by A. M. Taylor
He gave two curt nods, his eyes lost in the crowd and then turned back to the table. “I don’t know, Ange. I don’t know how I’m doing.”
“I’m really sorry for your loss,” Jack said.
Nate’s face pinched slightly as he peered at Jack. “I’m sorry, I don’t—?”
“This is Jack,” Ange interjected quickly, “we work together.”
“Well, thanks, Jack,” Nate intoned, giving me a sidelong glance as he drank from his beer bottle. “I need to talk to you,” he said in a low voice as Jack got up from the booth to get a couple more beers for him and Ange.
“Okay,” I said.
“Not here.”
I took a sip of my beer, not looking at him. “You just got here,” I said.
“I know, I just wasn’t sure if you’d come meet me or not.”
“Why?”
Nate sighed. “I don’t know, Mads, maybe because we haven’t really talked in about five years?”
I didn’t know what to say to that, so I just continued drinking. “Can I at least finish my beer?” I asked eventually.
“Sure. I’ll walk you home when you’re ready to leave.”
But we didn’t leave for a while. The bar was busy by then and our booth was attracting its fair share of attention, but it was easy enough to ignore with the benefit of a few beers down me. It was only when I got up to go to the bathroom that I really noticed just how much of a spectacle we were as friends and relatives of Nora and Noelle Altman. Working my way through the crowd I swear I could feel people staring at me, voices lowering as I passed and then rising again, just as they had done with Nate; but in all honesty I could have been imagining it.
It wasn’t until I was on my way back to the table that someone actually shouted “Hey,” at me, while simultaneously grabbing at my arm.
I pulled back just out of habit and turned to see who it was. The overly young blogger.
“I don’t want to answer your questions. I’m sorry,” I said. It wasn’t as if I owed him an apology, but he really did look so young and out of place. I wondered for a second if he was even old enough to drink. He shifted a little from foot to foot and tried to smile.
“I think we got off on the wrong foot.” He stuck his hand out as if to shake mine. “I’m Keegan Ellis.”
“So?”
“I … I went to school with you. I was in the same class as your sister. You don’t recognize me?”
“With Cordy?” There was no way this kid was the same age as Serena.
“Yeah. We did a load of the same classes together senior year.”
“Sorry, Keegan. I don’t remember. And it still wouldn’t change anything. I don’t want to answer any questions. Not from you or anyone.”
“Okay. Yeah, I’m sorry. I get that.”
I turned to leave but before I could go he grabbed my arm again. “I’m sorry,” he said again, and to be honest he did look a little terrified, “I’m really sorry to bother you like this, but I have this blog. It’s-it’s about Nora. Altman.”
“What?”
“I write a blog about Nora. About her disappearance. It’s investigatory. I just wanted you to know. I’m not here to pry into your life or anything. Or Noelle’s. I just really, genuinely, want to know what happened to Nora.”
Something fizzed in my ears like static and for whatever reason I couldn’t think of anything to say.
“Don’t you?” Keegan said when he realized I wasn’t about to say anything. “Don’t you want to know what happened to her?”
“Of course I fucking do,” I said, the words jumping out of me, ready to attack.
“Then, will you help me?”
“I can’t … I can’t talk to you.” I said, the static getting louder and beginning to crawl through me.
“You okay?” someone said to me once I’d reached our table, but I couldn’t tell if it was Ange, Jack, or even Nate. I shook my head, trying to shake it off, as someone stood up from the table to grab my arm. I pulled away as I had done with Keegan, alarmed, but it was just Nate.
“We should leave,” he said, looking around, his face hardening as he did so. “We shouldn’t be here anyway.”
I nodded in agreement and began to put my coat on.
We said our goodbyes to Ange and Jack, Nate raised a hand to Bright and Moody, still stood at their table on the other side of the bar, and we walked through the door and out into the cold dark. Our boots crunched through snow that was swiftly filling up the parking lot of the bar with a fresh fall. It was soft and heavy, and once the door swung shut behind us, immeasurably quiet.
“Did you walk here?” Nate asked, turning his face to the sky, letting a few snowflakes fall there silently.
“Yeah.”
“Come on then, I’ll walk you home.”
We were both quiet on the walk, heads bowed against the snow. The town was blanketed, soft and silent, but I thought I could sense something underneath it. Maybe I was imagining it, probably I was, but I couldn’t let go of the sense of something sharp and bitter beneath all that snow, struggling to come to the surface. A car rolled past us, going way too slowly, even for such a snowy night, the headlights glancing off us in the dark. I thought I could see whoever it was in the driving seat leaning forward, trying to make out who we were just as I was trying to make out who they were. I shivered, even though I wasn’t especially cold.
“You okay?” Nate asked, his voice coming at me as if from a great distance.
I nodded and then really thought about it and shook my head. I most certainly was not okay. I took a deep breath, steeling myself. “What was it you wanted to talk to me about?” I asked.
There was a long pause, long enough for me to turn to Nate in the dark, check that he’d heard me. He looked nauseous in the light almost, sick with grief and heartbreak. Finally, he just said: “Gloria Lewis.”
“Is she still hanging out around your house?” I asked.
“Yeah, her and her little cameraman. She wants to film an interview, all four of us. Remembering Noelle or something. She thinks it will help stop people throwing their own theories out there, as if anything could ever do that, let alone a fucking TV interview.”
“She said the same thing to me too.”
“You spoke to her?”
“Not officially. She knocked on the door, and we spoke, but I’d never do an interview with her. You know that.”
“I just wanted to check.”
I slowed my pace, cold and tired, but not quite ready to leave Nate just yet. “So that’s all you wanted? To tell me not to talk to Gloria Lewis?” I asked eventually.
Nate didn’t say anything, and I wondered if that was really why we were there, or if there was something else going on, something he wanted to say but didn’t quite know how. Long gone were the days when I could figure him out with just a look, so I said: “Because you didn’t need to tell me that.”
“I know.”
There was a long pause before I got up the courage to ask: “Did you see her?”
Feeling terrible, I watched the blood drain from Nate’s face, as he realized I meant Elle’s body. The sleepless bruises under his eyes appeared to grow even as we walked together side by side, but he managed to answer me.
“No. Mom and Dad identified her. I-I couldn’t go in there.”
We were nearing my parents’ house; I could see that the lights from the kitchen and den were still on, their amber glow warming up the cold night air. “Do they know how she died?” I asked quietly, watching Nate carefully.
He swallowed and nodded at the same time, unable to answer at first before saying: “She was suffocated. But the killer stabbed her as well.”
The world drained away to nothing but the two of us. I wished I hadn’t asked and yet was also glad I knew. The loss of Elle, the shock of it, the vastness of it was being obscured by the horror of it.
I tried to think of Elle before it all happened and couldn’t quite reach her. She was being edged out by
all the horror, and it was still only two days since she’d been found. What would become of her in the coming years? She’d be yet another story for people to pass around and claim ownership over, just as with Nora. Or maybe, eventually, she would find her way back to us. Her memory whole and real, rather than fractured and broken. As much as I wanted that to be true, I couldn’t quite believe it; it still hadn’t happened with Nora after all, and it had been ten years.
“And did he … do they know—had she been assaulted? Raped?” I could barely get the words out, they got stuck in my chest, my throat, my mouth, but for some reason I felt as though I had to know.
“No. She hadn’t been. Thank God,” Nate replied, although he sounded like he was biting down on something.
I felt something wash through me then, something like relief but not quite, and I had to stop myself from crying. I could have said something then about small mercies, but nothing about it felt either small or merciful, so I said goodnight, even though I wasn’t quite sure I wanted to, and left him out there alone in the night as I closed the door behind me.
CHAPTER NINE
My parents were still up when I got in, sitting in the den watching the news, but I said hi and goodnight, making my excuses and heading straight up to my room.
“Maddie,” someone said from the bottom of the stairs, and I turned to see my mom standing there staring up at me. She made her way slowly up to meet me on the landing before saying: “Where does your work think you are right now?”
“Right now?” I asked archly.
“You know what I mean. You’ve missed two days of work already.”
“I called in sick.”
Her hands were on her hips as she spoke and I watched as she pursed her lips, rolling them into a flat line and then stared down at the floor in disappointment. “You can’t afford to lose this job, Mads,” she said at last.
“I know that.”
“We’d all understand if you went back to Madison. You don’t have to deal with this and you shouldn’t feel like you have to.”
“Noelle has been murdered, Mom,” I said, watching as her face paled a little, even in the soft glow of the landing light. “What on earth makes you think that I’d be able to just drive on back to Madison and carry on as usual?”
“You don’t have to carry on as usual, honey. Just look after yourself. This can’t be good for you, any of it.”
My heart beat slower, heavier, the sound of waves crashing filling my ears.
“Maddie?” Mom said.
“I’m fine,” I said.
“If you were fine, wouldn’t you be going back to work?”
“I mean, I’m fine being here. I’m not about to fall off a cliff.”
She took a step towards me, her hand reaching to tuck a strand of hair behind my ear and then letting it rest on my shoulder. She looked tired, lines of worry stretched across her forehead, her mouth downturned, and her light blue eyes smeary with almost-tears. “You don’t have to do this,” she said, her voice quiet but strong, “you don’t have to take this on.”
I wanted, more than anything, to melt but instead my body stiffened, reflexively, and her hand dropped from my shoulder.
“I’m fine,” I said again. “I just need to go to bed.”
“Okay,” she said after a long pause. “Okay, Maddie, you go to bed.”
I didn’t go to sleep though. I had enough diazepam left that meant I could have slept for the next twelve hours, but instead I turned on my laptop after crawling into bed and looked up Gloria Lewis. Even though she’d since been hired by a TV news channel, the Wisconsin Daily News seemed to have hired her back to cover Noelle’s case, and I started reading her most recent article, her insinuating, insidious words bringing it all back to me.
It took me a lot longer to shore up the courage needed in order to go back and read over the highlights of her work from ten years before. I didn’t need to be doing this, I kept reminding myself; I already knew the shape of her words and the sting of them. I’d never forgotten them, even as everyone begged me not to read the articles, told me to ignore her, reminded me of how little Gloria Lewis’s words meant. But they meant something; they still did then. Even if all they meant was that in the midst of a storm not only could you get wrecked but there was always someone willing to go through that wreckage, pick it over and use it any way they wanted.
After a while I had to stop. Everything suddenly too much. Elle and Nora had begun to merge in my mind, until the particulars of Nora’s disappearance traced over the current reality of Elle’s murder. History wasn’t so much repeating itself as it was being rewritten. It was the same story with a different ending and yet I was still trying to figure out how it had all got started. How had we got here?
I wanted to throw my laptop across the room, the white noise of the hard-working fan suddenly making me feel sick, but instead I thought about the young blogger from Cool’s who claimed to be classmates with Cordy. Searching for him on Facebook I saw that he hadn’t been lying and he and Cordy were Facebook friends, albeit with very few, if any, interactions. Grabbing my phone, I called Cordy.
“Hey,” she said on picking up, “what’s going on? Is everything okay?” Her words were a rush of concern, sending a jolt of warmth through me that quickly turned to guilt. I was the older sister here, but I was so used to being the one in constant need of comfort that sometimes I forgot Cordy was still just twenty-two.
“Hey, I’m okay. Hanging in there.”
“I can’t believe it, Mads,” she said, hushed now, reverent, “how can this have happened?”
Cordy was just twelve when Nora disappeared, those five years’ difference in our ages shielding her from the worst of it; and yet she, too, like Elle, like Noah, had grown up in the long, long shadow cast by Nora.
“I don’t know,” I said, wanting to elaborate, wishing I had something to tell her, but coming up empty-handed.
“Do they have any idea who did it yet?”
“I don’t think so. At least, not that they’re telling us.”
“What about Nate? Have you seen him, what does he say? He must know something.”
“Like what?” I said, suddenly sharp.
“Just that they would’ve been all together that night, right? On Sunday? He’d know if she was acting strange or …”
“I don’t know, Cordy,” I said with a sigh, suddenly exhausted, “I really don’t know anything. I wanted to ask you about Keegan Ellis though, do you know him?”
“Keegan? Sure, I know him. Why?”
“He stopped me in the bar, said he wanted to talk to me for some blog?”
“Oh, the blog. Yeah, that makes sense, I guess.”
“So, you knew about it?” I don’t know why this annoyed me so much, but it did. Why hadn’t she told me about it before?
“Sure. He’s been writing it for ages. I didn’t realize he was still going with it, to be honest, but I guess now … with Elle.”
“Yeah, he’s back with a vengeance,” I said, spitting the words out.
“You don’t have to worry about him, seriously. He’s a nice enough guy; he’ll leave you alone if you ask him.”
“I just don’t get it,” I said. “Why’s he so interested? So obsessed? He didn’t even know Nora.”
There was a pause and I could hear Cordy’s breathing coming down the line.
Eventually she said, ever so gently: “I think maybe you don’t understand how much it affected everyone. Not just you. Yeah, Keegan and I are a lot younger than you but Nora’s disappearance was still a big deal. He just wants to know what happened to her. You can understand that, right?”
I think Cordy meant her words to reassure me but, for whatever reason, they didn’t. Of course, I understood wanting to know what had happened to Nora; that was all I’d ever wanted myself, but I didn’t want to know because her life was an interesting mystery to be resolved. I wanted to know because I owed it to her to find out, and because if I didn’t then I might e
nd up just as lost as she was.
Maybe that was why I hadn’t ever entered this parallel online universe, where everyone had something to say about Nora but no one seemed to know anymore than I did. The internet meant a certain degree of safety and comfort for me. Mostly it was just my Netflix watch list and episodes of television I already knew the endings of and films I’d watched a million times before. It certainly wasn’t somewhere I went in order to figure out what had happened to Nora.
I was in the minority, apparently, because when I finally put Nora’s name into the search bar there were way more hits than I’d been counting on. I took a look at Keegan Ellis’s blog first, trawling through his introduction as a native of Forest View who’d lived through Nora’s disappearance and wanted to see her found. I rolled my eyes as he overstated his connection to both the Altmans and the case. As a classmate of Cordy’s that made him all of twenty-two, meaning he fell right between Nate and Nora on the one hand, and Elle on the other, who was five years younger than him. He hadn’t even been in high school at the same time as any of them. But that hadn’t stopped his curiosity or borderline obsession by the looks of things.
The density of his research made my head spin, but the blog hadn’t been updated in a while and there was nothing written about Elle so far despite his presence in town. So, instead I went back to my initial search for Nora and found a Reddit thread about her that had been updated in the past twenty-four hours:
/r/noraaltman
Anyone see the news about Nora’s sister being found dead?
Submitted 17 hours ago by NeverGoesOut
Nora’s younger sister Noelle has been found dead at pretty much the exact spot that Nora’s car was found ten years ago. Looks like it’s murder.
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skeletonkey
Fuck man it’s the anniversary isn’t it? She was found on the 8th – that makes it ten years to the day since Nora went missing. Insane
