Page 2

The brass is cold. It would take one turn. I stand there with my fingers on it and my forehead against the wood, listening to the dark outside, and I think about every woman in every file I've ever read out loud, and I think about that breathing, slow and patient, three feet behind my back.

I take my hand off the lock.

I tell myself it's for the tape. If someone comes, I want it on the record. It's a lie, and I know it's a lie, and I lie in the loft in the dark with the fire ticking down below and the poker from the stove on the floorboards beside the mattress, and I don't sleep.

At ten past two, a footstep comes down on the frost outside.

The north wall, eight feet from my head. Slow and heavy, not hurrying. It moves along the wall to the corner, turns, comes down the east side past the porch where my recorder sits blinking its small red light, and keeps going. Around the south wall. The west. Back to the north.

He's circling the cabin.

I lie on my back with my hands fisted in the quilt and my heart slamming against my ribs, and I count. One circuit. Two. Three. My mouth is dry. My thighs are pressed together so hard they ache, because every time his steps pass the east wall the heat between them gets worse, not better, and I can't make it stop.

On the fourth circuit, he stops at the north wall, right below me.

I can feel him there through eight inches of logs. I don't know how I know it's a man. I know. I lie in the dark three feet above his head, listening to him not move, and the silence goes on so long that I say it out loud. Quietly. The voice I use on mic when I'm opening an interview with someone who doesn't want to talk.

"I know you're there."

Nothing. The creek. My own blood in my ears.

The steps go away into the trees. I lie there shaking until the window goes grey.

In the morning, I sit on the porch step in my socks with the recorder in my hands and my coffee going cold beside me, and play back the night.

The creek. The creek for hours. Then, at 2:10, the footsteps, loud on the frost, passing and passing again. The four circuits, clear as a metronome. The long silence at the north wall. My own voice, muffled through the logs, and his answer, lower, barely there.

Then the steps come around to the porch, and stop, right beside the recorder, and I hear him breathe. Close. Three inches from the mic. The same slow breathing that was on the road.

And then his voice, quiet and even, into the microphone, meant for me.

"Lock your door, Nora."

2

Cole

Edna told me the podcaster was coming three days before she came.

"About the seven," Edna said, and looked at me over her glasses, and went back to her crossword.

I know about the seven. I've carried two of them down off the ridge myself, and walked another one into the valley from the pass in the snow, and I'm the third name on that list. Four years ago I parked a rental car at the Lake Louise trailhead, left the keys on the front tire and walked north until there was nobody left who could find me. My mother reported me missing eleven days later. I know because the man who closed my file radioed it through to the ranger station where I pick up search-and-rescue calls, and I heard my own name go out over my own frequency.

Subject chose not to be found.

And now there's a woman on her way up the only road into my valley with a file on me in her bag.

So I went to meet her.

She stopped on the shoulder of the last switchback and got out of her car with her recorder already in her hand. Red hair, the dark coppery kind, stuffed under a green knit hat. Fair skin gone pink with cold. A wide mouth set in a straight line of concentration, and eyes gone narrow and sharp, listening. She held the recorder up to the trees like she was offering the valley a drink.

I came down out of the pines behind her and stood three feet off her left shoulder.

She never knew. I could have put my hand on the back of her neck. I stood there instead and breathed, slow, on purpose, into her microphone, while she stood with her eyes half closed listening to the wind, because I wanted to see if she was any good. If she'd find me on the tape.

I watched her through the Larch cabin window with the headphones on, playing it back, and I watched the blood go out of her face when she heard me. Watched her play it again. And again. Watched her hands go still on the table and her head come up and turn toward the dark window, and I stood forty feet out in the trees and knew she couldn't see me, and knew she was looking for me anyway.

She didn't leave. She didn't lock the door.