See Her Run

by Peggy Townsend

  The alleged suicide note had been located on the driver’s seat. It was written on the back of a gas receipt from a station in Reno, and Aloa wondered if Hayley’s apology had been for what she was about to do or for something else. Some sin for which she sought forgiveness? She made a note in her Moleskine and continued cataloging.

  She noted the truck’s high mileage, its near-empty gas tank, and a cell phone charger but no phone in evidence. She then turned to a statement taken from Hayley’s ex-roommate, a twenty-four-year-old named Samantha Foster who lived in a section of San Francisco known as Dogpatch. Once home to rusting factories and crumbling Victorians, it was now filling with start-ups, craftspeople, and trendy cafés, a familiar story line in this city by the bay.

  According to Samantha, Hayley had fallen apart after the death of her boyfriend, who’d died on a trip to Africa. She’d begun drinking heavily, which had led to a police complaint after a drunken scuffle with another patron in a local bar. That had been followed by an incident in which Hayley had been ordered off a Muni bus after the driver had complained about her loud inebriation—and the fact she’d vomited all over a fellow passenger. Vodka, apparently, had been Hayley’s first stage of grief.

  The ex-roommate said Hayley had sobered up after that and returned to training for her Cloudrunner quest, but she either didn’t know or wasn’t asked why Hayley had moved into her truck. The detective only noted that the ex-roomie had said Hayley had been acting “weird.” The detective did not elaborate on what that meant.

  “Christ,” Aloa muttered at the man’s incompetence.

  Aloa opened her laptop, praying no one had taken down Hayley’s social media sites, and was rewarded with Hayley’s still-open Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter accounts. A bit of luck.

  She examined photos of sunsets, of Hayley trail-running in someplace called Superstition Wilderness, of her crossing the finish line of her first Cloudrunner competition in Washington state. The posts revealed the kind of woman who’d rather be caught in a blizzard than a nine-to-five job, a woman who shunned high heels and expensive clothes for a life of freedom and wandering.

  There were photos of her boyfriend, Ethan—handsome, Aloa thought—and one or two old shots of an aunt who’d apparently raised her for a time. There were the requisite photos of sunsets and meals (mostly vegetarian), plus a Mother’s Day shot of her mom holding her as an infant.

  There were also hints of darkness.

  One selfie showed Hayley alone on a wind-tossed, empty beach with the message: It’s only when I’m outdoors that I can be my true self. Don’t judge me if you don’t know me.

  Aloa swirled the scotch in her glass, leaned her head against the back of the chair, and considered the woman Hayley had been. She had known loss, just as Aloa had. She had tried to rise above her peers, the same as Aloa had in her work. She wondered if Hayley also had eating issues. If she counted calories along with the miles. If she craved control over bodily weakness.

  Behaviors and habitat, Aloa thought.

  She returned to her laptop, typed in “death by heatstroke,” and read how, as the body overheated, proteins and membranes around the cells in the body—especially the brain and heart—began to malfunction or were destroyed altogether. Heatstroke victims became dizzy and nauseous, then disoriented. Hallucinations were common. An autopsy would reveal muscle changes that pointed to high temperatures in the body. Like being cooked alive.

  Aloa shuddered.

  More results led her to stories of immigrants dying in the desert heat as they fled from Mexico toward what they believed would be a better life in the United States. Humanitarian groups reported finding the bodies of men, women, and children with cracked eyelids and swollen tongues protruding from withered lips. Worst of all were the trails of dried blood on some of the victims’ faces. Those dying from dehydration would sometimes cry tears of blood.

  “My god,” Aloa said, and clicked out of the site.

  She picked up the case file and again read through the gruesome list of Hayley’s injuries. Lividity, the coroner said, indicated Hayley had died where her body was found. Aloa reached over and finished the last of her scotch, feeling the beginning of a warm buzz. She liked that spot between sober and high, between control and release. She set down the glass and contemplated pouring herself another drink, but instead flipped to the next page and found a photo of Hayley’s naked body laid out on a stainless steel autopsy table.

  The muscles in her belly tightened.

  The fluorescent lights made Hayley look like a waxen image of herself. Her once muscled and smooth legs were slashed with cuts, her skin pale except for the places where ragged wounds dug into the flesh of her cheek, belly, and thigh. Her eye socket stared emptily while her cracked lips told the story of the flies and beetles that had arrived to feast on her flesh. Aloa imagined the living Hayley against the photo before her and looked away.

  Such a horrible way to die.

  She sat there for a moment, breathing deeply in and out, then returned to her work, lifting the photo to examine it more closely. She could see half-moons of dirt under Hayley’s fingernails, an old scar on her collarbone, and, finally, something that drew Aloa’s attention: a gash at Hayley’s hairline. The cut was straight, about three inches across, and stood out when compared to the irregularity of Hayley’s other injuries. Aloa’s mind backtracked and she tugged the crime scene report out of the file. Item number twenty-three was a rust-colored smear on the left edge of the camper shell’s hatchback. Aloa turned to the lab results. The smear had never been tested. Could it have been blood? The result of an accidental collision with the open hatchback? Or, thought Aloa, a deliberate shove as the result of some kind of struggle? More sloppiness on the detective’s part. She made a note and moved on, fully awake now.

  She scanned the search reports, weather conditions, and a brief note about the missing witness who the two other campers had described as a guy who’d just happened by and decided to hang out with them. The only information they provided was that he was tall and called himself Boots. She filled her Moleskine with four pages of notes and questions, made herself a cup of tea, and clicked through more websites.

  At 1:00 a.m. she finally turned out the lights, brushed her teeth, and climbed into bed, but the images of Hayley’s body and of immigrants’ deaths rose and turned into a slide show she couldn’t stop. At 2:30 a.m. she gave up, went to the hall closet, and took out the only antidote she knew for the insomnia that had plagued her for most of her adult life.

  She padded into the living room, sat on a stool, and spread open her legs. She settled the cello between her knees, the instrument’s neck warm against her skin.

  She set her fingers, lifted the bow, and, in the darkness, began to play, the music rising, the notes vibrating through the instrument and into her body. The music filled her and drove out thoughts of horrible deaths, of Michael’s return, and of mistakes that could never be made right.

  She played the prelude to Bach’s Cello Suite No. 1 over and over until peace came. Only then did she sleep.

  CHAPTER 5

  Aloa woke at 8:30 a.m., her sheets twisted around her legs, her eyes ragged from only five hours of sleep. She pulled on yoga pants and a sweatshirt, did a few stretches, and went into the kitchen. Fog pressed gray against the front window. Today would be different. No more restrictive bullshit.

  She pulled her beloved Aldo Rossi French press coffee maker from the shelf next to the stove, set a kettle of water to flame, and began her morning ritual: heat water to boil and let stand thirty seconds, warm carafe with hot water and dump, grind beans, settle grounds, pour half of the hot water over the grounds for thirty seconds of what was known as bloom, then add the rest of the water, let steep for three and a half minutes, press, and pour. Leave the Mr. Coffees and Keurigs to others. This was the only way to make coffee.

  When the brew was ready, Aloa poured herself a mug and inhaled, savoring the scent, the rich dark color. She took a long pul
l and then checked her email. The contract with Michael was sitting in her inbox as promised. She sent it to the printer, put a whole-wheat bagel into the toaster, and made herself get out a jar of peanut butter despite the quick stab of guilt that came with the knowledge of how much fat and calories it would add. She hoped it hadn’t been a mistake to let Michael back into her life.

  She was fourteen when Michael had come to live with them, a boy Aloa’s father had treated as gently as if he were a wounded bird. Her dad had pulled the desk out of his office and moved in a double bed, which he covered in flannel sheets and a soft quilt. He spoke quietly, bought the boy new clothes so he would not have to go back to the house where his family was killed, and cooked pots of pasta and grilled steaks, even while his wife, Aloa’s mother, told him his salary barely supported three of them and asked how he expected it to cover four. But she shouldn’t have worried, because Michael lived like a ghost among them. He picked at his food and shunned the new clothes for what he had been wearing on the day his family died. He sat in his new room with the lights out and took showers only when Aloa’s father reminded him.

  A month in, Aloa’s dad persuaded him to go on their Saturday nature walk, but Michael had lagged so far behind Aloa and her father, it was as if he wasn’t there.

  “Nature reveals herself when she is ready,” Aloa’s dad told her afterward. “We need to be patient.”

  And so they were.

  As Aloa’s father told the story later, he looked out the front window one evening to see Michael striding up and down the block. He thought of the way a caged leopard will pace from one side of his enclosure to the other to relieve the mental stress of its prison. He’d gone out the next day and bought running shoes and shorts for both him and Michael.

  “Oh my god. Really, Ben?” Aloa’s mother had said to her husband when she saw the bill for $200.

  The next day her father and Michael had set off into the woods behind their house. They ran two miles on a shadowed hiking trail and came back. Michael went off to take a shower and Aloa’s father smiled.

  A week later, they were running three miles, then five, then seven, then ten. Aloa’s dad never said what he and Michael talked about on the trail, but after a while Michael stopped holing up in his room. He ate dinner with them, joined the cross-country team, and was named the year’s top scholar-athlete in the town newspaper. And, as Aloa watched, Michael became part of her father’s life. The two ran a marathon together, became fascinated with electronics, and, on warm evenings, would play catch in the backyard.

  Sometimes, Aloa’s dad called him “son.”

  But Aloa’s father wasn’t the only one captivated by this intelligent and broken boy. Slowly, Aloa found herself being pulled into his orbit too.

  In the evenings, as she struggled with calculus homework at the kitchen table, he would pull up a chair and carefully explain the beauties of math to her, never once attributing her mistakes to stupidity or incompetence, as her mother did. He lugged her cello to her recitals, listened patiently to her overwritten short stories, and once held back her hair while she vomited after a party that had featured way too much peppermint schnapps.

  In the summers, he drove her out to the lake while Aloa’s father, under the watchful eye of his wife, did the chores he had neglected for most of the school year. Aloa and Michael would swim out to an old raft and lie in the sun where he would open up, talking about music and life and whether it was better to live in a city like New York or in the mountains of Colorado.

  She picked New York. He picked Colorado.

  After, they would swim back to the shore, turn on the radio, and leave the car doors open while they ate the lunch Aloa had packed: ham sandwiches, potato chips, and, sometimes, beer Aloa stole from the basement refrigerator. Once, she had opened her eyes and caught him watching her as she lay near the lake’s edge in her bikini. Their eyes had caught, and for a moment, the space between them had seemed to pulse with an energy that Aloa could, or would, not forget.

  Then, on an April evening, when she was seventeen and he eighteen, they’d found themselves alone in the house. He’d suggested a movie and Aloa, feeling reckless, made them Jack and Cokes. He slid Legends of the Fall into the VCR while the moon rose and a warm wind awakened the buds outside. Halfway through the movie, she had seen a glisten of tears in his eyes and had taken his hand. Then somehow they were kissing and their clothes had tumbled off and by the time the film was finished, they were sweating and sex-sated, Michael murmuring “oh my god” into her hair.

  The next morning, when he would not look at her at the breakfast table, she had told herself their lovemaking had been nothing more than sad-movie sex, no different than her tryst with Jason Meyerson, to whom she’d given her virginity during a New Year’s Eve party that same year. Only, the truth was, what had happened was much more than that because, at some point in that warm and wanton evening, Aloa had lost her heart completely to Michael.

  Four days later, Michael left with no explanation beyond a note on the kitchen table, which said he had to leave and that he would be in touch. “Don’t worry,” he wrote, although Aloa’s father did. He startled when the phone rang, hurried home to check the mail, and cornered anyone who had known Michael. He grew distracted, complained of headaches, and experienced periods of sleeplessness. Even his Saturday walks with Aloa weren’t the same.

  A few weeks before the Fourth of July, Aloa’s father went for a six-mile run in the woods. A jogger found his body three hours later, and the coroner speculated that if someone had been with Aloa’s father or had found him sooner, he might have survived the sudden and partial blockage of his left anterior descending artery.

  Aloa blamed Michael for the stress he’d placed on her father and for not being there when he collapsed.

  She also could not stop thinking of the note Michael had left on her pillow: “I’m sorry,” it read.

  CHAPTER 6

  The morning fog misted Aloa’s dark hair as she strode through the city. She told herself this was why she had cut it short when she’d fled to San Francisco from LA—the ease of styling in a maritime climate—but there was a part of her that admitted it may have also been some kind of penance.

  She’d dressed that morning in black jeans, a white T-shirt, and a beautiful leather jacket she’d bought in LA. “Mary-Kate, my ass,” she’d said as she changed, although she did not give up her Timberland boots. They were a throwback to her father, sturdy footwear that made you feel as if you were born to handle hardship.

  She’d ringed her blue eyes in dark liner and slipped a platinum ring in the shape of a feather over her thumb. Four small silver hoops pierced the upper cartilage of her right ear. The piercings were all relics of her earlier life, each with a meaning linked to the time she had acquired them: the day of her release from the psych ward after she’d managed to gain ten pounds, her first reporting job, the afternoon a runaway she’d befriended while writing a story about homeless kids was found dead in an alley with a needle in her arm, and, finally, her firing from the Times.

  Some people got tattoos. Aloa wounded cartilage.

  She carried an old leather backpack over her shoulder, containing her notebook, a bottle of water, and two pens. In her pocket, her phone busily recorded her steps, her location, and her caloric output thanks to an app called HardE, which despite its overbearing name drew her like a bee to nectar. As a recovering anorexic, Aloa knew the dangers of recording movement and burned calories but thought if she could prove to herself that she consumed more than she used, it would show her stability, her resolve to live like a normal person. Yesterday’s relapse had left her feeling unsteady.

  She walked with long strides, her boots tapping out a four-four rhythm on the sidewalk. Her editor at the Times, a gruff man with tufts of graying hair, had once said Aloa looked like a heat-seeking missile when she walked. Aloa was pretty sure he hadn’t meant it as a compliment.

  Her steps took her past law offices and banks. Past li
tter-flecked alleys where life-worn humans slept under ragged blankets. Past coffee shops with six-dollar lattes. She no longer owned a car.

  It took her a little less than an hour to get to her end point: a concrete warehouse in the Dogpatch neighborhood where Hayley’s ex-roommate lived. Aloa frowned at the building, checked the address against the one she’d copied from the police report, and circled the structure. Could this be right?

  She found three metal sliders covering what must have been work bays. At the far corner was a battered, army-green door. A stenciled sign announced 101–107. She stepped back, snapped a shot of the building with her phone, and opened the door to find a hallway bathed in flickering fluorescent light. Her footsteps echoed on a concrete floor as she followed the passageway along the building’s length, locating 104. She knocked. It’s never this easy, she thought, and it wasn’t.

  The door remained closed, silent. Aloa sighed and looked up and down the hallway.

  As a reporter, she had always preferred the face-to-face interview, where the nervous tapping of a foot or the sadness behind a smile revealed hidden truths. An old reporter at the Oregonian, where she’d worked in the early days, called these forays “knock-and-talks,” which had the ring of an honest day’s work, which Aloa also liked. She continued on.

  Apartment 105 yielded an angry young woman whom Aloa had apparently awakened; 106 held a paint-splattered man who said he knew nothing about a Samantha Foster in 104. He asked if she would like to join him in a morning whiskey. Aloa declined.

  Aloa could hear music from behind 107’s door. She hesitated, knocked. Waited. When there was no response, she knocked louder. This time, the music died and the door cracked open to reveal a man in a blue mechanic’s coverall.

  “I’m full up. Two transmissions waiting,” the man said. He was broad-shouldered and looked to be in his late thirties. He had wild golden hair, what seemed like an overly large head, and a pair of too-big hands.