started with social media, but every one—Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn—came up dry. There were a few Jay Winters in the world, but not the one she was looking for. She switched to a broader search, googlingJay WinterplusChicago,andstill there was nothing. Not a photo, not a place of employment, not a single person who knew him. Jace, it turned out, had done the thing right.

Margot slumped back into the pillows, glancing at the time on her laptop. It was already midafternoon and she was nowhere closer to Jace than she’d been three hours ago. Where could she go from here, when she had nothing more to go on? Almost everything she knew about Jace was from a twenty-five-year-old investigation. Other than that, she knew his crime record and what he looked like a decade ago. She knew that he had a tendency toward violence, smoked weed in high school, and brought flowers to January’s grave every year. But the last one was the only road she could explore, and she already had. From the courthouse, Margot had driven straight to Kay’s Blooms, the florist shop where Jace had bought that bouquet of white roses. But the woman behind the counter had just shaken her head blankly at Jace’s mugshot. She was a part-time employee, she’d explained. The owner, who worked most days, was out of town.

Margot squeezed her eyes shut, trying to dredge up any scrap of information she’d left unexplored, but all she could remember was Pete’s warning about him.He was not a good guy.She dragged her hands down her face, letting out a frustrated groan.

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