by A. M. Taylor
“Not you too,” I said with a groan. “I thought you’d understand at least, as a cop.”
He shook his head. “Believe me, if I didn’t have to be here, I wouldn’t. It’s all way too close to home for my liking.”
“You seriously don’t wish you could be in the room with the Special Agents right now, even just as a fly on the wall?”
“If it was anyone else, maybe. But Elle …”
“I didn’t realize you were close at all,” I said, shifting in my seat. Bright’s gaze had left mine, and he was now staring blankly at the air just to the left of my face.
“We weren’t, but there’s just something about this whole thing. Ten years after Nora. It’s personal. How could it not be? I hate watching Nate go through it all again too. You must get that,” he finished, finally meeting my eyes again.
“Yeah,” I croaked, heat suddenly rising up my neck. “Do you think Jenna’s messages will lead to anything?” I asked, changing the subject.
“Probably not. They’re probably just from some kid messing around. Like your notes probably were too. Maybe even those ones you found on Noelle’s account.”
“What will they do with them? The Special Agents?”
“I don’t know to be honest. Maybe monitor her account? Don’t know how it all works at that level.”
“Do they have any idea of who killed her?” I asked, blood starting to beat heavily in my ears.
“We’re doing everything we can,” Bright said, almost robotically, before adding, his voice suddenly low and insistent, “I know you think we’re not, but we are.”
I made a noise that sounded a lot like a scoff. “It’s been ten years since Nora disappeared; a week since Noelle was killed. And what do you have so far? Nothing.”
“Not nothing, Mads.” He looked around the room then and dropped his voice even lower, his head tilted dramatically towards mine. “We found a knife. Near the body.”
“Near Noelle?
“Close, yeah. It was—covered in blood. They’re just waiting for the results to see if there’s a match and then they’ll make a statement. Maybe even an arrest. Look, I shouldn’t be telling you this; they don’t want it getting out until there’s something concrete to report, so please don’t mention this to anyone.”
“What kind of knife was it?” I asked, unable to keep my voice from trembling. Even my hands began to shake and I placed them under my legs, as I always did when I was worried someone would notice.
Bright pressed his lips together and closed his eyes for a second. “Hunting knife.”
“But that’s not … that’s not how she died, right? She was strangled?” I said, struggling a little to get the words out.
“She was asphyxiated. Suffocated. But at some point, she was stabbed as well, and it seems as though we’ve got the weapon that did it.”
“Do the family know all this?” I asked, cold sweat pricking at my skin, saliva thickening my throat.
He nodded again and then suddenly his head jerked up in response to something and when I turned around I came face to face with Chief Moody.
“Madeline,” he said, “I hear you’re responsible for bringing Miss Fairfax’s messages to our attention. Thank you for that.”
“Sure,” I said, although my voice didn’t sound like my voice at all and all I could think of was Elle.
“She’s going to be here a while longer, so it’s probably best if you head on home.”
I nodded dumbly, not realizing until he spoke that Bright was walking me out of the station.
“Are you going to be okay?” he asked, staring down at me as we reached the front doors.
“I’m fine,” I said, but I could tell neither of us really believed that. “Why didn’t Leo tell you about the messages I found?” I asked, confused.
Bright shrugged and stared down at me, face immobile. “It probably just slipped his mind. There’s been a lot going on, Mads.”
I nodded, suddenly unable to speak and set off towards my car without saying goodbye.
Once inside I locked the doors and gripped the steering wheel, watching as the skin along my knuckles turned whiter and whiter. I tried to focus on them, on watching my stretched, pale skin, but all I could see was Elle, lying suffocated in the white snow, a knife’s sharp blade glinting somewhere nearby, trembling with violence. My breathing was sharp, shallow and I tried desperately to even it out, but nothing worked, so eventually I stopped trying and just gave in, the cries that escaped from my chest and throat barely even recognizable as being human.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
I was still sat there in my dad’s car when a sleek black car pulled up in front of the steps of the police station, closely followed by at least half a dozen cars and vans stamped with the insignia of various news channels and media outlets screeching to a halt just behind.
I opened my car door with shaking hands, pushing through the crowd that had built up almost instantly. It was impossible to get to the front, and soon I couldn’t see the black car at all, my view completely blocked by reporters wielding giant microphones and photographers pressing on towards the front.
I looked around, heart pounding in my chest, trying to find Ange, who surely must’ve been there, before someone shouted, “There he is!” and the crowd surged forward as the back door of the car opened and out got Nate.
Suddenly there was a chorus of reporters chanting his name, out of sync with one another, but loud enough to drown out even the thoughts inside my head. Nate walked up the steps of the police station, head bowed, sandwiched between two Special Agents, and I tried to weave through the crowd.
As I edged closer to the front, I heard a familiar voice call: “Don’t say anything, son. Don’t say a word,” and turned to see Jonathan getting out of another car, accompanied by Leo.
Jonathan was already following his son up the steps, taking them two at a time, but I was able to get Leo’s attention.
“What’s going on?” I asked, breathless.
He looked down at me, doing a double-take, before following Jonathan and saying: “What are you doing here, Mads?”
“I was here already … I’d been to see Bright about Jenna’s messages.”
“Oh, right,” he said, clearly distracted.
“What’s going on? What’s happening?”
He stopped walking then and pulled me to the side, trying to get as far away from the crowd of reporters as possible.
“Nate’s just been arrested for Elle’s murder.”
I heard his words, but couldn’t make sense of them—even with that chaos surrounding me, confirming it, I couldn’t quite take it in. It was as if what he was telling me was coming at me through a snowstorm, the growing, silent static of fear, incomprehension drowning out even the noise of the amassed media. I realized that even as I’d worried what might happen, I’d never actually believed Nate would be arrested.
Leo was still talking but all I could see was his mouth moving, his lips forming strange shapes I could hardly recognize. He stepped towards me, hands wrapping around my arms, holding me in place, and I watched as his mouth made the shape of my name, Maddie, but I couldn’t hear or say anything. My body dripped with cold and my heart and lungs, stomach, pancreas and whatever else turned to granite inside my chest. I was so, so heavy.
Before I knew what was happening, Leo had walked me up the stairs and into the police station waiting room, pushing through that churning, desperate crowd with seeming ease. He gently pushed me down into a chair, telling Iris to keep an eye on me and came back a couple of minutes later with a mug of something.
“Maddie?” he said again and this time I looked up at him. He was proffering me the mug, “Take this, drink.”
“What is it?”
“Just coffee.”
“You don’t have anything stronger?”
“Maddie.”
I took the mug and swallowed down a few mouthfuls, the coffee thin and bitter, made hours earlier. Leo sat down in the cha
ir next to me and turned to me slightly, his knees gently knocking mine. “They found Nate’s fingerprints and DNA on the knife,” he said slow and quiet, and when I didn’t—couldn’t—say anything, he placed a hand on my knee adding, “his DNA’s all over it, Mads.”
“How could that be?” I asked eventually.
“Maddie. How do you think?”
The heat was slowly draining from my mug of coffee. There hadn’t been much there to begin with, but instead of listening to Leo it was as if all my attention was directed at the mug being held between my two hands. My senses had funneled themselves to one point; all I could feel were my hands and the lukewarm ceramic pressed against them. The world went in and out of focus, at one moment screaming at me, and then just as quickly reducing to the still surface of the black coffee, not even a ripple disturbing it. Leo was saying something important, I could tell by the tone of his voice, but my brain refused to listen. The snowstorm roared in my ears again, so loud I felt sure other people could hear it. How could they not hear it?
This had happened before, of course, but not for a while. My freshman year of college it happened almost daily.
***
There’s a girl sitting in the second row from the front of the lecture hall who looks like Nora. I’ve seen her a couple of times before, I think, from further away, but as I walked in late, I got a better look of her and realized how striking the similarity is. Not identical of course, nothing like that. If Nora was still around maybe I wouldn’t even have noticed this girl, but her absence makes her presence—even the whisper of it, a ghost of it—more pronounced.
I’m staring at the back of her head. Her hair catches the wintry light that falls as shafts through the tall windows. It must be more auburn than it looks at first glance because it gleams black and copper as she leans forward to make a note of something the professor has just said, sun catching as it does on a bird’s wing. I’m not taking notes. I haven’t even got a notebook out on the desk, let alone my laptop. I haven’t taken a single thing out of my bag to be honest.
It’s a film theory class. One of the few classes I’m still bothering to turn up to. Even when I get to the lectures, it’s all I can do to stay in the seat amidst all those people. All those faces. The professor has this long iron-gray hair she wears loose down her back. She has an interesting sense of style; one lecture she even turned up wearing a cape. She’s talking now, hands gesticulating; everyone’s drinking it in. She’s not just a theorist, she’s made movies. They’ve been shown at film festivals. Won awards. This class is almost impossible to get into, which is why I’m still here, showing up.
She asks a question, or at least I know she must have asked a question because the entire room has fallen completely silent; the kind of silence where you know everyone thinks they’re being cloaked in some kind of invisibility by not making a move or a sound. She casts around the room, amused, exasperated. She genuinely wants one of us to venture an answer. To try. She’s interested. That’s the worst part of it.
She doesn’t call my name. How in the hell would she know my name? Any of our names? Instead she says: “You, with the green hair,” pointing up towards where I’m sitting, right on the end of an aisle, my legs stretched out onto the stairs. My eyes are still on not-Nora’s hair as she turns around to see who the professor has picked on, and widens her eyes at me. Me, with the green hair dye still clinging to the tips of my hair. Her eyes are brown, not blue, but she has the same thick eyebrows, and a similar mouth and jawline. I realize that she looks more like Noelle than Nora, really, but they always looked so similar, the mistake is justified.
“Hmm?” The professor tries again. “Sorry, I don’t know your name. But would you like to try answering the question?”
The world comes crashing into focus and out of it again in a matter of seconds. Split seconds. I pull my eyes from not-Nora’s gaze; she looks concerned somehow. For some reason. And suddenly I’m looking at an entire lecture hall looking at me. My heart turns to granite in my chest, and my ears fill with buzzing. I struggle with my bag and my legs as I unfold from my chair and try to leave the lecture hall as quickly as possible. My limbs feel like lead, like I’m trying to walk through water, and yet the lecture hall itself is in the process of dissolving in front of my eyes in some kind of fierce fury.
I rush through the doors, blood pumping, and out into the hallway but there are people everywhere, crowds of strangers and students everywhere. Something stings at the back of my eyes. I have to get out of here.
I walk quickly, almost running, but barely even aware of myself, to the nearest bathroom, which happens to be in a campus Starbucks. I stay in there for minutes on end. First five, then ten. Fifteen, twenty. But I can’t leave. People knock at the door, calling for whoever is in there to get the hell out, but I can’t. Fear lies thick at my throat, it fills my mouth, fogs my brain. I can’t leave.
Eventually I scramble with my bag, finding my phone. Breathing heavily, in, out, in, out, like they tell you to. I pull up Ange’s name and call her, but it goes straight to voicemail. The same with Serena. Eventually I call Nate, and he picks up on the fourth ring.
“Mads? What’s up?”
I tell him where I am, my voice heavy, staccato. I can barely breathe. I cringe at every word I say, every chip in my armor revealed to him. But he isn’t far away, he says, the noise in the background telling me he’s somewhere busy, somewhere on campus.
I stay there, in my bathroom fortress, trying not to be sick, telling myself to be calm, be calm, be calm. I’ve never been good at listening to myself though. Or at least, not when I have anything useful to say.
And then he’s here, his knock on the door strong and direct, his voice calling my name. It still takes me a while to open the door though, and when I eventually do—for one second, less than a second really—instead of Nate’s face, it’s Nora’s that greets me. I shut my eyes, no longer able to trust them, and Nate pulls me into a hug, his breath warm against my neck.
“You’re okay,” he says, and as I stand there, allowing myself to be held, I try my hardest to believe him.
“Maddie?” someone said, but this time it wasn’t Leo and it certainly wasn’t Nate. My brain came into focus, dragging me back to the police station, back to reality. My dad was standing over me, his face white, drawn, lines around his mouth but not from smiling. “Maddie, honey, let’s go home.”
The coffee mug Leo had given me was still in my hands and I looked down at it and then up at my dad again. “When did you get here?”
“Just now. Leo called me; he didn’t think you should drive home.”
I listened to the two of them have a murmured conversation while I got myself together. Dad was thanking Leo for looking after me, before asking about Nate.
“He’s being questioned at the moment,” Leo said.
“Has he been charged yet?” Dad asked.
“They’ve got seventy-two hours to charge him, but with the hunting knife it’s looking pretty open and shut,” Leo said.
I could hear Dad sucking in his breath, it sounded like a low whistle, but it was the sound he made when he was most in distress. “And is Jonathan in there with him?”
“Yes, sir, but I think they’re going to try to get him a different lawyer.”
Dad was nodding, staring at Leo as he spoke, until he noticed that I was standing now, ready to go. “Okay, well thank you, officer,” he said a little wryly, before putting his hand on my back and walking me out of the station.
They were still there. The reporters, cameramen, photographers, and I heard someone call my name, my eyes blinking at the flash of a camera when I turned to see who had called my name. Dad rushed me down the steps, my eyes now trained on my feet, looking down, down, down.
Once we were through the crowd I spotted Mom waiting in her truck, the wipers going to keep her windshield clear of snow. She waved as we walked towards the Explorer, and started her engine. Dad took the car keys from me, and I got into the
passenger seat, the muffled quiet of the car protecting me from the outside world offering little relief.
We were silent on the drive home, the only sound the clicker as Dad signaled left. Through the lightly falling snow I could see the red lights at every crosswalk leading out of town and towards Old Highway 51. Everything blurred together, the white of the snow, the changing color of the stop lights, the turquoise neon as we passed the movie theater.
“It’s going to be okay, Mads,” Dad said eventually, his voice echoing strangely in the car.
I pressed my forehead against the cold glass of the passenger window. It is just as heartbreaking at twenty-seven as it is at seventeen to realize your parents are as helpless as you are.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Wisconsin Daily News
Ugly Twist as Brother of Victim Arrested for Murder
By Gloria Lewis
January 15, 2018
A suspect has been arrested in the tragic case of the murder of Noelle Altman which occurred in Forest View, WI on January 8. The suspect in question is no stranger to the case, nor to the family in question. In fact, it is the brother of the Wisconsin teenager, Nathan Altman.
Mr Altman was also a suspect in the disappearance of his other sister, Nora Altman, who went missing from the area ten years ago. However, with no evidence to go on, the police were forced to release him with no charge, and this oversight appears to have had tragic consequences.
In a statement to the press, the local chief of police revealed that a knife, believed to be the murder weapon, had been found buried in the snow some distance from where Noelle Altman’s body was found. Forensic examination has revealed that not only was the blood on the knife found to be Noelle Altman’s, but that her older brother’s fingerprints were also present.
