See Her Run
Page 1
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Text copyright © 2018 by Peggy Townsend
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Published by Thomas & Mercer, Seattle
www.apub.com
Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Thomas & Mercer are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.
ISBN-13: 9781503949874
ISBN-10: 1503949877
Cover design by Shasti O’Leary Soudant
CONTENTS
START READING
JULY 16 12:37 p.m.
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
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
CHAPTER 24
CHAPTER 25
CHAPTER 26
CHAPTER 27
CHAPTER 28
CHAPTER 29
CHAPTER 30
CHAPTER 31
CHAPTER 32
CHAPTER 33
CHAPTER 34
CHAPTER 35
CHAPTER 36
CHAPTER 37
CHAPTER 38
CHAPTER 39
CHAPTER 40
CHAPTER 41
CHAPTER 42
CHAPTER 43
CHAPTER 44
CHAPTER 45
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Fiction writers have a superpower that gives them the ability to build houses, create businesses, and reconstruct entire city blocks with a few taps of computer keys. Some of the places in this book are real; many are not. Meanwhile, the characters are all works of my imagination.
—The Author
JULY 16
12:37 p.m.
She ran through the desert with the white heat all around her.
Rocks scraped her feet. Branches stabbed her legs, leaving red threads of blood on her strong calves.
“Run,” she told herself. “Run.”
She had been at it for more than two hours, but it was only now that she was beginning to doubt she had the strength to save herself.
She looked over her shoulder. Still behind her.
Panic tugged at her, but she forced it away and kept moving. Heat radiated from above and below.
She tried to recall her drive to this place. Was the road to the right or to the left? Near the brown mountains or toward that small rise? If only she could get back to the highway, where a passing motorist might save her. Her skin felt too tight. A dizzying buzz filled her ears.
She pushed herself forward, stumbling now.
Another mile farther, or maybe it was only yards—she had lost all sense of place—she entered a section of rough dirt. She lurched across it, her toe stubbing against a spinelike rock. She felt, rather than saw, the serrated earth skidding up to meet her. The ground grated sickeningly against the flesh of her arms and belly, scraping the skin open. She tasted dust and bile and rusted iron.
She blinked at the shock, then summoned what willpower remained and got to her feet. Move, she thought, but after only a few steps, a wave of nausea overtook her.
She bent and vomited up a viscous string of yellow-green fluid. Pain knifed through her skull. Her stomach convulsed and she gagged again, but nothing came up. A shiver ran through her body. Why did she suddenly feel cold?
She straightened, felt the desert tilt around her, and staggered backward, falling on her butt.
Get up. Get up.
She groaned, rolled to her knees, and shook her head, trying to clear it. A few yards away, something moved. A ribbon of brown and black slithered across her path, disturbed from a rocky bit of shade by the vibrations of her fall. She gasped, pushed herself to her feet, and staggered away.
She could no longer see her pursuer, but that didn’t mean the chase had ended.
Go, go.
Somewhere above her, a raven croaked. Ethan’s favorite bird.
Her clouded brain summoned her last image of him: striding into the airport terminal for a trip from which he would never return. She missed him so much.
Before he left he had told her that, of the two of them, she was the stronger. But that was a lie. It was weakness that had brought her into this trouble. And it was Ethan’s strength that had eventually killed him.
Keep the secret.
She moved again, now in deeper sand, her heart beating a thready rhythm. She tried to swallow but couldn’t.
What was that ahead of her?
She swayed to a stop, peered into the desert.
Her cracked lips formed a single word: “Ethan.”
There he was. A tall, dark figure in the distance, shimmering in the heat. He wasn’t dead. It had all been a mistake. He had come to save her.
She raised a bloodied hand to let him know she had seen him, and saw his arms lift in return. But no.
She frowned as the figure seemed to sprout great wings and rise into the air, moving swiftly toward her. She felt a brush of wind. Ethan was flying.
She strained her sun-scorched eyes to see him, lifted her arms so he could grab her. But as she did, pain stabbed her chest. Dark spots danced in front of her eyes.
She bent, trying to stop the agony that stretched across her shoulders and down her arms. She heard a primal grunt and wondered vaguely from where it had originated. She felt herself falling. A shadow slid over her and then disappeared.
“Come back,” she whispered, though the actual words didn’t make it beyond her lips, beyond the dying cells in her brain that governed thought and sight and touch.
She never felt the raven that came at dusk to peck at the skin on her cheek.
CHAPTER 1
Aloa Snow sat on the Vallejo Street steps, leaned back on her elbows, and lifted her face to the sun. She could feel her stomach hollow against the heaviness of the manila envelope in her lap. It had been thirty-two hours since she’d eaten.
Her head thrummed with lightness as the day’s warmth spread through her. Her hip bones pressed against her jeans like stone butterfly wings. She felt alive, perceptive, in control. Dangerous feelings.
Seven o’clock, she promised herself. Seven o’clock and she would eat.
Her unbalancing had begun at 9:00 a.m. the day before, as one of San Francisco’s August drizzles fogged the front window of her house in North Beach. She’d just finished pitching a story about a new stem cell treatment for deafness to a cranky editor at Senior Trend magazine when her phone rang. She didn’t recognize the number and, for a moment, let herself imagine it might be an unknown editor with a decent gig. Something better than “Friendly People are Happier People,” which she’d written last week for a cosmetics company’s blog. The truth was, she would take anything. Well, almost anything. She was down to her last $700.
“Aloa Snow,” she had answered, remembering to keep the desperation out of her voice. Desperation was not an attractive quality on anybody, least of all a writer who’d be
come the journalistic equivalent of a bottom-feeder.
“It’s been a long time,” the caller said. The voice was male with the slightest trace of a Georgia accent, and Aloa’s heart stuttered. She had not heard from him in more than eighteen years.
“Don’t hang up. Please.”
Aloa’s fingers tightened on her phone.
“It’s me. Michael.”
“I have to go,” Aloa said.
“Just hear me out, OK?”
The line hissed in the silence that followed, and Aloa pictured the boy Michael had been: shaggy-haired, a runner’s body, haunted dark eyes. Michael had been in her dad’s high school biology class when a police officer had summoned the teenager into the hallway one December afternoon. Michael’s father, a colonel at a nearby army base, had mowed the lawn, hung the holiday lights, then turned a hunting rifle on his wife, his infant daughter, and, finally, himself. Aloa’s father had gathered up the shell-shocked boy, found a substitute for his class, and brought Michael home, where he’d lived for the next three years.
“I need to ask you something first,” Aloa said. It was the thing that had set off all that had followed in her life, the thing that made loneliness flood in if she wasn’t careful. She thought she might never get another chance for an answer.
“All right,” he said.
She took a long breath. “Did you ever feel bad for leaving him?”
Another silence, this one longer. Aloa wondered if he’d hung up.
“Every day,” he said, finally.
Outside, a dog yipped three high-pitched barks.
“You know he died three months after you left.”
“I didn’t hear until much later. I’m so sorry.”
“Sorry doesn’t change what you did.”
“I want to make it up to you. I know you’re having a hard time.”
Aloa glanced around the house her grandmother had built, at the narrow shotgun rooms, at the scuffed wood floors, at the front window with its view of the bay.
“I don’t want your charity,” she said.
“It’s not charity.”
“Then what is it?”
“I need your help. You’ve heard about Novo, right?”
Because Aloa didn’t live in a cave in the Himalayas, she knew what Michael Collins had become: software developer, tech genius, philanthropist. Novo was an independent newsroom Michael recently had founded and financed against what he saw as an underfunded and increasingly pandering media.
“I don’t do investigative stuff anymore.”
“You were one of the best.”
“Goodbye, Michael.”
“Wait,” Michael said. “This is about a girl, a runner. She died. Out in the desert. The cops said it was a suicide, but I got an email from her mother. She said her daughter was murdered, that the police didn’t look hard enough. I’d like you to find out what happened.”
“I know what you’re trying to do,” Aloa said.
A pause. “I’ll pay you. Fifteen thousand dollars.”
Aloa thought of her skimpy bank account, the mortgage payment due in a week. She’d never begrudged the money her mother had borrowed against the house to pay for the medical bills that were piling up around her, but the thought of losing the home her grandmother had worked so hard for made her sick. Fifteen grand would cover six months of payments with something left over for taxes. “That’s guilt money, Michael,” she said.
“Ten thousand, then. Plus expenses,” Michael said. “That’s our standard rate.”
Aloa closed her eyes. “I can’t.”
“Just look at what I’ve got, please. See what you think. See if you agree with me. The editors at Novo think there’s nothing there, and I told them I wouldn’t overrule their judgment, but I need to do this, ’Lo. I really do. You’re the only one who would understand.”
Aloa sighed.
“Good.” He rushed on before she could say anything. “I’ll get everything I have to you.”
“There are no guarantees, Michael.”
“I know. Just see what’s there. If you don’t want to do it, I won’t bother you again. I promise. Unless you want me to.” A trace of hope.
Aloa rubbed a hand over her face. “No, Michael.”
“All right. I understand.” A pause. “Thank you for taking a look, at least.”
The manila envelope had arrived that same evening at seven. Flown in by private jet from New York, the package had shown up in the hands of a young man in tight jeans and a button-down shirt who had said, “Mr. Collins wanted you to have it as soon as possible.”
Aloa had taken the thick envelope and set it on her desk unopened. By then, it had already been ten hours since she’d eaten.
CHAPTER 2
It was 7:00 p.m., a full thirty-four hours since she’d eaten, when Aloa finally pushed her way through the fly-speckled door into Justus, the dive bar/blues club/North Beach hangout located on a narrow alley a few blocks from her house. Actually, Aloa would have needed a half dozen more slashes to describe the cubbyhole tavern owned by a former Hollywood costume designer named Erik and his husband, Guillermo, a chef on the run from some unnamed Colombian drug cartel. It was a place cluttered with movie memorabilia and flea-market tables. A place where it wouldn’t be unusual to find Robben Ford or Cassandra Wilson slipping onto the tiny wood stage for a Monday night set, or for a discussion of poetry to end in a fistfight. A place where old men with gray ponytails and shadowy pasts hunched over glasses of cheap red wine, and where puzzling fusion dishes appeared on the chalkboard menu—hot and sour soup with pierogi, salmon confit with wasabi mayo—each one a mysterious coupling, each one incredibly delicious.
“Ah, the prodigal daughter has returned,” Erik cried as Aloa stepped through the door. He was a bear of a man with a thick neck, a barrel chest, and arms that looked like they’d spent years wielding a lumberjack’s ax instead of a Swedish sewing machine. “Baxter’s been asking about you.”
Aloa closed the door and gave a tight smile. Baxter was a fight-scarred tabby that had adopted Guillermo five years ago. Along with a stubborn independence born from being tossed out of a car on a busy highway in his first eight weeks of life, Baxter had a dislike for rules and a kind of psychic draw toward the wounded, so anyone who came into the bar after losing a job or being served with divorce papers might suddenly find a scrawny, one-eyed cat curled up in his or her lap.
Baxter, Erik always said, was the feline version of Aloa—both pushovers for anybody who needed saving.
“Where is the old boy?” Aloa asked, stepping into the bar’s muddy shadows.
“Upstairs, sleeping off half a braised pork chop,” Erik said.
“Well, tell him I miss him too,” Aloa said. She headed for a spot in the far corner of the room but was stopped by a yelp.
“Oh my god, sweetie,” Erik said. “Please don’t tell me you’ve gone Mary-Kate 2008 on us.”
Aloa looked down at her half-laced Timberland boots, her ragged jeans, the old wool sweater she’d tugged on over a too-large Clash T-shirt that had belonged to a photojournalist she’d accidentally slept with a long time ago.
“I’ve just been a little distracted,” she said, and pulled the sweater more tightly across her chest.
“Honey, that outfit isn’t a distraction,” Erik said. “That’s a cry for help.” He finished pulling a beer for a down-on-his-luck songwriter and came out to hug her.
“I’m fine. Really,” said Aloa, sliding behind a rickety table and setting the still-unopened envelope in front of her. “Everything’s good.”
Erik pulled up a chair. “Oh, honey, come on down off your crucifix. Tell Papa what’s wrong.”
“It’s nothing.”
“Sweetie.” Erik drew out the word as a warning against a lie.
Aloa’s fingers shook against the envelope and she pulled her hands into her lap. “Somebody called with a job. It threw me, I guess.”
Erik frowned. “Have you been eating?”
Erik waited. He was one of the few who knew her history: the slide into anorexia in college, her hospitalization when she got down to eighty-seven pounds, the three months in a psych ward, the backsliding, and, finally, her stubborn hold on normalcy.
“A little.” Aloa could not admit more.
“Gully,” Erik called over his shoulder. “We’ve got a 9-1-1 here.”
Gully, or Guillermo, as he was known to everyone but his husband, stuck his head out from behind the swinging kitchen doors. He was dark-haired, slender, bordering on beautiful.
“A steak. Stat,” Erik said.
Guillermo came into the room. He wiped his hands on a towel he’d tucked into the waistband of his canary-yellow pants.
“She’s not eating.” Erik waved a hand at Aloa.
“You are enferma?” Guillermo asked.
Aloa could feel herself coming off the high of restriction, felt darkness settling in. “I’m fine. I just didn’t feel like cooking.”
“Pssssh,” Erik said.
“A steak is too much. I have such a very thing,” Guillermo said. “A vegetable pho con Peking duck. Is accurate for you.” He hurried away.
“I love that man, despite his massacring of the English language,” Erik said, and turned back to Aloa. He tapped a beefy finger on the envelope. “Whatever is in there, honey, it’s not worth your health.”
“I know,” Aloa said.
“Rent your room out to horrible strangers. Sell your books. I hear Big Sue’s is hiring.” Big Sue’s was a strip club a few blocks away.
Aloa smiled tiredly. “They’d have to rename it. Flat Sue’s.”
“Honey, don’t disparage those two upstanding little sisters of yours.” Erik nodded toward her chest. “It’s your head I’m worried about. It’s time to forgive yourself. Time to take off the hair shirt. And I’m not talking about whatever that is.” He circled his finger at Aloa’s T-shirt. “That should be burned.”
“It’s not that easy,” Aloa said. “I let a lot of people down.”
Two years before, when Aloa was working for the Los Angeles Times, she’d written a story about a group of Vietnamese nail salon workers living in overcrowded apartments, working seven days a week, with their expenses, including supplies, being deducted from their meager paychecks and tips so they were earning less than five dollars an hour.