Her editor told her he wanted a face on what was essentially a labor story the same day Aloa’s mother had been admitted to the hospital with complications from her chemotherapy. Aloa had written the nail salon piece in one Dexedrine-fueled eighteen-hour stretch, combining pieces of stories from workers into a fictitious manicurist she called Binh Nguyen. It was a sin against the first commandment of journalism—Thou shalt not make stuff up—and yet Aloa had tried to rationalize the piece as being reflective of the truth and had filed the story. That same afternoon, she had asked for two weeks of family leave and fled north.
A month after her mother’s funeral, Aloa had been called into the editor’s office and given the choice of resigning or being fired. While her fraud wasn’t at the same level as some of journalism’s worst offenders, the editor said, it added fuel to the fires of those who attacked the press as manipulative liars. It also didn’t help that the newspaper had recently run a series of ads touting her as its award-winning senior investigative reporter.
Aloa had gathered what small bit of pride she had left and wrote the resignation letter.
“You won’t make them feel any better by dying for your sins,” Erik said. “If my carpal tunnel wasn’t acting up, I’d tear down those curtains over there and turn you into Scarlett O’Hara, because you’re a survivor, honey. You’re smart and funny and fierce and beautiful.”
He touched her cheek, the way Aloa’s dad used to. Emotion rose and she shoved it down.
“That would make me the best-dressed woman in the Opera Boxes,” she said, referring to a series of concrete openings in the Mission District where the homeless went in rainy weather.
“Don’t throw that kind of shade on yourself, honey.” Erik tsked. “Life’s dark enough.”
“Here you is,” Guillermo interrupted, setting a steaming bowl of fragrant broth in front of Aloa. It was filled with noodles, cilantro, bean sprouts, slices of crispy duck, lime on the side. “A grande bowl of love,” Guillermo said, just as the bar door pushed open and a rumpled man with a gray ponytail and a porkpie hat came in.
“Looks like the Brain Farm is starting to arrive,” Erik said.
The Brain Farm was what Erik called the group of old anarchists and rebels who came every evening around seven o’clock to squabble and complain and drink.
“Ink,” said the grizzled man, nodding to Aloa. He was known only as Tick. All the anarchists gave themselves nicknames, an old habit born of years of hiding and guerrilla theater and monkeywrenching. If they liked you, they assigned you a pseudonym too. Aloa’s was “Ink” for what supposedly ran through her veins after years of newspapering. Tick wouldn’t talk about his, though there were dark hints about a bank bombing in the sixties.
Erik rose from the chair. “Let me get you a glass of wine before those old farts drain me dry,” he said.
“Water is fine,” she said.
He touched Aloa’s cheek again. “It’s OK, sweetie. Don’t forget there are people who love you and care about you and won’t judge you. Not ever.”
Aloa felt a lump form in her throat and speared a piece of the duck into her mouth, chewing hard until the feeling passed.
She hated to cry.
CHAPTER 3
Aloa believed cops hid behind impersonal words in their reports in order to blunt the horrible things they saw every day: “Decedent” for the four-year-old girl who’d been starved to death, “Reporting Party” for the blind widower whose bank account had been emptied by a once-trusted helper, “Domestic Violence” when a young woman’s eye socket was shattered by her husband’s fist.
It had been her job as a journalist to uncloak those words, to lay bare the ugliness. She took a breath and began to read the reports Michael had given her.
In this case, the decedent was a twenty-five-year-old woman by the name of Hayley Poole. She was five foot five, 140 pounds, with brown hair and a small scar above her right eyebrow. On Friday, July 14, Hayley had gone with friends to a place called Jeremiah Valley in a remote section of the Nevada desert for a camping/bouldering weekend. She had left the campout in her Toyota pickup around 5:00 a.m. on Sunday after a confrontation with two locals who’d arrived with guns and accused the group of trespassing.
Hayley had reportedly yelled “nature is free” at the two men, causing her friends to hustle her into her truck. Everyone scattered into their cars and left, including the gunmen. A friend reported Hayley missing after she failed to show up for an appointment later that evening.
Searchers found the young woman’s abandoned vehicle on a dirt track forty-six hours after the report. Her body was recovered a full day later. It was more than twenty miles from any road.
The medical examiner’s report listed more than one hundred cuts on Hayley’s feet and legs, along with deep wounds on her face, the inside of her left thigh, and the soft part of her belly. One of her eyes was missing from its socket, and flies had already begun feeding on her cracked lips. The examiner estimated the girl had been dead for seventy-eight hours when her body was found.
Cause of death, he concluded, was severe heatstroke brought on by 112-degree heat, a dry westerly wind, and drug and alcohol use. The wounds on the victim’s body, excluding the cuts on her feet and legs, were the work of postmortem predators, although he was not sure about the missing eye.
Aloa flipped through the documents to the toxicology report. Hayley’s blood work revealed low levels of potassium and sodium, along with traces of lysergic acid diethylamide, or LSD.
Aloa opened her Moleskine notebook and began a timeline, then a list of observations and questions. “Party girl or drug problem? Distance from camp to truck?” she wrote under the “Questions” heading and then added, “Background check, men with guns?”
She read on to discover that Hayley had been going through a rough patch before her death. Her longtime boyfriend had died on a climbing expedition three months earlier, and because of a shin injury, a documentary being made about her exploits as an adventure runner appeared to be in jeopardy. She’d also lost an important sponsor and was living in her truck.
Aloa frowned at the term “adventure runner,” and thumbed through the documents until she came to a copy of an Outside magazine article she’d spotted earlier. In it, the writer described Hayley as one of the stars of a movement called FKT, a mostly solo and rebellious sport in which runners tried to log the Fastest Known Time from one point to another. There were no firing guns, no race bibs, and few witnesses. Most of the time, athletes would simply pick a mountain or a brutal landscape and begin to run.
According to the article, Hayley had set a speed record for the 211-mile John Muir Trail in the Sierra Nevada of California and went on to destroy the women’s record for the fastest time running rim to rim in the Grand Canyon. She was the best in a class of women who moved through the outdoors like a strong and graceful wind.
Her latest project was a quest to win what was considered the Olympics of this obscure sport, something called the Cloudrunner Race Series. It was a string of gnarly, high-altitude endurance footraces around the globe in which runners tested not only their bodies but also their minds. For a moment, Aloa wondered if Hayley’s lonely death in the wilderness of Nevada had been some kind of gesture or simply a sad coincidence.
An accompanying photo of Hayley showed her at the end of her Grand Canyon run. Her long hair was pulled back in a ponytail; a spray of freckles was scattered on her cheeks. The look on her face appeared to be one of exhaustion and joy, but there was something else beneath it. An undercurrent of wariness. As if Hayley already knew this triumph was fleeting and then she would be on to the next challenge, the next test.
Aloa understood how that felt: to have failure always lurking, to have success be as short-lived as the next day’s news cycle. And yet, this woman had been used to enduring hardship, to pushing herself past pain. How could someone like that kill herself?
Aloa cleared her throat and warned herself not to get attached to the vict
im. That was no way to examine the facts clearly. She penned the questions, “Why lost sponsor?” and “Boyfriend’s cause of death?” in her notebook, then returned to the police report.
The investigating officer described the campsite, the braided tangle of dirt roads in the area, and Hayley’s drinking and drug use (half a pint of vodka followed by the LSD) before her disappearance. He also reported the discovery of a note written on a gas receipt in Hayley’s truck.
It read simply, “I’m sorry.”
“Death is presumed to be the result of suicide brought on by depression, and aggravated by drug and alcohol use,” the investigating officer had concluded.
Aloa leaned back in her chair. The Brain Farm was hotly arguing. She had finished only half the bowl of soup and taken a few bites of the duck, but what she had eaten had tasted good and it now sat warm in her stomach. A culinary yank back from the ledge of relapse.
She took a long pull of water.
So far, it would seem as if the instincts of the editors at Novo had been right. A young woman had hit hard times and decided to end it all by going out into the wilderness. The only other explanation was some kind of deadly misjudgment, a walk into the desert followed by a loss of direction, confusion. And yet, according to the report, the young woman’s shoes and socks had been found fifty feet from her truck. If you were going for a hike in the desert, you wouldn’t take off your shoes, Aloa thought.
She knew it would be simple to turn down Michael’s assignment, though what the ten grand would mean for her finances was harder to dismiss. Maybe she could turn her grandmother’s bedroom into one of those Airbnb rentals. Maybe she could apply to a temp agency; although even if she got a job tomorrow, she wouldn’t be able to make next month’s mortgage. She thought about how bad it would feel to lose the house that had been part of her dad’s legacy to her, but she also wasn’t sure she was ready to let herself be publicly pummeled by the haters and trolls who would resurrect her mistake the minute her byline reappeared on a news story. She slid the documents back into the envelope.
I can’t do it, Dad, she thought.
Her dad was the one who had named her after a genus of moth in the family Arctiidae. He was a thinker, a naturalist, a man who preferred to observe the outdoor world rather than write research papers about it. Consequently, he’d been denied tenure at the university where he’d been hired as an assistant professor of biology, and wound up at a small high school outside of Columbus, Georgia, much to the disappointment of Aloa’s mother.
According to family lore, Aloa’s father had taken her into the woods ten days after she was born. He had pointed out downy woodpeckers, brown thrashers, and a Cooper’s hawk diving for its supper. He had described the birds’ habits, their markings, and whistled their songs to his infant daughter. It became their Saturday routine, this observation of birds, this quiet conversation about nature. His death had destroyed the family’s fragile financial situation and Aloa had moved to San Francisco with her angry and bitter mother, taken in by Aloa’s paternal grandmother, Maja.
Aloa looked down at the documents poking out of the envelope and remembered what her dad had said about relying on general impressions to make identifications. In the world of bird-watching, that technique was called “jizz.”
“You must look for the details. You must spend time,” he told Aloa. “Jizz is the provenance of those who have no patience. Not scientists.”
An image came into her head of her father sitting unmoving in the woods, enthralled by the movement of birds, by their color and sounds. His entire life, he’d prided himself on rigorous examination, on not letting failure stop the search for scientific knowledge. She knew if he were here, he would tell her that a single error was no reason to stop the pursuit of truth and that no material thing was worth the price of fear—not even his mother’s house. Slowly, Aloa pulled the papers back out onto the table.
The bar was full now: locals coming in after work, artists clasping mugs of beer in their paint-stained hands, a lone guitarist setting up onstage while Erik mixed drinks and hustled bowls of Peking duck pho to tables.
An hour later, Aloa had reread most of the documents and jotted down a list of things that needed exploring. At the top of her catalog was the fact that one of the campers on the trip had never been interviewed, or even definitely identified, by the investigating officer. The other was the discovery of a shell casing from a Glock 19 located within twenty feet of Hayley’s vehicle, which the officer dismissed as unremarkable in an area that was well known for target practice and drunken shooting parties.
Was the only requirement for being a cop in that place the ability to walk and breathe at the same time? Aloa wondered.
Her dad had warned her about glimpsing what you thought was a rare bird and then propping up your identification by filling in details based on what you wanted to see instead of what was actually there.
“Believing is not seeing,” he always said.
Had the detective been so lazy and sure of his suicide theory that he’d dismissed clues that would indicate something else?
Aloa looked at the documents scattered on the table and tugged out the magazine article with Hayley’s photo. She stared into the athlete’s eyes.
Despite Occam’s razor, which said that the simplest answer was often the correct one, in Aloa’s experience, it was just as true that easy answers were often wrong. And wasn’t every human owed at least the benefit of the doubt?
What if Hayley’s mother was right and someone had murdered the athlete by chasing her into the desert until she collapsed? What if someone had threatened Hayley and she’d run and then lost her way?
Aloa thought of her own disgrace and the page two headline that had appeared the next day. DISCREDITED REPORTER TO LEAVE TIMES. If she died tomorrow, Aloa knew her obituary would carry the same descriptor: DISCREDITED REPORTER DIES. In the same way that Hayley’s life would always end with the dark punctuation of suicide.
Aloa knew she would never be able to recover her own good name, but maybe taking a closer look at Hayley’s death would be a small atonement for her failing. Maybe it would be a tiny payment against her karmic debt. The young woman with the haunted eyes deserved a shot at redemption, something Aloa had not been given.
She brushed a hand over the photograph, felt the weight of Hayley’s shame and of her own, and made her decision.
She would email Michael tonight and accept the assignment with a list of provisions: no contact between them; half her payment due within twenty-four hours; the option to quit the story at any time if she felt it was falling apart; and final approval of all headlines, subheads, and edits—if she agreed to write it at all.
She slid the papers back into the envelope.
Shit, she thought.
CHAPTER 4
Aloa had settled her bill, thanked Guillermo for the food, and was now walking up the hill to her house with a to-go cup of Macallan twelve-year single malt scotch.
“Daddy’s little helper,” Erik had said, and winked as he slipped the container into her hand.
Aloa let herself into her house and switched on her grandmother’s old glass chandelier, illuminating the redwood-paneled living room. A floor-to-ceiling bookcase lined one wall, under which sat a heavy dining room table and a straight-backed chair: her “office.”
The house was long and narrow, each room opening off an extended hallway: living area, kitchen, two small bedrooms, bathroom, and a small porch with a washer and dryer. It was sandwiched between two stucco-and-glass monstrosities that had sprung up in the last five years and would have lived in eternal shadow except that her grandmother had possessed the foresight to install a series of pyramid-shaped skylights that allowed daylight to stream in.
Aloa looked up and could see a reflection of light from a chandelier in the neighbor’s living room, a sliver of moon. She went into her tiny kitchen and poured the scotch into a tumbler, licking a drop from her finger.
She unlaced her
boots, retrieved her laptop, and stopped for a moment to stare out the home’s best feature: a large window that offered a startling view of the San Francisco Bay. She watched a trail of red taillights stream across the Bay Bridge and then turned, put the scotch on an end table, and settled into her grandmother’s favorite chair.
It was a fat, overstuffed thing that had once been upholstered in burgundy velvet but had faded to the color of cheap rosé. After her mother had died, Aloa had cleared out all the accumulated stuff: the lace tablecloths and fussy silver, the knickknacks and throw rugs. All that was left was the rosé chair, the table, and a red leather couch she’d salvaged from her apartment in Los Angeles. Emptiness was good.
Aloa took a sip of the scotch, which was smoky and yet sweet. She lifted the glass in a small toast to Erik and pulled the case files into her lap.
One of her dad’s most important lessons had been that a birdwatcher must always consider habitat, behaviors, and time of year in making an identification. It was a way of observing that had set Aloa apart as an investigative journalist. That, plus a dogged determination, an instinct for spotting inconsistencies, and an uncanny eye for detail, had led some of her colleagues to nickname her “Herlock Holmes” behind her back. But it was exactly those traits that had brought her awards, pay raises, and jobs at bigger papers.
Until she screwed up.
She wouldn’t do that now.
She pulled out the crime scene report: a record of what was found in and around Hayley’s truck, a silver 2002 Toyota with four-wheel drive and a SnugTop camper shell.
Inside the low-slung shell, the technician had found Hayley’s wallet with fifty-four dollars in bills, a tent, two sleeping bags, a backpack filled with clothes, four pairs of running shoes, and a one-burner stove. The list reinforced what Aloa had learned from the reports: Hayley was a woman who lived in her truck, an athlete, a woman who relied on herself.
See Her Run Page 2