“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