See Her Run

by Peggy Townsend

  “I’ve tracked him here, to a place where he and his best friend, Ethan Rodriguez, once roamed in preparation for a trip into the forbidding Tibesti Mountains in north-central Africa. Only, no amount of climbing or trekking or deprivation could prepare Brasselet for what would happen. Nothing, he says, could have prepared him to watch his best friend die.”

  The story went on to describe how the pair had gone to the Tibesti to explore a land ravaged by desertification and species loss, a land of volcanic spires and land mines, of bandits and nomads.

  There, they found primitive drawings of animals that had roamed the once-lush area and the remnants of an ancient tribe who had shared some kind of trippy vision ceremony with them. They climbed towering rock spires, had a brush with a poisonous viper. Fifteen days into their return trip to the city of N’Djamena, they had been attacked by bandits.

  Aloa’s reading was interrupted by a bark from Tick. “There it is. Right there, man,” he cried.

  “I told you, money is the medium,” Doc crowed as Aloa’s fancy new printer whirred to life.

  Aloa ignored the men and turned back to the article. T.J. told Combs he had been relieving himself a distance from their camp when the robbers arrived. He’d heard a shout, zipped his pants, and hurried back only to find Ethan and their Teda guide kneeling in the sand with two men in headdresses and combat gear aiming AK-47s at them. He’d dropped to his belly behind a rough boulder and watched as the robbers shouted at Ethan and the guide and poked at them with their guns. One bandit punched Ethan in the face, causing him to sway from the impact.

  Without any weapon beyond a few fist-size rocks scattered around him, T.J. could only watch in horror as one of the robbers finished some sort of diatribe and then went over, grabbed Ethan by the hair, and slashed a knife across the climber’s throat. He did the same to the terrified guide.

  “All I could see was his blood spilling everywhere,” T.J. was quoted as saying. “It just kept coming. It was like some dream, but I couldn’t wake up.”

  The thieves took the expedition’s camels, which were loaded with food and gear, and disappeared into the desert. T.J. said he spent the night huddled in shock, then salvaged what he could from the campsite—a gallon jug of water, a multi-tool, and a Bic lighter—and hiked through the desert for a day before he found a Tuareg camp, where he was offered food and water.

  The article ended with T.J. saying he would continue adventuring because that’s what Ethan would have wanted.

  But was that what Ethan really would have wanted? Aloa wondered. Wouldn’t he have preferred to be alive? To live happily ever after with Hayley in the mountains, to grow old together, to live free like he’d written in his card? Or was there something inside people like Ethan and Hayley, where safety and the fear of death were overruled by a need to challenge themselves, to explore the limits of the human body and spirit?

  She refolded the article and considered what she knew she should do next. She grabbed her laptop, retrieved Combs’s contact information, and picked up her phone.

  He answered on the fifth ring.

  A cacophony of voices, music, and the clink of glass indicated he was in a bar.

  “Mark, it’s Aloa Snow. How are you?” she said.

  The background sounds seemed to rise in volume for a moment. She heard a loud cheer.

  “What do you want?”

  She steeled herself. She hadn’t expected this to be easy.

  “I saw your story on Ethan Rodriguez, the climber,” Aloa said. “Really nice job.”

  “Thanks.” Distrust edged out his obvious pleasure at the compliment.

  Aloa plunged ahead. “Listen, I was wondering if we could grab a beer or a cup of coffee? I’d like to pick your brain. Find out more about what happened to those guys on the trip, maybe take a look at your notes.” Space and readers’ time constraints meant reporters usually had to leave out two-thirds of what they’d reported from their stories.

  “Why do you want to know?”

  Aloa debated a lie but she’d vowed truth in everything after her disgrace. “I’ve got a gig. I’m doing some research for Novo. I’m looking into Rodriguez’s death for a story they want to do. It’s about his dead girlfriend.”

  “Are you frigging kidding me?”

  Aloa took a breath. “No. I’m not.”

  “Why would Novo hire somebody like you? You’ve seen the people on their staff. They wouldn’t let a faker like you anywhere near their site.”

  Among people whose business was news, the report that a journalist with a shelf full of writing awards had made up a source for one of her stories had spread as quickly and nastily as the flu. Aloa pressed down a flash of anger. “Mark, I know I made a mistake. I know what I did was wrong; my mom was dying, the editors wanted this big story, and I made a stupid decision . . . that’s not an excuse, that’s just how it was and I’m sorry for it every single day. All I need is some background on this Rodriguez guy, on the trip. Novo is going to vet everything. No shortcuts. I promise. Give me a hand here.”

  There was burst of loud laughter in the background.

  “I wouldn’t trust you with a sack of garbage, let alone my notes,” Combs said.

  Aloa pictured him as he had been when they’d met: his too-tight jeans, his styled hair, the air quotes he used to tell the conference leader how he’d been aced out of a job at the New York Times by a “targeted hire.”

  “That’s OK. I doubt there’s much difference between garbage and your notes anyway,” she said, and stabbed off the call.

  CHAPTER 11

  Aloa glanced over at the address in her open notebook as she drove over the Golden Gate Bridge. She was on her way to interview Hayley’s mother, who lived in Inverness, a tiny tourist town in western Marin County.

  Her stomach felt raw and her head seemed to float a few inches above her body—both the result of the gut-churning conversation with Combs and another round of 2:00 a.m. sleeplessness.

  She’d gone to bed at midnight, her body exhausted, but after two hours of tossing and turning, she had finally surrendered and climbed out of bed. She’d drunk a glass of water while standing at the front window and retrieved her cello. She lowered herself onto the stool, felt a shiver of coolness through the T-shirt she wore, and began to play. The complicated beauty of Mark O’Connor’s “Appalachia Waltz” filled the house, taking her mind away from shame and into the memory of mountains and pines and her father. She played until her eyelids grew heavy and then crawled back under the covers.

  She’d had a few hours of twitchy sleep before she’d awakened dry-mouthed and slightly nauseous with the certainty that she should email Michael and tell him the assignment had been a mistake. Combs had proved what she already knew: that it was almost impossible to make up for the sins of your past, and that she’d probably feel worse when this was over.

  She would have written the email, except for two things: there was a part of her that wanted to wipe the smug judgment off the faces of people like Combs, and, if she wanted to save her grandmother’s house, she really needed the money.

  Now she was behind the wheel of Doc’s car, a Volkswagen van so gutless he had to take long, circuitous routes to his volunteer cooking gigs in order to avoid the vehicle chugging to a standstill on one of San Francisco’s famed hills. Luckily for Aloa, the bungalow where Hayley’s mother lived was set low on the slopes above Tomales Bay.

  “Ms. Poole,” Aloa said when Hayley’s mom answered the door. She was a sturdy woman dressed in a green thermal shirt and overalls. Her short brown hair sprang from her head in a tangle that didn’t suggest any sort of style but rather a lack of interest in grooming.

  “Please, call me Emily,” the woman said. She looked to be in her late fifties, or maybe it was that the puffy, dark circles under her eyes made her look older. “Come in. Sorry, I didn’t have time to clean.”

  The small living room was littered with newspapers, partially empty coffee cups, unopened mail, and a pile of lau
ndry that could have been clean or not.

  “It’s fine,” Aloa said, wondering if the house was in its normal state or if the disarray was a product of grief. A dried-up pot of macaroni and cheese sat on the floor.

  “I’ve just been so busy,” Emily said, shoving the laundry aside so Aloa could sit on the room’s small couch. She picked up a stack of newspapers, put them down, then grabbed the pot of dry mac and cheese. She stopped, frowned.

  “Tea,” she said as if reminding herself. “And cookies.”

  “Tea is fine,” Aloa said.

  “I went to the store after you called,” said Emily, disappearing through a doorway into a small and equally cluttered kitchen.

  Aloa turned and peeked into a bedroom off the living room while Emily noisily prepared tea. It held an unmade bed, a nightstand piled with books, and a framed photo of Ethan and Hayley on some tropical beach.

  Ethan was dark-haired and olive-skinned. He wore board shorts that showed off his taut belly and muscled arms. He looked like some Latin American god.

  Hayley stood next to him in a blue bikini that gave her a look of power more than some kind of magazine-cover sex appeal. Still, they were a commanding couple. No wonder they had drawn attention from sponsors. Aloa took a quick photo with her phone, grabbed a shot of the disheveled living room, and shoved the phone back into her pack. She let her eyes drift back to the view out the house’s front window, a serene stretch of wide, blue bay with open hills beyond—a natural calmness in contrast to the chaos of the house.

  “Here you go,” Emily said, coming back with a small plate of oatmeal cookies. She shoved them toward Aloa. “They’re vegan.”

  In her years of reporting, Aloa had learned that accepting an offer of hospitality—no matter how unwelcome—often helped open the door to conversation. She’d drunk warm cola and bitter coffee and had once swallowed a gelatinous pickled fish at the home of a Russian gambler just to draw out confidences. She took a cookie and bit into it. It tasted like wet cardboard.

  “Thanks,” she mumbled.

  Emily stood as if waiting for Aloa to take another bite and then, thankfully, muttered “tea” and went off to get it.

  Aloa shoved the rest of the cookie into a pocket in her pack, mentally adding “one quarter oatmeal cookie” to the list of today’s food, which so far included only a piece of dry wheat toast and a cup of her strong coffee. She told herself she would eat lunch and that this restrictive bullshit had to stop, although she knew that, once started, the purity of self-denial was hard to shake.

  Emily reappeared a minute later with two mugs of tea, shoved aside the newspapers, and set one of the cups in front of Aloa. There was an oily sheen to the brew although the cup looked clean enough.

  “I’m so glad somebody finally wants to listen,” said Hayley’s mom. She perched on an upholstered chair garlanded with socks and towels and took a sip of her tea. “The cops in Nevada stopped taking my calls and the Chronicle wouldn’t talk to me. The magazines said they didn’t want to glorify suicide.” She huffed out a breath. “I didn’t know who else to turn to. Then I read about Mr. Collins in People magazine and emailed him. He’s a saint.”

  “Well,” Aloa said noncommittally.

  “Try your tea,” Emily said. “I’ve never talked to a reporter before.”

  “Researcher,” Aloa corrected, taking a tiny sip of the sharp-tasting brew.

  Emily frowned. “You mean, like a detective? I thought . . .” She let her voice trail off. Her hand fluttered from her hair to her face to her knee as if she didn’t know where it should rest.

  “Not a detective,” Aloa said, then thought she would have to come up with another way to describe herself. “More like an investigator.”

  “But still for Novo, right?” Emily asked.

  “That’s correct,” Aloa said.

  “OK. Well,” Emily said. “Shall I just tell you what I know or do you want to ask questions?”

  “Why don’t you start?” Aloa said, and pulled out her notebook. “I’ll ask questions as we go along.”

  “Sure.” Emily took a deep breath. “Hayley was such a good girl. Always helping everybody, always offering a kind word. She loved the outdoors. From the minute she could walk, she was outside exploring. Her first pet was a little garter snake she found. She named it Joe and kept it in her room. One day, she brought Joe to the office in her jacket pocket. Her father and I had a start-up back then. We couldn’t afford a sitter, so we always brought Hayley. Anyway, she let the snake out to play and well, you know, a few people freaked. Our best programmer threatened to sue. Said we had a hostile workplace. That’s when my sister took over.”

  “Hayley’s aunt?” Aloa asked.

  “Yes. In Sacramento. She was very good with children. Hayley loved it there. Our business was at a critical juncture.” Emily picked at the skin near her thumbnail.

  “How long did she stay with her aunt?” Aloa asked.

  “Hayley came back when she was ten, so it was five years, I think. My sister got sick. Breast cancer.”

  Aloa imagined what that decision had done to Hayley’s psyche: One day you bring your pet snake to your parents’ office and the next day you’re banished to a different family.

  “How did Hayley take the move?”

  “She was a good girl. We talked on the phone every week.” Emily squared her shoulders. “Hayley and I were always very close.”

  Aloa guessed there was a good chunk of revisionist history in that last statement but let it go.

  “Where is Hayley’s father now?”

  “Who knows? Last I heard he was in Brazil, but that was nine years ago.”

  “What about Hayley and Ethan? How long were they together? What was their relationship like?”

  “Let’s see, Hayley met Ethan after high school. He was in medical school at UC San Francisco. She was working at a coffee shop. I wanted her to go to college, but she was having, um, a little trouble. Took after her father.”

  “What trouble was that, Emily?” Aloa asked quietly.

  Emily looked up. “Do I have to tell you?”

  “If you want me to help.”

  Emily seemed to consider. “Well, she, um, was having, I guess you’d say, a problem with drugs. Nothing hard,” she added hastily. “Just that she fell in with a bad crowd. They got her into pills. OxyContin, Vicodin, Percocet. I didn’t know what to do with her. Then she met Ethan and everything changed. Ethan saved her.”

  “Tell me about him.”

  “Like I said, he was studying to be a doctor, but he quit school after he met Hayley. He got her healthy again. They backpacked for four months in South America and then rode bikes from here to Alaska. After that, they went to Spain and he learned to climb. That’s when Hayley started running. When they came back, they lived in a van outside of Yosemite for a while and then Ethan got sponsored. He had two first ascents, some speed records. He was what they call a free climber.” Emily waited half a beat. “That means he used ropes, but only so he didn’t fall. Otherwise, it was just him climbing, using cracks and little ledges, stuff like that.”

  Aloa nodded, even though the idea of clinging to a rock wall with your fingertips while the earth fell away around you seemed more like torture than sport to her.

  “He was getting magazine profiles. One of his videos got four million views. He did some stunt work too.”

  “For movies?”

  “Yes. That’s how he hurt himself. He had a bad fall in Canada. They call that a whipper, you know.”

  Aloa nodded, though it was the first time she had heard the term.

  “He got a terrible concussion and had to take time off. That’s when Hayley set her John Muir Trail record. Ethan supported her, dropped off food and gear, new shoes. She got a couple of sponsors after that. Ethan helped her write a book about it, but those stupid publishers couldn’t see how good it was.”

  Considering Hayley’s horrible poetry, Aloa guessed Ethan did more than help.

&nbs
p; “When he died, well . . .” Emily pressed her lips together, her eyes traveling past Aloa to the bay, or maybe even beyond it. Finally, she said, “When Ethan died, it was like I lost Hayley for a while too. She started drinking, which an addict should never do. I told her Ethan would be sad to know what she was doing and she said Ethan came to her in a dream and told her she needed to follow the dark steps.”

  “Do you know what that meant?”

  Emily shook her head. “Not really. But after that Hayley started acting strange. She said people were out to get her, that the world was full of hypocrisy. I think maybe it was the alcohol. Worried me sick. But then she got sober. She was a strong girl.”

  Aloa thought of the police report and the vodka Hayley had drunk that day. “She’d stopped drinking?”

  “Yes. Thank god for Hank Tremblay,” Emily said. “He’s the president of RedHawk Nutritionals. You’ve heard of that?”

  Aloa nodded. Who hadn’t heard of RedHawk, a supplement company started in a small cabin in Revelstoke, Canada? Its products were now sold worldwide.

  “Anyway, his company partners with a place called the Palms. It does rehab. Lots of nutritional counseling. Hank believes an imbalance in the body is what sparks addiction. Hank paid for Hayley to go there. He was Ethan’s biggest sponsor. I think he felt guilty after Ethan died, but I told him it wasn’t his fault.”

  A connection tickled Aloa’s brain.

  “Did Mr. Tremblay also set up an annuity for Hayley, by any chance? With a Canadian company?” Aloa asked. Tick had found details about the company the night before, but not who put up the initial money for the fund.

  “How did you know that?” Emily asked.

  Aloa gestured vaguely.

  “It was part of Ethan’s contract, kind of a life-insurance thing. Hank goes further than most sponsors. He even put Ethan on his company’s health insurance plan in case he got hurt. He was giving Hayley all kinds of free nutrition products. For her project, you know.”

  “The documentary she was doing?” Aloa asked.