RABBIT HOLE
A page-turning debut mystery that’s as addictive as a late-night Reddit binge, about a grieving woman obsessed with solving her sister’s cold-case disappearance via the true crime fandom.
Ten years ago, Theodora “Teddy” Angstrom’s older sister, Angie, went missing. Her case remains unsolved. Now Teddy’s father, Mark, has killed himself. Unbeknownst to Mark’s family, he had been active in a Reddit community fixated on Angie, and Teddy can’t help but fall down the same rabbit hole.
Teddy’s investigation quickly gets her in hot water with her gun-nut boyfriend, her long-lost half brother, and her colleagues at the prestigious high school where she teaches English.
A page-turning debut mystery that’s as addictive as a late-night Reddit binge, about a grieving woman obsessed with solving her sister’s cold-case disappearance via the true crime fandom.
Ten years ago, Theodora “Teddy” Angstrom’s older sister, Angie, went missing. Her case remains unsolved. Now Teddy’s father, Mark, has killed himself. Unbeknownst to Mark’s family, he had been active in a Reddit community fixated on Angie, and Teddy can’t help but fall down the same rabbit hole.
Teddy’s investigation quickly gets her in hot water with her gun-nut boyfriend, her long-lost half brother, and her colleagues at the prestigious high school where she teaches English. Further complicating matters is Teddy’s growing obsession with Mickey, a charming amateur sleuth who is eerily keen on helping her solve the case.
Bewitched by Mickey, Teddy begins to lose her moral compass. As she struggles to reconcile new information with old memories, her erratic behavior reaches a fever pitch, but she won’t stop until she finds Angie—or destroys herself in the process.
Rabbit Hole is an outrageous and heart-wrenching character study of a mind twisted by grief, a biting critique of the internet’s voyeurism, and an intriguing exploration of the blurry lines of female friendship.
- Soho Crime
- Hardcover
- January 2024
- 384 Pages
- 9781641294874
Buy the Book
$25.95
About Kate Brody
Kate Brody lives in Los Angeles, California. Her work has previously appeared in Lit Hub and The Literary Review, among other publications. She holds an MFA from NYU. Rabbit Hole is her debut novel.
Praise
“In this smart, chilling page-turner, a high school English teacher obsessed with her older sister’s long-ago disappearance gets caught up in Reddit conspiracy theories.” —People Magazine
“For anyone who’s ever indulged in a late-night Reddit binge or has found themselves in the amateur sleuthing vortex of true crime junkies, Rabbit Hole follows a woman who becomes obsessed with solving the cold-case disappearance of her older sister.” —Nylon
“From the first line, Brody’s novel had its hands around my throat. While Rabbit Hole has the pace and intrigue of a thriller, and brutal and evocative prose, what makes it stand out is its narrator, Brody’s refusal to soften her edges or portray her as anything less than a young woman savaged by grief.” —Jean Kyoung Frazier, author of Pizza Girl
“Kate Brody’s Rabbit Hole is a smart and edgy mystery that kept me turning pages feverishly from start to finish.” —Alexis Schaitkin, author of Saint X
Discussion Questions
- How unreliable is Teddy’s point of view? For instance, do you think that Mickey actually looks like Angie or is Teddy’s grief distorting her perspective?
- What is at the core of Teddy’s attraction to Mickey?
- How does Teddy’s gender affect her experience IRL vs. online? Does one affect the other? Can your online life bleed into reality?
- What does Wolfie’s death represent for Teddy?
- How do Clare and Teddy’s different backgrounds affect the way they grieve for Mark and Angie?
- Do you think that Teddy will ever leave home? Is she capable of reinventing herself somewhere else?
- Through the book, Teddy talks about not wanting children. When she goes back to Bill at the end, she imagines getting pregnant. What has changed? Why would she want that now?
- How do Teddy’s experiences online affect her sanity? How do they square with your own experience of the internet?
- The book is set in 2015. Have things changed online? How do stories like Angie’s get consumed for public entertainment? Can you think of any real life examples?
- Angie was not popular in life. By all accounts, she was not particularly attractive, smart or warm. Why does such a large following crop up in light of her disappearance? How does her absence flatten her and make her easier to love?
Excerpt
“I need you to help me with the bills,” Mom says.
“How much more?”
“No,” she says. “Not money. Well . . . maybe. But I need you to help do them.” She’s lying on the floor of the kitchen with Wolfie, her cheek pressed down to the tile. Two commas facing one another, small nothing between them.
I step over my old sick dog and Mom’s head to grab a box of cereal off the counter. “I wouldn’t lie on the floor like that. I saw ants in here last week.”
“Your father did everything online.” She strokes the bridge of bone between Wolfie’s eyes. She rubs with one finger down to his black nose and back up. His eyes close in relief. “People keep calling.”
“How? He just died.”
“They were calling before, too,” Mom says. “During the day, when you’re at work. He always said he’d handle it, but I don’t know . . .” She looks up at me. The pitch of her voice, the desperation stops me mid-chew, and I’m left with a mouthful of sharp Crunch Berries. “Please, Teddy. I can’t sleep.”
“You can come live with me,” I say, but the joke lands flat. “Mom, I’m kidding. It will be fine. I’ll do it.”
She turns back to Wolfie, and I watch them for a while. She’s no longer touching him, just staring into the milky expanse of his eyes.
I set down my bowl and get on the floor behind her quietly, carefully curling my body around hers. She is less muscular than I remember, and I can almost feel her bones, swimming in her drapey, expensive fabrics. I think of osteoporosis commercials. I think of how you never realize your parents are young until they’re not anymore. Her hair is clipped up on her head, and I unclip it. I sink my face in, and it smells like her. I wrap my arm around her front and sneak a glimpse over her shoulder at Wolfie. He doesn’t see me. He’s pleading to her from behind the clouds, and I feel like a voyeur.
“I put everything in bags,” she says. “I left them in his room.” Lately, we don’t leave Wolfie alone. We don’t say it, but we both know that it hurts him, all the attention. I hear him whimper when my hands roll over the tumors in his back that press against his spine. He is tired. He wants to sleep alone on the cold floor. He doesn’t want to be touched and called and fed. The car, which he used to love, is now torture with all its bumps and stops. But I take him with me to the store, to the park. I can’t let him be. Neither of us can. We’re worried that if we give him the opportunity, he’ll die on us, neatly and silently while no one is looking, not wanting anyone to make a fuss over him, and he’s a good dog who doesn’t deserve to die alone.
AS I MAKE MY way upstairs, it occurs to me that I’m not sure when the last time was that I walked all the way to the end of the hall, to the room I used to share with Angie.
In the years after Angie disappeared, we left everything untouched—the cliché thing where the dead kid’s room becomes a museum. I even moved out, into the basement. The room felt weird without her.
When I went to college, Dad moved his stuff into our old room. He said he needed office space for god only knows what, but then he installed blackout curtains over the windows and took down our bunk beds, erecting a metal platform with a twin mattress in its place. Mom called it his Batcave. She said she didn’t like to go in there. I rarely tried. The door was always closed.
“We can’t be together on this one,” she told me once, on the back porch, as the sun was setting. “He feels he has to go it alone.”
I pretended to understand what she was saying so that I could end the conversation.
The room upstairs still bears traces of Angie if you strain to spot them: her CD collection, a few pictures left on the walls, some Sharpie graffiti in the corner that used to be hidden by a poster. Now the defining characteristic of the space is Dad’s incredible, shocking mess. The desk surface is piled high with used tissues and the uneaten, organic protein bars that are evidence of Mom’s attempts to feed him. Handwritten notes cover everything like a layer of snow. They spill from desk to floor, in different shapes of crinkled, crumpled, and torn. Clothes on the ground are visibly soiled and heaped in the corner, hamperless. The room smells of human filth and decaying food. I burn with shame at the idea of anyone seeing this place. I preemptively form excuses to the most obvious question: How could you let this happen?
It takes me a minute to spot the bags Mom was talking about. Five double-knotted plastic shopping bags filled with bills are lined up along the wall by the door.
An IBM laptop sits next to my dad’s flip phone in the center of the desk, half buried under all the garbage. The computer is asleep until I tap it. A login screen rejects my best three pass-word guesses.
I steal two black trash bags from the kitchen and get to work clearing the carpet. I fill one bag with pure waste— food wrappers, used napkins, and unidentifiable rot. The other gets filled with mom’s smaller shopping bags and everything else, including:
- A pharmacy receipt for antacids and anti-depressants
- An invoice for $90.95 from Data Services, Ltd.
- A birthday card “to a beloved wife.” Inside: Dear Clare.
Nothing else. Unfinished, unsent.
- One day’s worth of food journaling: banana 70 cal, c&c
protein 210 cal; pb protein 240 cal; ensure 250 x 2 = 500, total
= 1270, tomorrow +++300
- A note in his writing: Mickey -> boyfriend??
- A receipt for two pairs of new reading glasses
- A pair of cracked and bent reading glasses
- Another note: BH: 603-565-7309
- A single green Post-it: r/unsolved
I take a break to call BH from my dad’s cell phone.
A man answers. “Hello?”
“Hi,” I say. “This is . . . Mark Angstrom’s phone.”
“Who is this?”
“Who is this?”
“Bill.”
“Bill who?”
“Rooney.”
I glance down at my dad’s note and see that what I thought was an H was a sloppy R. The ink doesn’t form a closed loop, but the paper is indented from pressure. “How did you know Mark?” I ask.
“We skipped a step here. Who is this?”
“Mark left a note with your number.”
“Okay. And you are?”
“Why would he have done that?”
“You can go ahead and ask him.”
“Not really,” I say. “Mark’s dead.”
“Are you serious?”
“Yeah.” I feel myself losing my nerve. “I was going through some of his things, and I saw this number, so I figured—”
“Clare?”
“What?”
“Sorry, is this Clare?”
“No,” I say. “Her daughter.”
“Angie?”
“Teddy.”
“Oh, right. Jesus. That makes sense. I don’t know why my mind went . . .” Bill lets his voice trail off.
“How do you know them?”
“I used to do your yard,” Bill says. “You probably don’t remember.”
A guy in his late twenties. His face is fuzzy, but I can see Angie clearly—taking a break from her failed efforts at back- yard tanning to sneak around the side of the house and bum a smoke from him. Me, left to man the reflectors we made out of cardboard and aluminum foil, ready to flash a signal if Mom popped her head out of the sliding door. Both of us pudgy with puppy fat in the tiny bikinis we bought with our own allow- ance. It wasn’t that Mom didn’t approve of two-pieces; it was that she thought they required a certain figure. She didn’t want us looking like the fat tourists.
“I remember,” I say to Bill. “You drove a white pick-up.” “Can I ask what happened?”
“Suicide.”
“How? I’m sorry, I know that’s not polite to ask.”
“He drove his car off the bridge by our house.”
“On purpose?”
“Yes, on purpose.”
“Jesus Christ.”
“Why did he have your number written down?”
“I don’t know,” Bill says. “Maybe he needed some work done in the yard or around the house.”
“Right. Maybe he wanted to make sure the gutters were cleaned before he offed himself.”
Bill misses my sarcasm. “Getting affairs in order, I think they call it.” He clears his throat, and I see him shirtless. I hear Angie in my head.
“Hot Landscaping Guy is here,” she says, leaping onto my top bunk, where the view of the driveway is better.
I protest: he’s not hot; he’s just tan and sweaty.
She’s such a mess of hormones that she can’t tell the difference.
She’s back to staring at Bill as he unloads the truck. “He only looks at you,” she says.
He does not. He doesn’t look at either of us. Also: he’s old.
But from that point on, I make a point to wear makeup on days that he comes by. I make a point to look and sound older than my fourteen years. To walk like my hips have already rounded, to sway.
“Hello?” Bill says. “Teddy?”
“I have to go,” I say. “Sorry.”
“I’m sorry about your dad.”
“Yeah, thanks,” I say.
As I go to end the call, I see that the tiny gray flip phone screen reads “bill” rather than the number that I manually entered. A saved contact.
“Hello,” I say, raising the phone back to my ear, but I only hear the dial tone.
I click through the contact list. There are only three. I’m not in here, nor my mom. Just “bill,” “don’t answer,” and “ginger.” I call “don’t answer” and “ginger” but both are disconnected numbers. No ring, just an automated message letting me know that I’ve hit a dead end. The outgoing call log doesn’t show any- thing past the calls I’ve made today; the incoming log is empty. I log onto Dad’s computer as a guest so that I can google Bill Rooney. It’s a common name, and I have to really dig to come up with anything relevant. Finally, I hit on my guy—William F. Rooney Landscaping in Brookdale, one town further inland. His business doesn’t have a website, but he is on Yelp with one five-star review from someone named Jeremy P.
Love Bill and his team! Have been using WFR for years. Fair prices, on time, super reliable. Plus Bill plays a mean guitar!!!
I return to my search bar: Bill+Rooney+guitar+Brookdale
In the images tab, pictures of a local band come up. I click through to the website hosting them, and it’s the homepage for the Shifty, a dive bar that I’ve been to once or twice with the other teachers for Friday happy hour. The events page informs me that Mondays are trivia, Tuesdays are two-for-one drinks, and Wednesdays are the standing performance date for the Marching Ants, Bill’s band. There he is, fuzzy in the back of the frame, hiding behind the lead singer.
Wednesday. Tomorrow.
I write the time on my hand with Dad’s pen, and I have to carve it into my skin, the ink is so dry.
“Teddy,” Mom calls. “Wolfie needs to go out.”
“Coming,” I call. I close the computer and glance back at Dad’s notes before I fold them in a square. Mickey -> boyfriend??? The only Mickey I can think of is our neighbor’s old dog, a Yorkie that barked incessantly at all hours of the night. He’s dead now.
“Teddy!”
“Coming!”
I tuck the square of notes neatly into my pocket. I slip Dad’s cell phone in the other one. I leave the bag of trash and the laptop. One thing at a time.