by A. M. Taylor
Regina didn’t offer up anything else, so I finished my coffee, left a big tip, saying thank you as I did so and left her and Ben to their quiet, shuttered morning.
Outside, the day burned with winter sun, the air so cold it was like sandpaper against my skin. I walked down to the lake, just to reassure myself it was there. I wondered where Kyle was and what had happened to him, and then I wondered where Annalise was and what had happened to her. I thought about Elle lying in the snow, waiting to be found and, finally, inevitably, I thought about Nora.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Despite having gone missing years apart, and despite being several years apart in age at the time of their disappearances, Nora and Annalise did have a few things in common other than geographical proximity. They were both in relationships that were experiencing problems, and they were both living in a small town they wanted to leave. They wanted something more. They wanted something bigger. I had no way of knowing what it was exactly that Annalise had wanted, or where it was she wanted to go, but Nora had been clear on what she’d wanted pretty much since we started high school, probably even before then. She had never imagined herself failing. She had never imagined herself falling.
I’d spent years thinking about those last few days leading up to Nora’s disappearance. She’d been in a weird mood, dealing with doubts and fears she’d never really confronted before. She’d been like that ever since Thanksgiving when she’d first found out about Louden’s cheating.
***
Nora is sat at the far end of the long wooden table when I walk into the Altmans’ kitchen for my annual Thanksgiving pie visit. She’s slumped down in her chair staring dolefully at her plate, dressed in a pallid outfit of oatmeal-colored pajamas. I have literally never seen Nora wearing pajamas outside of the hours of 9 p.m. and 9 a.m. so an obligatory alarm goes off in my head as I catch Nate’s eye and he gives me a questioning look. Sitting down next to Nora, she finally looks up to register my appearance.
“Hey,” I say.
“Hi, Mads,” she intones blandly, her voice hollow. Up close her dark, pitch-black hair looks dull, lighter in color almost, and her skin is red-and-white blotchy, her eyes puffy pouches. I have never seen Nora cry. I’ve known her almost fifteen years but never seen her cry. Not even at The fucking Notebook.
There’s general chatter and clatter from the rest of the table, the family generally ignoring Nora’s forlorn demeanor, which seems strange to me because in general she’s the sun around which the rest of the family merely orbits when it comes to social gatherings and occasions. Only Nate seems in the least bit perturbed, and I meet his gaze again. His face is as inscrutable as my own, however, and I can’t tell whether he knows about Louden yet. Nora wouldn’t have told him of course. The pair of them barely communicate these days. Nora’s pushing her fork around the cake plate in front of her, the blueberry pie half-demolished, and yet barely touched.
“Um, are you okay?” I ask in a hushed undertone. The question is redundant though, as she very clearly is not okay. She looks out at me from under a thatch of uncharacteristically unwashed hair. Her eyes say it all: of course I’m not fucking okay.
“Let’s go upstairs,” she says suddenly, grabbing the arm of my dark burgundy sweater. “You can bring your pie.” I risk a look at Nate, who’s still watching us, and follow Nora out the kitchen and up the stairs to her room.
With the door shut Nora collapses onto her bed, her eyes open, staring straight up at the white ceiling.
“What’s going on?” I ask, pulling the chair from out beneath her desk and wheeling it closer to her white iron bedstead. Leaning back in the chair I rest my feet on the side of the bed and look down at Nora as if I were the psychiatrist and she were my patient.
“I saw Louden. Last night.”
“And?”
She doesn’t say anything for a while, which throws me. In fact, the whole thing is throwing me. Nora doesn’t wallow. Nora doesn’t contemplate and ruminate. She doesn’t fret and agonize. And she always has an answer. To everything.
“And he was … Louden.”
“What does that mean?”
“I mean, he opened the door and, I don’t know, I was expecting guilt or something. A look of shame, anything. Just … something. But he opened the door and he just—he was just Louden. He looked pleased to see me, Mads. Pleased to fucking see me.”
“So, what are you saying—you guys didn’t break up?”
“Yes. No. I don’t know.”
This was possibly the first time I’d ever heard Nora say: “I don’t know.” I shift in my seat and stare down at her, willing her to talk.
“It was just so weird, Mads. I don’t know what I was expecting: him to just open the door and immediately admit to having slept with someone else in Chicago? Everything was just so freakishly normal. We went into the living room to say hi to his parents—even though, like, I’ve literally seen them more often in the past three months than he has—and then we went up to his room and he started kissing me and saying how much he missed me and … Oh my God, Mads, I just kissed him back and said how much I’d missed him!” Nora sits up straight suddenly and stares at me with rounded, wild eyes.
“So what are you saying? It just never came up …?”
“No, no. I-I eventually said something.”
“Well, what did you say?”
She slumps back onto the bed, her eyes back to staring at the ceiling. Just then my cell beeps and I slip it out of my pocket to read the text message. It’s from Nate.
Mads, what’s going on? Nora says she has flu, but she doesn’t have a single symptom. What the hell has happened? She’s acting pretty fuckin weird.
“Who is it?” Nora asks, suddenly suspicious, and for some reason I lie.
“Cordy. Checking I know I’ve gotta be back for family Thanksgiving charades.” I roll my eyes at Nora even though I love charades and am excellent at it.
Nora puffs out her cheeks and sighs as I rattle off a quick reply to Nate.
Well, she’s not got flu but don’t wanna say much more.
He texts back almost instantly.
Come back downstairs.
I frown at my phone and stick it back in my pocket.
“So, what did you say to Louden?” I prod Nora with the toe of my shoe, and she kind of just shakes her head at me.
“It was so awful, Mads. I just suddenly blurted out ‘how many girls have you hooked up with since moving to Chicago?’ and he just—He looked like I’d accused him of murder. But also like he’d committed murder, you know?”
“What happened after that? Did you dump him?”
“I don’t know. I don’t really know what happened, it’s kind of a blur. He said I don’t know what you’re talking about and then I said don’t be stupid, I’ve seen a photo, and he kind of looked like I’d accused him of another murder, and then I said how many again, and he said just one, and I said I didn’t believe him, and then I left. It was so weird though. I really thought I’d go over there, and he’d sit me down and say college was different to what he expected and he couldn’t carry on having a relationship and it was stupid to think that he could, and that would be it, you know? Like, I could accept that. I could respect that. But he just wanted to carry on as if he wasn’t a conniving, cheating, unrepentant asshole.”
“Wait, you went round there hoping he’d break up with you?”
“Not hoping. Just expecting. I really didn’t think he’d cheat on me for the sake of it. I didn’t think he’d do it just to carry on going out with me. I thought that would be it—he’d gone to college, realized he wanted to fuck loads of other girls and was gonna break up with me. Fine. I can cope with that. I could cope with that. I’m reasonable.”
“Sure.”
“I am! I’m not some hopeless … high school girl sitting at home imagining how my wedding to Louden fucking Winters is gonna look.”
“Right. You’re Nora fucking Altman.”
“Exactly!
I’m Nora fucking Altman and I’m not sure if I’ve actually broken up with my cheating boyfriend yet, or if it’s just implied I have.”
“Have you heard from him?”
Nora listlessly passes me her phone and it has sixteen missed calls and a ton of messages. All from Louden Winters.
“Have you answered any of these?”
“No.”
“Okay.”
“Is that a positive or a negative okay?”
“It’s completely neutral.”
“You’re not allowed to be neutral.”
“Well no, obviously I’m not neutral neutral, you know how I feel about neutrality in general.”
“It’s best left to the Swiss.”
“If that, the sneaky, neutrality loving bastards. No, I am 100 per cent on your side, but maybe you need to speak to him? To make sure he actually knows you guys are over? I mean, he’s not the brightest crayon in the box.”
“He’s not stupid, Mads.”
“Well, he’s not smart either. He cheated on you for one thing.”
Nora doesn’t move a muscle, and my phone beeps again, but this time it really is Cordy, and it really is time for me to go home. I have a championship title to defend, after all.
Nora catches one of my feet before I can swing them both down off the bed and onto the ground and says quietly into the gloom that has descended in her room: “I thought I’d want to kill him when I saw him, but I didn’t. What does that mean?”
“It just means that you’re not homicidal, Nora, not that you shouldn’t break up with him.”
I don’t think she ever really expected to be hurt by Louden. Or at least not as much she was. Not because she didn’t expect Louden to hurt her, but because she didn’t think she could be hurt. By him or by anyone. It was part of her entire attitude towards life: that it was something to be grabbed and molded into a shape or figure of her own making. I often wondered how long it would have taken her to realize that life wasn’t something we got to shape, but instead it was what shaped us. Not all that long probably; life had a way of announcing itself as the architect rather than whatever it was you were trying to build. It could knock things down just as easily—more easily—than build things up. Destruction takes seconds. Creation takes years.
By the time I got to Eagleton the day was slipping away from me, the winter sunlight was being leached from the sky, trees turning black as the air turned indigo. The waiting room was empty when I wandered in, small and stuffy from overworked radiators, and a young man in a brown uniform was sitting behind the reception desk looking bored.
“Hi, is Sheriff Lundgren around?” I asked, disturbing the receptionist from whatever it was he was looking at on his phone.
“Lundgren?” he said, looking up sharply. “Sure, who’s asking?”
“Maddie Fielder,” I said. The deputy just looked at me, his face blank, so I continued, “I just have a few questions.”
“About what?”
“I’d really rather ask him.”
“Her.”
“What?”
The deputy offered me a smirk and said: “The sheriff’s a her.”
He pointed at a room to my left, where a woman had just appeared in the doorway, and I grimaced internally at my mistake.
Sheriff Lundgren had brown-gray hair and wide, high cheekbones that made her face look expansive and welcoming even as she frowned at me. She was in the same brown uniform as her deputy, hands on hips, feet placed wide apart.
“What can we do for you, Miss?” she said, her voice pleasant, almost soothing.
“It’s Maddie,” I said, “and I wanted to ask you about Annalise. Annalise Rigby.”
“Annalise, huh? Well, what do you want to know about her? And why?” The deputy was looking between Lundgren and me, riveted, and I glanced at him momentarily before Lundgren said: “Would you prefer to do this in my office?” and I nodded.
Her office was colder than the waiting room—clearly the deputy had the radiator cranked up high—and messier. She went to sit behind her desk and waved her hand at one of the spare chairs in front of it for me to sit in.
“So, you wanted to ask me about Annalise? What exactly about her?”
I stared at her. I wasn’t sure what I wanted to ask her about Annalise exactly, except that I wanted to know every detail about her disappearance and investigation. I had a feeling that wasn’t really on the table, so instead of asking a question, I said: “I was friends with Nora Altman. And I knew Noelle too, obviously.”
The sheriff nodded curtly, and I knew immediately there was no need to clarify any further. “Okay, and now you’re here asking me about Annalise? Just as their brother has been arrested. Should I assume you know him too?”
“I do.”
Lundgren narrowed her eyes and shifted in her chair, getting comfortable. “What do you remember about Annalise’s disappearance?” she asked.
“To be honest, nothing. I only came across her name yesterday. I can’t believe I’ve never heard of her.”
Lundgren nodded. “Well, she didn’t get as much media coverage as Nora, that’s true. Nora had the benefit of being a few years younger in that case, although obviously there are no benefits here. Annalise also wasn’t from Stokely so that inevitably made people assume she’d simply left.”
“You don’t believe that?”
“I’d only been sheriff for a few months when Annalise went missing. Ever since I’ve always worked from the assumption of worst-case scenario.”
“What does that mean?”
Lundgren sighed, looking around her office for the words she needed. “I made a lot of assumptions with Annalise at the beginning. Based on the fact that she was an adult, and, from the lack of any pertinent evidence, I thought she was probably okay. That she’d simply upped and left. I made a lot of mistakes and even though I realized that fairly early on, it was too late to rectify any of them.”
“Did you ever look into Annalise’s disappearance being connected to Nora’s?”
“Well, there were some pretty clear similarities to Nora’s case, or at least I always thought so, but unfortunately most of those similarities were due to how inconclusive both cases were.”
“How do you mean?”
“The suddenness of the disappearance, the lack of evidence, the way there were no real personal effects missing at all apart from what they had on them.” Lundgren ticked off each item on her fingers as she listed these similarities, as if they were items on her grocery list. “I requested the file from Nora’s disappearance, for comparison, but we never got it. By then Nora’s case had already gone cold, and the department claimed it was in the process of being transferred to a new facility and couldn’t be located.”
“So, you never actually saw the file?” I asked.
“No, I did not.”
“Would that have been the Waterstone Police Department you requested the file from?”
“Sure was. I asked the Chief a couple times, but it was ‘no can do’ every time.”
“Do you think he was lying to you?” I asked, sensing a little more resentment from her than simply being annoyed at Waterstone for having lost the file.
Lundgren sighed and twirled a pen around in her hand. “I’m not accusing him of that. Probably they just mislaid it because it had been so long by that point, but it did strike me as a little odd that they weren’t more willing to help with Annalise considering everything that had happened with Nora Altman. Look Maddie, I’m guessing you’re here because you think all this—Nora, Annalise—has something to do with Noelle’s death. Am I right?”
“Yes.”
Lundgren nodded and directed her gaze straight at me. Her eyes were the same faded blue as stonewash jeans. “Do you think Nathan Altman is guilty?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” I said, answering as truthfully as I could.
“I don’t think you’d be here if you really believed it.” She was looking at me still, so steadily I had to look
away. I’d spent the last ten years being looked at the way she was looking at me then: like she couldn’t decide if I should be wrapped up safe and put away, or picked up, brushed off, and set on my way again.
“I don’t think I can believe it,” I said slowly, trying to articulate something I hadn’t quite wrapped my heart and my head around. If Nate was guilty, then I had lost him too. And I wasn’t sure I was prepared to lose anyone else; I wasn’t sure I’d survive that too. But that fear—that he really was guilty, and I was just too scared to see it—was there already, at the edge of everything, like frost on a windowpane. It had been there for a long time I suppose, sketching itself over that pane of glass that still loved to taunt me at night, but it felt different now, more urgent; maybe now it wasn’t just at the edges of the windowpane, but had frosted over the whole thing. Shadows moved beyond it, but the frost was too thick to see through. I wanted to smash it, to break through, to watch those cracks break and shatter and finally see through to the other side. I just didn’t know how. Maybe I wasn’t strong enough yet. Maybe I never would be.
“I think you need to start getting used to the idea that Nate Altman might well be guilty,” the sheriff said quietly but firmly. “Sometimes the solution’s just staring us right in the face, as much as we don’t want to look at it.”
By the time I left the Eagleton police station the world had gone completely dark. I looked up, expecting stars, but clouds must have rolled in at some point in the evening because there was nothing. I breathed in the sharp, clean air, grateful for the way it scraped my throat and lungs.
There was a time when the only way I could face the world was like that, air burning my lungs, darkness protecting me. I used to wait out the days, which were full of people and expectations, in my room until night fell and I could breathe in fresh air again. I would leave my dorm room at two, three in the morning, the hallway quiet or close to it, but strip lighting removing any sense of nighttime eeriness.