She glanced at the directions from Hayley’s mom and turned into a driveway that was basically two tracks in the dirt marked by a yellow arrow painted on a block of wood. Redwoods rose around her, their stately carmine-hued trunks a monument to the passage of time. Leafy ferns sprouted near their base.
She’d come home after her phone call with Michael, drank a Diet Coke, and took a few minutes to research Ethan’s climbing partner, T.J. Brasselet. She found photos of him climbing heart-stopping rock walls, a Facebook page that hadn’t been updated in seven months, and a mention of him in an article about his mother driving her van into Elliott Bay, killing her and T.J.’s baby brother.
Aloa then found the story in the Seattle Times: A woman named Cheryl Brasselet had cleaned her apartment; wrapped her two sons, ages six and four, into blankets; and loaded them into her ancient minivan. Engine roaring, the van had crashed through a wooden barrier at a ferry terminal and plunged into the 51-degree water.
The article said Cheryl Brasselet suffered from clinical depression, had just been diagnosed with brain cancer, and was about to be evicted for not paying rent for the last three months. Police speculated suicide, although they allowed a seizure might also have been to blame.
The only reason the six-year-old boy, Tyler Joseph Brasselet, had survived was that his mother, in what would turn out to be a case of beneficial neglect, had failed to buckle her children into their car seats. When the car sank into thirty feet of murky water, the oldest boy had been shoved into a tiny pocket of air. Rescue divers found him with his mouth pressed into that lifesaving bubble, his arms holding his little brother against his chest. The brother, Peter David Brasselet, had died of hypothermia, but T.J. had survived.
Was climbing T.J.’s way of lifting a middle finger to the death he’d already eluded once, or did he carry the same darkness as his mother?
She hoped, for his sake, it was the former.
The track hugged a steep hill, its edge falling into a canyon so deep Aloa did not want to think about what lay at the bottom. She followed the path around a blind curve and up another incline. Finally, the track dead-ended at a structure that looked like it might have come out of an episode of Tiny House Builders.
The home was rectangular and made of steel, as if it might have once hauled freight, but large windows cut into the metal made it seem open and airy. A deck with a stack of firewood at one end of it cantilevered over a steep ravine.
An old red Saab was parked out front, along with a rusting motorbike that didn’t appear capable of driving more than twenty miles without falling apart. Aloa got out of the car.
“Can I help you?” came a woman’s voice.
Aloa looked up to see a tall woman with red-gold hair step out the cabin’s front door. What the hell was Jordan Connor doing here?
“Oh, it’s you,” said Jordan, the dislike in her voice unmistakable. She came to the edge of the deck. “What do you want?”
Aloa squared her shoulders. She knew where this was coming from. A background search on Jordan Connor the night before had revealed that her father, a Texas oil and gas inspector, had been arrested when Jordan was twelve for accepting money in return for turning a blind eye to problem oil wells. He’d gone to prison for seven years, causing the family to lose everything they owned, and chances were, the dad would have escaped notice if not for a series of articles in the Dallas Morning News.
“Listen, I’m sorry for what I said the other day,” Aloa said, although she wasn’t entirely.
Jordan crossed her arms over her chest. She wore yoga pants and a tank top, which revealed the tattoo Aloa had noticed before: an ornate cross entwined with thorns.
“I’m just trying to help. Hayley’s mom is having a hard time with the whole suicide thing,” Aloa said.
“We’re all having a hard time,” Jordan said. “What good is it to dredge everything up?”
“Because,” Aloa said, “Hayley deserves to have her story told.”
“A story that will only make things worse.”
“Why is that?”
“Because you’ll just write all the bad stuff about her.”
“It’s not that way.”
“Reporters are all alike. All they want is dirt.”
Aloa swallowed the urge to argue. “I’m not looking for dirt. I’m trying to understand Hayley, understand what happened.”
Jordan shook her head.
Aloa knew she was getting nowhere. “Is T.J. here? I’d like to talk to him.”
“You can’t,” Jordan said.
“He’s not here?”
“I didn’t say that.”
Aloa pushed down her impatience. “Where is he, then?”
“He went up Pollux. It’s an old Douglas fir. A hundred yards that way.” Jordan nodded her head north. Aloa could see a faint trail through the shadowed forest.
“When will he come down?”
Jordan shrugged. “Who knows? He goes up there to meditate. He’s been having a hard time. I’m hanging out with his dog.” As if on cue, a blue heeler with a brown snout trotted from the house and came over to sniff around Aloa’s ankles.
Aloa looked in the direction Jordan had indicated.
“He won’t talk to you anyway,” Jordan said. “He doesn’t like reporters.”
“I’m guessing you don’t either.” Aloa decided to tackle the issue head-on.
Jordan lifted her chin. “Not really.”
“It’s not the reporter’s fault your father did what he did,” Aloa ventured.
“My dad was getting help, trying to make things right—even before the stupid articles,” Jordan said. “The reporter never wrote about that, did he? He made my dad this total villain.”
Aloa didn’t want to debate the finer points of fraud. “How is your father doing now?”
“All right. He’s working in the oil fields. He just bought a house.”
“Good to hear,” she said.
“Not really. He should be retired now, not busting his butt in 105-degree heat.”
“He made a choice.”
“Are you saying my father deserved what happened?”
“I’m just saying we never know where a decision might lead.”
Jordan’s eyes narrowed.
“I’ll bet your dad is proud of you, though.” Aloa switched tacks. “Your running, the work you do with She Soars.”
She Soars was an after-school program Jordan had cofounded to help girls learn the joys of exercise.
“I love those kids,” Jordan said.
“I’ll bet you do.” Aloa nodded her head toward the forest trail. “Listen, is there any way to talk to T.J.?”
Jordan considered her. “I don’t think that’s a good idea. Like I said, he’s not doing so hot right now.”
“I won’t push him.”
“Just like you didn’t push me at the bar?” Jordan shifted position, her feet in a wide stance, her arms folded across her chest.
Aloa gave an inward sigh.
“You should just go,” Jordan said.
“I’m afraid I’m going to have to hear T.J. tell me that,” Aloa said, and turned, heading toward the trail in the woods.
“Leave him alone,” Jordan called.
“I just have a few questions,” Aloa said over her shoulder as she trotted along the path into the forest. Shafts of sunlight cut through the trees. The smell of fresh growth and old decay filled the air.
She arrived a few minutes later at the base of a large Douglas fir. A blue climbing rope hung from unseen branches. She craned her neck upward. “T.J.?” she hollered. “My name is Aloa Snow. Emily said I should talk to you.”
“She’s a reporter,” Jordan called, coming up behind Aloa. The blue heeler at her feet gave one sharp bark.
Aloa ignored her and shouted up into the tree. “I’m doing research. I’m with Novo. We want to tell Hayley’s story.”
A disembodied male voice came down through the branches. “I don’t talk to reporters.�
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“I told you,” Jordan said.
Aloa had lots of experience persuading reluctant sources to speak, but she’d never done it at a throat-scraping shout before. “Listen, I just want to get the facts straight. You were her friend, like a brother,” she hollered.
“Go away,” T.J. called down.
“There’s so much judgment around suicide. So much pain for those left behind,” Aloa yelled back, remembering the suspicions about T.J.’s mother. “Think of Emily’s pain, her suffering. She deserves to know what really happened.”
“Emily told you to talk to me?” came T.J.’s voice.
“She gave me directions to your house,” Aloa called.
“Think about what you’re doing, T.J.,” Jordan hollered up.
“What did Emily say?” T.J. said.
“Can you come down?” Aloa said. “I don’t want to keep shouting.”
“Come up. Jordan will help you.”
Aloa estimated the tree was more than a hundred feet in height. Fifty feet, she’d read, was redline, the height at which a person would most likely die if they fell to the ground. But less was needed if you landed headfirst, which was what an old cop had told her as they stood outside a hotel where a young starlet had ended her life out a third-story window. “You see, the head’s heavy,” the cop explained. “Essentially, it turns your body into a lawn dart.”
Aloa shook off the image. “Can’t you just come down for a few minutes?”
“She doesn’t want to come up,” Jordan hollered.
“That’s not true,” Aloa called, although it was. She and her father had sometimes ascended the pines near their house to get closer to the creatures they studied. But none of the trees were as tall as this one.
A corkscrew of limbs rose up the trunk. Shafts of light stabbed through the leafy boughs. Besides curiosity, Aloa had another character trait that often got her in trouble, and that was stubbornness.
“All right,” she yelled to T.J. “I’m coming up.”
“Get her some gear, Jordan,” T.J. hollered back.
Ten minutes later, Aloa was snugged into a climbing harness with a helmet secured on her head.
Jordan, shaking her head, set an aluminum ladder against Pollux’s trunk. It was just tall enough that a person could stand near the top and grab hold of the tree’s lowest branch. But then what? Did you have to pull yourself up with pure arm strength? Aloa vowed to begin a regimen of push-ups when she got home.
Jordan clipped one end of the climbing rope to Aloa’s harness and ran the other end through a belay device attached to her own harness. “Top of the ladder. Grab that branch to the left. There’s a small spur coming out of the bark. Put your left foot on it and step on the branch to your right. That is, if you can.”
Jordan’s directions were like gunfire. Quick, loud, and meant to wound.
“Don’t worry about me.” Aloa looked up into the branches of the tree. “How tall is Pollux?”
“A hundred and twenty feet. A baby could climb it. I don’t know why I need to have you on belay.”
“Let’s just get this over with,” Aloa said, and put her hand on the ladder. She knew it would be painful if she slipped—even with the belay. She wouldn’t put it past Jordan to exact a bit of revenge on the media by giving her a little too much slack. What had Emily called it? A whipper?
She set her Timberland firmly on the ladder and began to climb. “I’m coming up,” she hollered to T.J.
“Stay on this side of the tree,” Jordan said. “If the rope gets tangled in the branches, you’re in trouble.”
At the top of the ladder, Aloa sucked in a lungful of air, fitted the toe of her boot on the spur Jordan had indicated, and began to climb. The fir gave off a sweet, fruity scent.
She monkeyed up the tree: Reach, step, pull. Reach, step, pull. At about eighty feet up, she stopped to rest and looked down. Jordan was staring off into the distance, her hands seeming slack on the rope. Should she holler down and tell her to pay attention? Aloa wondered, but then decided against it. She would not show weakness.
“How’s it going?” came a masculine voice. Aloa looked up through the branches to see a stretch of green canvas and a ruddy male face, shadowed by a trucker cap and a three-day stubble. He had a boxer’s nose, close-set brown eyes.
“You must be T.J.,” she said.
“One and the same,” he answered. “Not too much farther. You’re doing fine.”
“Thanks. It’s not as hard as I thought.”
Ten feet later, Aloa would change her mind.
She’d traveled upward, finding her way through the branches while admiring the view over the treetops, but then found herself at a spot more difficult than the rest of the ascent. It required a stretch and a slight lean forward over open space to reach the next branch, and Aloa pushed down a tickle of nerves. What had Jordan said? Even a baby could climb this tree?
Aloa glanced toward the ground, took a breath, and lifted herself on her tiptoes. With a hand on the tree trunk to steady herself, she leaned outward and began to place her boot on the branch. But at the same moment she stepped, there was a sudden tug at her hips and a loud shout from below. “Wait!”
“What the . . . ?” she thought, but there was no time for an answer because, in an instant, she was off balance and her foot was slipping.
The fall into empty space was like those dreams where your car is suddenly plunging off a cliff and your heart and stomach are shoved sickeningly into your throat.
Aloa grabbed for air, a scream exploding from her mouth. Then, as suddenly as it began, she was yanked to a halt. Her body swung, her hip crashed into the trunk of the tree, and the next thing she knew, she was suspended almost upside down from the rope like some horrible mobile.
“The belay snagged,” Jordan yelled from below.
“Are you OK?” T.J. called down to Aloa.
“I don’t know,” Aloa yelled back. There was a roaring in her ears.
“Just relax. Use your abdominals to pull yourself up,” T.J. said. “Grab the rope. You’ll be fine.”
The rope twirled her in a slow circle. The view to the ground was dizzying.
Aloa inhaled a deep breath and tried to calm her mind so she wouldn’t think of the ground, of the way her body would crumple into a broken mix of bones and organs if she smashed into it from this height. She counted one-two and then lunged. Her fingers grazed the rope but then slipped away so that she fell backward again.
“Shit,” Aloa cried. The detective had been right about the heaviness of the human head.
Now the rope swung again. She crashed into the tree trunk and then heard a loud crack, followed by a second sickening plunge. She was yanked to a halt, her head snapping once more. The sudden deceleration forced another cry from her.
From above, she heard T.J. yell, “Headache!” Then, the sound of hollow wood snapping through branches.
“I’m OK,” Jordan called as the limb thumped to the ground.
Bile rose in Aloa’s throat.
“OK. Listen,” T.J. called down to her. “Some of those branches on that side are pretty manky. You’ve got to be careful.”
Oh, now you tell me, Aloa thought.
“If you can just swing yourself toward the trunk and take hold of that knob that’s sticking out, you can use it to help you grab the rope,” T.J. called.
“I see it,” Aloa said.
“Then, if you can brace your foot against the trunk, you should be able to lift yourself up to that branch above you.”
“Just give me a second,” she yelled.
She willed her breath to calm, for the blood to stop pounding in her ears. Every part of her brain told her not to move, but she knew she couldn’t spend the rest of her life dangling upside down from a tree branch like some bizarre Christmas ornament.
She counted one-two-three and swung herself toward the tree trunk, feeling the wood scrape against her skin as weight and momentum pulled her hand away from the knob. She cur
sed and, on the third try, managed to hang on and pull herself up to the rope the way a child pulls itself to her mother.
“Good job,” T.J. called.
Aloa’s breath came in raspy bursts. Once again, she thanked her father for the sturdiness of her Timberlands.
With one hand on the rope and the other on the knob, she pushed the sole of her boot against the trunk’s rough bark and thrust herself upward just as T.J. yelled, “Pull, Jordan.”
The tug at her harness was just enough to help get her onto the branch above her.
“There you go,” T.J. said. “The rest of the way is easy.”
Aloa flopped onto an eight-by-eight square of canvas stretched taut between Pollux and a similarly sized fir a few feet away. Below her, a sea of green washed outward to the distant Pacific Ocean.
“Christ,” she swore.
“You know, the more you do it, the easier it gets,” T.J. said.
“I think my tree-climbing career is over, thanks,” Aloa said.
She sat up and brushed bits of bark and a few needles from her hair. “Could I have some water?”
“Have at it,” T.J. said, and handed over the gallon jug he’d stored next to a mesh bag of oranges and a jar of cashews. He was shirtless and barefoot, wearing a pair of ragged jeans.
The water was on the warm side but it tasted sweet and good, and T.J. watched her drink while she also studied him. His hands were large and knotted; his muscled forearms looked like there were rocks under the skin.
She handed back the jug, wiped the back of her hand across her mouth, and felt her heart finally slow.
“So Emily told you to talk to me?” T.J. said, settling the jug on the canvas.
“She did.”
“And you’re writing a story about Hay? About Ethan?”
Aloa dodged the question. “I’m in the early stages.”
“Have you found anything?”
“Maybe you could tell me about Hayley first. What was she like? What was she going through before she died?”
T.J. took off his trucker cap and ran a hand over his dreads. “Well, if I had to say one thing about Hay, I guess it would be that she was really strong but she was soft, too, you know. Like once, she totally gave away her bike to this old guy. He was like seventy and had to walk six miles to work every day. He lived in some kind of storage shed and he was a dishwasher and sent all his money to his grandson so he could go to college. Hay said he was the toughest person she knew and if she had the money she’d hire a limousine to drive him to work every day.”
See Her Run Page 14