by A. M. Taylor
“You mean that she slept with Bright on New Year’s Eve?”
Leo’s gaze focused in on me, sharp and clear. He’d been looking anywhere but at me while he spoke, avoiding eye contact. “You knew about that?”
I nodded, even though I’d only recently learned about it. I didn’t want him knowing that I’d been following the same rabbit hole that had led Elle to him, that I’d read the same messages she had.
“Louden still doesn’t know,” he said with a short, rasping laugh.
I could have pointed out that that was the least of what Louden didn’t know, but I didn’t. I couldn’t. Leo seemed to have fallen under his own spell and I was worried anything I said would break it and I’d never hear what happened to Nora. I should have been more worried about other things of course. I should have been worried that I was in the presence of a killer, a two-time murderer who had a gun at his hip and a badge over his left breast. But I could feel it, how close I was to finally finding out what really happened to Nora, and I couldn’t stop myself from pressing on, pushing forward, even though I should have been running away as fast as my legs could carry me.
“She used the bathroom to clean herself up, wash her face. She was pretty calm by the time she came back out and I gave her a beer. We both had one. She didn’t seem like she wanted to leave. At least not at first. We were having a nice time, talking, drinking. I asked her about Louden and Bright, but she didn’t wanna talk about any of that. She wanted to be distracted, I think. I think maybe she was a little embarrassed about how she’d been when I found her by the side of the road. She was always so cool, you know?”
He seemed to be waiting for a response this time, so I nodded. He was right, she was cool.
“I’d never seen her like that before. But the more we talked, the calmer she got. The cooler she got. More herself. We had a couple more beers. We were sitting over there,” he said, pointing towards the couch where he’d been sat when I found the cartoon.
He paused again, still staring at the couch, and I thought maybe I’d lost him. The cabin was so full, the air breathing in and out with Nora and her last few hours, I could hardly bear it. I could feel her there, her and Elle both, the haunting moving on from something ephemeral, from a gossamer veil to a velvet heaviness that permeated everything.
My limbs felt heavy, like iron, weighting me to the floor but also as though they might melt at any moment, while just underneath my skin, razors whittled away at my defenses. I wondered how long I would last.
“I kissed her,” he said, the words punching the air. “And she kissed me back for a while but then she pushed me away, started babbling again, putting her face in her hands like she was going to cry again. I wanted to make her feel better. I’d liked her for ages. I think maybe even Louden knew, which was why he was always bragging about how many other girls he was sleeping with, because he knew how much it killed me. But she wouldn’t let me hold her, wouldn’t even let me touch her, like I’d done something terrible, you know? She was the one who slept with Bright. She was the one who let me kiss her.”
Nausea tore through me again, even stronger than before and I thought I might actually throw up. I had to force myself to stay standing. Leo shook his head, lost to memory, engulfed by time.
“It didn’t have to happen the way it did,” he continued. “If she’d just gone along with it, none of this would have happened.”
“Gone along with what?” I asked. I was practically whispering, physically unable to make my voice any louder, any stronger, but my words still sounded like thundercracks in that quiet, deadly room.
His eyes snapped to me and whatever reverie he’d been in was gone. I’d ruined it. Spoken too soon.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
“She wouldn’t let me hold her. If she’d just let me hold her, it would have all been okay.”
I told myself to breathe, to stay where I was, to keep standing, keep listening, because Nora deserved that at the very least, at the very last; my full attention. I’d waited years to hear this story, to finally hear this truth, but she’d been waiting just as long to tell me, waiting right there for me while the world spun on and she stayed here, trapped.
“What did you do to her?” I managed to hiss.
Leo shook his head at me, although he’d gone back to not meeting my eye. His face was awash with something that looked so much like grief I wanted to scream. I’d seen it look like that so many times, at countless vigils, countless memorials, stood solid as rock next to Nate or nodding gravely as someone else spoke words of mourning, words of loss.
I couldn’t fathom it, all this hiding, all this covering up. It must have been exhausting. I’d spent my entire life just trying to be who I really was, faults, cracks, fault lines, crack-ups and all, and that had worn me down to the bone. My whole life, everything I’d felt, everything I’d thought, had been a battle, and I’d tried my hardest, even when it was damn near impossible for me, to show the people I loved and cared about who that person was. My friends and family could find me, even in the dark. No one could find Leo Moody, not even with the brightest spotlight in the world shining on him.
Even at that moment I still wasn’t sure I could see who he really was; was he still performing, still pretending? I hated him then for that as much as for anything else. The fact that he could fake it and fool us and none of us were any the wiser.
The back of my eyes began to sting and that boulder was back, building in my chest, my throat. I tried to push them both away, to concentrate on the room, on his face but it was going to be impossible to ignore forever.
“What did you do?” I demanded again, this time louder, forcing my words to stand up for themselves.
“I loved her, Mads. I loved her—”
“No,” I said in a strangled growl which I’d meant to be a shout. “No. Don’t you dare. Don’t you fucking dare. I loved her, Leo, I loved her. Ange loved her, Nate loved her. Elle loved her. You didn’t love her. You wanted to hold her in your hands and when she wouldn’t let you, you crushed her.”
All the color drained from his face. “I didn’t want any of this,” he said, voice loaded down with sadness, head shaking back and forth. “I never wanted any of this.”
“Well, this is what you have, this is what you did. What you did, Leo, not anyone else.”
His head snapped back towards me, his whole body stiff with contained energy, as his eyes darkened, icy blue sliding into indigo. I’d never seen anything like it before, would never have believed it possible, his many masks made real, his entire body slipping off one identity and embracing another.
He walked towards me, long strides covering the small space of the cabin in seconds, but it still took me a second to realize what was going on when he reached for my arm, wrapping his hand around my bicep and leaning down to whisper in my ear: “Who knows you’re here, Maddie?”
He jerked me towards him, my feet stumbling beneath my weight as he unbalanced me, and my breath got caught somewhere in my throat. I thought I was going to scream but my body wouldn’t let me; I could feel fear running, thrumming, thumping through me but it was stopping me from being able to think or do anything. Turned out that when it came to flight or fight, I wasn’t capable of either. I simply froze.
“I said, who knows you’re here, Maddie?” Leo repeated, his voice as sharp as a razor blade in my ear.
I shook my head. “No one, no one knows I’m here,” I said, trying to appease him, to keep him calm, to let me go.
For a second I thought it might have worked. He let me go, his hands releasing my biceps, but my mind was racing with thoughts of Ange, who I was desperately hoping had picked up the WhatsApp call I’d placed earlier and was listening in on everything that was happening.
I probably should have dialed 911, but at the time it had been more important to me for someone else to hear Leo’s confession.
But in that moment, all I could think of was survival, of getting out of there, and I had to hope that
Ange had called the police for me, and that they were on their way, or at the very least, that she was.
I slid my eyes towards my phone that was still sat on the kitchen table, just to reassure myself it was still there.
But Leo noticed the slip and grabbed the phone before I could get to it, throwing it across the room so that it hit the wall with a metallic crash.
In a moment of sheer panic, blood pumping erratically in my ears and my heart beating so loudly I could have sworn I could hear it, I reached for the gun that was holstered at Leo’s hip.
He was so quick though, too quick, and so much stronger than me that my fingertips had barely grazed the weapon when his hand, strong, firm and hot, wrapped itself around my wrist, pulling it back with such force, hot grumbling pain shot down my arm.
Before I understood what was happening, Leo pulled my arm behind my back, my body angrily shuddering against itself as fear, pain, and anger tore through my muscles.
Turning me against him, Leo threw me across the table and suddenly something smashed into my wrist and every single one of my bones turned to glass only to be shattered with the butt of his gun. This time I really did cry but it came out as a mangled sob, falling dully, hollowly onto the fake wooden tabletop.
“What are you doing?” I managed to gasp. “You won’t be able to pin this one on someone else again with Nate in custody. All your careful planning will have been for nothing.”
He pulled at my arm again, my shoulder screaming silently against the pain, but his voice was jumpy, jumbled when he said: “So, that’s what this is about? Nate?”
“You killed them. You killed Nora and Elle, and now you’re making someone else pay for it. Isn’t that why you drew the compass? To make it look like it was all to do with the Altmans, with Nate? And the hunting knife,” I said, gasping for breath as Leo leaned over me, his body pressed against mine as his lips warmly grazed my ear, filling me with a sick horror. “It’s Nate’s, isn’t it? And you planted it there, knowing it would be covered in his fingerprints? What did you do? Did you drive over there after you’d killed her, hide it somewhere near the body where you knew it would be found—?”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” he hissed, his grip tightening on me, even as he spoke, his frustration carried out by his hands and inflicted on me. It burned through my sweater, right to my skin, sinking deep into my bones.
He’d been there before; blind panic, burning anger and a body that could overpower me even as it couldn’t overpower that bright, boiling frustration. A dead weight dropped through me, from my chest, through my stomach and right down to my feet.
“And John Smith? What was that, some sick game you were playing with Elle? Keeping an eye on her, following her, messaging her on Facebook to what—to scare her?” The way he told it to me, it was Elle’s suspicions that had led to her murder, led her to his door, to that cabin, surrounded by snow and silence.
But those messages had started months before, and who knows, maybe there were more somewhere, going back even further, under a different name, another pseudonym, another mask for Leo to hide behind.
I wondered when the obsession had started, if it had been there all along, ever since he’d killed Nora, or if Elle’s seventeenth birthday had sparked it, set something off.
Leo pulled on my arm again, and I cried out, pain screaming from my wrist, all the way up to my shoulder.
“Stop fucking talking,” he said through gritted teeth, his face still so close to mine, his voice trembling against my ear, hot and thick. It wasn’t a denial though, and I knew I was right: Leo had been John Smith, taunting and tormenting Elle long before she’d arrived at his cabin door. I thought back to the scraps of paper scrawled with sharp-edged words, and dark intentions, that had been shoved into my locker in the months after Nora had first gone missing; had that been Leo too? But he had left high school by then, was already a cop, working, on all things, Nora’s missing person case. I doubted he had anything to do with those Facebook messages Jenna had received either. Whatever this was, this obsession, it was about Nora and Noelle, the rest of us were just shrapnel, falling apart in the background of the bloody scene he had managed to create.
I closed my eyes against the surface of the table, focused on the coolness of the faux wood across my left cheek, tried to stop my mind from closing in and closing down.
Leo was still holding the gun he’d just used to smash my wrist; I couldn’t see a way out of it, but as I lay there, my cheek crushed against the table, I could still feel Nora in that room. Noelle too.
They were both there, and they’d both been through it, and the horror and the unspeakable grief I met that realization with made me wake up. Opening my eyes, I stamped the heel of my right foot down onto Leo’s foot while simultaneously wrenching my smashed wrist free from his grip in an agonizing move.
The surprise destabilized him a little and despite the sick, swooping feeling of hot, sharp, insistent knives that was coming from what I was now sure was a broken wrist, I brought my elbow back to connect with his groin, forcing him to double over.
Leo staggered back, barely even making a sound, and I smashed my elbow down again, this time onto his lower back. My nerves, muscles, bones, and blood screamed out, but despite how fast everything was going it was like I was moving through water.
I held my right arm tight against my chest, holding onto my broken wrist as I kicked Leo in the crotch again, desperately trying to get him to drop the gun. It fell from his hand, landing with a crash and skittering across the floor.
I reached for it, but with my right arm held against my chest, my left hand had to do all the work, and once again Leo was faster. Our fingers touched as we both reached for the gun, and I sobbed, a gasping, desperate sound as he quickly snatched it out of my reach.
I wanted to give up, to give in. To lie down on that floor and for everything else to go away. But he wouldn’t let me. It wasn’t going to be that easy. Nothing ever was.
I tried to stand, my legs shivering with adrenaline, but before I could get there a shout of pain rang in my right shoulder, deep, hot and ugly, tearing through everything. I screamed, the sound filling the entire cabin, so vital and so vivid it sounded animal, the high notes hitting the ceiling, and the last guttural gasps falling at our feet.
Leo had shot me.
I dropped back down to the floor, turning to face him again in an achingly slow move that lasted a short lifetime. He’d dropped his arms at his side, the gun still black and strong in his right hand, and he was staring at me, his breathing erratic, his face blank.
My heart beat wildly at my ribcage, as if replaced with the wings of a giant, trapped bird struggling to escape, as the room closed in on me and all I could see was what was directly in front of me. Leo melted away and I struggled to the door.
But he was quicker than me yet again, and he reached for my arm, the same one he’d just shot, and dragged me up with it, urging the pain through me, strong and relentless, so that I was standing again, and pulled it back behind me.
I screamed out again, although I could hardly hear it against the sound of my own blood beating in my ears. Tears lay hot against my skin and nausea rolled through me so strong I retched, surprising myself when nothing came out. His breath was warm, disgustingly intimate, against the top of my head, his cheek resting there, his long body pressed against me and the gun nestling just beneath my ribcage.
When he spoke, it was just a whisper, a lover’s confession: “Nora fought back too, you know,” he said, and his voice crawled straight through me, digging deeper than any bullet could.
“Where is she?” I asked. “Just tell me that, at least. Just tell me where Nora is, Leo, please. What did you do with her?”
Leo held me against him even tighter, and my body sang with pain, rang with fear. “I’m surprised you haven’t figured it out yet. I thought it would be obvious.”
I closed my eyes, squeezed them tight and suddenly I could see it. Th
e gauzy white stretch of frozen water right outside the door. “The lake,” I said, as loud as I could, forcing the words out of me, despite the fact that I was draining, fading away.
“‘The lake,’” Leo repeated, and I let out a deep sigh. It was as if the world had opened up inside of me and everything was rushing out.
But when all that was done, what was left was relief. Because now I knew. I no longer had to live on a high wire; I didn’t have to traverse a tightrope anymore. Finally, I could fall.
The gun pressed against my bottom rib shifted a little, and Leo pressed his chin into the top of my head as his left arm held me closer and closer, squeezing the life out of me. His right hand clutched at my shoulder which was torn through with blood and bullets, the pain beginning to lift me through a veil I wasn’t sure I was going to be able to come back from.
I was light and heavy at the same time, falling in and out of darkness, rushing towards the ground. I could hear someone calling my name, the familiarity of her voice lost for a second in the sound of Leo’s heavy breathing, and the blood pounding in my ears.
Leo’s hold on me loosened a little, and I tried to break free, but all I managed to do was stumble against him. I could hear her. Her voice, finally. Calling me.
“I loved her, Maddie,” I heard Leo say again, his words a whisper in my ear, although I could just as easily have imagined it. “I loved her but she couldn’t see it.”
“No,” I tried to say, “no, no.”
Someone was shouting my name again, so loudly it pierced the room.
And then there was a long, screaming wail, getting louder and louder, an electric scream tearing through the snowy woods. I thought I was imagining it, dreaming of a savior, but it must have been real because suddenly Leo jerked away from me, rushing to the window to look out onto the whitewashed expanse.