“At these parties,” Nix told me during our first interview, in my Chicago sublet’s sunny kitchen, “I would just be, like, leaning on the wall having a beer, relaxed, and Cait would be very tense. I didn’t know her well enough to understand that was just her default mode. She was very intense, very intense. Very intense eyes. And she thought because I played field hockey and she was on the newspaper, which I guess was nerdy, that I should be some kind of bitch to her, which I never was. At that stage in my life, I couldn’t handle people that were so keyed up and I think she didn’t trust people who appeared to be okay with everything. She said she didn’t like ‘chill people,’ I remember that. She told me that at a party once and I thought she was insulting me. Later, she told me that I made her nervous because she thought I was cool.”i
During those high school years, Taer and Nix were quietly going through twin crises of sexuality. Both in the early stages of coming to terms with being a lesbian, they receded from the conversation whenever anyone said the word “gay” and barely dated anyone. Nix used her devotion to sports as an excuse; Taer pretended to have an unending crush on a boy who didn’t like her back. Nix explored lesbian porn links on her brother’s computer. Taer fantasized about a friend from gym class who took off her shirt in the locker room to show off the quarter-sized hickeys her boyfriend had left on her breasts. Besides the newspaper for Taer and field hockey for Nix, high school bored them both.
Taer went to Oberlin Collegej in Ohio. Nix went to the University of Chicago (U of C), where she met Molly (still going by her given name, Miranda) in a nineteenth-century fiction class. Nix and Taer didn’t stay in touch. If Facebook hadn’t been invented their first year of college, they might never have thought of each other again. Instead, they “Friended” each other sometime during their college years and remained marginally aware of each other’s love lives and music tastes.
Nix and Taer graduated college in May of 2008. Molly Metropolis hired Nix as her new assistant, while Taer moved back to Chicago to pursue a career in music journalism. As of January 14, when the CPD announced Molly’s disappearance, Taer still wasn’t progressing in her occupation of choice. Very occasionally, she wrote for the popular music news and criticism website Pitchfork.com and the Chicago Tribune music blog Sound Effects, for which she was barely paid. Taer never wrote professionally about Molly, but wrote about her frequently on her personal Tumblr blog, caitmusic.tumblr.com. She posted the audio of “Apocalypse Dance” with the following caption:
THIS. THIS FOREVER.
I’m so deeply in love with this song, it’s a little bit sick. There are just a few perfect pop songs in this world—“Like a Prayer,” “PYT,” “Toxic,” etc. — and this has joined the ranks of Prince, of Justin Timberlake, of Madonna. This is the Molly song people will play forever.
Because her work with the Chicago Tribune and Pitchfork wasn’t translating into more paid opportunities with other outlets, Taer worked as a barback and sometimes bartender at a bar called Rainbo, in a neighborhood known as the Ukrainian Village. (Deceptively named, Rainbo is a dive with a reputation for being a favorite of local musicians, not a gay bar.) Sometimes, she sold clothes to resale store Buffalo Exchange for grocery money. Taer lived in Humboldt Park, a grungy but cheap and gentrifying area near the more expensive and yuppie-filled Wicker Park neighborhood. Her apartment was on the top floor of an unkempt walk-up on the corner of North Monticello and West Thomas Street, with no architectural distinctions to speak of and at least two warped window frames that let in cold air.
She spent each day’s otherwise empty hours obsessing about her carpet. Taer hated her apartment’s carpeting with an intense fervor most people generally reserve for sentient beings. She paid for a steam cleaning, a huge expense in relation to her income, but while her roommate’s dust-related allergy attacks stopped for a few months, the cleaning didn’t improve the color or texture of the dingy gray-white carpet.
Taer petitioned her landlord for a flooring upgrade; she preferred Brazilian Cherry Wood, but would be satisfied with anything, really, so long as it wasn’t carpeting. Her landlord refused. Taer wanted to move, but didn’t want to break her lease or deal with a subletter. She pouted, instead, to her diary: “It’s like I’m trapped in hell.” Her frustration didn’t subside until Molly’s disappearance distracted her.
On January 14, scrolling through her Facebook page’s News Feed, Taer clicked on a link one of her friends posted to the YouTube video of Weis and Applebaum’s press conference.k She watched the full thirty-minute press conference, lying in bed, scribbling dismayed thoughts into her journal. When Weis mentioned that Taer’s old acquaintance Regina Nix was the last person to see Molly Metropolis, Taer got out of bed. She quickly read through articles from the Trib, CNN, and Oh No They Didn’t, looking for quotes from Nix. She called her editor at the Chicago Tribune, David Hurwitz, and asked if they had spoken to Nix. He hadn’t, but one of his journalists had been trying to contact her for a longer, more thoroughly researched piece on the hours before Molly Metropolis disappeared. If Taer got an interview with Nix, she could get a contributing credit on the piece. She called in sick to her shift at Rainbo, put on a heavy sweater and her quilted coat, and caught the Metra Electric Train Line from the Millennium Station (a renamed and refurbished Randolph Street Station) to Flossmoor. Taer was hoping Nix was hiding out at her parents’ house.
Taer wrote in her journal while riding on the Metra, her handwriting shaky due to the train’s constant motion:
I know it’s not really a journalistic hunch like in the movies, but I’m pretty sure Gina went home. I was thinking about that party at Rachel’s senior year when everyone just knew Gina was having sex with Christopher Brooks, of all fucking people, in the bedroom. A few of us went around the yard and looked through the windows, which was terrible of us. She didn’t leave her mom’s house for the rest of the summer. That’s where she goes to hide.
If she didn’t find Nix at home, Taer planned to ask Nix’s mother to help find her.
After arriving in Flossmoor, Taer walked to her own house, ate lunch with her mother, and asked to borrow the family car. She drove through Flossmoor’s small downtown to a neighborhood called Heather Hill and tentatively knocked on Nix’s door. Nix’s mother, Diane, answered and led Taer to the small living room at the back of the house. Nix was lying on the couch, wrapped in a blanket, listening to Philip Glass with her eyes closed. Diane left them alone.
Nix unwrapped herself and stood up. She was tall, and thinner than she had been in high school; her athletic body had given way to a more sinewy look. She had thick, slightly wavy brown hair, which she wore past her shoulders, with long bangs swept over her forehead and pinned back. Her nose came to a sharp point.
Nix initially refused to let Taer interview her, denying Taer access the same way she would eventually, temporarily, deny me. Taer convinced Nix to change her mind with self-effacing honesty. Taer told Nix the interview was her first real chance to impress her editors. She explained she was working at a bar and hated her life. She explained her frustrations with her carpet. Nix laughed at her a little bit, but it worked. She agreed to give Taer a few quotes, if SDFC would let her. Nix called Applebaum, who agreed to let Nix give the interview, and coached Nix on what she could and couldn’t say.