by A. M. Taylor
Johnny shrugged and looked around at his friends. “Well, I didn’t really know her, man. She seemed nice though. I knew her mostly from seeing her at the rink before practice—because of her figure skating, you know? And from parties and stuff, but we only ever had a few classes together. We didn’t hang out.”
“She was smart,” Mike said, then, with the forefinger of his right hand swirling through the pile of sugar in front of him.
“She was smart?” Ange asked.
“Yeah, I had a bunch of classes with her freshman and sophomore year. She was pretty much all AP these days though. I can’t touch that shit.”
“What classes did you have together?”
“Um, Spanish, biology. She was really good at Spanish. I think she wanted to do it at college.”
“Really?” I was surprised by this information but mostly because I knew it was true. I hadn’t expected any of these guys to actually know Noelle.
“Yeah. She liked it.”
“Were you and Elle friends?” Ange asked.
“Not like friends friends, but we’d stop and talk in the hall.”
“Did you have a crush on her?”
“Did I have a crush on her? Jesus, what are we, twelve? Fuck, I mean I thought she was hot. Everyone thought Noelle Altman was hot. But her and Jenna had been together since like forever, so there wasn’t any point.” Jenna and Elle had in fact been together for less than a year, but I guess that could be seen as “forever” if you were seventeen.
I waited for Ange to take the lead again, not wanting to be the reason this little interview went downhill again, and just as I knew she would, she stepped up.
“Jenna says you guys would try to hit on Elle. At parties, after games. That you two,” she waved a finger between Mike and Johnny, “were trying to hit on her all the time.”
Johnny scowled. “Yeah, I mean maybe, but we weren’t assholes about it. Just, you know, wanted to make sure she knew she had options,” he said, finishing his testimony with a smirk.
A small “ugh” sound escaped from the back of my throat, and Mike jerked his head up towards me, so I decided to change tack a little. “Do you know of anyone who would want to hurt her in any way?”
All four of the boys at the table looked at one another then and began shifting in their seats. Mike’s eyes returned to his pile of sugar, but instead of messing around with it as he had been doing earlier, he simply stared down at it. “I don’t think so,” he said eventually, and looked back up at me and Ange.
“There wasn’t any sense that she was resented due to her relationship with Jenna?”
“Are you asking if we’re homophobes?”
“No, I’m asking if you think anyone at your school might have hurt Noelle due to the fact that she wasn’t straight.”
“No way,” Johnny answered.
“No way?” Ange asked, looking from Mike to him. “You know that a kid who identifies as LGBT is, like, twice as likely as a straight kid to be attacked in some way, right?”
“Yeah, I mean, no I didn’t know that, but I don’t think that’s what happened here,” Mike said.
“It was some sicko, man,” one of the unknown boys said, his gray eyes turned to me. “This was proper psycho level shit. Like movie shit. How could someone we know have done that?”
“Yeah, man. It wasn’t anyone from school. It couldn’t have been anyone we know,” Johnny said.
I looked between Johnny and Mike, their faces equal parts defiant and surly. “What about someone called John Smith; you know anyone with that name?”
The two of them shared a look, eyes blank. “Wasn’t that one of the founding fathers?” Johnny asked, his voice serious, no trace of a joke to be heard.
“That was John Adams,” Ange offered, and Johnny’s face cleared.
“Oh, right, yeah. Then no. No one called John Smith at school, is there?”
Mike and the rest of the table all shook their heads, agreeing with Johnny. I’d thought, for a second, that John Smith could have been a pseudonym of Johnny’s—the first name almost matched after all, and he’d immediately recognized me as Nora’s friend—but either he was a very good actor or he genuinely didn’t know anything about it, and I was inclined to believe it was the latter. Because as much as I wanted to find out who had killed Elle, I also wanted to find out what had happened to Nora, and the longer I stayed, the more convinced I became that the two were related. I’d known, from the moment Ange had called to tell me she’d been found dead, that it had something to do with Nora too. Even if the police weren’t willing to reopen Nora’s case, I would. However long it took, whatever lengths I had to go to, however it may hurt me, I was going to find her finally.
The bar was busy by the time we got there, and it took me a while to spot Serena and Cordy through the crowd. They were sat with a guy I immediately recognized as Keegan Ellis and, to my great surprise, Hale Winters. I looked around the bar to see if Louden was there as well, but couldn’t see him anywhere. Ange and I waited at the bar for a while, each buying a pitcher of beer and taking it over to my sisters’ booth.
“Hey,” I said, dropping the pitcher on the table and pouring out a few glasses of beer. Serena and Hale moved up on their side of the booth so I could squeeze in.
“Hey, Mads,” Hale said quietly, “it’s been a while.”
“Yeah, it has. How are you?”
“I’m—”
“That was a stupid question. I don’t know why I keep asking people it. Obviously, you’re not great.”
“Yeah,” Hale said, “not great. I guess I’m just trying to wrap my head around everything. I can’t believe it. I can’t believe anyone would kill Noelle. She was so sweet.”
I took a long sip of my beer and gave Hale a sidelong look. She was wearing a black turtleneck and large gold hoop earrings almost hidden by her waterfall of black hair. Her make-up was perfect; winged eyeliner, dewy bronzed cheeks and dark plum lipstick. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d looked that well put together. Probably never.
“When was the last time you saw her?” I asked.
“It was a while ago but I tried to stay in touch with her a little. Especially recently. She reached out to me because she was thinking of attending Northwestern.”
“Really?” I asked. I hadn’t realized Elle was in touch with Hale at all. I wondered who had first reached out to who, and felt that quick kick of guilt roll through me again, wishing I’d kept in better contact with Elle, wishing I could have known what she was going through, wishing I’d done my job, and just looked out for her better.
“Yeah,” Hale said, “were the two of you close at all?”
“A little. We emailed pretty regularly,” I said, glossing over all the emails Elle had sent and I’d never answered.
“And what about you and Nate? Are you guys still close?”
I drew my eyes from her, taking a look once again around the bar. After Gloria Lewis’s article it seemed unlikely that Nate would turn up here tonight, I thought, but I wanted to be sure. “No,” I said.
“That’s a shame,” Hale said, giving me a small smile once I’d turned back to her.
It was strange to think how close I’d been to Hale at one point. How well we’d all known each other, how much time we’d spent together, how we’d spend all day at school together only to go home and call one another on the phone to talk about who knows what, and yet, then I was struggling to fill even that short time with something to say. It was partly that too much time had passed, too much had happened, too many things had been said, but I also wondered if I’d lost something as I’d got older, that elastic ability to spend time with people, to enjoy their company, and for it to not necessarily mean anything. Everything felt loaded to me now, weighed down. I wanted to crawl out from underneath it, to lighten up, but I had no idea how.
“So, Keegan,” I said, catching his eye, “did Cordy tell you that I changed my mind?”
Keegan’s eyes lit up as he looked at
me over the rim of his glass and it looked like he might choke on his beer. “Really? You’ll talk to me?”
“I don’t want anything I say to end up on your little blog, okay?”
“Um,” Keegan looked towards Cordy, who shrugged, and then back at me again, “so, what do you want to talk about exactly?”
The bar was loud, music booming over the sweat of bodies who were all wearing too many layers of clothing. There were several baskets of food in the middle of the table, most of them demolished, but there were some fries remaining and I picked at one, tearing it apart before popping it in my mouth. It was cold. “About Nora,” I said.
“But not for the blog?” Keegan clarified.
“No, not for your blog. I’m not giving you an interview, there are just some things I want to get clear on and I think you might be able to help me.”
“About Nora?” Keegan said, his face furrowed. “But you knew her better than anyone?”
“I wanted to get your thoughts on what happened the night she went missing.”
“Oh,” Keegan’s face cleared a little and he leaned forward in his seat, taking a draught of beer before continuing to talk, “well, there are a bunch of theories, but the most common one is that when she ran out of gas someone came along pretty quickly and offered her a ride. There’s a chance she might have been followed, either by someone random or by the person she was on her way to meet in the first place and so she just got in their car with them. She can’t have stayed out there too long though because she would have frozen.”
“That would account for why she didn’t call anyone to come help her as well. If someone came along right after her,” Ange said.
“Right, right. But do we know for sure that she even had a cell phone? They never found one, did they?” Keegan said.
“She had one,” I said.
“Okay but what would the cell reception have been like? I’ve been up there recently and it’s not great now; I can’t imagine it would have been any good in 2008.”
Ange, sat beside Keegan who was squashed in between her and Cordy, nodded. “Yeah, you’re right, it was always terrible at the lake house, remember?”
“It still is,” I said.
“And where her car was found is right between there and town. Maybe if you got stuck there you’d consider walking back to get help, but in winter? I don’t know,” Keegan said. “Do you think she was headed to their lake house?” he said, looking directly at me.
I shrugged. “That’s what I’ve always assumed. I don’t know for sure though.”
The conversation was starting to make my blood thicken. My limbs felt too heavy to move and yet I wanted nothing more than to get out of there, even though I was the one who’d initiated it. I took a deep breath, swallowed down some beer and scoped out the bar for the hundredth time. It was packed with people, their faces indiscernible to me. Someone let out a bark of laughter that rang like a shot over the music and the constant buzz of conversation. I looked to where it had come from and spotted a middle-aged man, his head clear of hair, waving his bottle of beer around in wild gesticulation as he entertained his watching crowd. My stomach began to punch at the wall of my abdomen and I took another sip of beer, turning back to my booth.
“You okay?” Hale said in a low voice right next to me. “You look like you might throw up.”
Before I had a chance to answer, Keegan turned to Hale and said just a bit too loudly: “You’re Louden Winters’s sister, right?”
“Right,” she said, stiffening a little next to me.
“Do you think Nora was on her way to meet up with him that night? They were dating, right?”
“He had an alibi,” Hale said almost robotically, before adding, “and they were broken up by then.” She started pulling on her coat, awkwardly elbowing me and Serena as she did so. “I have to go. I’ll see you all tomorrow,” she said as I got up to let her out of the booth.
“Bye,” I said, looking at her back as she disappeared into the crowd.
Keegan sighed as I sat back down. “Man, I’m sorry, do you think I offended her? I didn’t mean to make her feel uncomfortable.”
I raised an eyebrow. “Really?”
“Sometimes I forget we’re talking about real people, you know?” His confession dislodged me, the sound sucked from the room, the whole world slowed down to a sluggish drag before the roar of the bar came back to me and everything sped up once again. I’d never been able to forget we were talking about real people.
I thought of Elle lying among the snow, her body lifeless and alone, her eyes unseeing, her skin so pale it bled into the ground next to her. Blood roared in my ears and I had to close my eyes to clear the image from my mind. I had to hold onto her, but she was slipping away so fast. Her eyes were brown, I thought to myself desperately; her favorite ice cream flavor was mint choc chip, although she’d recently developed a liking for salted caramel. She’d read A Wrinkle in Time six times and Fangirl four. She loved Jane Eyre but thought Jane deserved better. She’d listened to the Serial podcast despite her mother’s protestations. Her favorite color was green. Her favorite character on TV was Captain Holt although Joan Watson from Elementary ran a close second.
She didn’t yet know what she wanted to do when she grew up.
We never would.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
WHERE IS NORA ALTMAN?
whereisnoraaltman.blogspot.com/2013/2/what-happened-to-nora-altman-timeline/2.html
It’s five years since Nora Altman went missing from Forest View, WI in January 2008 and we still have no idea where she is, or what happened to her. As a concerned citizen of the town (not going to reveal my name, sorry), I want to see if a little internet sleuthing can turn anything up that the (incompetent) local police department missed or overlooked in those crucial first few days.
What Happened to Nora Altman: A timeline
This is the second post in my “timeline” series in which I try to stitch together the timeline of Nora’s disappearance on January 8, 2008. If you haven’t read the first instalment, then please do so here.
Days 4–6
It was a few days before the police really started to investigate Nora Altman’s disappearance. Aged 17, she was still a minor, but the general consensus with missing persons who disappear around that age is that they’ve taken off on their own. This was their first mistake.
There are still people out there who think this theory possible. To them I would ask: have you ever been to Wisconsin in January? If Nora was planning on leaving town she would have decided to do so another day when her car hadn’t run out of gas by the side of the road. By all accounts she was a smart girl, knew her own mind, and definitely, definitely knew that she wouldn’t be getting anywhere any time soon without some wheels. So to me, at least, that’s that out. And if you’re still not convinced, then I say: come up here one winter and see how long you’d last.
The town started to get antsy around day four. By this point the police had spoken to Nora’s friends and family, but only in a casual manner: they still didn’t think she’d been kidnapped, or worse, killed. It had fallen to her friends and family to search the area around where the car had been abandoned, which is densely wooded and, at the time, very snowy. Without the help of trained professionals or sniffer dogs, they came up empty and walked away disappointed.
Following significant pressure from Nora’s dad, and in particular from the media who were starting to take an interest in the case, the chief of police announced that they were opening an official investigation into the disappearance of Nora Altman and treating the circumstances surrounding it as “suspicious.” Louden Winters was arrested two days later.
There are a lot of people who like Louden for Nora’s disappearance and possible (probable) murder. I’m just going to state right here for the record: I am one of them. To me it seems obvious partly because it is obvious. It may be boring but it’s true: it’s always the boyfriend, and I don’t think this case is any differen
t.
Here are some facts for you: Louden was the last person Nora spoke to on the phone, which means he might also have been the last person she spoke to period. She left her final voicemail on her best friend’s phone, but twenty minutes before that she had a four-minute conversation with Louden that none of us know the content of. Were they planning to meet? It seems more than likely. Of course, he’s denied this repeatedly and provided the police with an alibi that let him walk away from the arrest without charges, but the fact that his alibi was a police officer in the Waterstone Police Department has always struck me as a little suspicious.
Here’s another thing to think about: If he did do anything to Nora, he had plenty of time to cover it up and plan his alibi. How much easier would that have been with friends in the police department? Even if his friend didn’t actively help him, Louden would have been able to pick up on what was going on pretty easily, and known he had time to cover his tracks.
I probably don’t need to say this but this is all conjecture of course (don’t sue me for libel!).
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
In those first few weeks after Nora went missing everyone went over and over and over again the various different reasons why and how she had disappeared. Did she just up and leave? Was there any reason she would have run away from home? That was a question they asked me, sat in a freezing interrogation room in Waterstone that actually seemed to be shivering.
Is there any reason you can think of that Miss Altman would leave home, Miss Fielder?
No.
There really was no reason that I could think of. I answered that question every which way to Sunday, but they kept asking it.
***
Is she on anything? She has a lot of commitments, doesn’t she? She’s a member of several different clubs and organizations at school. And early admission; she’s applying to college early, isn’t she? And not just any school. A prestigious, competitive school. She put a lot of pressure on herself; her brother won a hockey scholarship to the University of Wisconsin. Did her family put a lot of pressure on her too?
