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He pushed open the door. The room was a good size, with seats enough for about forty people, and it was half-full. Heads turned to stare as we came into the room. There was a podium set up at the front of the room, with four chairs, along with bottled water and microphones. There was a projector screen behind our chairs displaying a big photograph of Nina. As we walked to the podium, the photo transitioned to a video. It was the same video Lee had shown Wright on Nina’s Instagram, the one of her in a bikini, pushing Simon into a swimming pool, then laughing into the camera. Lee stopped walking. Her eyes were fixed on the screen. The screen flicked again, to a photograph of Nina standing on the edge of a cliff wearing climbing gear, then to another of her eating ice cream. Another and another and another. It was too much. Leanne stopped in her tracks. I put my arm under hers to steady her. I don’t think Wright even noticed. He just kept on walking.
“Are you all right?” I asked in her ear. I could feel all the eyes on us.
Leanne gave me a short, sharp nod. She dragged her eyes away from the screen, focused them on the carpet, and started walking again. We took our seats, and Matthew cleared his throat and leaned into the microphone.
“Thank you all for coming here today. I’m Detective Sergeant Matthew Wright, with the Major Crimes Unit of the Vermont State Police. I’ve been tasked with leading this investigation. You’ve each been provided with a packet that includes some of what we know so far, as well as information about Nina and the police personnel tasked with finding her. Digital copies of the packet are also available.”
I looked around the room, trying to find someone I recognized. Oscar Milligan was here, standing off to the side, leaning against the wall like he owned the place. I guess maybe he felt he had more claim to it than anyone else in the room. He’d run the Waitsfield Bugle, our local paper, cobbling together a budget out of subscriptions from the few retirees who held on to them out of a sense of duty, or maybe just forgetfulness. He’d given up a few years before and moved on from Waitsfield. I’d never heard where, but it looked like he’d stayed in the game, at least. The other journalists I didn’t know. There were two blond women with the kind of makeup that looks like a mask in real life, but I guess looks right on TV. There were two guys operating cameras.
“This is Leanne and Andrew Fraser, Nina’s parents. They’d like to say a few words.”
Lee and I hadn’t talked about which one of us should speak. I froze up. For a moment, I couldn’t say anything, and then Lee jumped in, speaking fast, the way she always does when she’s nervous.
“Yes. I’m Nina’s mother. We love her very much and we want her to come home.” The words came out sounding like something she’d practiced. Like something she’d been told to say. Lee took a deep breath and tried to slow down. “We don’t know what happened. We hope Nina is okay, but it’s not like her not to be in touch with us. If anyone out there knows where she is, please get in touch with the police or with us.”
One of the blond women put up her hand. She didn’t wait for Matthew Wright to call on her.
“Can you tell us a little more about Nina, Mrs. Fraser?”
It was my turn. I wasn’t going to leave everything up to my wife. “Nina loves animals. Loves the outdoors. She’s very generous and kind. Everyone loves Nina.” I felt stupid. I was trying to be honest, to say the important things, but the words didn’t sound right. They didn’t sound like her.
“And she was with her boyfriend up until the night she disappeared. Have you talked to him?”
Matthew Wright spoke up. “We’ve talked to Nina’s boyfriend. He’s given us an account of everything that happened the last time he saw Nina. Nina was planning to stay overnight at Stowe. A friend was going to collect her the following morning, but we don’t know who that friend was, or if they showed up.”
Another journalist put his hand in the air. “Can we get Nina’s boyfriend’s name, please? How long were they seeing each other?”
“Simon Jordan,” Matthew said. “They’ve been dating for four years. As I said, Simon has been fully cooperating with the police investigation and has given us a full account of their last evening together.”
That was my cue. I leaned closer to the microphone and spoke slowly.
“Simon says they broke up on Friday night. After the breakup, he left, he says, and Nina stayed behind in the house. That’s something we don’t really understand. The house belongs to Simon’s parents. Nina could have called us for a ride. We’d have gone right over there.”
The atmosphere in the room changed, sharpened. Everyone leaned forward. Lee took my hand under the table and held on tight.
“We’re really worried about Nina,” she said. “The house she was last seen in was the Jordans’ house, which is obviously on private land. We would like to carry out a search for our daughter, with the help of friends, but we will need permission from the Jordans to access their land. I’d like to ask the Jordan family if they would agree to a search party coming onto the land to search for Nina.”
Immediately there were a bunch of hands in the air. A few people shouted questions. Matthew Wright put his hand to our microphones, pushing them away.
“I’m afraid that’s all we have time for right now.” His voice was very calm. “The family has released photographs of Nina, and some video. They’re all accessible from your digital packet. Any further questions should be addressed to the state police. Thank you all very much for your time.”
He stood abruptly. We followed. Lee was still holding my hand, and she held on tight all the way outside. Flashes went off. The sudden noise and the bursts of light coming from different angles were disorienting. More than that, they felt dangerous. Like we were hens inside a chicken run and they were all hungry dogs just outside it. The shouted questions, the pushing and shoving in the pack as they jockeyed for a better position, it was a lot. Lee was pale as a ghost and shaking. I put my arm around her until we got to the car.
“My god,” she said.
“Yeah,” I said. It was real now. It was actually happening.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Jamie
It was Rory’s decision not to press charges against Leanne Fraser for breaking into our house in Stowe. He didn’t ask me for my opinion. He said something about Wright putting him under a lot of pressure, and also that we had to consider the court of public opinion. It wouldn’t look good, he said, if we pressed charges against a worried mother looking for her daughter. I could see his point, but I wasn’t exactly thrilled about his decision. Breaking into our home was the behavior of a crazy woman. A normal person would have asked the police to check the house, if they were that worried. Or called us and asked if we had been there since Friday. If there was any chance Nina could still be at the house. In itself, that wasn’t an unreasonable question. But just driving up there and taking a great big rock and heaving it through a window... I mean. Honestly, it worried me. If she was willing to break into the Stowe house, what was to stop her breaking into our home in Waitsfield? Clearly, she was blaming Simon for Nina’s disappearance. What if she took it into her head to go after him?
Of course, Leanne didn’t find Nina, just some bits and pieces of clothing she’d left behind in the laundry. That was Monday. On Tuesday, Simon went out first thing in the morning and stayed gone all day. When he came back at five o’clock he told me he’d been to Burnt Rock Mountain, and he acted like it was the most natural thing in the world, to go for a hike when the girl you’d very recently been in love with was missing, when the police were asking questions. And maybe it was natural. What else was he supposed to do? Sit around at home, reading a book or playing video games? Rory went to work. I tried calling him a couple of times during the day, but he never answered.
All of which meant that I was alone with the whole thing. I had no one to talk it over with. I couldn’t call anyone, because I couldn’t trust anyone not to repeat every word I said to three other people the moment we hung up the phone. I knew enough about human nature to know that the story of Nina going missing would be like catnip. People would not be able to resist talking about it, speculating about what might have happened and what it all meant. For most of the day I stayed off social media. I busied myself with photographing clothes—this time a Dolce dress and a Prada skirt and jacket. It takes time to photograph clothes well. You need to steam the garment, then hang it so that it flows perfectly, and you need to light it and frame it just right. The work was a good distraction, but just after lunch my phone buzzed with a message from Georgia White. She’d seen Leanne Fraser at a press conference on local news, and thought I’d like to know. I switched on the TV, but the conference was already over, and I had to wait for an hour before the edited news report was uploaded on the channel’s Facebook feed. By then I’d finished one glass of wine and started on my second. When the post finally came up, I clicked play and watched as Leanne and Andrew Fraser took to the podium. There was a poster-sized still of Nina on a screen behind them. She was laughing and looked extremely pretty. Leanne looked like hell. Like she hadn’t slept in a week, like she’d never been introduced to a hairdresser or the concept of makeup. They talked about Nina. It was hard to watch. Leanne came across badly. She was robotic and unnatural. I think I was actually starting to feel sorry for her, until right before the end, when she all but said straight out that our family was hiding something. That we were preventing a search of our land, which was utter bullshit but was exactly the kind of thing that would supercharge the gossip engine. She also made it clear that she thought Simon was lying. When I finished watching the clip I stayed online and watched the comments as they came flooding in.
The first person to comment was someone I knew. That bitch Bianca Glasier—she’s my second cousin, and she’s always been a jealous cow—posted, saying that it was clearly suspicious that Simon had left Nina alone after a breakup that night, and that she’d never been seen again. Bianca said that the police had been holding back information at the press conference, probably because Simon was under investigation. I mean, are you kidding me? She had no clue what she was talking about, no clue. But that wouldn’t stop her from spreading that shit around on the internet. Her post got plenty of likes too. Plenty of supportive comments. Only one or two people said it was too soon to know exactly what had happened, and that hopefully Nina would come home under her own steam.
