by A. M. Taylor
I certainly wasn’t expecting to find anything from Bright of all people. But there it was—a stream of emails sent in the days leading up to Nora’s disappearance. Barely breathing but hyper aware of the sound of my heart pounding against my chest, I clicked on his name:
From: Michael Brightman 01/01/2008 13:14
We need to talk about last night. Call me
From: Nora Altman 01/01/2008 14:11
We never need to talk about it Bright. We’re never GOING to talk about it because it will NEVER happen again and I wish it never had happened in the FIRST PLACE.
From: Michael Brightman 01/01/2008 04:27
I just need to know you’re not going to tell Maddie. Because if you tell her than she’ll tell Serena and if Serena finds out we slept together I’m dead, you’re dead, we’re all fucking dead.
From: Nora Altman 01/02/2008 10:07
As if I’d ever tell Mads, the thought of her knowing makes me want to die. Just leave me alone. I’m not going to tell Maddie.
From: Michael Brightman 01/02/2008 10:14
Okay fine, that’s all I wanted to know, that you wouldn’t tell Maddie. But just so you know Leo saw us and I don’t think he’d tell Maddie but I just thought you’d want to know that. I’ve asked him not to tell Louden though, so don’t worry about that.
From: Nora Altman 01/02/2008 10:33
I don’t fucking care if he tells Louden. I WANT him to tell Louden.
From: Michael Brightman 01/02/2008 10:46
Well I don’t want him to! Jesus he’s one of my best friends. Just as long as no one tells Nate either cos he’ll tell Mads and then it’ll definitely get back to Serena.
From: Nora Altman 01/02/2008 10:50
Why on earth would I tell my brother any of this?
From: Michael Brightman 01/02/2008 10:53
I don’t know, just in case. All I care about is this not getting back to Serena. So seriously just don’t tell Maddie?
From: Nora Altman 01/02/2008 23:58
What did I just say about not telling Mads? I’m definitely not telling her any of this. But I am planning on telling Louden, not that it’s any of your business, so if you’re worried about him telling Serena, then you should probably tell her yourself.
From: Michael Brightman 01/03/2008 00:16
Please don’t tell Louden I’m actually really worried he might go crazy and tell Serena or something.
From: Michael Brightman 01/03/2008 00:31
Nora?
Seriously please don’t tell Louden
From: Michael Brightman 01/05/2008 11:31
Nora come on
Seriously
Don’t tell Louden
From: Michael Brightman 01/06/2008 13:12
Please don’t tell Louden, Nora. I’m serious.
From: Michael Brightman 01/07/2008 18:42
Nora? Please
I couldn’t breathe. Bright and Nora? My stomach, my heart, my whole goddamn body clenched with fear. Bright? He’d sent his last message a little over forty-five minutes before Nora had left her final voicemail on my cell phone, the message that was considered to be her last. I thought about Bright coming over to the house that morning to tell us her car had been found, and she was nowhere near it. He’d written this email barely twelve hours earlier.
My hand trembled slightly as I reached for my phone and called Serena. I could feel every pulse of my heartbeat, my scalp itched so profusely I swear I could actually feel my hair growing, and the scratchy feeling behind my eyes, the one that made me feel like I was about to cry every goddamn moment I was alive, was well and truly back. I swallowed hard, again and again, as if doing so would push the feeling away, as if I could breathe my way through it, as if I could close my eyes and it would stop, when all the evidence I’d ever accrued pointed to the contrary. There was nowhere for the feeling to go.
I counted the rings until Serena’s voicemail kicked in, but didn’t leave a message. Then I rang again and again until, finally, on my fifth attempt, she answered.
“Hey,” she said, sounding muffled, tired, and even a little alarmed. “What’s going on, Mads?”
“Sorry for calling so late. I just needed to ask you a question.”
“What’s going on?” Serena demanded again, sounding much more awake. Awake and unappeased. “It’s almost three o’clock in the morning, what’s the fucking emergency?”
“I logged into Nora’s Yahoo account.”
“Her email? Why the hell would you do that?”
“Well, I started by going on to her Facebook account, but there was nothing there, so I thought I’d try her email.”
I could hear Serena’s low even breaths but she didn’t say anything immediately. “What do you mean there was nothing there? What were you looking for?”
“I thought there might be some messages from Louden or someone that might tell me what was going on with her before she went missing.”
“But why would you suddenly be interested in that?” Coming from down the line, her voice sounded stretched and strained with exhaustion, pitching higher than normal. She wasn’t just tired from being woke up at 3 a.m., she was tired of all of it, of everything. Of all the calls I’d placed in the middle of the night before, of all the times she’d had to talk me down from something, to take me home, to make sure I was okay. It didn’t stop me though.
I ignored her question, but I still wasn’t sure how to frame the topic of Bright and Nora, and I had to force myself to say the next few words. “There were some emails from Bright. From right before she went missing. They slept together, on New Year’s Eve by the looks of things.” Serena was quiet for a long time. Or at least for what felt like a long time. “Did you know?” I asked finally, prompting her.
“Yeah, I knew,” she said at last.
“You did? Since when? Why didn’t you tell me?”
“One thing at a time, Mads.”
“Jesus, Serena, is it possible for you to ever not sound completely condescending?”
“I’m not trying to. Sorry. Whatever. This is hard for me too, you know.”
“But you knew?” my voice came out so much more quietly than I’d meant it to. The betrayal stung not because I didn’t trust Serena, but because she didn’t trust me. Didn’t trust me with information which she presumably had always assumed I was too fragile or fucked up to cope with.
“Yeah. Yeah, I knew. He told me right after. He was terrified it was going to come out and he’d be accused of having something to do with her disappearance.”
“Did the police know?”
“He is the police, Mads,” she said, unintentionally sending a shock of pure, cold fear through me.
“I mean did he tell anyone else?”
“I don’t know. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you, okay? It was just never the right time, and honestly, I didn’t see how it was going to help you in any way.”
“Your boyfriend cheated on you with my best friend. Weren’t you … weren’t you mad?”
“Of course I was mad, I was fucking furious! But come on, there was so much more to be worried and scared and angry about back then. To be honest, I think I just buried it and then in the end it didn’t matter. We were always going to break up anyway.”
“But what about Nora?”
“What about her?”
“Serena, Bright messaged her less than an hour before she went missing.”
I could hear Serena suck in a breath before saying: “That doesn’t mean anything, Mads. He didn’t see her that day. That’s why he was emailing her probably, he was trying to track her down.”
“And what if he did track her down?”
“Mads, come on. Listen to what you’re saying. Bright didn’t kill or do anything to hurt Nora. It’s absurd.”
“As absurd as Nate killing Elle?”
“Maddie,” she said very slowly, “I understand what you’re doing here. You don’t want it to have been Nate. You don’t want to believe that he’s capable of an
y of this—that he killed Elle, and in all likelihood killed Nora. But you’re reaching, you’re twisting everything to suit your own theory.”
I was tired of people telling me that. Of asking why I was asking so many questions, and then telling me it was just the guilt talking, or my inability to believe Nate could have done it. So what if it was? What did my motives matter—didn’t I at least deserve answers? Didn’t Nora? Didn’t Elle?
“You really think he did it?” I said at last, meaning Nate.
“What else am I supposed to think?” she asked.
She didn’t sound convinced though. She sounded tired, exhausted, just as Ange had done at the diner. It had been so long. We were tired of not knowing. Was that all it boiled down to in the end? We were done. We wanted it to be over. And here, here was an answer, finally. Someone to blame. A place to put all our loss and grief, fear and hatred. It didn’t feel the way I always thought it would though, and I couldn’t work out if that was just me, or if that was inevitable; that closure when it came, if it ever came, might mean the closing of a gate, but it also meant the opening of yet another door.
“Serena, we’ve known him our entire lives. This is Nate we’re talking about. Nate Altman. How can you think he’d do this to Elle? To Nora? Why would he do it?”
Serena didn’t answer immediately, and I imagined her gnawing on the nail of her right thumb, as she always did when she was thinking.
“Maddie,” she said eventually, very slowly, “everything you’ve just said, you could apply to Bright. And they don’t have a weapon covered in his fingerprints.”
She was right of course. Or, at the very least, I couldn’t find a flaw in her logic. And yet. It wasn’t just that I wasn’t ready to let go of Nate; I needed the “why” answered before accepting that he had done it. Maybe it was naive of me, childish even, the desire for a reason over reality. Death was often senseless, especially when it was accompanied by violence, and I had wondered if I would have been so set on the idea of a motive if the person they’d slapped the handcuffs on hadn’t happened to be Nate.
But I’d grown up with the Altmans, all of them, not just Nate, and it wasn’t just him I loved but Elle and Nora too and I couldn’t let it all end without knowing why it had even started.
I thought of Nate alone in jail and for whatever reason I couldn’t just leave him there. I understood why everyone was so willing to accept his guilt; it let us off the hook somehow, and allowed us to finally continue with our lives. But I needed more than that, more than fingerprints on a knife and someone behind bars. I needed to know not just who had taken Nora and Elle from us but why they had, and I was pretty sure I wasn’t going to be getting my answers from Nate.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
It felt as though I’d only just fallen asleep when my phone rang. Reaching for it, I saw it was from an unknown number and I just stared down at it for a minute as it buzzed in my hand, before finally answering.
“Madeline Fielder?” a vaguely recognizable voice asked. “This is Agent Lee, I’d like you to come down to the station to answer some questions, please.”
“Agent Lee? What happened to ‘call me Steven’?”
“Steven’s around here somewhere. I’m sure he’ll be back soon. Are you available for a quick chat?”
“It’s awfully early.”
“We can arrange a time that’s more suitable for you, but sooner rather than later would be better. Please.”
Light was beginning to stalk the edges of the curtains, trying to crack through, break the day wide open. I could have stayed in bed forever; I wanted to, wanted to wait as the world hurled itself forward and I tried to catch up, but that wasn’t what was in store for me. So, I told Agent Lee I’d be down there as soon as I could and got up to have a shower and get dressed.
The station was quiet, the waiting room only just beginning to warm up, the cold morning managing to creep its way in as I sat there and waited for one of the agents to come and get me. I was still shivering in my coat when Agent Lee finally appeared.
“Sorry to keep you waiting, Maddie,” he said.
I raised an eyebrow at him silently and just followed him out of the waiting room, down the hallway and into one of the few interrogation rooms the police station actually had, where Agent Gutierrez was already waiting. The room was airless, dusty, and cold. Lee offered me a coffee, which I accepted, and he disappeared again, leaving Gutierrez and I to stare at each other from opposite sides of a table.
“How are you doing, Maddie?” she asked, her voice smooth, low.
“I’ve been better.”
Gutierrez flattened her mouth and slowly nodded her head, as if she knew exactly what I meant. “You’re probably wondering why you’re here.”
“A little bit.”
“We just have a few more questions about the night Noelle Altman was killed. Nothing to worry about.”
Lee returned, three mugs of coffee balanced delicately in his hands. He passed me one with a smile before delivering another to his partner. He stayed standing, his back against the furthest wall from me, watching me while he drank his coffee, and Gutierrez leaned towards me, her arms resting on the tabletop.
“So, Maddie,” Gutierrez continued once she’d taken a sip of her coffee, “we just wanted to ask you about the night of January 7 again. Be 100 per cent sure of your movements that night.”
I looked from one of them to the other and back again. The question was posed perfectly nicely, and Lee smiled warmly at me yet again from the back of the room, but instead of reassuring me, it set me completely on edge. I’d already answered this question, I thought, so why were they asking it again? Was I a suspect now? Or was it possible that they didn’t actually have enough on Nate to make it stick?
“Maddie,” Gutierrez said when I didn’t answer, “where were you between the hours of seven and eleven that night?” She was beginning to sound a little impatient.
“I was at home. I’ve already told you that.”
“Did you see anyone else while you were at home? Or on your way back from the bar?”
“You mean apart from my parents?”
“Apart from your parents.”
“No. I walked home, got in, had dinner with my parents and then went to bed. I wasn’t feeling great.”
“You didn’t happen to see anyone on your walk home from Cool’s that night?”
I reached for the mug of coffee that I hadn’t yet drunk from and wrapped my fingers around it. “I don’t think so. Not that I can remember. I mean, there might have been some people on the street, but it was cold and dark and a Sunday night, so there probably weren’t that many people around to be honest.”
“Could any of those people you may or may not have seen have been Nathan Altman?”
“Nate? No. I didn’t see him again that night after leaving the lake house.”
“So, he didn’t stop by the bar to walk you home?”
I stared at her, something scratching at the back of my memory, something telling me to be careful, to watch where I was going. An image of Nate walking me home flashed through my mind, but it hadn’t been on Sunday. Finally, I shook my head and said: “No.”
“Are you sure about that, Maddie? You’d had a bit to drink, hadn’t you?”
“I’d had some wine. I wasn’t drunk. Not really.”
“What do you mean by ‘not really’?”
“I mean, I wasn’t drunk enough to forget running into Nate that night,” I said through my teeth. I watched as the agents shared a look, and forced myself to drink some of the coffee.
“Your recollection of that night differs somewhat from Mr Altman’s,” Gutierrez said at last.
“What?”
“He claims he picked you up from the bar, walked you home and then stayed to chat.”
My mind clenched, frantically. Memories falling in on one another, building up and breaking down. Nate had picked me up from Cool’s and walked me home, but that had been on Tuesday, the day aft
er Elle had been found, not the night she was killed. I swallowed hard, trying to rearrange myself and said: “No, not that night.”
“Not that night? Can you explain?”
“Well, he did come to the bar and we did walk home together, but it was a couple nights later. Not on Sunday.”
“So, you think he might have confused the two evenings?”
“I-I don’t know. Maybe.”
“Could you have confused them?”
“No,” I said too quickly, the agents once again sharing a look. I didn’t have a good enough grip on what was going on. I felt ambushed. Why had Nate told them he saw me on Sunday evening? One possible explanation pushed its way through my mind, insistent, persistent, unwanted; he was claiming me as an alibi.
“But you think Nate might have?” Gutierrez asked, her voice even, neutral.
I stared down at the tabletop. It was made of metal, covered in scratches, had probably been there for years. It had probably been there ten years earlier, in fact, when I had sat in that very room and was questioned all about Nora’s movements the night she went missing. “I guess it’s possible.”
“But you had been drinking that night. You’d had a fair amount to drink by the sounds of it, is there a chance you’re the one who’s misremembering?”
My head shot back up to stare between the two of them, still struggling, desperately to make sense of anything. I knew I had the whole picture right in front of me, but I was only being allowed to see it one section at a time. Every time I learned something new the focus would shift and I’d be left in the dark again.
“Maddie,” Gutierrez said gently, “is there a chance you can’t be sure of who you saw on the night in question?”
I wanted to say yes, that there was a chance, that I did see him, that I’d simply forgotten, been too drunk to remember as they seemed to be accusing me of, or had got my days mixed up, because I knew that was his way out, maybe even my way out. But I could barely form a thought, let alone a sentence, and as they stared down at me, expecting me to answer, it took everything I had to take a sip from that mug of coffee and swallow it down. I couldn’t save him though, not like this, not with a hand reaching out in the dark that turned out to be a fist. I knew if I did this, there would be no going back, I would have crossed a line that I hadn’t even realized needed to be drawn. So, I shook my head and finally said: “No, I’m not misremembering. I didn’t see him that night.”
