Look for Her Read online

  Dedication

  For Gavin

  Your patience and support make each word possible

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Acknowledgments

  P.S. Insights, Interviews & More …*

  About the Author

  About the Book

  Read On

  Praise

  Also by Emily Winslow

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Chapter 1

  Annalise Williams (Wolfson College), University Counselling Service, recorded and transcribed by Dr. Laurie Ambrose

  My mother picked the name Annalise for me because of a girl who was killed. Her name was Annalise Wood, and she went missing when she was sixteen. My mother was the same age when it happened. Annalise was lovely, much prettier than my sister and I ever became. She was the kind of girl you look at and think, Of course someone would want to take her.

  Don’t look at me like that. I know that what happened to her was awful. It just seems a very fine line between being the kind of person that others want to be with and be like and treat well, and being the kind of person that some others, just a few, sick others, want to take for themselves. That’s the same kind of person, isn’t it? The loved and lovely. Isn’t that from a poem somewhere? That’s what she was like. That’s the risk when you’re the kind of person who’s wanted. Good people want to be close to you, but the bad people want you too.

  There were two photos of her that the media used most: her most recent school portrait, and a snapshot of her laughing, with the friends on either side cropped out. Taken together, they presented the two sides of a beautiful and perfect person: poised and thoughtful, and spontaneous and bubbly. The kind of person who deserves help and attention.

  Realistically, if they wanted these pictures to help strangers identify her if they saw her out and about with the bad man, they should have used photos of her frowning or looking frightened. Either there weren’t any (which may well be the case; who would take a photo of that?), or they couldn’t bring themselves to advertise a version of her that was less than appealing. The narrative is important. If you want the “general public” to get worked up, you have to persuade. Attractiveness and innocence must be communicated, even if emphasising those traits makes the real person harder to recognise.

  In the end, she was already dead, so it’s a good thing, I suppose, that they used the nice photos. They’re the images that everyone remembers. My mum was a teenager when those pictures were in the paper every day for weeks, then weekly for months. Annalise Wood was the most beautiful girl in the world. Everyone cared about her. It’s what any mother would wish for her child, to be the kind of person that everyone would care about and miss if she disappeared.

  It wasn’t until Mum was over thirty that what really happened to Annalise Wood was discovered. Until then, several theories had become legend:

  That she had run away and was very happy somewhere, laughing at all of us thinking she’d been taken. Maybe her parents hadn’t approved of her boyfriend and she’d got her own way and taken revenge in one blow, by leaving her parents forever regretful of having forbidden her.

  That she was still alive but captive, chained in a cabin in the woods, or maybe in a harem in some other country.

  That her parents had killed her and buried her in the woods behind their property. This was a cruel theory, and absolutely no one believed it except for an eccentric local writer who sold the story in booklets before he was “spoken to” by the police.

  None of these were true, and everyone knows that now, but local kids still tell all of these versions as if they had really happened. They no longer say it was Annalise, who is now known to have been dead from the day she’d disappeared, but instead “some girl” from decades before, from the fifties or wartime or even Victorian days. They always describe Annalise, though, even if they don’t realise it: long, dark hair; pale pink skin; smiling. They still have details from those photos in their minds, the origin of the composite image forgotten.

  A book about the investigation came out when I was three. I remember my mother crying behind the locked bathroom door. The photos were reprinted in all the papers. Mum tells me that she found me staring at Annalise’s smiling face. She took the paper away from me, but I howled and demanded it back. She says I blackened my fingers fondling the page. I used to wonder if Annalise had been captive for years and then died when I was born. Maybe I was Annalise herself, reborn and recognising her own face in the news.

  I wasn’t. Annalise had been killed still wearing the clothes she’d been taken in, within two miles of where she’d been last seen, and the corruption had progressed at the rate one would reasonably expect for an old but not decades-old corpse.

  I did wonder, though, when I was a teenager, if we had some bond. I grew my hair long, though it wasn’t as thick and dark as hers. I wasn’t as slim, but I smiled. I mimicked her serene school-portrait expression in the mirror in my bedroom, and emulated her wide-mouthed laugh when in groups. I have a snapshot that’s almost exactly like the one of the original Annalise: me between two friends, woolly winter hats on, red scarf. With my hair mostly hidden, and my face half-turned, I look almost exactly like her. I cropped the picture like hers, just me, only a friend’s chin on the left and another friend’s shoulder on the right as evidence of my sociability. I was really proud of that photo. I felt like I’d lived up to my mother’s hopes for me. I was lovely (from certain angles) and popular (look! friends!). If I were taken away, people would want me back.

  I think it’s absolutely normal to fantasise about what other people would say if you die. It’s really not fair to act as if this is morbid or self-indulgent. I’ve even read it advised in a magazine to imagine what you might want said about yourself at your funeral. They meant for you to imagine the end of a long life, and consider what you want to be remembered for: work achievements, contribution to society, relationships with friends and family. There was no right answer, they insisted, just the opportunity to discover our own priorities while there’s still time. I don’t think what I imagine is all that different. Besides, we can’t help what we think about. We sometimes believe we can, but I know it doesn’t work.

  In my experience, there are ruts up there in our heads, sometimes with very steep sides. Sometimes in my fantasies I imagined, like I wanted to, that they chose my best photos (the cropped one, and my year nine school portrait, which is still my favourite), and that the news speculated that someone was driven so mad with lust by looking at me that he had to have me, and that I fought back so bravely that he had no choice but to kill me. Other times (and this is still inside my head but I can’t control it) no one cares. No photos are published, or a blurry one, or me in the background of a scene, looking lost. Everyone thinks I must have wandered off on my own, because who would actually bother to take me?

  Did I tell you that Annalise Wood was raped? The forensics said so. Well, that she’d had sex and then been killed, so one assumes. She’d also had a baby, before she went missing. Have you heard that one? This was kept secret for absolute ages but it finally leaked out. Not everybody knows but it’s talked about. She’d
had a baby when she was fifteen, a year before she was killed, and put it up for adoption. Her parents had sent her on a six-month exchange programme to France, they’d said, which is how it had been covered up. They never had a French student stay with them in return, so we all should have guessed, shouldn’t we? We all should have told stories about how it was the father, so enraged at having his child given away for adoption, who had punished her.

  No, I don’t think things like that all the time. I’m just telling you how it was. These are the kinds of things that most people think of, not that I think of just all by myself. We needed a story to make sense of Annalise dying. We still do. Another book came out last year. That makes two. Three, if you count the self-published booklet about the parents. People still care about her.

  Sometimes, typing my own name into a search engine, her photo pops up among the results. That’s how important her first name is; even with my surname, you’ll get her picture, usually the school one. She’s wearing a white blouse and the school jacket. In the age progression they made once, to try to make her look thirty, she was wearing a similar suit jacket, but she looked dowdy, like she worked in an office and was bored, like she celebrated her thirtieth birthday with a bunch of nice girlfriends from work but no boyfriend or husband or kids. I’m only twenty-four but sometimes I look in the mirror and it’s like I see this age progression happening to me, and I just want to make them stop and go back to using my good photos. Go back to that year nine pic, or that winter snapshot. Sometimes I wish I could freeze there. Not stop there. I don’t want to be killed, obviously. But I wish I could still be that person, that bright, bubbly person, and just stay there. I think that maybe the real Annalise is so loved because she hasn’t had to age.

  I went to my grandmother’s funeral six years ago and I hated that they put a recent photo of her on the service sheet. It’s not just that she looked old but that she looked broken. It was like if you stared long enough at it the tremor in her hand would act up, and her head would involuntarily bob, like it did near the end. I wanted them to use a photo from before, like when she was a young mum or when she worked at the arts centre. Mum pointed out that both of those were from before I was born, and didn’t I want a photo of the grandmother I’d known? Mum didn’t understand that all of her is the grandmother I’d known, even the bits I wasn’t there for. I looked at her and I saw all of her. It didn’t seem fair to reduce her to only who she was at the very end.

  The real problem with age isn’t just the whole falling apart business, though that’s pretty fucking terrible. The thing about age, even just my age, is that a young person is judged so much more indulgently. A young person is rated on their potential. You get complimented for having interests and plans and the natural talent or intelligence to maybe act on them. For a child to want to be a doctor or an astronaut, for a child to be “good at” maths or reading, is praiseworthy all by itself. But an adult has to actually hit the mark, not just aim for it. If you miss it, well, the wanting it, the having the potential to perhaps do it, doesn’t count for anything any more.

  I guess I’m feeling a bit at sea. Everyone’s so clever here. I’m clever too, I know that I am. Clever just doesn’t feel special here. You think getting into university is a kind of trophy, but it’s not. It’s just a door, and you walk through it and there’s a lot of work on the other side, hard work, not a reward. The real trophy is graduation, right? Except perhaps it’s not. Maybe that’s just another door too, and then the trophy is getting a job, but a job isn’t a trophy, it’s more work too. It’s all doors, doors, doors. I just want to get to where I’m supposed to go and just be there. I want to get to a room where there isn’t another door for me to aim for, just a nice couch and a bookshelf and maybe a TV. And a phone. And a man, a really nice man who adores me.

  No, no one in particular. Not right now. Of course I’ve had boyfriends. I’m not ugly. I have a very normal romantic life, overall. I’m only twenty-four.

  We still don’t know who killed the real Annalise. No one knows who the baby’s father was either. Probably both the killer and the father (or maybe the father is the killer) were strangers, grown men, but maybe one or both of them was a boy from school. I think that’s probably right. You know how boys are.

  No, no one’s ever tried to hurt me. Why would you wonder that?

  Boys are just boys, like boys everywhere. Girls can’t do anything right. When I was thirteen, if you wore a bra, you were teased for it. If you didn’t wear a bra and needed one, you were teased for it. If you didn’t need one, you were teased for that. There’s that awful couple of years where the girls expand, not just get taller but kind of inflate in parts, and we’re so much bigger than the boys, and then when the boys catch up it’s just this huge relief for everyone. [Laughs.]

  The first time was fine. I was at uni, in Warwick. I didn’t get into Cambridge as an undergraduate, so I went there. Everyone was taking this chance to make themselves over, just to be who they had always wished to be, except that they’d been trapped by their hometowns into being who they’d been since they were born. So I did it too. I made myself new.

  I was alone with this boy. Well, we were at uni, so he wasn’t a boy. But he was a fresher, like me, so not a man yet either. He was this male person. His name was Jason. I told him about what had happened to Annalise, but as if it had happened to me, years before when I was younger.

  Not the dying, obviously. Not the killing. But the taking and it mattering. I cried while I told it, which isn’t surprising because it’s sad, whoever it happened to. He put his arm around me. He comforted me, and touched me, and was indignant for me. I went from being this very ordinary person to being someone who’d been worth stealing, someone who was worth grieving, someone who’d been through so much and come out stronger. We did kiss that night, but nothing else. That would have been weird, don’t you think? You don’t tell a story like that and just jump in. But we did it later that week. He was very gentle. He kept asking if what he was doing was all right. He was my boyfriend most of the first year.

  No, that doesn’t matter. You’re going too fast. It doesn’t matter why we broke up but it matters a lot how we got together. I didn’t pretend to be Annalise because I’m a rape fantasist. I know some women think about that sort of thing, not the real thing, but a titillating form of playing at it. It’s not for me. I have never, ever asked any man to act out a rape scenario, and I don’t do it in my head either. When I think of Annalise, I don’t think of her on the ground, under that bad person. I think of her in that school jacket, or that red scarf. You know, she wasn’t even wearing either of those when she died. It was too hot. But I picture her the way she lived, not the way she died. Actually, better than the way she lived. After she died she was, like, beatified. She became a perfect image of herself instead of her whole, messy, real self. I took on that image. Anyone would want to be just the good bits, wouldn’t they?

  No, see, that goes back to the imagination ruts. I can take away the being killed part from what’s in my head, but not all of it, not the rest of it. I wouldn’t even know who Annalise was without her having been attacked, so pretending to be just who she was before … It doesn’t make any sense. She became “Annalise the saint” when she was taken. Before that she was ordinary. Popular, but not famous. Not perfect. It’s awful to think that we don’t entirely make ourselves, that we get partly made by what others do to us, but there it is. It’s true.

  I told you, I’m not a rape fantasist. If someone did that to me I might even kill myself. I know two girls who’ve been raped, or mostly raped, one by a date and one by a cousin, and they were each a mess for, like, more than a year. I told you: I don’t think about what happened to Annalise. I think about what it would be like to be loved that much. That’s all.

  Rhoda! [Laughs.] I’ve never met anyone called Rhoda. If my mother had called me that … No, I know. You mean if she had called me anything else, like Jennifer or Christine or Alison. I imagine I would be
different, but … I don’t think you understand where I grew up. It’s not my mother naming me for Annalise that makes Annalise important to me. It’s me being born into a town where everyone, including my mother, is haunted by her memory to the point that my mother wanted to call me that, that’s what makes Annalise important to me. Change my name, and I still would have those images in my head. Maybe everyone from Lilling does. Have you ever known anyone from there? No, I suppose you can’t admit it if you did. Privacy and all of that. But if you did, you’d know.

  I researched it once. The two years after Annalise went missing, the name doubled in popularity nationally. It’s never been a top 100 name, so that’s not a lot, but still … I’m not the only one.

  I am talking about myself, Doctor. Don’t be obtuse. You can’t describe anything without comparing it to something else. You just can’t.

  I had a children’s book about that. The first page showed a skyscraper. It was a photo of a cut-out piece of silver paper, rectangular with a point at the top and two columns of punched-out squares for windows. The next page was a photo of the same cutout, surrounded by cutouts of small village houses. The word TALL was printed on top. The next spread showed the same silver skyscraper dwarfed by cutouts of even bigger skyscrapers, so big we don’t see their tops. That had the word SMALL, describing the same silver building. It went on like that, with the moon being both bright and pale, depending on the sky, and a cape being both blue and purple, depending on the colours close to it. The last pages were of the silver building, the moon, and the cape on neutral, empty backgrounds, with the questions, “Tall or small? Bright or pale? Blue or purple?” You couldn’t pick what each item was without also choosing a context for it. You couldn’t judge it just by itself. Is it tall? Is it small? Compared to what?