Forget Me Not
A. M. TAYLOR

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Copyright

KillerReads

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www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2018

Copyright © Annie Taylor 2018

Cover design by Holly Macdonald © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2018

Cover photographs © Shutterstock.com

Annie Taylor asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Ebook Edition © October 2018 ISBN: 9780008312916

Version: 2018-05-13

Dedication

For Ruthie (big sister, best cheerleader, and all-round super woman)

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Keep Reading…

Acknowledgements

About the Author

About the Publisher

CHAPTER ONE
Madison Journal
Ten Years Gone: Family Mourns Missing Daughter
By Angela Cairney

January 7, 2018

Ten years ago, the family and friends of Nora Altman woke up to find themselves living in a nightmare. Tomorrow marks the anniversary of her disappearance when the 17-year-old’s car was found abandoned by the side of Old Highway 51 on the road between Forest View, WI, and nearby Stokely in the early hours of January 8, 2008. The car was locked, with no sign of a struggle; the only indication that anything was wrong with the car was the empty tank of gas that had presumably halted the teen’s drive.

The case has long since gone cold, and the local police department have been criticized both by members of the community and Nora’s family for not acting quickly enough when she was first reported missing. But Chief of Waterstone Police Department Patrick Moody claims he hasn’t given up. “We’re always on the lookout for anything relating to Nora’s disappearance. This is the kind of case that defines your whole career, but its impact has been much more far-reaching than that. It’s affected the whole community and I feel the full weight of that responsibility daily. Even now.”

Three years after the teen first went missing, her father, Jonathan Altman, almost launched a civil suit against the Waterstone Police Department. “There are no hard feelings,” Moody said, “he was just doing everything he had to do to find out what happened to his daughter. As a father, I would have done the same.”

Chief Moody was planning on joining the family and close friends of Nora today to mark the ten-year anniversary of her disappearance. “We’ve done it almost every year since Nora went missing. It’s good to get together and remember her, and also to remind ourselves that there’s still work to do.”

For the family, though, the nightmare still goes on. “We’ll never have closure,” Nora’s younger sister Noelle said. Only 7 when Nora went missing, Noelle regrets not having had a big sister to grow up with and guide her along the way. “My brother Nate tries his hardest, but it’s not the same. Even though I know I barely really knew her, I still really miss her. I just know she would have been the best big sister.”

CHAPTER TWO

I was dreaming of the sheet of glass again.

I was carrying this huge plate of glass that was beginning to crack, tiny spider webs of distortion spreading fast, and as it did the pane shifted in my heavy arms and slipped from my grasp. I woke just as it should have been shattering into a million pieces on the floor below me. I carried that great big sheet of glass everywhere I went, my arms straining with the effort, my forehead shining with sweat, the glass itself slowly, slowly cracking as I shifted it slightly from hand to hand, arm to arm. It was exhausting and debilitating, cumbersome and controlling and, I thought, so, so obvious to everyone I met that I was struggling. People recognized the struggle of course, just as I knew they would, gave it a name, and either pushed it to the back of their minds or worried about it endlessly depending on who they were and what they were to me. They all made the same mistake, though: thinking that pane of glass made me weak. You try carrying something like that around with you wherever you go. You get tired, sure; but you also get strong.

There was nothing particularly special about waking up to that shattering glass. I’d done it a thousand times before and no doubt it would continue to haunt me after; it wasn’t a portent, or an omen, I didn’t have to write about it in my dream journal, or put a black mark in my diary so that in the years to come I’d be able to look back and say “ah yes, the dream. I should have known something terrible was going to happen.” Because there was no way anyone could have known.

Because when the worst has already happened, you don’t expect it to happen again.

But this story doesn’t start with a dream. What story ever does? No, this story starts with Nora.

Nora’s parents had chosen Sunday for the memorial because more people were available. The day was white and gray, the sky thick and heavy even though the snow didn’t come until nightfall. It had been the same on the day Nora disappeared but then that should have hardly come as a surprise. January has a way of making every day look and feel the same, the month lasting forever and then suddenly over. I don’t know why we gathered at the lake house rather than at the Altman home, although I was glad we weren’t huddled around the trees by the side of the road where her abandoned car had been found that morning, so many years ago. Too many impromptu vigils had happened there in the days and weeks following Nora’s disappearance for me to feel anything other than nausea when I drove past. At least the lake held some happy memories, long gone but still just about holding on. So, Nora’s dad, Jonathan, spoke, and then her older brother, Nate, did, and then we all just stood looking at the lake for a while, no one really knowing what to do, what we were expected to do. That’s something I’ve learned over the last ten years; no one ever tells you what to expect or what’s going to happen next because no one knows. You’re on your own.

I waited for a while, wanting to get Nate on his own, but Leo and Bright were stood with him, their faces pale and maybe even a little drawn but talking to each other as animatedly as you can at a memorial. They were trying to draw Nate into the conversation, trying to coax him out, but wherever he was it wasn’t with them. I had a feeling he hadn’t been with them for a while.

“Hey, Maddie,” Leo said as I approached. “Nice to see you.” Leo had just graduated from the police academy when Nora went missing. Three months on the job and he was investigating the disappearance of his best friend’s little sister. Whenever I saw him back then the image of him in his brand-new uniform would shock me all over again; he looked so young, too young to be in a position of such authority, as though he’d put the uniform on for Halloween and never taken it off.

Bright, or Michael Brightman to give him his full name, was a year older than Nate and Leo; the same age as my older sister, Serena: They’d gone out for a while, in fact, back in high school. He’d had a year longer on the job than Leo, a year or so to prepare for something neither of them could ever have seen coming when they decided they wanted to be cops in the same small town they’d grown up in, where nothing ever seemed to happen. I could still see his face, stark, stretched and stunned, when he told me they’d found Nora’s car but that there was no sign of Nora.

“Nice to see you too,” I said, leaning in for awkward hugs with both Leo and Bright before stopping at Nate whose eyes were turned towards the lake, or where the lake would have been if it weren’t blanketed with snow. I had lain my hand on Nate’s arm in an attempt to get his attention, and he finally turned towards me.

“Hey, Mads. Good of you to come,” he said, his voice scratching the cold air around us.

I looked at him, trying to make sense of what he was saying before just nodding my head slowly and saying: “I wouldn’t miss it.”

Nate sucked in a breath, still not really looking at me, and I turned back to Bright and Leo, the latter of whom met my gaze and shrugged. “Can you guys give us a minute?” I asked, the two of them sharing a look before wandering off towards the lake house without another word.

“How’re you doing, Nate?” I asked.

Nate shoved his hands into his pockets and turned towards me with a sigh. “I don’t know, Mads. How do you think I’m doing?” He was facing me but not meeting my eyes, his gaze wandering across the snowy landscape, taking in the fractured group of people who had gathered to remember Nora.

His younger sister and brother, Noelle, and Noah, were walking together towards the house, looking for warmth; his aunt stood with her arm around his mom as she quietly cried. My oldest friend, Ange, was talking to Bright and Leo now, while our parents stood in a small knot, joined by Nate’s dad, Jonathan, and the Winters family. It was a scene familiar to me, too familiar, and I wondered if that was what Nate was thinking too: How many times had we done this, how many times had we stood here, if not exactly in this precise spot, then one very much like it, thinking about Nora, remembering her, trying to keep her with us even while she was taken further and further away from us?

Ten years. I tried to take it in and couldn’t. Ten years was a lifetime, an entire decade. What was there to say about an entire decade that, for the most part, had been marked only by absence? For some people if there’s something missing, if there’s a hole in their life, they fill it; I tend to fall down it.

“How’s work?” I asked, searching his face, desperate for something, anything. “How’s Texas?” Nate had moved to Austin almost four years earlier, and I’d barely seen him, barely spoken to him since, the distance between us so much bigger, so much wider than those thousands of miles.

Nate took another long breath, looked like he was readying himself for something and ran a gloved hand over his face before batting my question away. “Texas is fine, work is fine.”

“Wow, that’s really illuminating stuff, thanks, Nate.” I wanted to smooth out the edges of my words but, for some reason, even that day, I couldn’t. They were sharp and cold, like the weather, like the day.

“That’s all I have for you right now. How about you? You want to tell me all about your great, interesting life?” Sarcasm shaded his voice, adding an unfamiliar arch to it, and he was looking right at me then, his eyes dark and hard, like a dare. I shrugged off his question, trying to pretend it slid right off my back, and he decided that he’d made his point. “See, that’s what I thought. Good to see you, Mads, be sure to have a slice of the coffee cake before you go.”

And then he was walking away from me, hands deep in his pockets, shoulders hunched.

Nate and I used to be able to communicate with each other even through silence. Despite it, because of it, whichever way you want to look at it, neither of us had the words available to talk about Nora and that was how we communicated, through the understanding that she was there, always, in every word we said and every word we didn’t, every word we couldn’t. But it had been years since that was the case and, by then, whenever we saw each other, whenever we spoke, the silences in between had no give to them. They felt like gaps, misunderstandings, another hole to fall down, another hole to be filled.

I didn’t have any cake. I’d long stopped eating at those kinds of things. The food was a necessary distraction, it gave your hands something to do while you tried to figure out exactly what it was you were meant to be doing, but I could never take a bite, my stomach twisting and turning, my throat closing up as soon as I raised anything to my lips. Inevitably I just ended up carrying a loaded plate of food around before finding somewhere to stash it. No one stayed too long that time though. No one wanted to. We’d had ten years of these things after all, and were just marking time now. When she first went missing, even in the year or two after, there was still something close to hope at the vigils and memorials but, after ten years, that was just a way of saying look at how much time has passed, look at how we’re still thinking of you. Nora was gone, and it was simply something we had to do to remind ourselves that we were still here.

Eventually I followed Nate and the rest of the party into the lake house where everyone had decamped to. I would have preferred to have left without even a goodbye, but my parents had attempted to raise me better than that, and besides, they’d driven me there. I helped myself to a coffee in the small kitchen, wishing it was a little later in the day, wishing there was wine instead, or better yet, vodka, but grateful for the pocket of extra time it gave me away from everyone. The cabin was small, just one large room with a utility room off the kitchen, the front door opening onto the living room, and even though there weren’t that many of us, it was still too many. I clutched at my coffee cup, waiting for my hands to warm up, waiting for the crushing feeling inside my chest to ease up.

Noelle was sat on the arm of one of the couches, picking at a thread that was coming loose on the sleeve of her sweater. Ten years younger that Nora, she’d turned seventeen just a few months earlier, the same age Nora had been when she went missing. I stared at her, looking instinctively, automatically, for the similarities between the two of them as I always did when I saw Elle. I didn’t have to look for long. Her hair was lighter, and she wore it longer than Nora had, and her eyes were the same brown as Nate’s rather than Nora’s arctic blue, but Nora was there still. They had the same mouth and jawline, the same shaped eyes and long neck. I knew that when Elle stood up she’d be almost as tall as Nora was, but for now Leo was leaning over her, talking intently as Elle refused to meet his eye. I joined them with my coffee, maneuvering carefully around Nate as I did so, neither of us saying a word.

“Maddie,” Elle said, her eyes meeting mine, looking grateful, I thought, or maybe even a little pleased.

“Hey, you. How you doing?”

We hugged and her body felt small in my arms even as she pulled quickly away.

“Oh, you know. Not great.”

I don’t why I kept asking people how they were, to be honest. I hated that question even on a good day, let alone that day.

I nodded and slid my gaze towards Leo, who raised his eyebrows at me and asked: “How long are you in town for, Mads?”

“I have to get back tomorrow.”

“How you finding being back in Madison? You’re doing a PhD, right?”

Yet another question I dreaded even more than “how are you doing?”

I coughed through my coffee and shook my head. “No. I quit, actually. A while ago. I’m working in the communications department now. At the university.”

“Oh. How’s that going?”

“It’s fine. It has its moments.”

“Sure,” Leo said nodding, polite, polite, “well, it’s a job, right?”

I looked at him, trying to decipher his words but he just smiled, nice and easy, his face wide open.

“They all have their moments. Last call out we got was to save Mr. Hetherington from himself. He’d locked himself out of his house and decided it was best to just sleep off whatever he’d drunk in his car, but the neighbors were worried about him, so they called us. Probably almost died of hypothermia, but what are you gonna do, that’s the job, right?”

It would have been too generous to describe Hetherington as the town drunk. He was simply a guy who got drunk and happened to live in town. I wondered at what Leo was complaining about though. You become a cop in a small town, and what else do you expect from life except fishing drunks out of ditches and pushing cars out of snow drifts? Apart from a former classmate who’d been missing for ten years, of course. It took me a while to realize that he was throwing me a tentative bone. I wasn’t where I’d expected to be in my life, but there had been days, hell, there had been months and years, where getting to even where I was then would have looked like something close to a miracle. And when it came down to it, none of us were really where we had expected to be.

I returned Leo’s smile, or at least tried to and said: “Well, you’ll be running the place soon though, right?”

Leo rolled his eyes towards the other side of the room where his father, Patrick Moody, stood, replete in his chief of police uniform, too big for this room. “Yeah, just as soon as the boss retires.”

“Hey,” I said to Elle, grabbing at her bicep, “is Jenna here? I haven’t met her yet.”

Elle shook her head. “No, she couldn’t make it.”

“That’s a shame.” Talking to Elle felt like talking through a mask or as though I was trying on another character. I tried so much harder around her than anyone else. Not because I wanted her to like me or anything, but being around her made me act the way everyone else seemed to act around me. Drawing me out, pushing for information, wide concerned eyes, forced cheer; I went the whole nine yards with Elle even as I knew how much she must have been hating it. I couldn’t help it though, the blanket of concern that overwhelmed me whenever I saw her. I so desperately wanted her to be okay, even while I came to accept the fact I never would be. Hypocrisy doesn’t always come from a bad place, just a confused one.

My efforts normally paid off with Elle though. It would be a stretch to describe her as bubbly and I hate the word vivacious, but her infectious energy was hard to ignore normally. She’d been all of seven when Nora disappeared and, in some ways, I think her youth had shielded her from the worst of it. Sometimes I wonder if it would have been easier—better—if it had happened when we were all younger. Or older. There’s something about seventeen, those soft teenage years when you think you’re made of sterner stuff but are really still filled with cotton wool. It imprinted itself so hard, so firmly into and on to me because I was so malleable, so yielding. At seventeen you think you’re done, fully formed; but really you’ve barely even got started. It was like a handprint in wet concrete pushed in at just the right moment and then made permanent.

“You talking about Jenna Fairfax?” Leo asked, and Elle nodded.

“How do you know Jenna?” I asked.

“I’ve been coaching the hockey team for a while now. Me and Bright. Fairfax is one of our best players. On the girls’ team, I mean.”

I raised an eyebrow. “Of course.”

“Elle’s getting pretty good too these days. Most elegant player on the ice what with all that figure skating,” Leo said.

Elle’s face seemed to pale even further, and her lips pulled back in a grimace as if she was about to speak before she stopped herself.

“Elle, you OK?” I asked.

“Actually I’m feeling a little sick. I might go upstairs and lie down.”

“Okay,” I said, watching as she placed her glass of water on the coffee table and pushed through the crowd to the staircase.

“She’s taking this pretty hard, huh?” Leo said.

“I don’t know. Maybe she’s really just not feeling well.”

“What about you?”

“You’d think I’d be used to it by now,” I said.

“It’s a rough thing to have to get used to, Mads.”

I shook my head, not disagreeing with him, just trying to shake something loose. To get to the root of what made it all feel so disturbingly empty. “It’s just not getting any easier. Sometimes I wish we’d stop with all the commemorations and memorials. It’s not like any of us have to be reminded, right? It’s like we’re trying to prove something, but what are we proving? Look around, there’s what, sixteen, seventeen people here?” I was talking in a strained rush, my voice low and jagged, and Leo had to step towards me to hear properly. “What good does this do any of us? All I see is us getting older and Nora staying the same.”

Leo’s brow was furrowed as he leaned over me, his hand stretching out to rest warmly on my shoulder; but someone behind me spoke before Leo had a chance to answer.

“You can go home whenever you want, Mads. No one’s keeping you from leaving,” Nate said, his voice stripped of emotion, warmth.

My hands tightened around my mug of coffee which had started to go cold. “That’s not what I meant. I want to be here; I just wish we didn’t have to be.”

“That’s not what I heard.”

“Well, maybe you shouldn’t have been eavesdropping.”

Nate’s jaw clenched as his gaze shifted almost imperceptibly so that he was now staring just to the left of my face.

“All I’m saying is, I wish one goodbye was enough. Or I wish we even got a goodbye. But we don’t even get that luxury, so we have to keep saying goodbye over and over and over again and it just feels less and less real the more that time passes,” I said in a rush.

“It’s been ten years. You think we should have just ignored that? Why’d you even come if you were so violently opposed to the idea of a ten-year memorial?”

“I’m not ‘violently opposed.’ I’m tired I guess. I’m just really, really tired.”

“Well, then I’d suggest you go home and get some rest, Mads. Get some beauty sleep.”

I couldn’t remember when or why things had got so bad between me and Nate. One day he was the person I called when I couldn’t call anyone else, and the next—well, I couldn’t even tell you. He’d simply stopped returning my calls and eventually I’d stopped making them. But he’d never spoken to me like that, with such open hostility I could feel it pounding off him, such shortness that his words threw me so much I literally stepped backwards and onto Leo’s foot.

But Nate didn’t stick around to hear my response, even if I’d been able to somehow stumble across one; he simply slipped past me and into the crowd, joining his mother in the kitchen.

It could have been a concerned comment, I suppose, something sincere and almost loving, “go home, get some sleep.” But it wasn’t and the sudden realization of how little he thought of me then roared in my ears, drowning out everything else.

It took me a while to realize Leo was talking to me, saying something soothing but ultimately meaningless: How difficult this was for Nate, how he’d been having a hard time, how difficult today was for everyone. I didn’t need Leo to tell me any of that; I knew it all already, implicitly. It was in evidence everywhere you looked in that room, and it lived inside me that day just as it did every day, but casual cruelty had never been a part of my relationship with Nate, had never formed an integral part of our language. If our silences had no give to them anymore, then neither did our words. They were brittle, ready to break at the slightest of touches.

I tried to think back to when Nate was the person I rang in the middle of the night, to when his voice was the only thing I could bear to listen to. Just like everything else then it felt so long ago, a lifetime ago. It had been years since I’d seen his name flash across the screen of my phone and, just as with Nora, my relationship to him had gradually been reduced to snowy memorials, stuffy rooms, and stilted small talk.

I took a sip of coffee, while Leo talked at me, and balked at its temperature. Depositing the mug on the coffee table I made my excuses to Leo and headed towards Ange, who was standing on the edge of a conversation between a variety of parents, not joining in. Her eyes were glazed as she drank her coffee and she failed to notice me as I approached.

“Hey,” I said, shaking her out of her reverie, “when are you heading off?”

Ange looked at me and shrugged. “Probably in twenty minutes or so, I guess?”

“No, I mean when are you heading back home to Madison?”

“Oh, not till tomorrow morning. I’m meant to be having dinner with my parents tonight.”

“I can still drive back with you, right?”

“Yeah, of course. So, have you talked to Nate yet? How’s he doing?”

“He told me I should go home to catch up on my beauty sleep,” I said while reaching for Ange’s coffee cup and taking a sip.

“Wow. How caring of him. When did you guys last speak?”

“Last year’s memorial, I guess? Definitely haven’t heard from him since then. I’m trying to work out what I did to offend him so badly, but I think it might just be my very presence.” I tried to make my voice sound light, indifferent, but failed. The truth was, I really was trying to figure out what I’d done, where it had all gone so horribly wrong.

Ange made a face at me, grabbing back her coffee. “You know that’s not it.”

“Do I? We’re not exactly friends anymore. If we ever were.”

“You’re friends. Don’t overanalyze this, it’s just a weird day.”

“Yeah, I know. I’d say something trite, like ‘can you believe it’s been ten years?’ but mostly I just feel old. And tired.”

“You know what I keep doing? I keep looking at Noah and thinking that he was a baby when she went missing. That’s what I can’t believe. That his entire life has been the same length of time as Nora being gone.”

I looked around for Noah, unable to find him, and wondered if he’d gone upstairs to join his sister. He’d been almost a year old when Nora disappeared. He had no memory of her except the one we’d built for him in her absence, and I wondered what that looked like. What that could possibly look like. We’d spent the past ten years of our lives at events like this, memorializing someone we loved, someone we missed, but for Noah this had effectively become his life. He had no memories that weren’t connected to, and hijacked by, Nora’s disappearance. At the very least I could look back to when she wasn’t gone, but for Noah, it was all he’d ever known. I thought back to the day he was born, and realized his birthday was coming up. February 14th.

***

Nora’s pissed because the birth of her baby brother is ruining her Valentine’s Day plans, so we’re lying on the couch in her parents’ living room, illegally eating marshmallows. “I don’t know what they think they’re doing,” she says, widening her eyes at me, “having a baby at their age. It’s gross. Plus, you just know this is a save-the-marriage baby. It’s so obvious.”

“That’s not fair, your parents always seem pretty happy to me. And your mom’s not that old,” I say, but Nora’s eyes just get wider.

“Oh, really? You know the doctor said Mom had a geriatric womb?”

Nora starts laughing, and I can’t help joining her, throwing a marshmallow at her head at the same time. But she catches it easily, popping it in her mouth and starting to chew while saying: “She said she almost stabbed him with a scalpel or whatever.”

“That sounds about right.”

“Yeah, as soon as I reach, like, fifty, I’m gonna start carrying a knife around to threaten people who call me ‘old’ with. No one will be able to arrest me though. I’ll just be the eccentric, kinda scary old lady.”

“It’s the perfect plan.”

“Right? I’ll get away with so much.”

Elle comes into the room then, complaining about being hungry, and Nora holds out her arms to her, beckoning her to the couch. She hops up to join us, snuggling up in between us, and Nora starts to feed her marshmallows, daring Elle to keep her mouth open while she attempts to toss them in there. “You excited to meet your baby brother, smelly head?” she asks, and Elle scowls, her face a picture of cartoonish displeasure. She is not excited to meet her younger brother. Nora pulls her onto her lap, squeezing tight and says: “You know I wasn’t excited to meet you either,” which makes Elle turn her head towards her older sister in shock. “Yeah, I thought you were going to ruin everything for me because I loved being the baby and I loved being the center of attention. But then I met you, and you were just the coolest, even though you cried, like, all the time, plus you thought I was awesome, which made me feel awesome, and now you’re my best friend.”

“I thought Maddie was your best friend,” Elle says, looking over at me suspiciously.

“Well, sure. But you’re my other best friend.”

Elle doesn’t look all that convinced, but I smile at her and she slowly takes another marshmallow from the bag and begins to chew thoughtfully on it.

Their parents hadn’t arrived back with Noah until much later, and Katherine had wanted to let Elle stay sleeping, but Nora had crept into her room and woken her. I could still see the look of sleepy awe she had on her face when she gazed down at the baby. I wondered if Elle remembered that day at all; she’d been six, so it was plausible that she did, but I knew that I’d had to fight so hard to remember Nora any other way than being gone that sometimes those memories of her being here felt too far out of reach even for me.

“Have you spoken to Louden yet?” Ange asked, cutting through my memories.

I shook my head. Louden Winters was Nora’s ex and the brother of one of our high school friends, Hale, who hadn’t made it to the memorial but had sent a vast bunch of lilies in her place. We’d all been friends at one point, more than friends really. A group of mismatched friends and siblings who’d grown up together from scraped knees and training wheels right through to tequila shots and heads hanging over the toilet bowl. I’d once been as close to Hale as I was to Ange; but then Louden had been named as a suspect in Nora’s disappearance and for some reason Hale hadn’t taken too well to me accusing him of killing our friend. I’d been trying to ignore Louden’s presence altogether, pretending he wasn’t there, but he was six foot three, taller than most everyone else there and it had been getting harder and harder to ignore the fact that I hadn’t even said hello.

“When did you last see him?” Ange asked.

“A couple of years ago at Christmas I think. At the bar. You were there.”

Ange nodded. “Right, yeah. You really haven’t seen him since?”

“No. Have you?” I asked, unable to keep the trace of suspicion that licked through me then out of my voice.

Ange swallowed a mouthful of coffee and nodded. “Yeah, I was in Chicago for a couple of days last year, remember? I went for a drink with him and Hale.”

I raised my eyebrows, looking between Ange and Louden. “Why?”

Ange shrugged. “Why not?”

I stayed staring at Louden for longer than I meant to, trying to arrange my thoughts in a way that made sense, jigsaw pieces scrambling to find their mate and failing. I knew what I wanted to say: because he might have killed our best friend, and it was almost there, rising higher and higher in my chest until I pushed it down, away, saving it for myself. I wasn’t allowed to say such things anymore.

It had been okay for a while, at least, the wild accusations and rampant theories. Louden’s arrest had come just days after Nora went missing, one of the main suspects, but he’d provided an alibi and been released without charge. It hadn’t stopped my own suspicions of course, and neither had it stalled the small-town gossip, but all these years later there was something childish about those words, an intense naiveté that I wasn’t allowed to indulge in anymore. They were words from another life, another lifetime, the one right after she went missing. Nevertheless, cold sweat pricked at my skin all of a sudden, the airless room stuffy with bodies, my own body still cold from the world outside as Louden turned towards me, feeling my stare, liquid brown eyes catching light. He lifted his chin in my direction and I let out a heavy breath before turning back to Ange.

“What did he have to say for himself?” I asked, my attempt at small talk still managing to sound like an accusation.

“The usual. He’d just started seeing someone, but I don’t know if it stuck.”

“Lucky her.”

“Mads,” Ange said, warning lacing her voice.

“What? All I’m saying is he’s a bad boyfriend, that’s all.”

“That was over ten years ago. People change.”

It was something I wanted to believe, desperately, that people change. And maybe I did believe it, just with certain caveats; that change was glacial, imperceptible, and when it did come it didn’t necessarily mean anyone had changed for the better. It seemed to me as though it was the world that kept changing, often with a loud, deafening crack as life tore itself apart, and we were all left struggling to keep up. Not all of us managed to. I was testament to that; I was still struggling to keep up with the thundercrack that had torn through our lives ten years earlier and led us all there, to that room on a snowy day.

As I stood there, just waiting for the day to end, waiting for that heavy, empty feeling to lessen just slightly, even though I knew it wouldn’t, that it probably never would, I couldn’t possibly have known that another crack was coming, waiting to tear us all apart yet again. That less than twenty-four hours later, Noelle would be dead, and I would be left once again, breathless, desperate, trying to make sense of a world that seemed determined to leave me behind, too broken and battered to even try and catch up.

CHAPTER THREE

I woke the next morning to the same shattering glass and a feeling in my chest like I couldn’t breathe, the same way I’d woken up the day before, the same way I’d been waking up for the past ten years. The weight of the memorial the day before still hadn’t lifted on top of which I had a slight hangover. I wished it felt different, I wished I felt different, but whatever I did, whatever I tried, nothing ever seemed to change. Or maybe I wasn’t trying hard enough; there were definitely people out there who would prescribe to that theory. As if she knew I was thinking of her, my phone began to buzz insistently on my bedside table, the illuminated screen telling me Serena was calling.

“Hey,” I said, pushing myself to sit up in bed as I spoke.

“Hey,” she said, her voice sounding a little breathless down the line. She was on her way to work. “How are you? How did yesterday go? Are you doing okay?” The questions came short and sharp; rat-a-tat-tat, like incredibly efficient gunfire.

I closed my eyes and took a deep breath, trying to keep my voice steady. “It was fine, I guess. It was … the same as it ever is. Hard. Cold. Strange.”

“I can’t believe it’s been ten years, Mads. It’s insane. I really wish I could have been there for you. For Nora too.” Serena had modulated her voice, gentle, gentle, but there was wind whipping around her as she walked down the street, traffic noise practically drowning her out, so I had to strain to hear her.

“I know, it’s fine. It was all fine. Ange was there, we stuck together.”

“Mom said you guys went out for a drink after?”

I rolled my eyes up towards the ceiling. My mom and sister sharing notes about me wasn’t breaking news however, so I let it slide.

“Was Nate there?” Serena continued.

“At the memorial, yeah; he didn’t come for a drink.”

There was a little beat, the briefest of pauses before: “How was he? How was that?”

I held my breath before answering, one, two, three, four, before remembering that what you were actually meant to do was count to ten while breathing to calm yourself down, not cut off the supply of oxygen for ten seconds. When I finally let the breath out, the sigh that emanated from me seemed to fill my entire bedroom.

“It was about as awkward as I thought it would be,” I said at last, “actually, you know what, it was worse than I thought it would be. He seems to actively dislike me now. I don’t know what it is I’m meant to have done, but there it is.”

Serena made a sound I had a little difficulty translating and then said: “He needs to get over himself. You’d think after everything that’s happened he could at least be nice to you.”

“It was the tenth anniversary of his sister going missing, Serena. I think we could cut him some slack,” I said, allowing Nate more sympathy than I’d given him the day before, always on the defensive when it came to him.

“Yeah, and it was the tenth anniversary of your best friend going missing! He could cut you some slack.”

I couldn’t argue with her there and she soon arrived at her L stop, so we hung up, Serena promising to call me later, and getting me to promise to call our younger sister, Cordy, even though we both knew I wouldn’t. The room felt colder, and I felt older the moment her voice left it. As I started to think about what the day actually meant—about Nora having been gone for ten years, about ten years of limbo, living in purgatory, not knowing where she was or whether she was alive—I also felt the old familiar weight begin to grow. It started in my chest, always, a boulder I couldn’t budge, a wall I couldn’t climb over or knock down. Trying to ignore it, and my phone still in my hand, I did what I did most mornings and began trawling through Instagram, anaesthetizing myself with photos of coffee, home décor tips and puppies. Should I have been doing something more profound on the morning of the official anniversary of my best friend going missing? Maybe.

It wasn’t enough though, not nearly a big enough distraction, and so I started to wonder what Nora’s family were doing, whether they would mark the day in some way, or if they felt the day before had been enough. There was no grave to visit, not for Nora. Without a body Nora had never been buried but she still left her mark. She was their mark and she was my mark. Maybe we all have them, I don’t know. Maybe I just got mine a little earlier in life than usual. But she was. She was my mark. Indelible. Permanent. Ineradicable. In some ways I was thankful for the constancy of it; I knew she’d never be fully gone as long as I was still here. Maybe that was why the pane of glass I dreamt of every night and could feel slipping from my hands almost every morning kept haunting me; because, in some ways, I didn’t want to wake up to anything else because the moment I did I’d know she was truly gone.

So, I lay in bed and imagined the Altmans slowly waking up, getting dressed and gathering for breakfast. I could see them walking down the staircase that was still gazed down upon by dozens of photos of Nora; I could see them settling down at the large table in the kitchen, coffee smells trailing through the house, snow falling outside the window just as it was falling outside mine. More likely, Noelle and Noah were getting themselves ready for school while Nate packed up to head home to Texas. Jonathan had probably already left for work, and Katherine would still be in bed, staring as blankly up at her ceiling as I had when I first woke up.

I couldn’t have known that Noelle wasn’t there, that Nate was the first to realize, that he tapped gently at his mother’s bedroom door, had to shake her to get her attention and ask where his younger sister was. That when he rang Elle’s phone it went straight to voicemail and a bubble of panic began to build somewhere near his duodenum, and Noah looked on, his wide brown eyes taking everything in. That Nate rang his dad next who was on his way to his law practice in Madison, where he spent most of the week, and that Jonathan couldn’t pick up because he hadn’t set up his hands free that morning because he didn’t want to speak to anyone that day at least not yet. That eventually Nate rang Elle’s girlfriend, Jenna, who said she hadn’t seen her since Saturday, and then finally he rang his buddy, Leo, who was already at the scene and suddenly that bubble of panic popped except it turned into a tidal wave rather than disappearing into air and he had to struggle to keep up with what Leo was saying because it couldn’t possibly be true.

It might have been around that time that my own phone rang again, Ange’s name popping up on my screen. She told me she’d be over to pick me up in an hour to take me back to Madison, and I pushed my covers off, body aching, limbs too heavy, preparing myself for a shower.

I suddenly couldn’t wait to get back to Madison, not because there was anything waiting for me there, but because waking up in that house, in the exact same spot I’d woken up ten years before, only to hear the news that Nora was missing, had too much poetic symmetry for me to handle at any one moment. My teenage bedroom rang with her memory, every inch of that room simply sang with her presence, low and clear, piercing; there was nowhere I could look that didn’t bear some trace of her. Perhaps I should have relished that. Especially on that morning. But really all I wanted was to get away from it all. I didn’t need to have the memory of Nora screaming at me from every wall and every corner to remember her any better, to miss her anymore than I already did. I wanted to hide somewhere deep and dark where Nora had never been, and do my very best to leapfrog over that day. But that was never going to be a possibility. Not that day.

I showered and dressed in the same clothes I’d been wearing the day before for no reason other than when I’d packed to go home I hadn’t been able to think beyond the memorial. Mom had already left for work by the time I made it down to the kitchen, and my dad, who was a retired school principal—my high school principal, in fact—was sat in the breakfast nook drinking coffee. The familiarity of my family home, the sight of Dad reading the newspaper, the muffled light of the kitchen as snow crowded the window pane, crouched over me as it always did when I was back there: Here was my home, a reluctant sanctuary, and yet I did not feel safe. I never did.

“Morning, Mads,” Dad said, glancing up from the paper as I wandered past to help myself to coffee and maybe even a bowl of cereal.

“Morning.”

“When are you heading back?”

“Soon. Ange will be over to pick me up in an hour or so.”

Dad nodded, sipping at his coffee as I leaned back against the kitchen counter and took a long drag from my mug.

“When are you planning to take your car in to get fixed?”

“I can’t afford it,” I said shrugging, “not right now anyway.”

“We can lend you the money.”

“It’s fine, Dad. I just need to save a little money and I’ll get it done.”

“But how will you get around until then?”

“I can just get the bus, it’s not the end of the world.”

Dad looked out the window at the snow and then back at me, an eyebrow raised in skepticism. “You can borrow the Explorer if you want? I don’t use it so much anymore anyway.”

I shook my head. “Dad, if I left you without a car you’d basically be stranded whenever Mom left the house. It’s fine, don’t worry about it.”

“But the bus—”

“Is a perfectly legitimate form of public transportation.”

“Okay, okay, I get it. I’ll back off.”

“Thank you.”

There was a slight pause while Dad weighed out his words and said: “You know your mom and I are always happy to—” his voice trailed off but his words still managed to fill the room, unspoken yet heard loud and clear.

I’d lost count of the number of times we’d had this conversation. It wasn’t always that exact conversation, of course; it wasn’t always about my broken-down, practically worthless VW. Sometimes it was about rent or my meds, occasionally about the cost of therapy and health insurance. It was always there, the helping hand, perennially extended out towards me along with the tendrils of guilt that inevitably accompanied it whenever I took it. But guilt pounded its way through my life, relentless and as all-encompassing as rain in a summer storm, regardless of whether I accepted the help that was offered me.

“I know, Dad.” I said at last.

“Okay, I just thought it needed to be said. Because you’ve been doing really well recently, but if you need a little help with money, then that’s okay. And I know yesterday must have been hard for you, not to mention today, but we just want you to stay on the right track.” He said it all in a slight rush, even though he normally spoke slowly, thoughtfully. He’d obviously worked up to this a bit, not wanting to spook me, as if I was a highly strung racehorse. I wondered if he and Mom had discussed it before she left for work that morning, or maybe even the previous night when I stumbled in through the front door, a little worse for wear.

I thought about every bitten back word I’d never spoken to my parents, and every catapult line I’d thrown out at them and wished I’d pulled back on. It had been a long ten years, and I couldn’t help feeling that I’d made it even longer. The guilt I felt over losing Nora had seeped out, into, and over everything, and eventually evolved into a guilt about feeling guilty; hell, it might even have been guilt over having any feelings at all. There’s no manual for grief, and there certainly isn’t one for being someone a missing person leaves behind; but however you were meant to act in the face of the impossible, I was pretty sure that I’d failed. Everything I did was filtered through that failure, grimy with that guilt, and as much as I hated asking for help, I seemed to be in need of it, all the time. I wanted, desperately, to get to a place where that helping hand didn’t immediately feel like a punch to the gut, but I had no idea how to get there, no idea if I ever would.

I nodded, staring into my coffee cup. I could feel the grief building in me. The small round rock of loss that lived somewhere around my abdomen and rose through my stomach and lungs, and up through my esophagus until it stayed somewhere right at the back of my throat, threatening tears and an inability to breathe. Sometimes it rose even further and lived for days inside my head, growing moss, clouding my thoughts and vision. Those were the days my limbs felt too heavy to get out of bed. Those were the days that had taught me that sometimes it was easier to say nothing at all. I had to be careful here, to maneuver myself around all the ways I might trip up, or fall down, or however you want to put it, because if I didn’t, if I didn’t look for the signs and pay attention, that rock would get bigger and bigger and heavier and heavier and I wouldn’t make it out of the house, let alone back to Madison.

“You want me to make you breakfast?” Dad added gently once it became obvious I didn’t have it in me to reply.

I shook my head again, this time a little more forcefully and said: “I’ll just have cereal.”

I was sitting in the breakfast nook eating my cereal when Ange called me again.

“Hey, I’m just finishing up my breakfast,” I said on picking up, assuming she was parked outside somewhere waiting for me to come out, “you want to come inside and wait for me here?”

“Maddie,” she said, her voice a breathless straight line.

“Yeah?” I said, suddenly sitting up a little straighter. There was something about the shape of her voice that instantly shook me, old memories rattling around in my ribcage making my heartbeat pick up.

“I … I—”

“Ange, what’s going on? What’s happened? Are you okay?” My voice was snappy and sharp, but I couldn’t help it, I knew where conversations like that went and my fear translated to frustration all too easily.

“I was just driving through town to come get you and all these police cars passed me.”

There was no way I could have possibly known, so of course I thought of Nora, blindly following my memory back, racing those cop cars as fast as they could go to a morning so vivid it could have happened yesterday.

***

I wake up slowly, one side of my face still smashed into the cool blue of my pillow case. When my eyes open the room is an even, cold grey. Ange is already up, the bed empty and the curtains opened halfway, not that it’s made much difference. Outside the world is one single color. White.

I reach for my phone, checking to see if there are any calls or texts from Nora, but there aren’t any. There’s one from Nate but I don’t read it, not yet anyway. I can smell hot butter and coffee, and I pull on my bathrobe and slippers before heading downstairs to the kitchen. Cordy is sat in the breakfast nook, her back to the window, feet on the bench and knees pulled to her chest while she texts someone feverishly and almost completely ignores me as I walk into the room. Instead of my mom at the stove, Ange hovers over the skillet, spatula in her right hand, waiting to turn the French toast over. She’s still dressed in her pajamas, one of my hoodies pulled over her T-shirt to keep her warm. Mom walks in through the garage door, waving a bottle of maple syrup triumphantly in one hand.

“I knew we had more somewhere,” she says, closing the door behind her, “disaster averted.”

“Since when do we put guests to work?” I ask, waving my hand towards Ange, and then staring pointedly at my sisters.

“Ange isn’t a guest, honey,” Mom says, squeezing Ange to her side, and kissing her on the side of her head, “she’s family.”

“Yeah, she’s family. And family makes family breakfast,” Cordy says.

“You’re all disgusting. And Ange, I apologize.”

Ange laughs and flips over four slices of bread in the huge cast iron pan, one by one.

“Have you heard from Nora?” I say to her, helping myself to a cup of coffee from the machine.

She shakes her head. “No, nothing. Have you?”

“Not since before I left work last night. You think we should be worried?”

“I dunno. It’s not like her, but maybe she went up to the lake house and forgot to take her charger or something?”

“Yeah, maybe.”

Just then I hear the sound of the front door opening, and my dad’s low chatter as he welcomes whoever it is that’s just appeared. They walk into the kitchen together, Dad hanging back in the doorway as Bright enters the room. He’s running the rim of his hat through his fingers as Mom smiles at him.

“Michael, what are you doing here? You know Serena’s back in Chicago, right?”

Bright nods his head but doesn’t answer my mom, instead looking from me to Ange who’s still studying the progress of her French toast.

“Maddie, Angela, have either of you heard from Nora today?”

We look at one another, Ange’s face suddenly slack, and I shake my head at Bright. “No, we were just talking about her. Neither of us have heard from her since last night. Why?”

“When last night?” Bright asks.

“Um, she left a voicemail on my phone.” I pull out my phone from the pocket of my bathrobe and head to recent calls. “At about 7:30. 7:27 to be exact.”

“What’s this about, Bright?” Ange asks.

“Nora took her dad’s car last night, and it was found earlier this morning, unlocked, keys in the ignition, just off Old Highway 51.”

“Yeah, so?” I ask. “Where’s Nora?”

“We don’t know.”

I could feel the same grip of panic and loss that had folded and tightened itself around me ten years before when I said to Ange: “Where were the police cars going?”

“They were headed towards the old highway, so I turned round and followed them because—” Because that was where Nora’s car had been found, and Ange was a reporter and certain habits are hard to break.

“Are you there now? What’s going on? Is it Nora?”

“Mads, it’s not Nora. It’s not Nora, but there’s a body and I think … I think it’s Noelle.”

All the air I had in my body was pulled out of me and replaced with lead, or granite, or concrete, or something heavy and immovable that dragged me down, down, down. My vision swam, images of Elle rising to the surface. She’d looked so young at the memorial and yet so weary, the weight of the world crowding her shoulders. How could this be happening again? A little over a week earlier I’d met her at CJ’s, treating her to a hot chocolate which had always been her favorite. She’d been filled with a razor-edge energy, cracking jokes and telling me stories about her girlfriend, Jenna, but then something had shifted in her and she’d started asking me questions about Nora. I’d put it down to the anniversary coming up so soon and had been happy to answer them. Normally when anyone talked about Nora I clenched up, went into lockdown, but it was different with Elle. I didn’t have to guess what her motives were when she brought Nora up, unlike with so many other people who just wanted to indulge in their morbid curiosity, to gossip about a missing girl as though she were a celebrity spiraling out of control.

I closed my eyes and tried to keep that picture of her in my mind: sitting in a booth at CJ’s, skimming the edge of her mug with her forefinger so that a pile of whipped cream and mini marshmallows appeared there before she stuck it in her mouth, while I groaned in faux disapproval and she grinned wickedly at me. I wanted to hold it there forever, but I knew how quickly that memory, that moment, would be eroded, degraded, twisted and turned into something else. I knew how quickly she’d go from Elle—the girl I’d helped teach how to ice skate and rollerblade and who’d hated to lose at Scrabble but still tried her best to win every time—to yet another person I’d be forced to mourn.

I was struggling to keep my head above the water when Ange said: “Mads, are you there?”

“Yeah,” I gasped. “I’m here.”

She talked me through what she was looking at: two cop cars and an ambulance. She recognized most everyone at the scene, including Bright and Leo and Leo’s father, Chief Moody. She knew better than to ask me if I was okay, and I knew better than to ask her. She spoke slowly, taking her time, but each word was weighed, freighted down and heavy. She’d spent a couple of years on the crime desk of a Milwaukee paper when she first graduated, but had since moved to the news desk, where if a grisly or interesting crime came up, it was invariably scooped up by one of her colleagues still working on crime. Every time she’d had to cover the death or murder of a woman or girl she saw Nora was all she had said to me at the time; it was all she needed to say. But she was clearly trying to pick up the pieces of her training there, still a reporter at heart, even as she tried to make sense of something that would never make any sense.

“And you’re sure it’s Elle?” I asked eventually, my voice small and young-sounding in the enveloping warmth of my parents’ kitchen.

“I don’t know for sure obviously, but I overheard the cops talking. They all know her, Mads, they know what she looks like. It must be her.”

I nodded, even though she couldn’t see. There wasn’t a single officer on our police force who wouldn’t know who Noelle Altman was.

“I have to go, Leo’s coming over. I think he’s going to ask me to leave.”

“Okay,” I said.

There was a small beat and then, “Should I still come over?”

“Yes,” I said, even though both of us knew we wouldn’t be leaving Forest View anytime soon.

I sat there for a long time, the morning seeping away from me until Ange arrived and told me what had happened after we’d hung up. Leo had been very proper, apparently. Refused to give her any details, saying they couldn’t confirm anything until the forensics team arrived from Wausau. When she’d asked him if it was really Elle, he’d glanced back towards the body—the body—and said he couldn’t say, but she said she knew.

I was having trouble getting to grips with what she was saying though, and although I could barely trust myself to speak, I said: “You’re sure? You’re really sure it’s Elle?”

Ange took a deep breath and seemed to steady herself. “I can’t be 100 per cent sure, but I heard them say her name. Why would they do that if it wasn’t Elle?”

I didn’t have an answer for her but my mind was a storm of other possibilities, other reasons, any other reason but that one which was so impossible I just couldn’t contemplate it. After everything that had happened, after ten years of missing Nora, of Nora being missing, how could it possibly be happening again? As we sat there I felt the past ten years diminish, shrink down to nothing so that we could have been seventeen again, Ange and I, stood in this very same room, as Bright explained to us that Nora was missing and we had to tell him anything and everything—every last detail—of the last time we’d seen or spoken to her, because every little thing mattered now. I thought about Elle’s pale face the day before, her quiet voice. She’d looked sick, or sickened by something, and I hated myself for not having pushed her more, dug deeper, delved further and figured out what—beyond the obvious—was wrong. And I realized then that I’d already accepted it, that I was already thinking of her in the past tense, and the steady pounding of guilt and grief began to build and build until it filled up the whole room.

Eventually, Ange looked down at her phone, which she’d been passing from hand to hand, twirling it distractedly between her fingers. “I need to call work,” she said, her voice strained, and I realized I needed to do the same.

“To tell them you won’t be coming in?”

“To tell them … to tell them about this.”

I don’t know why I was so shocked. She was a reporter after all, but still I could feel my eyes involuntarily widen, and watched as Ange bit down on her lower lip, maintaining my gaze.

“This is big, Mads. This is going to be really, really big.”

“You mean for your career?” I said, wishing as soon as the words had come out that I could take them back.

Ange slammed her phone down onto the table. “You know that’s not what I meant. Jesus Christ, Mads, could you at least give me some credit?”

“I know, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it.”

Ange looked at me warily. “You meant it a little.”

“No. I didn’t. I think after everything that happened with Nora with the press, my natural instincts kicked in, that’s all.”

Ange took a deep breath, and sighed heavily, weighing down the air between us. “If I don’t call in about this, I’ll be made to look like just about the worst, most inefficient reporter of all time. We’re talking about the younger sister of Nora Altman being found dead ten years to the day, and in the same spot that Nora’s car was abandoned.”

“I know, Ange,” I said nodding, really trying to mean it.

“And if I’m writing about it, then maybe it could be just that little bit better this time?” she said, although it came out sounding like a question, as if she herself didn’t quite believe it.

“It’s possible,” I said slowly, although I too didn’t believe it. When Ange first told me she was going to major in journalism I couldn’t help but see it as a kind of reaction to everything that happened when Nora went missing.

The first time a reporter knocked on my door Nora had been missing for just under a week. The local paper had been covering the disappearance since the beginning, but it took a while for a bigger paper to take notice. But once they did, they didn’t let go. Not for a long time. She’d been a reporter for a Madison daily—Ange worked for its rival now—and she’d tried to get out of me whatever it was the Altmans had refused to give her. When I too had refused to talk, she’d described me as “pained and pale” and had questioned why it was that Nora’s best friends weren’t willing to talk about her disappearance. What were we hiding? What did we know? Didn’t we want to help spread the word about our missing friend?

It would be worse this time: I already knew that much. Ten years was a long time and not only would there be reporters and well-meaning chat show hosts pondering over this sad, tragic mystery, but now anyone with an internet connection could join in the fun too.

I wondered if Elle’s family knew yet, if their day of remembrance had been interrupted by something so familiar the remnants of it were still strewn around their lives. I didn’t even have to imagine their faces as they were told the worst; I’d seen it before. The image of Nate with red-rimmed, sleepless eyes, his shoulders shaking uncontrollably reared up at me and I looked down at my phone, almost convinced that, despite everything, there would be a message from him, but there was nothing. I could hear the hollow knock at their front door as the Chief stood outside in the gently falling snow and could see as Nate answered, already knowing the worst from Leo and yet still unable to quite believe it. Katherine would be in her bathrobe still, knuckles white as she gripped the hallway bannister, refusing to break down, unable to speak, her wide brown eyes drowned in exhaustion, all color drained. The only one I couldn’t see in all of it was Noah. It was only in his mind that the memory of Nora’s disappearance wouldn’t be playing in full technicolor, reliving the same moments again and again, trying to make sense of how it was all happening again.

My heart clenched, a cold, iron fist squeezing tight, the shock of it no less bright, no less big because I’d felt it before. We’d all been there before and yet familiarity doesn’t always mean comfort. Sometimes what we fear the most is the unknown. But other times, knowing what’s coming, the shape of it, the taste, the smell, is so much worse. How it sets the world on edge, blurs the edges of your vision, peels back layers of skin only to reveal more and more of the same damn thing. Sometimes, knowing what’s coming doesn’t save you, it just sets your heart pounding as you teeter on the edge, waiting for that rush of air before the earth rises up to greet you.

CHAPTER FOUR

I didn’t make it back to Madison of course. I went to bed early, not because I thought I’d be able to sleep the day away but because retreat has always been my first and last form of defense. I chose something on Netflix that I’d watched a thousand times before and didn’t have to think about at all, so that when my phone gently buzzed beside me I was only dimly aware of what Lorelai and Rory Gilmore were saying to one another. You would have thought that upon seeing it was Nate texting me I would have read and replied to the message immediately, but instead it stilled me, froze me even, and I had to wait a few minutes before shoring up enough courage to read it in full.

You awake?

he wrote.

My thumb hovered over the keyboard for a few seconds before I replied:

Yeah.

A few more seconds passed and then my phone started ringing in my hand. I didn’t answer immediately, I couldn’t. I just stared as his name lit up my phone screen and desperately tried to think of something to say when I picked up.

“Maddie?” Nate said, as soon as I answered, not waiting for me to say anything.

“Hi, Nate.” There was a pause and I looked around at my room, squeezing my eyes shut in an attempt to block everything out. I got the feeling, even from down a phone line, that Nate was figuring out what to say too, how to speak. I took a deep breath and did the decent thing and spoke for him.

“I heard about Elle,” I said, practically whispering in the dim bedroom light. “I’m so sorry.”

I could hear his breath catch, words getting caught in his throat. Words were always getting caught, trapped, in my world. There were just some things that couldn’t be said, couldn’t be heard out loud, not because that would make them more real but because sometimes sharing certain pieces of you makes them less real. Or maybe it was a combination of the two, I don’t know. I just know that there are times when language is made impotent.

“Nate,” I said, “is there anything I can do? To help?”

I heard that catch of his breath again and then the release. “Yeah. Yes, thanks. We have to go down to the station tomorrow, to the police station, but Mom doesn’t want Noah to come with us. Could you come round to sit with him?”

“Of course.”

“Thanks … thank you, Maddie.” There was another short pause before he added a little stiffly, “I know my mom will appreciate it.”

If I hadn’t already been stunned into submission by Elle’s death, I would have been heartbroken over the formality of Nate’s request. It was better, although only marginally, than the outright hostility I’d gotten from him the day before; but Nate talking to me as if he barely knew me, as if I barely knew him, was a special kind of heartbreak. The kind that had already begun to heal years before. It was like brushing your fingers over the remnant of a scar; your skin was raised, changed, marked and when you took the time to remind yourself of it the ache was still there, but only just. But Elle was an open wound, blood still pumping to the site of the injury, demanding all my attention just to keep it from hemorrhaging. Hearing Nate’s voice, however briefly, however stilted and formal, made that stupid old scar throb with pain though, however much I didn’t want it to. The last time I’d spoken to Nate over the phone, the last time I had called him, I’d still been living in New York. I was twenty-three, over a year out of college and finding it increasingly difficult to get out of bed every morning.

***

It happens the way it always happens; shutters screaming shut over everyday life. I pull on my running shoes because they’re the first pair of shoes I find, even though I haven’t run in months—since I got to New York, really—and even then it was only ever something I did because my therapist and all my doctors told me I should. Exercise, they all say, as if it’s some kind of magic word. Abracadabra. I grab my keys and my cell and as I’m slamming the door behind me I pull the hood of my gray sweatshirt over my head. I have to walk up the basement steps just to get to street level and when I do I can smell it, despite the city smell: the engine exhaust and the trash cans, the Chinese takeout and the pizza place a couple doors away, the dog shit and probably the human shit too. Snow. Not yet. It’s not snowing yet, but it will. I shiver, from anticipation mostly but also regretting not putting on a coat warmer than my leather jacket. I start walking, hands stuffed into my jacket pockets, not even looking where I’m going, but still feeling the too-huge feeling in my chest. It’s grown in the last couple days to the point that I can barely breathe. Even now, with the cold stinging my eyes, they’re already smarting from almost crying anyway. I try not to cry, I really do, but I do it anyway.

The brick wall keeps rising up no matter how hard I try to knock it down, or stop it from building up in the first place, and I haven’t left the apartment in days. It has taken me the last fifteen hours just to force myself out now, and the only reason I’ve been able to do so is because it’s night, the middle of the fucking night, and no one will care who I am or where I’m going, or why I’m doing what I’m doing, or why I am the way I am. Every time I think about seeing anyone, or speaking to anyone, or having to stand at an ATM, or in line at a coffee shop, or make eye contact, or purchase milk, the scratching feeling starts up at the back of my eyes and it’s as if I can actually feel my retinas. The block of granite gets bigger and bigger inside my chest, and the brick wall builds itself up again, as if I never managed to knock it down in the first place.

I take a deep breath to steady myself, and even stop, my hand resting on a black iron railing in front of a brownstone. I almost lean over, head between my legs, about-to-faint-style, but I just keep a hold of the freezing iron and let that reassure me. After a couple of seconds, or maybe even minutes, I’m able to look around me somewhat and I notice that there’s a guy on the other side of the street walking in my direction. He’s wearing what looks like a magenta shell-suit jacket, and corduroy trousers and shoes without socks and he kind of looks right at me, but not as if he’s seen me. Just as if he were watching a movie and I was a secondary character he wasn’t really all that interested in. Blank look, then move on. I feel warm relief spread through me, as though I’ve just done a killer pee, and begin to walk on again. I don’t stop until I get to the East River.

I hunker down in my sweatshirt and jacket, trying to make myself as small as possible, hoping that it’ll also make me feel warm as well. The snow smell is even stronger here, the wind whipping it up along the river and mixing with that almost-salty metallic smell you get from the water as well. I sit down on a bench and it takes me a while to realize that there are people lying under some of the other benches, presumably because it’s got too cold to lie on the actual benches. One, two, three, four flakes of snow hurl themselves at my face, but if you ask me, they’re not trying hard enough. I lean back on the bench and, suddenly, my hands still stuffed in my pockets, my right hand curls around my cell and then, as if it’s not four o’clock in the morning, or damn close, I’m calling Nate.

He picks up on the seventh ring when I’m about to give in and hang up.

“’Lo.”

“Nate?”

I can practically hear him sit up in bed, even across half—more than half—the country, across one time zone, thousands and thousands of miles of night, and black sky, and farmland, and mountains, and rivers, and road, and motels, and tollbooths.

“Mads?”

“Yeah.”

“Are you okay?”

“I dunno, Nate.” I’m sitting looking at the Manhattan skyline but it’s not even like I’m looking at it at all. The slick blackness of the river looks nice though.

“Where are you?” he asks, as if we’re back in Madison, back when this used to happen all the time, and I’d call, and he’d ask where I was and he’d come meet me, and sit with me, until the too-huge feeling went away or at least lessened slightly. Sometimes, he’d even spot me walking across campus and he’d come after me, without me even having to call him. I never asked if he was watching for me, or just sitting up, late at night, unable to sleep, and looking out of his window. I never asked.

“I’m looking at Manhattan. I’m in Brooklyn. Where are you?”

“I’m in bed.” Oh, of course. I wonder for a second if he’s lying down, or sat up next to Emmaline. I wonder if she’s there, asleep next to him, dreaming. Probably not even dreaming yet. Pre-REM.

I don’t say anything for a while and it feels like a full minute goes by until I hear Nate cough softly and then say: “You should go home, Maddie. Go back to bed.”

But I can’t tell him about how I haven’t left the apartment in almost three days, and how every time I even think about doing so, my vision swims and black, black, black seems to rise up in front of my eyes.

“I need to ask you a favor,” I say instead.

“Yeah, of course.”

“Can you read it out to me? Do you have it?”

I hear him suck in his breath, even across those thousands and thousands of miles, because of course he already knows, instantly, that I’m asking him to read to me the last words Nora ever said to me. It’s the last voicemail she left me—the last voicemail she left anyone—and I transcribed it years ago, worried I would lose it one day, which of course I did when I finally upgraded my cell phone. Nate’s the only other person in the world who has that transcript, and this isn’t the first time I’ve asked him to read it out to me.

“Mads.”

“Please, Nate.”

There’s a pause before he says: “Okay. Just give me a second.”

I wait while he turns on his computer I guess, and I can hear him moving about, and moving furniture around, and the sound of a Mac starting up. It takes a while of tapping and typing and then he says, with a catch in his throat: “Mads, it’s me. Where—oh God, Maddie I can’t do this. I’m sorry. I can’t read this out.”

I can hear in his voice that he’s about to cry, about to break down, and I wonder to myself if I’ve done this purely to know that someone else is crying at the same thing, and at the same time, as me, to know that someone other than me feels the same pain. I squeeze my eyes shut.

“I’m sorry,” I croak, “I should never have asked. I shouldn’t have called—”

“No, that’s—”

But I cut him off before he can finish his sentence and I say, “I love you, Nate,” and then I hang up before he can reply, if he even replies at all.

Back in my childhood bedroom, almost four years later, I managed to ask him what time I should be round the next day to look after Noah before crawling out of bed to root around in my bag for a bottle of diazepam I hadn’t had to use in months.

Ange and I met for breakfast at CJ’s the next morning. It had taken me a little while to get out of bed; my limbs heavy, my brain sticky. I’d almost given up and texted Ange to cancel, but I didn’t want to do that to Elle. I lost so much time, so much of myself after Nora went missing. Days, weeks, months had slipped by, sometimes with me barely even noticing, at other times with a heaviness and a slowness so thick it spread itself all over everything, smothering me. I couldn’t be sure that wouldn’t happen again; I never could be, but I wanted to do my best, my very, very best to ward it off for as long as possible. I felt as though I owed Elle that. At the very least.

The door stuck a little as I pushed it open, making a gentle sucking sound as it finally gave way and I walked into the overheated diner. The windows were temporarily frosted with condensation and I immediately started to unwind my scarf as I looked around the room, trying to find Ange. CJ’s wasn’t a chrome ‘n’ leather kind of diner. Just a wooden box by the side of the road with vinyl booths and a slightly off-putting plaid and taxidermy theme. The sloped roof met in a point in the middle of the building, atop which spun a slowly revolving sign that just said “waffles.” Ange was sitting in the booth furthest away from the door by a window overlooking the road rather than the parking lot, and she already had a cup of coffee in front of her when I sat down. The diner was quiet despite the hour; it was just before nine in the morning and normally it would have been busy, but there were only three other booths full of people and there was a general hush over the place that pricked at my skin.

“Morning,” I said to Ange.

“Hey. You sleep okay?”

“Once I popped a couple of pills, sure.”

Ange’s lips pursed just as she was raising her mug to her lips and she put the mug down before even taking a sip.

“How about you?” I asked.

“Not great. I spent most of the night emailing my editor and trying to write up an article about Elle’s death that he deemed printable.” She stared down into her coffee. “This is my fourth cup of coffee this morning.”

I raised my eyebrows and said: “I should probably catch up then,” while signaling to a dyed-blonde waitress I didn’t recognize that I was ready to order. “Is the paper sending anyone else up to help you?”

“No, I managed to convince them that I could handle it myself. They wanted to send up Elise who works for the crime desk but, in the end, I told them just to send up a photographer and I’d handle the rest.”

“Are you sure that’s such a good idea?” I asked.

“What do you mean?”

“Well, this isn’t just some random crime. This is Elle. You knew her. We were there when Katherine and Jonathan brought her home from the hospital, Ange. Are you really going to be okay writing in detail about her murder? Not to mention writing about Nora.”

“I’ll be fine,” she said shortly, looking up to smile at the waitress who’d just appeared at our table.

“Can I get you girls anything?” the waitress asked.

“Coffee,” I said before looking down at the plastic-encased menu, although God knows why I did; I already knew what I wanted. “Plus waffles, side of bacon, two eggs over easy. Bacon extra crispy though. Like, carcinogenic.”

The waitress kind of chuckled but Ange gave me an edgy look.

“Sure thing. And for you, Ange?”

“Just more coffee, waffles and a fruit cup, please.”

“Should I know who that is?” I asked Ange once the waitress had gone to place our order.

Ange shrugged. “She’s been here about a year. Ruby. She’s nice. Never charges for maple syrup.”

Before Nora disappeared CJ’s decision to start charging for maple syrup was one of the most controversial things to ever happen there. Ruby returned with a mug for me and poured me a cup of coffee before topping up Ange’s.

“Your food will be right out,” she said before leaving us be.

“I went by to see Willard Knowles before coming here,” Ange said. “Do you remember him?”

“Yeah, of course I remember him.” Willard Knowles was the editor of the local newspaper, and both Ange and I had done work experience with him while we were still in high school. “Is the paper still going?” I asked, unable to keep the surprise out of my voice. It had always been on the edge of collapse, even ten, eleven years ago.

“Yes and no. He’s gone online and he’s working out of his basement but the Forest View Examiner still lives. I went over to see if he knew anything about what happened to Elle. I’d been hoping to work out of his office, but when I saw his new setup I thought better of it.”

“Depressing?”

Ange shrugged. “Just a little weird. His photocopier is on top of his tiki bar.”

I let out a short snort of laughter despite myself, and reached for my coffee.

“He didn’t know much more than me; the police are keeping pretty quiet on this one. Willard thinks they’re waiting on the state police before they officially announce anything. But he did have some photos.”

“Photos?” I asked, barely able to get the word out. I wanted to press pause, to catch my breath; everything was moving so fast, too fast. Two days before I’d stood in front of Elle, talking to her, watching her, worrying over her, and now Ange was talking about crime scenes and photos and I couldn’t quite figure how we’d got here.

“Yeah. He went up to the scene as soon as he heard about it. I must have just missed him yesterday when I was there. They wouldn’t let him take any until the scene had been cleared and the body—”

There were those words again. The body.

The color drained from the room around me and I was drowning in silence.

It was impossible for me to reconcile those two words with Elle. I didn’t want to slip into such anonymity so quickly and so easily. I wanted to hold onto her, as I knew her, for as long as possible, because I knew, so very well, and so very, very painfully, how quickly and easily that whole person would soon turn into an image, an idea, a talking point, and finally, just a memory.

One of the strangest things about when Nora disappeared—around the time of the media furor, anyway—was how present and not-present she was. She was everywhere. In every article, on every TV news show, she even made it into Us Weekly for Christ’s sake. But she was nowhere as well. There were no photos of a crime scene because there wasn’t one. The photo that got circulated to the media was the one taken in junior year for the school yearbook. She was just simply—gone. But Elle was being referred to as “the body” now. Stripped down to her most basic function. When I thought of Elle I thought of her either laughing while sucking on a milkshake aged sixteen, or staring me down hard-eyed while playing board games aged six. I didn’t want to replace that with this new image that was coalescing in my mind, based on scraps of information and an overworked imagination.

“Maddie?” Ange was saying, reaching over to lay her hand over my forearm. “You okay?”

“Yeah,” I said, swallowing, “I’ll be fine.”

“So, Willard managed to get a picture of something that was left at the scene.”

“What was it?” I asked, suddenly sharp.

“It was this kind of symbol. In the snow.”

“Do you have a photo of it?” I asked.

“Not a good one, but Willard emailed it to me so that my paper could use it.”

“Can I see it?”

“Are you sure you want to?”

I swallowed, not sure if I could answer, not sure if I really did want to see the photo. I realized that it hadn’t quite sunk in yet; that I’d been skating over the surface of this loss, waiting for the ice to break under my weight and for me to fall through the frigid water below. I still couldn’t believe it, that all this was happening again, that Elle was gone, that Elle had been murdered. It felt ripped from the pages of a horror movie script, and yet I knew it had to be real because it all felt so familiar. I hated how used to grief Nora’s disappearance had made me, but I still wasn’t sure I was ready to confront the reality of Elle’s death, because doing so would chip away at my memories of her that were already starting to dim and distort.

The body.

The words echoed in my head and I shivered involuntarily as Ange said: “Mads, you want to see the photo?”

I could have said no, of course, but I didn’t want to give up so easily. Elle—a lot like Nora—had often demanded attention, and if there was any time she deserved it, it was now. So, I nodded yes, and Ange flipped her iPhone towards me after scrolling through her photos. I stared down at the screen.

“Does this mean anything to you? The symbol?” she asked.

The photo was taken at a strange angle, Willard obviously having tried his best to get the clearest shot, but all I could really make out was a symbol drawn into the snow the way a child does. It was the image of what looked like a compass, except that where the four points should have read N, S, E, W, every single one pointed to an “N.” I stayed looking down at it for what must have been a long time because after a while Ange had to clear her throat just to get my attention.

“You all right, Mads?” she asked.

“Yeah—” my voice caught on the word and I took a gulp of coffee. “Yeah.” I passed the phone back towards Ange. “It’s that compass thing the Altmans have at their lake house. Their granddad made it when Noah was born, remember?”

“What?”

“The symbol. It’s a copy of the ‘N’ compass at their lake house. You don’t recognize it? All of the ‘Ns’ represent one of the kids, right?” I traced my finger around the outside of the circle. “See? Nate, Nora, Noelle, Noah.”

“Shit, I didn’t even think of that. And we were just at the lake house on Sunday.”

She shrank down into her booth with a heavy sigh as Ruby the waitress deposited our breakfasts in front of us. I smiled up in thanks and noticed her glancing quizzically down at the phone in Ange’s hand. Ange quickly made the screen go dark and said: “Thanks, Ruby.”

“You girls need anythin’ else?” Ruby asked.

“Just more coffee, please.”

“Sure, you want me to keep it coming?”

We both nodded and with that Ruby went off to get us more coffee. Ange deposited the contents of her fruit cup over her waffles and then poured over at least three quarters of her jug of maple syrup. I watched as she began cutting up the waffles, adding blueberries and sliced strawberry to the forkful and then swirling it around in a pool of syrup.

“What do you think the significance is?” she asked as her dangerously loaded fork wavered towards her mouth.

I looked down to focus on my own plate, breaking off a piece of crispy bacon with my fingers and distractedly dipping it into my jug of syrup. I couldn’t get the words “the body” out of my mind. It was ricocheting off everything else I heard or thought, tainting everything, draining the world of meaning.

“I don’t know,” I said softly, wishing that I did. We were both quiet for a while until I asked: “So, did you get your article finished?”

She looked up sharply, her brown eyes coming into focus on me before she swallowed her mouthful of waffle and said: “Well, it’s my job, right?”

“I’m not judging you, Ange. Just wanted to know if you met your deadline.”

Ange flattened her lips into a straight line, picking up her phone again and looking for something on it. “It should be up by now,” she said. “Yeah, here we go. You want to read it?”

I nodded, reaching for her phone again and leaning back in the booth to read her article. As I did so a white noise roar screamed inside my head, drowning out the rest of the diner.

CHAPTER FIVE
Madison Journal
Teen Girl Murdered in Small Town
By Angela Cairney

January 9, 2018

The body of a 17-year-old girl, Noelle Altman, was found just outside Forest View close to the side of the road just off Old Highway 51 in the early hours of yesterday morning, January 8th. She is believed to have died between the hours of 8 p.m. on January 7th when she was last seen and 7 a.m. on January 8th when she was found by a local woman who drove past and noticed an abandoned car.

Noelle was the sister of Nora Altman who has been missing from Forest View since January 8th, 2008 when her car was found abandoned in the same spot by a local police officer. As with the disappearance of Nora Altman, the police currently have no leads as to the murder of Noelle Altman, and are asking that anyone with any pertinent information to please step forward. They do not think the two incidents are connected and a spokesperson has revealed that the possibility of suicide has been completely ruled out.

The Altman family have requested peace and understanding at this time, and our condolences and heartfelt thoughts go out to them as they deal with this tragedy.

It was a short article, and I read it quickly, drinking in the few facts Ange had managed to glean from somewhere. What time Elle was found, when she was believed to have died, the exact location she was found. It was all relevant, pertinent, and yet it didn’t feel real. How could I be reading about Elle?

“The same spot,” I said, lingering over that detail. “How close was it exactly to where Nora’s car was found?”

Ange raised her eyebrows. “Really close. Willard said her body was a little ways off in the woods, but you could see the road still. The car was right by where the ribbon is.”

I reached for my coffee, as if going to drink some, but couldn’t lift it to my lips. Sometimes, when I closed my eyes, I could still see the headlines and photographs that filled the newspapers in the days and months after Nora’s disappearance. But that little patch of land where her car had been found existed somewhere inside me, desolate and snowy, even in the summer when the sun managed to warm my skin and my mind managed to crawl its way out of a perpetual winter. For Elle to have been found there—to have been left, abandoned there, as if she were nothing but a scrap to be discarded and forgotten—gave shape to her death in a way I hadn’t anticipated. Whoever had done this may as well have placed Elle within the chalk outline of the body Nora had never left behind.

CHAPTER SIX
Wisconsin Daily News
Family Fears for Missing Teen
By Gloria Lewis

January 15, 2008

It’s been seven days since Wisconsin teenager Nora Altman went missing from the small town of Forest View, and her family is concerned. “This isn’t like Nora,” her father, attorney Jonathan Altman, said at a press conference held in nearby Waterstone last night. “She has never left home without telling either her family or friends where she is going, and we are very, very worried that something terrible has happened to our wonderful girl. We remain hopeful that she is somewhere, healthy and alive, and if that is the case then Nora, please come back to us. Please get in touch. With anyone. To anyone who may have taken her, may have hurt her … I beg you, please come forward. Please bring our girl back.”

An emotional Mr Altman was unable to finish his statement and plea to the wider public to be on the lookout for the tall 17-year-old girl who went missing over the course of the night of January 7. Her car was found abandoned by the side of the road, on a lonely and unpopulated stretch of Old Highway 51 the next morning, January 8, by local policeman and friend of the missing teen, Officer Leo Moody. It was Moody’s father, Chief of Police Patrick Moody who took over from Mr Altman at the press conference, issuing the description of the brunette and asking the public to report any sightings, and for any witnesses who may have seen her as she exited her vehicle or later on that night to come forward.

In a separate statement, the police department made it clear that despite the family’s fears they do not yet suspect foul play. Nora is a popular, smart, and tenacious young woman by all accounts, and there is no evidence yet that she left the area under anything other than her own steam. Nora Altman is described as being roughly five foot nine with dark brown, almost black hair and blue eyes. Anyone with any information regarding her whereabouts is asked to call the number below.

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