Forget Me Not: A gripping, heart-wrenching thriller full of emotion and twists!. A. Taylor M.

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СКАЧАТЬ “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 СКАЧАТЬ