by A. M. Taylor
“Will you just calm down? What’s wrong with you?”
“I’m perfectly calm, Leo,” I said, lying, “I’m just confused about how you came to have this.”
“I don’t know,” he said, throwing up his hands. “Maybe you gave it to me years ago?”
I gave him a quizzical look and let out a bark of what I hoped sounded like good-natured laughter. “We weren’t exactly in the habit of drawing and giving each other cartoons ten years ago. I didn’t even know you could draw until fifteen minutes ago.”
I was staring at Leo, willing him to make sense of it to me, but he was looking around the living room, basically anywhere but at me, looking as lost as I felt.
“Look, Leo, I drew this and gave it to Nora. I’m not trying to pick a fight with you or anything, I’m just trying to figure out how it came to be here. Did you find it somewhere?”
“Maybe? I can’t remember. Maybe she gave it to me or something.”
“When would she have given this to you? And why?”
Leo sighed, leaning forward so that his elbows were resting on his knees and he could place his face in his hands. “I don’t know, Mads. Can’t we just drop this? Why is it so important?”
“You know why it’s important. She had this in her wallet, Leo. It would have been on her when she went missing.”
Leo propelled himself to standing, a flurry of movement, his image of quiet repose suddenly gone. The speed of his movement, and the look on his face—which had slipped from studied confusion to unrestrained frustration—took me aback.
“You couldn’t possibly know that for sure,” he said, his voice strained, pulled and yet much too loud. His choice of words, the way he said them, finally convinced me he was hiding something rather than simply confused.
I took my time to answer, heart beating heavily in my chest, willing it to slow down. The crinkled cartoon rustled almost silently in my hand, and I tried to think as fast as the blood that was beating in my ears. I knew that the only way this cartoon being here, ten years later, made sense was if Leo had seen Nora on the night she went missing, and if Leo had seen Nora on the night she went missing and never breathed a word of it—not to me, not to Nate, not to his own father who was the chief of police—then what else was he hiding?
I looked up at him, suddenly realizing how tall he was, how quiet his cabin was, how silent and remote that snow-covered lake outside his house had felt when we got there.
Pine Grove Lake.
Something caught at the back of my brain, digging in and grabbing on. Those messages Elle had been receiving on Nora’s Facebook could have come from here too.
Leo was staring down at me, demanding a reply. His face was a blotchy concoction of red and white, his eyes somehow glinting hard and silver, even though I knew they were blue. I swallowed, slowing down my breath, trying to catch it, trying to stop my mind from running away with me, and to stop it from shouting “run away” so loudly at me.
“No,” I admitted, slowly getting up from the floor, “I can’t know that for sure, but I’m pretty fucking positive. She wouldn’t have just given this to you anyway. It has nothing to do with you.” I was trying to keep my voice light, casual, but I was sure it wasn’t working because Leo seemed to react even more defensively.
“Or maybe me having it has nothing to do with you.”
“What does that mean?”
Leo sighed and sat back down, crossing one leg over the other at the ankle, giving himself a little more time to rearrange himself in a more casual manner. I felt sure we were both pretending though.
“You didn’t know Nora as well as you thought you did, Mads. There was a lot about her that would have surprised you. If you’d known.”
I cocked my head at him, and suddenly it was my turn to be angry. I’d lived too long with Nora—both when she was alive and by my side, and when she was gone and yet still right by my side—to let someone undermine my relationship with her. It didn’t matter to me that she’d disappeared while still holding onto secrets. Finding out that she’d slept with Bright and never told me hadn’t disappointed me in the way you might think; in some ways it had been a relief, that even ten years on there was still more of her for me to know, that even then, she could still surprise me. It made her more real, as if she was still breathing life into our lives, rather than a picture caught in amber, never changing.
“Don’t do that,” I spat, “don’t you dare. You have no idea what I did or didn’t know about Nora.”
Leo held his hands up, palms facing forward, the universal sign language for don’t blame me, and said: “All I’m saying is that people have secrets.”
“Okay, so explain to me, Leo, what’s the secret here exactly? I’m listening.”
I was standing over him now, and he leaned forward again, reaching out to grab my wrist and pull the illustration free from my hand.
“Don’t get hysterical, Mads, it’s not worth it. Just sit down and drink your coffee. It’s just a cartoon. Who cares how I got it?” he said with faux gentleness.
I was watching him closely then, trying to read him, trying to understand what was going on. My mind had leapt to a conclusion but I was struggling to join the dots in between. None of it quite made sense, not yet, but I was determined to think it through. I wandered back towards the dining table which divided the living area and kitchen and sat down on one of the wooden chairs, not wanting to sit next to Leo on the couch but not wanting to turn my back on him either. The knowledge of his gun strapped to the side of his hip buzzed at the edge of everything, getting louder and louder.
“Either it’s a secret, or it’s no big deal and you can’t remember, Leo. It can’t be both. Can you just please explain to me how you have a cartoon I drew ten years ago?”
Leo shook his head, staring at me, his blue eyes cold and compelling. Or maybe I was just imagining that, recasting him in his new role, in a new image, one that made sense with what I was thinking. One where Leo could have killed Nora and, in all likelihood, Elle as well.
Here was someone I’d known all my life, maybe not intimately, maybe not as well as I knew Nate, but still, I’d known him forever. I knew his father and his mother; I remembered when his granddad died and that his grandmother was still alive. I knew he didn’t drink wine and that he preferred rum to vodka, that he played ice hockey and played it well, that he took his coffee black and preferred waffles to pancakes.
How had my mind leapfrogged over all that, all that history, I wondered, and immediately decided that this discovery changed everything? That here, finally, was the person who took Nora. That it wasn’t Nate, as everyone thought, but Leo. Was it purely because I didn’t want it to be Nate? Because I needed him to be innocent?
It didn’t matter. In that moment, none of it mattered because I no longer really had the ability to think clearly. And I desperately needed to, in order to get Leo to admit to me what he’d done, and then get out of there alive.
“Why do you care so much, Mads? Do you want it back or something, because I can give it back to you if that’s what you want?” He made to stand up, as if he was going to give me back the cartoon but I raised my hand to stop him.
“You can keep it. I don’t care that you have it. I just want to know how you have it. Why you have it.”
“Isn’t it obvious? Nora gave it to me.”
I stared at him. I didn’t believe him for a second and yet he was almost convincing. Everything was moving too fast, and I worried that in my struggle to keep up, I was finding footholds in all the wrong places, catching my breath when I should have been running as fast as I could. Barely an hour earlier I’d finally been forced to confront the fact that Nate had killed both his sisters, and now everything was rushing away from me again.
“Why would she give it to you?” I asked cautiously, trying not to sound too accusatory.
“Because we were …” His voice trailed off as he refused to continue.
“You were what?” I prompted, gett
ing impatient now, pushing a little too hard, but I felt close, so close to an answer and was worried if I pulled back too much I’d never get there.
Leo sighed and rubbed his face in his hands before finally saying: “We were sleeping together, okay?”
I let out a bark of laughter that seemed to bounce off the walls of the cabin. It wasn’t what I was expecting him to say, and yet I shouldn’t have been surprised by it. As a lie, it made sense; but that didn’t make it true. “You’re lying. That is complete bullshit.”
“It’s not, Mads.”
“Okay, fine,” I said, pretending to play along, “let’s say you were sleeping together; it still doesn’t explain why you would have that cartoon. Why Nora would have given it to you. It doesn’t mean anything to you, so why would she give it to you?”
“She-she told me she drew it. That I was supposed to be the wolf. The one who wins the fight. I had no idea you actually drew it.”
I looked at him. His voice had been hesitant, a slight waver to it, but he’d come up with that easily, smoothly. Maybe it was true. Or maybe it was a lie he’d told himself so many times he’d come to believe it.
Because that didn’t sound like Nora. Why would she lie about drawing a cartoon to a guy she was sleeping with? To impress him? Nora already believed she was pretty fucking impressive. On top of which she’d never recast herself in the role of bystander. She loved that cartoon because I’d drawn her winning, defeating Louden, finally taking up her role as alpha female, as she believed she was. She’d never have passed on that role to some guy she happened to be sleeping with.
“That’s the truth, Mads. I promise you. I had no idea you drew the cartoon until just now, you have to believe that—I’m as shocked as you are! She was lying to both of us. To everyone. All along.”
I nodded slowly, his words filling up my brain, brick by brick. “Okay,” I said, hating the way my voice shook and taking a deep breath to steady it, “okay, Leo, I hear you. I believe you.”
The words felt wrong in my mouth, the lies like bile, but the relief that swept across his face, all through his body like a wave, pounding across the distance between us, convinced me he was lying. Only the guilty could experience a relief so profound.
I’d thought I was doing a good job of pretending, of convincing him he had convinced me, but just then my phone buzzed on the table beside me, making me jump, startled. I grabbed it, my hand covering the screen but something about my jittery movements must have alerted Leo because he stood up suddenly, tall and broad in his little living room and said: “Who was that?”
I looked up to find his eyes on mine, burning hard, blue fire, and it was that that made me finally think that I was in serious trouble. It wasn’t as if I hadn’t thought so before, it was that now I felt it rather than thought it, the fear crystallizing not only at the center of my mind, but in my veins, in my blood, lying thick and impenetrable all along my bones.
“It’s just Ange,” I said, picking the phone up and checking the notification. She was asking where I was.
“Don’t answer her,” he said stoutly, staring at me.
“Why?”
“Does she know you’re here?”
“No,” I said, watching as he shook his head and began to pace around the room.
Taking advantage of his distraction, I wrote a quick reply to Ange and then carefully placed the phone back down on the table. “Why would it matter whether Ange knows I’m here, Leo?”
His head whipped towards me, stopping short his pacing, and I almost flinched but managed to stay still.
Everything in that cabin had suddenly changed. It wasn’t just Leo who kept flipping from a studied casualness to razor wire energy, the whole place had taken on a new role in my eyes.
Whatever Leo was saying, whatever was the truth, she’d been there; Nora had been here, and it was possibly the last place she’d ever been. The force of that ripped through me, tearing everything I knew, everything I’d ever thought I knew apart.
I wasn’t the only one struggling to keep up though. If I was suddenly tumbling through airless space, then so was Leo; his face had gone red, his eyes kept sliding towards and then away from me, and his right hand was gripping his gun, still in its holster for now, as if it were his personal talisman.
I looked down at my phone to see that Ange had replied to my message and, making sure to do so just as Leo turned away from me to restart his urgent pacing, I turned the ringer down to silent and pressed the call icon in the corner of our message stream. Then, when Ange picked up without saying a word, I pressed the speaker button.
“Is this what happened with Elle?” I asked.
“What?” Leo stopped mid-pace, once again going completely still.
“Did Elle find out you killed Nora? Is that why you killed her?”
“I didn’t … that’s not …” Leo’s eyes were darting everywhere, looking at anything but me, but I had to keep going, to keep pushing. I could feel how close I was to getting him to tell me the truth, and he seemed so unraveled that I thought I could do it. That maybe I could get him to confess to killing Nora and Elle, and even make it out of there alive.
“Did she figure it out?” I said. “Did she figure out what you’d done and come here to confront you about it?” The thought of Elle appearing at Leo’s door that snowy night, of her here all alone, trying to get at the same truth I was, turned me inside out.
“That’s not … I didn’t mean to …”
“You didn’t mean to kill her?” I said, standing up, the chair no longer able to contain me.
“She came here—”
“Oh, so it was her fault?”
“She kept digging! She didn’t know what she was doing, she wouldn’t stop talking, she said she had evidence, I don’t know what, but she just wouldn’t stop. She shouldn’t have come here. She’d still be alive if she’d just never come here.”
“She’d still be alive if you hadn’t killed her.”
Something passed over his face, but I couldn’t quite decipher it. Pain? Regret? It didn’t matter, not really. He was someone else by then, or maybe he had been the whole time and I had just never recognized him, not really, not until that moment.
“She was going to turn me in. I had no choice. She had evidence. I did what I had to do.”
“She didn’t have evidence,” I said quietly. “She had a hunch. A feeling.”
“Maybe. I don’t know. Maybe she didn’t have any evidence, but I couldn’t take that risk.”
“So, you killed her? Rather than take a risk?” I didn’t know how I was continuing to speak, to make sense, to even stay on my feet. I wasn’t sure if what I was feeling was fear or something else, something I couldn’t put my finger on, because I’d never felt it before. How do you name something so new to you your first instinct is to run from it when you feel it? Maybe it was fear, fear so intense it was paralyzing, but I wasn’t thinking of myself. As soon as I’d found that sketch I’d known. Known I was in the last place both Nora and Noelle had been, and I knew, then, it was full of them. Everywhere I looked, there they were. Maybe that’s what a haunting is, at the end of the day, a place we can barely bear to be because it’s so full to the brim with those we’ve lost. And maybe that’s what was happening to me. I wasn’t afraid, I was haunted.
“It was too dangerous for me. To just let her go thinking I had killed Nora.”
“And it was perfect timing for you really, wasn’t it? Everyone in town? Nate, Bright, Louden. The whole gang back together. Nate and Louden were both suspects for Nora, so easy to assume they’d be dragged into this as well.”
Leo seemed to wince a little, maybe just a bit, but I couldn’t tell what was real and what was fake by then. He’d been lying for ten years, staring us all in the face while doing it. “I didn’t plan it,” he said levelly, in a low, steady voice that scared me more than the panic from before, “she came here, Mads. I never would have hurt her if she hadn’t come here.”
�
�And Nora? Was that all an accident too? Did you mean to hurt her?”
Leo turned away from me, towards the cork board layered with photos, almost every one with Nora’s face gazing out from it. All of us caught in the same time warp she was forever trapped in. Forever seventeen. I’d thought it a memorial when I first saw it, but was it really a monument to what he’d done? To his real self who lay hidden beneath the layers of normality he so resolutely presented to the rest of us.
My stomach suddenly gripped at me, nausea penetrating right through to my bones so that I felt weak, stupid and weak.
“She ran out of gas,” he said simply, “the fuel gauge was broken, and I stopped to help. She was on her way to see Louden. At the Altmans’ lake house. But she … she’d lost it. Maybe the car running out of gas was the last straw, I don’t know. I’d never seen her like that; she was crying, shouting at me, at one point she actually screamed, yelled at the sky, kicked the tires of the car. Eventually I got her into my truck; I was going to drive to the lake house, but she was a mess and didn’t want Louden to see her like that, I guess, so I suggested we come here first so she could calm down a little, and then I’d drive her over later.”
He paused, still staring at the cork board full of photos, before turning to face me. “She didn’t know the half of it. Of Louden’s cheating, I mean. That whole first semester he was in Chicago every text he sent was about some girl he was banging. And then Nora finds out and suddenly he’s heartbroken? It was bullshit, all of it. He should’ve just broken up with her, but it’s Louden, right? He has to have everything. She was on her way to break up with him, I think. She was going to tell him about Bright, or at least that’s what she told me.”
